The two full-length books on Brother Coyote listed below specify most of
the printed literature on the animal. (He is "Brother" in Mexican tales
and I feel much more brotherly toward him than I feel toward character
assassins in political power.) It would require another book to
catalogue in detail all the writings that include folk tales about Don
Coyote. Ethnologists and scientific folklorists recognize what they call
"the Coyote Circle" in the folklore of many tribes of Indians. Morris
Edward Opler in _Myths and Legends of the Lipan Apache Indians_, 1940,
and in _Myths and Tales of the Chiricahua Apache Indians_, 1942 (both
issued by the American Folklore Society, New York) treats fully of
this cycle. Numerous tales that belong to the cycle are included by J.
Gilbert McAllister, an anthropologist who writes as a humanist, in his
extended collection, "Kiowa-Apache Tales," in _The Sky Is My Tipi_,
edited by Mody C. Boatright for the Texas Folklore Society (Publication
XXII), Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1949.
Literary retellers of Indian coyote folk tales have been many. The
majority of retellers from western Indians include Coyote. One of the
very best is Frank B. Linderman, in _Indian Why Stories_ and _Indian
Old-Man Stories_. These titles are substantive: _Old Man Coyote_ by
Clara Kern Bayliss (New York, 1908, OP), _Coyote Stories_ by Mourning
Dove (Caldwell, Idaho, 1934, OP); _Don Coyote_ by Leigh Peck (Boston,
1941) gets farther away from the Indian, is more juvenile. The _Journal
of American Folklore_ and numerous Mexican books have published hundreds
of coyote folk tales from Mexico. Among the most pleasingly told
are _Picture Tales frown Mexico_ by Dan Storm, 1941 (Lippincott,
Philadelphia). The first two writers listed below bring in folklore.
CUSHING, FRANK HAMILTON. _Zuni Breadstuff_, Museum of the American
Indian, Heye Foundation, New York, 1920. This extraordinary book, one of
the most extraordinary ever written on a particular people, is not made
up of coyote lore alone. In it the coyote becomes a character of
dignity and destiny, and the telling is epic in dignity as well as
in prolongation. Frank Hamilton Cushing was a genius; his sympathy,
insight, knowledge, and mastery of the art of writing enabled him to
reveal the spirit of the Zuni Indians as almost no other writer has
revealed the spirit of any other tribe. Their attitude toward Coyote
is beautifully developed. Cushing's _Zuni Folk Tales_ (Knopf, New York,
1901, 1931) is climactic on "tellings" about Coyote.
DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Voice of the Coyote_, Little, Brown, Boston, 1949.
Not only the coyote but his effect on human imagination and ecological
relationships. Natural history and folklore; many tales from factual
trappers as well as from Mexican and Indian folk. This is a strange book
in some ways. If the author had quit at the end of the first chapter,
which is on coyote voicings and their meaning to varied listeners, he
would still have said something. The book includes some, but by no means
all, of the material on the subject in _Coyote Wisdom_ (Publication XIV
of the Texas Folklore Society, 1938) edited by J. Frank Dobie and now
distributed by Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas.
GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Wolves and Wolf Nature, in _Trail and Camp-Fire_,
New York, 1897. This long chapter is richer in facts about the coyote
than anything published prior to _The Voice of the Coyote_, which
borrows from it extensively.
LOFBERG, LILA, and MALCOLMSON, DAVID. _Sierra Outpost_, Duell, Sloan and
Pearce, New York, 1941. An extraordinary detailment of the friendship
between two people, isolated by snow high in the California Sierras, and
three coyotes. Written with fine sympathy, minute in observations.
MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. _Talking to the Moon_, University of Chicago
Press, 1945. A wise and spiritual interpretation of the black-jack
country of eastern Oklahoma, close to the Osages, in which John Joseph
Mathews lives. Not primarily about coyotes, the book illuminates
them more than numerous books on particular animals illuminate their
subjects.
MURIE, ADOLPH. _Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone_, United States
Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C., 1940. An example of
strict science informed by civilized humanity. _The Wolves of Mount
McKinley_, United States Government Printing Of ice, Washington, D. C.,
1944. Murie's combination of prolonged patience, science, and sympathy
behind the observations has never been common. His ecological point of
view is steady. Highly interesting reading.
YOUNG, STANLEY PAUL (with Edward A. Goldman). _The Wolves of North
America_, American Wildlife Institute, Washington, D. C., 1944. Full
information, full bibliography, without narrative power. _Sketches of
American Wildlife_, Monumental Press, Baltimore, 1946. This slight book
contains pleasant chapters on the Puma, Wolf, Coyote, Antelope and other
animals characteristic of the West. (With Hartley H. T. Jackson) _The
Clever Coyote_, Stackpole, Harrisburg, Pa., and Wildlife Management
Institute, Washington, D. C., 1951. Emphasis upon the economic status
and control of the species, an extended classification of subspecies,
and a full bibliography make this book and Dobie's _The Voice of the
Coyote_ complemental to each other rather than duplicative.