Coyote America

by Dan Flores

  After many wonderful hours, the beings in the lodge began to grow faint and hard to see. Then the Spirit came to Coyote and revealed that as dawn came in the living world, night came here. He told Coyote to remain where he sat and not move, and Coyote said he would. When dawn came Coyote found himself sitting in the open prairie. As instructed, he remained there all day, broiling in the heat but waiting motionless.

  This went on for several dawns and several nights, with Coyote’s friends and wife returning and making merry, then fading as dawn came, and Coyote waiting patiently in the heat of the day. Finally, after what seemed a very long absence, the Death Spirit came to him and said, “Tomorrow you will go home. You will take your wife with you.” He told Coyote that they would travel for five days and pass five mountains, and while he could talk with his wife, under no circumstances should he touch her; he should never lay a hand on her until they had passed the last of the five mountains. Then the Spirit admonished Coyote, “You, Coyote, must guard against your inclination to do foolish things.”

  At dawn Coyote and his wife started out, although Coyote could barely discern her at his side. But when they crossed the first mountain, Coyote could feel her presence more strongly. When they camped on the homeward side of the second mountain, she became clearer to him, and at the next camp, beyond the third mountain, she became clearer still.

  Now they were making their fourth camp, with only the final mountain to cross the next day, and Coyote could at last see his wife’s face and her young body. She was almost a living being again. Coyote had dared not reach out to her before, but now, looking at her right there with him, he was overcome with joy at having her again and so impulsively ran to embrace her. “Stop! Stop! Coyote!” she cried. But it was too late. At the very instant he touched her body, she vanished.

  On learning of Coyote’s folly, Death Spirit was furious, and he did not hesitate. “You, Coyote, were about to establish the practice of returning from death. Only a short time away the human race is coming, but you have spoiled everything and established for them death as it is.”

  At this Coyote hung his head and wept. But then he had an idea. Drawing himself up, he retraced the journey he and Death Spirit had made. He tried with all his might to see the horses and taste the serviceberries. He found the spot where the long lodge had stood, even where he had sat with his wife beside him. And when night fell he strained to hear voices and see fires.

  When dawn came, Coyote found himself sitting in an open, empty plain, all alone.

  Ten thousand years ago, with North America drastically changing as a result of the end of the Wisconsin Ice Age and scores of its most characteristic species becoming extinct, the continent’s indigenous wild coyotes had furnished a model of survivability for humans struggling through this epic environmental crisis. The somewhat shocking truth is that resulting stories about Coyote and the essence of his personality are probably older than the Gilgamesh epic at the foundations of Western civilization, and in the Americas they spread across as wide a geography. The Aztecs, 5,000 miles from Crow and Blackfeet country, preserved Coyote’s likeness in their codices, stone effigies, and stelae. As befits Coyote’s character in the stories, Aztec coyote cults in North America’s most sophisticated civilization held festivals for him.

  Gods come and go, but Old Man America was too useful a deity to abandon. As the Siouan “Winyan-shan Upside-Down” story testifies, Indians were still creating Coyote stories well after Europeans arrived, and they continued to tell them in their own communities into the twentieth century and beyond. Well beyond, at least long enough for American ethnographers and folklorists to discover their narrative richness and delights, as I discuss in the Epilogue.

  Indian peoples also continued to find the wild coyotes that had inspired their doppelganger god of particular interest, worthy always of respect and often of veneration. Rarely did any Indian try to domesticate a coyote, though. Because of their evolution as smaller dogs in a wolf’s world, domesticated coyote pups mature into nervous and highly unpredictable adults. Indians who lived among coyotes occasionally did breed their female dogs with both coyotes and wolves to restore some wild traits in their camp dogs. But unlike wolves, coyotes were never destined to become our domesticated familiars, which is just as well. To assign credit where it’s due, coyotes did not choose domestication, thank you very much.

  But more so than the host of other animals whose personalities, character traits, and special abilities Indians always studied closely, wild coyotes did appear to many native peoples as unusually powerful (and sometimes dangerous) fellow inhabitants of the continent. Barre Toelken has written of the Navajos of the Southwest that they drew no real distinction between the coyote in the desert and ma’ii, their name for Old Man Coyote, or between the principle of “disorder” Coyotism implied and the special coyote power present in all wild coyotes. So impossible was any of this to tease out that Navajos used the noun ma’ii to refer to all these qualities. Their word ma’iitsoh, meaning “large coyote,” designated the wolf.

  Farther north, on the Northern Plains of the mid-nineteenth century, both mountain man Osborne Russell and the Jesuit missionary Father Pierre-Jean De Smet wrote that the tribes there spoke of the coyote as Medicine Wolf, an animal helper able to “make things happen.” Father De Smet, a Belgian Catholic who established numerous missions across the Northwest, was a close observer of Indian religions. He wrote in his memoirs that the northern tribes treated the coyote “as a sort of Manitou. They watch its yelpings during the night, and the superstitious conjurers pretend to understand and interpret them. According to the loudness, frequency, and other modifications of these yelpings, they interpret that either friends or foes approach.”

  One example of the Indians’ sense of coyote power available to them through Coyotism famously occurred among the Navajos during the greatest misfortune that ever befell them. A tribe of hunters, herders, and raiders from the north who arrived some six hundred years ago in the Southwest’s Four Corners, the ancient homeland of coyote evolution, the Navajos found themselves at war with US troops during most of the 1850s and early 1860s. Distracted by the Civil War, the United States, in a fit of exasperation at the success of Navajo raids, sent Taos mountain man and scout Kit Carson to command an invasion of Navajo country in 1863. Carson’s men conducted a horrific scorched-earth campaign. By 1864 some 8,000 Navajos had surrendered to the frontier army, only to find themselves condemned to incarceration in eastern New Mexico, three hundred miles from home. Their “Long Walk” to the Bosque Redondo prison camp and four years imprisoned there under constant guard is a searingly painful chapter in Navajo history.

  Pueblo Indian rock art of a coyote and its prey. Courtesy Dan Flores.

  But Navajos also recall how this episode ended. After years of pleading to return home and frequent breakouts of small groups fleeing westward across New Mexico, in 1868 the United States finally agreed to a treaty that gave the Navajos a reservation and allowed them to return to their homeland. In Navajo oral tradition, the act that accomplished this longed-for release was not negotiation or pleading. It was their ritual performance of a Coyote Way ceremony, which infused Navajo leaders with enough “Coyote power” finally to effect their release.

  Coyote power: surviving by one’s intelligence and wits when others cannot; embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates; exulting in sheer aliveness; recognizing our shortcomings with rueful chagrin. These are the values Old Man America has embodied for thousands of years. Since his origins in the mists of continental human history all the way through the American counterculture of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Coyote has been an irresistible character. All creators of Coyote stories, from Paleolithic times until now, have instinctively grasped one essential: that humans delight in Coyote’s exploits because we recognize how they shine a light on motives we struggle with. Coyote Man has always showed us truth.

  Old Ma
n America had been going along, having many a wonderful adventure and starring in his own biography of immortality for maybe 10,000 years. But two hundred years ago, his world began to change. Coyote’s effortless trot across the continent had led him directly into the path of a whole new class of storytellers with names like Meriwether Lewis, Mark Twain, and Ernest Thompson Seton. While they sometimes found him as quirky and funny as ever, his divine glow of immortality, his role as humanity’s holy antihero, began to dim. Not among the Indian people who had cherished him from those faint beginnings far back in the mists of the ancient continent, of course. But at least for a time, at the hands of these new inhabitants, Old Man America was about to get seriously demoted.

  CHAPTER 2

  Prairie Wolf

  Once, for twenty years, I lived on the American Great Plains. I have never been so impressed with a landscape. If you can, suspend disbelief over that sentence for a moment. Like most Americans, I grew up in towns surrounded by forests; I, too, feel the undertow of a universal, hypnotic attraction to ocean beaches. I’ve also spent a fair share of my adult life embedded in the Rocky Mountains, a vertical base reversal from the horizontal world of the plains. But I’ve never gotten over the sense that the sea, the woods, the mountains all suffer in comparison with the prairie. Face-to-face, the vast prairie sweeps belie your instincts about such country. Their sublimity, I think, arises from their unfathomable boundaries and their self-confident grandness of scale, combined with an echoless, calm monotony of sensory affect.

  But the reason the open steppes of the world so readily pull us up short probably has as much or more to do with genetic memory as anything else. For the past 45,000 years, since we left Africa and began to explore the planet, taking the measure of one landscape after another, we have been searching for a place that seems to have haunted our dreams. Almost certainly that dreamscape is our point of origin. In the literature of exploration, the landscapes that arouse our strongest passions always resemble our original African template: yellow savannahs speckled to the limits of our sight with herds and packs of wild animals. It is a phenomenon common to people across the globe.

  So think of the American Great Plains as one more reminder that we can find home again. Two hundred years ago, except East Africa itself, no part of the globe thrilled us in the same primeval way. And it was out on these vast, horizontal, yellow sweeps, in the midst of grassland bison herds and packs of various wild canids, among flapping, hooting, scavenging birds, that the indigenous North American coyote first captivated western Indians with its intelligence and eerie familiarity. Now, in the nineteenth century, Americans from European and other backgrounds arriving at the edges of the great prairies were about to have their turn at understanding the coyote. This was where American and European scientific and literary travelers, rediscovering their home base, recorded their very first literary descriptions of the intriguing, jackal-like carnivore they at first called a “prairie wolf.” In the process they would register an initial “contact” reaction to this unfamiliar predator. Their first-impressions take on the coyote would color the next chapters of its biography in bold, primary hues.

  The months of August and September 1804 loom large in the natural history of North America, and indeed in the history of science worldwide. In the short stretch of three weeks, ascending the Missouri River into the grassy plains of today’s Nebraska and South Dakota, American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark described most of the characteristic wildlife that made North America unique in the world. Encouraged by President Thomas Jefferson to seek out and collect plants and animals not found in the Atlantic states, on August 23 the party downed the first bison most of them had ever seen. By September 7 they had seen their first prairie dogs, or “burrowing rats” in Clark’s rather less flattering description. A week later they were marveling at a “Buck Goat of this countrey… more like the Antilope or Gazella of Africa than any other Species of Goat.” That was the pronghorn antelope. Three days later they sighted “a curious kind of Deer of a Dark Gray Colr… the ears large & long.” Thus did the American mule deer come to the notice of world science. The next day, somewhere in the vicinity of present Chamberlain, South Dakota, one more American original emerged from the wilds of the Great Plains. This one would eventually turn the heads of, even perplex, scientists in places as far-flung as Philadelphia, Paris, London, and Stockholm.

  For most of September 1804, members of the Lewis and Clark expedition had reported seeing what they all assumed to be some kind of fox. The more they observed the sleek, beautiful canines, however, the less foxlike they seemed. So on September 17, a Monday on which the party’s hunters killed thirteen white-tailed deer, two mule deer, three buffalo, and eight pronghorns, one of the hunters also shot an animal that a member of the group, Joseph Whitehouse, designated in his journal as a “Priari Wolf.”

  As a man of Enlightenment science, aware that his explorers’ discoveries would be scrutinized in the great royal academies in Europe, Jefferson had encouraged precise scientific reporting. But the creature in the grass before him mystified William Clark. Although in size it was about like “a gray fox,” viewed close up it did not appear very foxlike. Obviously it was not one of the large wolves these Americans knew from both Europe and the Eastern US. Agreeing with other members of the party who had gathered around to puzzle over the animal, Clark decided that it was a small carnivorous wolf entirely new to American science and resolved to name it the “prairie wolff.” He went on to correct earlier recordings in his journal: “What has been taken heretofore for the Fox was those wolves, and no Foxes has been seen.”

  More than half a year later, on May 5, 1805, after the Americans had pushed across the plains as far as eastern Montana, Meriwether Lewis summed up the party’s impressions of these new “prairie wolffs.” His training in the sciences may have been cursory, but Lewis was careful and observant, and he knew this was the first bit of natural history about the new animal that much of the world would read.

  the small woolf or burrowing dog of the prairies are the inhabitants almost invariably of the open plains; they usually associate in bands of ten or twelve sometimes more and burrow near some pass or place much frequented by game; not being able alone to take a deer or goat they are rarely ever found alone but hunt in bands; they frequently watch and seize their prey near their burrows; in these burrows they raise their young and to them they also resort when pursued; when a person approaches them they frequently bark, their note being precisely that of the small dog. they are of an intermediate size between that of the fox and dog, very active fleet and delicately formed; the (years) ears large erect and pointed the head long and pointed more like that of the fox; tale long (and bushey); the hair and fur also resembles the fox tho’ is much coarser and inferior. they are of a pale redish brown colour. the eye of a deep sea green colour small and piercing. their tallons are reather longer than those of the ordinary wolf or that common to the atlantic states.

  Neither Lewis nor Clark ever wrote up a more detailed scientific description. Lewis rarely if ever proposed Latin binomials for their discoveries, which zoological taxonomy would have required to make them the official discoverers in Western science. Nonetheless, Clark’s original 1804 description did offer up three tantalizing elements of the coyote’s story that are still with us. First, this was an animal, unlike larger wolves and smaller foxes, unknown to Europeans, who thus did not bring centuries’ worth of preloaded myths and stories about coyotes to North America, as they did with wolves. Second, Clark and his compatriots found the coyote confusing. Was it a fox? A wolf? Something else? Puzzled ambiguity has played a role in the coyote’s biography ever since. Finally, and self-evidently, nineteenth-century Americans had to get halfway across the continent, to the edges of the Great Plains, before they began to encounter these prairie wolves. When the coyote first came to the attention of US citizens, then, this canine that no one expected was exclusively a creature of the western half of the country an
d, more specifically, of the Great Plains and the western deserts.

  Neither Clark nor any other western traveler about to encounter coyotes for the first time would realize that the coyotes they came across weren’t just one-way subjects of observation. Almost surely the explorers underestimated the animal, for coyotes were also taking their measure and gauging the possibilities. Contact with Americans was a propitious event from the coyote perspective as well.

  As they so often turned out to be, Lewis and Clark were late to the game. Other Europeans were studying the natural history of the Americas too, and they had been at the task far longer. So the first printed description of a coyote appeared not in the 1814 publication of Lewis and Clark’s journals but in a work that saw print some 160 years earlier. In 1651 Spanish author Francisco Hernandez, in a book chapter titled “Concerning the Coyotl, or Indian Fox,” was actually the first Western author to introduce the North American coyote to a reading audience.

  In the coyote’s initial audition as a literary figure for Europeans, confusion was naturally the theme. This “is an animal unknown to the Old World,” Hernandez wrote, and it was either a fox, an “Adipus” (a Mediterranean term for a jackal), or some new, distinct species. He continued that it had a “wolflike head” but “approaches in appearance our own fox,” and “its bite is harmful.” This first written notice of coyotes by a European spoke of the animal with some alarm, pointing out that it not only preyed on the sheep Europeans had stocked in New Spain but also attacked “stags and sometimes even men.” Hernandez concluded, “The animal inhabits many regions in New Spain, particularly those tending toward cold and chill climate.” He also included these curious lines: the new creature, he said, was “a persevering revenger of injuries” but also “grateful to those who do well by it.” He used the ancient Aztec name for it: coyotl.