The northern cattle ranges threatened the habitats of many indigenous animals. The antelope herds were greatly reduced, and the buffalo were all but exterminated. Predators such as the coyote, mountain lion, grizzly bear, and wolf were hunted mercilessly to reduce their numbers. Wolves were considered a major threat to stockmen, and cowboys were ordered to kill them whenever possible. This sometimes involved chasing the animals down until they were exhausted, a practice that in Russell’s day was considered good sport. This watercolor shows a cowboy about to loop a hapless wolf caught out in the open. The animals were usually dispatched with a bullet, since the pelt was worth money. Even so, this practice was not as destructive to the animals as the use of poison, which became so widely indiscriminate that livestock and even humans—sometimes children—became innocent victims. As his career advanced, Russell became a strong advocate for the preservation of wildlife, and the endangered wolf was one of his interests. Ernest Thompson Seton, a nature writer whom Russell eventually met in 1904, wrote highly popular stories on lone wolves who had been forced to become outlaws. During the period Russell executed this watercolor, several renegade wolves in Montana had eluded hunters long enough to acquire names and have stories told about them. But in the end, all of them were hunted down and killed by the end of the 1890s, for the bounties on their skins were very high. By 1900 a naturalist for the Smithsonian Institution reported that, in the course of an extensive field trip to observe the wolf in the Montana wilds, no wolves were encountered.