Coyotes and Indians

Coyotes and Indians

A few days after we moved to New Mexico we saw two coyotes just a few hundred yards from our house, which is in the middle of Santa Fe. Since then we’ve seen single coyotes several times, always near a small arroyo down the street. Neighbors tell us they are common, though they don’t venture far from the arroyo.

Like most locals, I expect, we look kindly on the coyotes. They are a dash of southwestern color and confirm that the Wild West is not entirely gone. We share half-in-jest warnings to watch our dogs. Just knowing there are coyotes in the neighborhood makes one a bit more alert and alive.

Nudged by the local fauna, a month ago I bought a paperback called Coyote America, by Dan Flores, a Santa Fe based historian. It was an eye-opener. Flores traces coyote history, from the distant past—coyotes, along with all canids, originated in the American southwest—to today. Coyotes are thriving, thank you, and have recently expanded their range to include almost all of the United States and Canada. They have learned to get along well with man and show up in cities big and small, feasting on the mice and rats that accompany human settlements.

Modern civilization has accidentally done several things to benefit the coyote, despite a determined extermination campaign that has lasted 100 years and is not quite done even today. First, our desire to make the West safe for sheep and cattle proved almost completely effective in wiping out wolves, the coyotes’ greatest enemy. Wolves see coyotes as competitors and will often hunt and kill them, or keep them away from food. The last wild wolves in the lower 48 were done away with in the 1920s. Without wolves, coyotes expanded their territories and generally had the wilderness to themselves.

Another boon to the coyote happened in the late 19th century, when reformers took aim at the packs of wild dogs that lived in virtually every American city. We sent out dog-catchers, rounded them up, and put them in pounds. Soon dogs were on leashes or behind fences, and our cities were easy pickings for enterprising coyotes.

This is not to say, however, that coyotes have had it easy. For most of the late 19th and 20th century America waged a no-holds-barred war on coyotes. State and federal bounties incentivized constant killing, but as governments got involved, these retail measures gave way to wholesale trapping and poisoning, mostly with strychnine. Full-time professionals backed by government bureaucrats made it their business to wipe coyotes from the face of the earth. The rationale was the threat posed to big game like deer and elk, and the desire to make the West a sportsman’s paradise. (The innocuously named Biological Survey, part of the then-new Forest Service, took the lead early in the 20th century. Ranchers argued that if the government was going to create protected forest areas where predators could hide and multiply, then the government was obliged to keep them under control). When scientific studies were undertaken in the 1920s it turned out coyotes had minimal impact on game animals, but this didn’t stop the killing, which had taken on a life of its own. Ranchers and farmers wanted coyotes gone and dominated politics in most Western states.

The popular image of the coyote was overwhelmingly negative—it was seen as an ugly, cowardly, pest, of no more intrinsic value than a rattlesnake or tarantula. Flores blames Mark Twain for a good part of this bad press. Twain penned an oft-quoted description of coyotes in his 1872 book Roughing It that called them “spiritless and cowardly,” “coarse-haired and pitiful,” and so on. This became conventional wisdom, repeated by other observers who often contrasted the coyote negatively with the supposedly more noble wolf. Coyotes were said to be barely worth the price of the bullets needed to dispatch them.

Why, despite these assaults, coyotes didn’t go the way of wolves and grizzlies and mountain lions—that is, disappear—is a fascinating story. For one thing, coyotes respond to pressure by increasing the size of their litters. For another, they are adaptable, able to live in close proximity to man, eating our chickens and lambs as well as our garbage and rats, finding places to hide and breed in our midst. Coyotes are highly flexible in their intra-species relations, sometimes living and hunting in large packs, but able to operate in pairs or solo as circumstances dictate. Coyote behavior has been shaped by its position as a middle predator, always under threat from wolves and larger competitors. Coyotes long ago learned to be cunning, wary, and opportunistic.

Their continued survival of course infuriated the coyote-killers. After World War II the government geared up for a final solution, using new poisons developed during the war. But luckily for coyotes the tide began to turn. The new science of ecology taught that predators like the coyote were not just pests but played a vital role in keeping the environment in balance. The widespread use of poisons came to be seen as dangerous to other wildlife and to the entire food chain, including man. The sheep industry declined, and there was less pressure from below on government to continue with extermination. And the broader culture began to embrace the American wilderness and abandon the dream of a West wholly fenced in and tamed.

We can even thank Hollywood. Walt Disney in the 1950s put out a series of cartoons, and eventually a full-length feature called “The Coyote’s Lament,” which protested the bad treatment of coyotes. Flores remembers this as a turning point in his own views. Wiley Coyote wormed his way into every living room.

In short, the White Man moved a little way towards seeing the coyote the way the American Indian always has. For many tribes in the West, Coyote was a central figure in myth and story: the creator, the trickster, a bundle of appetites whose schemes often go awry, but also a cunning mediator between gods and men. Flores contrasts the affection and deep connection to Coyote felt by Native Americans with the pathological hatred and misunderstanding of most white settlers. It makes for sad and uncomfortable reading.

After reading Coyote America I dipped into the ethnographer Barry Lopez’s 1977 compilation of Coyote stories, Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping With His Daughter: Coyote Builds North America. Lopez tells us that “No other personality is as old, as well known, or as widely distributed among the tribes as Coyote.” Coyote stories, as Lopez warns the reader, are not always simple or fit for children; Coyote is full of lust and does many terrible things. “Coyote stories detailed tribal origins; they emphasized a world view thought to be a correct one; and they dramatized the value of proper behavior. To participate in the stories by listening to them was to renew one’s sense of tribal identity. For youngsters, the stories were a reminder of the right way to do things—so often, of course, not Coyote’s way.”

Native Americans didn’t romanticize the coyote or make him a cuddly Disney character; they built on the coyote’s real traits of wiliness and adaptability to create an elemental character of great power. It goes without saying that the thought of doing away with coyotes never crossed their mind.

Here in the Southwest you are forced to confront the history of Native American interactions with Europeans, first the Spanish and then Anglo-Americans. It is impossible not to see the parallels between how Anglo-Americans have treated both coyotes and Indians. After initial cautious encounters we became convinced that it was impossible to co-exist. “Civilization” and Manifest Destiny were deemed incompatible with untamed predators, whether people or animals. Sometimes in hot fury, sometimes more in sorrow than anger, we pursued an implacable policy of extermination punctuated by half-hearted efforts to give the enemy a remote place of sanctuary. We created myths of inferiority and threat that justified our actions. We used the most extreme methods—biological warfare (tuberculosis-infected buffalo skins given to Indians, infectious mange deliberately spread to wolves and coyotes), habitat destruction, traps, poisons. Only after thoroughly transforming and destroying the natural environment that each depended on for survival, and bringing both to the brink of elimination, did we begin to regret what we had done.

Today coyotes as a species are thriving, even if attitudes remain mixed. (Here in New Mexico, like many Western states, hunting clubs and outfitters regularly hold coyote shoots, offering prizes for the most coyotes, the biggest coyote, etc. You don’t need a license, and it is always open season.) In contrast the damage done to Native Americans, in terms of their living culture, seems sadly to be permanent and irreversible. A particularly offensive strategy used with Native Americans that has no parallel for coyotes was the policy of forced assimilation. Since the beginning of the Republic it was thought the height of tolerance to offer Native Americans the chance to change themselves into modern Europeans; if they succeeded, they might be accepted as citizens. To this end Native Americans were forced onto reservations, and children were taken from their parents, to be turned into good Christians and farmers.

While we still have coyotes, Coyote is barely alive, eking out an existence on reservations and in scholarly studies. I doubt my ability, being old and set in my ways, to see the world in a way that includes Coyote, no matter how many stories I read. I hope I’m wrong. I look forward to future encounters near the arroyo.