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169 Introduction: To Hell with the Audience Mary Austin was a prominent regional writer in Carhart’s time. Born in Illinois in 1868 (a year before Carhart’s mother), she and Carhart aspired to share a new regional culture composed of Indian, Hispanic, and Anglo ways of adapting to a harsh environment. When Austin encountered Carhart’s book on the ways of the wolf, she was working on her autobiography, in which she described a mystical childhood union with nature very much like Carhart’s 1919 experience at Trappers Lake.2 Austin settled in Santa Fe in 1923, the year the Bureau of Biological Survey’s traps and poisons killed one of the last wolves in Colorado.3 There she met Ernest Thompson Seton, who in 1898 had portrayed the last wolves in New Mexico as tragic royalty. He grounded his eulogy for “Lobo, King of the Currumpaw” not just in the best science of his time but also in imaginative writing that led some to brand him “a nature faker.”4 I Am Going to Write a Wolf Book You know yourself that we are rather uncontaminated with the polyglot of the eastern centers. We are farther from the European influence. Writers here are distinctly western stock; pioneer types. They write very much as they see the world and that is through a rather clear, western atmosphere. I believe we are able to get a better perspective of America from here than when hedged with the hectic drive of the stewpots of polyglot cities. And I believe all the factors working together will bring out some outstanding writers of a new regional literature that will set a new and different tempo in our American books. —Arthur Carhart, 19321 Cha p t e r t e n I Am Going to Write a Wolf Book 170 Seton’s successor as a wolf authority was Stanley Young, Carhart’s collabo-­ rator on Last Stand of the Pack. One of Young’s goals was to eradicate Seton’s imaginative, even sympathetic way of portraying predators, such as wolves, and other “vermin,” such as crows and ravens. Another of Young’s goals was to eradicate the predators themselves—all of them. In a fashion that appealed to Carhart, Seton had worked as an independent wolfer, without the organizational support of a federal agency. In contrast, Young rose swiftly through the ranks of the Bureau of Biological Survey (BBS), leaving Denver for Washington, D.C., in 1928, where he became head of the Division of Predatory Animal and Rodent Control at the BBS.5 As the coauthors attempted to market their book, Carhart was turning against poisons and developing mixed feelings about his writing partner, just as his ambivalence was growing about the wolves. As Young moved up in the kind of bureaucracy Carhart reviled, Carhart began to feel his peers might be the ardent Austin and Seton rather than the dour, master bureaucrat Young. Although Carhart was the principal author of their book, he was bound to Young in many ways, not the least of which was Young’s status as a stockholder in the Colorado Floral Company. How did this pair work together? Young provided the facts, which he called “science.” Carhart provided the saga. Seton’s earlier mix of science and saga had piqued Austin’s interest about wolf lore related to Native American cultures. She wanted to know more, and she found it in Carhart and Young’s book, where clever wolfers like Big Bill Caywood used their knowledge of wolf lore to kill wolves. But was there something more? What did Austin see in the prosaic Carhart? She was a social theorist who was as interested in wolf behav-­ ior as in Indian lifeways. Her considerable political sophistication extended beyond her personal friendship with Herbert Hoover, whom she admired as an efficient humanitarian who saved countless lives after World War I through well-­organized relief efforts. Like many American writers in the aftermath of the war, Austin felt there had to be better ways than those of the discredited Europeans to organize society and form good citizens. Like Carhart, Austin thought the public lands of the West might hold an answer. Austin saw that Carhart was writing a morality tale, driven by the imper-­ atives of survival of the fittest in a setting where wolves and Indians had for-­ merly preyed on bison. In his foreword to Last Stand, Carhart wrote: “There was plenty of food for the gray...

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