The Essential American Soul, Wyoming Version

…He lives by death, by killing the wild things of the air and earth.

It’s not good enough. But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted…A man who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white. This is the very intrinsic-most American. He is at the core of all the other flux and fluff. And when this man breaks from his static isolation, and makes a new move, then look out, something will be happening.

–DH Lawrence, “Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels,” Studies in Classic American Literature

The US is a violent country.  Every American knows this. We need violence to get through the day. We need to watch it. We need to play at violence in games. We need to hear it and feel it. We need to believe we’re more violent than anyone else. We need the security of thinking no one can take our violence away. We’re frightened by the violence around us and turned on by the violence done to others. Many of us are scared we’re not violent enough, that when push comes to shove, when it comes time to prove our violence, we won’t measure up. 

Violence is the American pathology. Killing is our pathogen. No masks allowed. Let it spread.

We celebrate our violence in national holidays. Put on violent displays on the lawn of the White House. We light up the skies above us with simulated missiles and explosions and ooh and awe in tones reserved for the sex Americans can’t seem to enjoy unless it too seethes with more than a touch of violent domination. Hollywood has trained us to think of our orgasms as fireworks going off, bombs exploding. Sex and death are conflated in our minds, forever merged. Our pleasure principle runs on the desire to inflict pain, to demonstrate our power, even as the power of the country fades. The American male feels empty and impotent without it.

We take our violence with us. To work. To the bar. To the football stadium. To the bedroom. To Europe. To the Middle East.We must demonstrate who we are, wherever we go.. To ourselves and to others. We take our violence into the woods. Into the mountains. Into the deserts. We inflict violence whenever we can against any living creature that passes our way. But it’s no good to merely kill. We must prove we’ve killed. Others must know. So we take home the skins, the heads, the bones of what we’ve killed as trophies. We film our acts of killing. We pose with the carcasses. We broadcast the images. We kill for the sake of killing. Our way of life is a bloodsport.  Though few who act out the scenes in its pages have read it, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian has become our Holy Text, the how-to guide to becoming an all-American white man, white in the mind, I mean, bone white in the soul–a post-modern Deerslayer, primed to go off on full-automatic.

We sanctify ourselves in the blood of what we’ve killed. Mark ourselves with it. We initiate our children with stories of bloodshed. We sit them in front of a screen where they will see more than 12,000 violent acts a year, 33 killings a day, day after day, some of the snuff films produced almost weekly by our own Department of War. We indoctrinate our children into our violent ethos. By the time they are 12, they are as drenched in virtual blood as was the young Ike McCaslin in Faulkner’s “The Bear,” one of the best stories ever written about how endemic violence is to the American character and the way violence defines how we think of ourselves.  Americans tell themselves tall tales about how heroic our killing is and we believe that the stories are real. That they are history. Our history. Our birthright.  Inscribed in our Constitution, as it were. Ritualized. The world is there for us to kill and consecrate ourselves with its blood. 

We need to “get” our deer, our elk, our salmon, our trout, our fox, our beaver, our coon, our wolf, our bear. We see ourselves as failures if we don’t come back with something dead in our bag, over our shoulder, on a sled, in a cooler, in the truck bed, or strapped to the hood of the SUV. We’ll kill birds and insects and reptiles and trees and cacti and rocks. We’ll kill entire mountainsides.  We’ll kill rivers. We’ll kill each other. We’ll even kill the dead. We count the kills in our games and share the scores with others. We must kill more today than yesterday. We will kill until there’s nothing left to kill. Then we’ll kill ourselves.

Here, the honor is not in how one kills, but in the act of killing itself. The ability to kill. To kill without regret. Without being haunted by the lives you’ve cut short, even innocent lives. Especially innocent lives. To kill with your hands, with a knife, with a gun, with an arrow, with a joystick, by pressing a button, by opening the bomb-bay doors, by striking a match, by inserting a needle, by flipping a switch.  

That’s the ideal American psyche at work, the way we’re programmed to be. We must kill and demonstrate that we killed as proof of citizenship, a symbolic passport into the Republic of Death. The real American psycho isn’t an outlier. Not here, anyway. He’s your neighbor, your uncle, your brand representative, your lawyer, your banker, your golf partner, your kid. The kid you made. The kid you shaped and molded to be just like you.

We’ve seen regular American kids do their wet work at Shiloh and Antietam, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, at Samar and Moro Crater in the The Philippines, during the Caco War in Haiti, in Okinawa, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at Cinacattì and Biscari, at Maledy, Chenogne, and Dresden, at No Gun Ri, in Selma and Birmingham, at My Lai, Chu Lai, Thuy Bo, Hué, and Son Thang, at Benedict Canyon and on Cielo Drive, at El Mozote, in Jonestown, at Columbine, in Amiriyah, in Waco, at Bagram, in Maiwand and Panjwayi, at Fallujah and Abu Ghraib, at Sandy Hook and Uvalde, at a girls school in Minab, Iran.  Any mother’s son can become an American killer and get praised by the President, even for jabbing a knife into an injured prisoner of war, who was just a kid, a teenage boy, then posing for a photo with his corpse and sending it to your buddies, like Eddie “the Blade” Gallagher. Or you can brag in your memoir about shooting your puppy in the head and casually tossing its body in a quarry, to prove a woman could be as cruel as any white man, then get rewarded with a cabinet post, like Kristi Noem.

In this context, then, consider these two stories from the all-American state of Wyoming. A mythic American state. The Cowboy State. The state of oil patch wildcatters. (We take the names of the things we kill. We own them.) The Dick Cheney State. The state that was wrested into American hands by violence and maintained by violence. A state where great and unrelenting violence is done to the Earth in the heart of one of its most glorious landscapes, where it is stripped, blasted, slashed, burned, drained, bulldozed, gouged, drilled and poisoned.

There are many ways to kill a wolf in America. But most of them are mundane and prosaic. They’re not likely to bring you acclaim and notoriety. Few will hear about your feat if you simply gun down a wolf from a helicopter, kill a wolf with an M-44 cyanide bomb, pour gas into a wolf den filled with pups and strike a match, put out a contract on a wolf with a hired killer from the government, track down a wolf with a drone and shoot it with a long-range rifle and telescopic scope, inject rat poison in an elk carcass and wait for wolves (and whoever else) to feed on it and die an agonizing death, run one over with your cybertruck or, like the current Governor of Montana, catch a wolf in a trap and then after it has struggled to free itself for a few painful days heroically shoot it.

But if you want to get your name in the papers and your drunken face on cable TV, you’ve got to be more creative. You can’t just be a routine sadist anymore; you’ve got to go the extra mile. You’ve got to bring your wolf torture to the people. Consider this: since wolves lost their protection under the Endangered Species Act more than 1,000 wolves are killed in the US each year, either by hunters, poachers or government wolf killers. They’re killed quietly, remorselessly, anonymously. Hardly anyone notices.

In 2024, a Wyoming hombre named Cody Roberts set out to change all that. Roberts runs a trucking company in Daniel, Wyoming, a small town in the Green River valley southeast of Jackson. He’s a grown man who likes to post photos of himself on Facebook with animals that he’s killed: pheasants, elk, deer and a mountain lion. But merely posing with slaughtered wildlife didn’t get him that much acclaim. Then one day in late February, Roberts was out on his snowmobile when he spotted a wolf, hit the throttle and began to chase it. All in good fun, you know. Ultimately, Roberts caught up with the terrified, exhausted animal and ran over it twice, for good measure. He could have run over it a third time and no one would have given a damn. Like 85 percent of Wyoming, this section of the Green River Valley, cleaving between the Gros Ventre and Wind River Mountains, is a predator kill zone, which means you can kill pretty much any wolf you see, however you want to kill it and nobody will pay much attention, certainly not the government or CNN. Chasing down a wolf with your snowmobile and running over it repeatedly is a perfectly legal thing to do in Wyoming. Some even call it sport.

Then Roberts got the idea that would make him famous. Rather than put the injured wolf out of its misery (or, god forbid, find a vet to treat its wounds), why not take it back to town and show off his captive in society? So Roberts duct-taped the wolf’s mouth shut and hauled it all the way home to Daniel, population 158, where he took selfies of himself and his prize. In one photo, the grinning Roberts is holding a beer, as he squats next to the distressed animal, which biologists later estimated was little more than a pup, probably only nine months old. But in Wyoming, even pups are fair game. You can shoot them, trap them, cudgel them, poison them, burn them, and use them as jumps for your snowmobile. Nothing wrong with any of that, legally speaking.

Here’s where Roberts crossed the line that made his name. That evening, Cody took his prize to the oldest building in town, the Green River Bar. Ever a prankster, he walked into the saloon announcing that he’d found a “lost cattle dog.” The bartender, who knew something was up, said, “Cody, you better not bring in a fucking lion!”

It wasn’t a lion (this time, anyway). It was an angular, trembling, gravely injured wolf pup with a light gray coat–a wolf that could barely move. The wolf was now muzzled and had two collars strapped around its neck, a tracking collar and a shock collar. Roberts pulled the wolf around on a leash, showing off his mangled catch to the 30 or so patrons in the Green River Bar, many of them apparently his relatives.  After a couple of hours of drinking and boasting, Roberts dragged the wolf out of this venerable establishment and shot it. Shot it dead. (Though to give you an idea of what the Wyoming Fish and Game officials think of wolves, their write-up on the incident referred to the leashed and shock-collared wolf pup Roberts shot behind the saloon as being “harvested.”)

Word of this inspiring spectacle soon spread, ultimately reaching the offices of Wyoming’s Game and Fish Department. An investigation was launched. Not into the wolf’s torture and death, which from the state of Wyoming’s point of view was a thing to be desired, but into how the wolf went social, how it got into town, into a bar, spending hours with humans without killing or even biting anyone, some of the patrons even petting and sympathizing with this wild canid of legendary ferocity.  This was the line that must not be crossed. This was the act that must be punished. So Roberts was initially given a citation for the offense of illegally possessing warm-blooded wildlife. He was fined all of $250, a penalty Roberts gladly paid. One local told WyoFile that Roberts has “been going around town telling people it was worth it. $250? That’s a round for the bar.” It’s the price of fame…or infamy. The two are pretty much inseparable in American society these days. [Roberts ultimately was charged and pleaded guilty to animal cruelty and was sentenced in April 2026 to 18 months’ probation and fined $1,000.]

Two years later, another Wyoming man tortured, kicked, tossed and repeatedly stabbed a coyote to death. On camera. The video, which was sent by a private investigator to the Cowboy State Daily. 

The video shows a desert landscape in winter. A man dressed in camo reaches under an icy shrub and pulls out a coyote by its tail. The coyote is bleeding. It has already been wounded. The man hurls the injured animal into the air. (Average weight of a coyote is just 30 pounds, though this one seems even thinner.) It lands several yards away. The coyote appears stunned. Then after a few seconds, it gets up and tries to run. But one of its legs appears to be broken. It can barely move as it tries to hobble away from its assailant.

The man chases after the coyote and kicks the crippled animal in the head. The coyote howls in pain. Then it falls. The man draws a knife. He walks around the coyote, who is lying down, trembling from pain and fear. The coyote’s breathing is labored. The man plunges the knife into the coyote’s shoulder. Then he kicks the coyote again. The coyote raises its head. Its mouth is open. The coyote stares back at the man with the knife, looming above it. The man hits the coyote on the head with the flat blade of his knife. The video ends before the man stabs the coyote once more.

Anyone who has lived with dogs and knows the intelligence of canids, their sense of themselves, their loyalty and pride, will recognize the last look that wounded coyote gives to its torturer: why me, what have I done? It’s a look of betrayal of the co-evolutionary link between humans and canids.

After the video was released, a Wyoming man admitted in a video statement that he was the person who tortured and killed the coyote. His name isn’t worth mentioning, but you can find his confession here.

He said he’d gone on a coyote hunt in West Texas. He and his buddy had chased a coyote in an ATV, wounding the animal. Then he pursued the coyote on foot. “When I got to it (the coyote), um, it wasn’t dead, it was still alive,” Wyoming Man said. “Pulled it out of a brush pile, um, kicked its legs out from under it, stabbed it, you know, it was growling at me, I kicked it again.” Wyoming Man said he has no respect for coyotes, wolves, and other predators because they “tear apart” their prey. “That’s not an excuse, that’s just a fact of life.”

I doubt Wyoming Man is a vegan. How does he kill and prepare the flesh he consumes? Does he get the slaughterhouse to do the ripping and tearing for him? There are few ghastlier places on earth than a confined feeding facility or an IBP abattoir.

Wyoming Man said they were hunting coyotes that day because they’d attacked his buddy’s horses and livestock. The average coyote weighs about 30 pounds, this one looks even thinner. That’s less than half the size of Lola, our Australian shepherd. Lola couldn’t bring down a thousand-pound horse, even if she wanted to, and neither could a coyote. Mainly, coyotes eat rodents: mice, voles, rats, and gophers. They’ll eat a rabbit, if they can catch one, which is rare. Like RFK Jr., they have a fondness for carrion, especially roadkill. They’ll dine on frogs, snakes, beetles and grasshoppers. They’ll nibble on grass and leaves, eat nuts, mushrooms and berries. But they don’t eat sheep, pigs, cows, dogs or horses. They’re good to have around. They make fine music in the evenings, yipping, laughing and howling, ridge to ridge, in a songlike style that can go on for half an hour. They communicate to each other, to us, to any being that’s listening. And if you listen often enough you’ll begin to get a sense of what those songs express: joy, horniness, loneliness, fear, a wild defiance.

Wyoming Man worked for an outdoor clothing and gear company called Born Primitive, which fired him after he admitted to the torture and killing of the coyote, saying in a press release: “Born Primitive Outdoor  supports ethical hunting.” Whatever that means. The Trump administration just re-legalized the use of M40 cyanide bombs as an “ethical” means of killing coyotes, devices just as barbaric as Wyoming Man’s knife-wielding savagery.

How far do you take the ethical killing of sentient beings? Where does that logic lead? To blasting wolves that wander across the boundary of Yellowstone National Park? Shooting endangered Bengal tigers to protect eco-tourists? Standing your ground against Trayvon Martin and his bag of Skittles and can of Arizona Ice Tea? Taking headshots at kids scrambling for food in Gaza City?

After “pumping lead” into a pack of wolves and watching a mortally wounded she-wolf bleed out, the young forester Aldo Leopold looked into the wolf’s eyes and saw “a fierce green fire” burning out, which he recognized as the end of something vital in America. The experience changed his life and radically altered the history of the American environmental movement. Nearly a century later, when so much of the American wild has been lost, pulverized and rendered into numbers on balance sheets, what did Wyoming Man, Leatherstocking in Camo, all geared up and outfitted to hunt and kill, see when he looked into the dying eyes of the panting, bleeding coyote that made him stab it one more time? A threat? You don’t grab the tail, run after, and kick an animal you really fear, do you? I don’t know. But I don’t think he saw or felt anything. Not even his own reflection in the glassy darkness, remaining insensate to the enveloping void around him. For Wyoming Man, it was merely a case of “very bad optics for the hunting community.” (There it is: the concern over how it looks to other hunters versus how he looked to the coyote and the look the coyote gave to him.) 

Wyoming Man is no Lone Ranger. His brutal exploits were simply caught on tape and leaked to the wrong people. He’s one of thousands with the same white mentality, deep white, who kill because they can, because they want to, because they have to. There’s a group that kills coyotes. It’s their thing. It’s part of what they think defines them as men. There are, in fact, so many of them out there that a coyote is killed almost every minute of the day in the US, more than 500,000 a year. Year after year. They are shot, trapped, poisoned, and bombed. They are chased down by packs of dogs, by ATVs, by government killers in helicopters. They’re killed for sport, they’re killed for fun, they’re killed out of hatred, they’re killed out of anxiety, they’re killed from boredom. They’re killed in killing contests. They’re killed in their dens with their pups. They’re burned alive, for kicks.

Bad optics, indeed. Very bad. But those “bad optics” are often the point. They serve as a kind of testimonial to your “whiteness” as an American man. How you prove you’re a true killer.  That what you’ve done is real, man. Gratuitous violence is only meaningful when it’s conspicuous. When it is shared and shared again.  When it gets a lot of likes or dislikes. It doesn’t matter which. People have to know what you have done, how you did it and, most importantly, that you’ve done it without regrets. That beneath the “flux and fluff,” this is your intrinsic nature.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.