Oregon Country "Wolf Meetings" of 1843 establish policy on predators in the Pacific Northwest

     "The ostensible purpose of (the wolf meetings) was to adopt measures for the extermination of predatory animals, a suggestion of practical character, on which all might unite, for there was perhaps not a settler possessing livestock in the whole country who had not suffered loss from this cause."

--Charles H. Carey, "General History of Oregon," 1971




The Oregon Country "wolf meetings," so-called because while they were certainly to do with setting up a regional (European) government of some sort, they were ostensibly about predator control which was an issue of immediate concern to any of the less than 500 European settlers then in the Willamette Valley.  Right away, what one notices is that there is no thought of living with predators, nor, and this is understandable since anything like a modern understanding of ecosystems and trophic cascades must have been embryonic at best, is there any notion that there may be long-term and totally unpredictable consequences.

The first meeting was held on February 1, 1843 at the Oregon Institute in Salem.  Again, the idea was to use the pressing issue of predation, something that all of the settlers could get behind, as an excuse to convene a meeting who's real purpose was to form at least the outlines of a provisional government.

The second meeting occurred on February 6, 1843, and instituted a system of bounties for wolves, mountain lions and bears.  Notably, the settlers made their opinion of the indigenous peoples clear when they established that they would receive half the pay-out on bounties.

On May 2nd, 1843 the last "wolf meeting" happened and the beginnings of a provisional government were established.

For the purposes of this blog, what's most telling about the very existence of the wolf meetings is not just that they were wholeheartedly all about killing off as many predators as possible, but rather, that they were never questioned at all, by anyone inside that community.  It was a given that predators were bad; it was an obvious position that was so ingrained in the world-view of the people who lived in that particular place and time, that they could no more imagine someone wanting to defend predators then could a contemporary American imagine someone wanting to defend terrorists.

Wolves must die!  It's a no brainer, right?

Anyhow, here's the Oregon Historical Society's page on the subject.