Interesting you mention that. Setting aside practical near impossibility to repopulating the Plains with bison (or at least true free roaming) it's pretty well understood now just how much we damaged the ecosystem by slaughtering so many. The buzzwords of "regenerative ranching" is conceptually doing pretty much what bison always did in the first place throughout the Plains.
I don't know if you drive across Kansas much but if you do I found a walk I did in the Konza Prairie (a research plot used by Kansas State) very interesting. They have a bison herd and have studied how much of a keystone species they were to the prairie ecosystem. There were so many bison that their wallows are still prominent topographic features, important for flora and fauna still. You can find the geo-engineering from them in the Pawnee, too.
At some point following that topic thread led me to a book published back in 1911 by a guy named Franklin Hiram (F. H.) King titled "Farmers for Forty Centuries" that discusses this. The gist being that Japanese, Korean and Chinese farmers were able to farm the same plots of lands for thousands of years and the soil never died. Fundamental to that was grazing animals.
en.wikipedia.org
I know time can only go forward. Why does it have to be the wolf or us?
Clutching your pearls in Victorian-era fear mongering isn't a solution.
Wolves do attack people and rabies is a factor. But they aren't any more likely to attack a human than a cat or bear and will for the same reasons, e.g. protective mothers, opportunistic, desperation. It's none of their faults we pushed into their habitats and I don't see how eradicating them for our convenience helped. I mean, I'm not going hesitate to protect myself from an encounter and attack, including killing a threatening predator. But we scoff at the gubermint "saving us from ourselves" with nanny air bags and crap. Why then do we advocate santiziing the lands "just to be safe?"
The degree to which wolves pose a threat to human safety has been a central part of the public
controversy surrounding wolf recovery in Europe for the last three decades. This report seeks to
update our knowledge for the period 2002 to 2020. We searched the peer-reviewed literature,
technical reports, online news media sources and contacted regional experts to gather as much
information as possible. Our coverage for Europe and North America is likely to be high, but for
the rest of Eurasia we have at best found a good sample of events, especially for the period after
2015. We identified relatively reliable cases involving 489 human victims. Of these 67 were vic-
tims of predatory attacks (9 fatal), 380 were victims of rabid attacks (14 fatal), and 42 were victims
of provoked / defensive attacks (3 fatal). Attacks were found in Canada, USA, Croatia, Poland,
Italy, Iran, Iraq, Israel, India, Kirgizstan, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Russia,
Mongolia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Saudi Arabia. In addition, we found an almost
equal number of cases that we could not include because of poor documentation as well as
cases that we could clearly reject based on evidence, for example where the attack was actually
caused by dogs.
If wolves were so antithetical to humans there would never have been dogs. So at some point the relationship wasn't all antagonistic. In Yellowstone/Grand Teton the risk must certainly be considered significant in the same way as is argued in Colorado (hunters, ranchers, recreation). So many tourists traipsing right in their habitat and nothing serious in human fatalities has happened (other than someone dispatching 20% of the population recently and there's cattle taken, not to gloss over it).
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
The most recent human fatality due a wolf attack in North America was 2010 in Alaska. The most recent (two in fact) mountain lion were 2018 in Oregon and Washington. As far as the Yellowstone pack, the last documented human-wolf attack in Wyoming was 1908 (it was only fatal to the wolves, several of which were shot) and there's none listed in Montana ever. A human is killed by a bear almost annually in North America.
There are also quoted Dept of Wildlife workers in same article.
