Papers Of Abraham Lincoln

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[Resolved,] that the Secretary of State be requested to furnish the public printer with the copy of an act entitled “An act, to encourage the killing of Wolves,” approved February 15th, 1837; and that the public

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printer be required to publish the same forthwith in the State Register, for the information of the people of this State.2

1Daniel Turney introduced the resolution in the House of Representatives on December 28, 1839, and the House adopted it. The Illinois State Register printed the act in its entirety on January 4, 1840.
Illinois House Journal. 1839. 11th G. A., special sess., 99-100; Illinois State Register (Springfield), 4 January 1840, 3:5.

2Illinois was originally home to large numbers of wolves and coyotes (also called “prairie wolves”) that inhabited the margins where the prairie and timber ecosystems meet. Pioneers also chose to settle in these edge habitats, which provided them with lumber, water, pasture, and small game. As settlers depleted deer herds and replaced them with domestic livestock, protection of livestock from hungry wolves became paramount. By the early years of the nineteenth century, counties began paying bounties for wolf scalps and settlers began to organize wolf hunts called “frolics.” The Illinois legislature first placed a bounty on wolf scalps in 1823.
M. J. Morgan, Land of Big Rivers: French and Indian Illinois (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), 201-04; Richard S. Fisher, New and Complete Statistical Gazetteer of the United States of America, Founded on and Compiled from the Census of 1850 (New York: J. H. Colton, 1857), 310; John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 12, 135; “An Act to Encourage the Destruction of Wolves,” 28 January 1823, Laws Passed by the Third General Assembly of the State of Illinois (1823), 86-88.