The Coyote Effect
Mike Smith
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From tipped over strewn garbage cans in the alley to missing pets in rural neighborhoods and mutilated livestock on farms, the Coyote can be blamed for many things in New Mexico. He can also be implicated for some of the state’s more strange occurrences. The coyote is said to be the preferred form of Indian skinwalkers, and in a 1979 government funded inquisition he was officially branded as the cause of New Mexico’s bizarre cattle mutilations.
Stranger still, the coyote can even be blamed for the Lincoln County War.
The infamous war, for those of you who don’t know, ravaged Southeastern New Mexico back in the late 1800s and involved historical figures such as John Chisum and made legends out of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett. The basis of the war was a feud between the wealthy but greedy Lawrence G. Murphy, who used his general store in the town of Lincoln to monopolize much of the area, and those who opposed him, notably John Tunstall, Alexander McSween, Billy the Kid, and John Chisum.
How then, does the coyote pan into all this?
Enter the Butterfly Effect, a subsidiary of Chaos Theory which promotes the idea that even the most minute of conditions or circumstances can have long term and long reaching effects.
The basic principle, in more poetic terms, goes as such: Can the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?
More or less, The Butterfly Effect is similar to the Domino Effect, with one thing affecting another, and another affecting another and so on. One seemingly insignificant event that has bigger repercussions. If the flapping of a butterfly’s wing could potentially cause so much chaos in theory, what then, could the howl of a coyote do?
According to Lincoln County War lore, Alexander McSween and his bride, Susan, were initially traveling to Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the Santa Fe Trail until they had a chance meeting with one Miguel Otero. While making camp at Punta De Agua for the night they struck up a conversation with the charming Mr. Otero who was camping nearby. The icebreaker, and their reason for chatting apparently, was the howl of a coyote.
“That fellow,” said Otero referring to the howling coyote, “sounds like he is a dozen.” The McSweens laughed at the remark which Otero took as an invitation for further conversation and strolled over to their camp. Upon getting acquainted with one another and hearing that young Mr. McSween was a lawyer looking for a town to set up practice in, Otero directed the young man and his wife to the town of Lincoln, which before that night they had never even heard of.
With a letter of recommendation to Lawrence G. Murphy written by Otero, the McSweens traveled on to Lincoln and with the help of the powerful Mr. Murphy, McSween’s practice did quite well. Soon, though, McSween would come to recognize Murphy for the tyrant that he was and align himself with powerful ranchers John Chisum and John Tunstall. The group of men, tired of Murphy’s unjust monopoly, decided to open their own store to compete with Murphy’s, one that would be more affordable to the citizens of Lincoln County.
With that, the Lincoln County War was set in motion. Even though the McSween faction (of which Billy the Kid was a part) was often thought of as the “good guys”, it was Murphy who had the law on his side, as well as backing by the corrupt and powerful Santa Fe Ring, who ruled New Mexico at the time. Within a short time John Tunstall and Alexander McSween would both be dead as casualties in the so-called war, Billy the Kid would be an outlaw, and his former friend Pat Garrett would hunt him down in what has now become a legendary tale of tragedy and betrayal.
If the coyote had never howled at that precise moment on the night McSween met Otero and McSween never went to Lincoln, is it possible then that the Lincoln County War never would have happened?
This was by no means pondered by myself but was proposed by Walter Noble Burns in his classic literary piece The Saga of Billy the Kid in which he wrote:
“If the coyote in the hills had kept silence that night, one of the chapters of New Mexico’s history that was written in blood might never have been written at all.”
There’s a fine line between corny and clever, but would it be too much to call this hair-trigger incident the Coyote Effect? Apparently Burns was years ahead of his time. The Saga of Billy the Kid was published back in 1925, and the Butterfly Effect theory was not proposed until 1972 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., by Edward Lorenz.
Weaving an epic, almost Greek, tragedy out of the Lincoln County War Burns wrings more drama out of the aforementioned chance meeting by writing:
"A letter of casual courtesy, written by a stranger, met by accident, to a man they had never heard of in a town of whose existence they had never dreamed, changed the whole course of life for the McSweens, turned them aside from the happiness which apparently was their just due, and involved them in a strange tangle of tragedies which apparently they did not deserve. Fate crooked a beckoning finger from the Capitans, and without hesitation, blindly, blithely, they obeyed the summons."
Of course, there is the problem that Burns did romanticize his work on The Saga of Billy the Kid a little too much, such as his allegation that Mrs. McSween played the Star Spangled Banner on her piano during the siege at her home in which her husband eventually lost his life. Although she was interviewed by Burns, Mrs. McSween vehemently denied the piano playing incident, leading one to wonder what else Burns may have exaggerated, including the notion that the coyote’s fateful howl may have started a war.
The idea that a coyote’s howl may have triggered one of the most viscous confrontations in all of New Mexico’s history is still a fascinating one though. If that coyote hadn’t have howled at that exact moment, then perhaps Otero would have never struck up conversation with the McSweens, the lawyer and his wife would have never moved to Lincoln County, never joined forces with Tunstall and Chisum, the Lincoln County War never would’ve happened, Billy the Kid would’ve never been gunned down by Pat Garret in Ft. Sumner for his “crimes” during the war and never become famous, the million dollar economy that is the Kid with it’s racetracks, gambling casinos, museums, and tourist attractions never would have happened, Emilio Estevez would have never played the Kid in Young Guns I and II, Bill Richardson may not be running for president, and…well, the list goes on.
It still begs the question though: After all these years should the principle of the Butterfly Effect really have been called the Coyote Effect instead?
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Reader Comments (2)
http://www.mrarmageddon.com/awesome/learnedfromsimpsons/space_coyote.jpg
"You have found your beneficent path to infamy, Mike and John. Now [obligatory melodramatic pause] do you know who your soul mates are?" - Coyote [speaking in a telepathically perceived voice that sounds suspiciously like that of the late Johny Cash, to John LeMay, and Mike Smith who have just eaten the merciless literary chili peppers of Quetzlzacatenango, grown deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum] ;-)
Seriously though, good comment--especially "That trickster, Coyote, was named as the preferred manifestation of 9 out of 10 shape-shifting shaman and professional skin walkers (when polled by the Amerindian Medicine Association)."