would kill wolves, cougars or bears as a rite of passage. Although some of the first European colonists traveling to North America would report back that wolves were more populous in the New World than in Europe, writings from the Lewis and Clark Expedition indicate that wolves were seldom seen except in aboriginal buffer zones. After the European colonization of the Americas, the first American wolf bounty was passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony on November 9, 1630. Further wolf bounties opened in Jamestown, Virginia on September 4, 1632, and in other colonies. Payments to white settlers included cash, tobacco, wine and corn, while Native Americans were given blankets and trinkets. A New Jersey law started in 1697 stated that any white Christian who brought a wolf carcass to a magistrate would have been paid 20 shillings, while a Native American or Black person would have been paid half that much. It later became customary for Native Americans to provide two wolf pelts a year without payment. In 1688, a Virginia law abolished the requirement of tribute in wolves to be paid in accordance to the number of hunters in each tribe, demanding 725 hunters to kill 145 wolves a year. In the 19th century, as the settlers began increasingly moving west in pursuit of more land for ranching, wolves were becoming increasingly more hunted as threats to livestock. In 1818, a "War of Extermination" against wolves and bears was declared in Ohio. Iowa began its own wolf bounty in 1858, with Wisconsin and Colorado following suit in 1865 and 1869. Wolf pelts soon began to increase in demand as beavers began to become scarce from over-trapping. In the 1830s, a wolf pelt was worth only $1, doubling in the 1850s. Records of the upper Missouri outfit of the American Fur Trading Company indicate that 20 wolf pelts were shipped down-river in 1850, with 3,000 being shipped three years later. Civilians turned bounty hunters known as "wolfers" began killing ungulates in large numbers as bait, poisoning the meat in hopes of attracting unsuspecting wolves. It is estimated that between 1871 and 1875, this method killed thirty-four thousand wolves in Montana and Alberta alone. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, wolf hunting could become a cultural event as large numbers of people advanced through wolf territory in hopes of flushing any animals from hiding. In these types of hunts,