Old Man Coyote

The Authorized Edition

by Frank B Linderman

“Of dramatic interest. . . . [Linderman’s] prose is clean and crisp, and in its qualities of movement and poetry superbly adequate to the demands made upon it.”—New York Times.

Trickster and transformer, powerful and vulnerable, Coyote is a complex figure in Indian legend. He was often the ultimate example of how not to be: foolish, proud, self-important. The tales in Old Man Coyote were told by the Crow Indians of present-day southeastern Montana. During long winter evenings by the lodge fire, they enjoyed hearing about the only warrior ever to visit the Bird Country, the Little-people who adopted a lost boy, the two-faced tribe that gambled for keeps, the marriage of Worm-face, and the origin of the buffalo. Wandering through these well-spun tales is the irrepressible Old Man Coyote, sometimes scoring a coup, sometimes getting his comeuppance.

Ohio-born Frank B. Linderman (1869–1938) spent his adult life in Montana, first as a trapper, then as a publisher, politician, and businessman. Fred W. Voget is an adjunct professor of anthropology at Portland State University and the author of The Shoshoni-Crow Sun Dance.

— ©1996