DNA showed that the mountain lion killed in Chicago was the same animal that had been spotted over the past four months in nine locations throughout northern Illinois and Wisconsin. DNA also proved that the mountain lion had come from a population in the Black Hills of western South Dakota, meaning it had wandered at least 800 miles. 

In 2008, it was almost unheard of to see a mountain lion east of the Mississippi River, but over the past 16 years, a steady stream has migrated from the Black Hills throughout the upper Midwest. Nearly all have been young males, who disperse long distances to find territory and mates. One cat in Morrison, Illinois, was discovered hiding under a farmer’s corn crib in 2013 and shot and killed by a Department of Natural Resources officer. As in 2008, this death sparked public outrage. In 2015 the Illinois legislature passed a bill protecting mountain lions and other apex predators from being killed or harassed, unless they represent a threat to life or property.

In the fall of 2009, my partner and I decided to document the locations in Illinois and Wisconsin where the mountain lion killed in Roscoe Village had been spotted. We named him Milton, after the town in Wisconsin near his first confirmed sighting. We wanted to know more about the landscape this animal had traveled through, and how it roamed so deeply into the heart of the third largest metropolitan area in the country. During a weekend road trip, we photographed and videoed the sites, making it as far as the Mississippi River north of New Albin, Iowa, where a remote trail camera had captured an image of a mountain lion that was strongly suspected to be Milton. 

Investigating these spaces from the perspective of a lone mountain lion gave me insight into how humans have transformed the rural and suburban landscapes of the Midwest. But I still felt uncertain about what broader meaning could be drawn from Milton’s journey over a geography of farms, fences, highways, rivers and towns of all sizes. In the spring of 2024, I decided to revisit these locations to see how these landscapes have changed. I wanted to reacquaint myself with Milton and understand how the scientific and cultural conversations around mountain lions recolonizing the Midwest have evolved over the past 15 years. I especially wanted to know whether a stable breeding population of mountain lions is a real possibility in the Midwest.

Roscoe Village, Chicago

On Friday, November 6, 2009, I found the exact spot where Milton was killed in Roscoe Village, and began walking around the neighborhood, trying to imagine a mountain lion hiding in the alleyway. I drove west toward the Chicago River and marveled that Milton had almost certainly crossed the highly-trafficked, four-lane Western Avenue. I contemplated the advantages and disadvantages of his mode of transportation. As a mountain lion he would have needed to stay away from busy streets and intersections, but he also had the advantage of being able to jump fences, swim across the Chicago River and traverse backyards at night, options that aren’t available to the average human. The city began to seem like a landscape consisting of stacked layers of navigational maps—layers that revealed themselves only to those operating within a particular mode of transportation.

Mountain lions’ range once included most of North and South America, the largest range of any mammal in the Western Hemisphere. As a result, they hold the Guinness record for most names accorded to any mammal: mountain lion, cougar, panther, puma and over two dozen more—all refer to the same species, Puma concolor. Throughout the past two centuries, hunting, habitat destruction and targeted extermination campaigns have erased them almost completely from both continents, including the Eastern and Midwestern United States. Since the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and other subsequent laws that have curtailed hunting and trapping, many apex predator species have been making a comeback, with varying levels of success. The ESA helped mountain lion populations in the West rebound. 

But much of that progress has been undercut, as a combination of hunting, poaching and habitat loss have adversely affected the health of these isolated and fragile populations. Throughout the first two decades of the 21st century, there has been a gradual dismantling of protections for cougars in many western states. 

In South Dakota—the location of most of the migrating cougars seen east of the Mississippi River—the legislature reclassified cougars from a threatened species to a “big game animal” in 2003 and opened the first cougar hunting season in 2005. The annual “harvesting” quota steadily increased to 100 by 2012, when the total population of cougars was less than 300 individuals. In 2014, Nebraska implemented its first cougar hunting season in over a century, despite there being an estimated population of only 15–22 individuals in that state. And, in 2023, without any public input, Utah passed a last-minute amendment to a bill that legalized year-round, unrestricted hunting and trapping of mountain lions. Between May of 2023 and May 2024, 512 mountain lions were killed in Utah out of a population of less than 2,000.

Wilmette, Illinois

The morning after exploring Roscoe Village, we followed the Chicago River as closely as we could, driving north to the suburb of Wilmette. We figured the river was Milton’s most likely path into the city, providing cover and sheltering him from roads. Between Roscoe Village and Wilmette, there are 10.5 miles of parkland. Four different residents in Wilmette reported seeing Milton, including at one spot near where a branch of the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan, adjacent to the Bahai Temple and a golf course. When I revisited the site in 2024, it looked basically the same as it had in 2009: an upper-class neighborhood with large houses surrounded by a decent amount of open green space. Other open, vegetative spaces are common on the north side of Chicago, including 18 forest preserves. This cover would have been essential for the leg of Milton’s journey that took him through the north suburbs of Chicago, which have a combined population of nearly one million people. 

The Forest Preserves District of Cook County is a product of early open-space initiatives in the city. By the time the forest preserves plan was written in 1914, the original prairie landscape of the region had already been radically transformed by Euro-American settlement. The preserves created a landscape that was quite different from the original prairie: dense forests, often filled with invasive shrubs like honeysuckle and buckthorn, and an exploding deer population due to a lack of predators.

The Forest Preserves of Cook County are managed with brush clearing, tree thinning and prescribed burns. There is another theory of comprehensive land management, though, that could include the reintroduction of apex predators: rewilding. 

Rewilding is described in slightly different ways depending on who you’re talking to, but broadly it is about putting the pieces in place to allow natural spaces to thrive without human management. In the North American context, it has focused on protecting swaths of undeveloped land and connecting these with a series of corridors, including wildlife crossings, and reestablishing populations of carnivores. 

As a restoration approach, rewilding has continued to evolve and taken hold globally, especially in Europe, where a number of rewilding projects are already underway, including restoring Iberian lynx in Spain. In Chile, mountain lions have been getting a boost from rewilding efforts and national park protections, resulting in a growing tourist economy. If states and cities in the Midwest were to adopt some of the broad lessons of this global rewilding initiative, then perhaps migrating mountain lions could move freely through this landscape. In the process, they would alleviate deer overpopulation, saving money and effort devoted to ecosystem management and decrease car collisions with deer.

Round Lake Park, Illinois

Before arriving in Wilmette, Milton zigzagged to the west, where he was spotted in an open field in Round Lake Park, a village of about 7,500 people some 16 miles inland from Lake Michigan. Just prior to this, he was spotted twice in the suburb of North Chicago, which lies along the lake. Between these locations is an expanse of highways, office parks and subdivisions, as well as four forest preserves. 

Highways, housing developments and strip malls have transformed the edges of cities across the U.S. into a landscape that is not quite urban and not quite rural. Driving from Chicago to the Illinois-Wisconsin border near Clinton, Wisconsin, there is a blending of urban and suburban, exurban and rural: farms abut parking lots, golf courses are encased by six lane freeways and housing tracts are punctuated by retention ponds and drainage canals. Traversing this terrain in 2024, I couldn’t discern how much that stretch of space had changed in 15 years; it seemed congested and sprawling then, and it feels quite similar now. Still, Milton traveled through these spaces without incident. 

The areas surrounding the Illinois-Wisconsin border that Milton traversed in 2008 were once prime cougar habitat—a mix of open prairie, oak savanna and riparian corridors—but today, farming and population density make the region inhospitable to a stable breeding population of cougars. 

In his 2012 book, Phantoms of the Prairie, the biologist John Laundré systematically analyzed state by state ways to reintroduce cougars to the Midwest, taking into consideration habitat, the availability of prey and the likelihood of human tolerance. In 2010, Laundré coined the phrase “landscape of fear” to describe the positive effects of predators on an ecosystem. Yellowstone National Park is a famous example of these effects, where the return of native plants and more complex ecosystems emerged after wolves were reintroduced in 1995. 

Laundré was an advocate of rewilding and served as the vice president of the Cougar Rewilding Foundation for over a decade until his death in 2021. His 2012 analysis identified Shawnee National Forest, in the southern tip of Illinois, as the best area for recolonization in the state. In Wisconsin, Laundré identified the state’s northwestern forests, which already has a substantial black bear population and some wolves. 

Although Laundré seemed tentatively optimistic about the prospects of cougars recolonizing northern Wisconsin, his 2020 essay “Dead Cat Walking” expresses pessimism about the likelihood of recolonization without strategic action from wildlife agencies and organizations, especially since confirmed sightings have been almost entirely of males. The idea that lone cougar sightings mean they will inevitably recolonize east of the Mississippi, Laundré wrote, “absolves everyone, especially wildlife agencies, of any responsibility. It doesn’t require any effort on the part of the many wildlife organizations except to act as cheerleaders, wishing them the best, sending their hopes and prayers, while boosting their membership along the way.”

There has also been pushback on the idea of rewilding by some environmental historians, such as Dolly Jørgensen and Irma Allen, who identify a troubling resonance between rewilding and outdated visions of wilderness as pristine spaces untouched by human history. Many have critiqued the ways that this strict nature/culture divide tends to erase and exclude the presence and histories of nonwhite people and is unrealistic when it comes to creating healthy ecosystems in a postcolonial landscape. At the same time, there are Indigenous-led initiatives that embrace the concept of rewilding, such as the Indigenous Rewilding Network, which intertwines rewilding with their landback work. Even critics like Jørgensen and Allen don’t seem to be suggesting that we give up on the idea of rewilding entirely, but work on making it more resistant to the perpetuating a nature/culture divide. 

Janesville, Wisconsin, and a farm near Milton, Wisconsin

In late January of 2008, Milton’s tracks were confirmed by state biologists near a truck stop off I-90 near Janesville, Wisconsin. At the time, there were a couple of big box stores, including a newly built Menards, and a 16-foot-tall fiberglass cow named Bessie, built in the 1960s to lure motorists off the interstate. When we stopped there on a sunny Saturday in May 2024, the area seemed significantly transformed from our first visit. In 2009, it felt quiet and spacious—just a few cars in empty parking lots. In 2024, it was jam-packed with people, cars and new businesses. The web of parking lots was clearly designed without pedestrians in mind, so I could only imagine how much more challenging it would be for Milton if he were to traverse the area now, as compared to 2008.

The site of the second confirmed sighting of Milton in Wisconsin was in an old barn on a farm in a rural area near his namesake town of 5,500 residents. Milton was taking shelter in the barn when he was disturbed by a farmer; as he escaped, he cut his paw on a broken window, providing the DNA that would prove his identity as the cougar killed in Chicago. When we visited this time, we discovered that the barn had collapsed. More crucially, the rural areas surrounding the farm are now filled with large new houses, not yet inhabited. 

Highway 26, near Milton, Wisconsin

On January 4, 2008, a driver spotted Milton crossing a two-lane highway north of the town of Milton, Wisconsin. In the years since, the road has been developed into a four-lane divided highway with a grass median. Roads and highways limit animal migration and restrict genetic movement between populations, and cougars are among the most deeply affected. 

One strategy to mitigate this is to build wildlife crossings. A massive example is currently being constructed across ten lanes of Highway 101 in Los Angeles. This project was inspired in part by P-22, a cougar who, like Milton, managed to wander into a large city. P-22 survived in a large urban park for 12 years, isolated and cut off from other cougars. In 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $350 million to initiate the Wildlife Crossing Program to research and build wildlife crossings across the country. Some states, including Indiana and Iowa, have introduced further legislation to address the issue. 

Nothing on the scale of the Los Angeles project has been proposed in any of the Midwestern states that Milton wandered through, but wildlife crossings are growing more popular as a method for encouraging biodiversity in our contemporary landscapes. Even if it’s not realistic to expect cougars to fully recolonize the Midwest, crossings could help them navigate these spaces.

California and other western states present Midwestern states with two possible paths forward. While many western states have used the threat of increased contact between cougars and humans as the justification for raising hunting quotas, California serves as a counter-example. In 1990, the public voted to pass Proposition 117, which banned the hunting of cougars and allocated state money for their protection. In 2014 and 2017, legislation was passed in California requiring law enforcement and landowners to prioritize non-lethal responses to encounters with so-called “problem” mountain lions. The mostly peaceful coexistence between cougars and the human population of California belies the arguments that are used to justify the violence exercised toward cougars in other states. Some studies show that hunting actually increases the likelihood of fatal encounters between humans and cougars. 

While cougars are currently a protected species in Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, it’s difficult to predict whether that would continue to be the case if their populations were to grow. Writing in the New York Times in 2023, biologist Mark Elbroch expresses optimism about the potential for cougar breeding populations east of the Mississippi, especially with human assistance, arguing for the importance of “… new state policies, public outreach, and education and support from the public for a creature that was once purposefully pushed toward oblivion.”

In addition to the sightings of cougars that are investigated and confirmed by state biologists are a much larger number of unsubstantiated sightings, a phenomenon often dubbed “cougar hysteria.” Cougars in these reports turn out to be house cats, or photographs taken from the internet. In Wisconsin’s Driftless area, there is a decades-old trend of black cougar sightings, which is an impossibility according to biologists. Despite the patient willingness of many DNRs to investigate, conspiracy theories have emerged to explain the discrepancy between the hundreds of reports and relatively few confirmations. It is difficult to know what is behind the phenomenon: Does cougar hysteria represent an enthusiasm for wild carnivores, and possible public support for the project of cougar recolonization? Or is it the opposite: Are people terrified of having these animals in their midst, meaning they would resist attempts to welcome cougars back to the landscape?

At the end of our 2009 trip, we camped at a mostly deserted state park in northern Illinois. Sitting by the fire in the dark, we shined our flashlight on a mysterious, bear-like animal walking near our campsite. The animal stopped, squinted in the glare of our flashlight, then turned its back and walked calmly away. When we got home the next day, internet research had us convinced we saw a wolverine, until we discovered that wolverines haven’t been documented in the Midwest for over 150 years after their populations were eradicated with unregulated trapping. Fifteen years later, I still feel stuck between my memory of the event (“it looked just like a wolverine!”) and what is realistic. It was a fitting end to our journey: in pursuing one ghost, we encountered another, even more impossible one.

Robyn Mericle

Robyn Mericle is an art historian and artist living in Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Illinois at Chicago and teaches in the fine arts department at Loyola University Chicago. Her research focuses on early 20th century American cinema and photography, with a particular interest in how ecology, landscapes and the lives of animals are represented in art and visual culture.