Wolverines and the Lewis and Clark Expedition's 'Tyger Cat'

A curious wolverine in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. NPS.

The wolverine (Gulo gulo) is the largest member of the weasel family, though it could pass for a small bear with a bushy tail. Few people ever see one: only about 300 remain in the continental U.S., mostly in the high country of the Rocky Mountain states.

What Lewis saw

Wolverines never appear by name in the Corps of Discovery's journals, but the expedition very likely met them — it just didn't know what to call them.

• Mid-June 1805: returning from the Great Falls of the Missouri, Meriwether Lewis came upon an animal he first took for a wolf. At about sixty paces he saw it wasn't: it was brownish yellow, standing by its burrow, and it crouched like a cat, staring at him as if ready to spring. He fired; it vanished into the burrow. From its tracks he was "still further convinced that it was of the tiger kind," and though unsure, he was "almost confident" he'd hit it.
• A name: in his next paragraph Lewis called it a "tyger cat."
• Another sighting: he probably saw another wolverine in mid-August 1805, near Lemhi Pass.

The animal

• Size: up to 45 pounds and often up to 45 inches long, including the thick tail.
• Senses: poor eyesight, but a keen sense of smell and hearing that lets it find almost any sick or decaying prey.
• Look: long fur, mostly black with shades of brown and a cream-white stripe along the side, a bear-like head, and long claws.

Sources

Based on "Wolverines," Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, National Park Service, quoting Meriwether Lewis's journal for June 1805; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article's National Wildlife Federation photograph is replaced here by an NPS photograph.