Elk have been gathering on lightly-hunted lowland ranches along the upper Missouri River near where I live for a number of years, and we only started getting significant numbers wolves around Townsend about 5-6 years ago, long after they showed up around Dillon.
The first wolves to appear around here were apparently spin-offs from the Canadian packs that migrated south across the border into northwestern Montana years ago, and they are still mostly in the Elkhorns where they first showed up, not the Big Belts on the east side. So elk moving onto valley ranches during early fall sure wasn't originally due to wolves.
One study a few years ago indicated elk will stay on private land with little human hunting pressure even after wolves move in. Apparently they'd rather deal with a few wolves than humans with rifles.
That was certainly the case with the ranch I hunted an hour south of here two years ago, which only allows a few rifle hunters each fall. The pack had been living on and around the ranch for quite a while, but elk still moved onto the property from surrounding public land as soon as hunting season began--and stayed there even while four of us hunted and killed bulls.
However, we hunted only on horseback and foot, and didn't go whooping and hollering and high-fiving after a bull went down. Instead we sat quietly until any other elk moved off, and even when retrieving the bulls we killed, we never drove into the area where most of the elk lived except during midday. As a result the elk stayed on the ranch, despite our hunting and the wolf pack.
