The Champawat Tigress: How Jim Corbett Ended Kumaon's Deadliest Man-Eater

In the early 1900s, the villages around Champawat lived in fear. People stopped going to the forest for firewood. Women stopped cutting grass on the slopes. Doors were barred before dark. Somewhere in the oak and pine forests was a tigress who had learned to hunt people.

By the time a young man from Nainital came to find her, she had been blamed for about 436 deaths.

Where did the Champawat tigress come from?

She began killing in western Nepal, and was driven across the border into Kumaon by the Nepalese Army. Her attacks started around the village of Rupal. Local hunters failed to stop her, so soldiers were sent in. They could not kill her either, but they pushed her across the Sarda (Kali) river into India.

In the hills of Champawat she carried on. Her kills spread across a wide area, and she rarely stayed in one place for long, which made her almost impossible to track.

Who was Jim Corbett?

In 1907, Jim Corbett was a 31-year-old railway contractor from Nainital who knew the Kumaon forests from childhood. He had grown up hunting and tracking around Kaladhungi and Nainital, and the government asked him to help. He agreed on two conditions: that the rewards be cancelled and that other hunters be kept away, so he would not be seen as a bounty hunter.

How was the tigress finally killed?

After she killed a 16-year-old girl named Premka Devi near the village of Fungar, Corbett followed the trail into a gorge of the Champa river and organised a beat. The tehsildar of Champawat gathered about 300 villagers. They spread out across the hillside, shouting and beating drums to drive the tigress down towards Corbett.

On 12 May 1907, she came out of the gorge. Corbett fired, and after several shots, the last of them with the tehsildar's own rifle, the tigress fell. When the villagers examined her, they found her canine teeth were broken, probably from an old gunshot wound. Corbett believed this injury had stopped her hunting wild animals and turned her towards people.

Why does the story still matter?

Because it changed Jim Corbett, and through him, how India protects its tigers. Corbett went on to hunt other man-eaters in Kumaon and Garhwal, including the Leopard of Rudraprayag. But over the years he became a photographer and a conservationist, warning that tigers were vanishing.

India's first national park, set up in 1936 in the Kumaon foothills, was renamed Jim Corbett National Park in his honour in 1957. Today it is one of the best places in the country to see a wild tiger, a very different story from the one that began in the forests of Champawat.

Can you visit the place today?

• The memorial: a small board near the Chataar bridge, on the road from Champawat towards Lohaghat, marks where the tigress was brought down.
• Champawat town: combine it with the carved Baleshwar temple and the Ek Hathiya Naula. See our Champawat travel guide.
• The book: read the first chapter of Corbett's Man-Eaters of Kumaon before you go. Standing in those hills after reading it is quite something.