Speaker 1: This is me Eat Your Podcast coming in you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely folk bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything. Hey, everyone, welcome to the Me
Speaker 1: Eat Your Podcast. This is as high as we've ever
Speaker 1: been in that we're in the nineteenth four of a
Speaker 1: hotel right now, Seattle, Washington, the Western Um. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is the Yeah, as high as we've ever been, looking
Speaker 1: out on Puget Sound. And I'm here with couple folks.
Speaker 1: But the most important one right now is are you
Speaker 1: still go by professor? You can't be a professor anymore.
Speaker 1: I'm not a professor anymore. Now, So what are you now? Uh?
Speaker 1: Just a citizen, right, I guess? Oh yeah, I can
Speaker 1: say that. We're here with the writer Dan. Now. We
Speaker 1: had this debate earlier because I had always thought I
Speaker 1: had always like floorries. That's correct, Okay, I thought this
Speaker 1: this guy, your former student, doesn't know that. What were
Speaker 1: you trying to tell me? It was? I've always heard flores, yeah,
Speaker 1: within Flores, yeah, Flores. Yeah, it's uh, it's because it's
Speaker 1: pronounced uh with a Louisiana French accent, like it's floor. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So writer and citizen Dan Flores who I met when
Speaker 1: he was Professor Dan Flores years ago. I was in
Speaker 1: graduate school and I had to. I think it was
Speaker 1: part of the recordment. You take a seminar or something
Speaker 1: outside of your discipline. I was a writing, a writing student,
Speaker 1: and I took a class. Um, I took your class.
Speaker 1: What was your that class called? You remember the when
Speaker 1: I was in it was it was an environment all
Speaker 1: writing seminar, I think is what you took. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I was just humiliated in it. Um, way out of
Speaker 1: my league. All these guys I knew all about writing
Speaker 1: about things that they were sure happened instead of things
Speaker 1: you thought might have happened. Um. Which is part of
Speaker 1: the being a historian. I think that they try to
Speaker 1: train you and that I recall you might have that class. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I was like I was out gone. There was
Speaker 1: some good students in there. Man. But I met Dana
Speaker 1: took that class, and it was just had a profound
Speaker 1: impact on me. Um. The body of literature that you know,
Speaker 1: we looked at and just like a way of thinking
Speaker 1: about things. Um. We had your student on who Who's here?
Speaker 1: Randa Williams on talking about his dissertation he did, and
Speaker 1: you were involved in that as an advisor. Yea, um,
Speaker 1: but just just again, can you hit what um in
Speaker 1: your own words, like what an environmental historian is and
Speaker 1: does and looks at. It's not it's that terms not
Speaker 1: a term people are familiar with outside of academics and scenes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a kind of term that you end
Speaker 1: up explaining to people in bars quite a bit, uh
Speaker 1: when they ask you, you know what you do or
Speaker 1: what you write about? I mean, basically, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a way of thinking about their relationship between people in
Speaker 1: the natural world. And so it's and and doing it
Speaker 1: using history, which of course causes you to to examine
Speaker 1: changes over time. And so it's a environmental history and
Speaker 1: it's only been around for about thirty five or forty
Speaker 1: years now as a as a field of study. In fact,
Speaker 1: we're in Seattle right now because the American Society for
Speaker 1: Environmental History is meeting here. This is its annual conference,
Speaker 1: and it held its first one in nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: So they'll give you an idea of how recent this
Speaker 1: feel has been around. But it's basically a way to
Speaker 1: uh to look at the history of how people have
Speaker 1: interacted with nature and that's a broad enough, uh spectrum
Speaker 1: of study that you just get the right and think
Speaker 1: about all kinds of things, you know, not just the
Speaker 1: environmental movement itself or the history of conservation Teddy Roosevelt.
Speaker 1: But uh, I mean in Randall's case, for example, he
Speaker 1: he got to think and write about how hunters have
Speaker 1: played a role in American culture in the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: And the thing I've been interested in most in the
Speaker 1: last few years has been, uh, animals and the relationship
Speaker 1: between people and animals. Yeah, and you have two books
Speaker 1: coming out right now? How many books? How many like
Speaker 1: book length manuscripts have you published? Uh? These two will
Speaker 1: be the ninth and tenth. Uh so, and that dates
Speaker 1: back to about four My first book came out in
Speaker 1: hundreds of academic papers, well hundreds. But I've written an
Speaker 1: academic popular and academic articles. Yeah, a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of popular things. I probably have published more popular
Speaker 1: things than academic pieces, but I've done I don't know,
Speaker 1: actually I'm just having a hazard guess, but maybe two
Speaker 1: or three dozen academic papers and peer reviewed kind of journals,
Speaker 1: and then I often spun off, you know, popular article
Speaker 1: or two from those kinds of things. Oh that is
Speaker 1: that how you work generally, Like you'll find stuff through
Speaker 1: your research that would be like, you know, would be
Speaker 1: suitable to a popular audience. Yeah, so you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: writing for academic journals is a wonderful things. How you
Speaker 1: make your reputation in a field and get a professorship
Speaker 1: and and all that sort of stuff. But uh, they
Speaker 1: don't pay you any money for those kinds of things.
Speaker 1: And I always I mean, I started out as a
Speaker 1: magazine writer before I ever became an academic, so I
Speaker 1: always had in my mind when I would do an
Speaker 1: academic piece, so how can I spend this off somehow
Speaker 1: as a you know, as a popular article and uh
Speaker 1: reach a bigger audience with it for one thing. Uh,
Speaker 1: make a little bit of change from it as well,
Speaker 1: but primarily kind of reach more people. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of the things I've done is as academic
Speaker 1: and scholarly things have ended up, as you know, either
Speaker 1: getting absorbed into a book or or published as a
Speaker 1: as a popular article. So what are what are the
Speaker 1: two books you have now? And why in the world
Speaker 1: are you published in two books at the same time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's an unusual thing. Um, So the books are American Serengetti,
Speaker 1: which is UM just a day or two away from
Speaker 1: officially being out UH. And the subtitle of that book
Speaker 1: is UM the Last Big Animals of the Great Plains.
Speaker 1: And the other book is called Coyote America Unnatural and
Speaker 1: Supernatural History. And that book comes out about the middle
Speaker 1: of May. And you're writing them both at the same time. Well,
Speaker 1: I wasn't really And you know, the truth is, the
Speaker 1: books are connected to one another because UM the Coyote
Speaker 1: Book or a Coyote Book was originally contracted to the
Speaker 1: publisher of the American Serengetti book, and which was a
Speaker 1: university press publisher. And I've retired from the University of
Speaker 1: Montana two years ago, and as I got close to retirement,
Speaker 1: I realized that, so there's not really much point in
Speaker 1: writing books for university presses anymore. I mean, that's really
Speaker 1: great when you're a professor and you get rewarded by
Speaker 1: your university for doing that and in the field for
Speaker 1: doing that. But I knew I was about to retire,
Speaker 1: and so to reach bigger audiences, I wanted to do
Speaker 1: a book. UM start writing books basically for UH commercial presses,
Speaker 1: And so I had acquired an agent who asked me
Speaker 1: about three or four years ago, so what are you
Speaker 1: working on now? Said, well, I've got a coyote book
Speaker 1: that's contracted to the University of Kansas Press, and uh.
Speaker 1: He said, well, why don't you write a proposal out
Speaker 1: of that and let me take it to New York
Speaker 1: and see if I can sell it? And I did
Speaker 1: and he did. Uh. The problem was, so that was
Speaker 1: all great, but the problem was University of Kansas Press
Speaker 1: didn't take all that kindly to us sort of taking
Speaker 1: their book away from them. And so the only way
Speaker 1: to kind of resolve things with with Kansas was to
Speaker 1: promise them another book, which, yeah, which they agreed to,
Speaker 1: but they also said, okay, that's fine, we want to
Speaker 1: keep the same deadline you had with us, however, And
Speaker 1: so basically this time last year, I had a deadline
Speaker 1: for the Coyote Book in New York of January, and
Speaker 1: I had a deadline for the American Sarrangetty Book in Lawrence,
Speaker 1: Kansas of May the first. So I finished up the
Speaker 1: Coyote book and uh, in hailed a couple of times,
Speaker 1: took a couple of deep breaths, and uh, since I
Speaker 1: was already used to getting up every day and writing
Speaker 1: four or five or six hours. I just kept ongoing
Speaker 1: and in another four months or so, managed to finish
Speaker 1: off that. Yeah, that American sarrang Getty book. But in
Speaker 1: a way, you've been researching that book for your entire career. Indeed,
Speaker 1: I had, and I you know, and I had, I
Speaker 1: had written some of it actually, um already, I mean
Speaker 1: I ended up I ended up revising pretty considerably the
Speaker 1: things that I've already written. But yeah, I had worked
Speaker 1: on Buffalo. Uh years ago. I had written a kind
Speaker 1: of a major scholarly peace about Buffalo that sort of reimagined,
Speaker 1: reconceptualized what happened to him in the nineteenth century. That
Speaker 1: became a pretty successful academic article. Yeah, I've I've had
Speaker 1: a lot of great luck just telling that story for you,
Speaker 1: being like you know what I was reading. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: always credit you, though, man, Yeah, well, I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: and you uh you did credit me, and I appreciated
Speaker 1: that in your in your Buffalo book. But I so
Speaker 1: that story I kind of uh you know, I knew
Speaker 1: pretty well, and that provided me with a starting point
Speaker 1: for the chapter that's on Buffalo in this American Staring
Speaker 1: Getty book. But Leo the premise of the American when
Speaker 1: you say the last big ones, you mean the last
Speaker 1: big ones that are here now? Are the last big
Speaker 1: ones like the ones we lost at the end of
Speaker 1: the Places scene. Yeah, that's an excellent question. I mean,
Speaker 1: I actually talk about both versions of the American Serengetti.
Speaker 1: The Pleistocene version um doesn't get as much coverage as
Speaker 1: the historic version of the American Serengetti, but I spend
Speaker 1: a good bit of time talking about it because down
Speaker 1: to ten thousand years ago, I mean, we really we
Speaker 1: had an African analog on the American Great Plains. Uh,
Speaker 1: with all the the charismatic megafauna that we're here. I mean,
Speaker 1: we had elephants in the form of mammoths. We had uh,
Speaker 1: we had camels. We had of course, huge herds of
Speaker 1: giant bison that were sort of the counterpart to wildebeest
Speaker 1: herds in Africa. We had a lion, the step Line,
Speaker 1: which was actually a larger lion than the African lion.
Speaker 1: We had giant and very grass isisle short faced bear
Speaker 1: that was down to about twelve years ago was probably
Speaker 1: one of the most formidable predators anywhere in the world.
Speaker 1: Some people think that humans weren't able to to migrate
Speaker 1: to North America until about fifteen thousand years ago because
Speaker 1: these short faced bears were there at the bearing straight
Speaker 1: and they presented such a formidable barrier uh to humans
Speaker 1: that we basically they had to become extinct before humans
Speaker 1: were able to get to North America. So there was
Speaker 1: this large beast she area of animals down to ten
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. A giant hunting, very fast hunting hyena. Uh.
Speaker 1: There were cheetah like cats that were related to cougars
Speaker 1: um cougars are kind of their descendants, but they were uh,
Speaker 1: curved fang cats, one called a scimitar cat. And of course, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the the these cats that we imagine from
Speaker 1: the plies to saying running down the calves of of mammoths.
Speaker 1: But most of that beast sherry, with the exception of
Speaker 1: five or six animals, when extinct about ten thousand years
Speaker 1: ago in an extinction scenario frankly that we still don't
Speaker 1: quite understand. I mean like we don't understand it temporarily.
Speaker 1: We don't understand it temporarily or in terms of costs.
Speaker 1: For example, one of the most common creatures of the Pleistocene,
Speaker 1: American Serenghetti were bands of wild horses. Some biologists believe
Speaker 1: that they comprised as much as twenty of the biomass
Speaker 1: of grazing animals on the Great Plains down to about
Speaker 1: eight or nine thousand years ago. And they the thing
Speaker 1: about horses is they migrated across the Bearing Strait and
Speaker 1: they ended up in Asia and in Africa, where they
Speaker 1: became zebras and quaggas and and related animals, uh and
Speaker 1: European horses. And they survived in all those places. But
Speaker 1: for some reason that we don't grasp, about eight or
Speaker 1: nine thousand years ago, all those horses became extinct in
Speaker 1: North America. And so we lost this giant biomass of
Speaker 1: grazing animals in the form of wild horses that completely
Speaker 1: disappeared from the Pleistocene serengetti. And we don't know exactly why.
Speaker 1: I mean, some of the speculation is that they contracted diseases. Um.
Speaker 1: Some of some of these is the blitz Creek hypothesis
Speaker 1: totally out of fashion, though it is not out of fashion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so there's a paleog Yeah. The so the ideas
Speaker 1: range from the Blitzkrieg that you mentioned, which was popularized
Speaker 1: by a paleo biology saying Paul Martin now Paul Martin
Speaker 1: at the University of Arizona, who wrote a bunch of
Speaker 1: really compelling books. The most the last one he wrote
Speaker 1: was called Twilight of the Mammoths, and his argument was
Speaker 1: that about fifteen thousand years or so ago, humans began
Speaker 1: migrating out of Asia into North America, confronting a bit
Speaker 1: of animals that had never seen human predators before. And
Speaker 1: these these people were very accomplished predators with a very
Speaker 1: sophisticated tool kit, and the Blitzkrieg model speculates that in
Speaker 1: a period of less than three hundred years, these people
Speaker 1: expanded from Siberia into the America's all the way down
Speaker 1: to the tip of South America and wiped out most
Speaker 1: of these speed She's that we're confronting human predators for
Speaker 1: the first time and just sort of collapsed in the
Speaker 1: wake of this assault. It's out on one hand, it's outlandish.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, when you look at the if,
Speaker 1: when you look at how where things went extinct win
Speaker 1: and when people showed up there, and then you have
Speaker 1: things like Mammoth's on Wrangle Island, up until four thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, and no one had ever stepped foot on wrangle.
Speaker 1: It just gets weird, man, it does get weird, and
Speaker 1: it's Martin argued, and other people have argued that as
Speaker 1: humans spread out of Africa, we actually kind of did
Speaker 1: this all over the world. Uh. You know, some of
Speaker 1: the really good examples of it are, for example, in
Speaker 1: the islands of Polynesia, where as soon as humans arrive,
Speaker 1: um for instance in a y uh thirty, some species
Speaker 1: of flightless birds become extinct within a couple of hundred
Speaker 1: years because they're such easy targets for human hunters. And
Speaker 1: humans usually arrived with dogs and sometimes with hawks, and
Speaker 1: this suite of animals that we bring along with us
Speaker 1: as domestic that's sort of play a role. And and
Speaker 1: the simplification of the ecologies of all these far flung
Speaker 1: places that we get into. Yeah, in Europe. And I'm
Speaker 1: not arguing, like I don't know enough to argue for
Speaker 1: it against it, but I'm just talking about the parts
Speaker 1: that are compelling is that Europe had versions of all
Speaker 1: these things we're talking about in the American when what
Speaker 1: you describe as the American serengetti, but they went through
Speaker 1: it thirty years ago, and we know that humans were
Speaker 1: like that. You know that the human hunters like basically us,
Speaker 1: like people that were they alive today, could fly an airplane.
Speaker 1: You know that they arrived there around those times and
Speaker 1: you saw the same thing happened again. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, it's just like, how in the world could
Speaker 1: you kill them all? Yeah, it's uh, it's it's with
Speaker 1: atladdles and that's the primary su primary weapon they had
Speaker 1: at laddles and sometimes just stabbing spears, but lay the
Speaker 1: other ones out. I kind of hijacked it with the
Speaker 1: blitz screen thing is so fascinating. It's not as fun
Speaker 1: as it's more fun than the things like the disease.
Speaker 1: Yeah it is. And so uh, the best evidence, by
Speaker 1: the way, for the blitzkrieg is in North America is
Speaker 1: with mammoths. I mean we we've only recently, for instance,
Speaker 1: actually discovered kill sites of horses in North America from
Speaker 1: there have been some discovered in the last seven or
Speaker 1: eight ten years. Yeah, and those are the first one.
Speaker 1: So part of the problem with the blitzkrieg model is that, Okay,
Speaker 1: so if that's your model, then you expect to go
Speaker 1: out there and archaeology paleoarchaeology is going to yield up
Speaker 1: all these sites with slaughtered animals, sort of the way
Speaker 1: it does in Europe. At with horses in France. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a spot in France where something like thirty or
Speaker 1: forty thousand horse carcasses were killed and butchered by human
Speaker 1: hunters driving off cliffs. Well, I mean, that was the
Speaker 1: speculation for a long time. It looks like what they
Speaker 1: were actually doing was driving them into corrals. They were
Speaker 1: driving them into corral. Such a horrific vision driven off
Speaker 1: a cliff's yeah, it's a horrific vision. And there's a
Speaker 1: there's a wonderful nineteenth century illustration of horses pouring off
Speaker 1: a cliff in France. But it looks as if what
Speaker 1: they actually were doing were billing corrals and crawling them
Speaker 1: and then then kill them. Some people argue, in fact
Speaker 1: that the reason we have modern horses, which most of
Speaker 1: which spring from European and African sources, is because about
Speaker 1: six thousand years ago we domesticated them before we could
Speaker 1: kill them all off. We finally domesticated them, and that's
Speaker 1: what enabled them to serve in the mythology of plains
Speaker 1: tribes horses sometimes play a role, or am I wrong?
Speaker 1: I remember someone pointing out that, like the like this
Speaker 1: idea of of the mounted planes hunter was a two
Speaker 1: was like a brief phenomenon's it started to years ago.
Speaker 1: But they're like, how could it be so ingrained? How
Speaker 1: could the horse become so quickly so ingrained in the mythology.
Speaker 1: It just had such a profound impact on them. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, some some tribes. I saw an exhibit in
Speaker 1: in Calgary several years ago that was curated by the
Speaker 1: Blackfoot Confederacy and at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and
Speaker 1: and these Blackfoot elders said in the text of this
Speaker 1: exhibit that there mythological stories remembered horses from thousands of
Speaker 1: years ago, and so they argued that they had preserved
Speaker 1: a memory of horses from back in the Plies to Saine,
Speaker 1: and when in the seventeen hundreds they encountered European horses,
Speaker 1: they were able to draw on some mythology about these animals. Um,
Speaker 1: you hear the term collective memory, Yeah, and a collective
Speaker 1: tribal memory is I mean, you know, I don't denigrate
Speaker 1: that at all. It's it's entirely possible that that was
Speaker 1: the case. But I would say that Martin's argument about
Speaker 1: a blitzkrieg is most evident with mammoths, where we do
Speaker 1: have kill sites with projectile points like Clovis points embedded
Speaker 1: in the skeletal material of the recovered animals, and they're
Speaker 1: there are a lot of of Clovis sites with mammoths.
Speaker 1: Do you remember that you and I visited one of
Speaker 1: those slights together, Well, I wrote about that. That's sort
Speaker 1: of like that's how the American Serengetti book opens, In fact,
Speaker 1: is when that with that visit that you and I
Speaker 1: made over to Blackwater Draw, uh and sort of giving
Speaker 1: ourselves our own personal tour because I were called. We
Speaker 1: drove all the way over there from Santa Fe and
Speaker 1: the place was close, so we just hopped over the
Speaker 1: fence and and gave ourselves a tour. But uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: so the Blackwater Draw, I mean, that's that's the the
Speaker 1: the original Clovis site in North America where butchered mammoths
Speaker 1: were first found with with evidence of human hunting. But
Speaker 1: there's not much evidence for the other animals. I mean,
Speaker 1: you'd think that there would be all these camel sites
Speaker 1: out there with butchered remains and points and horse sits
Speaker 1: and and so that's been one of the problems more
Speaker 1: recently last ten or fifteen years with the Blitz Creeg
Speaker 1: model is that there's not there aren't the sites out there.
Speaker 1: Maybe we just haven't found them, but except for the
Speaker 1: mammoth site, there's not much out there. There's a I
Speaker 1: believe at Lyndenmeyer, the Lindenmeyer site near Fort Collins, Colorado,
Speaker 1: there was a foreshaft made from a camel bone. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there's evidence obviously that they were using yeah, picking
Speaker 1: it up. They were at least exploiting the remains of camus,
Speaker 1: whether they were camels where they were killing or not.
Speaker 1: So what is the horse sight that turned up? It's one.
Speaker 1: It's one near Boulder, Uh, Colorado. Uh. And I've not
Speaker 1: read much about it or visited it, but it's one
Speaker 1: that uh was unearthed I don't know, maybe seven eight
Speaker 1: years ago. So there is a horse sight near Boulder
Speaker 1: that shows evidence of human butchering and evidently human kills
Speaker 1: of horses. The problem with that, of course, is that
Speaker 1: you'd think if the horse comprised thirty of the biomass
Speaker 1: of all these grazing animals. There would be scores of
Speaker 1: sights like that, and we've struggled to try to find
Speaker 1: any at all. So that's led some people to say, Okay,
Speaker 1: what actually happened to these animals was a changing climate.
Speaker 1: We know that about the time, so two things happened.
Speaker 1: A copy said about the time all these animals disappeared,
Speaker 1: humans arrived from Asia and the climate started changing, and
Speaker 1: the climate was cycling into a much warmer and drier regime.
Speaker 1: And so one of the arguments about what happened to
Speaker 1: all these original American Serengeti animals is that they basically
Speaker 1: succumbed to a changing climate. They were evolved to kind
Speaker 1: of an ice age climate, and when the climate turned
Speaker 1: warm and dry, uh, it basically dried up their habitat,
Speaker 1: and so they disappeared as a result of that. And
Speaker 1: then one of the more most recent explanations is a
Speaker 1: disease explanation, which is so far mostly speculative because we
Speaker 1: don't other than people saying, Okay, we can't figure this out.
Speaker 1: There's got to be some other reason, and maybe it's disease.
Speaker 1: The problem is that right, carnivore exactly and I think
Speaker 1: people focus on all these large animals, but we lost
Speaker 1: many many small animals, lost a lot of small animals,
Speaker 1: although at least in In Martin's argument, it's mostly the
Speaker 1: large animals and a lot of the small animals are intact.
Speaker 1: But Martin even argues that I mean, so, for instance,
Speaker 1: some of the I mean horses specialized in stiper grasses
Speaker 1: and needle and thread grasses, and those grasses are still
Speaker 1: all over the West. So it's like the fodder that
Speaker 1: they were grazing is still there, but the animals disappeared.
Speaker 1: So the truth is right now. This is one of
Speaker 1: the great mysteries of North American environment. I would too,
Speaker 1: I'd love to know anybody had to keep the secret,
Speaker 1: but we have not figured it out yet. All we
Speaker 1: know is that that version, that much uh African like
Speaker 1: version of the Serengetti disappeared between eight and twelve thousand
Speaker 1: years ago. So what do you call in the Serengetti like?
Speaker 1: Lay it off me. In terms of geography, it's the
Speaker 1: It's basically the American Great Plains, so the Hunter Meridian
Speaker 1: to the Rockies. Yeah, it's the hundredth meridian. Uh. In
Speaker 1: some instances for some species slightly further east. Uh, but
Speaker 1: basically about the hundredth meridian to the Rockies and from
Speaker 1: Texas uh into Alberta and Saskatchewan. So just for people
Speaker 1: to get a grasp on it to be like the
Speaker 1: Texas Panhandle, right western Oklahoma, western Kansas exactly, kind of
Speaker 1: all of the Colorado, all of the Dakotas, yeah, all
Speaker 1: the all the dakotassa, portions of New Mexico, Yeah, eastern
Speaker 1: New Mexico and up into a handful of Canadian provinces,
Speaker 1: right yeah, up, And basically the plains sort of start
Speaker 1: grading as you go farther north, they begin to grade
Speaker 1: into aspen motts uh at about oh, I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe the fifty second parallel fifty one or fifty second
Speaker 1: parallel as you go north, and the Canadian US border
Speaker 1: is the parallel. So a couple of degrees north of
Speaker 1: the Canadian border, you start losing the savannah's the grasslands,
Speaker 1: and you began to have that country broken up by
Speaker 1: copses of trees. So that's basically it. So it's this,
Speaker 1: it says long north south stretching uh province east of
Speaker 1: the Rocky Mountains that stretches about fifteen to sev hundred
Speaker 1: miles north and south, and from the Rockies eastward goes
Speaker 1: maybe four hundred miles. So it's that area, and that
Speaker 1: area for eight hundred thousand years has been one of
Speaker 1: the marvels of the world in terms of enormous numbers
Speaker 1: of big animals, grazers and all the predators that that
Speaker 1: preyed on them. And yeah, so that's it. So earlier
Speaker 1: you're talking about I asked you if you meant the
Speaker 1: ones that used to be here are the ones that
Speaker 1: you here? Now you're taking like the whole dynamic view
Speaker 1: of it. What's here? What's here? Now? Do you get
Speaker 1: into who lived and why do they live? I guess
Speaker 1: because you can't. You can't say why they lived if
Speaker 1: you don't know what why the other ones succumbed. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's uh. You know, this is one of the things
Speaker 1: about sort of ecological history or environmental history is that,
Speaker 1: you know, as John Muir said about things, everything is
Speaker 1: connected everything else, and so it becomes kind of impossible
Speaker 1: to just look at a snapshot, say the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: when we know there were millions of buffalo and the
Speaker 1: Great Plains without understanding how they got there, and the
Speaker 1: reason they were there in our historical account from the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century is because of that extinction that happened ten
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. Only a small handful of animals survived
Speaker 1: that extinction. Bison were one of the primary survivors of it.
Speaker 1: Gray wolves became a primary survivor, grizzly bears, uh, coyotes,
Speaker 1: elk of course, pronghorn antelope, which is really one of
Speaker 1: the most fascinating animals of the Great Plains, because those
Speaker 1: animals are still completely adapted to the Pleistocene serengetti they are.
Speaker 1: They're able to outrun Pronghorns can outrun today their fastest
Speaker 1: pursuers by twenty And the reason they run so much
Speaker 1: faster than gray wolves do, for instance, is because they
Speaker 1: evolved to outrun cheat us and hunting hyenas. And so
Speaker 1: here they are ten thousand years later, still adapted to
Speaker 1: out running all these animals that disappeared thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: of years ago. You know, I was I touched on
Speaker 1: this a little bit in something I did recently, and
Speaker 1: I pointed out there uh great reluctance to jumping. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it had many many people come forward with videos
Speaker 1: and photos of them in fact jumping, but a great
Speaker 1: reluctance to jump, great reluctance because they evolve done on
Speaker 1: grassland plains without the necessity of jumping very very little timber.
Speaker 1: And that's one of the reasons why when you if
Speaker 1: you watch prong horns, I mean, their technique for going
Speaker 1: through a barbed wire fence usually is to turn sideways
Speaker 1: and go through the strands. I mean, they don't do
Speaker 1: what you would think looking at them, a gazelle would do,
Speaker 1: which would be too easily bound over it, or what
Speaker 1: a mule deer does. Instead, they'll they'll go at a
Speaker 1: fence and go through the strands of barbed wire, sometimes
Speaker 1: in a big cloud of hair. But all those those
Speaker 1: creatures then survived, and the reason, for instance, prong horns
Speaker 1: and bison become so numerous is because they inherited grasslands
Speaker 1: where most of their grazing competitors have vanished. And so
Speaker 1: it's possible for bison, for instance, which ten thousand years
Speaker 1: ago probably I mean bison were maybe only five million strong,
Speaker 1: but with all the other grazing animals gone, it's possible
Speaker 1: for bison to expand their populations into the thirty million
Speaker 1: animals that we're here, uh in the nineteen hundreds are
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds, and so it's a it's a version
Speaker 1: of the American Serengetti that sort of is the next
Speaker 1: step down historical timeline, with a smaller contingent of animals,
Speaker 1: but nonetheless one that had so much magic and poetry
Speaker 1: to it that when Europeans began traveling to the Great
Speaker 1: Plains in the early nineteenth century, the early eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the most common literary motifs of
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century West are these rhapsodies about the multitudes
Speaker 1: of animals that people were were encountering so much that
Speaker 1: I mean European sportsman Uh Sir William Drummond Stewart in
Speaker 1: the eighteen thirties, uh Sir George Gore in the eighteen
Speaker 1: fifties took on a little John, bloody little John. These
Speaker 1: guys came over and they basically they conducted uh safaris
Speaker 1: on the great Planes at the almost slashes at the
Speaker 1: same time that the first safaris were happening in Africa,
Speaker 1: when British sportsmen were going into South Africa in the
Speaker 1: eighteen thirties, At the same time that William Drummond Stewart
Speaker 1: was was doing these high end guided safari hunts in
Speaker 1: the American West out on the Great Plains, and uh,
Speaker 1: I mean the stories of those are pretty remarkable. Give
Speaker 1: a snapshot of the abundance of some of the animals
Speaker 1: besides the ones we hear about, like you know, everyone's heard, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean just you know that looked like clouds moving
Speaker 1: and took days for the herds of the past. But
Speaker 1: you never hear someone articulate like how many you know
Speaker 1: a prong horner antelope we're on the landscape, or how
Speaker 1: many big horn sheep? Were people ever encountering those in
Speaker 1: a way that would be surprising to us? Now, Oh
Speaker 1: yeah they were. I mean one of my favorite descriptions
Speaker 1: of those animals is uh John James Otto Buns in
Speaker 1: eighteen forty three. I mean, here, you've got a guy,
Speaker 1: you know who is the most celebrated, uh nature painter
Speaker 1: in the United States. Uh. He had just completed in
Speaker 1: eight thirty eight The Birds of America that made him
Speaker 1: a worldwide literary and artistic figure. Had gone on a
Speaker 1: book tour of Europe with his hair cascading down around
Speaker 1: his shoulders and dressed in Buckskins is kind of the
Speaker 1: classic American noble savage. And he returns to the United
Speaker 1: States after this very successful book tour and decides he's
Speaker 1: gonna do the same thing for the mammals of America
Speaker 1: that he had just done for the birds. He had
Speaker 1: painted four and thirty five American birds, all life size
Speaker 1: on the page, and so he decides he can't obviously
Speaker 1: paint elk and buy some life size on a page,
Speaker 1: but he's going to try to do something similar. He's
Speaker 1: gonna try to to portray all the great native creatures
Speaker 1: of North Americ Okay. In order to do that, he's
Speaker 1: got to make a trip to the west. So he
Speaker 1: and his sons Um and a couple of companions in
Speaker 1: three go up the Missouri River and he gets into
Speaker 1: western North Dakota um approaching the Montana border, and right
Speaker 1: some of the most extraordinary descriptions of the multitudes of
Speaker 1: animals that he's seeing that I've ever read. I mean,
Speaker 1: he says that no one could conceive of the numbers
Speaker 1: of animals of many different varieties that they were seeing
Speaker 1: day after day after day from the proudest steam vessel,
Speaker 1: the Omega that was pushing up to Fort Union, and
Speaker 1: he closed one of my favorite lines of his. He
Speaker 1: wrote his wife a letter and he closed it with
Speaker 1: he was writing late at night, and he was describing
Speaker 1: for all these animals. He was saying. Every day, he said,
Speaker 1: I've never seen so many wolves in my life. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're going up the river and there's a wolf lying
Speaker 1: on the sandbar. There's another one climbing up the bank
Speaker 1: on the other side. There's some sitting out on sandbars
Speaker 1: in the middle of the river watching us like dogs.
Speaker 1: There was a picturesque heard of bison at the same time,
Speaker 1: cantering along and in front of us in the river.
Speaker 1: I heard of about thirty elk or swimming the river.
Speaker 1: And the racks of the bulls are projecting out of
Speaker 1: the water, and the tips are sweeping along the surface,
Speaker 1: and their mountain rams. And he just goes on and on,
Speaker 1: and he finally says to her, I've got to stop writing.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna be able to go to sleep. I'm
Speaker 1: too excited to keep going. I just I can't write anymore.
Speaker 1: And he he gives you this, you know, this lived
Speaker 1: sense of what it was like to see all these animals.
Speaker 1: Now you know what I've done and in the book
Speaker 1: is okay, I've provided the what we think what biologists
Speaker 1: think were the numbers of these animals. We think there
Speaker 1: were probably, depending on the climate, between twenty million and
Speaker 1: thirty million bison. Thirty million when the climate was good
Speaker 1: there were plenty of rains and the grass was lush,
Speaker 1: probably twenty million when there were droughts. And so it's
Speaker 1: it's not a static figure. It obviously it's consistent of
Speaker 1: what we see today with wild the numbers I mean
Speaker 1: lesser versions, but I mean it's it's nothing to have
Speaker 1: populations increase and decrease like that, absolutely, and I mean
Speaker 1: pretty on a pretty short time scale and a short
Speaker 1: time scale. And that's how that's exactly how it functioned.
Speaker 1: It's it's more a an algebraic kind of equation than
Speaker 1: it is some static figure. But the static figure that
Speaker 1: we have, and the same thing happened with these animals too,
Speaker 1: for prong horns, is about fifteen million UM four we've
Speaker 1: got at present, let's say about six hundred thousand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so from fifteen million, and I mean the one of
Speaker 1: the stories I tell in the book is that the
Speaker 1: Yano Sticado Plateau of West Texas eastern New Mexico. That's
Speaker 1: the country where you and I went to look at
Speaker 1: the Black Water draw elephants side. Uh, that was one
Speaker 1: of the best pronghorn ranges in the West. It probably
Speaker 1: had during the heyday of pronghorns, as many as two
Speaker 1: and a half three million pronghorns. Vernon Bailey of the
Speaker 1: United States Biological Survey made a trip across the Yanno
Speaker 1: Staccato in and at that point he counted thirty two
Speaker 1: thirty two of them were left in eight h in
Speaker 1: that particular part of the of the Great Plains. So
Speaker 1: what happened to all those I mean, you hear like
Speaker 1: we've gone into such a scruciating detail by what happened
Speaker 1: all the Yeah, you know, like all the facts that
Speaker 1: went into the near extermination of the buffalo or bison,
Speaker 1: and and uh, you know where what they were being
Speaker 1: used for in the commodification of them. You never read
Speaker 1: about some guy just stacking up a shipload antelope and
Speaker 1: sending the hides and tongues off in rail cards. But
Speaker 1: they did that. They did exactly that. And the reason
Speaker 1: they did that was because after the Civil War, I mean,
Speaker 1: you've got this this large contingent of young American men
Speaker 1: who have fought in the war for both the Union
Speaker 1: and the Confederacy, who no weapons, very well, they know
Speaker 1: how to shoot. And many of them return home, especially
Speaker 1: the Confederates, to a devastated region where you couldn't really
Speaker 1: make a living. And one of the things they did,
Speaker 1: we think probably as many as twenty thousand of them
Speaker 1: probably did this is they went out onto the Great
Speaker 1: Plains and for as long as the animals lasted, they
Speaker 1: hunted for a living. They hunted for the market, and
Speaker 1: once the bison were gone, they turned to each of
Speaker 1: the other animals in turn supplying supplying meat locally and
Speaker 1: export and export that's right, hides, uh, dried flesh, whatever,
Speaker 1: whatever you could basically get by shooting these animals down
Speaker 1: and selling them to the American or the Canadian or
Speaker 1: the European market. And so once the bison were gone,
Speaker 1: they turned their hand to prong horns and began doing
Speaker 1: exactly what they had done with bison. Two prong horns,
Speaker 1: I mean, they shot them down. They one of the
Speaker 1: things you could do with prong horns. They were reluctant
Speaker 1: to leave their ranges, their home ranges, and you could
Speaker 1: get a band of them running and they would not
Speaker 1: exit their home range, and people, these hunters on horses
Speaker 1: could just work their way around in the center of
Speaker 1: this this running herd of antelope. And after they would
Speaker 1: make the rounds of about a ten or twelve or
Speaker 1: fifteen mile home range three or four times, they were
Speaker 1: completely exhausted, and at that point you could almost walk
Speaker 1: up to them and club them in the head. And
Speaker 1: so using techniques like that and also UH in places
Speaker 1: like the Black Hills, they would surround prong wars in
Speaker 1: the winter when the snow was too deep for them
Speaker 1: to get away, and just kill them by I mean
Speaker 1: like like hunters killed harp seals uh in the twentieth
Speaker 1: century and just clubbed them down and basically ripped their
Speaker 1: hides off the Sometimes they would sell the meat, but
Speaker 1: mostly they were selling the hides. But it's not a
Speaker 1: good it's not a quality high high, but it was
Speaker 1: what was left the bicenter gone. And so they do
Speaker 1: this in turn to to prong horns to elk um
Speaker 1: and I mean by nine five the big horn rams
Speaker 1: of the Great Plains UH, the mountain sheep are gone
Speaker 1: to in places like the Northern Plains bad lands, they're gone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in the and in that case, you also have
Speaker 1: like you we mentioned earlier, like there's always this idea
Speaker 1: that disease may have played a role. I think with
Speaker 1: big horn sheep. As sheep came out, you also have
Speaker 1: doubt about it. And you know you have pneumonia which
Speaker 1: may with that particularly am one might have been more devastating,
Speaker 1: like people now and then try to make the case
Speaker 1: that what happened that you can't explain what happened to
Speaker 1: the buffalo unless you look at disease. I don't know
Speaker 1: if that that just seems to be an idea that's
Speaker 1: sort of always out there. No, it's definitely there, and
Speaker 1: I think it's it's correct. The problem with it, And
Speaker 1: I mean, so here's an example of it. We know
Speaker 1: that the last eight hundred to a thousand bison that
Speaker 1: we're out there that were being rounded up to provide
Speaker 1: the nucleus of the herds we have today, they almost
Speaker 1: hall all had bovine tuberculosis. Uh. They were infected with that.
Speaker 1: Some of the herds ended up uh getting brucellosis by
Speaker 1: nine hundred. Not all of them did, but some of
Speaker 1: them ended up with brucellosis, which is another exotic disease.
Speaker 1: And one of the diseases that we don't know much
Speaker 1: about the impact of but probably didn't have some impact
Speaker 1: because there's sure evidence that it was out there is
Speaker 1: that sometime after eighteen hundred, anthrax probably got among the
Speaker 1: western bison herds. And so these are all Eurasian livestock
Speaker 1: disease with non native animals. Yeah, and especially when when
Speaker 1: oxen and cattle were being driven over the immigrant trails
Speaker 1: through the Buffalo range from the twenties, possibility disease transmition down.
Speaker 1: There's a possibility as they transfer, and it almost certainly happened.
Speaker 1: The problem with it is that it's really hard to quantify.
Speaker 1: We don't really know what what kind of effect it had,
Speaker 1: except that it probably had a pretty considerable effect. So
Speaker 1: very very obviously the same thing happened with sheep. So
Speaker 1: what what's the time frame like there? When guys, when
Speaker 1: when you say that you had all these market hunters
Speaker 1: who are making money and sometimes good money, hunting for
Speaker 1: the buffalo hide market, when they had turned their attention
Speaker 1: to analop or turned her attention to helt it still
Speaker 1: it probably took decades, right, I mean, to get things
Speaker 1: to such a depleted To get things so depleted that
Speaker 1: we started to take legal action to try to protect
Speaker 1: animals and regulate hunting didn't happen as slowly as you
Speaker 1: would think. I mean, it was pretty quick because there
Speaker 1: were a lot of guys out there, and a lot
Speaker 1: of them had become very skilled in doing this. Uh,
Speaker 1: they knew the weaknesses of the animals. And I mean,
Speaker 1: I'll give you one example, and uh, there's a cowboy
Speaker 1: named George Wolfforth who is rounding up stray cattle um
Speaker 1: on the Texas Yano Esticado in a canyon where I
Speaker 1: used to live, and I lived in West Texas, Yellow
Speaker 1: House Canyon. He he rides up one morning out of
Speaker 1: Yellow House Canyon, and of course there's this gigantic plateau
Speaker 1: out in front of him that stretches a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty miles east and west and north and south about
Speaker 1: three hundred miles and at a slight pitch to from
Speaker 1: west to east, that's right. And he rides up on
Speaker 1: this out of the canyon, up on this plateau and
Speaker 1: it's a foggy morning, and he's sitting on his horse
Speaker 1: looking for strays and sees the fog beginning to lift,
Speaker 1: and as it lifts, and this is night, this is
Speaker 1: as it lifts. What he sees, he says, as far
Speaker 1: as the eye could see, and the fog made it
Speaker 1: this sort of mystical, unreal kind of image. All he
Speaker 1: could see on the plane where there were no more buffalo,
Speaker 1: he saw no more wolves, he saw no bears, he
Speaker 1: saw no elk. All he could see were bands of
Speaker 1: prong horns and bands of wild horses. Those were the
Speaker 1: last two surviving animals. And when it was only prong
Speaker 1: horns left, when the elk had either been killed or
Speaker 1: driven into the rockies. Because that's what happened to some
Speaker 1: of these animals, uh, They basically fled to the mountains
Speaker 1: from this kind of pressure. When it's nothing but wild
Speaker 1: horses and prong horns left, the hunters went after the
Speaker 1: prong horns, and mustangers went after the horses. And I
Speaker 1: mean we know, for example, after the horses for what, well,
Speaker 1: not meat, No, no, not meat. They were after them
Speaker 1: for two things. Basically, they were especially hired cowboys from
Speaker 1: the ranches that were then beginning to populate the great planes.
Speaker 1: We're shooting them down because they were competition for grass,
Speaker 1: for Yeah, for cattle, and so they were cowboys were
Speaker 1: hired just to go out and shoot them down. But
Speaker 1: by about nineteen fifteen or so. Uh. And you know
Speaker 1: you have to when you think about wild horses, now,
Speaker 1: what you have to realize is that wild horses, remember,
Speaker 1: had gone extinct in the place to scene, but we
Speaker 1: had reintroduced them. We Europeans had reintroduced them to the
Speaker 1: America's uh in the fifteen hundreds. And one of the
Speaker 1: remarkable environmental stories in North America is the success of
Speaker 1: the horse when it's reintroduced to the place where horses
Speaker 1: had evolved. Because North America's where horses had evolved fifty
Speaker 1: six million years of horse evolution. So what factor drove
Speaker 1: in to extinction that then went away in time for
Speaker 1: them to come back, We have no I did, but
Speaker 1: when they were bazaars l But when they were reintroduced,
Speaker 1: they went feral across the Great Plains, I mean in
Speaker 1: an instant. You've written about that, like you've written about
Speaker 1: the the routes they were through trade and theft and wandering. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they got primarily the horses got loose in the West
Speaker 1: as a result of what's called the Pueblo revolt of
Speaker 1: six eighty in New Mexico. It's when the Pueblo Indians
Speaker 1: drive the Spaniards out of New Mexico for a dozen
Speaker 1: years and capture all their hurts. I mean they trade,
Speaker 1: for example, sheep and goats to the Navajos, which is
Speaker 1: what creates the modern Navajo economy of of hurting those animals.
Speaker 1: And they traded horses up the Rockies. Within about fifty years,
Speaker 1: horses had gotten from New Mexico all the way into Canada,
Speaker 1: traded up both sides of the Rocky, both sides of
Speaker 1: the Rockies, which is what creates the Great Plains horse
Speaker 1: riding Indians. But a lot of horses got away and
Speaker 1: scattered in to the Plains as a result of the
Speaker 1: Pueblo revolt. And so that's sixteen eighty. We think by
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred, wild horse urge on the Great Plains probably
Speaker 1: numbered as high as between one and two million animals.
Speaker 1: I mean, they became the basis of a major economy
Speaker 1: in the West for about a century. How many horses
Speaker 1: live in the US now not wild horses? Uh No,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I probably knew that figure at some point,
Speaker 1: but I don't recall how many, but we've got about
Speaker 1: forty to fifty thousand wild horses. But one of the
Speaker 1: interesting things about that that's a controversial animal. It's controversial animal.
Speaker 1: And one of the reasons is because it's not the
Speaker 1: Great Plains where they are. They're out in the sagebrush deserts,
Speaker 1: so the Great Basin, particularly in Nevada, and so it
Speaker 1: was the Great Plains where they really went feral when
Speaker 1: they were returned here. And we think probably by nineteen
Speaker 1: hundred the number may have been as high as three
Speaker 1: million wild horses on the Great Plains. But about nineteen
Speaker 1: fifteen we discovered, uh that Americans had sort of created
Speaker 1: a new economy with pet dogs and cats that needed food,
Speaker 1: and so the Midwest, especially the Kettle Ration Company, began
Speaker 1: to build pet food plants. And what happened to most
Speaker 1: of the wild horses in the West by the late
Speaker 1: teens and twenties was that they ended up getting caught
Speaker 1: by mustangers and shipped by rail to Illinois and turned
Speaker 1: into cans of dug food. In Illinois kept kept slaughtering
Speaker 1: horses up until very recently. Up until very recently, now, JR. Simplot,
Speaker 1: you know when you buy a French fry you know,
Speaker 1: very likely came off, you know the result of j R.
Speaker 1: Simplos work. JR. Simplot got his start. Can you explain that?
Speaker 1: I'm sorry? Like like he's a simp. JR. Simplot as
Speaker 1: a major provider of seed potatoes, and I think they
Speaker 1: do a lot of they do, my rights that they
Speaker 1: don't know what they still do provide like McDonald's French. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he got you know, he got his start. He bought
Speaker 1: uh a bunch of teachers somewhere We're getting paid with
Speaker 1: these bonds because of some school funding shortages, and he started.
Speaker 1: He bought the bonds at fifty cents on the dollar
Speaker 1: or something like that and used and then when the
Speaker 1: bonds mature, turned around using to buy a bunch of
Speaker 1: piglets and went out in the desert and fattened all
Speaker 1: those piglets on wild horse meat. And that was sort
Speaker 1: of the start of Simplot. Then, I when I was
Speaker 1: when I lived in Miles City, Montana, we had a
Speaker 1: guy in his nineties and lived next to us, and
Speaker 1: in the thirties he had been a must are well.
Speaker 1: He was raising pigs on horse and he said that
Speaker 1: they would have the most beautiful sheen the pigs would
Speaker 1: get the most beautiful sheen, he said, a very tight
Speaker 1: curl in the tail, perfectly erect ears like every sign
Speaker 1: of a well fed pig. He was reluctant to send
Speaker 1: the pigs to slaughter with meat in their belly. He
Speaker 1: would finish them on barley, just to clean their system out.
Speaker 1: He said, they would visibly deteriorate quality and before his
Speaker 1: eyes and barley and he would take a horse, take
Speaker 1: it into the pig pen, shoot the horse tied off
Speaker 1: to a fence post, pull the hide of the tractor,
Speaker 1: and sell the hide for three bucks. Then he'd give
Speaker 1: the pigs a day or two and they'd eat it
Speaker 1: down to the bone. And then before the bones was
Speaker 1: splinter he'd going to throw all the bones out of there.
Speaker 1: One day, him and his brother were cutting wood and
Speaker 1: he cut his thumb off on the saw. His better
Speaker 1: flicked dead into the pig pen. Pigs eight that send
Speaker 1: those off. That's a great storys day. And he was
Speaker 1: just like, what did finger that? THO? I don't know
Speaker 1: how to fathom up. Yeah, so someone bought a pig
Speaker 1: that had actually been eating folks. But um, it's just
Speaker 1: like the picture he paints like how horses were used
Speaker 1: and viewed is bizarre. Well, yeah, that's so that's one, uh,
Speaker 1: one way that they were used. I mean, I can
Speaker 1: tell you to others. There was an attempt actually in
Speaker 1: the eighteen nineties to use horse meat in the United
Speaker 1: States to feed the poor in the eighteen nineties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a I've got a newspaper article from nine seven.
Speaker 1: In fact, it's over here on the Pacific coast, I think,
Speaker 1: let's see it from Seattle, someone arguing that's what we
Speaker 1: ought to do in order to to feed America's poor,
Speaker 1: is that we should feed them because we've got a
Speaker 1: lot of horses, with plenty of wild horses too, And
Speaker 1: that's what one good use of horse meat would be,
Speaker 1: is to feed the poor. But one one way that
Speaker 1: I guarantee you lots of wild horses ended up sacrificing
Speaker 1: their lives for kind of a dual good as people
Speaker 1: saw it in those days, was they would be caught
Speaker 1: and led out, shot and then laced with stryct nine
Speaker 1: in order to kill the one last big animal, charismatic
Speaker 1: animal of the old American serengetti, which was gray wolves.
Speaker 1: And so the technique that the biological survey used for
Speaker 1: the teens and twenties and into the thirties when there
Speaker 1: were still plenty of horses around in order to poison wolves,
Speaker 1: uh in large numbers, and to try to eradicate coyotes
Speaker 1: as well, was to lead horses out and shoot them
Speaker 1: and lace the carcass. You'd inject before the vastar system
Speaker 1: shut down, you'd inject the strict nine in there to
Speaker 1: to distribute it, so it would distribute it through the
Speaker 1: through the body. That's right. Yeah, And that was again
Speaker 1: for better grades, for better cattle country to get rid of,
Speaker 1: to get rid of, but on cattle, yeah, for the
Speaker 1: for the sake certainly for the sake of converting that
Speaker 1: landscape into a working agricultural society. And you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: one of the things I say in this book is
Speaker 1: first of all, thinking about the great planes as uh,
Speaker 1: this grand wildlife spectacle that you could without any stretch whatsoever,
Speaker 1: referred to as the American Serengeti. Is a kind of
Speaker 1: a way to reconceptualize it. To me, in the proper
Speaker 1: ecological way, this did exist, because we've kind of in
Speaker 1: a way forgotten that it existed. The only story that
Speaker 1: we've preserved out of any of this really is the
Speaker 1: story of of bison, and we haven't really preserved the
Speaker 1: story of all the grizzly bears that were out on
Speaker 1: the Great Plans, for example, feeding on the bison surplus,
Speaker 1: and the dead animals that bison that drowned in the
Speaker 1: rivers and so forth. We haven't thought too much about wolves,
Speaker 1: or of driving elk into the mountains, or of the
Speaker 1: prong horns slaughter, or of what happened to the wild horses.
Speaker 1: We've just thought about bison. But if you think of
Speaker 1: it in the hole, it's easier to conceptualize it as
Speaker 1: this really was an American Serengetti that we had, And
Speaker 1: what's so striking about it to me is that we
Speaker 1: almost wholesale converted it into this agricultural, privatized landscape, agricultural empire,
Speaker 1: whereas the colonial powers in Africa they didn't really do that.
Speaker 1: I mean, they made sure that we ended up with
Speaker 1: Serengeti National Park and the Massimer National Preserve and Kruger
Speaker 1: National Park in the Veld in South Africa. So in
Speaker 1: Africa we ended up with these big game parks to
Speaker 1: preserve the African version of this and in North America
Speaker 1: he declared it fly over country. Declared a fly over country,
Speaker 1: and a place that you just ignored that really wasn't
Speaker 1: interesting enough for people to even stay there. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's been. One of the stories of the Great Plains
Speaker 1: is that unlike any other region of the United States
Speaker 1: and the twenty twenty first centuries, it endlessly is hemorrhaging
Speaker 1: population and losing people. So one of the I mean,
Speaker 1: the way I end this book is that, um so
Speaker 1: that it's not a complete downer about what we did
Speaker 1: and it's just all gone. Is that. I mean, one
Speaker 1: of the really uplifting parts of this story is that
Speaker 1: you get to the twenty first century and in Montana
Speaker 1: along the Missouri River, we've got this organization called the
Speaker 1: American Prayer Reserve that is so far raised about a
Speaker 1: hundred million dollars in the last ten or twelve years
Speaker 1: in order to try to tie together uh two big
Speaker 1: public lands, the Charlie Russell National wild Life Refuge and
Speaker 1: the Missouri Breaks National Monument with the private lands that
Speaker 1: lie in between them. And what they're trying to do
Speaker 1: is to as ranches come up for sale, to try
Speaker 1: to buy them with yeah, and willing buyers with the
Speaker 1: idea that we can ultimately create this this preserve uh
Speaker 1: that will kind of be really uh a Yellowstone of
Speaker 1: the Great Plains, I mean, and they're hoping for an
Speaker 1: aerial extent that's gonna be twice the size of Yellowstone. Also,
Speaker 1: it's two million acres. They're hoping. American Prairie Reserve is
Speaker 1: hoping for as much as three and a half to
Speaker 1: four million acres of land where we actually can do
Speaker 1: what has happened in the parks in Africa and recreate
Speaker 1: this American serengetti with all these these animals restored grizzly
Speaker 1: bears and gray wolves and prong horns and bison of course,
Speaker 1: and you know, possibly uh the full suite of animals
Speaker 1: that were there hundred and fifty years ago. Are they
Speaker 1: seeking a park designation? And you know, no, they're not,
Speaker 1: at least they're not saying they are now. They're they're
Speaker 1: sort of arguing at this point that uh, it's going
Speaker 1: to be uh, it's gonna be private enterprise that creates it.
Speaker 1: It's gotta be accessible to the public. Um, they're running
Speaker 1: black management right now on some of it. Yeah, public
Speaker 1: access hunting we'll see, you know, just to editorialize a
Speaker 1: little bit, I think they'll find tremendous amounts of support
Speaker 1: um with outdoors and if they are ticking, if they
Speaker 1: clarify and articking that that a little bit, but which
Speaker 1: might do them some good. It would do them some good.
Speaker 1: It would bring a constituency that they may not have anticipated,
Speaker 1: I think, because unfortunately just to I don't know if
Speaker 1: it's editorializing or not. But when I hear that, I
Speaker 1: can already hear the voices of you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of people that we deal with every day. When they
Speaker 1: hear that, they're going take it all the way from me.
Speaker 1: But you gott understand that they're dealing with in the
Speaker 1: private land. They're dealing with private land, already deeded land, right,
Speaker 1: So I mean, in some way you could argue what
Speaker 1: they're doing right now. They're not decreasing access. Um. I
Speaker 1: want to I want to move on to the to
Speaker 1: your your coyote. Yeah, but first I want to ask
Speaker 1: you something because this has always bothered me. Is there
Speaker 1: a proof that there were not elk in the mountains.
Speaker 1: I always hear that this idea that elk were pushed
Speaker 1: into the mountains. Don't you think that it was? There
Speaker 1: was elk across the entire range. They were eradicated in
Speaker 1: some areas and continue to survive in some areas. I
Speaker 1: think there were elk in the mountains. Yeah, yeah, like
Speaker 1: people when people say, I I hear that so much,
Speaker 1: but just doesn't make sense to me. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: there were grizzlies in the mountains, There were elk in
Speaker 1: the mountains. There were there were big horns sheep in
Speaker 1: the mountains. Obviously those animals were also out on the
Speaker 1: Great plains, and they ended up the ones that were
Speaker 1: on the Great Plains ended up either being killed or
Speaker 1: or fleeing to the mountains, but just gradually pushed by pressure,
Speaker 1: because I mean you can you can push animals. I
Speaker 1: mean we see it today, like pressure moves animals. But
Speaker 1: I just have a hard time imagine that they very quickly, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: to to like an alpine environment. I'm guessing that they
Speaker 1: were just evenly distributed, and you saw the great abundance.
Speaker 1: Now we think of him as a mountain animal, but
Speaker 1: they were planes animals. Oh man, they were planes animal
Speaker 1: for sure. Yeah, there's no doubt. All right, So layoff
Speaker 1: the Kyote Book. I call m coylets. I know the
Speaker 1: proper terms maybe coyote. Well, I call it wildly coyote.
Speaker 1: I don't call him wildly coyote. You know, you don't
Speaker 1: say wild coyote. You know. It's funny. My kids been
Speaker 1: watching Um I let him watch Looney Tunes just because
Speaker 1: I relate to it, and m they watched a lot
Speaker 1: of road running wildly coyote. And outside of my house
Speaker 1: was a phone pole that like provides part of my
Speaker 1: house that's leaning at a precipitous angle. And my brother
Speaker 1: was visiting. He commented how that phone pole is gonna
Speaker 1: tip over, and my son asked, well, the whole house
Speaker 1: tip over too, And my brother said, I think these
Speaker 1: kids watch too much. They learned physics from Wiley. And
Speaker 1: while Yoe, of course, can fall off the highest cliff
Speaker 1: in the solar system and it, you know, it flattens him.
Speaker 1: But he who gets up and walks away from you
Speaker 1: can't teach your kids the natural laws but water that show.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so, so lay out the Kyote book for me.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call him kyotes just for consistency. Yeah so,
Speaker 1: and but but what I will say about that is
Speaker 1: and I tell the story and two places in the
Speaker 1: introduction and then in a chapter called prairie Wolves, which
Speaker 1: is what they were originally called in America the books
Speaker 1: Kyote America. The book is called Coyote America, A Natural
Speaker 1: and Supernatural History. But I lay out the story in
Speaker 1: two different places in that book. Why you say coyote
Speaker 1: and I say kyote. Yeah. And I always said, anybody
Speaker 1: who's ever killed one, say yeah, Well, that's that's served.
Speaker 1: That's sort of it. People who killed them, who managed them,
Speaker 1: who attempted to poison them to extermination back in the nineties,
Speaker 1: I'll call them coyotes. And the origin of that too
Speaker 1: syllable pronunciation goes back to the mountain men who were
Speaker 1: in the uh Southwest in the southern Rockies in the
Speaker 1: eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, because they for the first time,
Speaker 1: we're encountering a name other than prairie wolf. Everybody in
Speaker 1: America who first encountered coyotes in the early nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: starting with Lewis and Clark, That's the name Lewis and
Speaker 1: Clark gave them, was prairie wolf. That's what everybody calls
Speaker 1: his old trapping books refuses that name. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: would be like, what in the healthy time about the
Speaker 1: one day had occurred to me that he talk about,
Speaker 1: But he was writing, Yeah, that's right. And there I've
Speaker 1: seen examples and by nineteen fifteen or so where people
Speaker 1: are still using the term prairie wolf, that was the
Speaker 1: Anglo American name for an animal that they had never
Speaker 1: seen before. Because coyotes, I mean, they back up with
Speaker 1: their evolution a little bit, and because this is a
Speaker 1: really they've got the probably the most fascinating biography of
Speaker 1: any animal in North America. And it is uh a
Speaker 1: surprising and unexpected story really that coyotes have. They are
Speaker 1: part of the evolution of the canad family that took
Speaker 1: place in North America beginning five point three million years ago,
Speaker 1: and that produced all the wolves, all the jackals, and
Speaker 1: the coyote east of North America all around the world.
Speaker 1: So all the jackals of Africa and southern Europe, all
Speaker 1: the wolves of the entire globe all come from the
Speaker 1: evolution of a North American family of animals, the canad family,
Speaker 1: that evolved five point three million years ago. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so what's so for one thing, it makes coyotes, I
Speaker 1: mean they're a distinctively North American animal in part because
Speaker 1: they not only evolved here, we think probably in the
Speaker 1: southwest is where this family of animals evolved. But unlike
Speaker 1: jackals and wolves, coyotes never left North America. They remained here. Wolves,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, became cosmopolitan, followed the big herds
Speaker 1: of animals that were migrating across the Bearing Strait and
Speaker 1: across the the Connectivity Bridge to Europe and ended up
Speaker 1: in Europe and Asia and everywhere else. Jackals ended up
Speaker 1: about a million years ago, separating from the coyote line
Speaker 1: and and getting into Africa and southern Europe. Coyotes never left.
Speaker 1: They stayed in North America, and they were found only
Speaker 1: in the West, from the Great Plains westward when America
Speaker 1: is like Lewis and Clark first encountered them, so nobody
Speaker 1: who was settling Plymouth or Jamestown ever encountered a coyote.
Speaker 1: Lewis and Clark get to what is now Nebraska in
Speaker 1: the fall of eighteen o four, and in the stretch
Speaker 1: of about it's about three weeks, they encounter all the
Speaker 1: classic animals of the American West. They encounter the first bison,
Speaker 1: they've ever seen. Uh. This is in middle of August
Speaker 1: of eighteen o four. They counter pronkorn antelope they encounter,
Speaker 1: they say, a deer with strangely large ears that hops
Speaker 1: rather than runs. The mule deer. Uh. And then they say,
Speaker 1: and we keep seeing this fox, a kind of fox
Speaker 1: that nobody has ever seen before. And after about a
Speaker 1: week or so of describing seeing this fox, one of
Speaker 1: the hunters in the party finally shoots one, and William
Speaker 1: Clark lays it out on the grass and he starts
Speaker 1: looking at it, and he says, this is not a fox.
Speaker 1: This is some kind of wolf. It's a small wolf.
Speaker 1: But but this is a wolf. And he says, I
Speaker 1: think the best name for it, since we're out in
Speaker 1: the prairies is a prey wolf, And so Lewis and
Speaker 1: Clark name it a prairie wolf. And for more than
Speaker 1: a hundred years many Americans refer to coyotes as prai wolves.
Speaker 1: But in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, Americans start
Speaker 1: going across the plains to Santa Fe. After, for example,
Speaker 1: Mexico becomes independent of Spain. In one they open up
Speaker 1: the trade between Missouri and Santa Fe. And so all
Speaker 1: of these traders are going from St. Louis to Santa Fe,
Speaker 1: and along with them go mountain men to trap the
Speaker 1: beaver streams like kick Carson. And when these guys get
Speaker 1: to Santa Fe and they start pointing out there goes
Speaker 1: a prairie wolf. The people in Santa Fe say, no,
Speaker 1: that's a coyote. And so these Americans listen to that
Speaker 1: word coyote, and what they're actually hearing is a Spanish
Speaker 1: version of a no waddle Indian word. And or nowat
Speaker 1: is the name of the language. No what is the
Speaker 1: language that the Aztecs spoke. And some of the settlers
Speaker 1: who had gone to to found Santa Fe in sixteen
Speaker 1: had been either Aztec or know what speakers, Indians who
Speaker 1: had been probably subjugated by the Aztecs and forced to
Speaker 1: speak the Essex language. And so they got to Santa
Speaker 1: Fe and they saw these animals. They used the old
Speaker 1: Aztec word for them, which was the original pronunciation, was coyote.
Speaker 1: The Spaniards heard coyot, the Indian word, they converted it
Speaker 1: to coyote in a Latin pronunciation. And then Anglo Americans
Speaker 1: started showing up in the eighteen thirties and they they
Speaker 1: hear coyote and his Frederick Ruxton, one of the chroniclers
Speaker 1: of the mountain man life and the Southern Rockies, says,
Speaker 1: as we all sat around the campfires in the Southern
Speaker 1: Rockies in the thirties and the eighteen forties, you could
Speaker 1: hear the mex that can say coyote. The Indians say coyote,
Speaker 1: and all the trappers would say they couldn't pronounce that
Speaker 1: with three syllables. They would say coyote. And of course
Speaker 1: those guys went back to Kentucky and Virginia and Illinois,
Speaker 1: and when they heard people say, so, did you see
Speaker 1: any prairie wolves out there, they would say, so, you
Speaker 1: mean coyotes. What we've ended up with, then is kind
Speaker 1: of a a bifurcatid pronunciation where rural people in America,
Speaker 1: and as you said a minute ago, people who tend
Speaker 1: to shoot coyotes, that's what they say. I just that's
Speaker 1: a coyote. But in the sort of more literary circles
Speaker 1: of urban places, yeah, they used the term. They used
Speaker 1: the term coyote as the as the classic pronunciation, and
Speaker 1: I think it's probably what they're trying to do is
Speaker 1: to pay homage to the Spanish pronunciation. Nobody says coyote anymore,
Speaker 1: but but a lot of a lot of people say coyote.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating, man, I had no idea. Yeah, so they're
Speaker 1: So that's one of many gems that's in your book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's one of the things that you're going to discover.
Speaker 1: You're also going to discover, as I said, that these
Speaker 1: are North American animals that evolved more than five million
Speaker 1: years ago, and one of the fascinating uh consequences of
Speaker 1: that today is one of the things we've got going
Speaker 1: on in the eastern United States is the emergence of
Speaker 1: an animal called the coy wolf, and it's an intermixture
Speaker 1: and interbreeding between coyotes that, under persecution by the federal
Speaker 1: government and state governments over the last seventy or so years,
Speaker 1: have expanded their range out of the West all over
Speaker 1: North America, and not just all over North America, not
Speaker 1: just a Maine and Florida and Virginia, but into all
Speaker 1: the major cities of the United States. They've done that
Speaker 1: because they've been persecuted, but it's taken coyotes into places
Speaker 1: where there are remnant Eastern wolves. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that's happened is that they are freely interbreeding with
Speaker 1: the red wolves, the endangered red wolf of the South,
Speaker 1: and with these Eastern wolves that are still found in
Speaker 1: eastern Canada and creating a new predator that is on Minnesota,
Speaker 1: Wisconsin and New York and Virginia and the Deep South.
Speaker 1: They're creating this animal where they run into Eastern wolves.
Speaker 1: That's where they run into from the Great Lakes, basically
Speaker 1: eastward in Canada, and thens are going, yeah, when when
Speaker 1: they how does of work is it? Is it a
Speaker 1: male wolf female kyote? It's yeah, it's usually that way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's usually uh, male wolf and female coyote. But evidently
Speaker 1: there have been crosses that have gone the other way.
Speaker 1: They produced viable offspring. And the reason they do is
Speaker 1: because red wolves and Eastern wolves are also from this
Speaker 1: North American wolf stock that never left North America, and
Speaker 1: so they're closely related biological aid coyotes, and so they
Speaker 1: easily interbreed. But in the West where we have gray wolves.
Speaker 1: Gray wolves, for example, in Yellowstone, when they were introduced
Speaker 1: into Yellowstone in ninety six, the first thing that happened
Speaker 1: was that gray wolves knocked the coyote population back in
Speaker 1: Yellowstone by fifty They gray wolves do not interbreed with coyotes.
Speaker 1: They kill them. They attack them. And the reason we
Speaker 1: think this is happening is because gray wolves are are
Speaker 1: a set of wolves. There are five subspecies of them
Speaker 1: that left North America, evolved for a couple of million years,
Speaker 1: probably in Asia and in Europe, and then only began
Speaker 1: returning to North America about twenty thousand years ago. So
Speaker 1: they had had enough separate evolution and another part of
Speaker 1: the globe that by the time they returned to North America,
Speaker 1: they no longer recognized any biological ties with with coyotes
Speaker 1: or with American wolves like red wolves, and their reaction
Speaker 1: to coyotes has not been to interbreed with them, but
Speaker 1: to basically attack them and kill them. Yeah, and Kyle's
Speaker 1: returned to favor on foxes. A lot of red fire,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of gray foxes. And and that's when
Speaker 1: they roll in. That's that's right. It's the big dog,
Speaker 1: little dog thing, and it happens at every every level.
Speaker 1: But I mean, I was telling you, I mean before
Speaker 1: we we started on air here that what we think
Speaker 1: explains the cleverness, the wiliness, and the survivability of coyotes.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you think about this for a second,
Speaker 1: we managed to wipe wolves out in North America. We
Speaker 1: extra pated wolves, We did everything we could, even including
Speaker 1: passing a law in one that earmark coyotes for total
Speaker 1: extermination in the United States, and have not been able
Speaker 1: to do it. Despite spending billions of dollars and developing
Speaker 1: a whole witches brew of poisons to try to eradicate them,
Speaker 1: we have never been able to do that. So one
Speaker 1: of the things about the coyotes story is that this
Speaker 1: is a story that turns upside down. Are our notion
Speaker 1: about the human relationship to nature, where we think we
Speaker 1: arrive and everything goes ship bang because nothing in nature
Speaker 1: is able to resist us. The coyote story is completely
Speaker 1: the opposite. These guys have forecundity. It's attributed to the
Speaker 1: fact that for the last twenty thousand years they have
Speaker 1: been persecuted by gray wolves, and they evolved an ability
Speaker 1: to survive under persecution and even to colonize new areas
Speaker 1: under persecution. So what we think is going on is
Speaker 1: that coyotes haven't evolved their wiliness and their ability to
Speaker 1: survive and our in our presence and under our persecution.
Speaker 1: Just as a result of the last two hundred years
Speaker 1: of us trying to wipe them out, they brought to
Speaker 1: bear these evolutionary adaptations that go back at least twenty
Speaker 1: thousand years as a result of their interaction with gray
Speaker 1: wolves and what they evolved or it was a whole
Speaker 1: suite of these kind of remarkable adaptations. One of them
Speaker 1: that's probably the most important one is called fishing fusion adaptation. Now,
Speaker 1: what it means is coyotes and they're only about nineteen
Speaker 1: mammal species around the world that can do this. One
Speaker 1: of the other ones happens to be us. We do this,
Speaker 1: and what it means is they have the ability to
Speaker 1: exist both communally in the in coyote terms and packs
Speaker 1: or as singles and pairs and so, whereas wolves are
Speaker 1: only pack animals. And it became kind of their Achilles
Speaker 1: hill when the government was trying to poison them out,
Speaker 1: because you could kill one wolf out of a pack
Speaker 1: and use the scent glands of that wolf to bait
Speaker 1: your your meat cubes, and you would in turn, in
Speaker 1: a few days, kill every single animal in the pack,
Speaker 1: as they would be drawn to the scent of that
Speaker 1: lost companion. But coyotes, when you try to do that,
Speaker 1: their response is to go into this fish and fusion
Speaker 1: kind of adaptation and they just scattered to the winds.
Speaker 1: And what they do is when you're persecuting them and
Speaker 1: driving their populations down, one of the things coyotes, I mean,
Speaker 1: we all love how coyotes howl. What they're actually doing
Speaker 1: with those howls is they're taking a census of the
Speaker 1: coyote population in a territory. And if they howl at
Speaker 1: night and they don't hear responsive house from other pairs
Speaker 1: or packs of coyotes, that triggers an autogenic response to
Speaker 1: hormonal response in them, so that they have larger litters.
Speaker 1: And so as you drive the population of them down
Speaker 1: and they take this howling sensus and don't hear other
Speaker 1: coyotes in the landscape, they produced larger litters. And what
Speaker 1: these larger litters often prompt them to do is to
Speaker 1: go into what's called colonization mode. So they start going
Speaker 1: out to the ages of their territory and expanding and colonizing.
Speaker 1: And what it's meant that is that once we started
Speaker 1: trying to eradicate them. That produced the spread of coyotes
Speaker 1: all over North America. I mean, in response to our persecution,
Speaker 1: they scattered everywhere. I once watched a movie, a documentary
Speaker 1: that was highly critical of coyote hunting, okay, and it
Speaker 1: was like a pro kyote movie, highly critical of Kyle hunting.
Speaker 1: And the thing he makes the point, he's like, the
Speaker 1: more you hunt them, the more we're gonna have. But
Speaker 1: then I want to think it o. So if that's true,
Speaker 1: then I would think that you would welcome hunting because
Speaker 1: you like them, and it makes more of them. It does. Indeed,
Speaker 1: if you live in and you want them, you should
Speaker 1: send your cousin in Nebraska. That's right, go out and
Speaker 1: go out and blast away at them. Yeah, it's so
Speaker 1: they you know, they make up this this creature that
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways throws environmentalists for a loop.
Speaker 1: I mean, I had a conversation a few months ago
Speaker 1: with a couple of women who wanted to do a
Speaker 1: coyote documentary, and we sat down over the conversation and
Speaker 1: it emerged fairly quickly that what they wanted to do
Speaker 1: was to do a documentary to save the coyote, and
Speaker 1: so I had to say to them, so you realize
Speaker 1: that they don't need your help. They are perfectly capable,
Speaker 1: thank you of saving themselves and go about it in
Speaker 1: a completely nonchalant manner, trotting by looking at you with
Speaker 1: those yellow eyes and sort of see you later. You know,
Speaker 1: so long, it's been good to know you. And they
Speaker 1: don't really need your help. Uh, they can do it
Speaker 1: very well on their own. So it's it's not the
Speaker 1: hand of the handful of a small handful of species
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, very small handful of Canada geese. And
Speaker 1: these guys are you know. The truth is, and if
Speaker 1: we thought of them this way, I think it might
Speaker 1: change the way people think of them. I mean, what
Speaker 1: they are is they're a wolf. They're a small species
Speaker 1: of wolf. And so what you know, if you if
Speaker 1: you sit in back East in your study and you
Speaker 1: lament the loss of wolves in America and you would
Speaker 1: love to see wolves return to America and a coyote
Speaker 1: trots through your backyard, that's cause for celebration because the
Speaker 1: fact is that's what they are, and they have managed
Speaker 1: to uh to re inhabit our landscapes, including our biggest cities.
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the great recent stories of coyote
Speaker 1: was a group of people walking out of a bar
Speaker 1: in Queen's Last Spring and looked up. They heard a
Speaker 1: sound and looked up and a coyote was on the
Speaker 1: roof of the bar and queens looking down at them,
Speaker 1: and they snapped pictures with their phones, and somebody, of
Speaker 1: course calls the police, who alert animal control, and the
Speaker 1: animal control people arrived. The coyote is just sort of
Speaker 1: walking back and forth along the roof of the bar,
Speaker 1: and people by now gathered out in the street, traffics
Speaker 1: going by. Here's this kyote a few feet away, And
Speaker 1: as soon as the animal control truck comes around the
Speaker 1: corner with lights on, the coyote looks back behind him.
Speaker 1: There's an abandoned building with broken glass in the windows,
Speaker 1: and sort of like some Hollywood action hero, he just
Speaker 1: sort of hops off the roof of the bar through
Speaker 1: the broken glass of them. If the building has got
Speaker 1: that's great man, you know, uh, I kind of we're
Speaker 1: getting We're I'm gonna wrap it up, but I want
Speaker 1: to remind remind you something that you said all those
Speaker 1: years ago when I was in your class. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to think of what year it would have been somewhere
Speaker 1: here or something like that. Yeah, we were talking about
Speaker 1: a famous battle, um Adobe Walls. Tell everyone what the
Speaker 1: Battle of Adobe Walls was. I know there's like part
Speaker 1: one in part two. But you you were getting you
Speaker 1: were driving out a story about where one of the
Speaker 1: participants from the Indian side, from the Native American side,
Speaker 1: one of the participants described what went wrong at that battle.
Speaker 1: Jock supposed to the narrative of what went wrong from
Speaker 1: them from the Euro American side, So you can. I'll
Speaker 1: remind you later what it was. But you just at
Speaker 1: the stage for what that battle was. Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: mean and I remember the story. I tell you too.
Speaker 1: They the Battle of Adobe Walls was battle between buffalo
Speaker 1: hunters and the Texas Panhandle who were holed up in
Speaker 1: this old trading fort, uh which is up above the
Speaker 1: present day Amarillo on the Canadian River, and a group
Speaker 1: of Comanches and Southern Cheyennes, who, by the Treaty of
Speaker 1: Medicine Lodge Creek of eighteen sixty eight, knew that buffalo
Speaker 1: hunters weren't supposed to be below the Arkansas River. The
Speaker 1: Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek, the Indians that insisted the
Speaker 1: buffalo hunters have to stay north of the Arkansas in Kansas.
Speaker 1: And yeah, so here these guys were, these buffalo hunters
Speaker 1: had crossed the deadline and had gone down into the
Speaker 1: Texas Panhandle where they weren't supposed to be. And so
Speaker 1: this group of Comanches and Southern Cheyennes felt perfectly justified
Speaker 1: in attacking this buffalo hunter camp. And so they mounted
Speaker 1: up a war party, and about have o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 1: just as as it was starting to get light, they
Speaker 1: decided to make a raid on this camp and wipe
Speaker 1: these guys out. And from the side of the story
Speaker 1: of the buffalo Hunters, some guy gets up at about
Speaker 1: four thirty or five in the morning, he's got to
Speaker 1: go outside and take a whizz, and he's as he's
Speaker 1: taking a whizz, he looks up on the ridge and
Speaker 1: he sees silhouetted in the coming twilight of the morning,
Speaker 1: this group of Indians getting ready to ride down on them.
Speaker 1: That's one version of what happened. Another is that, uh,
Speaker 1: this was an old fort and uh a vega or
Speaker 1: one of the roof beams cracked and it woke somebody
Speaker 1: up and I walked outside and we're looking around to
Speaker 1: see what had happened, and looked at old adobe, old
Speaker 1: adobe building, and this roof beam cracked, and so it
Speaker 1: woke a couple of them up, and they walked outside
Speaker 1: and they saw anyway, the Indians launched an attack, which
Speaker 1: they thought was going to be a surprise attack on
Speaker 1: the sleeping camp, and it turned out some of these
Speaker 1: guys were already up, and so they repulse the attack,
Speaker 1: and the Indians, in attempting to explain it later, so
Speaker 1: we'll see if this is how you remember. The Indians,
Speaker 1: in attempting to explain it later, used their own cause
Speaker 1: effect logic to explain why this had happened the way
Speaker 1: it had. And their logic was not that damn, we
Speaker 1: were gonna launch a surprise attack, and some of those
Speaker 1: guys were already up, and they alerted everybody else. Their
Speaker 1: logic was on the way to the attack. That morning,
Speaker 1: one of the Cheyen's has shot a skunk, and it
Speaker 1: was taboo to arrow a skunk, and so that had
Speaker 1: screwed the medicine for the whole band, and so when
Speaker 1: they launched that attack, they no longer had the right
Speaker 1: medicine with them and in their cause and effect explanation,
Speaker 1: which we would call a supernatural explanation for why it failed.
Speaker 1: This was the reason a taboo had been broken, the
Speaker 1: animals had turned against them, and therefore the attack was
Speaker 1: a failure. It took me ten years to understand what
Speaker 1: that story means. I resisted it at first. That's not
Speaker 1: what happened. What happened was but but when you were
Speaker 1: telling you, you you were making the point of we have
Speaker 1: our ways of explaining things, and we have these things
Speaker 1: that are true to us, you know. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: a decade later, I'm like, you know, I do I
Speaker 1: Finally I'm old enough now or I've been around enough now,
Speaker 1: I'm like, he was right. He's right. It's because the
Speaker 1: god damn s gone. So you worry about that for
Speaker 1: ten years. I would return to it periodically. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: you never said anything. Ran You didn't say much. Concluding
Speaker 1: thoughts Man Too Million name one of my favorite podcast today.
Speaker 1: I think, Um, I have a clarifying question. Well, I
Speaker 1: have a couple of things. Well, I'm wondering if we
Speaker 1: have enough time, because I think we could if it's
Speaker 1: all right with you, if you can chat a little
Speaker 1: bit longer. I would love to hear to talk about
Speaker 1: just the bit if we could get like the very
Speaker 1: abridge version of the bison, the bison story story, but
Speaker 1: his his influential paper here, and then coyotes. It's always
Speaker 1: kind of this myth that you hear about, like the
Speaker 1: more you shoot him, the more there's gonna be. So really,
Speaker 1: what what what what you explain that is to be true?
Speaker 1: Like there they are going to produce more offspring the
Speaker 1: more pressure you're putting on them whatever poisoning shooting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So one of the ways that we know it's different
Speaker 1: from what it could be is that we had about
Speaker 1: seventy years in Yellowstone, for example, of healthy coyote population,
Speaker 1: nobody hunting them, no wolves there because wolves are eliminated
Speaker 1: from Yellowstone by about and we don't get wolves there
Speaker 1: again until we have this period of about seventy years
Speaker 1: where there's a coyote population that biologists can study that
Speaker 1: don't get pressured either by people or by gray wolves.
Speaker 1: And what they did is very interesting. Their population rose
Speaker 1: to this carrying capacity plateau and it never got any bigger.
Speaker 1: And so as soon as wolves arrived, what happened was
Speaker 1: the kyote population dropped by almost half, but then under
Speaker 1: wolf pressure, it has begun to build back to its
Speaker 1: original size and large, and they have scattered out of
Speaker 1: the park. So it's almost like this test case of
Speaker 1: the theory of whether or not it's pressure that causes
Speaker 1: them both to colonize and expand their range and also
Speaker 1: caused their causes their population to rise. And so the
Speaker 1: guy who's done this study also did UM for his
Speaker 1: PhD dissertation. He studied UH the Hanford Preserve around Hanford,
Speaker 1: where the same thing was true. There were no wolves,
Speaker 1: people weren't shooting, trapping, or poisoning. It's in Washington State,
Speaker 1: it's the Handford Nuclear site. And what he discovered was
Speaker 1: the same phenomenon that without pressure, their populations rise to
Speaker 1: this caring capacity level and then they they don't get
Speaker 1: any bigger. And the reason they don't is because it's
Speaker 1: not so much the litter sizes fall. They followed to
Speaker 1: maybe four or five pups, whereas when they're under pressure
Speaker 1: sometimes they'll have thirteen or fourteen pups. But the litter
Speaker 1: size were followed about four or five pups. And because
Speaker 1: the UH, the population of coyotes was at the carrying
Speaker 1: capacity of the resources, they would not often be able
Speaker 1: to get all those pups raised without losing a couple
Speaker 1: of them or maybe three of them, because there just
Speaker 1: wasn't weren't enough resources out there to raise the entire litter,
Speaker 1: and so that seemed to be the the what provided
Speaker 1: the ceiling um. So, I mean, we actually do have
Speaker 1: a couple of these sort of test cases where you
Speaker 1: can observe what happens if they don't have any pressure
Speaker 1: on them, and Yellowstone is probably the best one. But
Speaker 1: as I said, there's this this at least one other
Speaker 1: one too that people have studied. Because he hasn't got
Speaker 1: he wanted him to explain that, I know, the fog
Speaker 1: question with the coyote the then does that flip like
Speaker 1: the whole freederor control thing to like basically, kill more
Speaker 1: coyotes equals more big bucks. How does that relate to
Speaker 1: that you're not and just the research that you've done
Speaker 1: and your yeah, well, I mean there's a so for example,
Speaker 1: state of Utah um with a Mule Deer Protection Act
Speaker 1: few years ago, you know, created a bounty on let
Speaker 1: stay bounty on coyotes. They did that almost two years
Speaker 1: to the day after a major study came out on
Speaker 1: coyote effects on mule deer populations in Idaho. It was
Speaker 1: a result of about a ten year study on coyotes
Speaker 1: and mule deer, and the conclusion of this study, authored
Speaker 1: by about fifteen or sixteen biologists, was that coyotes had
Speaker 1: virtually no effect on mule deer populations. And I mean,
Speaker 1: this is one of those classic instances, almost like like
Speaker 1: climate science or something, some major study comes out and
Speaker 1: next door, the neighboring state completely ignores it and nonetheless
Speaker 1: goes ahead and puts a bounty on coyotes in order
Speaker 1: to save mutle here. So the science that's out there
Speaker 1: indicates I mean, and this science goes back to the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties really when the Murray brothers were studying coyote
Speaker 1: depredations in Yellowstone and in Jackson Hole. Because the biological
Speaker 1: survey actually they wiped out wolves. They decided, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, you can kind of see the transparency of it.
Speaker 1: It's the government bureau, our major target is gone. We
Speaker 1: gotta survive some way. So they proclaim the coyote is
Speaker 1: the arch predator of our time. It turns out, actually
Speaker 1: most of that predation that was going on that was
Speaker 1: really coyotes and not wolves. So we need government needs
Speaker 1: to keep funding us, and we need to continue to
Speaker 1: to do this predator control thing. And they send the
Speaker 1: Murray brothers out to study coyote predation on game animals
Speaker 1: as the arch predator of our time in Yellowstone and
Speaker 1: Jackson Hole, and both the Murray brothers, o Loss and
Speaker 1: Adolph both argue that we have no evidence that coyotes
Speaker 1: are causing the population of sheep, muled ere, prong horns,
Speaker 1: big horns, elk, any of those animals to go down.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's true and bad winners. They will sometimes
Speaker 1: manage to kill a calf, and you can certainly find
Speaker 1: as the Bureau had as hunters had arguable, we can
Speaker 1: open their stomachs up after we poise them and it's
Speaker 1: got elk meat. But the Mury brothers watched them close
Speaker 1: enough to realize it's scavenged. I mean, these elkers are
Speaker 1: then bad winners, their animals dying, and for sure the
Speaker 1: coyotes are going out and scavenging on the dead animals,
Speaker 1: but they're not out there hauling down elk in packs
Speaker 1: of little coyotes nipping at their heels. The same conversations
Speaker 1: happened right now in the East with white tails, where
Speaker 1: a lot of even though study after study keeps coming
Speaker 1: out saying, you know, I think that the white tailed
Speaker 1: decline we've been seeing in the last you know, five six,
Speaker 1: seven years is contemporaneous with coyotes coming in. UM. It
Speaker 1: seems that maybe it's not what's really going on here.
Speaker 1: There could be other factors that play. And there's a
Speaker 1: great reluctance with people to accept that because it's it's
Speaker 1: a it's just it's clean. Yeah, we like, we love skapegoats.
Speaker 1: You know, it's clean. It's clean to think that way.
Speaker 1: I got friends in Wisconsin, good friends who on one hand,
Speaker 1: advocate and we need to shoot more white tails. We've
Speaker 1: got too many white tails. That's we've got unhealth. They heard,
Speaker 1: there's too much risk of disease transmission. I gotta shoot
Speaker 1: coyotes because they're going after the deer. So well, they
Speaker 1: don't want the coyote to get the deer. You know,
Speaker 1: they want to they want to put their tag on it.
Speaker 1: But but I do, you know, I do. I had
Speaker 1: a guy recently telling me that the thing he and
Speaker 1: he see, he's a very student observer of the natural
Speaker 1: world in his area in Kentucky, and he was saying,
Speaker 1: he's he says, I'll tell you one thing that happened
Speaker 1: when coyotes came in here. He says, fucking groundhogs vanished.
Speaker 1: No one else is crying for groundhogs. But he's like,
Speaker 1: that's one thing I do think is exactly attributable, because
Speaker 1: I think they came in and just hammered the groundho
Speaker 1: I'm sure they probably did that, you know. And what
Speaker 1: people in in in New York and Chicago and Denver
Speaker 1: and l A I'll argue is that you know your
Speaker 1: pets aren't safe when coyotes are in town. That's the
Speaker 1: that's that that argument is the least interesting to me. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: that's just that's you know, for for a lot of
Speaker 1: people living in the suburbs. That's the thing that I mean.
Speaker 1: I just saw online the other day a couple that
Speaker 1: had invented a coyote vest and you put it on
Speaker 1: your little dog and it's got these spikes coming out
Speaker 1: of the vest and some sort of quills that come
Speaker 1: up off the back of its neck, and it's supposed
Speaker 1: to repel coyote attacks. And I mean they're advertising on
Speaker 1: the internet that they've got these coyote vest that you
Speaker 1: can buy. But I mean, what's actually going on is
Speaker 1: it's not everybody thinks. What's happening is that coyotes in
Speaker 1: urban situations, you know, they're scarvenging. They're scavenging garbage from
Speaker 1: the back of the McDonald's and the burger king, and
Speaker 1: they're they're eating cats, and they're eating poodles and stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, the truth is what they do in urban
Speaker 1: areas is the same thing they do in rural areas.
Speaker 1: They basically go after mice and rats. Operation they eat
Speaker 1: a lot of grassopers, a lot of fruit, and primarily
Speaker 1: mice and rats. And although they do kill cats and
Speaker 1: they do kill small dogs, it's not because they're eating them.
Speaker 1: It's because they regard them as intra guild competitive predators.
Speaker 1: And they see a cat or a small dog out there,
Speaker 1: and their response to that is that this is another
Speaker 1: predator that's invaded my territory, and so they will kill them.
Speaker 1: But I mean, very rarely will they haul them off
Speaker 1: and chow down on them. I mean, this is just
Speaker 1: another one of the urban myths about coyotes that's out
Speaker 1: there from the perspective of the pet owner, it probably
Speaker 1: doesn't matter. So it doesn't matter the animal is dead,
Speaker 1: or it might be better actually if they haul the
Speaker 1: cat down to the den of pups. And actually the
Speaker 1: cat gott was made some use of. But yeah, coyote vests,
Speaker 1: so you can you can acquire one, no doubt soon
Speaker 1: for your cat as well as your dog. That was
Speaker 1: your follow up question. You wanted to know about bison
Speaker 1: though the story, well, the the chapter that I do
Speaker 1: in American Serengetti on Bison, uh is a it's a
Speaker 1: new take, and so it's not the it's not a
Speaker 1: regurgitation of my original story, although I do I do
Speaker 1: build on that. And what that story argued was that
Speaker 1: what we've thought about what happened to bison is far
Speaker 1: too simple. I mean, we've basically always argued that, you know,
Speaker 1: they they were still sixty million of them at the
Speaker 1: end of the Civil War, and these buffalo hunters go
Speaker 1: out in the space of twenty years, they managed to
Speaker 1: wipe out sixty million animals in the market hunt, and
Speaker 1: that's what happened to him. And what I argued in
Speaker 1: that piece back in was that the truth is uh
Speaker 1: the bison herds. For one thing, we're never that big.
Speaker 1: They were only about how that size. And secondly, they
Speaker 1: were dwindling visibly as early as eighteen fifty because of
Speaker 1: a whole group of causes that kind of came together
Speaker 1: like a perfect storm in the fourties and eighteen fifties.
Speaker 1: And UH one of them certainly was the market hunt,
Speaker 1: although it wasn't the hide the American hide hunters who
Speaker 1: responsibly primarily was Indians being caught up in the the
Speaker 1: buffalo robe trade that was sponsored by the fur companies.
Speaker 1: Hides with hair on right and and tanned by Indian
Speaker 1: women who were who were the processors, who were the
Speaker 1: labor force, and the men would go out and and
Speaker 1: procure the animal, and the women would take the pelt
Speaker 1: off and then tan the the robe and produced this
Speaker 1: marketable commodity that was then traded to UH, to the
Speaker 1: fur trade company. So there was there was blankets and
Speaker 1: for all kinds of things, primarily primarily as people were
Speaker 1: sort of competing for the last big buffalo hunting grounds.
Speaker 1: In many instances, UH, what they were getting in trade
Speaker 1: were firearms and ammunition and powder. UH, metal goods of
Speaker 1: all kinds, certainly textile blankets and beads and things, but
Speaker 1: often firearms and ammunition because there was a there was
Speaker 1: a competition for these last grounds of of huntable animals.
Speaker 1: I mean the Lakota people, the Western Lakotas were driving
Speaker 1: across the Great Plains from east to west during all
Speaker 1: these times, taking away the buffalo grounds of the Pawnees,
Speaker 1: the buffalo ultimately the buffalo grounds of the crows Uh
Speaker 1: in order to to exploit the herds themselves. So it
Speaker 1: was kind of this capitalist market fueled inner tribal competition
Speaker 1: for the the last remaining resource. So that was one
Speaker 1: of the causes, but there were others. One was the
Speaker 1: spread of horses across the plains, again, which ate the
Speaker 1: same grass uh drank the water that bison drank, and so,
Speaker 1: and the horse numbers were becoming high enough that the
Speaker 1: competition between horses and bison was getting to draw down
Speaker 1: the size of the buffalo herds. And there was as
Speaker 1: well the fact that diseases, exotic bovine diseases whose impact
Speaker 1: we can't really quantify, but things like bovine tuberculosis and
Speaker 1: anthrax were having an impact by the eight forties because
Speaker 1: of the immigrant trails that were going across the plains.
Speaker 1: And then perhaps the one that's uh the easiest to
Speaker 1: to assess in terms of quantifying is the change in
Speaker 1: climate that was happening in the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties.
Speaker 1: And what what was going on was that what we
Speaker 1: called the Little Ice Age, about a two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty year period of much cooler, wetter temperatures in the
Speaker 1: northern hemisphere, was coming to an end in the eighteen
Speaker 1: fourties and eighteen fifties, and as it came to an end,
Speaker 1: it was producing a series of droughts. Uh, there was
Speaker 1: a a drought on the Great Plans in the eighteen
Speaker 1: fifties and early eighteen sixties that was probably the most
Speaker 1: severe drought that we have a record of in the
Speaker 1: last thousand years. And as it drew down the carrying
Speaker 1: capacity of the grasslands, what this meant was that buffalo
Speaker 1: didn't have as much grass to eat, and so the
Speaker 1: numbers were plummeting as a result of deteriorating environmental conditions
Speaker 1: for them. And one final thing that I talked about,
Speaker 1: I talked about all of these causes in this article,
Speaker 1: which argued for this multiplicity of causes The one other
Speaker 1: one I talked about was the fact that in the past,
Speaker 1: when conditions like this had prevailed on the Great Plains,
Speaker 1: Buffalo had tended to migrate westward into the mountains where
Speaker 1: there was more grass and lusher conditions, and eastward out
Speaker 1: into the prairies towards the Mississippi River, where there would
Speaker 1: be more more grass and more rainfall. But by the
Speaker 1: eighteen forties, American Indian policy had basically placed something like
Speaker 1: five thousand Eastern Indians in Kansas and Oklahoma in the
Speaker 1: Indian Territory as a part of the removal policy, most
Speaker 1: famous aspect of which is the Cherokee Trail of Tears,
Speaker 1: where they're taken out of the southeast and put out
Speaker 1: in Oklahoma. And that puts this body of people right
Speaker 1: in the way of where Buffalo would formally have spread
Speaker 1: eastward in order to to sort of relieve the pressure
Speaker 1: of a drought out on the pla. So they don't
Speaker 1: have any refuges to expand into anymore, and they're just
Speaker 1: kind of caught out in a deteriorating Great Plains landscape
Speaker 1: with all these other effects. And so the argument became
Speaker 1: that by eighteen fifty, I mean we actually probably only
Speaker 1: have maybe twelve fourteen million buffalo left on the Great Planes,
Speaker 1: not sixty million, So by the end of the Civil War,
Speaker 1: that makes it quite a bit easier for the white
Speaker 1: hight hunters to arrive and sort of shoot down the
Speaker 1: remaining animals. So that was the story that I did
Speaker 1: in and I certainly fold a good bit of that
Speaker 1: into the chapter on Buffalo. But I try to tell
Speaker 1: a sort of a bigger story in in this chapter
Speaker 1: in American Serengetti about Buffalo and and the main thing
Speaker 1: that I take on is our supposition that we all have.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can go online and find find t
Speaker 1: shirts that sort of argue for this that it was
Speaker 1: a conspiracy between the federal government and the American military
Speaker 1: that wiped out the Buffalo. People still, yeah, they still
Speaker 1: talk about it, and the scapegoat of it is Philip Sheridan.
Speaker 1: And Philip Sheridan you can go online right now and
Speaker 1: find a T shirt with this quote on the front
Speaker 1: of it. Philip Sheridan is supposed to have made this
Speaker 1: speech in Austin, Texas in the early eighteen seventies when
Speaker 1: the Texas legislature. As the story is told over and
Speaker 1: over again, was considering a bill to outlaw the hide
Speaker 1: hunt in the Texas Panhandle, and Sheridan supposedly goes to
Speaker 1: Austin and stands up in front of Texas legislature and says,
Speaker 1: you can't do this. What you should be doing, in fact,
Speaker 1: is making sure that those animals are wiped out in
Speaker 1: order to be able to put the Indians on reservations
Speaker 1: and open up the planes to the festive cowboy and
Speaker 1: the speckled cattle. And he goes on to say, instead
Speaker 1: of uh detigrating these buffalo hunters, you should give them
Speaker 1: a medal. They should be recognized as American heroes. And
Speaker 1: the medal should have a discouraged planes Indian on one
Speaker 1: side and a dead buffalo on the other side. And
Speaker 1: so this story gets told, I mean, amazingly enough, no
Speaker 1: historian had ever looked at the origin of this story.
Speaker 1: It's told by a buffalo hunter in nineteen oh five,
Speaker 1: during the conservation period of Teddy Roosevelt, at a time
Speaker 1: when we were trying to save buffalo and a lot
Speaker 1: of people thought of these buffalo hunters as having been
Speaker 1: murderers of all these animals. And this buffalo hunter named
Speaker 1: John Cook writes a memoir published in nineteen o five
Speaker 1: called The Border in Buffalo, and he produces this speech
Speaker 1: which is something like patents speech. At the beginning of
Speaker 1: that movie. You can almost see the American flag rippling
Speaker 1: behind Sheridan as he says all this. And historians, journalists,
Speaker 1: the buffalo field campaign up in Yellowstone have just bought
Speaker 1: this thing, hook, hook, line and sinker, and nobody has
Speaker 1: ever bothered to go back and say, first of all,
Speaker 1: the Texas ever actually trying to pass a law to
Speaker 1: outlaw the buffalo hunt in the Panhandle. Did Philip Sheridan
Speaker 1: ever actually go to Austin, Texas and make a speech
Speaker 1: in front of the Texas legislature. And the answer to
Speaker 1: both those is, Texas never considered such a law. And
Speaker 1: in fact, when a law like this came up in
Speaker 1: the national legislature, it was the Texas component that thought
Speaker 1: it tooth and nail at the national level. Philip Sheridan,
Speaker 1: we have no record that he ever went to Austin,
Speaker 1: Texas and made such a speech. And the source of
Speaker 1: the story, then you realize, is this buffalo hunter who's
Speaker 1: writing his memoir at a time when buffalo hunters are
Speaker 1: being castigated. And when you look closely at the story,
Speaker 1: he even starts it out with this disclaimer of it
Speaker 1: is said that the Texas legislature was considering. So he
Speaker 1: does this kind of removes himself from it. It's not me,
Speaker 1: it is said, however, And so I tell this story
Speaker 1: in this chapter in order to try to disabuse people.
Speaker 1: Dispatch a grand student down the guy who would you
Speaker 1: remember this because that happened when you were at Montana,
Speaker 1: Dan Brewsters his name. He is now the director of
Speaker 1: the Buffalo Field Campaign. Yeah, and is now the director
Speaker 1: of And he's the grad student who went down to
Speaker 1: Austin to try to find all this and came back
Speaker 1: from his spring break in a week of being down there.
Speaker 1: He was working for the Buffalo Field Campaign then and said, man,
Speaker 1: I gotta say it's not there. And so a friend
Speaker 1: of mine who works in the National Archives, knowing that
Speaker 1: I was working on this, dug up for me the
Speaker 1: sort of the ultimate sort of reversal of this. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know if this will rescue Philip Sheridan's reputation
Speaker 1: or not, but Philip Sheridan was in Montana Territory in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy eight, and heard about buffalo hunters shooting down
Speaker 1: buffalo right and left, and wrote a telegram to Washington saying,
Speaker 1: I want this buffalo hunting stuff stopped right now. We
Speaker 1: are going to end up with Indians who don't have
Speaker 1: a bite to eat this summer because these white guys
Speaker 1: are shooting down all these animals. We've got to stop
Speaker 1: this bubble. I'm not shooting you. And so I quote
Speaker 1: Shardan's exact opposite story than what he's been credited as
Speaker 1: saying in history, this story is everywhere. It's everywhere. When
Speaker 1: I was kind of immersed in this whole world, it
Speaker 1: was like, it's just like, oh, I had already know,
Speaker 1: excepted I've heard about that, and I just like always
Speaker 1: dismayed about how many people point that out. Yeah, it's everywhere.
Speaker 1: So one of the things, it's a comfortable, easy thing.
Speaker 1: Well it's I mean, so think about it. We tried
Speaker 1: to claim that, you know, in the aftermath of the
Speaker 1: Civil War, that the Civil War is not about slavery.
Speaker 1: It's about the Southern way of life. It's about preserving
Speaker 1: a culture in the South. I have a brother back
Speaker 1: in in Texas who still argues this, And so I
Speaker 1: mean That's the reason these kinds of stories are comfortable
Speaker 1: to us is that it removed the responsibility for the
Speaker 1: action in history from us to some agency out there,
Speaker 1: like the federal government that everybody is always quick to
Speaker 1: take aim at. And so it wasn't we. We didn't
Speaker 1: do it. The federal government in the military did this,
Speaker 1: I mean, and the truth is, of course we did it.
Speaker 1: American citizens did it. The market hunt did it. Unrestrained
Speaker 1: capitalism did it. I've tried. When I was writing about
Speaker 1: high Hunters and in my Buffalo book, I don't think.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I ever, I don't think I
Speaker 1: actually wrote this. But when I was talking about it,
Speaker 1: I would say, let's let's it sound like I'm condemning
Speaker 1: these guys. I want to say, in all honesty, I
Speaker 1: would have been right out there with them. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: were a lot of guys who were broke after the
Speaker 1: How in the world would they have even like you
Speaker 1: got some guy pushing the plow, he said, the Ohio
Speaker 1: Valley or coming out of Pennsylvania right next to no
Speaker 1: education or no education quite possibly illiterate, has never been
Speaker 1: out there, did It's like that? He's like, I'll go
Speaker 1: out there and fix them Indians and shop. It's just like,
Speaker 1: not what he's going out there for. He was going
Speaker 1: out there for under like money, adventure. You know. It's
Speaker 1: like the grand picture wasn't there. I would like as
Speaker 1: much as like I grew up, you know, I saw one.
Speaker 1: It's earlier today. I grew up shopping for a trap
Speaker 1: line in Canada. It's like if I was alive at
Speaker 1: that time, If I was alive at that time, I
Speaker 1: would have been like, you're ship me, let's go before
Speaker 1: they're gone. Well, it's hell, you what, I can't say
Speaker 1: that I wouldn't have been right out there too. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's impossible to say at the time. But it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a simple you know. You take these like kind
Speaker 1: of like everyday motivations, the kinds of things people still
Speaker 1: do and still think about, and apply it in that
Speaker 1: context at that time, and that's yeah, the kinds of
Speaker 1: things you wind up with. There were some of these
Speaker 1: buffalo hunters like John Cook, the guy who wrote this
Speaker 1: memoir who I mean, they defended it all to the end,
Speaker 1: even when society had turned against it. Um. I mean.
Speaker 1: There was a guy down in Texas, Jay Wright Moore,
Speaker 1: who used to lead parades in his buffalo hunter outfit.
Speaker 1: And he had this book, Buffalo Bone Days, and that's right,
Speaker 1: Buffalo Bone Days. And his stock speech was that all
Speaker 1: the buffalo between the Brazis River and the Platte didn't
Speaker 1: amount to one homesteader family somewhere in Kansas, and so
Speaker 1: don't go mourning all those buffaloes. That didn't amount to
Speaker 1: a single thing, one homestead or family in Manita more
Speaker 1: than that. But there were some of them buffalo Jones,
Speaker 1: you know, in in Kansas. I mean, you know about
Speaker 1: this guy, Steve, I know, I mean, he sort of
Speaker 1: spent the rest of his life stricken with guilt about
Speaker 1: what he had done. He said, I spent my entire
Speaker 1: youth trying to wipe these animals out, and now I'm
Speaker 1: gonna try to atone for that wickedness by attempting to
Speaker 1: save some of them for America in the twentieth century. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he'd ride out, try to rope up calves and then
Speaker 1: put them on cow that's right, put him on cows
Speaker 1: to get milk. Yeah. And he knew from his hunts
Speaker 1: where some buffalo, even when everybody thought they were all gone,
Speaker 1: he knew there's some of them left in the Texas
Speaker 1: Panhandle where used to hunting those brakes along the automoskado.
Speaker 1: I guarantee I can go down and find something. He did.
Speaker 1: He went down and found a group of about sixty
Speaker 1: And this was seven or eight years after everybody was
Speaker 1: convinced that there were no more buffalo on the other planes.
Speaker 1: I mean, but these guys, you know, they knew how
Speaker 1: to hunt, and they knew guns, and a lot of
Speaker 1: times that's all they knew how to do. And so
Speaker 1: here was an opportunity to make some money from it,
Speaker 1: and they went out and and did it. But when
Speaker 1: you got twenty thousand of them out there on the
Speaker 1: planes and doing it, the ultimate result is ultimate result
Speaker 1: is in our time we only get to read books
Speaker 1: about this or see movies about it. And one of
Speaker 1: the things that kind of excites me about the idea
Speaker 1: of the American Prairie Reserve and recreating the Americans Serengetti,
Speaker 1: is I want to experience it myself. I don't want
Speaker 1: to just read a book about what it was like
Speaker 1: or see go see The Revenant to see what the
Speaker 1: West was like. I mean, I want to, you know,
Speaker 1: as thora said, I wanna I want an entire heaven
Speaker 1: and an entire earth. I don't want to think that
Speaker 1: some demigo has come along before me and pluck the
Speaker 1: best of the stars out of the sky. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you're rooting for it, the return of the American Serengetti
Speaker 1: a man. Absolutely, it's a noble cause there's a lot
Speaker 1: of you know, there's a lot of arguing. A lot
Speaker 1: of arguing needs to happen in Phillips County, Montana. I
Speaker 1: think there's a lot of a lot of arguments gonna happen.
Speaker 1: I certainly agree, Yeah, I certainly agree with the goal. Um,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be like all worthwhile things, it's gonna it's
Speaker 1: gonna amount to a fight, you know. Yeah, Well getting
Speaker 1: Yellowstone was you know, that was that was not a
Speaker 1: huge fight, but it was something of the fun we
Speaker 1: all everyone listen, everyone's come to agree. Roosevelt is great man.
Speaker 1: Everything you do is great. You think at the time
Speaker 1: when he says, hey, I got an idea, Yeah, people
Speaker 1: were piss well, they were living about the Grand King.
Speaker 1: And you know when he when he made it into
Speaker 1: a national monument. I mean, people were furious about that,
Speaker 1: especially in Arizona and uh In Arizona Territory. I mean,
Speaker 1: they were absolutely furious about it. But as Roosevelt said,
Speaker 1: you know, nothing man is going to be able to
Speaker 1: do to it is going to improve improve what it is.
Speaker 1: The ages have been at work on it, and so
Speaker 1: all we can do is detract from it. The best
Speaker 1: thing to do is is to preserve it as it is.
Speaker 1: And I think in this American Serengetti issue, it's not
Speaker 1: that we have a remnant thing that we can preserve.
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to recreate that and that's gonna be
Speaker 1: That's an even that's an even bigger task. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: different than setting something Christine aside. Yeah, recreating something is
Speaker 1: a bigger project. But it's kind to me on the
Speaker 1: scale of of setting you know, the world's first national
Speaker 1: park aside in the form of Yellowstone. Uh. And so
Speaker 1: it's kind of a one of these big vision things
Speaker 1: for our time, the way Yellowstone was for people in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century. Yeah, there's a it's coming up now,
Speaker 1: like just in in the political environment where people look
Speaker 1: at chunks of wild land and like the wild land
Speaker 1: sort of has to justify its existence. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: it's sitting there doing nothing as though every minute wild
Speaker 1: places they're supposed to be like to lay out their
Speaker 1: ledgers improve at any given moment, like what their value
Speaker 1: is in the moment when I think that the more
Speaker 1: accurate way of thinking about wild places is it's like
Speaker 1: money in the bank. What am I doing with it
Speaker 1: right now? It's setting there, and that ship is getting
Speaker 1: more and more valuable every minute, and I don't know.
Speaker 1: I might not cash it, my children might not cash it,
Speaker 1: my grandparents might not cash it, right or my grandchildren
Speaker 1: might not cash it. But at the same time, it's
Speaker 1: just something they're getting exponentially more valuable as time it
Speaker 1: goes by. And it's like disgusting to me that somehow
Speaker 1: people look at chunk or ground and it has to
Speaker 1: justify itself in terms of in terms jobs. All the
Speaker 1: leopold he had this line where he said that, uh, America,
Speaker 1: just in case. All the Leopold's are one of the
Speaker 1: fathers of the modern conservation movement, and Avid Hunter and Fisherman,
Speaker 1: and he had this line where he said that we've
Speaker 1: become like hypochondriacs about our economic health, where we're incapable
Speaker 1: of being healthy, where we view our economic health as
Speaker 1: like you know, soul full of anxiety about it that
Speaker 1: we can't realize that we're actually okay, you know, And
Speaker 1: I think that the way wild lands need to just
Speaker 1: like in sort of some kind of petty economic way,
Speaker 1: account for what they're doing in the job cycle, all right,
Speaker 1: Like who's creating more jobs. It's a thing like in
Speaker 1: hunting and fishing right now, so many people are starting
Speaker 1: starting saying like, okay, we gotta do we should do
Speaker 1: conservation work because look at the economic imprint of hunters
Speaker 1: and fishermen. You know, we contribute all these billions of
Speaker 1: dollars to the economy every year. And I went up
Speaker 1: thinking to myself, okay, so let's say you did that
Speaker 1: same math and realized that having clean air and clean
Speaker 1: water and wild places is costing us money. Does that
Speaker 1: mean we feel differently about it? Like that doesn't change
Speaker 1: my perspective on it. I'm not like, oh, yeah, you're right,
Speaker 1: we should have wilderness because we're making money off it.
Speaker 1: It's just like, you know, I hear that. I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know, that's great, but it doesn't change my opinion
Speaker 1: one way or the other. I don't like it less
Speaker 1: or more. Now that you've justified it's value. To me,
Speaker 1: that's that's trying to think in about values that are
Speaker 1: sort of outside economic determinism and trying to insert them
Speaker 1: into that kind of model. But I mean there's some
Speaker 1: things that you don't put price tax on. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of the It seems to me
Speaker 1: the finer sentiments in the human spirit are not really
Speaker 1: things that you add up in ledgers. Um. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, I still believe in that old, that great
Speaker 1: old Wallets Stigner line about the geography of Hope. That's
Speaker 1: kind of to me what wild places represent. So I mean,
Speaker 1: we we've as our population grows around the globe, I mean,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be putting more pressure on wild places and
Speaker 1: shrinking the possibility of biodiversity. Uh. And that's the theme
Speaker 1: of the modern era. So every opportunity, it seems to
Speaker 1: me when you can take a stand against that and
Speaker 1: even reverse it with something like this American prairie reserve idea,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm that that makes me want to endorse
Speaker 1: it and and work on behalf of it, because I
Speaker 1: think the the primary theme is in the other direction.
Speaker 1: So yeah, this this American Serengetti, American Prairie Reserve Project
Speaker 1: is kind of an opportunity to do good in the
Speaker 1: classic old Aldo Leopold Teddy Roosevelt fashion. And it's probably
Speaker 1: one of the reasons that, you know, groups like the
Speaker 1: National Geographic for instance, and the Grosvenor family are really
Speaker 1: excited about it because it does have a little bit
Speaker 1: of a whiff of that old time big vision conservation.
Speaker 1: Uh thinking, did you know, Uh, Leopold's kid is a hydrologist.
Speaker 1: I believe I've never I don't think i've ever met him.
Speaker 1: I could be messing up. I think he has a son, Luna. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I could be. I could messing this up too, but
Speaker 1: I think it's kind of right. He says, Uh. Rivers
Speaker 1: are the gutters through which run the ruins of continents.
Speaker 1: It's a good one. Yeah, that's a good one too.
Speaker 1: We could toss good clothes for these guys are after
Speaker 1: a long time. All Right, I don't have any concluding thoughts.
Speaker 1: That was a fine conclusion. Now, thank you for your time.
Speaker 1: Former professor, current author Dann Floor. He's going and find
Speaker 1: your books. You can get him on Amazon, pre order
Speaker 1: them or order them, order one, pre order one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's the way it is. Now you can
Speaker 1: order American Serengetty and pre order Coyote America and Kaudy
Speaker 1: America is not very far away, about six weeks or so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: order now, you get it early, all right, Thanks man,
Speaker 1: you're bad. Thanks asstsstssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss