The coyote, also known as the American jackal, prairie wolf, or brush wolf, is a species of canine native to North America. It is smaller than its close relative, the gray wolf, and slightly smaller than the closely related eastern wolf and red wolf. It fills much of the same ecological niche as the golden jackal does in Eurasia; however, the coyote is generally larger.
Yellowstone National Park is a national park of the United States located in the northwest corner of Wyoming and extending into Montana and Idaho. It was established by the 42nd U.S. Congress through the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872. Yellowstone was the first national park in the U.S. and is also widely held to be the first national park in the world. The park is known for its wildlife and its many geothermal features, especially the Old Faithful geyser, one of its most popular. While it represents many types of biomes, the subalpine forest is the most abundant. It is part of the South Central Rockies forests ecoregion.
The Crow, whose autonym is Apsáalooke, also spelled Absaroka, are Native Americans living primarily in southern Montana. Today, the Crow people have a federally recognized tribe, the Crow Tribe of Montana, with an Indian reservation, the Crow Indian Reservation, located in the south-central part of the state.
Park County is a county in the U.S. state of Montana. At the 2020 census, the population was 17,191. Its county seat is Livingston. A small part of Yellowstone National Park is in the southern part of the county.
Livingston, occasionally referred to as L-Town by locals, is a city and county seat of Park County, Montana, United States. It is in southwestern Montana, on the Yellowstone River, north of Yellowstone National Park. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 8,040.
Terry Conrad Johnston was an American Western fiction author who wrote 31 novels and had more than 10 million books in print.
Absaroka–Beartooth Wilderness was created from existing National Forest lands in 1978 and is located in Montana and Wyoming, United States. The wilderness encompasses two distinct mountain ranges: the Beartooth and Absaroka ranges. These ranges are completely distinct geologically speaking, with the Absaroka composed primarily of volcanic and metamorphic rock, while the Beartooth is made up almost entirely of granitic rocks. The Absaroka are noted for their dark and craggy appearance, lush and heavily forested valleys, and abundant wildlife. The highest peak in the range, in Wyoming, is Francs Peak at 13,153 feet (4,009 m). The Beartooth is more alpine, with huge treeless plateaus and the highest peak of Montana. The wilderness has more than 120 peaks over 10,000 feet (3,000 m) and 28 peaks over 12,000 feet (3,700 m), including Montana's highest, Granite Peak at 12,799 feet (3,901 m). The wilderness is integral to the 20-million-acre (81,000 km2) Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and borders Yellowstone National Park.
Ivan Doig was an American author and novelist, widely known for his sixteen fiction and non-fiction books set mostly in his native Montana, celebrating the landscape and people of the post-war American West.
Thomas Francis McGuane III is an American writer. His work includes ten novels, short fiction and screenplays, as well as three collections of essays devoted to his life in the outdoors. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Cutting Horse Association Members Hall of Fame and the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame. McGuane's papers, manuscripts, and correspondence are located in the Montana State University Archives and Special Collections and are available for research use. In 2023, he was given the first Award for Excellence in Service to the MSU Library for the advancement of scholarship and access to unique materials.
Wolf reintroduction involves the reintroduction of a portion of grey wolves in areas where native wolves have been extirpated. More than 30 subspecies of Canis lupus have been recognized, and grey wolves, as colloquially understood, comprise nondomestic/feral subspecies. Reintroduction is only considered where large tracts of suitable wilderness still exist and where certain prey species are abundant enough to support a predetermined wolf population.
A black wolf is a melanistic colour variant of the gray wolf. Black specimens were recorded among red wolves, though the colour phase in this species is not extinct yet. Genetic research from the Stanford University School of Medicine and the University of California, Los Angeles revealed that wolves with black pelts owe their distinctive coloration to a mutation which occurred in domestic dogs, and was carried to wolves through wolf-dog hybridization. Besides coat and knee colour, they are normal grey wolves.
Richard Shaw Wheeler was an American writer and former newspaper editor. He is best known for his novels set in the American West, including the "Barnaby Skye" series. Wheeler was the 2001 recipient of the Owen Wister Award for lifetime contributions to Western literature, and is a six-time Western Writers of America Spur Award winner.
Wolf: The Journey Home, originally titled Hungry for Home: A Wolf Odyssey, is a 1997 American young adult novel written by 'Asta Bowen. Originally published by Simon & Schuster with line drawings by Jane Hart Meyer, it was retitled and reprinted without illustrations in 2006 by Bloomsbury Publishing. Based on true accounts of the Pleasant Valley, Montana, wolf pack, the novel traces the life of a female alpha wolf named Marta after the forced relocation of her pack in 1989 to an unfamiliar territory. Terrified, Marta abandons her pack and begins a journey in search of her home; she eventually arrives in Ninemile Valley, where she finds a new mate with whom she starts a new pack.
The history of wolves in Yellowstone includes the extirpation, absence and reintroduction of wild populations of the gray wolf to Yellowstone National Park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. When the park was created in 1872, wolf populations were already in decline in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. The creation of the national park did not provide protection for wolves or other predators, and government predator control programs in the first decades of the 1900s essentially helped eliminate the gray wolf from Yellowstone. The last wolves were killed in Yellowstone in 1926. After that, sporadic reports of wolves still occurred, but scientists confirmed in the mid-1900s that sustainable gray wolf populations had been extirpated and were absent from Yellowstone as well as 48 states.
Luther Sage "Yellowstone" Kelly was an American soldier, hunter, scout, adventurer and administrator. He served briefly in the American Civil War and then in an 1898 expedition to Alaska. He commanded a U.S. Army company in the Philippine–American War and later served in the civilian administration of the Philippines. On June 26, 1929, Yellowstone Kelly was laid to rest with full military honors overlooking the Yellowstone Valley in Billings, Montana, after an impressive funeral procession.
The U.S. state of Wyoming faces a broad array of environmental issues stemming from natural resource extraction, species extirpation, non-native species introduction, and pollution. Wildlife species that have been affected by these issues include:
Craig Lancaster is an American author, playwright, and journalist, best known for his novels 600 Hours of Edward, its sequel, Edward Adrift, and The Summer Son. His other notable works include a short story collection as well as numerous articles and essays produced during his career as a newspaper writer and editor. The author, a two-time High Plains Book Award winner, was lauded as "one of Montana's most important writers."
'Asta Bowen, sometimes spelled Asta Bowen, is an American young adult writer. She's best known for her novel Wolf: The Journey Home.
Gary Ferguson is an American writer. Ferguson is the author of more than 20 nonfiction books. His books have won awards from the Society of American Travel Writers, the High Plains Book Festival, and the Montana Book Award committee. His book Hawks Rest was the first book to be named Book of the Year by both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association and the Mountains and Plains booksellers association.
The conservation of bison in North America is an ongoing, diverse effort to bring American bison back from the brink of extinction. Plains bison, a subspecies, are a keystone species in the North American Great Plains. Bison are a species of conservation concern in part because they suffered a severe population bottleneck at the end of the 19th century. The near extinction of the species during the 19th century unraveled fundamental ties between bison, grassland ecosystems, and indigenous peoples’ cultures and livelihoods. English speakers used the word buffalo for this animal when they arrived. Bison was used as the scientific term to distinguish them from the true buffalo. Buffalo is commonly used as it continues to hold cultural significance, particularly for Indigenous people.
Kevin De Ornellas, “Thunder Horse”, in Abby H. P. Werlock, ed., The Facts on File Companion to the American Novel, 3 vols (New York: Facts on File, 2006), volume 3, pp. 1266-7. ISBN 0-8160-4528-3.
