From The Annals of Webster County, West Virginia (1941). The story is by Daniel Stoffer Hamrick, who was 17 years old when he killed this, the last West Virginia wolf.
During the last 40 years there has been a lot of controversy about the wolves still roaming the woods and hills of West Virginia. The following article may set at ease some minds which still believe they hear the cries of the wolf at night.
On January 8, 1897,the last gray or timber wolf was killed in West Virginia, according to my belief. Some eight or ten years before that date, wolves were playing havoc with sheep in Webster, Pocahontas, Nicholas, Braxton, Greenbrier, and Randolph Counties. About 1891 or 1892, John Gregory killed the mother wolf and one or two of her young.
From that time on for five years the male wolf was the lone representative of his tribe in the West Virginia mountains. He ravaged sheep far and wide. One night he would kill only one and the next night a great many.
On the night of Jan. 20, 1895, the wolf killed 27 lambs owned by my brother, Jacob Hamrick, on Point Mountain, Randolph County. The wolf was often hunted and traps were set for him to no avail. The county courts of Randolph and Webster Counties offered separate bounties of $100 each to the person who would bring the scalp of this wolf to them. The farmers of the mountain region were discouraged. They said they could not afford to raise sheep as the wolf killed the most of them.
On New Year’s morning, 1897, Uncle John Hamrick, who was living on a farm near Whittaker’s Falls of the Elk River, came down to my father’s house and said that on the previous night the wolf had killed five of the best sheep that he had, a loss of at least $50.
There was two feet of snow on the ground and it was very cold. Nevertheless, we started immediately to organize a wolf hunt. Every man we could coax into the hunt was sought. I still remember clearly my father saying: “Sonny, you put the saddle on my horse and go as quickly as you canto Joe Sharp’s place and tell him I have sent you for him and his dogs.”
This I did and I found Mr. Sharp in a willing mood. When we returned with the dogs we learned that the wolf had been tracked into a thicket on Point Mountain, just above where Currence Chapman then lived.
I do not remember all who started the first day but the second morning when we met halfway up Mill Run there were 15 men and boys in the party, namely: John, Robert and George Rose; Calvin Hamrick, Spencer Hamrick, W.S. Hamrick, David W. Hamrick, Lilly Hamrick, Francis Cowger, John Dodrill, Garfield Dodrill, Lee A. Hamrick, Adam Hamrick, Joe Sharp and myself. We followed that wolf track for eight days, in subzero weather and over four counties, but most of the time in Webster and Randolph. One evening just at dark we found ourselves at the mount of Flint Run on the Back Fork of the Elk, where Lilly Hamrick said to me: “I can’t travel any more.”
We built a campfire but we didn’t have anything to eat. Brother Jacob said that if someone would go after it, he could get a horse at his place on which Lilly could ride. Brother Lee said he would go and I went with him.
We walked three miles up Point Mountain to the farm. Shortly after we left the campfire someone produced a bottle of hot drops and told Lilly that if he would take some he would be all right. Adam, who had been the leader of the party from the start, remarked so Lilly could hear him, that there was nothing wrong with him except that he had given up. Either the hot drops or Adam’s insult did the work for when we started down the mountain with a pair of horses we met the whole part coming with Lilly in the lead.
One morning we were on stands on the Upper Elk. The wolf came within 50 yards of John Dodrill and stopped. He had a new gun, either a Winchester or a Marlin. John took dead aim and pulled the trigger but the gun didn’t go off. He tried again, and again the gun refused to fire. The wolf had enough of the fooling around and disappeared.
When we came up, John said: “Men, that wolf is not to be killed.” We hunted in the snow and found the two cartridges which had failed to discharge. We put them back in the gun and they both went off this time.
Then John said: “The hand of the Almighty is against us.” We tried to convince him that the reason the gun didn¹t discharge was because ice was in the gun. John finally said: “I will still go with the hunt but don’t place me where you think the wolf will come.”
On the night of Jan. 7, we were cared for by the good Dutch[German] people on Turkey Bone Mountain in Randolph County. The next morning while I was loading my gun, Mr. Wooftner said to me: “One cartridge is enough.” Ir eplied that I could carry cartridges better in the magazine of the gun than in my pocket. (Wooftner knew Hamrick was a good marksman.)
We went that morning to the spot where we quit the night before, the head of Back Fork of the Elk. Adam told Jacob Hamrick and Milton Hull to hold the dogs for one hour and 20 minutes until he could have time to place the men on stands. We all went down to the fork of the stream and took stands. Lee Hamrick stood close to the creek. Alva Sharp stood above him, and I was next. Laben Hull was next above me and John Rose above him. The rest were strung out in like manner on up the mountain. I could see Mr. Sharp below me and Mr. Hull above me.
Mr. Sharp got so cold he was building a fire when the wolf came straight to him. The wolf must have winded him for he changed his course and came between Mr. Hull and me. I was standing on a log that was lying against a large maple tree when I sighted the wolf and fired the shot that brought his depredations to an end. I fired past Lee Hamrick and I know he jumped at least three feet when the bullet zipped past him. (Apparently Lee Hamrick pursued the wolf when it appeared before Sharp.)
The others came up and measured the distance of my shot at 187 steps. It was then one o’clock. There was much rejoicing that our enemy was dead and that our cold and painful tramping was ended. We walked from there to Laben Hull’s and danced all right. The next day everyone within a radius of several miles came to see the wolf. We weighed the wolf at Mr. Hull’s and discovered it weighed 87 pounds. It had eaten nothing in the eight days except one grouse. We didn’t give it time to kill any sheep in that period.
I took the scalp to the county court at Webster Springs but the court refused to pay the bounty. After finding a man for my guardian, and I was only 17, I employed the late Senator E.H. Morton, a very able attorney. He brought suit against the county court and secured judgment in justice court. The court appealed the case to the circuit court. But when we came up for trial the court compromised and paid the bounty.
If there are any of those who would scoff at the above story, I refer them to the above men now living and to the court record of Webster County (pg. 255-258).
This story reads almost like a piece of Russian literature. Heavy snow. Deep forests. Men with guns. And a fell beast that was destroying flocks of sheep, which was a great source of income, wool, and meat for small farmers in those days. All it needs is a sled
This region in West Virginia is deep within the heart of the Allegheny Mountains. It doesn’t surprise me that this was the last redoubt of the wolf in the state. Not very far from here, at Valley Head in southern Randolph County, the last of the Eastern wood bison, which ranged as far north and east as Western New York, was killed in 1825.
This wolf was part of a breeding pair, but his mate and pups were killed. Forced to make a living on his own, he began to regularly haunt the sheep pastures.
Natural prey must have been quite scare in those days, for the only contents of the wolf’s stomach was a paltry grouse.
A grouse is pretty hard for a dog or wolf to catch. After all, they do fly when something tries to pound upon them.
So this wolf would have been pushed to his limit to be forced to waste energy hunting ruffed grouse just to survive.
In West Virginia, people still claim to see wolves. In reality, they are almost certainly seeing the larger Eastern coyotes, which do have some wolf ancestry.
But a wolf was recently killed in Missouri. It was later confirmed to have come down from the Great Lakes wolf population— most likely Minnesota, if my geographic sense is correct. A wolf of a very similar size to the one Hamrick killed was shot for killing sheep in Massachusetts. This wolf was believed to have wandered down from Quebec. It is also very likely that wolves occasionally show up in the remote haunts of northern Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and the Adirondacks of New York, which is a proposed site for a wolf reintroduction.
So it’s possible that a wolf will one day wander into West Virginia, but by the time they get here, they will have already established themselves in other parts of the East.
I don’t for a minute think the (contrived) red wolves of North Carolina will come up here. That population is already tightly managed and is largely restricted to a peninsula on the Carolina coast.
I don’t think the wolf that Hamrick killed was a red wolf or an Eastern wolf. The best science on the genetics of these animals shows that they are recent or relatively recent wolf and coyote hybrids.
This wolf was likely part of or closely related to the Eastern North American wolves (Canis lupus lycaon) that are now most common in Quebec and Ontario. The Massachusetts wolf that was killed in 2008 was of this subspecies, and it would be the subspecies that would be reintroduced into Northern New England and New York State. Many members of this subspecies have coyote mtDNA, which was once used to declare them a new and unique species.
The truth is that many of them derive from a female coyote ancestor. That’s why they have coyote mtDNA. Their nuclear DNA shows that they are wolves with quite a bit of coyote in them. The red wolf, by contrast, is a coyote with some wolf in it.
I’m sure that many states have some record of their last wolves, and I’m sure that most of them involve stories about wolves tripping traps and slaughtering whole herds of cattle.
But I don’t know of many states that have one about a 17-year-old crack shot bringing the last wolf down.
If you talk to hunters, one fact comes out loud and clear – all hunters of the yore were liars. Their ability to lie was directly proportional to their tendency to hate predators and inversely proportional to good human values.
In the above story, it is clear that the pseudo hunter has built his fiction on the dark image of wolf painted in those days. What we now know of wolf, this story would be discarded by people within less than 5 seconds.
In fact, a little bit of exaggeration is considered to be permissible in non-fiction adventure stories of today. For example, adventurers and naturalists tend to merge the events observed over several days and instances into one continuous series of events observed during a day.
A way to avoid getting into exaggeration is what modern writers do. They write about the main story, which could be short to the point of being bland, within a very broad canvass that comprises many other related topics. An example is John Vaillant’s The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival.
Most writers on hunting are a bit untruthful. My grandpa’s line was you couldn’t believe half of what you read in sports magazines.
At least they didn’t write about the wolf killing children, which would have been a highly unusual occurrence in North America, much less the Eastern states.
On the contray, it was either Jim Corbett the world renowned hunter of man eating tigers or Stanley Coran (my memory deceives me due age) who narrated a “true story” of two odd shaggy creatures running around near a village in India in early 20th century. The hunters followed the track of what they believed were wolves to a den. On approaching the den, the crowd confronts a male wolf who escapes, but poor female wolf was shot to death as she defended her litter. They discovered a litter in the den comprising of two human girls behaving exactly like wolves and continuing to do so for many years of their lives.
The Rev. Singh’s story appears in one of Coren’s works. I can’t remember which one.
However, there appears that the Reverend Singh was lying about Amala and Kamala’s origins.
They were two girls that may have had autism or Rett syndrome.
In that part of the world, it was once common to say that children with learning disabilities were raised by wolves.
Kipling didn’t come up with the story about Mowgli on his own.
Yes, now I remember. It was indeed Stanley Coren in his ‘How to speak Dog’. And of course, it was proven to be fabricated. Thanks for pointing it out.
In India, hunters and writers were normally projecting the image of wolves in accordance with general perception of the animal there. In North America, hunters were projecting an image in accordance with general perception here.
One should read the old wolf trapping narratives from the Old West.
The wolves are always almost super-human in their cunning.
And very human in their depredations against livestock.
That would make sense lol. Any good book(s) that you could recommend to read on this? I will appreciate.
The Great American Wolf by Bruce Hampton has a great compendium of Old West wolf stories.
He misses the mark on the red wolf, but then it was written well before all the important genomic analysis came out.
Thank you. It looks like an interesting read. I will definitely get hold of it.
I prefer Setons stories. He at least clearly had a serious appreciation of wolves as living breathing creatures deserving respect. Incidentally, there was an article about an Oregon wolf crossing into CA, so maybe someday there will be wolf populations in CA again. I suspect the original (now extinct) CA wolves were probably more closely related to the (now endangered) Mexican wolf, at least in the S. Calif areas, but who knows? Maybe they were just a continium of the Northern wolves (the Oregon animals hail from Washington) and those of the South.
Peggy Richter.
Despite the fact that it may possibly represent the demise of the Eastern wolf in WV, as a genealogist, I always appreciate stories like this.
Its tales like this that really flesh out otherwise dreary series of begats. Can we trust their veracity 100%, of course not–they don’t come close to being primary evidence. Nevertheless, they do provide the genealogist/historian with a window into the nature of the people of WV at the turn of the 20th Century.
For me personally, the story sheds a bit of illumination into the lives and mindsets of my Straight family ancestors in Eastern KY (Catlettsburg, just t’other side of the Ohio from Kenova, WV.) My grandfather, Herbert Lee Strait/Straight, was b. there just about the time of this tale.
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I highly doubt that there are no wolves currently in WV, as I’ve seen a few before. One of them, a pet named Zoe, lives in Davis Creek and roams the hills all day. When she comes to my grandmother’s home she always gets any meat leftovers from the fridge and some loving on from my young sister. She’s a huge beast, almost 4’2″ when sitting, and not like dogs at all. Very aloof. It almost seems like she’s barely putting up with our presence. lol
I’ve also come across maybe three wolves while hiking near Hawks Nest and Bluestone over the course of a few years, which were very skidish and after catching site of me sauntered off into the woods. Whenever I see a wolf OR a coyote I high-tail it back home. They are wild animals after all. Dangerous ones.
[…] There are conflicting accounts of when wolves disappeared from West Virginia. In a previous post, I wrote about an account of the purported “last wolf” that was killed in the high mountains near the border of Randolph and Webst…. […]