Episode 176: South Carolina’s War Against Beasts of Prey, 1693–1790

To secure the natural landscape for colonial settlement, South Carolina’s early government offered bounty money to white, black, and Native American hunters for destroying “beasts of prey” that menaced settlers, crops, and livestock. Commencing in the coastal Lowcountry in 1693 and spreading westward to the Piedmont, bounty hunters pursued panthers, wolves, bears, and bobcats to extirpation by 1790.