Bounties, taxes, and the wolf

1824 — 1908, and one wolf in 2003

Paid in scalps: The earliest Allen County record of the wolf war is fiscal. The county's early history, as reprinted in the Allen County genealogy record, describes the first tax years 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: "The State taxes were generally paid in wolf scalps, on which a bounty was allowed." The wolf was, in effect, a currency of the first county government: the state paid for its extermination and accepted its scalp in payment of taxes.

The system: Indiana's bounty machinery, 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" (Hoosier State Chronicles, 1 September 2015), which the Allen County Genealogical Society's wildlife index links as the reference on the subject. Neighboring counties' surviving commissioners' records show the price climbing as the animal grew scarce — LaGrange County, two counties north, set a bounty of one dollar for an adult wolf in 1833, doubled it in 1837, and raised it to five dollars by 1843, paying bounties on 47 wolves in a single twelve-month period in the mid-1840s. Allen County's own bounty payment books were not reached; the scalp-tax line above is the Allen County evidence in hand, and the LaGrange figures are printed as the neighboring record of the same system, labeled as such.

The end: The Indiana Department of Natural Resources' gray wolf page gives the state's verdict in one sentence: "Early European settlers eliminated wolves from the state by 1908." No Allen County "last wolf" date is established in any source reached, and none is printed. The wolf's only confirmed return to Indiana since is a single animal: a yearling male found dead in east-central Indiana in 2003, which the DNR determined had originated from a Wisconsin pack. There is no breeding population of wolves in Indiana, and the DNR notes that domestic dogs and coyotes are the animals usually behind modern wolf reports — a caution this section adopts for every large-predator story it touches.

Sources:

1. "Early Allen County Indiana History," Allen County INGenWeb / Genealogy Trails (genealogytrails.com) — the wolf-scalp tax passage from the county's early history.
2. Stephen J. Taylor, "The Call of the Wild: Bounties, Taxes & Terror," Indiana State Archives / Hoosier State Chronicles blog, 1 September 2015.
3. Rex Fisher, The LaGrange County Courthouse: A History from 1833 to 2007 (the LaGrange County bounty series, 1833–1845), via archive.org.
4. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, "Fish and Wildlife: Gray Wolf" (elimination by 1908; the 2003 Wisconsin yearling; no breeding population), in.gov.