The Wolves of Fergus County: Predators, Power, and Profits in Central Montana

Tim Lehman, professor of history at Rocky Mountain College, examines the wolves of Fergus County and their effects on local economies in Central Montana. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Montana passed bounty laws to create incentives for killing wolves and other predators in an attempt to transform the landscape from a Native American buffalo ecology to a Euro-American cattle economy. Historical records of bounty payments not only reveal patterns in the extirpation of predators but also demonstrate the importance of this infusion of money into the emerging cash economy.