EDITOR’S NOTE: Caprock Chronicles is written or edited by Paul Carlson, emeritus professor of history at Texas Tech University. This week’s essay, written by Ray Cragar of Lubbock and Paul Carlson, looks at a mysterious and unexplained phenomenon with wolves on the Llano Estacado.

In February 1877, a rancher named John Lovelady, riding on horseback below the caprock south of the mouth of Yellow House Canyon, witnessed thousands of wolves loping over the plains and up the Yellow House.

The wolves, he said, were maybe "twenty abreast, and the pack must have been two or three miles in length." He saw them "heading in a northwestern course across the plains."

"On the same day," others wrote, "some parties (perhaps including William S. Glenn, a former bison hunter) saw what was undoubtedly this same pack, crossing Yellow House Canyon, still traveling in a lope and headed northwest."

A historical marker, developed by William C. Griggs and placed near the Lubbock Lake Site, commemorates the Lovelady-Glenn wolf sightings.

Such a migration had happened before 1877 and probably many times. David Lavender in his scholarly book on William Bent’s Fort in present Colorado, for example, relates a tale of migrating wolves. He writes about 17-year-old Bill Boggs ,who in 1844 was with a wagon train bound for Santa Fe through Bent’s Fort.

"One night," Lavender writes, near present-day Larned, Kansas, while Boggs stood "guard over … grazing mules, his heart leaped at the sound of a great splashing in the [Arkansas River]." He placed "his ear to the ground" and heard "the strangest rumbling, neither horses nor buffalo."

Boggs soon "discovered a vast drove of migrating wolves." All night he "watched the ghostly packs plunge into the wide Arkansas and paddle across — 40,000 of them, he estimated. The event occurred 430 miles north-northeast of Lubbock and 33 years before the Yellow House incident.

Lt. Robert G. Carter of the Fourth Cavalry also described large numbers of wolves. In "On the Border with Mackenzie," he wrote that at night near a military camp on the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos, near present-day Aspermont in the early 1870s, wolves in countless numbers, "came out of the ‘bottoms’ of numerous coulees, arroyos, and ravines."

"No such number of wolves," he wrote, "had ever been seen or heard by us in that country."

In fact, "about the third or fourth night (in our camp) their number seemed to increase and double up." On the last night, he noted, the wolves "again congregated by thousands" and, thus, "we spent five days and nights in this wolf-besieged camp."

Clearly, in the past wolves could be found in Texas in huge numbers. Indeed, the state was once home to several subspecies of gray wolf: Mexican gray wolf (in western portions of the state), Texas gray wolf (in Central and South Texas), and the buffalo wolf (on the plains following bison herds).

Unfortunately, according to Jason Manning in "wolfology/tripod.com," the Texas gray wolf became extinct about 1942. Once experts thought the buffalo wolf was extinct, but some subspecies may exist in the Michigan-Wisconsin area. The red wolf of eastern and Central Texas is a separate wolf species.

Lt. Carter’s wolves in the early 1870s were not leaving the Brazos River country, but Lovelady’s and Glenn’s wolves in 1877 and Boggs’ animals in 1844 were migrating. What mysterious force caused them to congregate in such enormous numbers around Carter’s camp or move in such massive totals along the Arkansas and the Brazos rivers?

Wolf packs were rarely as sizeable as Carter, Lovelady and Boggs indicate their packs were. In the Lovelady and Boggs descriptions, particularly, the wolves moved as one colossal body strung out in wide formations and extending in length for miles.

Clearly, once there were hundreds of thousands of gray (buffalo) wolves following the gigantic bison herds. Bison sometimes moved slowly, grazing along the way. Other times, they ran or stampeded in immense numbers and for long distances.

Wolves followed, sometimes in smaller packs circling a quietly feeding herd of whatever size, and sometimes, as perhaps in the Boggs explanation of 1844, rushing to keep abreast of the animals they hunted.

Plenty of questions remain, of course, especially about the 1877 wolf migration in our area. Where did they first congregate? Did one pack start the journey and others join along the way? If it was an "exodus" rather than a migration, what were they leaving behind and where were they going?

Finally, did gray wolves really congregate in such astounding quantities? We know that bison numbers were huge, perhaps as many as 25 to 30 million during their peak years.

But, in 1877, bison numbers in our area were in terrible decline. Also, cattlemen were pushing their livestock to and through former bison ranges toward our area, and the state had recently created more than 50 counties in the Panhandle-South Plains region.

In response to such loss of prey and habitat, perhaps the buffalo wolves in inexplicable ways — mysterious ways — still unknown to humans organized their hegira.