One or Several Lobos? Uncovering the Wolves Behind the Legend
A few months ago, I saw a Call for Submissions for Network in Canadian History & Environment that piqued my interest. It was for a new essay series on Animal Encounters, edited by Caroline Abbott and Heather Green. The series would have a special focus on encounters with animals in archives. Immediately, this made me think of all the real animals behind Ernest Thompson Seton’s stories. He claimed that his stories were “true,” but the actual line between fact and fiction is unclear. We know that he kept extensive journals, so I want to find out whether we can identify the specific individual animals behind his fictional characters.
It turns out that I’m not the only person thinking about this. The historian David L. Witt has written a series of blog posts about his efforts to track down the remains of the real wolves featured in Seton’s most famous story, “Lobo” or “The King of Currumpaw.” This task is trickier than it seems. Seton met these wolves more than a century ago. Over the intervening decades, there have been several sets of wolf skins and bones labelled as Seton’s characters Lobo and Blanca. Yet what of the real identities of these wolves? Seton killed multiple wolves on his hunting trip to New Mexico in 1893. What happens to their individuality when myth and legend mix in the historial archive?