Dan Flores

But in 1900, coyotes really were becoming more numerous.

And not just that.

In arid southwestern cities like Los Angeles, the wild song dogs were already attracting attention as urban dwellers.

They were also primed for spreading out of the West and over the next 80 years would start showing up in urban jungles as far flung as Denver, Chicago, New York, as well as Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco.

It turned out the coyote puzzle Seton tried to resolve with Tito was going to require figuring out a hell of a lot more of the coyote biography than we ever knew.

Looking both directions in 1900, what a crazy roller coaster of a biography that has turned out to be.

When we humans got to North America 23,000 years ago, coyotes greeted us at the front door.

The Canaday family, it produced not just dire wolves, gray wolves, jackals, and coyotes, but also your pup at home, is a five and a half million year old family of American animals.

Jackals, gray wolves, and others did eventually migrate across the land bridges into the Old World, gray wolf ancestors in particular colonizing most of the northern hemisphere before returning to America about 30,000 years ago.

Coyotes, though, never left, and by 800,000 years ago were evolving into their modern form as a medium-sized jackal-like wolf.

If you want to know what it's like to be an American, get to know the canid that never left.

Coyotes have been yipping and howling the original national anthem across the continent for nearly a million years.

When humans wandering out of Africa and across Asia finally made it to North America, they confronted a massive die-off oddly similar to the one Seton would one day invoke in Scribner's Magazine.

Mammoths, camels, horses, lions, all were disappearing.

But a particular survivor of that crash caught the attention of these first Americans, and soon they started thinking of it as an avatar, a stand-in for humans in the imagination.

Coyote with a capital C is not only a native deity from the Paleolithic, thus the oldest American god of which we have a record.

As Old Man America, Coyote was also the chief protagonist in this continent's oldest literature, both hero and fool of stories told around campfires and preserved by native people for 10 millennia or more.

Europeans arrived in America with experiences with bears, foxes, and wolves, but no prior experiences of any sort with coyotes.

Innocent of any knowledge of Indians' ancient familiarity with the animal, even from accounts in Mesoamerica, where the Aztecs had long before named the animals coyotal, Americans on the eastern seaboard didn't know of coyotes until Lewis and Clark named them prairie wolves.

A line in Moby Dick testifies that when Melville was writing his masterpiece, we were still using that name.