336 Wild Beasts 



use of those great advantages in the struggle for existence 

 which they possess. Their speed, endurance, and hardi- 

 hood, the number produced at a birth, and their exceeding 

 sagacity, qualify this race to fight the battle of life, hard as 

 it is in most instances, in a manner that but few animals 

 of any kind can equal. 



There are two reasons why, in the midst of fragmentary 

 notices and romances innumerable, authentic annals of 

 American frontier life are so meagre in their accounts of 

 what these beasts have done. The first is that our earlier 

 settlers were men such as they have encountered nowhere 

 else, and the wolves were soon cowed. In the second 

 place, perils threatened those living on the border, which 

 were so much more imminent than any which ever 

 became actual through the agency of wolves that these 

 beasts came to be disregarded. Those depredations and 

 murders which they really perpetrated were only per- 

 petuated in tradition, and when survivals of this kind 

 came to be recast by writers who, besides being unac- 

 quainted with all the facts, knew nothing about the 

 animals themselves, they at once assumed a form that 

 was stamped with all the incongruities of crude inven- 

 tion, and served only to conceal more effectually that 

 portion of truth upon which these poor fictions were 

 constructed. 



It is probable that all, who, having really observed the 

 character of those wolves that inhabit what were once the 

 buffalo ranges of the Northwest, and then going southward 

 made the acquaintance of that large, yellowish-red wolf 

 called the lobo, in Mexico, will admit that there is much 



