I’ve never seen a timber wolf, even though they no doubt once roamed — from time to time — across the little valley west of Bryson City where I reside.

Elk have been reintroduced in the Smokies. Based upon the numerous reported sightings, it’s likely that a few cougars still reside in the Blue Ridge. One can easily imagine a scenario whereby wood bison might be reintroduced in Cades Cove. But I really can’t contemplate any scenario whereby timber wolves might be reintroduced.

Can you imagine the uproar in the region’s newspapers if, say, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asked for public input regarding a possible timber wolf release at, say, Wayah Bald in the Nantahalas? That’s not going to happen, but we can still remember the timber wolf and the not so long ago time when it was the most formidable creature one could encounter in these hills.

Timber wolves formerly ranged over most of North America but no longer exist in the eastern United States. The most formidable of all the wild dogs of the world, the timber wolf can measure over 6-feet in length, stand nearly a yard at the shoulder, and weigh as much as 175 pounds.

In Cherokee lore he was the revered “Wa-ya,” the companion of Kana’-ti, their master hunter, and they would not normally kill a wolf. Certain hired killers who followed elaborate rituals for atonement could slay wolves that raided stock or fish traps.

The demise of the wolf began with the arrival of the colonial settlers, who brought an inbred fear and hatred of the “blood-thirsty varmint” from Europe and could not tolerate raids upon livestock. The first wolf bounty was set in eastern North Carolina in 1748 at 10 shillings for each wolf scalp. Bounty hunters pursued their quarry with guns, dogs and wolf pits. After the Revolution, the bounty in North Carolina climbed to $5 per scalp.

This intense pressure helped drive most of the remaining population into the mountains by the early 1800s, where skillful hunters familiar with the upcountry were required. The brothers Gideon and Nathan Lewis of Ashe County were the first of the renowned wolf hunters in WNC. They knew a good thing when they saw one. Locating a wolf den, one of the brothers would crawl in and secure the wolf pups as bounty, but somehow the female would always “escape.”

When asked why they never managed to kill a mature female, Gideon would reply matter-of-factly, “Would you expect a man to kill his milk-cow?”

The period of the Civil War marked a resurgence of wolves as many excellent marksmen were pulled out of the mountains or otherwise occupied by the conflict so that the multiplying wolves became increasingly brazen. But by the 1880s, they had become a scarce commodity in WNC. According to Mammals in the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1985) the last gray wolf was killed in Haywood County in 1887.

That, however, seems unlikely as reports lingered on into the 20th century, and The Bryson City Times was referring to wolves being “up around Clingman’s Dome” on into the early 1890s.

Scalp bounties were paid in both Swain and Clay counties in 1889. The Swain bounty was paid by the county commissioners, who “alloted Q.L. Rose $5 for wolf scalp.” This was, of course, the legendary fiddle-player, story-teller, blockader, and hunter Aquila (“Quil”) Rose. Just as Mark Cathey was the region’s most renowned fisherman, Quil Rose was its foremost hunter. It’s pretty much a standoff as to which of the two men was the most outlandish storyteller.

At that time Rose was living on Eagle Creek (between Hazel Creek and Fontana Dam) in what is now the national park with his part-Indian wife, Aunt Vice. Eagle Creek before the turn of the century was remote, to put it mildly. Rose valued his privacy. To this day, the foundation of one of his block stillhouses is said to be up Eagle Creek “in some white pines.” He produced what he called “tanglefoot” on a large scale and got rid of the stuff fast. On being asked if moonshine improved with age, Rose emphatically denied it, citing his own research: “I kept some for a week one time and I could not tell that it was one bit better than when it was fresh and new.”

Whether riding his little jackass or sitting on his porch, Quil Rose always carried his Winchester on his arm. But he could be wonderfully friendly if he identified a visitor as a “gentleman” rather than as “a sheriff’s posse, the road-boss, or revenue galoots.” The most vivid portrait of the man as wolf hunter appears in a long-forgotten book by Wilbur Zeigler and Ben Grosscup entitled The Heart of the Alleghanies, or Western North Carolina (1883). The authors had visited Rose to hunt deer. As they settled in to spend the night at his cabin, Quil obliged them with one of his tales: “I was forced to cross a creek on some shelving rock above a waterfall. The rock was slick and I fell into a crevice, strikin’ bottom on somethin’ soft and hairy.

“A wolf?” someone asked.

“Yes, dog my skin!” Quil exclaimed. “Hit was the dry nest of a master old varmint under that fall. He was as fat as a bar jist shufflin’ out o’winter quarters, an’ he only had three legs. One gone at the knee.
Chawed hit off, I reckon, to git shet o’ a trap. Well the wolf snarled and struggled like mad, but I had the holt on ’im. I didn’t dar to lose my holt to git my knife, so I bent ’im down with my weight, and gittin’ his head in the water drowned ’im in a few minutes. Then I toted and dragged ’im out to the dogs.”
There was one last twist to Quil Rose’s wolf tale. Zeigler and Grosscup subsequently verified that the story was true except in regard to one notable point — in the telling Quil had taken the place of the actual hunter.

(George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 287713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com

 

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