by Dan Flores
Subsequent Spanish authorities, such as Francisco Javier Clavijero, in his Historia Antigua de Mejico, published in 1780—a quarter century before Lewis and Clark named the animal “prairie wolf”—still relied on Hernandez. But by Clavijero’s time the Spaniards had more experience with American animals, so his account expands the coyote’s treatment considerably: “The coyotl, or coyote, as the Spanish call it, is an animal similar to the wolf in its voracity, to the fox in its cunning, to the dog in its shape, and in other propensities to the adive, or jackal; for which reason some Mexican writers have counted it among several of these species; but it is undoubtedly different from all of them.”
Clavijero also noted that by 1780 the coyotl had become “one of the most common quadrupeds of Mexico.”
Indians may have had thousands of years’ worth of close familiarity with the coyote, and prior accounts and descriptions by Spanish authors might exist, but the taxonomic approach that dominated Western science by the early nineteenth century was clear. To claim official scientific discovery of a species, one had to publish a detailed description accompanied by a proffered binomial to classify it in the Linnaean system. As a result, the honor of adding the prairie wolf to science fell not to William Clark or even Francisco Hernandez but to a naturalist named Thomas Say, the zoologist on an American exploring expedition to the West some fifteen years after Lewis and Clark. Say, a young naturalist from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, was a member of the Stephen Long expedition across the plains to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado in 1819 and 1820. Not until 1823, however, did he officially describe the “type specimen” of the prairie wolf from a Nebraska coyote he was finally able to catch by using a bobcat as bait. His binomial, Canis latrans Say (Say’s barking canine), has been the recognized scientific name ever since, although not—it turned out—without challenge.
Because Say became the “official” discoverer of this “new” carnivorous canine, his journal entries are worth mulling over for insights into how this strange animal first struck Americans. “The prairie wolves roam over the plains in considerable numbers,” he began his account. Not only were they “by far the most numerous of our wolves,” but they constantly loitered around the explorers’ camps, seemingly very curious and unafraid and affording western travelers many opportunities to study their habits.
Say became the first writer to notice and comment on what we today recognize as coyote fission-fusion adaptations. He wrote that although they appeared in singles and pairs, coyotes “often unite in packs for the purpose of chasing deer, which they very frequently succeed in running down, and killing.” Their “swiftness and cunning” were often insufficient to bring down large prey, however, so they were “sometimes reduced to the necessity of eating wild plums, and other fruits… in order to distend the stomach, and appease in a degree the cravings of hunger.”
The naturalist could not help but notice, as had Meriwether Lewis, a defining prairie wolf trait: “Their bark is much more distinctly like that of the domestic dog, than of any other animal; in fact the first two or three notes could not be distinguished from the bark of a small terrier, but these notes are succeeded by a lengthened scream.” To that he added, in an initial rendering of what was about to become a constant refrain about coyotes, “The wonderful intelligence of this animal, is well worthy of note.”
As for the prairie wolf’s place among the world’s carnivorous canines, Say was obliged to consider the widespread claim made by European naturalists, on reading the Lewis and Clark descriptions, that the prairie wolf was most likely an American species of jackal. This became a serious and lengthy debate. Defending his conviction that this creature was wholly unknown to Western science, Say noted, “The latrans does not diffuse the offensive odour, so remarkable in the two species of jackalls, (C. aureus and C. anthus,) though in many respects it resembles those animals.” That observation turned out to be insufficient to lay to rest arguments that the American prairie wolf might actually be a new form of jackal.
Say ended his description with an intriguing claim: “This animal… is most probably the original of the domestic dog, so common in the villages of the Indians of this region, some of the varieties of which, still retain much of the habit, and manners of this species.”
In combination with expedition artist Titian Ramsay Peale, Thomas Say briefly planned a book that would have been an early mammal version of John James Audubon’s Birds of America, combining the naturalist’s descriptions with Peale’s paintings. The book never materialized, but it does seem remarkable in light of their plans for it that Peale’s 1819 watercolor painting of the prairie wolf—the very first visual rendition of a coyote by an American artist—is titled “Fox.” At least Peale didn’t call it a jackal.
Today Thomas Say receives unquestioned credit for adding the coyote to Linnaean science, but given the number of naturalists drawn to the West in the early nineteenth century, he not surprisingly had rivals in the game. Close, almost unaccountable misses to describe the animal provide additional details about the coyote’s original circumstances. One of these involved one of the most famous English naturalists ever to work in early America, Thomas Nuttall, whose coyote misses are especially intriguing.
At a time when American universities were only barely starting to turn out trained field naturalists (that’s why no bona fide naturalist accompanied Lewis and Clark), Nuttall arrived from Yorkshire in 1808 at the age of twenty-two and at once came to the attention of a prominent American professor of the natural sciences, Benjamin Smith Barton of the University of Pennsylvania. Barton had been Jefferson’s advisor on natural sciences for the president’s western expeditions; one of his students, Dr. Peter Custis, had accompanied the president’s 1806 expedition to the edge of the Southwest. Barton became a Nuttall advocate, introducing him to William Maclure of the American Philosophical Society, who nominated him for membership. With patrons like these, Nuttall got to explore across the West for the next three decades.
The first painting of a coyote by an American naturalist, Titian Ramsay Peale, misidentified the animal as a fox! Courtesy American Philosophical Society.
In 1818 and 1819 Nuttall embarked on a natural history expedition to the edge of the southern prairies. It was the same summer that Thomas Say first saw coyotes a few hundred miles farther north. Nuttall’s route took him diagonally (southeast to northwest) across Arkansas Territory, then westward as far as central Oklahoma, and on south to the Red River and the border of Spanish Texas.
Read Nuttall’s southwestern journal today, and it’s clear he was naturalizing along the logical eastern edge of the coyote’s early nineteenth-century range. Everywhere these early explorers first encountered them, coyotes were part of a zoological cohort that included bison, pronghorns, prairie dogs, and usually elk. As travelers moved from the east and began to enter the West, the presence of all these animals coincided with the first appearances of a grassland-dominated landscape. Nineteenth-century Americans were fascinated sensory observers of these changes and repeatedly recorded a predictable progression. Explorer John C. Fremont’s journey westward from Chouteau’s Landing on the Missouri in 1842 captures it well. A month’s travel up the Kansas River, as the woodlands opened into sweeping, grassy prairies, Fremont began to report pronghorns “running over the hills.” The next day he noticed that artemesia, or sagebrush, had become common. The day after that, elk began to appear on the river. Within a week they were among the buffalo herds, and at that point “wolves in great numbers surrounded us during the night… howling and trotting about.”
Almost every traveler who entered the Great Plains from the east had this experience, and coyotes—“small wolves”—always attracted attention in the midst of this zoological sea change. “Three different kinds were present,” Francis Parkman wrote. “There were the white wolves and the gray wolves, both extremely large, and besides these the small prairie wolves, not much bigger than spaniels.” Parkman saw them in action: “The
y would howl and fight in a crowd around a single carcass, yet they were so watchful and their senses so acute, that I was never able to crawl within a fair shooting distance; whenever I attempted it they would all scatter at once and glide silently away through the tall grass.”
The ecological edge that marked this profound environmental boundary sometimes transitioned the country from “the East” to “the West” in no more than twenty or thirty miles.
So it fascinates me that in 1819 Thomas Nuttall traveled right down the seam of that East/West boundary, from the present Tulsa area southward along the western stretches of the Ouachita Mountains to the Red River, moving in and out of prairie country like “an immense meadow… covered with luxuriant herbage, and beautifully decorated with flowers.” Infrequently the Englishman saw bison, the most common mammal marker of the prairie edge. But he never mentions coyotes.
In August 1819, in company with a plainsman named Lee, Nuttall decided to explore farther westward. On the Cimarron River that month, just northeast of present-day Oklahoma City, the naturalist scribbled in his journal that they had seen a badger den “about the size of those made by the prairie wolf.” So by this point he had seen coyote dens. But Nuttall had taken seriously ill, fainting and nearly falling from his horse in a malarial delirium. This was his only reference to an animal that in 1819 was his to describe and win credit for, had he only acted.
Sixteen years later, having traveled across the West with fellow naturalist John Kirk Townsend, on California’s Central Coast near Monterey, Nuttall listened as coyotes “tame as dogs yelled every night through the villages.” By that point a fellow naturalist exploring the exact coyote prairie edge that Nuttall visited in 1819 had set off a scientific debate about the strange new canines of the prairies.
Was the new animal actually a jackal, an Old World creature known until that time only in Africa, the Middle East, and southeastern Europe? That was the first question science posed about “prairie wolves,” and from the 1830s to the 1850s, the debate set the naturalists of the Philadelphia Academy against those of the new Smithsonian in the capital city. Earlier in western exploration, the academy had supplied many of the naturalists. Through the influence of a scientist named Spencer Baird, however, the Smithsonian ended up manning the federal government’s Mexican-Boundary Surveys and Pacific Railroad Surveys with botanists, mammalogists, ornithologists, and geologists of its choosing.
Prairie Wolf, Fort Clark, 1833–1834, by Karl Bodmer. Courtesy Joslyn Art Museum.
Initially, Say’s designation of the prairie wolf as a new species, previously unknown and unrelated to jackals, carried the day. And Say had an early and influential supporter, European explorer Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, who, it so happened, was about to make a famous journey up the Missouri River in the 1830s, right into the heart of prairie wolf country.
The early-nineteenth-century American West attracted European naturalists and artists in much the way East Africa did later in the century and for many of the same reasons. European scientists, trained in Linnaean taxonomy and steeped in the romantic hero-adventurer tradition of Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, looked to the American West and to the plains of East Africa as one final chance for the holy experience of the wild Pleistocene planet. Landlocked Germans, denied sea exploration, were especially avid consumers of the reports of these terrestrial adventures in wild places.
The Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson of his day, Alexander von Humboldt was example, model, and mentor to many of the explorers from Europe; some of them, it turns out, were apparently also his lovers. Among the young men who won von Humboldt’s personal patronage, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, who explored Brazil from 1815 to 1817 and then ascended the Missouri River into the American West in 1833 and 1834, became one of the most celebrated of his protégés. Maximilian had received anthropological training at the University of Göttingen. As a result native peoples were always his real interest. But nineteenth-century explorers had to be generalists, so he taught himself the basics of natural history as well.
Prince Maximilian also had the good fortune to spend the 1832–1833 winter in America’s most personable science and arts commune, New Harmony in Indiana. Among his confidantes on all-things West that winter was Thomas Say, the Philadelphia Academy naturalist whose Canis latrans designation had established the prairie wolf as a new species and no jackal. You would guess that the German prince heard a good deal about Say’s barking canid of the plains that winter in Indiana.
Maximilian also had the good instincts to retain the services of the best-trained painter to venture into the West until that time. Young Karl Bodmer was a Swiss artist whose voluminous work on the prince’s Missouri River voyage would become one of the best of all visual representations of the natural West. Urged by his patron to pay close attention to ethnographic detail, Bodmer produced Indian portraits and scenes of plains life so exacting that both modern Indians and Hollywood have relied extensively on them to recapture the world of the Plains Indian. He also brought a skill to capturing the atmospherics and exposed geology of western landscapes that went unmatched until Maynard Dixon traveled to the West seventy-five years later. But Bodmer’s real training was in portraying the wildlife of the European forests. So it is no accident that this young Swiss artist drew the best portrait of a coyote produced by anyone in the early West.
By the late summer of 1833, Maximilian and Bodmer were at Fort McKenzie, in present-day eastern Montana, where, as the prince wrote, “we everywhere met with wolves.” As an acquaintance of Say’s now and a scientist who kept up in his field, Maximilian properly understood the difference between gray wolves and coyotes. “In the environs of the fort there were, at this time, wolves, foxes, and a few hares,” he wrote, “and during the night we heard the barking of the prairie wolves (Canis latrans Say), which prowled about, looking for any remnants of provisions.” One of these, trapped for the sake of art and science, became the model for Bodmer’s subsequent gorgeous pencil portrait, a gracefully and precisely rendered representation on paper of a western coyote’s sense of self.
Prince Maximilian went on to write a classic of the early West with his two-volume Travels in the Interior of North America, which appeared in print in Germany between 1839 and 1841. For his part, Bodmer became one of the most celebrated wildlife and forest-scene artists of nineteenth-century Europe. His “Prairie Wolf” from 1833 North America, done before American culture would spin out a much more negative interpretation of the coyote, stands today as one of the most exacting wild canid portraits ever made.
Maximilian’s (and by extension von Humboldt’s) acceptance of Say’s argument—that the prairie wolf was a wholly new animal, unknown in world science—did not settle the jackal issue. Following the Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which added a third of the present United States to the nation, American scientific explorations to the West intensified. The naturalists who accompanied the expeditions tended to come out of Smithsonian connections, although some Philadelphia Academy men were still involved. One of the latter was a physician-naturalist named Samuel Washington Woodhouse, who worked on three western expeditions in the 1850s, including a famous early exploration of the Grand Canyon with Captain Lorenzo Sitgreaves. But prior to that expedition, Woodhouse had explored with Lieutenant Israel Woodruff in the Indian Territory—as it turned out, in exactly the same country where Thomas Nuttall had missed joining the jackal debate back in 1819.
During Dr. Woodhouse’s naturalizing with the Corps of Topographical Engineers in Oklahoma, he had a coyote encounter, and it was enough to draw him into the debate against his fellow naturalist, Thomas Say. Just twenty-seven and a native Philadelphian, Woodhouse obviously knew about Say’s Canis latrans. He probably knew that Thomas Nuttall had preceded him on the Cimarron River, where Woodhouse began to collect in October 1849 as the party entered the prairie country. They saw their first signs of buffalo just east of present-day Stillwater, near a landmark call
ed Bald Eagle Mound and where, on October 19, they terminated the season’s work and returned to their homes for the winter.
Richard Kern’s drawing of naturalist Samuel Woodhouse’s North American Jackal. Courtesy US Government Printing Office’s “Sitgreaves Report.”
In the summer of 1850, the party resumed the survey at Bald Eagle Mound. Camped now in that magical edge-of-the-plains boundary, Woodhouse got his opportunity to join the debate in July. In that same week he encountered elk, a wolf, and his first bison. On July 17, two of his party brought in “2 prarie wolves” they had shot, too late in the day to preserve. Maybe Woodhouse thought all night about his decision, but the next day, as he prepared the specimens, he concluded that he would challenge Say directly. With the coyotes in hand for close examination, he agreed that this was a species new to science, clearly in the genus Canis. But as far as Woodhouse could determine from the jackal descriptions in his texts, the North American canines he was handling were jackals. He decided to make the larger male his type specimen and named it Canis frustror, the “North American Jackal.” Later Richard Kern, artist for several exploring expeditions into the Southwest, did a drawing of the animal for the official “Sitgreaves Report” of 1853, by which the “North American Jackal” entered science via the massive US commitment to publishing exploration accounts.