La Plata County Clerk and Recorder Tiffany Lee is responsible for a lot.
She runs elections, she titles and registers motor vehicles, records property records and marriages and retains the Board of County Commissioners’ records.
Outside the bounds of her duties? Examining the scalps of coyotes, wolves, mountain lions and bears and compensating the bounty hunters who killed them.
But such was the duty of her predecessors around the turn of the 20th century.
“I, W.J. Ryman, do solemnly swear that the scalps here produced by me this day are of coyote three in number within the County of La Plata and that the same were killed by me within the month last past,” one man wrote in the clerk’s scalp book in May 1878.
The clerk, John Reid, signed the affirmation, and likely verified the kills before making a payout.
Lee marvels at the delicate record book in which Reid documented the scalps. It’s one of dozens of county records from that period she maintains in a former evidence room in a part of the county jail complex.
In this series
This month, The Durango Herald is taking readers back in time through the lens of La Plata County government archives. The documents offer a look at what county residents cared about, how they lived and died, and the political landscape over a period of time, stretching from the mid-1880s through the 1930s.
The series appears each Sunday over four weeks: Aug. 4, Aug. 11, Aug. 18 and Aug. 25.
“County clerks – we did a lot of things – and even to this day, county clerks do many things and wear many hats,” Lee said.
The bounty sums were not insignificant. In 1881, the clerk paid $2.25 for three wolf scalps, $5.50 for 22 hawk heads – the total bounty of $7.75 is equivalent to about $240 today.
Beginning around the time La Plata County was formed in 1874 and for decades thereafter, bounty hunters killed dozens of predators. In one day in June 1891, for example, V.S. Weaver brought in the scalps of 13 bears, four coyotes and one mountain lion.
Unregulated bounty hunting was a blunt instrument of sorts used to clear the West of wildlife that threatened the lives and livelihoods of colonial settlers, one that is not consistent with the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation that rules in Colorado today.
The records of scalp bounties, which span 1877 to at least 1929, show the evolution of predator-bounty laws. Earlier records, before 1889, show that the county clerk received scalps and distributed payment by simply writing out sworn statements in longhand on a blank page.
By 1889, the Colorado Legislature had passed a state law creating bounties that were verified by the county but distributed, it appears, by the state. The county, by that point, had an official ledger that could be easily filled out and signed by a scalp-bearing affiant.
Like many issues of the time, rules around predator hunting and conservation remain relevant today. Initiative 91, which proposes a ban on recreational hunting of mountain lions, bobcats or lynx, will be on the ballot this November.
Although Lee has been around ranching and hunting her whole life (the cows in her yard are nicknamed McDonald’s and Burger King, she joked) and is not particularly squeamish, she says that hunters should definitively not bring scalps to her office today – if for no reason other than the blanket bounties are long gone and would not be administered by her anymore if they were to return.
“It’s not a part of my job,” she said. “If they all of a sudden walked in here, my staff would probably go, ‘whoa.’”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
