The Basement: Dan Flores | Ice Age Giants, Camels in America, and Coyote Resilience

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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AJ Gentile (0:30)

Today I'm talking with Dan Flores. Dan is a historian of the American West, and he spent 40 years writing the biographies of North America's wild animals. Coyotes, bison, wild horses, wolves. 40 years writing biographies for animals that can't sue him for defamation. That's a smart business model, honestly. His most famous book is Coyote America, and the story it tells is hard to believe. For most of the last century, the federal government tried to erase one animal from the continent with poison, bounties and money from Congress. The Coyote won. Today we're covering that war and the two brothers who exposed it, the footprints at White Sands and the direwolves. Real direwolves? Finally, one that might outlive that star kid. There's a moment where Dan analyzes a set of 23,000-year-old footprints, like a witness statement, a teenage girl, a toddler on her hip, a ground sloth rearing up when it catches or sent.

That one is a good story. Let's go down to the basement.

I'm excited to talk to you, sir.

Dan Flores (1:39)

Well, I'm excited to be here.

AJ Gentile (1:41)

Before we talk about animals, I want, this is a story telling show, and you're a story teller, so this is perfect.

Take me back to your junior in college, you're meeting with your creative writing professor, and something ends up in sports or field. What happened?

Dan Flores (2:01)

Well, I'm impressed that you know that. Yeah, so I was an English major as an undergraduate, and I had a creative writing professor who was quite good, and he published sort of Wild West kind of novels.

And so I was impressed by the fact that, you know, he knew the publishing world and had an agent and all that sort of thing. So he asked us to do a piece in his class, as if we were going to write it for a magazine. And so I sat down and duly wrote this piece, and he read it, and I frankly don't remember exactly what sort of grade he gave me on it. Although one of the things I remember he did say to me was, he said, so you do, you've got a ready flow of words, and that's a good thing for a writer. So that's kind of almost the only memory I had of what exactly he said. But I did have the fun before the semester was over, of going into his office, having sent that piece to Sportsafield magazine, and had an editor there after taking a look at it, about a month later, sent me a letter, an official letterhead, stationery, Sportsafield, and said, we like your piece. It was about crows and ravens, and we're going to publish it. And so I got to go into my creative writing professor and show him a letter of acceptance from a national magazine for that piece I did.

AJ Gentile (3:42)

Did you get a check?

Dan Flores (3:43)

I did get a check, yeah.

SPEAKER_4 (3:44)

No, no, your first gig.

Dan Flores (3:45)

It was my first gig. It was, you know, they didn't, because I didn't have any illustrations for it. In fact, one of the things, this particular editor's name was David Pitzel. I've never forgotten him, because he sort of became, he took me under his wing, and sort of told me how to play the game and what he would be interested in and what to look at. And one of the things he told me was, we're going to have to hire an illustrator to illustrate your piece, because you don't have any illustrations, you don't have any photographs to go with it.

Go and buy yourself a 35mm camera, get Kodachrome film, get yourself a 300mm telephoto lens, and follow the sort of photographs we published by a guy, one of their photographers is named Edwin Bower. Follow the kind of photographs he does, and when you submit things to us in the future, send me photographs and I can double your check. But the original check for that piece was $300.

AJ Gentile (4:42)

That's gotta be good money.

Dan Flores (4:45)

When you're a junior in college, and more than that, I think what it gave me a sense of, I remember telling my mother, you know, shit, I think I can be a writer.