
However, a 1975–77 National Park Service sponsored study revealed that during the period 1927 to 1977, there were several hundred probable sightings of wolves in the park. It is generally accepted that sustainable gray wolf packs had been extirpated from Yellowstone National Park by 1926, although the National Park Service maintained its policies of predator control in the park until 1933. In 1916, when the National Park Service was created, its enabling legislation included words that authorized the Secretary of the Interior to "provide in his discretion for the destruction of such animals and of such plant life as may be detrimental to the use of said parks, monuments and reservations". This predator control program alone killed 1,800 wolves and 23,000 coyotes in 39 U.S. In 1907, under political pressure from the western cattle and livestock industries, this agency began a concerted program which eventually was called: Animal Damage Control. Biological Survey which was the forerunner of the U.S. In 1885, Congress created the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy with the express purpose of research for the protection of wildlife.

Army did not begin killing any wolves until 1914. Official records show however, that the U.S. Army took over admin of the park on August 1, 1890, Captain Moose Harris, the first military superintendent, allowed public hunting of any wildlife and any predator control was to be left to the park's administration. In January 1883, the Secretary of the Interior issued regulations prohibiting the hunting of most park animals, but the regulations did not apply to wolves, coyotes, bears, mountain lions, and other small predators. The gray wolf was especially vulnerable to this wanton killing because it was generally considered an undesirable predator and was being willingly extirpated throughout its North American range.
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In the early years of the park, administrators, hunters, and tourists were essentially free to kill any game or predator they came across. In 1872, when Yellowstone National Park was created, there was no legal protection for wildlife in the park yet. Soldiers displaying Wolf pelt at Soda Butte Creek patrol station, 1905 In 1995, gray wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone in the Lamar Valley. When the Endangered Species Act of 1973 was passed, the road to legal reintroduction was clear. Starting in the 1940s, park managers, biologists, conservationists, and environmentalists began, what would ultimately turn into, a campaign to reintroduce the gray wolf into Yellowstone National Park. After that, sporadic reports of wolves still occurred, but scientists confirmed that sustainable wolf populations had been extirpated and were absent from Yellowstone during the mid-1900s. The last wolves were killed in Yellowstone in 1926.

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.

When Yellowstone National Park was created in 1872, wolf populations were already in decline in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. The reintroduction of wolves was controversial as it is with the worldwide reintroduction of wolves. The History of wolves in Yellowstone included extirpation, absence and reintroduction of the gray wolf ( Canis lupus) to Yellowstone National Park.
