Coyote America

by Dan Flores

  The genesis of these two animators’ movie star coyote easily could have been Old Man Coyote of the Native American stories. In the circles they moved in, the continent’s original deity was attracting widespread attention in the 1940s and 1950s. As developed by Maltese and Jones, even Wile E.’s personality seemed uncannily similar to that of the sometimes buffoonish, antihero Coyote. But all the originators of Wile E.—animation master Chuck Jones, in particular—insisted over the years that the idea for Wile E.’s character traits came exclusively from Mark Twain’s historic coyote description in Roughing It: “a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton… a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.” Maltese and Jones made Wile E.’s obsession with the Road Runner one of the most fanatical, single-minded pursuits in all of film history, but in the early cartoons Wile E. ate everything from bugs to tin cans on the roadside. He was a coyote gourmand in the Twain style.

  Twain’s evocation of the Southwest’s wild canines had always had a long reach, and it inspired Maltese to develop not just a starving, salivating coyote but a difficult desert prey based on the greater roadrunner, which is actually a ground-dwelling giant cuckoo native to the Southwest. Coyote and Road Runner then assumed their forms via Jones’s remarkable animation magic. Their first encounter came in a theatrical cartoon short titled “The Fast and the Furry-ous” in 1949, followed three years later by “Beep, Beep” and “Going, Going, Gosh!” By that point, a pointy-eared, tail-swishing star had been born.

  Chuck Jones initially remained with the franchise for only two-dozen episodes before stepping down in 1964, which ended the “classic” period of the cartoons. Although two dozen more Road Runner and Coyote cartoon shorts appeared across the next decade, brought to the screen by different writers and director-animators, the Maltese-Jones creations later starred in the Saturday morning TV series, The Road Runner Show, which aired from 1966 to 1968, and in Chuck Jones’s 1979 theatrical movie The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie. Jones finally returned for a last trio of Road Runner–Coyote cartoons. Two appeared in 1979 and 1980, and a final episode, “Chariots of Fur,” aired in 1994.

  It seems slightly outlandish, but given pop culture’s reach, the world almost certainly gleaned most of what it knows about coyotes—and the generations from the 1950s to the 1970s decidedly did—from casual, sometimes passionate, often joyously stoned delight with the fantasy world of the Road Runner–Coyote cartoons. We learned to associate the red, canyonated deserts of the Southwest with these junior wolves. In the same decades when real coyotes were crossing the Mississippi River and taking up residence in the forests of the East and already eyeing cities there, movie and TV cartoons had us all convinced that the only natural habitat of the coyote was the rectilinear red rock desert. That may have had as much to do with Chuck Jones’s growing affection for New Mexico (one of the Chuck Jones Galleries, owned and run by his estate, was long in Santa Fe) as with Mark Twain’s original description. In his autobiography, Chuck Amuck, Jones says that the series loosely followed a set of nine rules, and according to “Rule 6,” “All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters—the Southwest American desert.”

  As for what Wile E. taught us about coyote natural history, the pseudo-Latin binomials the animators dreamed up for coyotes told us everything we needed to know: Carnivorous vulgaris (first three shorts, 1949–1952), Eatibus anythingus (1954), Famishius famishius (1955), Famishius vulgaris ingeniusi (1958). Desertous-operativus idioticus and Overconfidentii vulgaris (both in 1962) provided hints that the Coyote’s character was evolving with the times.

  With the 1960s, the Mark Twain–inspired Coyote became a Space Age sophisticate. Wile E. now began to acquire a personality more appropriate to a cartoon protagonist from a culture soon to produce Apollo moon shots and the White Album. Maltese and Jones had always intended for the audience to identify with the Coyote, and to make his and the Road Runner’s adventures universal, at first there was no dialogue (“Rule 4—No dialogue ever, except Beep-Beep!”). As Chuck Jones described his antihero’s appeal years later, “Humiliation and indifference—these are conditions everyone of us finds unbearable—this is why the Coyote when falling is more concerned with the audience’s opinion of him than he is with the inevitable result of too much gravity.”

  Wile E. remained nonverbal in all the early cartoons, but eventually the modern world required a Coyote who could explain how to attain the unattainable. First given voice by genius Mel Blanc in the cartoon short Operation Rabbit (1952), in both Bugs Bunny cameos and the Road Runner–Coyote shorts the hero became the self-styled “Wile E. Coyotay, Super Genius,” a refined, overeducated, decidedly overconfident canine. Wile E.’s casual self-regard seemed perfectly to mirror that of the smug, cocksure policy mavens of the John F. Kennedy–Lyndon B. Johnson years. As the innocent 1950s gave way to a more problematic decade, television’s Coyote became a modernist. So in his endless, myopic pursuit, Wile E. became ever more intoxicated with the disease of the American empire in the 1960s: the technological fix.

  As a supergenius inhabiting the flickering blue screen of the time, Wile E. was surfing the high tide of American scientific and economic confidence, from which technological solutions for all our problems seemed to flow from unlimited Space Age scientific cleverness. From nuclear power to birth-control pills, from disappearing away all annoying insects to achieving chemical victory over real coyotes on the range, we could solve everything, all the time. In Wile E.’s case, as we all know from deep memory, the ultimate problem solver was not DuPont or Westinghouse but the “Acme Corporation.” And Acme’s overconfidence rivaled that of the Coyote. In these classic cartoons the promise of the technological fix took the form of Acme Jet-Propelled Roller Skates, an Acme Batman Outfit, Acme Leg Muscle Vitamins, and the Acme Burmese Tiger Trap, so many mad-genius devices of pursuit that today an online poster of Acme’s whizbang technologies (it’s the work of Chicago artist Rob Loukotka) totals up more than one hundred of them. In iconic, American style, Wile E. trusted every one of those contraptions naively, optimistically, wonderfully. A corporation offers it for sale? Then of course it’s going to work!

  But, of course, like so many of America’s easy fixes, then and now, Acme’s technology always delivered unintended, funny, and poignant consequences that no supergenius could ever be expected to anticipate. We laughed because Wile E.’s plight hit so close to home. Like Old Man Coyote, Wile E. was an exaggerated version of Everyman, and the brilliance in both characters lay in how familiarly they drew their caricatures of human nature. We could identify with everything about them, in Wile E.’s case with his comic overconfidence, his unswerving obsession with a goal, his unfailing faith in technology.

  Acme Corporation poster. Courtesy Rob Loukotka (http://fringefocus.com).

  But since Wile E., like Old Man Coyote, was an avatar in a coyote suit, like the continent’s original deity the cartoon star spoke to us about ourselves and also about the coyotes of the age. At an important moment, Wile E. gave us the very opposite of the “archpredator of our time.” Wile E. was (and is) an entirely sympathetic character.

  Wile E. Coyote has pursued the Road Runner in a relentless, televised Möbius strip through the background of all of American life since 1950, until we now reflexively all count a coyote as our friend. He was there again as our avatar when writer Ian Frazier had him star in one of the funniest New Yorker stories ever, “Coyote v. Acme,” wherein as part of his 1960s hangover, the now litigious-savvy canine determines to bring a product liability lawsuit against the Acme Corporation for flawed technology (“Mr. Coyote seeks compensation for personal injuries, loss of business income, and mental suffering caused as a direct result of the actions and/or gross negligence of said company… [inhibiting] his ability to make a living in his profession of predator”).

  On a couple of occasions, once for a posthumous celebration of Chuck Jones’s birthday, I’ve gone to the Chuck Jones Gallery in Santa Fe and gott
en a tour of the inner recesses, where Jones’s rollicking, slapstick cartoon creations on the gallery walls—Bugs, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, we know them all—give way to creations he seems to have felt more personal about. My favorite every time I’ve gone has been an oil painting Jones did that hangs in the gallery manager’s office. The first time I saw it, I glanced up from a conversation to witness this thickly rendered swirl of color, the dabs of paint so heavy that they threw shadows, yet in a style at once oddly familiar.

  Then I stepped back from the wild brushstrokes and took in the subject entire. It was a self-portrait, but not of Jones. It was Wile E.—tormented coyote face, crenulated nose, cocked and mad eyes, with the head beneath a winter cap swathed and bandaged. I looked closer at the swirling color, the mad glint of the near eye, a little out-of-focus portrait of the Road Runner over his shoulder, in the background, and all of a sudden I saw.

  Wile E.’s head was swathed and bandaged because he was missing an ear.

  Wile E. Van Gogh, oil on canvas by Chuck Jones, 140 × 90, circa 1992. Artwork courtesy Chuck Jones Museum. Looney Tunes characters, names, and all related indicia are TM & © Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc.

  Sometimes coyote consciousness has gone for the eroticism at the heart of the human experience, as in Joni Mitchell’s 1976 song “Coyote” about her hookup with writer-actor Sam Shepard: “Now he’s got a woman at home / He’s got another woman down the hall / He seems to want me anyway.” The poems in Peter Blue Cloud’s Elderberry Flute Songs, an imagining of “contemporary Coyote tales” written in 1982, also tend to head off into coyoteroticism. Sometimes coyote consciousness has looked language in the eye, as with Pablo Mitchell’s 2005 book Coyote Nation and the use of “coyote” as a term, in ever more multicultural America, for all of us whose ethnic backgrounds are blurry. At other times it has presented shopping channel truth—this is America, after all—as when carved, wooden howling coyotes wearing bandannas became fad components of so-called Southwestern style.

  With practitioners like painter Harry Fonseca, coyote consciousness has been comic. The Forrest Gump–like Coyote in an entire series of his paintings tends to occupy set-pieces of American history, as in his marvelous piece from a mock Roaring Twenties, Coyote Does a Rudolph Valentino. Pay attention and Coyote shows up almost everywhere, sometimes in the most unexpected extraterrestrial places. California science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson has a furtive, elusive, dreadlocked character known as Coyote accompany humans as a stowaway on our next step into the solar system, our colonization of Mars, in his trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars.

  Harry Fonseca, Coyote Does a Rudolph Valentino. Courtesy the Harry Fonseca Trust.

  What, in the end, might coyote consciousness grant modern America from the origins of Coyotism in the dimness of continental history? A fallen Unitarian minister named Webster Kitchell may help here. In the 1990s Kitchell published God’s Dog: Conversations with Coyote, which explores coyote consciousness from just that perspective. Kitchell had come to the Southwest from Amherst and Harvard Divinity School, and his church soon developed a large and loyal following, even after the minister himself suffered a crisis of faith and gave up on God. Ironically, or maybe whimsically, he then turned to Coyote, “a god who was willing to listen sympathetically.”

  “I met Coyote shortly before dawn on the summer solstice,” he writes. “There are coyotes, and there is Coyote.… It was at Ghost Ranch, near Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was to meet some people and hike to Chimney Rock to greet the sun on the solstice.” Instead, along the way he met a coyote, which ultimately prompted a series of conversations with the American avatar.

  “The trouble with you humans,” Kitchell has Coyote tell us at the outset of their relationship, “is that weird mind. Somewhere along the evolutionary line you left your animal nature behind. You left behind its truth. You even tell lies about your animal nature, calling it bad or ‘lower.’”

  As the conversations continue (Coyote often arrives for them driving a red convertible with one or more attractive blondes in tow), the minister upbraids Coyote for having no morality in all the ancient stories about him. “I have an absolute morality,” Coyote responds. “I am for me. And a few of my friends.” Well, then what about death? Kitchell asks. “Death is a little prod in the back of your awareness which asks if you’re hiding from life,” Coyote responds. “When you really accept your own death, life becomes tasty and tangible and sensual.” Coyote conceded that since he was immortal, his insights about death might not be firsthand, but as far as he could see, mortals had best focus always on life, not hope for something after.

  Coyote Cantina, New Mexico, entrance art. Courtesy Dan Flores. Picture used with permission of Coyote Cafe, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  By the end of their conversations, Coyote had become a god even a fallen minister could believe in, a god of life rather than death. In Kitchell’s view, Coyote even passed Friedrich Nietzsche’s test of the superman—to have accepted your life so completely that you would want it to play out again exactly the same way, in every single detail, because it is yours and yours alone.

  In our modern world nobody needs another religion, but I do appreciate and enjoy Coyote as social critic and clever philosopher of human nature. So I’m guessing that since the coyote is now a Continental Everyman, Beuys’s “I Like America and America Likes Me” may have been the first act in another, contemporary chapter in coyote consciousness, this time on a national stage rather than just a western one. Maybe as a result we’ll resurrect the Aztec Coyotlinauatl festivals and all dress up as coyotes once a year. At the very least a new coyote consciousness should definitely heed that odd line from the first European to write about them when he noted that the coyote was “a persevering revenger of injuries” but also “grateful to those who do well by it.” As coyotes go trotting off into the American future, however their story plays out, it will be something to see.

  Coyote tracks in the sand. Coyote is still “going along.” Courtesy Dan Flores.

  The coyote’s biography in North America has always been one of many acts, but in the twenty-first century it is now a fully American story, an adventure from coast to coast. The Hundred Years’ War on Coyotes in the American West has certainly pressed on with a very much alive federal killing agency that continues to dispatch a phenomenal number of coyotes every year. In its own clueless way, Wildlife Services begs the question of how North America ever functioned without us. Its irony as a taxpayer program is that its relentless, lethal harassment of coyotes in the rural West is a principal reason why there are coyotes running through the streets of New York City today. If we actually want fewer of them or want to slow their saturation of the continent, the obvious solution is to stop killing them and allow their populations to stabilize. It’s a simple thing, but for a full century now, human nature has been unable to stand back and allow coyote nature to work.

  We also ought to value the coyotes trotting through our yards for the avatar stand-in role they play for us. Humanity faces what from all best indications looks to be a noir future, a daunting challenge, environmentally and ecologically. Coyotes have already experienced at least two similarly epic climate swings, one the demise of deep cold and wet, the other a peak of hot and dry. Many, many other creatures did not survive those. Coyotes did, and they originally attracted our attention because of it. They have also survived our own attempt to wipe them off the planet, and we were pretty damned dedicated to that. As our future unreels, I for one am going to be watching coyotes very, very closely to see just what they do.

  One thing I already know now. However the world changes, starting from this point, anywhere at all in America, I’ll get to step outside at night and hear that half-million-year-old coyote national anthem, sung to the stars and planets as they swing over an old, old continent.

  Dan Flores is the A. B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of Western History at the University of Montana and the author of ten books on various aspects of wester
n US History. Flores lives just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  ALSO BY DAN FLORES

  American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

  Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain West

  The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains

  Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest

  Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys into the Heart of the Southern Plains

  Canyon Visions: Photographs and Pastels of the Texas Plains

  Journal of an Indian Trader: Anthony Glass and the Texas Trading Frontier

  Southern Counterpart to Lewis and Clark: The Freeman and Custis Expedition of 1806

  The Mississippi Kite: Portrait of a Southern Hawk

  PRAISE FOR

  COYOTE AMERICA

  Finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson

  Literary Science Writing Award

  Winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award

  Mountains and Plains Indie Bestseller

  “Captivating.… Dan Flores looks at a creature whose howl sent shivers down the spines of generations of farmers and ranchers. They responded by waging war on an animal that not only refused to disappear, but began showing up in places like Central Park. The coyote turns out to be the Road Runner in disguise, and is having the last laugh after all.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “It is often impossible to separate how animals behave ‘wild’ from how they behave around humans. Coyotes are a startling example.… Historian Dan Flores has fun describing how coyotes make a mockery of our attempts to put nature in order: ‘It turns out, the coyote really is The Dude, and The Dude absolutely abides.’”