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Wolf

In a biographical sketch written in 1859, Abraham Lincoln recalled the scene of his youth in frontier Indiana: "We reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods." While wolves were probably rare as far south as Indiana, they retained their position atop the food chain in Illinois well into the nineteenth century. Happy to partake of farmers' livestock, wolves faced a determined eradication campaign that drove them to more remote ranges in the twentieth century.