1936] MAMMALS OF OREGON 275 



Distribution and habitat. These large, light-gray wolves of the 

 Great Plains region still extend westward into central Idaho and 

 supposedly belong to the form once found with the buffalo in eastern 

 Oregon (fig. 62). In 1916 Wm. F. Schnabel, of Caldwell, Idaho, 

 wrote to the Biological Survey that, about 1889, " Old Chief Yakima 

 Jim told me that when he was a boy there were lots of wolves in the 

 Cow Creek Lakes Country " in extreme eastern Oregon. The age of 

 Yakima Jim was then supposed to be about 110 years, which carries 

 the record back to perhaps 1789, the time when the buffalo were com- 

 mon there. In most of the records of " wolves " killed by trappers 

 of the early expeditions in eastern Oregon no distinction was made 

 between large wolves and coyotes. In 1854 Suckley reported them 

 very numerous in Oregon and Washington from the Cascades to the 

 summit of the Rocky Mountains, and especially in the Blue Mountain 

 country. In 1915 Jewett reported a large wolf killed in Logan 

 Valley, Grant County, near the Strawberry Mountains in the Blue 

 Mountain Plateau, the skin of which he saw. This is the only recent 

 reliable record of a wolf killed in that section. 



On June 27, 1927, Elmer Williams, one of the Biological Survey 

 predatory-animal hunters, trapped an old male wolf on the Sycan 

 Marsh, east of Fort Klamath, that had been credited with killing 

 a great number of cattle and some horses over a period of 12 years 

 in that section. It was almost white, possibly owing to age, as the 

 much-worn teeth showed it to be an old wolf. It had the heavy 

 muzzle of gigas but less thickened carnassial tooth and a low, wide 

 coronoid process of the lower jaw that suggest a variation from 

 either typical gigas or nubibus, possibly a remnant of the form 

 that occupied the sagebrush country when the buffalo were there in 

 abundance. 



The lower jaws, some extra teeth, and a part of the skeleton of a 

 wolf taken from the South Ice Cave, about 40 miles south of Bend, in 

 December 1927, by W. J. Perry of the Forest Service, show the same 

 tooth and jaw characters as the Sycan specimen, possibly even more 

 strongly marked. These bones are old, but probably only a century, 

 or such a matter, as the cave is not very dry and bones would prob- 

 ably not have lasted for a great length of time in it. Until more 

 material is obtained from caves or otherwise it is not advisable to 

 recognize a separate form on such slight characters as are shown 

 in the present scanty material, and for the present these specimens 

 seem best referred to the plains wolf. 



Joseph Mailliard's (1927, p. 358) reports of two large wolves seen 

 near Straw, Modoc County, Calif., just southeast of Tule Lake, by 

 Game Warden Courtwright in October 1922, would suggest the pos- 

 sibility of a few wolves then ranging in the Klamath section or 

 possibly the Sycan wolf and his mate may have wandered down 

 there at that time. The importance of obtaining specimens, even 

 any old skulls, from this region or anywhere east of the Cascades 

 cannot be too strongly emphasized. 



Senior Forest Ranger George O. Langdon reports a wolf track 

 seen in the fall of 1930 near Desolation Butte on the Whitman 

 National Forest in the Blue Mountains, probably the latest record 

 of this species of wolf in Oregon. 



