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Chapman's list, 1880; the state's verdicts to 2003
The county's word: Chapman's 1880 chapter lists the black wolf and the black bear among the animals that went "with or before" the buffalo, and the panther with them; his rare-and-going list adds the catamount and the lynx. The panther and the catamount are one animal under its two period names — the cougar — and the chapter's printing both is a compiler's artifact of 1880 taxonomy, preserved here as printed rather than silently merged. Unlike the Fort Wayne file, which carries settler testimony of wolf packs around farmhouses and pitchforks carried against them, no St. Joseph County wolf-hunt narrative, bounty record, or named last wolf was found in the sources reached: the county's predator record is Chapman's list and nothing larger, and it is printed at that size. The Indiana portion of Chapman's volume does carry the period's state-level wolf-hunt and native-animal sketches (its contents list "Native Animals," "Wolf Hunts," "Bee-Hunting," and "Snakes" among the general Indiana chapters); those are the state's stories, not this county's, and they are not borrowed here.
The state's verdicts: The Indiana Department of Natural Resources' gray wolf account closes the question the county record leaves open: in the DNR's words, "early European settlers eliminated wolves from the state by 1908" — unregulated hunting, trapping, and predator control, on the DNR's telling, with the federal recovery framework coming only after the animal was gone. The one modern exception proves the boundary of the statement: the single wolf confirmed in Indiana in the modern era was a young male killed in east-central Indiana in 2003, identified by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a disperser from a Wisconsin pack — a wanderer from a recovered population hundreds of miles north, not a remnant of this state's. For the cougar and the bear, the county record reached carries no return entry at all: no confirmed St. Joseph County record of either animal in the modern sources consulted, and the file prints the absence plainly rather than the sightings that circulate without a confirming authority.
Sources:
- Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), Chapter II, p. 340; and the volume's contents for the Indiana-part animal chapters, pp. 157–159.
- Indiana Department of Natural Resources, "Gray Wolf" species account, in.gov — eliminated from Indiana by 1908.
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service news account, October 2003 — the east-central Indiana wolf identified as a Wisconsin-pack yearling.