Coyote America

by Dan Flores

  Woodhouse’s challenge did not survive the test of science. Say prevailed, and zoology recognized the American prairie wolf as a new species that occupied a jackal-like niche on the Western Plains. Today we know that similar golden jackals and coyotes come from the same line of canid evolution in ancient America and went their separate ways only 1 million years ago. Taxonomists now recognize Woodhouse’s “jackals” as a coyote subspecies, Canis latrans frustror. His “Holotype, specimen no. 4105” in the National Museum of Natural History shows a young male animal with an especially dark pelage—its tail is almost black. But it is clearly a coyote.

  Jackal or wolf? This wasn’t the only question about the prairie wolf that confronted the first generations of Americans who encountered the animal. They faced two more big questions, the second of them as fundamental as whether to classify the new animals as jackals. It revolved around what to call them.

  In 1832 and 1833, as Prince Maximilian and Karl Bodmer were wintering at the New Harmony colony, farther south in the prairie wolf’s range—Santa Fe and the Southern High Plains to be exact—poet and future judge Albert Pike of Boston was preparing to venture from New Mexico eastward into Comanche country. His forays resulted in an obscure but important little book, Narratives of Two Journeys in the Prairie, which has intrigued readers for nearly two hundred years now.

  Pike’s book came about in this way. A decade had passed since Mexico’s successful revolution against Spain had opened the fabled cities of Santa Fe and Taos to American traders and mountain men like Kit Carson. By the time Pike got there, a dozen years of trapper work in the Southern Rockies had made beavers scarce in the mountains, so the literary-minded New Englander had joined a group of forty-five trappers (including famous preacher-trapper Old Bill Williams) heading east in what proved a vain and foolhardy search for beaver colonies out on the High Plains.

  The importance of Pike’s little book for coyote history, though, has less to do with beaver or adventure than with the discovery of an ancient name out of old America. Traveling in a party equally divided between Americans and New Mexicans, a few weeks onto the prairies, Pike bent over his journal one night to pen a description of the wild canids the party had seen, and for the first time an English-speaking writer gave the world access to the old continental name for the animal Americans had been calling a prairie wolf. On these prairies, Pike reported, were “bands of white, snow-like wolves prowling about, accompanied by the little gray collotes or prairie wolves, who are as rapacious and as noisy as their bigger brethren.”

  One encounters the word “collotes” nowhere else, and its pronunciation must have confused Pike’s readers. I think the truth was something like this: as a resident of New Mexico for a year, traveling with New Mexicans, and a student of languages himself, Pike was not offering a phonetic rendering. Instead he was using the Spanish double l, which is pronounced as a y.

  This was the first use of a form of the word “coyote” in printed English. But the book that put the name into its modern spelling and more widely alerted Americans and Europeans to the fact that the prairie wolf had another, even more evocative name was Josiah Gregg’s classic Commerce of the Prairies, first published in 1844.

  Gregg was a Missourian who had followed two brothers into the Santa Fe trade and eclipsed both (and almost everyone else involved) to become a trader, amateur naturalist, and author. Gregg’s life well illustrates the freewheeling society of the American frontier. He studied, successively, surveying, medicine, and the law before “consumption” (tuberculosis) led a physician to prescribe a climate cure—a trip to the Southwest—for the then twenty-four-year-old. Mexico had opened up storied Santa Fe to trade with the United States in 1821, so the easiest way to get to a dry climate was to join a trading party to the fabled southwestern city.

  Gregg made his first journey across the plains in 1831 and for the next nine years crossed the western prairies repeatedly, religiously taking notes on everything he saw and heard, with the idea of writing a book on the region. The result was his Commerce of the Prairies, a famous, essential firsthand account of the nineteenth-century West, which went through fourteen printings in its first half century and was published in both England and Germany.

  A good number of Gregg’s associates thought he was a crank, probably a hypochondriac, and for certain a pseudointellectual. He may have been all of those things, but he was also a careful observer of nature who later corresponded with and collected plants for famed St. Louis botanist George Engelmann. In the late 1840s, Gregg collected more than 650 plants in Mexico; today twenty-three plant species are named for him. So his observations of the animal he said the American traders called the prairie wolf are worth a close look, not only for his early natural history of the animal on the wild plains but for the insights his account yields into how the name “prairie wolf” over time gave way to “coyote.”

  Gregg and other American traders entered a New Mexico where Spaniards had settled among the Pueblo Indians along the Rio Grande more than two centuries earlier. The Spanish entradas that founded Santa Fe in 1610, however, were actually multicultural. Sephardic Jews, fleeing the Inquisition to the far ends of the Spanish Empire, were among the settlers. So were Mexican Indian auxiliaries, fighting under the command of Spanish officers from Barcelona and Madrid. Some of those Indian New Mexicans spoke Nahuatl, the ancient language spoken by many of the Aztec Empire’s subjects. These people had a timeless familiarity with the animal the Americans were calling a prairie wolf. The Nahuatl name, 1,000 years old by the 1830s, was of course coyotl.

  Gregg and Pike put us in the place and time when Americans discovered the coyote’s old name. Gregg bartered and traveled with New Mexicans and had to have encountered prairie wolves in their presence. Both Americans would have heard the translation of the Nahuatl singular noun into Spanish. Hispanicizing the Aztec word coyotl was accomplished by dropping Nahuatl’s absolutive suffix -tl and substituting a Latin-accented e. So the new name Gregg and other American traders heard applied to the animals by the residents of Santa Fe was coyote, pronounced by nineteenth-century Spanish speakers as coy-YOH-tay, with the accent on the second syllable.

  Gregg introduced the new name for the prairie wolf to a global audience almost matter-of-factly, as a lead-in to the natural history he obviously found far more intriguing than the etymology of the name: “There is a small species [of wolf] called the prairie wolf on the frontier, and coyote by the Mexicans, which is also found in immense numbers on the Plains. It is rather smaller than an ordinary dog, nearly the color of the common gray wolf, and though as rapacious as the larger kind, it seems too cowardly to attack stout game. It therefore lives upon the remains of buffalo killed by hunters and by the large wolves, added to such small game as hares, prairie dogs, etc., and even reptiles and insects.”

  Gregg was enough a student of natural history to know about the ongoing scientific debate: “The coyote has been denominated the ‘jackal of the Prairies;’ indeed, some have reckoned it really a species of that animal, yet it would seem improperly, as this creature partakes much less of the nature of the jackal than of the common wolf.” He continued with an observation that everyone who lives in Coyote America can relate to: “Like ventriloquists, a pair of these will represent a dozen distinct voices in such succession—will bark, chatter, yelp, whine, and howl in such variety of note, that one would fancy a score of them at hand. This, added to the long and doleful bugle-note of the large wolf, which often accompanies it, sometimes makes a night upon the Prairies perfectly hideous.”

  Finally, Gregg weighed in with a prairie legend that flirted with a larger truth than he ever imagined: “Some hunters assert that the coyote and the dog will breed together. Be this as it may, certain it is that the Indian dogs have a wonderfully wolfish appearance.”

  Pike’s and Gregg’s books were the first to teach Americans the old continental name for the prairie wolf. Being willing to attempt in everyday frontier English a multisyllabic Nahuatl n
oun that had itself been Hispanicized was another matter. Help with unraveling how that oral-learning process worked comes from another Southwestern writer of the time, George Frederick Ruxton. A minor English nobleman and a military veteran at the age of seventeen, Ruxton had carved out an arc of adventures from Spain and Africa to Canada before journeying, in 1846, to Santa Fe, where for the next three years he traveled with a diverse crowd of traders and mountain men operating out of northern New Mexico. He spent much of his time in present-day Colorado, particularly in the high mountain valley the trappers called Bayou Salado, now South Park. The Englishman was self-aware enough to know that some back home thought he’d reverted to barbarism. But for Ruxton, “the very happiest moments of my life have been spent in the wilderness of the Far West.”

  Ruxton’s Life in the Far West is a strange creation, a form of novelized history that folds together both his own experiences and those of the reckless hunters he consorted with. He had enough experiences himself that the affection his book evinces for coyotes seems genuine. Because Ruxton entered the West where he did, like Pike and Gregg, he learned to call prairie wolves by their Aztec name. Like Gregg, whose book he had no doubt read, Ruxton spelled it “coyote.” But that was only one of his spellings of the word. Another he used just as frequently offers up hints about how English- and French-speaking Americans, very early on, put their own stamp on the animal’s name.

  As Life in the Far West proceeds, Ruxton increasingly spells “coyote” slightly differently, finally settling on a spelling that I think more accurately reflects what he was hearing on the trail and around the campfires among his associates: “cayeute” was the spelling he came to prefer. This second version, I think, phonetically renders how English speakers were saying the word. If we can trust Ruxton’s ear—after all, the Englishman famously took great pains to capture the vernacular language of the trappers—by the 1840s Americans on the frontier were already anglicizing “coyote.” Or more accurately, they were anglicizing a Hispanicized Indian word. In their parlance coy-yo-tay was evolving into a word that to Ruxton’s ears sounded like KI-oht—two syllables, with the accent on the first, Anglo-Saxon-like.

  Here is what Ruxton wrote about his cayeutes: “Besides the buffalo wolf, there are four distinct varieties common to the plains, and all more or less attendant upon the buffalo.… [L]ast and least [is] the coyote, or cayeute of the mountaineers, the ‘wach-unkamnet,’ or the ‘medicine wolf’ of the Indians, who hold the latter animal in reverential awe.” No jackal, this, Ruxton said, was a “wolf, whose fur is of great thickness and beauty.” It was “of diminutive size,” to be sure, but was “wonderfully sagacious, and makes up by cunning what it wants in physical strength.” Smart as it was, “the cayeute, however, is often made a tool of by his larger brethren, unless, indeed, he acts from motives of spontaneous charity.” He meant that since coyotes were less anxious around humans than gray wolves, hunters often threw them scraps. But then “the large wolf pounces with a growl upon him, and the cayeute, dropping the meat, returns to his former position, and will continue his charitable act as long as the hunter pleases to supply him.”

  Americans and Europeans learned from Commerce of the Prairies and Life in the Far West that Lewis and Clark’s prairie wolf actually possessed a very old and rather exotic name, one that much predated the European arrival in America. So from the late 1840s on, “coyote” gradually obliterated “prairie wolf” as the proper name for the still mostly unfamiliar new wild dog of America. Herman Melville’s line in Moby-Dick invoking “the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves” was one of the final appearances of Lewis and Clark’s chosen name in print. That was in 1851.

  The third question nineteenth-century Americans posed about the prairie-wolf-become-coyote was as fundamental as what to call it. What were citizens of the United States supposed to make of this unfamiliar little canine, about which they had no legends, no folklore, no preconceived notions? However “diminutive,” as a carnivorous predator the coyote was arguably starting from a position of disadvantage. Was it, like the larger gray wolf, a menace, a threat to civilization, vermin to be eradicated? Might the coyote have useful, even commercial, qualities? Did it serve some function? Resolving those questions—determining the essential character of the coyote—would take the entire second half of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth. We’re still trying to figure out what we think about them even now.

  At mid-century, there was no emerging consensus. Various travelers to the West observed coyotes, often with fascination, and sometimes painted them, but they initially took no stand on the animal’s essential character.

  When John James Audubon finally went west with his sons in 1843 to work on what he planned as his second great book on American nature, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, he finally got to observe and paint what was then still called the prairie wolf. His oil painting of two specimens of Canis latrans (his endorsement of Say) is among the more successful mammal paintings to come from the Audubons’ journey up the Missouri River. Audubon and his sons painted almost the full suite of Great Plains species on this trip, not just coyotes but bison, lions, prairie dogs, and even the Swift fox, which they realized was actually a kind of fox and not another version of the “prairie wolf.”

  Prairie Wolves, 1843, by John James Audubon. Courtesy University of Michigan Special Collections Library.

  The famous bird painter dutifully entered various observations about the coyotes he saw, but they were value-free: “We saw coming from the banks of the river no less than eighteen Wolves, which altogether did not cover a space of more than three or four yards, they were so crowded. Among them were two Prairie Wolves.” A French hunter also told Audubon he had seen wild horses kill wolves—most likely coyotes—by seizing them in the middle of their backs and throwing them high enough to stun them, after which “they stamp[ed] upon their bodies with the fore feet until quite dead.”

  In the decades before a stereotype emerged, when Americans were seeing coyotes with fresh eyes, coyote observations were primarily curious and general. Like many predators, the animal had exotic qualities that drew attention to it, but aspersions, let alone hatred, seemed wasted on the little canines. Prairie wolves the size of “spaniels” hardly seemed worthy of special loathing to Francis Parkman, just annoyance that they were so wary before his gun. Washington Irving found that their howls “gave a dreariness to the surrounding solitude,” but he didn’t bother with further castigations. Heinrich Balduin Mollhausen, another German who trained in natural history as an acolyte and favorite of the great von Humboldt and served as a naturalist and artist on several American exploring expeditions in the 1850s (before going on to a career as “the German James Fenimore Cooper”), at one point in his adventures saved himself from starvation by subsisting on frozen wolf or coyote meat. One could argue that New Englander Herman Melville was still using “prairie wolf” as the preferred name because of his distance from coyote country. But at least he did get them into his book without casting aspersions.

  When America’s interest in settling the West revived after the Civil War, and explorers, government officials of various stripes, military troops, and literary adventurers—as well as immigrants wishing to settle—again moved into coyote country, a peculiar fascination set in with the animal most were seeing for the first time. On the trails, in churches and bars, and in the new farmsteads and ranch houses, coyotes came up for much discussion. Scottish naturalist Hans Kruuk argues that with our evolutionary background as hunters, we humans look on predators with an especial fascination as competition. Our evolutionary history holds a genetic memory of when we were prey too, so we can also exhibit an instinctive anticarnivore loathing. Because they seemed like smaller wolves, coyotes aroused suspicion in frontier folk. Though too small to arouse a prey response, they did strike us as potential competitors. That became an acutely realized reaction when American farmers and ranchers actually began to live and raise domestic livestock in c
oyote country.

  With no imported mythology about them and scant or no interest in Indian religions or fables about a Coyote deity, Americans in the West found coyotes ripe for original interpretation. Beginning in the 1870s and lasting for the rest of the nineteenth century, a new, unflattering image soon formed in the American mind, and particularly in a very specific mind—that of writer-humorist Mark Twain.

  Twain’s description in his 1872 best seller Roughing It provided the foundation for a coyote assessment that began as neutral but started to grow worse as time went on. Although he was traveling by train, the author’s first sighting of “the cayote, pronounced ky-o-te,” he tells a reading public, was somewhere west of Omaha, in “vast expanses of level greensward, bright sunlight, an impressive solitude,” on the same day he saw his first prairie dogs and pronghorns. But Twain’s prose ignored both the latter in favor of a three-page soliloquy, verging on comic rant, about an animal—“not a pretty creature or respectable, either”—he came to know as he crossed the West.

  Western coyote. Courtesy Dan Flores.

  In Twain’s view, the coyote’s choice of homes defined him, for he lived “chiefly in the most desolate and forbidding deserts.” With the animal’s suspect habitat laid out, Twain then hit stride in what became a classic description with a long reach in American culture: “The cayote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerable bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of foresakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want.”