Missouri — Videos — Wildlife History

Coyotes are an American original. They evolved in North America one to two million years ago in the heart of the Pleistocene Epoch. Their world had North American hyenas, dire wolves, and sabertooth cats, among other predators. They became omnivores and master survivalists in that world, and those adaptations served them well when another predator showed up in North America about 12,000 years ago. Us.

We co-existed fairly peacefully for most of humanity's history on this continent. In many Native American religions, coyotes were revered as trickster gods. They were responsible for everything from unleashing buffalo onto the Great Plains to providing fire. Euro-Americans shattered that co-existences when they started an all-out war on coyotes.

In today’s video, I’ll discuss the first salvos of that war, coyote bounties. We’ll cover the history, why bounties were misguided, and how much money states wasted on them. Before we continue, please like and subscribe to learn more about North American wildlife history.

Bounties have a long history in the United States. The story began in 1630 when the Massasschutes Bay Colony placed a bounty on wolves. Bounties were a tool to incentivize people to kill more animals. Europeans passed their hatred of wolves onto future generations through oral storytelling like Little Red Riding Hood.

As settlers moved west, they brought diseases, livestock, and a disdain for predators. When they encountered coyotes, they confused the animals with wolves. Merriweather Lewis described coyotes as “prairie wolves” in his journal. The name stuck, and people have associated wolves with coyotes ever since.

The earliest record of coyote bounties I could find is in Missouri in 1825. In Kansas, the state government passed the first bounty law in 1877 that applied a 1 dollar bounty to each scalp. Today, one coyote would be worth around 30 dollars. Remember the dollar amount because it will be important later in this video.

The hatred for coyotes was based in part on false assumptions about their diet. Many people believed that coyotes eat larger game or domestic species like deer, cows, etc, that humans rely on. While they occasionally eat those animals, it has been shown in many studies that coyotes typically eat smaller prey that many humans consider pests.

A biologist for the National Parks Service named Adolph Murie conducted one of those early studies in 1940. In “Ecology of the Coyotes in the Yellowstone” Murie concluded that coyotes mainly consumed small mammals, birds, and a variety of smaller prey like fish, reptiles, and insects. Basically, they’ll eat whatever they can find whenever they can find it .

Despite the misunderstanding, states across the western U.S. placed bounties on coyotes in the 19th century. Some states went to extreme lengths to support the bounty. Montana, for example, spent almost two-thirds of its annual budget on wolf and coyote bounty payments between 1883 and 1923.

States wasted a lot of money paying bounties. As we see today, coyotes are still alive and well. They’ve even expanded their range. The bounties failed to wipe out coyotes, and they wasted money in other ways. There are reports of people raising coyotes as farm animals for these bounties.

I searched newspaper archives across the country and found over 1,000 mentions of people raising or farming coyotes for the bounty. It is easy to see why if we look at an example from Oregon.

Sheep ranching was a significant business in Oregon in the 19th century. However, some ranchers argued they could make more money selling coyote scalps. The Statesman Journal published an article titled “Coyotes VS. Sheep” on 11/27/1894 that argued sheep ranchers should raise coyotes.

At the time, one sheep was worth around two and a half dollars, and the bounty on coyotes was 6 dollars per scalp. Coyotes also have five to seven pups a year, while ewes only have one or two. As the writer said, “The arithmetic and logic of the matter are easy.” A similar story unfolded in Kansas.

In 1913, Anderson County discovered that they had suffered fraudulent bounty payments for a number of years. According to an article called “Coyotes Raised for Scalps in the Chanute Weekly Tribune on 05/09/1913, a hunter named W. F. Wells discovered several people were raising coyotes for the scalps.

These people had caught a breeding pair of coyotes and kept them. The article mentions that a Sunday school superintendent raised the coyotes for years and made 50 dollars in five years. A neighbor got fed with this and stole the coyotes before the superintendent could turn them in. The neighbor collected the one-dollar bounty.

Another example from Kansas comes in May of 1903 when The Wellington Journal reported that a dozen or more farmers were organizing the “Society for the Prevention of the Destruction of Female Coyotes” or S.P.D.F.C for short. Their goal was to protect female coyotes as breeding stock.

The writer says that the larger than normal number of bounties being turned in led to “a general suspicion that the bounty business is being worked for all its is worth in this county.” Females were rarely turned in, with “nine out of every ten being young coyotes.” There could be another explanation, however.

The article is scientifically inaccurate because it claims females can have several litters of pups a year. Female coyotes only have one litter, and they typically give birth to four to seven pups, generally born in April or May. The number of pups depends on the how much food is available and the local coyote population.

The fewer coyotes in an area mean more food is available and more pups are born. Notice when that article was published, late spring. It’s easy to see how someone would suspect foul play when the majority of animals turned in were young pups in May or June. But another likely scenario is hunters found and killed dens when the mother wasn’t around.

People across the country were suspicious, but we shouldn’t assume that raising coyotes was common. It's possible people simply didn’t believe coyotes could continue to thrive under hunting pressure and made up excuses for their failures to exterminate coyotes.

Bounties were the start of America’s war on coyotes. In a future video, I’ll discuss the federal government's role in the slaughter. Ultimately, that was a failure as well. Even today, the United States Department of Agriculture estimates that 50,000 coyotes are killed a year.

They keep expanding and, despite our best attempts over the last couple of hundred years, are still thriving. That is where the power of adapting to an ever-changing landscape helps them. The strategies they employed to live with North American hyenas, dire wolves, and sabertooth cats serve them just as well as living with us.

Thank you for watching.

Citations

Coyote America, Dan Flores.

Louis and Clark Journal

A Brief Hist A Brief History of Extension Pr y of Extension Predator Contr or Control in Missouri ol in Missouri
The original text of the law was published in the Walnut Valley Times on May 18, 1877. It is also possible to find the text fully cited as a Kansas statute. See Kansas State Board of Agriculture. Biennial Report – Kansas State Board of Agriculture, Volume 1, 584.

Murie, Adolph. Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone. (Washinton D.C., U.S Government), 1940.

Predatory Bureaucracy, Michael J Robinson

Statesman Journal, Coyotes vs Sheep, 11/27/1894.
Coyotes Raised for Scalps, Chanute Weekly Tribune, 05/09/1913.

The Wellington Journal, 05/09/1903.

Video Clips

United States Fish and Wildlife Service American Mammals 1

Other footage courtesy of Videvo

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