The American West
Ep. 20: Coyote: America’s Jackal and Its Roller-Coaster Ride Through History
27 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the historical significance of the coyote in American culture?
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. Brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest.
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Chapter 2: How did early American writers influence perceptions of coyotes?
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.
Like many of the Indian coyote stories folklorists were just beginning to collect, Tito took a widely observable truth and offered an explanation for it. That truth was a widespread puzzlement about coyotes. Why weren't these wild dogs doing the proper thing and dying off?
At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was waist deep in the largest destruction and die off of wildlife discoverable anywhere in modern world history. 30 million bison were down to fewer than 1,000. 15 million pronghorns were all but gone. We had so devastated elk, bighorn sheep, and grizzly bears that they were surviving only as tiny remnants hiding in the deepest mountains.
Five million wild horses were about to end up in pet food cans. And by 1920, we would have poisoned to death a million gray wolves. When Seton wrote Tito, the most numerous bird species on Earth, American passenger pigeons had 14 years of existence left.
Yet, as the Scribner's article put it, despite the fierce war that had for a long time been waged against the coyote kind, for some inexplicable reason, coyotes were not following suit. Indeed, the more we shot them, poisoned them, trapped them, ran them with dogs, blew up their dens, the more of them there seemed to be. By way of an explanation, Seton invented the Tito of his story.
She is a little female coyote who is captured as a pup and chained in a ranch yard as a curiosity, where she shrewdly observes how her human captors use guns, traps, dogs, and poisons against her kin. Ultimately, she escapes, finds a mate, has pups of her own, and then proceeds to teach her pups and their children's children, as Satan phrased it, all the tricks of coyote extermination.
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Chapter 3: What role did Ernest Thompson Seton play in coyote storytelling?
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. Montana was typical. As a territory, it created the first bounties on canid predators in 1883 and proceeded then to prostitute itself to the ranching industry's predator hatred.
Between 1883 and 1928, Montana paid bounties on a staggering 111,545 wolves and 886,367 coyotes. a ranching subsidy that grew so large during the territorial stage that it devoured two-thirds of the government's budgets. As a state, Montana outdid mere bounties.
In 1905, its legislature passed a law requiring veterinarians to introduce sarcoptic mange into the wild canid population, an early form of state-sanctioned biological warfare. A century later, coyotes and wolves in the northern west still haven't recovered from that disease. When the forerunner of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S.
Biological Survey, began to cast about for more reliable congressional funding in the early 20th century, Director C. Hart Merriam hit on the idea of making the Bureau the answer to the so-called predator problem. Faithful to a fault to their packs, mates, and pups, wolves were relatively easy marks for government hunters armed with poison bait.
As Ernest Thompson Seton wrote in perhaps the most famous of his wildlife stories, Lobo, King of Karumpaw, with the scent of a dispatched pack member, a hunter could proceed to lure and kill every additional member of a wolf pack. In Montana, 23,575 wolves had died in 1899. By 1926, The number had fallen to 17.
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Chapter 4: Why did the coyote population thrive despite extermination efforts?
But as humans steadily cleared the Central American forest, dispersing coyotes began colonizing Costa Rica during the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, they have steadily pushed into Panama and the Grand Isthmus between the continents.
They crossed the Panama Canal in 2010 and are colonizing South at a rate of about 40 miles a year, which means that by 2018, they began to approach Darien National Park athwart the Isthmus, beyond which lies Colombia and all of South America.
The intertwined green density of Darien National Park, a jungle of spider monkeys, tapirs, giant anteaters, peccaries, and birds, reptiles, and amphibians almost beyond count, would not strike a fan of wily coyote roadrunner cartoons as classic coyote habitat. Replete with mountain lions and jaguars that would enjoy taking out a migrating canid, Darien surely looms as a coyote obstacle.
But coyotes have confronted unfamiliar settings before without blanching. Their numbers, like ours, possess some individuals who can take on situations like big cities or jungles with a calm conviction of purpose.
Adventurous ones may be hit by cars or taken out by a jaguar, but just as there are coyotes in Chicago and Manhattan, some are without question pushing through Darien Park to Columbia as I write this. When they succeed, they will almost certainly spread across all of South America. For coyotes, this may well be their version of a planet B, of a Mars perhaps.
Given their candid version of a human-like self-confidence, coyotes have a certain penchant for making the news. Colonizing another continent is a story that's hard to top, but there are other candidates. Not many other animals are participating in the rescue of a fellow mammal from extinction.
But a particular coyote population in Texas and Louisiana, which residents and biologists have now named ghost wolves, has attracted attention from geneticists for doing exactly that. The species they're helping to rescue is the red wolf, the most endangered wolf on the planet. There's a true irony in this particular story.
Since a half century ago, biologists believed the primary threat to red wolf survival was interbreeding with migrating coyotes who were swamping red wolf genetics. I was a young teenager in Louisiana just when these hybridization events were happening.
Among the coyotes I was seeing back then, I twice came face to face with strapping leggy animals with mesmerizing yellow eyes that sure looked like wolfy coyotes. If these were coyote-red wolf hybrids, and they almost certainly were, that mixture made for gorgeous animals.
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