COYOTE THE AMERICAN JACKAL

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August and September of 1804 loom large in the natural history of the American West, and indeed in the history of western science. In the short stretch of three weeks, ascending the Missouri River in what is now Nebraska and South Dakota, the American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark described for Enlightenment science many of the diagnostic wildlife species that made the Great Plains so unique in North America. On August 23, encouraged by President Jefferson to seek out and collect plants and animals not found in the Atlantic states, the party had downed the first bison most of them had ever seen. By September 7 they’d encountered their first prairie dogs, or “burrowing rats,” in Clark’s rather less-flattering description. A week later it was a “Buck Goat of this countrey . . . more like the Antilope or Gazella of Africa than any other Species of Goat.” That was of course the pronghorn. It was followed three days later by “a curious kind of Deer of a Dark Gray Colr . . . the ears large & long.” Thus did the mule deer come to the notice of science.

The day following, somewhere in the vicinity of present Chamberlain, South Dakota, one more American Original emerged from the wilds of the Great Plains to arrest the attention of scientists in Philadelphia, Paris, London, and Stockholm. For most of that month the party had reported seeing what they had assumed to be a kind of fox. The more they observed these sleek, beautiful canines, however, the less fox-like they seemed. So on the morning of September 18, Clark finally decided to collect one. With the animal in the grass before him, the explorer was mystified by its ambiguity. Although in size about like “a gray fox,” it looked more like a small wolf than any fox. Yet just as obviously, it was not the large wolf these Euroamericans knew both from Europe and the East. Clark finally decided to call the creature a “prairie wolff.” And he then went on to correct his journal: “What has been taken heretofore for the Fox was those wolves, and no Foxes has been seen.”

This account of the discovery of the American coyote is well known in biological and ecological literature, but it cannot carry the burden of standing as Book of Genesis for what has become, two centuries later, America’s most widely observed wild predator. Like the other animals Lewis and Clark “discovered,” coyotes had hardly been invisible to the native peoples in the West across the previous 15,000 years. Nor, like pronghorns, had they escaped the notice of previous French traders, traversing the plains since the early 1700s, or the Spanish colonists in New Mexico and California, who had borrowed the Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan) name—coyotl—for the animal.

The literary accounts Jefferson’s explorers penned—Meriwether Lewis would go on to write a lengthy coyote description a few months later—and the expedition’s fame help explain why the coyote’s history so often begins in 1804. But because neither Lewis nor Clark wrote up a scientific description or proffered a Latin binomial for their 1804 coyote, they did not become its official discoverers even in western science. That honor fell to Thomas Say, naturalist on the later Stephen Long expedition to the Rockies, who in 1823 officially described the type specimen of Clark’s “prairie wolf” from a Nebraska coyote he trapped using a bobcat as bait. Despite competition from other naturalists of the era, who believed the coyote might actually be a North American jackal—and even an African biologist today who, upon seeing a coyote in Yellowstone, said flatly, “that’s a jackal”—Say’s binomial, Canis latrans, has been the accepted scientific name for the coyote ever since. Science should get its due, certainly, but a 200-year-old name simply can’t do justice to an ancient American Original like the coyote, whose evolutionary roots lie 5 million years deep in America, and whose furtive profile western Indians had known as a commonplace for perhaps 15,000 years.

William Clark’s 1804 description of his “prairie wolff” does, however, tantalize us with three elements of the coyote’s remarkable story that are still with us. The first is that this was an animal, unlike the wolves, unknown to Euroamericans. No European brought centuries’ worth of preloaded myths and stories about coyotes to North America. Second, Clark and his compatriots found the coyote confusing, ambiguous. Was it a fox? A wolf? A jackal? Something else? That ambiguity has played a marked role in almost every facet of the coyote’s biography ever since. Finally, nineteenth-century Euroamericans had to get halfway across the continent, to the Great Plains, before they ever saw a coyote. That becomes most interesting given the arc of the coyote’s modern story.

In the beginning the coyote was as western as sagebrush or deserts, and that it played such a significant—and ancient—role in the indigenous religions of North America is a testament to how powerfully this small, crafty wolf captured the human imagination. Virtually everywhere in North America Indian peoples had lived side-by-side with coyotes, over time the animal assumed the guise of a mythic human avatar being. In the form of Coyote (or Old Man Coyote), it became a crucial character in native cosmology. The Trickster figure is a very old human religious deity, so old it was in place long before the invention of agriculture. In fact it dates to the Paleolithic, in America the time of the elephant and giant bison hunters. Anthropologists have found Tricksters in pantheistic religions around the world, where they usually take the form of animals—hares, spiders, bluejays, ravens—although in Old Norse traditions the Trickster is a human-like god called Loki. But in America, at least from Oregon and the Columbia Plateau southward through California, the Great Basin, the Great Plains, the Southwest, and far into Mexico—in short, everywhere coyotes ranged—it was the western song dog that ancient native peoples chose for their Trickster deity. Across 10,000 years of stories that constitute the oldest literary canon in American history, Coyote emerged as a distinctive continental figure, crucial to the Indian grasp of human nature and the animal within.

In hundreds of mythic native stories, Coyote almost never was the Ultimate Cause god. More often, in traditions like those of the Salish and Nez Perce, he was the immortal, earthly helper to a more abstract divine being, and he inhabited the world before humankind. In these stories Coyote created the very terrain of the American West, causing rivers like the Missouri to flow one direction, but not both. In a famous Nez Perce story Coyote defeated monsters whose body parts he forged into various tribal groups. For some people, like the Karuks, he invented fire; he taught others how to hunt bison. And in stories from the Yanas, Navajos, and others, Coyote famously introduced death in the world to preserve Earth from human over-population.

As one of America’s most ancient deities, and an avatar for humans, coyotes like the one portrayed in this Pueblo Indian petroglyph starred in the oldest literary canon in American history. Dan Flores photo.

It is obvious who Coyote really was, but in the event you were a bit dense, his description left no doubt. Coyote stood upright on two legs, had arms and hands, and although he brandished a tail and a wolfish head, he spoke every human language known. His mythical function in the beginning of time was creation. Coyote took the basic structure of the world as set in motion by the Creator, then “improved” on it and gave it the natural laws that make it work. That done, his larger purpose in the many oral stories about him was to reveal all the complexities of human nature. Rather than a perfect deity, set up as role model for humans, Coyote was the personification of the full suite of humanity’s traits, good and bad. He was admirable, inspirational, imaginative, energetic, a whirlwind biophysical force with a large capacity for taking sensuous pleasure in life. But he was also selfish, vain, cunning, deceitful. And quite often envious, lustful, ridiculous, and possessed of an overconfidence that got him into endless fixes. Old Man Coyote’s major flaw as a god, indeed, resulted from a combination of both his positive and negative traits. He found cause, sometimes admirable, sometimes laughable, never to be quite satisfied with the way things were. But he was also fallible. Because he was invariably unable to predict outcomes with any degree of accuracy, his tinkering with nature often produced disaster. Especially for him.

The truth is that Coyote is very probably North America’s oldest extant deity, who bequeathed us down the timeline a continental world of imagination, creation, artistry. Unfortunately, because of Coyote’s hubris and selfishness, his best-laid plans for improving the world endlessly produced consequences he never intended. In other words, in Coyote ancient Americans possessed an unusually instructive deity. It was easy for native peoples to see the Coyote impulse writ large in human nature. In every way, Coyote functioned as our stand-in figure in the world, and he has done so almost since human time began here.

To history and religion we can also add the sciences as critical to understanding why we can’t turn our eyes away from the coyote. Consider coyote evolution. This is an animal whose co-evolution with North America is as deeply embedded as ours is with Africa, indeed more deeply, since unlike us the coyote has never left the continent that gave it birth. The Canidae family that produced wolves, jackals, and coyotes is a 5-million-year-old family of American proto-wolves. By a million years ago various groups of this family did migrate, following land bridges across the Bering Strait into the Old World and becoming golden jackals and Asian and European gray wolves there. The ancestors of the gray wolf (Canis lupus), particularly, became cosmopolitan and eventually colonized almost the entirety of the planet. But there was a line of canids that never left America, and by 800,000 to a million years ago they began to diverge into larger forms. There were true American wolves like the eastern wolf (Canis lycaon) and the red wolf (Canis rufus), which became hunters of most of America east of the Great Plains. And there was the smaller American wolf—the coyote—that came to occupy the same niche in western America that jackals did in the Old World. In evolution a million years between siblings is not a very long separation, and that would produce consequences in the coyote/wolf story, too.

The coyote’s closest relation, which explains many things about the coyote’s history and present, is undoubtedly the red wolf, whose original range stretched from the edges of the Southern Plains across the South to Florida, and up the Atlantic shore all the way to eastern Canada. As famous Kansas naturalist E. Raymond Hall wrote of the American red wolf, it differs from the world traveler gray wolf in featuring a “smaller size and more slender build.” Its nose is sharper and longer than the gray wolf’s, its foot pads are smaller, and its “general coloration [is] more tawny.” While the red wolf became a long-legged hunter of deer in the forests and swamps of the South and East, its evolutionary sibling, the coyote, became the jackal of the American plains and deserts.

The advantages of life on the Great Plains may have been the same for both coyotes and humans. During the Pleistocene, the great savannas were where the action was. In America, elephants, giant bison, herds of wild horses, and a diverse bestiary of smaller animals flocked to the plains. Perhaps by spawning the small, quick coyote, evolution allowed North American canines to compete in a situation with a great many predatory opportunities. And, eventually, to function alongside larger gray wolves, which 20,000 years ago began to return to their evolutionary homeland.

The paleontological record indicates that Pleistocene coyotes had to be especially creative adapters, and that, too, has had consequences. About the same time that extreme climate stresses (caused by volcanic eruptions on the island of Sumatra 71,000 years ago) led our ancestors to transform their cultural lives, in what Jared Diamond has popularized as our “Great Leap Forward,” coyotes were acquiring some of the traits that made them so unique, resilient, and successful in North America.

Like humans, who are intensely social but whom anthropologists describe as having developed a unique kind of social life—“fission-fusion societies”—coyotes became the very rare predator to do the same. Fission-fusion capability allows for unusual flexibility to individuals, who can be either gregarious or solitary, depending on what circumstances call for. In such societies, individuals cooperate to take on large endeavors, but flexibility allows for more individualized effort in different situations. The gray wolf, which evolved and became specialized as a pack animal to pursue large prey, is not a fission-fusion carnivore. Indeed, that would become a near-fatal flaw in wolves in the modern age, as their pack instincts made them vulnerable. Most other predators are either solitary or social, not both.

We humans, and coyotes, are exceptions. Our successes come from our plasticity. Coyotes could be solitary hunters, focusing on the kind of small prey an individual animal could capture. Given different opportunities, coyotes could also become pack animals when prey like deer called for cooperation. It is the adaptation that made them, like us, opportunists that could encounter wholly new situations and thrive. It is one of the adaptations that allowed them to survive twentieth-century America’s war on predators when wolves could not.

And it seems to have been in place way back in the Pleistocene. Coyotes then were distinct from the animal Lewis and Clark would see in 1804. Their skulls and jaws were thicker, their teeth wider, most likely because their initial response to life on the plains was to pursue larger prey, in packs. This was, unfortunately, a niche that newly returning gray wolves also filled. So in the wake of the Pleistocene Extinctions of 10,000 years ago, when scores of animal species on the American Plains disappeared, competition between gray wolves and coyotes intensified. The genius of the coyote was to back away and seek out the new strategy of individual effort. Wolves remained big, 5- to 6-foot-long pack hunters weighing 80 to 120 pounds. Coyotes became 3- to 4-foot-long, 30- to 40-pound solitary foragers for small game, even omnivores. Fission-fusion—and sheer, crafty intelligence—turned out to be especially effective in turning coyotes into canids that could survive a wolf-dominated world, and eventually a human-dominated one.

Coyotes would go on to evolve an array of other traits we would take special notice of, certainly because of their similarities to the traits of wolves, which were after all our first animal domesticate. Like our dogs, as well as ourselves, coyote young require lengthy childhoods—neotony is the biological term—to learn culture and critical information about the world from their parents. The social life of canids is so similar to ours that we understand it on many levels, even when it features a kind of census-taking. Coyotes become mated pairs, but they do something else quite remarkable. Average coyote litter size is 5.7 pups, but coyotes seem to have an autogenic mechanism that allows them to assess the ecological possibilities around them. If they sense fewer coyotes relative to resources, they give birth to larger litters. Their classic yodeling howl, which has so long stood as the iconic night sound of the starry-skied West, has many functions, but one is assessing the size of the surrounding coyote population. Coyotes also evolved an ability, under intense pressure to survive, to go into a “colonization” mode featuring not just large litters but migration into new settings. It would take halfway through the twentieth century but biologists would eventually conclude that as a result of these adaptations, eradicating coyotes is virtually impossible. To wipe out a regional coyote population, 75 percent of all coyotes have to be removed—not once but every single year for fifty straight years—to produce even a momentary impact.

Their ready identification with the social lives and survivability of wild coyotes is the reason for the Old Man Coyote traditions of Indian peoples in North America. Ten thousand years ago, native cultures would have had many scores of animal candidates for their deity figures. But for Indian peoples in the American West, something about coyote survivability in a general Pleistocene collapse obviously captured their imaginations. Once they moved into coyote country, American explorers, settlers, government officials, and literary figures also found coyotes worthy of fascinated attention, but usually with very different ends in mind.

With our evolutionary background as hunters, we may be fascinated by predators, but we long ago recognized them as danger, and as competition. Given our Old World experiences with wolves, we were suspicious of coyotes from the first. But while the coyote seemed too small to arouse our fears, it was without doubt a competitor, especially so when our domestic livestock were involved. In churches and bars and over polite conversation, as well as in the ranch houses of the West of a hundred years ago, no North American predators escaped a general excoriation. But for intriguing reasons, coyotes struck everyone as particularly vile. With no imported mythology and scant knowledge of Indian ideas of a Coyote deity, Americans in the West found coyotes ripe for original interpretation. And for half a century after 1872, a very unflattering one emerged.

It was Mark Twain’s description in his 1872 book Roughing It that seemed to provide the foundation for an American coyote assessment that only grew worse as time went on. In Twain’s view, the coyote’s choice of homes defined him, for he lived “chiefly in the most desolate and forbidding deserts.” He went on: “The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerable bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want.”

Wanting meant becoming a target. Strychnine, first available in the 1830s, by the 1850s had become a regular commodity at western trading posts. As a result, predator pelts began to join the international fur trade in that decade. The commercial buffalo harvest of the 1860s–1880s created boom-time conditions for Great Plains canines, but also inaugurated the initial campaign of extermination against them. The real target was wolves, but strychnine did not discriminate: a poisoned bison carcass in Kansas yielded thirteen wolves, but also fifteen coyotes and forty skunks. They weren’t always collateral damage. Coyote pelts functioned as a medium of exchange on the Great Plains after the Civil War, their value set at $1 in the fur trade; tens of thousands of plains coyotes met that fate. But many more were killed by wolfers as byproducts of the trade in wolf pelts. No one knows for sure, but western writer George Bird Grinnell estimated that wolfers killed hundreds of thousands of coyotes on the Great Plains during these years.

Meanwhile both cattlemen and sheepmen were taking their herds and flocks into the West. Cattle ranchers never got too heated up about coyotes so long as wolves remained, but sheepmen—who regarded coyotes as a “parasite on civilization”—early on pushed for bounties. Most western states enacted bounties on both wolves and coyotes in the late nineteenth century. Montana for its part went even farther, trying deliberate introductions of sarcoptic mange, an early form of biological warfare.

According to the Salt Lake Weekly Tribune in 1887, the ranchman’s view was not universal in the West. Near Fillmore, Utah Territory, farmers had poisoned coyotes to scarcity, only to find their croplands invaded by rabbits “which have multiplied into swarms, so that the farmers pray for coyotes now.” But stockmen prayed (and did more) to effect the opposite outcome. It was only their fury towards wolves that delayed the coyote’s turn until the twentieth century.

Gone now was the Indian deity who created the world. Observing the same animal, what Americans saw was a sick, despairing, forsaken, miserable creature, an animal (as we warmed to the task) that took on traits of both cunning and cruelty. Articles by popular writers like Ernest Ingersoll and Edwin Sabin described coyotes as “contemptible” and “especially perverse.” Their howls were “eerie” and “blood-stilling,” even defiant. Coyotes supposedly lacked “higher morals,” and were “cowardly to the last degree.” Exploring ideas for commercial gain from coyotes, a 1920 article in Scientific American asserted that coyotes were not worth the price of the ammunition to shoot them, then went on to add the ultimate insult for the age (and a patriotic reason for shooting them anyway): the coyote, the writer avowed, was the “original bolshevik.”

Eradication of such an unsavory animal seemed the logical next step, and a century ago everyone was on the bandwagon. Nature writer John Burroughs argued that predators “certainly needed killing.” William T. Hornaday, a conservation hero who saved the last bison and led the charge to replace market hunting with sport hunting, thought that for coyotes, “firearms, dogs, traps, and strychnine [are] thoroughly legitimate weapons of destruction. For such animals, no half-way measures suffice.” Not even John Muir, who found coyotes “beautiful” and “graceful,” came to the defense of predators. With packets of strychnine available in every hardware store in America, it had become almost a patriotic duty to scatter a few to beat back the continent’s wild predator horde.

By the twentieth century, however, there were many Americans who believed that exterminating animals like coyotes was too big for individual effort. It seemed too big for livestock associations or state bounty programs, too. Coyotes, in particular, seemed somehow impossible even to thin out. In Ernest Thompson Seton’s allegorical story in an issue of Century magazine in 1900, a coyote “Moses” who had learned all of civilization’s designs against the “coyote kind” was the explanation for the coyotes’ seeming invincibility. Getting rid of predators appeared to call for experts in mass techniques.

If ever there was a poster child for the stereotypical government agency that hangs on even when the tides of both science and public opinion threaten to drown it, it was the Bureau of Biological Survey. The bureau’s quite benign roots lay in the 1880s, and until 1905 its mission was to conduct a nationwide survey of the flora and fauna of America. But doing pure science threatened it with extinction every time appropriations votes came up. Stockmen in the West particularly blamed the federal government’s new public lands system—national forests and national parks—for creating a system of mountain refuges for wolves and coyotes fleeing persecution on the Great Plains. In a search for an economic mission, the bureau’s Vernon Bailey began to position it as an agency of national wildlife experts with solutions to the “problem of predators.” The first large congressional appropriations went to the bureau in 1914, to be used “on the National Forests and the public domain in destroying wolves, coyotes, and other animals injurious to agriculture and animal husbandry.” The next year it hired 300 hunters across the West to engage in this new federally mandated war against the wild, then asked Congress to allow it to accept additional funding from stockmen’s associations and state legislatures. And the bureau’s PR campaign spread the idea to hunters that its project of destroying predators would produce bumper populations of game animals for sport hunters, bringing new allies to the cause.

Since the quickest way to mass-kill wolves and coyotes was not shooting but poison, the bureau built a plant in Albuquerque to produce strychnine tablets in volume. In 1921 it relocated its so-called Eradication Methods Laboratory to Denver, where it would perfect an amazing witch’s brew of ever more efficient and deadly poisons. Hunters first engaged in “pre-baiting,” or strewing cubes of fat and meat across the countryside to get coyotes habituated to them. The poison bait stations went in next. Stanley Young, a field hunter who became a coyote specialist and public relations figure for the bureau, found that using strychnine it was possible to kill 350 coyotes in ten days. Approaching his bait stations, he found every dead coyote frozen in a signature strychnine convulsion, their tails sticking straight out as if they’d been electrocuted.

That scene, the visual imagery of a coyote extermination campaign, was about to be writ large across the West. As wolves melted away before the onslaught, Señor Coyote’s turn had now come. Although federal hunters had initially concentrated on the wolves that stock associations particularly wanted wiped out, by 1923 wolves were so scarce on both the plains and in the mountains that thereafter the hunters never killed more than a single wolf a year. Nonetheless, in Colorado alone the bureau set out 31,255 poison baits in 1923.

The truth was, bureau arguments for making coyotes public enemy #1 may not have been mere propaganda. With the keystone predator, the gray wolf, now gone or nearly so, an ecological revolution was under way across America. With their competitors eradicated by the bureau, coyotes now exercised their ancient “fission-fusion” capabilities. At least some coyotes began to form packs and hunt larger prey—including sheep and, on very rare occasions, newborn calves. And with wolves gone, not only did the coyote population bloom in the West, in the decade of the 1920s coyotes began an unprecedented and historic expansion of their range—eastward across the Mississippi River, where they would gradually begin to fill the wolf’s vacant niche in the East and South.

With wolves eradicated and the Denver plant cranking out the strychnine, the bureau’s Predatory and Rodent Control hunters by 1924 had set out 3,567,000 poison baits across the West—figuratively a scorched-earth policy against coyotes. In that decade the bureau was averaging 35,000 poisoned coyotes a year. But even with such a campaign, coyotes were not so easily erased as wolves, whose strong, pack-based social ties had doomed them. Like Old Man Coyote in the native traditions, the real coyote somehow seemed immortal. Newspapers like the Rocky Mountain News in Denver would run stories with titles like “U.S. Agents Stalk ‘Desperadoes’ of Animal World thru Deserts and over Mountain Ranges of West,” but somehow, against the lowly, slinking, immoral coyote, the bureau could not win the war of civilization.

Almost without interruption since 1915, a federal agency today called Wildlife Services has waged an unceasing war on coyotes using guns, traps, poisons, and airplanes. Since the 1850s Americans have killed untold millions of coyotes, prompting them to spread across the entire country. Dan Flores photo.

And unexpectedly, coyotes began to acquire champions. At their annual meeting in 1924, the American Society of Mammalogists debated whether predators served essential functions in nature, and whether American policy was tragically wrong in pressing for their eradication. Scientific luminaries such as Joseph Grinnell, E. Raymond Hall, Olaus Murie, and Aldo Leopold began to demonstrate with their field studies that, lacking predators, the natural world often swung precipitously to new and often very fragile paradigms.

The reaction of the bureau to this threat from the scientific community was to double-down on denials of a role for predators and propose a shocking final solution. “Large predatory mammals, destructive to livestock and to game, no longer have a place in our advancing civilization,” the bureau’s E. A. Goldman thundered. Ignoring the accumulating science, in 1928 the bureau offered up its faunal end-game. If Congress would fund the bureau at $10 million for a decade, it would wipe out coyotes—“the archpredator of our time” Goldman called them—once and for all.

The proposed 10-Year Plan for coyote eradication was the final straw for the scientists and ecologists. One of them, Olaus Murie, working as a bureau biologist since 1927, was known for his conviction that scientists must above all be ethical. Now Goldman wanted him to study coyotes, hoping to buttress the bureau’s position. In his report Murie evaluated “the factions interested in [the] coyote question” and concluded that there was an emerging group he called “The Nature Lovers.” Murie argued that these people might actually represent a state of human evolutionary enlightenment. As he put it, “I firmly believe that it is working against the best interests of humanity to . . . ridicule those who see beauty in a coyote’s howl.”

In 1931, however, Congress passed the famous Animal Damage Control Act, appropriating $1 million a year for ten years for the bureau to pursue “the eradication” of coyotes, the “Gangsters of the Animal Kingdom” in the media’s phrase. As it turned out, the bureau pursued its coyote mission relentlessly well beyond a single decade. World War II produced an explosion of knowledge about chemicals, and in 1946 it offered up thallium sulfate as an improved predacide. Its advantage was that dying coyotes did not alarm other coyotes, as with strychnine. Instead, the new poison killed them slowly, often causing their hair to fall out first. (Hairless coyotes, dying of thallium sulfate poisoning, were sometimes found huddled, freezing, in outbuildings of ranches.) A second new poison, sodium fluoroacetate, was called Compound 1080 because it had taken the lab 1,080 tries to create it. With Compound 1080 the bureau got closer, sometimes approaching local coyote extirpation. A third technique, the “humane coyote getter,” was designed to close the deal. It featured an upright tube capped by scented cloth that coyotes found difficult to resist, and fired a mist of sodium cyanide directly into a coyote’s face.

But wasn’t overconfidence too often the downfall of Old Man Coyote’s plans to change the world? The new poisons killed vast, unknown numbers of coyotes, but coyotes not only weren’t exterminated by the 10-Year Program, they actually continued to expand their range. Unlike wolves, coyotes are fertile by a year old. Poisoned to scarcity, they simply had larger litters. With fission-fusion adaptability, they could turn to a large array of prey, particularly the massive rodent population. They readily hunted as loners or pairs, making them harder to wipe out. And without question they had the huge American public lands, where thanks to the scientists national parks, at least, had been off-limits to bureau hunters since 1936, as refuges for rebuilding their populations.

So coyotes held on, and meanwhile the cultural pendulum began to swing. Rachel Carson’s legendary 1962 book, Silent Spring, dramatically changed the way many Americans felt about poisons. By then scientists had published sufficient work about the role of predators to begin to change how people felt about them, too. And in the 1960s and 1970s the science of ecology and the environmental movement created a whole new appreciation for a species’ innate right to exist. Surfing this wave, President Richard Nixon not only banned the use of poisons in federal predator control on public lands in 1972, he supported the Endangered Species Act in 1973, one of the most important and controversial environmental laws in US history.

A superficial view of the decades since might lead one to say that little has changed for coyotes in America. That would be a mistake. Like so many policies, coyote control has become a marker of politics and the culture wars. Nixon’s poison ban did not survive the Reagan years, although many restrictions remain and a continuing ban on blanket poisoning has made shooting coyotes from airplanes and helicopters the strategy of choice since the 1970s. The Endangered Species Act and changing public attitudes now protect coyotes from the invention of some new form of extermination. But the coyote war is far from over. Congress during Reagan’s terms separated Animal Damage Control from the Fish and Wildlife Service, relocating it in the Department of Agriculture where in the 1990s the USDA renamed it “Wildlife Services.” So on behalf of agriculture, particularly on behalf of a shrinking but still powerful sheep-raising lobby, federal coyote control continues. Between 2006 and 2011, Wildlife Services’ hunters “controlled to death” 512,710 coyotes in the United States. From all causes (including increasingly popular “coyote hunting contests”) we still kill about one-half million coyotes a year, every year, in the United States.

The response of the coyote to all this has been downright remarkable. Starting in the 1920s, coyotes began mysteriously showing up in places where the animals had never been known before. In 1949 a Wisconsin biologist collected a coyote on the Apostle Islands. Within another two years marginal records of coyotes had cropped up in Indiana, Illinois, and 200 miles east of the Great Lakes, in eastern Ontario. With some confusion, a 1955 work on mammal distributions noted coyote appearances in Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. As a kid growing up in Louisiana, I first saw coyotes there in the early 1960s. Now they are in every province in Canada, and by 2011 they colonized their last continental state, Delaware, which became the forty-ninth US state to list coyotes as part of their twenty-first-century fauna. Coyotes now blanket North America from Alaska to Panama, a distance of 7,500 miles. In the United States they now drink from Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic, and Gulf waters. In response to 150 years of persecution, more coyotes now exist than at any time in history.

For those used to thinking of coyotes in Mark Twain terms, this former resident of the “most desolate and forbidding” plains and desert wildernesses has done something else equally astonishing. Confronted with a continent transformed by humans, coyotes adopted mankind as a lifestyle and moved in amongst us. Since 1940 virtually every city and town in America, starting with Los Angeles and now even including New York City, has acquired a resident coyote population. Studying this urban coyote phenomenon, Ohio State biologist Stanley Gehrt realized a few years into his work that it wasn’t a few dozen coyotes he was studying in Chicago, but that “hundreds, even thousands” of coyotes were roaming the streets and alleys of the Windy City. By the early twenty-first century, the most common large wild animal most urban Americans had ever encountered was a coyote, and as often as not it was in their backyards.

Unlike every other charismatic Great Plains species, the small North American wolves we call coyotes not only survived the nineteenth- and twentieth-century war against them but also have spread across the continent and into major cities from coast to coast. Dan Flores photo.

The coyote’s final demonstration of its smarts and adaptability is the best evidence yet that the American Original truly is a continental totem animal—not just for the ancient West, but in our time for the whole country. In a striking nod to Lewis and Clark’s puzzlement in 1804 about just what kind of animal coyotes were, coyotes are now mirroring our own multicultural patterns in modern America. Just as the United States is rapidly becoming a nation of blended ethnicities, coyotes have become the active agents in a blended wild canid population in America. What scientists call a “canis soup” is their version of our “melting pot.” Careful genetic work among eastern coyotes indicates that by interbreeding with dogs and with their remnant, close relative wolf cousins (like the red wolf), the last 75 to 140 generations of coyotes have thoroughly mixed wild canids in the East and South. Remnant eastern species of wolves are now 40 to 75 percent coyote—in truth, “coywolves.” Recovery efforts for the endangered red wolf, which coyotes appear to have hybridized with both anciently and during their migrations eastward in the mid-twentieth century, have had to feature such massive interventions to keep coyotes and red wolves apart that in a modern America now saturated with coyotes, pure red wolves will likely never be recovered across any significant part of their former range. And that’s mostly a result of the coyote’s remarkable success story.

Among the charismatic Great Plains animals, the coyote’s story stands alone—not just separate, but in shocking contrast to the situations of bison, pronghorn antelope, grizzlies, wild horses, even wolves. Human thoughtlessness, or economically driven impulses, saw us stoically push the other last surviving charismatic plains megafauna to the edge of extinction. But the same level of exploitation and focused persecution that drove wolves, grizzlies, and wild horses off the Great Plains produced another response altogether from coyotes. Like native pronghorns and bison, coyotes are still on the Great Plains. But now they’re also everywhere else.

Coyotes are still wild and numerous and playing their ancient role on the plains, but in the world we humans transformed, they are also practicing their new urban lifeway here, as well. In the Queen City of the American Great Plains, Denver, coyotes started to become an urban presence in the 1980s. As of 2015, the estimate—which urban biologists think probably too conservative by maybe 20 percent—is that there are 112 coyote packs with established ranges in the Denver Metro Area. Those 112 coyote packs have a summer population of more than 1,000 coyotes living, hunting, and thriving in the plains’ biggest city.

That’s a stunning tribute to “the prairie wolf.” But then, almost everything about coyotes is a stretch for superlatives.