Doug Crowe advanced the science and practice of wildlife management in Wyoming by a quantum leap, pushing the needle ahead 40 years or so. Wyoming became the bellwether for other states’ wildlife management and remains so today thanks to him.
Crowe, who died a few years ago, was a complicated man who came up with ingenious ideas and yet alienated those in power who could promote those ideas.
In Kris Kristofferson’s words, he was “a walking contradiction/partly truth and partly fiction.” And, as Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”
Nobody who ever worked with Doug Crowe has a bland, milquetoast opinion of the man.
I recently drank some beer with a few old friends who knew Crowe, and we swapped memories and tall tales of this cantankerous, battle-scarred old veteran of the battlefields of wildlife management in the Big Empty.
Bob Budd was the trail boss of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association back in the day. Art Reese and Walt Gasson were both colleagues in the Wyoming Game and Fish Department during Crowe’s tenure there. I worked in the governor’s office at the time when Doug left his big boot prints on the state.
We all agreed that he was, at the same time, an intellect to be respected and a burr under our saddles.
For you history buffs, Doug Crowe fought tooth and claw to introduce Peter Drucker’s concept of Management by Objective to the hidebound old Wyoming Game and Fish Department, an agency that theretofore had been focused solely on selling hunting and fishing licenses to the “happiness is a warm gut pile” demographic.
By applying these business principles to herds of critters instead of to corporations, Crowe revolutionized how a critical state-owned resource would be managed into the future. He did so by force of his considerable ego and his single-mindedness. And he left his blood in the soil in so doing.
So we hoisted a beer to Doug Crowe the visionary, then told stories about Crowe the atavistic knucklehead.
Like that time Crow (whose worldview was equal parts Ed Abbey and Attila, King of the Huns) got 86ed from the Wyoming Legislature for storming the floor to rant about a bill that he liked or hated. Egregious violations of decorum were Doug Crowe’s stock in trade.
Or those parties that Crowe hosted for University of Wyoming graduates in biology and rookie, red-shirted WGFD newbies. Movable feasts they were, either somewhere in the Shirley Basin, along the Sweetwater or tucked up into the Sierra Madre, featuring tequila for breakfast, lunch and dinner; washed down with more tequila.
Graduate-level seminars in debauchery and ecology, so we are told. Survivors don’t talk openly about them.
Here’s a hint: if you want to develop esprit de corps in your organization, bust out the agave.
Art Reese confirmed a persistent rumor that, at a Christmas party for WGFD cadres, where Crowe was in charge of making margaritas, Crowe reached into the freezer and pulled out the frozen carcass of a muskrat. He blended the rodent with tequila and triple sec into the sixth or seventh pitcher of hooch.
Reports vary from “nobody knew the difference” to “the dog wouldn’t even touch it.” Draw your own damn conclusion.
And that time that Crowe left WGFD to work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and was assigned to go to Botswana to work with Africans on elephant management. Gossip on the street has him consorting with the wrong Ruthless Warlord of a Rebel Splinter Group and being tossed into a dark African jail.
Gossip also says that it took the combined political clout of the Wyoming congressional delegation at the time – Al Simpson, Dick Cheney and Malcolm Wallop – to get his sorry ass out of the hoosegow and back home to make margaritas.
See what I mean about partly truth and partly fiction?
But know this for certain, Doug !@#%ing Crowe was an elegant, dangerous cross between grizzly bear and birdwatcher, and he served well the state he loved. We should all hoist one to his memory.
Rod Miller can be reached at: RodsMillerWyo@yahoo.com
