6. Modes of Poaching and Production
As the fall of 1892 drew to a close, Yellowstone's acting superintendent, Captain George S. Anderson, paused to reflect on recent events at the park. The past year had witnessed a number of developments: the erection of a new army barracks at Mammoth Hot Springs; heavy rains that had washed out ef>many of the park's roads and discouraged tourist travel to Yellowstone; an early September snowstorm. Still, one issue above all preoccupied the captain. “Trouble with poachers,” railed Anderson, “continues to be one of the greatest annoyances the superintendent has to contend with. There is gradually settling about the park boundaries a population whose sole subsistence is derived from hunting and trapping.” It especially irked the superintendent that the poachers surrounding Yellowstone operated with the knowledge—and seeming cooperation—of the local population. “In most civilized countries the occupation of such vandals as these is held in merited contempt,” grumbled Anderson. “But it is not so in the region of which I have made mention.” The captain identified numerous violations during the previous months: “All the people are thoroughly cognizant of the location of the boundary lines, but only respect them in the presence of some member of the park force. Live elk, deer, antelope, and bears are caught and sold; the various furbearing animals are trapped for their pelts, and hunting parties are guided into the best game region.”[1]
More than any other phenomenon, it was Yellowstone's prolific poaching that defined the relationship between park officials and the
Settlers near Yellowstone typically responded to such critiques in much the same manner as their counterparts in the Adirondacks. Stressing their natural right to subsistence, residents argued that conservation laws unfairly interfered with the frontier custom of “killing for the table.” As one Wyoming resident contended in 1895, “When you say to a ranchman, ‘You can't eat game, except in season,’ you make him a poacher, because he is neither going hungry himself nor have his family do so. … More than one family [here] would almost starve but for the game.”[5]
This defense of poaching as a pioneer tradition, however, simplified local practices almost as much as did many conservation policies. By the turn of the century, poachers killed game for many reasons besides
At daybreak, March 14, 1894, Scout Felix Burgess located what he had been searching for: a set of ski tracks confirming official suspicions that a lawbreaker was lurking somewhere in the park's northeastern corner. For some time, rumors had hinted that someone from Cooke City was in Yellowstone killing buffalo for their hides and heads, which could bring from one hundred to four hundred dollars in nearby Montana towns. In addition, the soldiers at one of the army's outposts on the park's eastern edge had recently found tracks indicating that a man pulling a toboggan had slipped by their station late one night in the middle of a blizzard. After efforts to locate this mysterious traveler had failed, Captain Anderson had directed Burgess to make periodic patrols of the area where the tracks had been discovered. But days of searching had yielded nothing—until this morning.[7]
Together with Private Troike, an enlisted man posted to the park, Burgess followed the tracks a short distance. The two soon stumbled across a “teepee” and, bundled in gunny sacks and hoisted into a tree to keep them away from the park's scavengers, the heads of six buffalo. Burgess and Troike also picked up a fresh set of ski tracks, which they pursued to “a newly-erected lodge” where the poacher had been staying. The next question—figuring out where the poacher himself might be—solved itself shortly afterward: the pair heard six rifle shots in rapid succession. Upon investigation, Burgess and Troike spotted five dead buffalo several hundred yards away. The animals had been driven into the deep snow and shot. Hunched over one of the carcasses was a man removing the buffalo's hide with a knife.[8]
Despite the two hundred yards separating him from the poacher, Burgess decided he needed to act before the wrongdoer detected the
Howell's capture became an immediate national sensation. Not only was this the first instance of a poacher being caught in the park in the act of killing and dressing an animal, but, through a curious twist of fate, the arrest came at the same time that Emerson Hough, a correspondent for Forest and Stream, happened to be visiting Yellowstone. Hough telegraphed his editor, George Bird Grinnell, with the news of Howell's capture, and Grinnell, with the help of the Boone and Crockett Club, publicized the event as incontrovertible evidence of the need for expanded protection of Yellowstone.[10] Grinnell and his supporters found it especially galling that Howell, after killing at least eleven buffalo in the park, could be punished only by expulsion—the same weak penalty that civilian superintendents had complained about years earlier. “The man Howell, who has just been arrested, has destroyed property belonging to the Government—that is, to the people—which was worth from $ 2,500 to $ 5,000; yet if we may judge the future by the past, he will be allowed to go on his way practically without punishment,” fumed Forest and Stream. “If he had committed a similar act anywhere else—if he had destroyed Government horses or mules or grain or supplies of any sort to this extent—he would have served a long time in prison. So long as these lewd fellows of the baser sort … know that they will not be punished for their invasions of the Park, ten regiments of troops could not protect it against their raids.” The only solution, according to Grinnell and his associates, was to greatly increase the penalties for violating the regulations governing Yellowstone National Park.[11]
In their effort to compensate for the weakness of the park's official penalties against poaching, Yellowstone's military superintendents—Captain Anderson in particular—had over time cobbled together a variety of semilegal sanctions. As one local newspaper phrased it, “It has been the custom … for Capt. Anderson, superintendent of the Park, to
The second penalty concocted by the park's military authorities was the confiscation of all goods that lawbreakers had used in committing their crimes. Unlike imprisonment, this measure at least had some basis in Department of the Interior regulations. At first, the officers in charge of the park had construed confiscation as applying only to rifles, traps, and other items of hunting equipment. Under Anderson, however, this policy expanded to include horses, saddles, harnesses, sleds, tents—anything of value that wrongdoers might have in their possession. When the captain compiled an inventory of the goods taken from poachers in 1893, the list made for “quite an array of confiscated property,” including seven or eight horses. Many poachers, however, soon learned how to take the sting out of this penalty by claiming that whatever they had with them at the time of their capture was the property of someone else. When George and Henry Rockinger, from Gardiner, were apprehended in the park at midnight on December 17, 1894, with a sled load of freshly killed elk, for example, the army initially confiscated all the Rockingers' equipment. Not long afterward, though, another resident of Gardiner came forward to state that the horses, sled, harness, and butcher cleaver taken from the Rockingers actually belonged to him; he had lent them to the Rockingers without knowing that they were going to use his property to poach elk. Park authorities had no alternative but to return the items. Similar scenarios occurred with such frequency that Anderson could only observe that “it seems strange to me that whenever a thief is caught poaching in the park everything he has with him, but his skin and bones, belong to some good citizen.”[14]
Howell's well-publicized arrest created the ideal opportunity to replace this improvised, legally questionable system of enforcement with a more comprehensive and permanent arrangement. Building on their network of well-placed allies in Congress, Grinnell and the Boone and Crockett Club sped through both houses “an Act to protect the birds and animals in Yellowstone National Park, and to punish crimes in said park.” Signed into law by Grover Cleveland less than sixty days after Howell's capture, this measure declared all violations of the Department of the Interior's regulations at the park to be misdemeanors, punishable by a fine of up to one thousand dollars and two years in prison. The act also assigned a magistrate to the park with the power to try and punish offenders. “In one sense it [Howell's killing of park buffalo] was the most fortunate thing that ever happened in the Park,” enthused Captain Anderson, “for it was surely the means of securing a law so much needed and so long striven for.”[15]
Many of those living on the park's perimeter, however, drew a different set of lessons from Howell's arrest. A few inhabitants, in keeping with the view that violations of the game laws were forgivable when done to meet basic subsistence needs, expressed sympathy for the pressing hunger that, they felt, must have pushed Howell to his “perilous” deed. Asked the Livingston Post, “Was he, like many another man in these times, out of employment and destitute of the means of securing clothing, a bed, or perhaps even food? Indeed, it would seem that he must have been surrounded by some such circumstances to induce him forward.” While the Post did not think Howell's “slaughter of buffalo” should go unpunished, the newspaper did raise mitigating circumstances: “The plea of ministering to his own necessities ought certainly to have some weight in determining Howell's punishment.”[16]
Far more common, however, were expressions of local disgust at Howell's killing of rare animals (by the 1890s, there were only two hundred to three hundred buffalo at Yellowstone) simply to sell their heads and hides to the commercial trophy market. Howell “will find no apologists in this section … for his nefarious work,” declared the Livingston Enterprise. “The sentiment here is universal that the small remnant of American bison still in the Park should be protected by rigid laws to prevent their extermination at the hands of poachers whose only object is to secure the valuable consideration offered for their scalps and hides.”[17] More often than one may suspect, such public declarations were supported by private gestures. During the 1890s, park authorities received a steady trickle of notes from anonymous local sources, providing tips
Other residents fretted that deeds such as Howell's only confirmed the harsh opinions of them voiced by conservationists, and thus provided a justification for the army's unwanted presence in their midst. As one inhabitant of Cooke City griped, “This place has a bad reputation as a roost for poachers. … everybody living here is held responsible for the trespassing of a few men[,] and the general opinion prevails that we are nothing else but a whole community of outlaws.” “The residents of Park County do not desire to have odium cast upon them or any justification given for the obnoxious and unjust rules of the Park military authorities by the lawless acts of buffalo slayers,” agreed the Livingston Enterprise. “They will stand upon their rights as citizens of Montana in the matter of killing game in this state in the open season, but very few if any will be found to condone so open and flagrant a violation of the laws of Montana as the killing of the few remaining buffalo.”[19]
Intriguingly, Howell, who was by no means silent in this debate, chose not to describe his actions in the economic terms employed by his defenders. Instead, in the chatty letters to the editor that he contributed to the newspaper, he attempted to defuse popular impressions of him as “a desperate, bad man” by focusing on the skill and daring that had enabled him to elude park patrols for so long and to survive a harsh Yellowstone winter over a hundred miles from the nearest settlement. “I was doing what a great many more would do if they had my courage and ability,” he contended in one letter.[20] Delighting in his notoriety as the “National Park Poacher,” Howell indulged a correspondent for Forest and Stream with a detailed description of the techniques he and other poachers used to outwit Yellowstone's patrols when hunting elk: “It is the simplest thing in the world. When the snow begins to fall in September and October, we wait until a nice snowstorm has set in, and then taking a saddle horse and two or more pack horses, we start for the Park and travel fast. After reaching the ground we have previously selected to hunt over, we make a long detour and cross our tracks perhaps
As his account underscores, poaching for Howell involved more than simply the killing of game. It was a test of his bravery, of his knowledge of the local landscape, of his skill as a hunter and tracker—in sum, an exercise that called upon many of the qualities at the core of rural masculine identity. This connection between poaching and manliness may help explain why poachers, despite the care they took to hide their lawbreaking from Yellowstone's authorities, so often bragged about their risk-taking to fellow community members, an activity that frequently appears to have taken place in the male venue of the local saloon. Several of the anonymous notes received by park authorities tell of overhearing poachers in barrooms “mak[ing] their bosts [sic] of hunting in … the park” and “remark[ing] that he was ‘too cute for any park policeman to take him in.’” Trial transcripts reveal that some poachers avidly displayed the results of their illegal hunting to bartenders and other saloon regulars.[22] Such evidence suggests that poaching satisfied a number of masculine functions. Not only did it allow local men to fulfill their idealized male role as provider of food and income, but the risk that illegal hunting involved gave it—in certain circles, at least—a manly cachet. Poaching's many similarities (killing, the use of weapons, the risk of encounter with armed opponents) to the quintessential male activity, warfare, can only have amplified these connotations, especially once the army assumed control of the park in 1886.[23]
Because of such factors, even those who decried poachers as outlaws were not immune to admiring their masculine qualities. Forest and Stream might sniff that Howell was “a most ragged, dirty and unkempt looking citizen … dressed in an outer covering of dirty, greasy overalls,” but the magazine still expressed amazement at his skill in constructing his own skis and in hauling a heavily loaded, 180-pound toboggan across the frozen Yellowstone landscape. Impressed that Howell had endured harsh winter conditions during his surreptitious foray alone in the park, one correspondent for Forest and Stream termed Howell “in his brutal and misguided way a hero in self-reliance. … Howell, or any like him, I hate instinctively, but I salute him.”[24] Even the park's scouts, who as local residents doubtless realized better than anyone else the hazards involved in venturing into the park during its harsh winters,
Yet manliness was not the sole province of poachers, as the curious coda to Howell's experience at Yellowstone reveals. In 1897, following a stagecoach robbery in the park, acting superintendent Colonel Samuel B. M. Young hired Howell, “who knew all the bad men and poachers around the park,” as a scout. Howell's skillful tracking soon led park authorities to the robbers' trail, and after their capture Howell received $ 150 in reward money (despite Theodore Roosevelt's strenuous objections to any sort of payment to the former poacher). During his time as a scout, Howell also patrolled Yellowstone's western perimeter, reporting to Young that “I would like to locate all the buffalo I can on this trip that I may know where to go to protect them during the hunting season.”[26]
On one level, Howell's apparent change of heart—from poacher of buffalo to the animals' protector—may seem like an extraordinary leap in moral perspective and in mode of relating to nature. On another level, though, there were inescapable continuities between the two positions. Tracking and other outdoor skills, the competitive challenge of outwitting an opponent, toughness, and physical bravery: all were qualities that poachers and scouts alike called upon to perform their assigned roles. Paradoxically, many of the same qualities that animated poachers could animate the park's local defenders as well.[27]
While Howell's arrest rid Yellowstone of “a notorious poacher” and helped establish a stricter enforcement policy, it did not, as Captain Anderson had initially hoped, signal the end of poaching in the preserve. Game continued to be killed in the park, not only by solitary poachers like Howell but also by organized groups of lawbreakers. The most daring and dangerous of these bands was the “merciless and persistent lot of head and skin hunters” that headquartered itself in Henry's Lake, a small Idaho village of ninety-eight people located not far from the park's western boundary.[28] As one army officer put it, “[At Henry's Lake there] lives a gang of hardy mountain pirates who make a scanty living by hunting, trapping, and fishing. … Natural poachers, they are banded together and work in concert, completely dominating the sparsely settled section, adjoining the Park, in which they live. Such skilled robbers are they and so minute their knowledge of the country that it is almost impossible to convict them.”[29] Attempting to build on
Whether or not the target of Anderson's attention can best be described as a criminal gang remains open to interpretation. There is little question that a number of the inhabitants of Henry's Lake were participants in a systematic poaching operation that sold meat, heads, and hides to area taxidermists and mining camps. But whether this group was a just a loose association of familiars or a hierarchically arranged band with a clearly defined membership—a true gang—is less clear. The group at Henry's Lake was certainly less organized than the “poaching fraternities” active in rural Great Britain at much the same time. Such fraternities, which often had as many as forty members, possessed a highly developed hierarchy of armorers, treasurers, and other officers and a complex initiation process that usually involved swearing oaths of loyalty and secrecy.[31] By contrast, the lawbreaking at Henry's Lake appears to have been much less structured, with the prevailing unit of organization being the family. Two of the leaders of the supposed gang were the brothers James and Al Courtenay; their father-in-law, Silas McMinn, and his step-son, Jay Whitman, also participated from time to time in their poaching activities, as did McMinn's neighbor, Dick Rock. This reliance on family and neighbor recurred in other Yellowstone poaching operations, no doubt because of the heightened loyalty such arrangements offered. A pair of well-known poachers from Idaho, George and John Winegar, were also brothers; William Binkley, the leader of a band of poachers in Jackson Hole, often hunted with his son-in-law.[32]
Although the group from Henry's Lake endeavored, like poachers everywhere, to avoid keeping a predictable routine, they did have a repertoire of favorite techniques. Typically, the village's poachers hunted in the southwestern corner of the park, particularly in the Madison River basin and the Bechler River basin. Their standard procedure was to haul a sled or wagon up to Yellowstone's western border, then slip across on horseback, often following a streambed so as not to leave any tracks. After killing whatever game they could find, the poachers would then load their packhorses and use the cover of darkness to steal back out of the park, trusting their horses to remember the route. Occasionally, the band relied on other tricks to fool the park authorities. One common technique was to cache one's rifle and ammunition in the park
One frequent target of the Henry's Lake poachers was elk. After killing an elk in the park, the poachers would butcher the animal, taking only the best cut of meat (the “saddle”) back to the village with them. Once at Henry's Lake, the poachers would box the meat or cover it in burlap and then ship it via stagecoach to nearby mining camps such as Virginia City disguised as “beef or domesticated elk.” (The McMinns' neighbor, Dick Rock, owned a number of domesticated elk, providing a convenient cover for the steady shipments of elk meat from the village.) Another of the poachers' favorite targets was buffalo. The risks involved in killing a buffalo in the park were such that poachers seldom took the time to butcher the animals for their meat but would smuggle the heads and hides out, as these could be sold for several hundred dollars on the trophy market. In addition, during the spring some of the residents of Henry's Lake would try to capture buffalo calves, which they would then corral in remote locales outside the park. Once the buffalo were full grown, the poachers would arrange for the sale of the animals' heads to one of the not overly scrupulous taxidermists with whom they did business.[34]
Although many of the people of Henry's Lake apparently knew what the poachers in their midst were doing (“there is no secret made about these hunting expeditions,” remarked one inhabitant to park authorities), this knowledge did not equate with full support of the group's activities.[35] In fact, at the same time that some of the inhabitants of Henry's Lake's were slipping into the park to poach, other inhabitants were slipping notes to park authorities, urging the army to curb the poachers' activities. “What is the game warden doing?” queried one such letter. “Is he going to let a few men kill all the elk in the Park[?] they come across the line to fead and they are killing them bye the four horse load and shiping them.”[36]“Dick Rock of Henry's Lake Idaho has
Almost without exception, those who passed such information to the authorities at Yellowstone either ended their letters with a plea that their identities be kept secret or chose to shield themselves behind pen names. (Intriguingly, like the letter writers above, many of those who selected this latter option signed themselves “a citizen,” providing suggestive, if fragmentary, evidence that such informers viewed the control of game to be connected to issues of community and civic responsibility.)[38] The authors of these letters offered a harrowing litany of the woes that could befall those known to have informed on poachers to park officials. “Keep my name still if your man ketch them,” pled one informant. “I have horses here on the range and if they should find me out they wood run them off.” “This must be confidential,” added another. “If it were known my house and stock would not be worth a cent, we have some hard citizens here.” A third letter writer was even more alarmist: “You will pleas keep this perfectly secret if they should find out that I have given you any information [I] would be in danger of my life as there is some tough cases up here.”[39]
As such pleas reveal, the public acceptance that the Henry's Lake gang enjoyed masked considerable private resentment. While community members may have been afraid to confront the poachers directly, they proved more than willing to work behind the scenes to bring about the group's downfall. Once they realized the extent of the efforts against them, the village's poachers, much like timber gangs in the Adirondacks, attempted to intimidate local residents into halting the flow of information to conservation officials. “After you was at the lake they [the gang members] tried very hard to find out where you got yor information from,” explained one informant following a surprise patrol of the village by park scouts. “Be very carefull don't let yor best friend no our business.”[40] During a subsequent patrol, the military interrogated Henry's Lake's lone storekeeper. The man, while apparently anxious to dislodge the poaching operation in his village, was afraid of appearing to cooperate with park authorities. “I think Sherwood [the storekeeper] will give up any information he gets,” reported the officer in charge, “but only in secret, as he claims—and I think truly—that they would
With Idaho authorities doing little to restrain the dangerous cast of characters in their midst, the residents of Henry's Lake turned to one of the few alternatives available to them: the conservation forces at Yellowstone. Inhabitants' behind-the-scenes information enabled the military to put together one of its most successful antipoaching campaigns ever. Thanks to its improved intelligence on the poachers and their compatriots, the army broke up the group's distribution network, arresting some of the taxidermists to whom the gang had sold heads. Similarly, after locals identified the poachers' favorite hunting spots, the army stepped up its patrols of the affected areas and resurveyed the boundaries in the park's southwestern quadrant, eliminating the ambiguity that had previously allowed poachers to argue that they had captured their game outside Yellowstone's borders.[42]
Such measures allowed park administrators to celebrate the new century with their first successful prosecution of any of the poachers from Henry's Lake. In 1900, James Courtenay and Jay Whitman were arrested and fined three hundred dollars apiece for killing an elk in the park. Deciding that “Park authorities had it in for him,” Courtenay and his brother left the area shortly afterward, while Whitman moved to the new town of West Yellowstone, Montana, where he eventually opened a tourist campground. In 1902, their companion Dick Rock, having eluded all attempts by the army to catch him poaching, suffered a more poetic form of justice: he was gored to death by one of his captured buffalo. As such losses mounted, the gang at Henry's Lake, if a gang it was, dwindled to a shadow of its former self, its participants no longer able to inspire the terror that had once so gripped their village.[43]
In 1899, Edwin Daniel, a businessman from Chicago, wrote to Forest and Stream about a strange new poaching practice he had encountered during a recent hunting excursion to Wyoming. Just outside Yellowstone, Daniel reported, he had discovered a large number of elk that had been “simply shot recklessly and wantonly, and without any object whatever, except it might be perhaps to get their teeth.” To Daniel as well as to many of Forest and Stream's other subscribers, such behavior could only be described as bizarre. As one of the magazine's puzzled
There was nonetheless a rational explanation for such goings-on. Elk teeth—or, to be more precise, the prominent upper canines, or “tusks,” of the adult elk—had long been used by the Assiniboine, Cheyenne, Shoshone, and other Indian peoples as a form of adornment. The women of the Crow tribe, for example, ornamented their buckskins with hundreds of elk teeth, so that a single costume might weigh as much as ten or twelve pounds. Following the rise of the reservation, these practices became increasingly rare among Indian peoples. In their place, however, there arose another group whose members decorated themselves with elk teeth: the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elk, a fraternal organization founded in New York City in 1868. With growing numbers of club members wearing elk tusks—favorite fashions included using the teeth as watch fobs, rings, cuff links, and hat pins—the price of the teeth shot upward. “Five years ago I bought them in Idaho for 50 cents,” lamented one club member, “whereas now a pair of fine teeth cannot be had for $ 5.” Other commentators placed the price even higher, from ten to fifty dollars a pair, depending on the size and coloration, with the larger tusks from mature bulls bringing the best money.[45]
For the inhabitants of the Yellowstone region, who had the good fortune to live near some of the largest remaining elk herds in the United States, this booming market in elk tusks was an unexpected windfall. Under Wyoming law, residents could kill two elk during hunting season. The teeth from these animals, which previously might have been discarded, could now be sold for a tidy sum. In addition, if one chanced across the remains of a dead elk—a none-too-infrequent occurrence during the region's harsh winters, when elk sometimes died by the hundreds—it was a simple matter to collect additional tusks with the aid of a pair of pliers.[46]
Yet not all the settlers living near Yellowstone were content to gather tusks through legal means. Some, as Forest and Stream's correspondents had discovered, killed elk simply for the animal's two canine teeth. Such illicit “tusking” could often be quite extensive. In 1916, for instance, park scouts reported finding “the bodies of 257 elk which had been killed for their teeth” by “certain lawless individuals” near Gardiner. Trial records from this period tell of tooth hunters who were observed with anywhere from 24 to 270 elk teeth in their possession.[47]
Even more than earlier poachers like Howell or the gang from Henry's Lake, tuskers proved difficult for park authorities to apprehend. Since elk teeth were small, the fruits of one's lawbreaking could easily be hidden in a shirt pocket or tobacco sack, where they were safely out of view of any passing park official. Once safely outside of Yellowstone, it was simple to conceal one's loot amid one's personal possessions. The compact size of elk teeth made selling them easy as well. Rather than smuggling a cumbersome animal head or hide to a nearby taxidermist or having to preserve and market large cuts of meat, the tusker could simply mail a small package to any one of the dealers in elk teeth who advertised in local papers. And because elk teeth did not spoil, they could be gathered year-round, whereas most other forms of hunting were pursued in the winter months when the cold weather ensured that animals' pelts were at their thickest and that whatever meat one killed would not spoil.[48]
In addition to these inherent advantages, many tuskers utilized a variety of tricks that enhanced their elusiveness, as the career of one notorious tooth hunter, William Binkley of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, demonstrates. Like most inhabitants of the Yellowstone region, Binkley made a living through a variety of means. Besides “prov[ing] up on a home-stead,” where he ran a few cows and “raised some garden,” he also worked from time to time as a butcher, a guide for visiting sports hunters, and, according to the 1900 census, a teamster.[49] But Binkley seems to have spent most of his time tusking, an undertaking in which he was frequently joined by a number of accomplices from Jackson Hole. (Park authorities dubbed the group the “Binkley-Purdy-Isabel gang,” in honor of its primary participants.) When poaching, Binkley relied on a small-caliber rifle, a weapon that could seldom be heard from more than fifty yards away. (Other poachers, concerned that their shots might attract the attention of passing army patrols, fashioned homemade silencers that muffled the noise of their rifles.)[50] After he killed an elk, Binkley seldom removed the teeth right away. Rather, as one game warden explained, the standard practice for Binkley and his compatriots was “to shoot an elk, and probably not go to him for a week. His teeth wouldn't be hurt, at all. His teeth would be just as good in a week, and the elk would be partly ate up by animals, and then the man would be plumb safe to go back and get the teeth. There would be no evidence agin him.” When it did come time to extract the elk's teeth, Binkley often took the added precaution of using a “skee”—“a flat piece of board and
The careers of Binkley and his partners in crime also offer some tantalizing clues as to their motivations. One piece of evidence comes from a Wyoming saloon, where Binkley showed the bartender his finger, telling the man that it had a callus from “pulling the trigger, shooting elk.” Binkley proudly noted that this callus was the only one on his hand because he “didn't work.”[52] A similar contrast between poaching and work was drawn by one of Binkley's compatriots, Oscar Adams. Telling an acquaintance that “he was making more money [tusking] than by working on a ranch,” Adams added that he believed it “was foolish to work for wages.”[53]
Binkley and Adams's positioning of poaching and work as opposed categories may initially appear peculiar. After all, to be successful, a poacher had to exert considerable physical effort. He might spend days in the saddle or on snowshoes, making long, surreptitious journeys through rough terrain. To avoid encountering any of the scouts or soldiers patrolling Yellowstone, a poacher frequently operated at night or during snowstorms and other bad conditions. Moreover, neither Binkley nor Adams belonged to the one group for whom hunting truly was play: upperclass sports hunters, such as the members of the Adirondack League Club or the Boone and Crockett Club, who found the chase most glorious when it fulfilled a cultural rather than economic function. For Binkley and Adams, poaching was no amusing pastime; it was the source of much of their annual income.[54]
Where tusking did diverge from the world of work for Binkley and his compatriots was in the contrast that it posed to wage labor. When he stated that it was “foolish to work for wages,” Adams was no doubt celebrating the poacher's freedom from the dependency and time discipline of the workplace. Despite the risk of arrest (apparently never overwhelming: Binkley and Adams, like many of Yellowstone's poachers, evaded capture for years), poaching allowed its practitioners to embrace many long-standing producerist ideals—to work with a rhythm, and at the time, of their own choosing; to avoid subservience to bosses and employers—while also earning far more than the typical wage laborer.[55]
Because of such factors, poachers at Yellowstone were predominantly drawn from the region's growing working class. Although the army kept no precise data on the occupations of the poachers it arrested in the park, observers noted that a large number were agricultural and industrial
Drawing upon republican traditions that equated hunting with independence f"and self sufficiency, many of those arrested for poaching in the park defended themselves by pointing to the debilitating circumstances that had driven them to their illegal acts. After his capture in 1914, for instance, the unemployed worker Harry McDonald maintained that he had hunted in the park only because he was “broke all the time.” McDonald noted proudly that he had never poached for trophies; he “wanted no heads but wanted some meat whether it was a deer, elk or [mountain] sheep.” Although unsympathetic to McDonald's plight, park authorities were not unaware that hunting often provided a subsistence cushion for local laborers. As Yellowstone's superintendent acknowledged in 1912, many of the elk killed after migrating out of the park went “to families that otherwise might have had a slim meat ration for the winter due to dull times for workingmen in this section of country.”[59]
This use of poaching to distance oneself from the strictures of the workplace, however, left its practitioners vulnerable to charges that they lacked the appropriate commitment to the work ethictaand to community improvement. “We have a splendid game country here, but there is a certain element who seem to be doing the best they know how to deplete it,” contended one Montana resident in 1897. “There are men here engaged in trout fishing rgetand selling, in the open market, which is against the law. … Elk meat was brought in by the wagon load, for sale, last winter. There are men here who are always at such work; but would not do an honest day's work.” A correspondent for
Because of such factors, disputes over poaching often brought to the surface local class tensions. William Simpson of Jackson Hole, for example, explained the activities of Binkley and other neighborhood poachers by dividing the community's inhabitants into “two classes. … One is those who see in the country a future for themselves” and families, typeand who are particularly anxious to protect the game within the borders of Uintaz and Tremount counties. The other class is those who have no permanent interest, no property, nor anything to keep them, outside of being able to kill game for the meat, hides, heads nand teeth; otand in this manner they make a partial living without work.” For Simpson ereand others like him, poaching spoke of the larger struggle between agrarian modernizers f">and backward rural holdovers (whose primitivism merited the charge of “white Indian”). Yet in certain respects the two groups were not as far apart as they may have appeared. A poacher like Binkley might resist entering the labor market, but he did so by intensifying the sale of natural resources. Thus, both the poacher [.and his detractor sought to capitalize on the spread of market relations. Indeed, by certain measures, a poacher like Binkley could be considered even more attuned to modern economics than his critics: through his intensive sale of game, Binkley was commodifying a good that many other residents resisted bringing entirely within the marketplace.[61]
For all of Binkley's ability at eluding park authorities, he had less success in evading the volatile emotions that poaching excited among the members of his own community. Jackson Holers' first effort to control the poachers in their midst came in 1899, when the town's inhabitants took up a collection to hire an additional game warden, primarily to prevent outsiders from hunting illegally in the area. Three years later residents formed a “Game Protective Association” designed, in the words of one participant, to “make it hot for the game hogs.”[62] Despite being early targets of the association, Binkley,;@and his accomplices did not alter their behavior. By 1906, the wily tuskers' neighbors had had enough. Some twenty-five Jackson Holers formed a “citizens' committee” to bring the poachers to justice. After a brief meeting to debate the merits of a summary lynching, the group decided to offer Binkley,
Even after this close call, Binkley professed ignorance as to why his actions had triggered the wrath of his fellow residents. After all, he observed, many other members of the “citizens' committee” also hunted illegally. Thus, “they are not any better than I am. … They have been doing just the same.” While it was certainly true that many other Jackson Holers ignored local game laws, Binkley overlooked the distinctions that rural folk had long drawn between different modes of poaching. Viewing subsistence as a natural right, the residents of Jackson Hole—much like country people in the Adirondacks and elsewhere—rarely opposed poaching done for necessities such as meat, hides, or tallow. On an earlier occasion, in fact, Binkley had been a beneficiary of this local tolerance of subsistence poaching. A few years before his nearlynching, Binkley shot an elk out of season for an ill neighbor who needed meat, an act for which he was arrested not long afterward by the state game warden. Outraged at what they considered to be Binkley's unjust treatment, Jackson Holers took up a collection ef>and paid his hundred dollar fine.[64]
These same residents, however, were far less willing to be similarly tolerant of Binkley's foray into tusking. The distinctions rural Americans had attempted to draw between subsistence activities and commercial behavior may have been breaking down in the increasingly cashbased economy of the late nineteenth century. But Binkley's tusk hunting presented few such ambiguities. His slaughter of hundreds of elk—at the time of his arrest, Binkley had close to three hundred tusks in his possession—simply for their teeth represented an unmistakable example of destructive market engagement that, if allowed to continue unchecked, would destroy the natural resources upon which all the village's inhabitants depended. (These same fears about overexploitation—about “a few men kill[ing] all the elk in the Park”—no doubt played a large role in animating local opposition to the poachers at Henry's Lake as well.)[65]
In creating a “citizens' committee” to discipline Binkley, Jackson Holers drew upon a lengthy, if informal, tradition of community control over local resources. Most often, this control had taken the form of excluding those seen as outsiders—Indians such as the Bannock and
Sheep Men Warning
| We will not permit sheep to graze upon the elk range | |
| in Jackson's Hole. Govern yourselves accordingly. | |
| Signed: the Settlers of Jackson's Hole |
Those shepherds brave or foolish enough to enter the valley were beaten and had their sheep killed by Jackson Holers determined to protect the local elk habitat. While attacks on fellow community members were rarer, the relentless tusking of Binkley and his compatriots eventually placed them outside the communal circle, making them targets for the same sort of violence.[66]
Binkley's forced exile from Jackson Hole did not end his connection with the region. Following their flight from Wyoming, Binkley and Charles Purdy were arrested in Los Angeles, where a California game warden discovered their stash of “hides and horns underneath the floor of an unused room” in a local taxidermy shop. Tried on charges of having violated the 1900 Lacey Act forbidding the transportation of illegally killed game across state lines, the two were fined the maximum amount allowed, $ 200 apiece. The pair were then sent to Yellowstone, where they faced a second trial on charges of having poached game in the park. Found guilty on these counts as well, Binkley and his compatriot were fined another $ 933 and confined to the park's guardhouse for three months. Binkley's confinement, however, did not last for long. In October 1907 he managed to escape from his cell. Calling upon the detailed knowledge of Yellowstone's hiding places and secret pathways that he had acquired during his many years as a poacher, he eluded all attempts to recapture him.[67]
Having made good his escape, Binkley may—or may not—drop from the historical record. A number of clues—hair color, height, and a raspy voice—point to Binkley as the masked man who, on the morning of August 24, 1908, undertook the most daring robbery in Yellowstone's history: the armed holdup of several of the park's tourist stagecoaches. Perhaps Binkley needed money to finance a final escape from the region. Or perhaps he wanted to “show” park authorities, as he had threatened during his confinement. But if the robber was indeed Binkley, his concern over the inequities of the wage labor system apparently remained intact: when the first stagecoach pulled into view, the robber announced that he
If many park observers thought tusking an odd endeavor, they found the events that took place at Yellowstone in early February 1915 even more bewildering. The incidents began around midnight on February 1 when “some miscreant” cut the woven wire fence that ran along the park's border with Gardiner. The following evening, one or more figures slipped into a holding pen of elk located near Yellowstone's northern entrance, “in sight of the town of Gardiner.” Fashioning an impromptu spear from a knife tied to a long stick, the trespassers proceeded to stab to death seven of the elk stored in the pen. The savageness of the attack as well as its lack of any understandable motive baffled park officials. “Scarcely any of the meat had been taken,” noted the park's superintendent, who speculated that “it appeared likely that the work was done by some one for spite, possibly by the same persons who cut the fence.”[69]
This assault on the park's elk, for which no one was ever arrested, remains one of the oddest episodes of poaching in Yellowstone's history. Unlike the illegal hunting undertaken by Howell, the Henry's Lake gang, and Binkley and his colleagues, it was a crime without a clear beneficiary. Why kill so many elk, especially if one was to leave the most valuable parts of the dead animals, the teeth and the meat, behind? Given this seeming senselessness, it is tempting to dismiss the attack as an irrational act of animal cruelty—the work, in the words of one observer at the time, of a “fiend.” Such a position becomes harder to maintain, however, once we piece together the conditions prevailing at Yellowstone during the early 1900s. It seems that a certain grim logic may indeed have underlain the actions that unfolded on those cold nights in February 1915.[70]
Our investigation starts with the prologue to the elk stabbing: the cutting of the fence running along the park's border with Gardiner. As we have seen, the army began construction of this fence in 1903. Although its initial purpose was to serve as “a means of keeping stock of all kinds off … the park,” the fence also helped prevent wildlife from wandering out of the park—especially Yellowstone's antelope herd, which often wintered on the grassy plain abutting Gardiner. Making the fence serve this second function, however, required constant adjustments. Elk regularly tore down or leapt over fences designed for livestock, while antelope, because of their small size, often slipped through openings that
This fence building was part of a larger program by Yellowstone's superintendents to limit the mobility of the park's game animals (a rare example of a program of state simplification aimed not at local residents but at wildlife). The first effort in this direction came in the mid1890s, when park authorities endeavored to build a “tame” buffalo herd from animals purchased from commercial ranches. These buffalo were corralled at all times as a protection against poachers like Howell and the “gang” from Henry's Lake. A more indirect form of controlling animal mobility was the winter feeding program that the army initiated in the early 1900s. Each year, the military harvested several tons of hay from alfalfa fields the soldiers planted in the park. Soldiers then fed this pasture to Yellowstone's deer, antelope, mountain sheep, and elk during the winter months in an attempt to dissuade the animals from wandering to the lower elevations outside of the park in search of forage, where they might be killed by local hunters.[73]
As might be expected, those living on Yellowstone's fringes seldom appreciated these policies, which pinched off much of the area's animal supply. The ensuing shortages of game exacerbated tensions over Yellowstone's borders, particularly over the issue of how one determined when an animal had left the protection of the park and become fair game for passing hunters. While settlers considered any animal that strayed even momentarily beyond Yellowstone's confines a legitimate target, park authorities took a more expansive view. As Major Harry Benson explained to the secretary of the interior in 1909, “It is not believed that the State authorities intended game to be killed by these
Protesting that they were “neither the ignorant or lawless element as charged by Col. Young,” several of the participants pointed out that their killing of the antelope had been legal under Montana's game laws: “A law-abiding citizen of Montana tried, convicted and sentenced because it was rumored that he had killed game in his own county and state. Can, then, a superintendent of the Park or commander of a military post deprive a citizen of an adjoining state of the rights vested in him by the constitution? It is not claimed that the offense (?) was against the rules, and within the jurisdiction of the Park authority or military reservation. Game is migratory.”[75] Despite such arguments, Yellowstone authorities maintained that many of the animals that strayed beyond the park's boundary were only out of the park temporarily and therefore should not be hunted. In 1908, the army barred thirteen people charged with “killing park antelope that had escaped through [the] fence near Gardiner” from any future access to the park. Two years later, the military issued a similar judgment against Shirley Brown of Gardiner for killing a deer “that had just jumped over the park fence into Mont[ana]. … This [shooting] was not in violation of the letter of any law but was in violation of spirit of same.”[76]
In light of such policies, the cutting of the fence in February 1915 can perhaps best be understood as a rebellion against the army's efforts to control the region's wildlife. There were reasons both practical (to allow animals out of the park) and symbolic (to demonstrate one's disregard for the army's attempts to impose its own boundaries on the landscape) that could have motivated a disgruntled local to damage the barrier that was the most visible marker of Yellowstone's northern limit. The timing was equally significant: the attack came shortly after the army had replaced the previous fence with a seven-foot, wovenwire version, which
| SOURCE: U.S. National Park Service, Annual Report of the Director of the National Park Service, 1917, 132; U.S. National Park Service, Annual Report of the Director of the National Park Service, 1918, 127. | |
|---|---|
| Winter 1911–12 | 137 |
| Winter 1912–13 | 538 |
| Winter 1913–14 | 99 |
| Winter 1914–15 | 375 |
| Winter 1915–16 | 618 |
| Winter 1916–17 | 496 |
| Winter 1917–18 | 145 |
| TOTAL | 2,408 |
But what about the attackers' choice of target—the elk corralled near Yellowstone's northern entrance? It may have been that these were simply the closest and easiest park animals for the poacher to kill, but there are also reasons why attacking such animals would have resonated symbolically with some of the local population. Herding elk into pens was a recent development at the park—an outgrowth of official concerns that Yellowstone's elk population was rising to unmanageably high levels. But rather than revising the antipredator and winter-grazing policies that had led to this surge in the elk's population, the army opted instead to ship thousands of “surplus” elk via railroad to zoos, parks, and other conservation sites. (See Table 8.) The collection point for these shipments was situated just across the border from Gardiner—a location convenient to the town's railroad station but also one that gave the village's inhabitants a prominent vantage point from which to watch the removal of the region's most popular game animal. Moreover, many of those who witnessed the army's shipments doubtless disagreed with the park authorities' belief that the region was suffering from an oversupply of elk. Because of the military's fence and feeding policies as well as some uncooperative winter weather, the game supply beyond the park's borders had been quite sparse of late. “Hunting has been very poor during the last two seasons,” noted Yellowstone's superintendent in 1915.
Under such circumstances, the attack on the penned elk at Gardiner may well have represented a protest against the army's conservation policies. Once integral to local subsistence, the park's elk had instead come to symbolize the new conservation order taking shape at Yellowstone. Viewed from this perspective, the stabbing of the penned elk constituted not an attempt at illegal appropriation of resources but rather a crime against property: the destruction of something belonging to Yellowstone officials (much as the setting of forest fires in the Adirondacks at this same time sometimes appeared to be intended to destroy state-controlled forestlands).[78] Perhaps the stabbing even represented, as the historian John Archer has argued in his study of incidents of animal maiming in nineteenth-century rural England, “a form of symbolic murder,” in which the animals were killed in place of a despised park administration. This theory would help explain why the killers took “scarcely any of the meat” from the dead elk: the deed they were performing was more akin to assassination than to hunting.[79]
It is even possible that the attack on the elk was a form of vengeance against the animals themselves. To some locals, it may have appeared as if Yellowstone's wildlife, having become comfortable with the protection the army provided, did not venture outside the park as they once did and still should have. As one resident of Gardiner lamented in the early 1900s, the animals, having learned “where the line is,” no longer allowed themselves to be hunted as before. The killers' decision not to take any of the meat or teeth from the dead elk may therefore have been an act of revenge designed to demonstrate local outrage at the animals' seeming betrayal of their preexisting relationship with the region's inhabitants.[80]
Yet for all the elements of possible social protest underlying this savage attack on the park's elk, apparently not everyone in Gardiner shared the perpetrators' motives. After the stabbing, several of the village's inhabitants, expressing revulsion at the slaughter of “a large number of … helpless animals,” started a popular subscription that raised over three hundred dollars in reward money for the arrest of the elk killers. Other residents hinted at an even darker fate for the animals' assailants. “It would not be lucky for the guilty person or persons if some of the citizens of Gardiner apprehended him, so incensed are they with the cowardly crime,” observed a local newspaper.[81]
Such a response—Gardiner's residents raising money to help capture a poacher—was not the sort of local behavior that Captain Anderson had predicted in 1892. However, in his haste to lambaste the “people who live on the borders of the park” for “intentionally and purposely … depredating” in Yellowstone, Anderson had missed an important truth. At no time did the poachers plaguing Yellowstone enjoy the total acceptance that Anderson and other park officials imagined. In fact, on many occasions illegal hunters found themselves the targets of popular efforts designed to restrain their efforts. Thus, rather than divide rural folk and park authorities into two mutually exclusive camps as early conservationists often did, it is more telling to emphasize the extent to which each category flowed into the other, complicating any easy moral tale about conservation. There were, for instance, those associates of the park, such as the soldiers who cooperated with local poachers, who evinced little interest in the goals of conservation. And there were those local inhabitants who aided the Yellowstone administration, either by seeking employment as scouts, by passing along information on poaching or other wrongdoing, or, as in the case of the stabbed elk, by raising money to support the arrest of lawbreakers.[82]
In the end, the fact that the American countryside produced both prolific poachers and a moral ecology that criticized certain poaching practices should not prove surprising. Poaching touched on many issues at the heart of turn-of-the-century rural life—the desire for self-sufficiency, the drive to prove one's manliness and daring, the hope of avoiding the dependency of the workplace—as well as on abiding notions of community responsibility and of one's right as an American to the hunt. These factors sometimes coincided but often conflicted, prohibiting rural folk from reaching any easy consensus about poaching's moral stature. In subtle yet unmistakable ways, Yellowstone by the early 1900s had become as much a monument to such tensions as it was to the geothermal energies that powered its famous geysers.