Dan Flores

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.

But by then, Southwestern travelers like Thomas Nuttall, Frederick Ruxton, Josiah Gregg, and Mark Twain were hearing the Hispanicized three-syllable version, Coyote.

that Western locals used.

That led Twain to instruct Americans on how to say the name in his book in the early 1870s, but not before mountain men and trappers, unwilling to decorate a dog-like animal that snuck around their camps with three whole syllables, took coyote back to the Midwest and the South.

With no old-world mythology to call on and scant interest in Indian religions or fables about a coyote deity, Americans found coyotes ripe for original interpretation.

Beginning in the 1870s and for the rest of the 19th century, a new, unflattering impression formed in the American mind.

Twain's coyote description in Roughing It was intended as comedy, but laid the foundation for an assessment that grew worse as time went on.

Gone now was the Indian deity who had created the world.

Gone was even the perplexing prairie wolf of earlier in the century.

Now, a new repetitive trope emerged.

To New York journalist Horace Greeley, the coyote was a sneaking, cowardly little wretch.

Ernest Ingersoll's 1887 The Hound of the Plains in Popular Science Monthly and Edwin Sabin's The Coyote in Overland Monthly in 1908 described coyotes as contemptible and especially perverse.

Their howls were eerie and blood-stealing, even defiant.

Coyotes lack higher morals and were cowardly to the last degree, they wrote.

Exploring ideas for commercial gain from the killing of coyotes, by 1920, an article in no less than Scientific American asserted that while coyotes weren't worth the price of the ammunition to shoot them, every patriotic American ought to kill coyotes on sight since the coyote, the writer averred, was the original Bolshevik, the original communist.

From the perspective of Western stockmen, the impression the coyote gave of being a small wolf seemed all they needed to know.

The first environmental act old world colonists had implemented in America was to launch a war of extermination against wolves, and the coyote's turn had now come.

Both stock associations and governments lavishly funded bounties to the point of creating a new economic niche in the West, the bounty hunter.