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.