Item - The Wolf Hunters of Minnesota

The Wolf Hunters of Minnesota is an 1899 five-cent-novel by James C. Merritt. The story chronicles the assault of a horde of wolves on a small Minnesotan settlement while a group of ruffians kidnap the hero’s loved ones.

Familiarity with the attitude of the time period towards wolves is essential in order to understand this story– in its logic, a wolf is not only an innately ravenous and aggressive animal, but a “half-starved devil, in the guise of an animal” (Merritt, 1). Wolves throughout the story display a level of aggression and malice far beyond the scope of real wolves. Time is taken each time the wolves are encountered to describe them as cannibals: every time a wolf is shot dead, it is “torn limb from limb and devoured by their rapacious fellows” (3). They employ tactics against enemies, such as in chapter XXV, Besieged By Wolves, when the pack jumps onto the thatch roof of the party’s cabin in order to try to dig into their house. With these elements of characterization, the wolves of the story serve to represent a satanic band of monsters. In opposition to them are the main characters, wolf hunters, specialized bounty hunters rewarded by the government for thinning wolf populations. Wolf-bounties were a real historical practice, overseen by many state governments. The express purpose of these policies was the extermination of all wolf populations in the United States (Riley et al.).

Merritt uses wolves in the novel as a moral indicator. Association with wolves is association with evil, while the characters who continuously battle them are virtuous. The former can be seen most acutely in the character of Donald Allen, a fraudulent rancher who breeds wolves. Since the government pays per wolf scalp turned in, Allen uses his ranch to harvest the wolves and generate income. We are told that Allen himself is “an old rascal” (Merritt, 14), and everyone who consorts with him, “no better” (14). Allen’s accomplices are described, without exception, as “ugly villains” (16), and all speak in a noticeable accent, which is absent from the protagonists. The orthography of the dialect is clearly meant to portray the characters as gruff, and unaware. “We ain’t pooty”, they claim, but “we’re as good fellers as the next ones, and ye won’t get any better husbands” (16), these comments uttered as they are attempting to force two women into marriage. The evil of these characters is directly tied to wolfish behavior (as it is portrayed in the novel), such as their forcing themselves on the women. When the villains turn on each other, they fall on one another “tooth and nail” (24), much as the wolves in the story do when one of the pack is felled. Villainy and wolfishness are intimately connected in the logic of The Wolf Hunters of Minnesota.

Against the backdrop of this moral cosmology, Shakespearean dramatic elements unfold. The Wolf Hunters of Minnesota takes many story beats from the work of the ubiquitous English writer for the arc of the character of Ned. Mistaken identity, one of Shakespeare’s most prevalent ironic devices (White), is everywhere around this character. Ned is an orphan who searches for his father in the story, and meets an old hermit who is looking for his son. He remarks multiple times about their seemingly parallel quests, saying “I’m looking for a dad and you for a boy. Only suppose—” (Merritt, 18), though he is always interrupted before he can finish the sentence and draw attention to the situation. The pair later learn that they are indeed father and son. When Ned mentions a mischievous woman in town, calling her a vixen, the hermit recognizes his description of her. It just so happens that the woman who stole the hermit’s son has the surname Vixen, and that the woman which Ned was referring to is indeed her, another case of initially mistaken identity. In another example of mistaken identity, when Ned is trapped in a cave and hears commotion outside, he assumes that it is his captors and does not try to get their attention. In truth, it is his friend Kit, who has come to rescue him, and “had he had the least suspicion that it was Kit who was trying to get in, the boy… would have wanted to go out at once” (18).

The final battle between the last surviving villain and the protagonist is a callback to one of the first scenes of the story. At the beginning of The Wolf Hunters of Minnesota, Kit King flees from a pack of wolves, but falls into a frozen river. He passes beneath the ice for a time before finding a hole and managing to pull himself onto the surface using his weapon. His party finds him in time and is able to revive him. During Kit’s fight with Rufe, last remaining member of the villainous Reynolds family, Rufe falls into the very same river. They eventually find his hand frozen in place above the water, trying to pry himself up with his weapon. The scenes are clearly meant to echo each other, and to show what Rufe (and by extension his group) lacks what Kit has. Kit was physically stronger than Rufe, and was able to pull himself up. He also had friends to look for him and heal him. Rufe (due to his history of murder, kidnapping, and abetting the fraudulent wolf ranch), was not looked for until the next day, for “no one mourn[ed] the death of such a man” (Merritt, 32). The differences between the two scenes are clearly meant to tell us what is associated with villainy in the morality of the novel– antisocial behavior and physical weakness. In regards to the latter respect, it’s worth mentioning that the characters who hunt wolves, in contrast to Rufe, display superhuman levels of strength. When Kit is trapped inside a cabin, he fights a pack of wolves, and in the case of one of them, “Kit seized the wolf by its hind legs, tore off its scalp, and threw the body outside” (28).

The story of The Wolf Hunters of Minnesota is a blend of Shakespearean drama with a moral system qualified by one’s fellowship with wolves. Characters who own wolves act like wolves, and are villainous and criminal– reflecting the attitude of America towards wolves at the time. Plot elements from Shakespeare’s repertoire are acted out as these villains struggle against a wolf-hunting cast of heroes imbued with superior strength and the love of their broader community. This story shows how a moral system can be established and supported by authoritative traditions, such as Shakespeare, and how these characterizations can support harmful environmental policies. The demonization of wolves no doubt supported the common misconception that wolves were ravenous demons, and in some part contributed to the general public accepting the bounties placed upon their heads. By displaying characters who interacted with wolves as villains and kidnappers, they turn the plot devices of Shakespeare into their own moral construction— into a cudgel against anyone who might disagree with exterminating wolves. With this story, anyone who advocated for wolves might be called a Rufe, or a Donald Allen, a thug trying to use wolves for profit, or a kindred spirit to them, who would turn on their allies at the first sign of trouble. It glamorizes wolf-hunting by giving the wolf hunters superhuman strength and the acceptance of their peers, makes their wolf-owning opposition look monstrous and unintelligent by having them all be ugly kidnappers. The Wolf Hunters of Minnesota is a story that tolerates no nuance on the subject— through Shakespeare’s voice it proclaims: honor, strength, love, and friendship, these are the domain of wolf hunters, and evil, deceit, betrayal, womanizing, fraud, these are what come of suffering the wolf to live.

--Julien Azar

Works Cited:

Merritt, J. C. (1899). The Wolf Hunters of Minnesota. Frank Tousey, 29 West 26th St.

Riley, S. J., Nesslage, G. M., & Maurer, B. A. (2004). Dynamics of early wolf and Cougar eradication efforts in Montana: Implications for conservation. Biological Conservation, 119(4), 575–579.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2004.01.019

White, R. S. (2016). Comedy of disguise and mistaken identity. Shakespeare's Cinema of Love. https://doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9780719099748.003.0006

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