San Carlos and White Mountain Apache Attitudes toward the Reintroduction of the Mexican Wolf to Its Historic Range in the American Southwest

Abstract

S hortly after his arrival in the Southwest in 1917, U.S. Forest Service biologist Aldo Leopold participated in the killing of a wolf somewhere in the White Mountain range, which stretches across the borderlands of south-central Arizona and New Mexico. Leopold and a number of companions were eating lunch on a high rimrock position overlooking a river when they spotted a female wolf and her six grown pups playing in an open area below them. Immediately, the men pulled out their rifles, and with more excitement than accuracy began blasting away at the family. When the rifles were empty and the shooting had stopped, only the old wolf was down, and one pup was seen dragging a leg into a rock slide. Leopold, who would go on to become perhaps the most famous conservationist in American history, described the death of this wolf-and his personal transformation-in one of the most quoted passages in the literature of wildlife conservation: