In 2020, Yellowstone National Park celebrated the 25th anniversary of the reintroduction of wolves to the park. The following winter, roughly a fifth of the park’s wolf population was trapped or shot.
Journalist Ryan Devereaux writes about that period in his new book, “The Hunt: A True Story of Resurrection and Retribution in the West.”
Here & Now‘s Peter O’Dowd speaks with Devereaux about the book.
Book excerpt: ‘The Hunt’
By Ryan Devereaux
Dawn broke as it always did on the morning everything changed. Golden light spilling down from the mountains, then continuing west in a silent wave. It had been a dry winter in Gardiner. The basin where the tiny town sat was mostly free of snow. The longest undammed river in the Lower 48—once known as the Elk, now known as the Yellowstone—glimmered as it always had. But there was an absence on the land. Had been for nearly one hundred years. As the sun rose and the town awoke on January 12, 1995, those days were coming to an end.
From the north, a pair of horse trailers and a column of law enforcement vehicles were fast approaching, tires humming over US Route 89. The lights of the squad cars flashed red and blue in the cold Montana air. Inside the trailer, watching silently through the oxygen holes of their aluminum containers, were eight wolves, freshly plucked from the wilds of the Canadian Rockies. Their coats were shades of auburn, gray, and black, their ears pierced with red tags. They were bound for Yellowstone National Park.
Marked by the iconic Roosevelt Arch, a fifty-foot monument to America’s national park ideals, Gardiner was—and still is—Yellowstone’s primary northern entrance. Wolf reintroduction was the biggest story to hit the unincorporated Montana community since the arrival of the railroad nearly a century before. The moment was at least two decades in the making, more if you counted the generations of scientific revelations and turns in American thinking that inspired it all. The top wildlife officials in the country had flown in, trailed by news crews from around the world. The two-lane road into the park was closed to the public. The feds weren’t taking any chances, not on overzealous wolf lovers, or on anti-wolfers eager to take a shot at the animals.
Hundreds of locals lined the streets as the vehicles rolled into town. Schoolchildren snug in their winter coats waved miniature American flags. The caravan and the wolves it bore passed under the Roosevelt Arch at 8:35 a.m. The crowd cheered. People wept.
Whether the wolves could sense it or not, they were ascending a plateau of some eight thousand feet, cut through with a vast system of valleys, rivers, and a massive lake. Wonderland, Yellowstone’s oldest nickname, was a nod to the geothermal marvels that led the 2.2-million-acre reserve—which sits almost entirely in northwest Wyoming, with slivers peeking into southwest Montana and eastern Idaho—to become the country’s first national park. The wolves’ destination, the Lamar Valley, could have just as easily inspired the title. A grassland ecosystem par excellence, the Lamar was likened to the Serengeti of East Africa—a grand savanna that could sustain charismatic megafauna in huge numbers. For thousands of years, it was prime hunting ground for humans and wolves alike. That ended within a few decades of the park’s creation in 1872; when the government decided the best way to preserve Wonderland’s “natural” splendor was to boot out the people and kill off the wolves. Yellowstone’s wolf-eradication program was part of a sweeping federal campaign of mass poisoning and slaughter that saw wolves outside of Alaska and Canada all but erased by the 1930s.
In the seven decades after the park’s last wolves were exterminated—along with most of the plateau’s grizzlies and mountain lions—Yellowstone’s elk population exploded to historic proportions, with most of the animals congregating in the Lamar. By January 1995, their numbers were pushing nineteen thousand. For a handful of local families who specialized in guided hunting, these were the golden years. For the elk, it was a different story. Unchecked by predators, they ate themselves out of house and home. Unable to cope with competition from their own species, thousands starved each winter. Thousands more were shot by park rangers in government culling operations. Those that survived put enormous strain on the wider web of plants and animals to which they belonged. The grim scene came just as the nation was entering a new era in environmental thinking. Pioneering ecologists and scientists were challenging America’s war on predators, often at great professional risk. Backed by hard data and groundbreaking fieldwork, their critiques were part of a larger social, political, and cultural shift that in the 1970s culminated in a historic wave of new federal environmental laws—the most famous and sweeping of which, the Endangered Species Act, paved the way for the wolves’ return.
As head biologist for the government’s new experiment in environmental reparations, Doug Smith saw none of the hoopla in Gardiner that morning. Instead, the thirty-four-year-old was at park headquarters, bundled for a long day in the field and waiting for the procession to arrive.At six foot two, Smith was tall and lean, with the attenuated build of an endurance athlete, the bearing of an alpine explorer, and a handlebar mustache that was somewhere between frontier cattleman and outlaw motorcycle rogue.
By the mid-1990s, Smith was fast becoming one of the leading wolf experts in the country, a rising star as skilled in the backcountry as he was in the academic literature. He knew as well as anyone that a reintroduction like what Yellowstone was attempting had never been done before. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, but success was far from guaranteed. The government’s reintroduction proposal had garnered more written public comments than any other environmental policy decision in history. Of the more than 160,000 received, 100,000 were for the plan. Though there was majority support in all three of the states impacted, the opposition in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho was ferocious. The region’s most powerful industries, lawmakers, and many a pissed-off local insisted wolf reintroduction was a thinly veiled attempt by powerful environmental nonprofits and wealthy liberals to erase traditional Western lifeways.
In the run-up to the historic moment, the feds held hundreds of meetings in small towns and cities across the West. The largest environmental groups in the country chartered private buses to bring in wolf advocates en masse. Local protesters said that an unwanted federal experiment had been shoved down their throats at the behest of ignorant outsiders. Law enforcement ringed the perimeter of the heated gatherings. “The Wolf Is the Saddam Hussein of the Animal World,” read a demonstrator’s sign in Helena. “This is a battlefield in a new civil war, the bicoastal areas against the West,” shouted a former Republican congressional staffer at a hearing in Cody, Wyoming. “This is a war on our culture, our way of life. And in this war the wolf is the nuclear weapon!”
By January 1995, the reintroduction was a month behind schedule. A new Congress was in session. For the first time in nearly half a century, Republicans controlled the House of Representatives. Culture war politics were at a fever pitch. In the West, where battle lines were drawn around federal power and the natural world, the new class of GOP representatives featured hard-right ideologues who cast the return of the wolf in grand, conspiratorial terms. The legislators were on the warpath. If they could stop the unholy experiment in its tracks, they would.
Smith joined the caravan of vehicles not long after they passed through Gardiner. While his higher-ups attended to the media circus, his responsibility lay with the animals themselves. The first of the wolves’ pens was located in the lower Lamar. The wind was whipping when they finally arrived. Up on the plateau, the snow was a foot deep.
The plan was to unload three wolves, all still in their containers, place them atop mule-drawn sleighs, and haul them to the first acclimation pen. Two more enclosures stood ready at a site known as Rose Creek, and another called Soda Butte. Armed law enforcement rangers would stand guard over the sites twenty-four hours a day, hidden in nearby hunting blinds so as not to disturb the animals.
Shutters whirred as the containers were carefully pulled from the horse trailer. It was as Smith was heaving the heavy boxes that he caught his first glimpse of one of the animals inside. Their sedatives long since worn off, the wolves were awake but still. Smith had seen plenty of wolves before, but this moment, he recognized, would be different.
The slow-moving train of people and animals reached a clearing a half mile from the road. At its center stood a chain-link pen, surrounded by lodgepole pine. With help, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and US Fish and Wildlife Service director Mollie Beattie, whose agency was responsible for wolf recovery in the West, hand-carried the first of the containers the final stretch. It was a dramatic moment designed for maximum media impact. The Washington brass placed the containers inside the pen, and then—nothing happened. Nobody made a move to release the wolves. Nobody could.
While the wolves were en route, opponents of the reintroduction had filed a late-stage motion in federal court seeking an emergency halt to the project. Represented by a powerful, politically connected law firm, the plaintiffs were making a last-ditch effort to quash the reintroduction before it began. A panel of judges determined they would need forty-eight hours to consider the motion. Under no circumstances, they said, could the wolves’ cages be opened while they made up their minds. The kennels were dropped in the snow with the wolves still locked inside. The government officials retired to headquarters to field questions from the press. The reintroduction was “an extraordinary achievement,” Babbitt told the assembled reporters, but if the court did not act fast and order the wolves’ release, he warned, “Those cages will be coffins.”
From “The Hunt: A True Story of Resurrection and Retribution in the West” by Ryan Devereaux. Copyright © 2026. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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