LaConte: The celebrity wolves, and wolf hunters, of Eagle County
These days, it may seem like wolves are spending an awful lot of time in the news in Colorado, but the truth is wolves have always made headlines, especially here in Eagle County.
In Red Cliff, the Eagle County Blade often published wolf stories from the Western Slope, and exactly 120 years ago, in January of 1905, wolves were on the front page of the Blade. This was because, according to “reports from all directions,” wolves on the Western Slope were “becoming unusually plentiful and destructive,” the Blade reported.
During the previous week, rancher E. A. Brown, while trying to preserve game on his park in the Big Beaver Valley, found that “wolves entered the preserve and killed four out of the nine deer there,” the Blade reported. “If the wolves continue their nefarious work the stockmen will be compelled to raise a fund to encourage the trappers.”
But not all wolf kills were performed using traps. In a story headlined “Killed him with rocks,” the Blade celebrated the efforts of W. D. Cunningham, who, during the previous week, was walking with his dog, “Tige,” when their path was crossed by a gray wolf.
Billy and Tige attacked; the dog wounded the wolf, and it retreated to a nearby hill and crawled into the rocks.

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“Seeing that the wolf was bottled up, volunteers were called for to bring the bugger out into the open,” the Blade reported. “Tige routed him out, and Billy stoned the animal to death. It was then found that the wolf had been in a trap, and one of its front legs was entirely useless. It was a merciful act to put it out of misery.”
Or was it? For some wolves, being caught in a trap one time made them especially hard to catch again. A wolf that became one of the most notorious in Colorado history was once such a specimen, and that wolf called Eagle County home. His name was Old Lefty of Burns Hole, and at the age of 4, he got caught in a trap and fought his way out, amputating his own foot. This was a few years after the Blade reported on Billy and Tige and suggested that stockmen may need to be compelled to raise a fund to encourage more trapping.
Arthur Carhart, the former Forest Service worker credited with coming up with the idea for wilderness protection in 1919, wrote about Old Lefty in his book “The Last Stand of the Pack.”
After leaving his “big, well-formed wolf foot” in the trap, “the last scab dropped from the red, scarred stump and it became black, calloused,” Carhart wrote. Old Lefty resumed his leader-of-the-pack role and terrorized the ranches of Eagle County for the next eight years, and “no stockman in Northern Eagle County was immune from the raids of his band of slaughterers.”
Eventually, those stockmen did exactly what the Blade (and, moreover, its source in that reporting, a paper called the White River Review) suggested, and raised a fund to encourage more trapping. By 1912, $50 per wolf head was being offered, and a man known as William H. “Big Bill” Caywood became a celebrity in the world of wolf trapping. From 1912 to 1913, Caywood killed 140 wolves. The Grand Junction Sentinel called him “America’s greatest wolf trapper,” and the Meeker Herald called him “The King of Wolves.”
In 1915, Congress founded the Bureau of Biological Survey, a government-sponsored predator killing operation that saved the stockmen the expense of paying out bounties on wolves. Caywood was among the first to join. In 1920, Caywood was dispatched to Garfield and Rio Blanco counties to try to capture Rags the Digger, a wolf that had caused more than $10,000 in losses to cattlemen and had an uncanny ability to sense traps.
While Caywood was chasing Rags, trapper Burt Hegewa came to Eagle County in search of Old Lefty. Both men eventually captured their prey in 1921, and for a while, the region was quiet. But then a couple years later, a menacing lone wolf known as Grey Terror began stalking Eagle County. Grey Terror was unlike anything the county had seen before, a renegade wolf which appeared to be slaughtering just for sport, killing far more than he could eat.
“In one or two instances he had killed cows and had torn at their bellies until he had found the unborn calves they carried, and had eaten of that only,” Carhart wrote of Grey Terror.
Eagle County had become rife with fear of the lone wolf. Caywood was called in.
“Never in any history has there been a more determined campaign against a criminal of any kind than that which Bill Caywood launched against the elusive, unknown killer in Eagle County,” Carhart wrote. “Just before Bill Caywood had come the butchering wolf had killed in two weeks seventeen young head of livestock — slaughtered them for the joy of killing — and had not eaten a pound of meat from any of the seventeen.”
In late July of 1923, Caywood found Grey Terror in one of his traps.
“Mr. Caywood says he was ‘just lucky’ in making the capture,” the Eagle Valley Enterprise reported. The headline read “Caywood ends career of old range killer.”
In 1935, the Denver Post reported that the Bureau of Biological Survey had killed the last wolf in Colorado, but scholars said the actual date of the total eradication of wolves in Colorado was 10 years later.
And for a long time, wolves were mostly out of the news, until the mid-1990s when the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone put people in Colorado on high alert. Reports of wandering wolves started increasing here, some unfounded, but some totally accurate. In 2004, a wolf made its way down from Yellowstone and was hit and killed by a vehicle on I-70 near Idaho Springs. In 2009, another Yellowstone wolf — this one wearing a tracking collar — traveled through Eagle County before being found killed by poison in Rio Blanco County.
But the story of a wolf in Colorado that might have made the most headlines occurred during that period between eradication in 1945 and the Yellowstone reintroduction in 1995. Exactly 50 years ago, in January of 1975, President Ford awoke one morning in Vail to find the heater had broken in the house he was staying in. Temperatures inside the house were in the 30s, and Betty Ford donned the President’s fur coat to stay warm. She was photographed in it, and when asked about the jacket, the President revealed that it was made of Alaskan wolf hide.
Protests ensued, culminating with a visit from a man named Ruffin Harris of Aspen. Harris stood outside the home Ford was staying in on Mill Creek Circle for hours; alongside him was his pet wolf, Sasha. The protest made nationwide news, and by the end of it, a crowd of 300 people had gathered alongside Harris and Sasha in Vail. United Press International photographed Harris and Sasha outside the home, and Harris was holding a sign that read “Wolves are better wild than worn.”
John LaConte is a reporter at the Vail Daily who authors the weekly Time Machine feature that runs on Mondays. Email him at jlaconte@vaildaily.com