How many wolves were killed in Yellowstone between 1883 and 1917?

Records for wolf killings in Yellowstone between 1883 and 1917 are fragmentary and shaped by changing management regimes, so the short answer is: official park records document only a few dozen confirmed kills inside the park during that period, but the full regional slaughter outside and around Yellowstone was orders of magnitude larger and better documented. 

Quick Reference: Wolves Killed in Yellowstone (1883–1917)

Time Period	Management Authority	Documented Wolf Killings Inside Yellowstone	Key Notes
1883–1886	Early civilian administration	No reliable records	Recordkeeping was inconsistent; wolf control occurred but was rarely documented in detail
1886–1916	U.S. Army administration	14 wolves (reported total)	Army reports later cited that 14 wolves were officially killed during military management of the park
1915	Early predator control phase	7 wolves	Marks the beginning of systematic, well-documented wolf eradication efforts
1916	National Park Service formed	14 wolves	Predator control intensified as wolves were seen as threats to elk and deer populations
1917	National Park Service	4 wolves	Continued removals under formal NPS predator-control policy
Total (documented minimum)	1883–1917	Approximately 39–45 wolves	Represents only confirmed, recorded kills inside park boundaries

Yellowstone’s earliest formal administrators were the U.S. Army (which managed the park from 1886 until the National Park Service took over in 1916). Army reports and later park reports show that the Army and early park employees killed wolves when they were viewed as threats to stock and game. A commonly cited figure is that the Army itself reported killing 14 wolves during its tenure (1886–1916), with most of those removals occurring in the mid-1910s as predator-control efforts intensified. 

More detailed annual tallies survive for the World War I era because park superintendents and biologists later compiled the numbers. Adolph Murie’s compilation of superintendent reports shows recorded park kills of seven wolves in 1915, fourteen in 1916, and four in 1917 — a total of 25 documented kills for those three years alone. When historians refer to the wave of predator control that began about 1914, they often point to these annual tallies as evidence that the systematic removal campaign was underway by the mid-1910s. 

If you try to build a single precise number for “how many wolves were killed in Yellowstone between 1883 and 1917” you quickly hit two problems: first, recordkeeping before about 1914 is spotty and sometimes lumped together with removals on adjacent lands; second, different sources use different definitions (wolves killed inside park boundaries versus wolves taken in the surrounding Greater Yellowstone region or in state bounty programs). Because of those limits, careful histories typically give conservative, documented counts for the park itself (the documented Army and superintendent reports amount to tens of wolves, not hundreds), while stressing that the regional bounty era was catastrophic — state and county bounty records for Montana and Wyoming show tens of thousands of wolves killed between the 1880s and the 1910s (one frequently cited figure is ~80,000 wolves reported killed in Montana alone from the 1880s into the 1910s), a level of killing that drove wolf populations to near extirpation across the Plains and Rockies. 

Putting those pieces together, the most defensible, evidence-based statement is this: within Yellowstone National Park proper, surviving official reports document on the order of a few dozen wolves killed between the late 1880s and 1917 (for example, 14 reported by the Army during 1886–1916 plus 25 recorded in 1915–1917), but because of overlapping counting methods and incomplete records those published figures should be treated as minimum documented kills rather than a complete tally. At the same time, the broader regional slaughter during 1883–1917 was enormous and well documented in state bounty records — tens of thousands of wolves died in Montana and Wyoming during that same era, which explains why Yellowstone’s wolf packs were functionally eliminated by the 1920s.