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Chapman 1880 to the state mammal record — last records sized at published strength
Lead: By 1880 the county's large predators were already a memory Chapman could not even illustrate: of the larger quadrupeds, “we cannot even find a specimen preserved in taxidermy.” The panther, the black wolf and the black bear stand in his gone-list, ahead of the beaver and elk in the same breath. What the state record adds is dates — and the dates are state dates, not township dates. This township's share is Chapman's sentence and nothing later; no last-wolf, last-panther or last-bear record for Olive Township or St. Joseph County was found in this section, and none is printed.
The wolf: Indiana's published record, summarized by Indiana DNR and Purdue/extension writers from the state mammal literature, is that gray wolves were eliminated from Indiana by 1908 under bounty and settler persecution; a single confirmed modern wolf — a dispersing animal shot by a farmer, reported in 2003 in the secondary record — does not re-establish a population, and DNR prints no breeding wolf population in Indiana. Chapman also preserves the county's own wolf culture in the state-history portion of the volume — “Wolf Hunts” and “Native Animals,” pp. 157–158 of the Indiana section — the bounty-era world in which the county's wolves were hunted as vermin, which is context for the extirpation, not a county last date.
The panther — cougar, puma, catamount; Chapman uses both “panther” (gone) and “catamount” (become very rare) in the same paragraph, a period doubling this article does not resolve into two animals: Indiana DNR's mountain lion page states the species “once lived in much of the eastern United States” and “were extirpated from Indiana by the late 1800s,” that Indiana “has no breeding population of mountain lions,” and that the only confirmed modern reports were fall 2009 in southern Clay County and spring 2010 in northern Greene County — southern Indiana, with the 2010 animal's ear tag suggesting an escaped captive in the Woodland Steward's DNR-authored account. Neither confirmed report is within a hundred miles of this township.
The bear: black bears were, in the DNR-authored Indiana Woodland Steward account, extirpated from Indiana “since the 1800s,” with “only a few rare records after 1830” and no resident population since before the Civil War in the secondary summaries; the same account records the modern pattern — rare wandering animals, not residents: a northern Indiana bear in 2015 described as “the first confirmed for the state in 144 years” (which arithmetically reaches back to about 1871), a second Ohio River crossing in 2016, and later southern-Indiana wanderers (2021, Vanderburgh–Pike counties). The 2015 northern animal is the closest modern bear record to this county in the published record reached, and it is still a visitor that Michigan DNR ultimately euthanized in April 2016 after habituation — not a return, and not St. Joseph County ground. The honest closing line for all three: gone before Chapman's book, unreplaced since, and any modern headline animal is a state-level wanderer unless a county record says otherwise. None does.
Sources:
- Chapman (1880), p. 340 (panther, black wolf, black bear in the gone-list; catamount, lynx in the rare-list); contents, Indiana section, “Native Animals” and “Wolf Hunts,” pp. 157–158.
- Indiana DNR, Fish & Wildlife: Mountain Lion (in.gov) — extirpated by late 1800s; no breeding population; confirmed reports Clay Co. 2009, Greene Co. 2010.
- MacGowan, Brian (Indiana DNR), “Black Bears and Other Large Predators in Indiana,” Indiana Woodland Steward — extirpated since the 1800s; 2015 northern Indiana bear first confirmed in 144 years; wolf shot by a farmer noted.
- Indiana DNR / secondary state summaries — gray wolf eliminated from Indiana by 1908; no breeding populations of wolf, cougar or bear in Indiana.