COYOTES AND LOBOS

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