Yellowstone wolf reintroduction—30 years later.
BY SOPHIE TSAIRIS
Editor’s Note: On Jan. 12, 1995, paws in shades of gray pressed into the frozen ground at Crystal Creek in Yellowstone National Park, leaving prints in the snow hardly seen in that landscape for nearly 70 years. The tale of wolves in and around Yellowstone has been a winding one, with the reintroduction of the species to the park 30 years ago marking one of its most significant turns. After the predators had been systematically eliminated in the area in the early- to-mid 20th century, the decision to bring them back was heralded by many as a conservation victory and by others as a grave mistake, but all understood it as an act that would have major impacts on the ecosystem.
On this anniversary year, controversy around how to manage wolves still roils like the thermals of Yellowstone, with most battles playing out in courtrooms and congressional assemblies. To honor this milestone, Mountain Outlaw is returning its gaze to the wild places these creatures inhabit, and to the wolves themselves. In recognition of three decades since the fateful reintroduction, we bring you stories of three wolves that offer insight into how these animals relate to this landscape—and how we relate to them.
The White Wolf: Fomenting Hostility
In the early 1900s, a ghost appeared in the rolling prairies and rugged mountains of Judith Basin, Montana. This specter wasn’t supernatural, but rather a creature of flesh and blood that seemed to possess a mythical ability to vanish into thin air. He came to be known near and far—revered and feared—as the White Wolf.
irst spotted as a snow-colored pup near Square Butte in 1915, this lone wolf would go on to haunt Central Montana for nearly two decades. Sightings of the wolf were reported all the way from the Little Rockies in the north to the Big Belt Mountains in the south. To the ranchers whose livelihoods depended on their livestock, he was a devastating predator wreaking havoc on sheep and cattle. But even to the stockmen that loathed him, he embodied what had, in part, drawn them to the West in the first place: wild mystique, cunning and unbridled freedom.
In 1926, rancher Earl Neill managed what no one else had—he wounded the elusive wolf with a shot to the hind leg. Maimed but alive, the wolf disappeared once more into the landscape. An article in the Choteau Acantha dated April 3, 1930, chronicled J. Williams’ account of the wolf from the winter of 1923: “It was about this time I began to notice one particular wolf, which from his habit of following the highway most of the time, I began to refer to as the roadrunner. This is the wolf that has been receiving so much attention the last year and has been referred to as the white killer. A reward is offered for his capture … he was shot once and crippled by Earl Neill of Windham but managed to escape to the mountains and outwit his pursuer, who followed him for the next few days … he has been shot at a number of times by good hunters but has always managed to escape. At first he was lucky in dodging traps but soon he became, I believe, the wisest wolf in the state.”
Four years later, A.V. Chaney and his five Russian wolfhounds cornered the White Wolf near Geyser, where Chaney attempted to rope the animal. Once again, the wolf escaped, despite his age and limp, slipping the noose and wounding two of the hounds before disappearing.
The local “wolf war” caught the attention of the Associated Press, and soon the story of Montana’s ghost wolf went national. Professional hunters and trappers descended on Judith Basin, drawn by hefty rewards and the challenge of capturing an animal that had become legendary. They came with horses and snowshoes, planes and dogs, to test their skills against the wolf ’s. In bars and saloons around central Montana, the wolf ’s exceptional intelligence became the subject of conversation, lore and wagers.
On May 5, 1930, Neill, who had wounded the wolf years before, spotted the aging animal once again. Along with his neighbor, Al Close, and two dogs, Neill gave chase. The hounds finally cornered the wolf in a dense patch of fir, and Close, taking aim from 40 yards away, ended the legendary animal’s long reign.
On May 11, 1930, Elva Wineman, who covered much of the White Wolf ’s life for several news outlets, wrote in Lewistown’s Democrat News, “As he lived, bold, courageous, arrogant, flaunting his contempt for man and beast alike, – so he died, head up, facing the rifle unflinching and fearless.”
When the body was examined, they found an animal that weighed 83 pounds and measured 6 feet from nose to tail. His teeth were chipped and worn from years of survival. At an estimated 18 years old, he far exceeded what was a 10-year average lifespan of a wolf at the time. The stockmen who had cursed his name for so many years found themselves unable to forget such a worthy adversary. In death, the White Wolf achieved a different kind of immortality—mounted and displayed at the Basin Trading Post in Stanford, Montana.
Years after that final hunt, Close would recall the moment before he pulled the trigger: “I almost didn’t shoot because I thought, ‘What a shame to kill such a smart fellow.’ It was the hardest thing I think I ever did. I knew it was the cruel nature of the wilderness, the fight for survival that had made him the ferocious hunter that he was. But I came to and let the bullet fly fairly into the face of the old criminal.”
In a final gesture of respect, the Judith Basin Stockman’s Association raised money to have the wolf mounted for permanent display at the Judith County Courthouse, where he remained for 60 years. In 2017, the White Wolf was inducted into the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame.
The reign of the White Wolf marked a period in Montana’s history when wolves were considered “a decided menace to the herds of elk, deer, mountain sheep, and antelope,” according to the 1915 Yellowstone Superintendent Annual Report, and efforts to “exterminate” the population were underway.
Between 1914 and 1926, at least 136 wolves, including about 80 pups, were removed from dens, trapped, shot and poisoned in Yellowstone National Park.
Once among the most abundant predators in North America, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates through genetic data and extrapolations of wolf densities that likely hundreds of thousands of gray wolves inhabited the continent from coast to coast when Europeans arrived in the 1500s. But it took just a couple of centuries for humans to systematically hunt and trap the apex predator out of existence, wiping out 95 percent of their historic range by the mid-20th century. According to Yellowstone National Park, an intensive survey in the 1970s found no evidence of a resident population of wolves in the park, with the exception of occasional sightings, but no breeding pairs were confirmed.
During the 1980s, wolves began to reestablish breeding packs in northwestern Montana, with 50-60 wolves reported by 1994. Around the same time, public attitudes shifted enough to sway politics toward wolf recovery with human intervention. Under the protections of the Endangered Species Act and some 80 years after the White Wolf was first spotted as a pup, on January 12, 1995, eight gray wolves were released into holding pens in the Lamar Valley of northern Yellowstone National Park. A new chapter in the complex story of wolves in the American West was about to begin.
Wolf No. 9: The Reintroduction Years
Doug Smith was kneeling on the ground, concentrating on disarming a leg-hold trap, when he felt eyes on him. Looking up, he found himself face-to-face with a wolf, just a few feet away, staring at him through the chain-link fence.
It was 1995, and the wolf was female No. 9, one of the wolves reintroduced to the park in the ’90s. As a wildlife biologist, Smith had extensive experience with wolves, even hand-rearing a couple of pups himself as a “wolf mother” while interning at a captive research facility in Indiana early in his career. He continued as lead biologist for the Yellowstone Wolf Project for several decades after helping to reintroduce those first wolves, but this interaction with No. 9 felt like nothing else he’d experienced.
“I had this moment alone with a wild wolf,” Smith said, recalling the day he released her from her holding pen for the second time. “When we cut her loose that October of ’95, she became a free wolf for good—but you get a special bond forever.” That unexpected connection became one of the defining moments in Smith’s 28-year career as Yellowstone’s wolf biologist, and Wolf No. 9 would go on to become one of the most influential matriarchs in the park’s wolf restoration effort.
The 14 gray wolves arrived in Yellowstone that January after countless bureaucratic battles to get them transplanted from the Canadian Rockies. They were carried in crates by then- U.S Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Mollie Beatty and Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Mike Finley, and placed in holding pens in the Lamar Valley before eventually being released into the wild. Over the course of two years, 31 wolves would be introduced to Yellowstone, eliciting mixed responses from the public, and some biologists who believed wolves would have made their way back to the region on their own.
Smith remembers the sensation they inspired. “It’s truly one of those things when someone walks in the room and the vibe changes,” he said. “These wolves were like royalty.” Transported in crates on a horse trailer, the wolves became instant celebrities, with visitors rushing to take photos beside the trailer whenever it stopped.
The reintroduction team placed the wolves in acclimation pens—a strategy designed to break the “homing response” that might cause them to attempt returning to their capture locations. The pens needed to be far enough from roads to shield the wolves from human disturbance, yet accessible enough for feeding and monitoring.
“The first winter we were so worried about people killing them,” Smith said. Anti-wolf sentiment ran high, prompting 24-hour surveillance of the pens. “Even back then there were so many people with strong feelings against wolves.”
Smith’s journey with wolves began long before Yellowstone. As a teenager growing up in Ohio, he wrote letters to wolf biologists across the country, desperate to work with the animals that had fascinated him since childhood. At 18, his persistence paid off when he secured positions at Wolf Park in Indiana and later as a field technician at Isle Royale. By the time the Yellowstone reintroduction began, Smith brought 15 years of wolf experience to the project.
Among the reintroduced wolves, Smith formed his strongest bond with No. 9, a Northern Range wolf. The accessibility of her territory allowed him to know her better than most. Her story took a dramatic turn when, after being released, she crossed the Beartooth Plateau only to lose her mate, Wolf No.10, who was shot down by a man who claimed he thought it was a wild dog. He was the first reintroduced Yellowstone wolf to die.
In Decade of the Wolf, Smith and co-author Gary Ferguson describe how No. 9 waited loyally for her mate to return. When he didn’t come back, she gave birth to a litter of pups under a large Douglas fir—“the first sizeable litter of pups born in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem in some seventy years.”
The mother wolf moved each pup individually to a safer location high on a nearby mountain in a jumble of rocks. In what was very likely a life-saving decision, then-director of the Wolf Project Mike Phillips called for the re-capture of No. 9 and her eight pups and returned them to the acclimation pen in the Lamar Valley.
Smith spent months horse packing up to feed them twice weekly. On one such occasion, a windstorm knocked trees onto the pen, creating gaps, and the pups escaped. Doing what any 3-month-old pups would, the litter quickly took to exploring the area around the pen, using the perimeter of the chain-link fence as a racecourse. Smith and his team set rubber-padded leg-hold traps to recapture them, eventually retrieving all but two. It was during this period that Smith had his memorable encounter with No. 9, made particularly momentous by the scheduled visit of President Bill Clinton, the first lady, and their daughter, who were coming to see the wolves. Smith had gone to the pen early that morning to disarm the traps, concerned about the possibility of one of the guests stepping in one. Usually, when humans were around, the wolves would stay to the very back of the 1-acre fence, as far away as possible, Smith explained.
“I’m down on my hands and knees digging this trap up and dealing with it, and when I looked up, there was No. 9 just a couple feet away, just staring at me.”
When No. 9 was finally re-released for good in October 1995, she became a foundational figure in Yellowstone’s wolf restoration. Her eight pups and their subsequent offspring established new packs throughout the park’s available habitat.
“She was really one of the key wolves to stand the population on its feet and get what I call the New Yellowstone Wolf Era going,” Smith said. By 2000, approximately 80 percent of Yellowstone’s wolves carried No. 9’s genes. Even today, nearly 30 years later, her genetic lineage persists in 10-15 percent of the park’s wolf population.
As the wolf aged, Smith made the compassionate decision not to recapture her when her tracking collar failed. “She was graying,” he said. “It got harder and harder to catch the wolves because you run them down with a helicopter—you’re chasing them and they’re running for their life, and I just started feeling bad about it. I even remember back then seeing her from the airplane going ‘I don’t know if I want to catch her again.’” Because of this decision, the exact end of No. 9’s story remains unknown—a dignified conclusion for a wolf who helped reshape an ecosystem.
Despite current challenges, and what Smith calls “a return to war on wolves,” his memories of Wolf No. 9 and her contribution to what he called “the New Yellowstone Wolf Era” remain a powerful reminder of what was accomplished 30 years ago.
1479: A Controversial Conservation Legacy
In this 30th anniversary year of wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone, Canis lupus remains a hot rod for debate about conservation, predator tolerance and coexistence. Wolves have always been the West’s complicated neighbors—inspiring awe, fear and deep-rooted antipathy.
As of January 2024, there were an estimated 110 wolves across nine packs in Yellowstone National Park. The park wolves are at the center of a larger population connected throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. While protected in the park, wolves who cross the imaginary boundary are managed by the states with varying policies— and tolerances—and often killed by hunters, poachers or because of livestock predation. The Northern Rocky population 84 of gray wolves has been delisted from the Endangered Species List since 2017; wolves in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem are no longer protected by the Endangered Species Act. While the number of annual wolf mortality varies upon year, state and accuracy of reports, several hundred wolves are killed by humans each year in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.
Within the park today, the average lifespan of a wolf is 3.5 to 4 years. Rick McIntyre, longtime Yellowstone naturalist and author of the book series Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone said approximately 50 percent of deaths inside the park are caused by fights with other wolves.
One such wolf was female No. 907, the revered alpha of Yellowstone’s Junction Butte Pack who died on Christmas Day 2024 following injuries sustained in a fight with the Rescue Creek Pack. She was nearly 12 years old.
Despite losing an eye early in life and developing a limp in her later years, 907 led her pack since 2016, birthing 10 litters of pups, the most ever recorded in the park’s history. She bore her last litter in the spring of ’24—only one pup emerged from the den.
Now nearly 2 years old, that pup—female No. 1479—has big shoes to fill as the only survivor of the famed and recently deceased matriarch’s final litter. McIntyre observed 1479 grow up without the normal play and social interactions involved with having siblings or littermates.
“You could compare it to an only child that grows up in a neighborhood with no other kids their age,” he said. “In some ways she was deprived in that regard, but on the other hand, there were a lot of yearlings that spring and summer and they played with her. She also received a lot of attention from her mother.” McIntyre explained that social and leadership skills are what often determine who becomes alpha rather than physical battles of strength. “I often tell people that there are no two species on earth as similar in social behavior as people and wolves,” he said.
In the battle that lost 907 her life, many other Junction Pack wolves also died, likely including the pack’s alpha male.
We saw the Junction Pack yesterday on March 20,” McIntyre said. “They number 11 now, with six that were born to the pack, three adults and three pups. Five adult males from the Rescue Pack have joined the group, bringing new vigor.”
McIntyre said Wolf 1479, now a young adult, has only two other older females above her in the pack hierarchy. He thinks it’s very possible that she will eventually take 907’s place as alpha female of the Junction Pack, continuing her mother’s legacy.
These dynamics among the Yellowstone wolves are natural threads woven into the ecosystem’s wild patchwork. But the patchwork is expanding, with a new color thread represented by the increasing—and increasingly deathly—interactions between wolves and the human world. Wolf 907 played an integral role in the species’ Yellowstone-based drama of the wild, but her youngest offspring’s fate could very well take a different turn, one greatly determined in myriad court cases and legislative actions, as well as by polarized public perceptions.
Thirty years after the reintroduction, it’s easy to forget such a milestone was the product of battles reminiscent of those still surrounding wolves today: What began as a congressional directive in 1988 took six years of exhaustive research, countless public hearings and unprecedented community engagement before wolves were returned to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. And even so, it was not the end of the story. As Smith wrote in Decade of the Wolf, the battle for sustained wolf conservation was far from won.
“When it comes to attitudes about the wolf, especially outside the national parks, on some days it seems little has changed at all in the past sixteen years,” he wrote in the 2012 book. “The animals continue to find themselves in an angry ping-pong game of politics, the result of their kind being neither fully predictable, nor always well behaved.”
Three decades ago, the howl returned to Yellowstone, but we have yet to see if the coming decades will retain such a sound, or merely an echo.
Sophie Tsairis is the deputy editor of Mountain Outlaw.
