by Dan Flores
As was Twain’s wont, he was just warming up. “The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.” Twain’s coyote is “spiritless and cowardly,” and “he is so homely!—so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful.” How could such a vermin subsist? As far as Twain could tell, he was a pure butcher house scavenger, living on offal, carrion, and the carcasses of emigrant train livestock.
But the coyote had a sense of humor, and what other writer would have been more appreciative of that? Send a dog that has a good opinion of itself after a coyote, Twain averred, and the “cayote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition.” Jokester coyote would gleefully let the town dog get within twenty, even six feet of him, but despite the tumult at his heels, “the cayote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile.… [A]nd forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude.”
Gone now was the Indian deity who created North America. Gone was even the perplexing prairie wolf of earlier in the century. Observing the same animal as before, Americans now saw a sick, despairing, forsaken, miserable creature, one (as we ourselves warmed to the task) that took on the unsavory traits of cowardice, cunning, and cruelty. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a repetitive trope emerged. In New York journalist Horace Greeley’s version, the coyote was “a sneaking, cowardly little wretch.” By the time English adventuress-writer Isabella Bird wrote A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains in 1879, that description was something of a set piece: “I saw two prairie wolves, like jackals, with gray fur, cowardly creatures, which fled from me with long leaps.”
Within a decade, articles like Ernest Ingersoll’s “The Hound of the Plains” in Popular Science Monthly (1887), and later Edwin Sabin’s “The Coyote” in Overland Monthly (1908), were describing coyotes as “contemptible” and “especially perverse.” Their howls were “eerie” and “blood-stilling,” even defiant. Coyotes supposedly lacked “higher morals,” and naturally they were “cowardly to the last degree.” Exploring ideas for commercial gain from the killing of coyotes, a 1920 article in Scientific American asserted that coyotes were not worth the price of the ammunition to shoot them, then went on to add the ultimate insult for the age (and a patriotic reason for shooting them anyway): the coyote, the writer avowed, was the “ORIGINAL BOLSHEVIK.”
From avatar Coyote deity to avatar Original Bolshevik, the coyote had traveled a long way in just a century’s time. Wherever his destination lay, the road was now, suddenly, a very steep uphill climb.
CHAPTER 3
A War on Wild Things
Living in the evolutionary heartland of America’s native canines, as I have for a decade in the piñon-juniper mesas south of Santa Fe, I have borne witness to one certain truth about coyotes as neighbors: you do not see them so much as hear them. Even in rural New Mexico I only see a coyote trot through the yard or lope across the road in front of my car perhaps once a month. But howling coyotes mark my nights almost without fail. I hear their salutations through my open windows or skylights often enough to awaken from my summer dreams. Yodeling coyote music is inseparable from the silvery wash of planets and the high moons of the winter night skies of this part of the world.
Sometimes one coyote’s melody becomes a general regional symphony, as individuals and pairs and packs join in, and when that happens you can hear—or perhaps you imagine in the mind’s eye and ear—coyote song spreading like a contagion, picked up by pack after pack until it fades into far distances, faint howls winking out in the mind in a kind of aural canine redshift. It is sometimes easy to think, in the summer New Mexico dusk, that what begins with a single coyote pouring out his soul across these canyons and dwarf forests has by morning rippled in concentric circles from this spot of origin across the full sweep of North America, as far as the last coyote at the farthest edge of the last ripple. Which of course today could be in Maine. Or Alaska or Costa Rica or Florida.
Young coyote howling North America’s original national anthem. Courtesy Dan Flores.
In my view the coyote’s howl is the original national anthem of North America, a canine “Star-Spangled Banner” that has been playing for nightly sporting events on this continent for nearly 1 million years.
But over the past couple of centuries, most Americans, at least judging by the literary types who wrote about the subject, formed quite different mental images when they heard a coyote howl. I won’t belabor the small variations among the examples (and there are a very great many examples) because the general thrust is always the same. The coyote’s cry, for many Americans riveted by the sound, did not intone the ballad of the continent—America’s ancient native song—that some of us hear today. Instead, someone like Lieutenant Robert Carter, a New Englander and West Pointer who in 1935 wrote a book about his youth on the Great Plains, when “that section was overrun with Indians, buffalo, wolves, jack rabbits, prairie dogs, sage brush and cactus,” viewed the howl of this indigenous canine as positively alien. Carter’s description is so typical, it’s a frontier cliché. “Their blood-curdling howls—which is first a sharp bark, followed by a succession of sharp, staccato yelps running into each other and ending in a sort of long drawn out quavering howl—were, at times almost indescribably melancholy, and awakened us at all hours of the night, which caused [my] newly-made bride to sit up in bed and shrink back in alarm.”
A sense that so much about North America was strange and frightening and that we ought to terraform and remake it extended to every element of continental ecology, from grasses to animals of all kinds. But in truth, almost no other creature reaped the whirlwind of condescension and hostility toward “alien” American nature in quite the way coyotes did. We campaigned to erase those “manic, lunatic” howls for all time and good riddance. And even as evidence mounted of the wrongheadedness and futility of that course, we spent more than half a century in furious pursuit of it.
On September 8, 1887, the Salt Lake Weekly Tribune ran a piece with an unanticipated storyline. Rather than indulging in the usual coyote character assassination of the 1880s, the writer took a surprising tack. The coyote, he argued, “is the salvation of the Utah farmers in some sections. About Fillmore, a few years ago, in a co-operative way, they exterminated these wild canines by poison, since which time they are under the necessity of fencing their crops with a coyote-de-frise of sagebrush to exclude the rabbits which have multiplied into swarms, so that the farmers pray for coyotes now.”
So that the farmers pray for coyotes now. If, somewhere in the American West, there actually were farmers who prayed for coyotes in the late 1880s, their prayers were faint and fell on uncomprehending ears. With the exception of the odd scientist or two, impressed that for some reason this little junior wolf seemed an especially irrepressible creature, in the half century from the 1880s, coyotes had about as many friends in America as did rattlesnakes, tuberculosis, homosexuals, and, yes, Bolsheviks. Farmers, ranchers, writers for any manner of national publications, and eventually employees of almost every state and federal agency involved with wild predators seemed almost to vie with one another in labeling the coyote a vile species of vermin that should not be allowed to breathe up good air. At a distance, the hatred seems hard to square with anything rational. It certainly wasn’t based on science and sometimes looked suspiciously like the collateral damage of a puritanical loathing of our own animal natures. But from the 1880s until the 1930s, the received wisdom in America, very rarely questioned, was that the only good American prairie wolf was a dead one. The real question was how to kill as many coyotes as possible in the very shortest period.
For the coyote, who, after all, saw this phase of its story from the wrong end, thousands of years of veneration by Ind
ians had seemed to turn on a dime.
From the time the bison slaughter commenced in the 1820s, it took little more than half a century to clear the Great Plains of that ancient population of animals, which during spans of good weather must have approached 25 to 30 million animals. One effect of that species cleansing was to open up the great grasslands to domesticated animals. Cattle- and sheepmen began taking their herds and flocks into the open-range West in the 1860s, and as the vast lake of bison puddled into a few remnants, ranchers and sheepmen replaced the native animals wholesale with pastoral domestics that they turned into an economy.
Fur traders at western trading posts during this war on the wild fairly soon realized, however, that coyotes had some utility in the global market. Like so many other mammals in the West—beavers, famously, but also bison, elk, deer, otters, minks, muskrats, indeed virtually everything that grew fur on its back—coyotes and wolves wore pelage that interested those involved in the international market in animal skins. Opinions differed about the quality of coyote fur. Meriwether Lewis argued that it was much inferior to fox fur, but George Ruxton thought it “of great thickness and beauty.” In a trade where beaver pelts and buffalo robes were worth $3 to $4 or more, a trapped or poisoned, then skinned coyote was worth only a fraction of that. But the skins were much lighter to ship east, and the animals were so common—recall Josiah Gregg’s comment that coyotes were “found in immense numbers on the Plains”—that in some parts, coyote pelts began to function as money. Frontier trader James Mead, who in 1864 built a trading post near today’s Wichita, Kansas, recorded that to settle a debt of $3,000, the famous trailblazer Jesse Chisholm offered him buffalo robes, wolf skins, beaver pelts, or buckskins. “I chose coyote skins,” Mead wrote, “which were legal tender for a dollar, and he counted out three thousand.”
Not accustomed to fearing humans, coyotes were not at first in the least wary. Soon enough they learned their error, for by the mid-nineteenth century we possessed a killing agent that did not require stalking or trapping or shooting skills—or even our presence, for that matter—and exploited a predator’s willingness to scavenge rather than risk injury in a hunt. Strychnine, made from the seed of an East India fruit, was in commercial production in Pennsylvania as early as 1834. Cheap and entirely unregulated, it became a key tool of biological warfare against the natural world in America for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Strychnine was also horrifically deadly in tiny amounts, usually administered in the form of white tablets. Within ten to twenty minutes, a tab of strychnine gulped down as part of a predator’s meal wreaked havoc on the central nervous system, launching the victim into waves of wrenching, convulsive cramping—a truly shocking sight when anyone was around to see it, which was rare. Asphyxiation was the cause of death, but strychnine seized living animals with such violence that it left a characteristic signature: dead bodies with rigidly arched spinal columns and straight motionless tails, spotted at distances across the prairies as toppled-over question marks.
By the 1850s, trading posts in Westport, Missouri, where overland travelers struck out across the Great Plains, regularly stocked strychnine for western travelers. This is how predator pelts began to join the international fur trade in that decade. With strychnine pellets in their saddlebags, travelers and traders could lace every dead bison or horse they saw with the poison, hang around a day or two to see what happened, and reap the benefits. Confronting strychnine, western predators were suddenly very vulnerable.
The nadir of the commercial buffalo harvest in the 1860s to 1880s turned the plains into a pathetic slaughterhouse. This created unprecedented boom-time conditions for grizzlies, large scavenging birds, and wild canines, but the time also inaugurated the first of many scorched-earth biochemical wars against such animals. For a few years wolves and coyotes lived large off the blood sport. But as even creatures as numerous as bison began to dwindle away before the market hunt, ultimately hunters had to expand their target species to keep working. So elk, pronghorns, wild sheep, deer, and sometimes even wild horses fell under the gun sights of the grand killing fests of the 1870s and 1880s.
No one, then or now, has ever been able to measure a war on wild things on this vast a scale. There were between 5,000 and 20,000 hunters on the Great Plains in those years, and we have the anecdotes of only a few of them. But western writer and conservationist George Bird Grinnell, founder of Forest and Stream magazine, believed that in the case of coyotes, hide and fur hunters killed some “hundreds of thousands” on the Great Plains during those two decades.
Hundreds of thousands is an abstract figure, too big and vague to linger in the mind. But maybe this will. While we’ll never get closer to a true figure of all the coyotes killed in those decades of their first encounters with Americans, we can speculate with some certainty that every one of those coyotes wanted to live rather than be shot down, struggle in bewildered fear in a steel trap, or suffer a wretched death from poison. They would all, to use the philosopher Bion’s phrasing, have died in earnest.
These western settlers rarely agreed with one another on much, but they did share a hatred of predators. It was an enmity that had begun 10,000 years ago when humans first began herding goats and sheep, ripened in Europe down the centuries, festered in eastern North America and the Southwest when Europeans introduced the pastoral lifestyle there in the 1600s, then reached a crescendo of venom in America after the Civil War.
Cattle ranchers never got too heated up about coyotes so long as wolves lurked about their herds, but sheepmen quickly came to regard them as a “parasite on civilization.” Virtually on the heels of organizing stock associations to compensate for losses to predators and rustlers, cattle and sheep raisers began to push for a predator-control tool that New Englanders had used as far back as the 1630s: a cash bounty paid to the man who presented the head or ears of an extinguished predator. The first territorial and state bounties in western America targeted wolves as the primary threat to livestock. But coyotes did not escape notice from ranchers or bounty hunters for long.
Having little initial familiarity with coyotes, new residents often lived in the West for a decade or so before deciding that coyotes deserved a price on their heads. Kansas, for example, bountied wolves in 1864 but did not add coyotes to the list until 1877, when payment for either a wolf or a coyote was set at $1 per “scalp.” Colorado Territory created its first bounties in 1869; Montana Territory followed suit in 1883 and Wyoming in 1893. The territory of Arizona and New Mexico created its bounty system in 1893; its list included coyotes as well as wolves, bears, lions, and bobcats.
In the bounty phase of the predator war, Colorado was typical, going for wolves first but adding coyotes in 1876, then raising bounty payments over time, from 75 cents “a scalp” in 1879 to $1.50 in 1881. In 1893 the Colorado legislature began to differentiate between wolf and coyote bounties, paying $2 for the former and $1 for the latter. Urged on by stockmen’s associations, whose members tended to dominate western legislatures, by 1914 western states were paying $1 million a year in bounties that overall averaged $1 per animal. It’s an easy bet that coyotes formed a plurality of those 1 million bountied animals per year. Not winnable, but easy.
As large apex predators whose presence and domination had always served to suppress coyote numbers, wolves were never as numerous as their smaller cousins, but due to their reputation alone, initially they got the brunt of this lethal attention. A new federal agency, dedicated to the destruction of predators, would soon call bounties into question as an ultimate solution, but bounties undoubtedly produced results, especially with wolves. With packets of strychnine available in every hardware store in America, scattering a few poison tablets across the countryside to help beat back the continent’s wild predator horde was almost a patriotic duty for ordinary citizens.
Some governments in the West—in Montana, for example—absolutely prostituted themselves before the ranching industry. Between 1883 and 1928 Montana pai
d bounties on 111,545 wolves and 886,367 coyotes, a ranching subsidy that grew so large during the territorial stage that it devoured a stunning two-thirds of Montana’s annual budget! As a state, Montana bountied 23,575 wolves in 1899, but by 1920 wolf populations had collapsed to such an extent that in that year Montana paid bounties on only 17 gray wolves. Since bountied coyote numbers remained consistent—about 30,000 a year, with no drop at all between 1883 and 1928—in 1905 the state’s legislature upped the pressure on coyotes by actually passing a law requiring veterinarians to introduce sarcoptic mange into the wild canine population. This early form of state-sanctioned biological warfare still afflicts twenty-first-century coyotes and wolves in the region.
To many, these measures were not enough, not for wolves and certainly not for coyotes, whose numbers inexplicably remained undiminished despite the extraordinary numbers reported killed. The source of the problem, many westerners came to believe—naturally enough, it had to be so—was the federal government. At the turn of the twentieth century a new federal policy underway in the West represented a sea change, and as it originated with scientists and a handful of eastern intellectuals, westerners were suspicious from the start.
From the time of the first homestead acts, designed by Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s, the public domain that the United States steadily added to the country in the nineteenth century had been administered by the General Land Office, which offered it for sale (or sometimes as free homesteads or grants) to citizens or to infrastructure-building corporations like railroads. For more than a century the public domain’s intended destiny, in classic American tradition, was to become private property. Through purchase (Louisiana, Alaska, parts of Arizona and New Mexico), diplomatic agreement (the Northwest), war (the Southwest), and annexation (Texas, Hawai’i), the United States acquired an enormous amount of public domain between 1803 and 1898, and as various federal expeditions explored it, a prescient handful of Americans began to wonder about privatization as a blanket policy aimed so bluntly at such an ecologically diverse range of landscapes.