Wolfers

An unidentified person in chaps holding a wolf skin, circa 1920–1925.
Galt Museum & Archives, 19961009052.

On a winter's day in 1873, Canadian Donald Graham found himself in an armed standoff with a man remembered now only as “The Bigheaded Dutchman.” Both men had guns drawn as they faced off over a pile of dead wolves. Just the day before, Graham had been safe at Fort Whoop-Up where he, like so many others, had come to conduct trade with the local Niitsitapi, Blackfoot.

These were the last days of the bison that still roamed the Great Plains millions strong, and the wolves followed the herds by the hundreds. The market for wolf pelts was booming in the 1870s. Almost 30,000 skins were transported out of southern Alberta at the height of the boom. The people who delivered them were known as “wolfers.”

They were considered to be a “rough lot,” and were looked down on by many people. Wolfers would create a six-mile circuit along which they would leave several bison carcasses which they poisoned with strychnine. The animals who ingested the strychnine would experience muscular convulsions before finally dying of asphyxia. The wolfers would ride back along their circuit and collect the bodies of the poisoned wolves. A baited bison carcass might deliver 20 or more wolves at a time and a wolfer could collect hundreds without breaking camp.

Graham was no wolfer, but when word came that some wolfers near the Bow River had been interrupted and left behind a haul of about forty dead wolves, he took a chance and partnered with the Dutchman to collect the skins. The disagreement allegedly started when Graham caught the Dutchman taking more than his fair share from the haul. That day the Dutchman lowered his weapon first, though he warned he might have shot Graham in the back later had he been a different man. For the risk he took, Graham earned as much as $2.50 a skin.

Graham’s story is recorded in Firewater by Hugh Dempsey. You can learn more about early traders and the animal pelt trade in the late 1800s at Fort Whoop-Up in our selection of books about Fort Whoop-Up.