Editor's Note

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When the Maine Warden Service approached Down East last year in the hope we might consider running an article commemorating its 130th anniversary, game wardens had no idea that this magazine’s editor was writing a book in which one of their number would figure prominently. In fact I had been following the work of Maine game wardens closely for more than a decade and needed no persuading. I think it surprised Colonel Joel Wilkinson that I embraced the idea. It will come as another surprise that the editors of the Magazine of Maine have chosen to honor the men and women of the Maine Warden Service with the 2010 Down East Environmental Award.

This year marks the thirty-second time this magazine has presented its coveted citation. If you look back over the decades, you’ll see a veritable honor role of the state’s environmental protectors from land trusts (e.g. the Maine Coast Heritage Trust in 1991) to businesses (Hancock Lumber in 2003), from politicians (Ed Muskie, posthumously in 2008) to private citizens (Robert Cummings in 1981). The Down East Environmental Award might have grown out of the spirit of activism of the 1970s, but we have always defined the term broadly. Giving the award to the oldest conservation law enforcement agency in the nation makes perfect sense, and when you consider that fourteen game wardens have lost their lives in the line of duty — more than any of Maine’s other police forces — the honor seems overdue.

Like any government agency, the Warden Service has weathered its share of rough times and deserves the continuing scrutiny of the state’s citizens, but on the anniversary of its creation it has earned its moment in the sun. We tend to think of poaching these days as the slightest of misdemeanors, but it’s worth looking back to 1873 when a correspondent from the Ellsworth American reported the following: “The number of deer shipped from Maine the past year has exceeded two thousand, and it is safe to say that three-fourths of those deer were killed by less than a hundred men . . . nine out of ten [deer] were shot in the back of the head, thus proving that they were slaughtered in the water, driven in by the hounds. Evidently the deer needs protection.”

Those deer found their protectors in wardens like Lyman Hill and Charles Niles, who were murdered in 1886 trying to stop the slaughter.