Did you know that one of the most famous animal stories ever written came out of the ranch country of northeastern New Mexico, just east of the Enchanted Circle? In the early 1890s, the Currumpaw country, a land of rolling mesas and precious running waters around Sierra Grande and Capulin Volcano, was ruled in local telling by an old gray wolf named Lobo. Ernest Thompson Seton, the naturalist who hunted him, opened his famous account by calling Currumpaw a vast cattle range, and Lobo the king whose power was felt over the whole of it.
Click to see more photos of Lobo and Ernest Thompson Seton — the wolf and the hunter, courtesy of the National Park Service
By then, decades of hunting had thinned the bison, elk, and pronghorn that wolves once lived on, and Lobo and his small pack turned to the ranchers' cattle instead. For nearly five years the pack raided the herds along Currumpaw Creek, killing, by some accounts, approximately two thousand head of the region's finest cattle. Ranchers offered a bounty of one thousand dollars for Lobo's capture, and several hunters tried for it and failed. The wolf they called the King seemed to know every trap and every poisoned bait set for him.
Seton arrived in northeastern New Mexico in 1893 to work as a naturalist and animal trapper, and he took up the hunt. At first he fared no better than the men before him: Lobo evaded every trap he could devise and avoided any poison. Studying the pack's tracks, though, Seton kept noticing a smaller paw print ahead of Lobo's big ones. A cowboy told him he had seen the white wolf, Blanca, break away from the pack, and Seton concluded that she was Lobo's mate, allowed to run in front where no other wolf would have dared to lead.
That insight ended Lobo's reign. Seton set obvious traps around a heifer carcass, then hid two steel traps by the severed head, and Blanca stepped into them and was found the next morning. Seton wrote that Lobo's powerful howl turned to a plaintive cry. Days later, on January 31, 1894, Lobo himself was caught, by Seton's own account with each of his four legs clutched in a trap. The men roped and muzzled him and took him back to the ranch, where the old wolf refused to eat or even look at his captors and died that night, just four hours later.
Seton told the story first in Scribner's Magazine in November 1894, and in 1898 it opened his book Wild Animals I Have Known, carrying the Currumpaw country to readers around the world. The hunt changed the hunter for good. "Ever since Lobo," Seton wrote, "my sincerest wish has been to impress upon people that each of our native wild creatures is in itself a precious heritage that we have no right to destroy or put beyond the reach of our children." He championed the wolf for the rest of his life and became a founder of the Boy Scouts of America. A wolf pelt long identified as Lobo's is kept today at the Ernest Thompson Seton Memorial Library and Museum at Philmont Scout Ranch near Cimarron, an easy addition to an Enchanted Circle drive from Red River, and a quiet reminder that the most famous character in these mountains once had four legs and a price on his head.