NORTH AMERICA AND THE WEST INDIES 215 



years in Yancey, Caldwell and Watauga. " Dr. C. Hart Mer- 

 riam states that during one of his visits to Roan Mountain, in 

 1887 or 1892, a den of wolves was discovered and the young 

 were captured. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century 

 wolves were spoken of as abundant in South Carolina, but by 

 Audubon's day they were much fewer. The last one known to 

 have been killed in the State was shot in Berkeley County, 

 near St. Stephens, between 1856 and 1860. E. B. Chamberlain, 

 of the Charleston Museum, who kindly supplied this record, 

 had reports of other wolves in the Santee section at about the 

 same time. 



How far to the south the gray or timber wolf extended its 

 range may never be certainly made out, for the black or 

 Florida wolf of extreme southern United States is now regarded 

 as a race of the species Canis rufus by Goldman in his recent 

 review. Dr. Francis Harper (1927) refers to this form the 

 wolves formerly found in Okefenokee Swamp, southern Georgia, 

 where according to his investigations the last one killed was 

 about 1908. 



West of New York State and the Allegheny Mountains, the 

 timber wolf was formerly common and is believed to have 

 intergraded with the Plains wolf in the more open region west 

 of the Mississippi. The story of its original abundance and 

 gradual extermination is much the same as elsewhere in the 

 East, except that in the more remote and wilder regions, as in 

 northern Wisconsin, some still remain. In northern Minnesota 

 wolves were common till at least the late years of the last 

 century. Herrick (1892) has an interesting note in his "Mam- 

 mals of Minnesota" indicating, as in some other instances, an 

 occasional influx of numbers in certain districts: "During the 

 winter of 1884-85, wolves became very abundant and insolent 

 in Wright county, and were seen about the outskirts of Monti- 

 cello in broad daylight almost daily, though they were suffi- 

 ciently wary to escape capture." Cory (1912) writes that this 

 wolf was still "common in northern Wisconsin and possibly 

 occurs occasionally in other parts of the State," but although 

 stragglers may at times appear in Illinois, all efforts to secure a 

 specimen have failed, and most of the reports of wolves prove 

 on investigation to be based on coyotes. In Wisconsin, recent 

 records are available from as far south as Buffalo County. 



In the region of the Ohio Valley wolves were formerly plenti- 



