Barnabas Armstrong was nearly back to his farm when his sled was attacked by wolves. As he furiously lashed his steeds to escape, his loyal dog jumped off the wagon to fight off the wolves. Once safely home, Barnabas got his gun, summoned his neighbors with pitchforks, and went out into the dark cold wintery woods to rescue his dog…
This 1830s incident was the first time wolves were seen in New Brunswick, and marked the beginning of a strange era of wolf attacks in the province.
This was remarkable because during the French Era, virtually no sightings of wolves were recorded. Later, Early Loyalists also failed to mention wolves.
Despite the lack of evidence of wolves, in 1792 the Legislature of New Brunswick declared a bounty would be paid for killing wolves or bears, saying “many losses have been suffered by sundry inhabitants of this province by the destruction of their Sheep by Wolves.”
The bounty offered was 20 shillings per wolf if killed by a white person, but only 10 shillings per wolf if killed by an Indigenous person.
In order to collect the reward money, the pelt (skin) of the wolf that was killed had to be brought to the government. While bounties were collected for bears, no wolf bounties appear to have been paid..
In 1818, prominent Nova Scotia scientist and inventor of kerosene Abraham Gesner declared wolves were extinct in New Brunswick.
Two decades later, Barnabas Armstrong and his dog went to the local grist mill with a sled load of grain. Only the day before his wife had given birth to twins.
At the mill Barnabas traded some of his grain for fresh raw meat. It was nightfall before Barnabas and his dog began their trip home. Likely attracted by the meat, a pack of wolves appeared out of the darkness..
Barnabas tore a pole loose from his sled and tried to beat the wolves back as they nipped at his terrified horses who galloped in terror towards home.
Barnabas grabbed some of the raw meat and threw it off the wagon. The wolves hungrily fell upon it, giving him and his wagon a chance to escape. His loyal dog jumped off the wagon to hold off the wolves..
As soon as he got home, Barnabas Armstrong assembled his neighbors, armed with a single gun and several pitchforks. They went into the cold, dark night looking for the wolves that took his dog.
They found his beloved dog limping along the snowy path, hurt, but still alive.
Life was not easy in The Maritimes in the early 1840s.
There were several back-to-back harsh winters.
The economy was slumping with the shipbuilding industry in rapid decline.
Political unrest led to multiple riots all the way from the North Shore to Saint John.
The government of the time was widely seen as draconian, jailing journalists for criticizing it.
As if all of that weren’t bad enough, reports of wolf attacks began..
In the winter of 1843, farmer Thomas Teeling had gone to Woodstock to get pork and beans. Returning after dark he got chased for two miles by a pack of wolves.
Hearing the wolf sounds in the woods, and correctly guessing they were after her husband, Mary (Brown) Teeling of Miramichi armed herself and her two sons, aged 15 and 13, with torches and flambeaux (used to spear salmon).
They ventured into the darkness to fight the wolves, arriving in the nick of time, as he was too exhausted to keep going.
In 1844 famous British author and world traveler Sir James Alexander’s camp near Washademoac (New Canaan) River was attacked by wolves.
He wrote that a surveyor he’d befriended was killed by wolves near Grand Falls. That winter, the Saint John Globe reported wolf attacks in Sussex and Musquash.
The following winter attacks were reported at Lepreau River and Eel River Lake. Abraham Gesner, who had earlier declared wolves extinct in New Brunswick, saw a pack of wolves running across Eel River Lake with his own eyes.
Facing a wave of attacks by wolves, public hysteria mounted. Starting in 1854, a new political party called The Destruction of Bears and Wolves Party began running in elections.
The Legislature responded by reviving the wolf bounty, upping it to three New Brunswick pounds per wolf pelt — roughly equivalent to three or four months wages.
With the economy in freefall, such an enormous bounty immediately led to hunting wolves becoming a welcome source of income.
Men and women alike took to the forests to hunt for wolves; the bounty lists recorded a number of women who had killed wolves and bears.
Over the next few years hundreds upon hundreds of wolf pelts were brought in –90 in 1848 alone– for the lucrative 3 pound bounty.
Abraham Gesner, who had declared the wolf extinct in 1818, was puzzled. There shouldn’t have been enough food or space in New Brunswick to support so many wolves. Gesner began extensive interviews and research into the wolf mystery.
He could only account for one or two packs totaling some 15 wolves who had come up from New England searching for food. Suffering during the brutal winters of the first half of that decade, the desperate wolf pack resorted to the virtually unheard-of behavior of attacking humans.
Gesner recorded that that pack was destroyed in 1846 by the people of Lepreau River who managed to corner and kill all 15 wolves after their town was attacked.
The rest of the hundreds of wolves could not be accounted for.
Legendary historian and naturalist William Francis Ganong delved into the wolf mystery much later, in 1908. By then there had not been a single wolf sighting in New Brunswick since 1862, when the wolf bounty ended.
Ganong reviewed old documents, and concluded that there was little evidence of wolves ever having had lived in New Brunswick before that pack came up from New England.
He contacted dozens of elderly trappers who spent their lives in the woods, finding that not one had ever seen so much as a wolf’s paw print.
Ganong recorded meeting Manly Hardy of Maine, an American fur trader who purchased wolf pelts the government had paid bounties on.
Hardy told Ganong that many pelts were from breeds of wolves found as far away as Labrador, Canada’s North and the United States.
Perhaps during those economically depressed times, crafty New Brunswickers acquired wolf pelts from elsewhere, and presented them to the government in order to collect the exorbitant reward money.
