Dan Flores

As a poster animal of the West, the coyote has a roller coaster biography, seen as a sacred deity in one phase and a varmint meriting eradication in another.

The ultimate outcome is not what anyone would predict.

I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West.

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Coyote, America's jackal and its roller coaster ride through history.

In the year 1900, the Canadian-American nature writer, Ernest Thompson Seton, wrote one of the more intriguing stories ever penned about coyotes.

Since coyotes have been inspiring human storytellers for more than 10,000 years, that's enough faint praise.

Among early American writers, even Lewis and Clark, who introduced Americans to the animal and named it Prairie Wolf, were late to the game.

Way back in 1651, Spanish author Francisco Hernandez had written Concerning the Coyotal or Indian Fox, a piece that included a curious take about an intelligent animal who didn't forget.

The coyote is a persevering revenger of injuries, the Spaniard wrote, but by the same token is grateful to those who do well by it.

Closer in time to Seton, there was Mark Twain's several pages of coyote description in his best-selling book, Roughing It.

The proper pronunciation of the name is coyote, Twain told readers, but he didn't stop there.

He is a long, slim, sick, and sorry-looking skeleton with a gray wolf skin stretched over it.

He has a general slinking expression all over.

The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of want.

The bar, then, was high.

But Seton's Tito, the story of the coyote that learned how, wasn't just the lead piece in Scribner's in the 1900 August issue.