Paid in wolf scalps

1824–1908 · THE COUNTY'S FIRST CURRENCY

The tax: In Allen County's first years, a resident could pay his state taxes in wolf scalps. The county's early history, as reprinted in the Allen County genealogy record, sets out the first tax schedule after the county's organization in 1824 — fifty cents on every male over twenty-one, thirty-seven and a half cents on a horse — and then states, in so many words: "The State taxes were generally paid in wolf scalps, on which a bounty was allowed." The wolf was thus a currency of the first county government: the state paid a bounty for its extermination and accepted the scalp back in payment of taxes. The system around the practice — and the newspaper terror that sustained it — is the subject of Stephen J. Taylor's Indiana State Archives study, "The Call of the Wild: Bounties, Taxes & Terror." Neighboring LaGrange County's surviving records show the price climbing as the animal grew scarce — one dollar in 1833, two in 1837, five by 1843 — printed here as the neighboring record of the same system, labeled as such. The end of the story is the Indiana Department of Natural Resources' one-sentence verdict: early settlers eliminated wolves from Indiana by 1908. The wolf's only confirmed return since is a single yearling male found dead in east-central Indiana in 2003, traced to a Wisconsin pack; there is no breeding population in the state.

Sources: the Local Animals section of this history — "Early Allen County Indiana History," Allen County INGenWeb / Genealogy Trails (the wolf-scalp tax passage); Stephen J. Taylor, "The Call of the Wild: Bounties, Taxes & Terror," Hoosier State Chronicles, 1 September 2015; Rex Fisher, The LaGrange County Courthouse (the LaGrange bounty series), via archive.org; Indiana Department of Natural Resources, gray wolf page (elimination by 1908; the 2003 yearling).