Animal Bounties in St. Charles County, Missouri Territory
by Bob Brail
Every gardener in southern St. Charles County knows how difficult it is to prevent deer and rabbits from devouring plants. Even the most closely tended garden often shows evidence of browsing animals: hosta leaves are eaten, green bean vines are stripped, and lily blooms have been chomped off. These critters can be so frustrating.
It may be hard to believe, but there was a time when the animals which caused problems for area residents were not deer and rabbits, but predators of a more serious type, namely wolves, panthers, and bobcats. These animals were common in this area when Missouri was still a territory, and were the cause of many losses of livestock. One historian states that before statehood, wolves were “very numerous” in St. Charles County, making it difficult to raise any kind of livestock. A wolf could kill an eighty pound hog, and wolves were in “abundance” in Missouri as late as the 1840's. In order to deal with this predator problem, the legislature of the Territory of Missouri passed an animal bounty law a few days before the end of 1816.
Passed on December 23, 1816, the law specified three animals: wolves, panthers, and wildcats. Wolves refers to the Red Wolf, which was extirpated from Missouri in the early 1950's. The last of Missouri's native Panthers died in the 1920's. This animal goes by several other names including painter, catamount, mountain lion, cougar, and puma. The term Wildcats refers to Missouri's bobcats; however, the word bobcat was not used until the 1870's. So the surviving bounty records never uses bobcat.
The animal bounty law specified that any person killing a wolf, panther, or wildcat was required to take the scalp with both ears to the nearest justice of the peace within ten days. The animal “had to be taken within ten miles of a settlement.” A justice of the peace would determine the veracity of the hunter's story by placing him under oath and asking him questions until “the justice [was] satisfied.” Wildcats earned a smaller bounty, fifty cents. Wolves and panthers earned a greater reward: if the wolf or panther was an adult, the payment was two dollars. If the wolf or panther was younger, the bounty was $1.50. The bounty was to be paid from the treasury of the county where the animal was killed. The justice of the peace was the one to determine the age of the animal, if there were any doubt. His final responsibilitly was to “burn or destroy” the scalps.
Bounty payments started March 1, 1817, and ended two years later. During those two years, bounties were paid for the 210 wolves, panthers, and wildcats killed in St. Charles County, 45 in 1817, 165 in 1818, and 4 in 1819. For several years, St. Charles County in Missouri Territory encompassed a much larger area than the current county boundaries. Until December, 1818, when the territorial legislature voted to end its first animal bounty program, St. Charles County included all of what are now Warren, Montgomery, Lincoln, and Pike Counties. In other words, the 210 animals were taken from what is now a five-county area in eastern Missouri.
John M. Peck was a Baptist missionary who visited St. Charles County in December 1818, perhaps saw the skin of one of these animals. In his book Forty Years of Pioneer Life, he described his trip through the county. About fifteen miles west of present-day Dutzow, Peck stayed with James Stevenson. Peck wrote that “two young panthers graced the . . . kitchen” of Stevenson. The James Stephenson listed in the bounty records is probably the same individual. Stephenson (Stevenson) earned three animal bounties: the first in April 1817 of fifty cents for a wildcat, the second in October 1818 of $3.50 for seven wildcats, and the third in December 1818 of $1.50 for a wildcat and one “young panther,” perhaps one of the skins Peck saw in Stevenson's kitchen.
It is possible to determine which bounty hunters probably lived within the boundaries of what is now St. Charles County by comparing the bounty records of 1818 with the 1819 population census of the Missouri Territory (by which time the modern boundaries of the county were set). St. Charles county residents in 1819 territorial census who were paid bounties in 1818 are the following:
The total bounty money paid for 1818's 165 animals was $231.50. One hundred three bounty hunters brought in their kills throughout 1818, with a decline in the summer; the number of hunters paid in each month were as follows: January 7, February 17, March 8, April 12, May 9, June 7, July 6, August 5, September 5, October 10 November, 6, December 11. One of the greatest payments was made to Micajah Ausley, who was paid $12 for six wolves in September. Thomas Blankenship earned $6.50 for two wolves, one panther, and two wildcats in May. In the same month, Amos Burdyne and John Comegys were paid $8 for eight wolf pups. David Highsmith brought three panthers in June; his bounty was $6. The largest bounty paid in 1818 also took place in June; $13.50 to Charles Wells for five wolves and five wildcats. Also of note was the fifty cents paid to Joshua Ferguson for the wildcat killed by his “negro man Adam” in July.
One historian wrote, “Trapping wolves became a very profitable business.” For example, one farmer in Audrain County claimed that he paid his taxes for two years from the bounty he received for four wolf pups. The relative income worth of one dollar for unskilled labor in 1818 is comparable to about $360 today. Even though one could argue that hunting takes great skill, it would be classified as unskilled labor. It becomes apparent why bounty hunting attracted so many men; a person could remove a predator of his livestock and be paid rather well for it. Even a single wildcat would bring in several hundred dollars in 2022 dollars (relative income worth). Charles Wells, mentioned previously, would have earned nearly $5,000 in 2022 dollars for the twelve animals he killed in June 1818.
Whether the hunters used traps or tracked the animals with dogs, there was always risk involved in bounty hunting. In 1834 young adult Gert Goebbels settled in Franklin County. In his memoir Longer Than a Man's Life in Missouri, published in 1877, Goebbels mentions the death of a hunter apparently killed by a panther in late 1840's. He also details his experience hunting and killing two young panthers that he and a friend eventually smoked from a tree. Goebbels writes that “[l]arge beasts of prey . . . were never dangerous to human beings who did not irritate or incite them,” apparently choosing to overlook the fact that a bounty hunter's trap or snarling dog would certainly “irritate or incite” a wolf to become dangerous to a hunter!
On December 11, 1818, the territorial legislature passed an act to repeal its decision to sponsor an animal bounty program; the repeal would take effect April 1, 1819. It is a mystery as to why the Missouri Territorial legislature ended the bounty program after little more than two years. Talk of repeal had begun at least by early November when Representative Henry S.Geyer of St. Louis made public his support of a repeal. On the last day of November, George Tompkins, Howard County's representative, introduced a bill to repeal the bounty program but the bill was rejected by a vote of twenty-one to eight. The bill was then sent back to committee for future consideration. One possible explanation for the end of the bounty is that the program was too costly for the territory. In January, 1822, the Missouri Intelligencer reported that the animal bounty program in Franklin County, New York, paid $20 per animal. The county coffers apparently soon were nearly depleted, resulting in the quadrupling of the county tax in one year. The Intelligencer editor wrote, “If the legislature does not grant relief, the landholders will, nay must, abandon the lands to the wolves.” Closer to home, in 1818 Howard County, Missouri, paid out $178 in animal bounties, which constituted over eight percent of its total expenses for the year. So perhaps the Territorial legislature ended the program because it had not provided sufficient funds to pay the bounties.
In October, 1820, a bill to commence payment again of animal bounties was introduced by Representative Richard Murphy of Lawrence County, but the bill did not pass. Eventually, however, animal bounties would again be paid. Wolves continued to be a problem. By 1870 the wolf bounty had increased to five dollars, half to be paid by the county and half by the state. Funding could still be inadequate; in 1893 the Missouri legislature appropriated $4,000 for wolves killed from 1891-1894, $2,000 of which funded deficiencies in the bounty program from 1891-1892.
What could be more disheartening to a man doing chores on his St. Charles County farm in the last years of the Missouri Territory than to find his chicken coop ravaged by a bobcat or his prize boar killed by a wolf? The answer for many men in the early days of Missouri's past was to seek out his animal adversary to destroy it. Not only would he rid himself of the predator of his livestock, but he would also provide himself with a monetary reward.
Sources: “Bobcat” (etymonline.com); CPI Inflation Calculator (officialdata.org); Familysearch.org; Forty Years of Pioneeer Life by John M. Peck (archive.org); “Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970” (babel.hathitrust.org; A History of St. Charles, Montgomery, and Warren Counties, Missouri (archive.org); Longer Than a Man's Lifetime in Missouri by Gert Goebel (eds. Walter D. Kamphoefner and Adolf E. Schroeder); Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser (shsmo.newspapers.com); Missouri Intelligencer (shsmo.newspapers.com); “Missouri Judicial Records” Missouri State Archives (s1.sos.mo.gov); “Missouri State Archives – Missouri Session Laws, 1824-Present” Missouri Digital Heritage (cdm16795.contentdm.oclo.org); “Missouri State Legislators, 1820-2000” (sos.mo.gov); “Mountain Lion Facts” (mdc.mo.gov); Pioneer Families of Missouri by William Bryan and Robert Rose (archive.org); “Red Wolf” (mdc.mo.gov); St. Charles County Missouri Territory Enumeration for 1817 and 1819 (Transcribed by Melvin Goe, Sr.); “Wolf Scalp Bounties” Missouri Historical Review April 1943 (shsmo.gov).