1
00:00:01,480 --> 00:00:04,280
Speaker 1: Following the arrival of the global market economy in the

2
00:00:04,280 --> 00:00:07,880
Speaker 1: West in the early eighteen hundreds, important elements of the

3
00:00:07,880 --> 00:00:13,160
Speaker 1: biodiversity preserved by thousands of years of native management collapsed

4
00:00:13,200 --> 00:00:18,040
Speaker 1: in little more than three decades with exploitation of animals

5
00:00:18,040 --> 00:00:22,400
Speaker 1: that snared Native people, working class Americans, and produced the

6
00:00:22,480 --> 00:00:27,040
Speaker 1: country's first millionaires. I'm Dan Florries, and this is the

7
00:00:27,080 --> 00:00:32,640
Speaker 1: American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in barrel,

8
00:00:32,880 --> 00:00:36,000
Speaker 1: Velvet Buck arrives this summer just in time for the

9
00:00:36,040 --> 00:00:39,479
Speaker 1: season that calls us home. A portion of every bottle

10
00:00:39,520 --> 00:00:44,120
Speaker 1: supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters

11
00:00:44,159 --> 00:01:01,840
Speaker 1: and wildlife enjoy responsibly start of the endgame for the

12
00:01:01,880 --> 00:01:14,480
Speaker 1: ancient West. In the year nineteen sixty seven, a famed

13
00:01:14,560 --> 00:01:18,200
Speaker 1: American painter named Thomas Hart Benton laid down on canvas

14
00:01:18,319 --> 00:01:21,160
Speaker 1: perhaps the most poignant painting about the trajectory of the

15
00:01:21,200 --> 00:01:26,400
Speaker 1: nineteenth century American West any Western artist has produced. Benton

16
00:01:26,480 --> 00:01:30,280
Speaker 1: based Lewis and Clark at Eagle Creek on an eighteen

17
00:01:30,319 --> 00:01:33,480
Speaker 1: oh five account in the Explorer's Journals, and in a

18
00:01:33,520 --> 00:01:37,080
Speaker 1: further nine to reality on an actual place. The painting

19
00:01:37,160 --> 00:01:40,760
Speaker 1: dramatically captures all the hues and lines and rhythms of

20
00:01:40,800 --> 00:01:44,800
Speaker 1: the white cliffs of today's Upper Missouri River breaks National Monument.

21
00:01:45,760 --> 00:01:48,440
Speaker 1: But what makes Benton's canvas one of the West's great

22
00:01:48,480 --> 00:01:51,480
Speaker 1: paintings is not his use of explorer journals or his

23
00:01:51,640 --> 00:01:56,200
Speaker 1: abstract rendering of a well known Western locale. Instead, it's

24
00:01:56,320 --> 00:01:58,320
Speaker 1: the story the painting tells.

25
00:01:59,720 --> 00:02:00,480
Speaker 2: In Lewis and.

26
00:02:00,440 --> 00:02:03,720
Speaker 1: Clark at Eagle Creek, the west of the previous ten

27
00:02:03,840 --> 00:02:08,800
Speaker 1: thousand years yet exists, and it looms over the arriving

28
00:02:08,840 --> 00:02:12,880
Speaker 1: Americans who appear a minor blip in the timeline of

29
00:02:12,919 --> 00:02:18,400
Speaker 1: a world that's impossibly ancient. That sense of a timelessness,

30
00:02:18,720 --> 00:02:22,080
Speaker 1: carried by a sensuous river amid the forms and colors

31
00:02:22,120 --> 00:02:26,840
Speaker 1: of immense space, dwarf any foreboding about the old world.

32
00:02:26,919 --> 00:02:32,440
Speaker 1: Having discovered this remote interior piece of the continent. Now

33
00:02:32,520 --> 00:02:36,000
Speaker 1: let the mind leap a quarter century ahead in time

34
00:02:36,080 --> 00:02:39,280
Speaker 1: from Lewis and Clark. When the decade of the eighteen

35
00:02:39,360 --> 00:02:45,000
Speaker 1: thirties dawns, A calm, confident American West has somehow contracted,

36
00:02:45,040 --> 00:02:49,160
Speaker 1: in both size and grand promise, the Western world that

37
00:02:49,240 --> 00:02:53,040
Speaker 1: had Lewis and Clark marveling, built by one hundred centuries

38
00:02:53,080 --> 00:02:57,400
Speaker 1: of native inhabitation and a magnificent diversity and abundance of

39
00:02:57,440 --> 00:03:01,680
Speaker 1: wild animals had been intact when the explorers past Eagle Creek.

40
00:03:02,440 --> 00:03:05,639
Speaker 1: But the eighteen thirties is the decade when any resistance

41
00:03:05,639 --> 00:03:09,440
Speaker 1: to high speed change becomes forever futile. For the West,

42
00:03:11,320 --> 00:03:16,720
Speaker 1: vastness and abundance were both shrinking. As the fame Maximilian

43
00:03:16,840 --> 00:03:21,360
Speaker 1: Bodmer expedition on the Missouri River documented so well, the

44
00:03:21,400 --> 00:03:26,919
Speaker 1: bigger world was beginning to rush. In history doesn't remain

45
00:03:27,000 --> 00:03:29,720
Speaker 1: in the past, so it's not a special insight to

46
00:03:29,760 --> 00:03:33,880
Speaker 1: realize that no time exists apart from what went before

47
00:03:34,160 --> 00:03:38,840
Speaker 1: or after human cause. Climate change hasn't popped into existence

48
00:03:39,120 --> 00:03:42,920
Speaker 1: in our twenty first century with no advanced warning, and

49
00:03:43,000 --> 00:03:46,040
Speaker 1: what we do about it or don't do, will likely

50
00:03:46,080 --> 00:03:50,480
Speaker 1: affect us and the planet for centuries to come. Still,

51
00:03:50,520 --> 00:03:53,800
Speaker 1: there are decades in the human story, the nineteen sixties,

52
00:03:53,960 --> 00:03:57,880
Speaker 1: for instance, when civil rights of all kinds, ecological concerns,

53
00:03:58,120 --> 00:04:01,680
Speaker 1: and a growing mistrust of war that do stand as

54
00:04:01,760 --> 00:04:06,000
Speaker 1: exceptional for North America west of the Mississippi River, and

55
00:04:06,160 --> 00:04:11,760
Speaker 1: especially for the region's environmental story. The long eighteen thirties decade,

56
00:04:12,160 --> 00:04:15,360
Speaker 1: which in truth spanned the years from the eighteen twenties

57
00:04:15,400 --> 00:04:18,840
Speaker 1: through the early eighteen forties was one of those exceptional

58
00:04:18,960 --> 00:04:23,280
Speaker 1: and memorable times. With his arrival, a West that had

59
00:04:23,360 --> 00:04:27,680
Speaker 1: been relatively quiescent for thousands of years was morphing into

60
00:04:27,720 --> 00:04:31,720
Speaker 1: something new so rapidly it shocked many who witnessed it.

61
00:04:35,279 --> 00:04:38,800
Speaker 1: Stories about the West, as we know have long dazzled world,

62
00:04:39,440 --> 00:04:42,200
Speaker 1: from Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West of more than a

63
00:04:42,240 --> 00:04:46,679
Speaker 1: century ago to today's Yellowstone The West stories fascinate because

64
00:04:46,720 --> 00:04:51,680
Speaker 1: they offer up an endemic world to human design, despite

65
00:04:51,720 --> 00:04:55,640
Speaker 1: our lingering romance for eighteen thirties accounts of mountain men

66
00:04:55,800 --> 00:04:59,880
Speaker 1: are the overlanders on the Oregon Trail. However, the West

67
00:05:00,120 --> 00:05:03,080
Speaker 1: ecological stories have never made much of a dent in

68
00:05:03,120 --> 00:05:07,360
Speaker 1: our historical memory of the region and its frontier. Nonetheless,

69
00:05:07,440 --> 00:05:10,240
Speaker 1: much of what happened in the Classic West actually centered

70
00:05:10,240 --> 00:05:13,320
Speaker 1: around an extensive ecological destruction of the West, Lewis and

71
00:05:13,360 --> 00:05:17,200
Speaker 1: Clark saw. The truth is that stories like the ones

72
00:05:17,240 --> 00:05:20,839
Speaker 1: that follow in this episode were central to Western history

73
00:05:21,120 --> 00:05:24,640
Speaker 1: and to the freedom of action we intitively associate with it.

74
00:05:25,520 --> 00:05:28,560
Speaker 1: To my mind, stories like this reveal important things that

75
00:05:28,720 --> 00:05:32,760
Speaker 1: romance about a kick Carson or a Narcissa Whitman obscures

76
00:05:32,760 --> 00:05:38,159
Speaker 1: from the big picture in roughly chronological order. Then consider

77
00:05:38,240 --> 00:05:42,920
Speaker 1: how these stories about Western ecologies offer a different way

78
00:05:42,960 --> 00:05:49,640
Speaker 1: to see the West in the early nineteenth century. At

79
00:05:49,640 --> 00:05:52,599
Speaker 1: the start of the eighteen thirty decade, the prevailing notion

80
00:05:52,760 --> 00:05:56,120
Speaker 1: about the West had been captured by the American Exploring

81
00:05:56,160 --> 00:05:59,719
Speaker 1: expedition led by Stephen Long, which in eighteen nineteen and

82
00:05:59,720 --> 00:06:02,239
Speaker 1: eighteen twenty had crossed the Great Plains to the Rocky

83
00:06:02,279 --> 00:06:06,719
Speaker 1: Mountains of Colorado. Intriguingly, Long's party was convinced that the

84
00:06:06,839 --> 00:06:10,880
Speaker 1: ancient quiescent world that scene was still the best future

85
00:06:10,960 --> 00:06:15,320
Speaker 1: for the West. The region they explored was almost wholly

86
00:06:15,440 --> 00:06:20,480
Speaker 1: unfit for cultivation, they claimed, and peculiarly adapted as arranged

87
00:06:20,520 --> 00:06:27,080
Speaker 1: for Buffalo's wild goats and other wild game and incalculable multitudes. Thus,

88
00:06:27,160 --> 00:06:31,360
Speaker 1: the West was best left as a frontier, which by

89
00:06:31,400 --> 00:06:34,640
Speaker 1: no means implied, however, that they believed the West should

90
00:06:34,640 --> 00:06:39,080
Speaker 1: be left untouched or to the native people or Spanish settlers.

91
00:06:39,760 --> 00:06:43,760
Speaker 1: That was because the American idea of a frontier rested

92
00:06:43,800 --> 00:06:47,320
Speaker 1: on the recent history of the Atlantic seaboard, the South

93
00:06:47,680 --> 00:06:52,400
Speaker 1: and the Mississippi valley. All these had initially functioned as

94
00:06:52,600 --> 00:06:56,000
Speaker 1: wild lands exploited for their animal.

95
00:06:55,600 --> 00:06:58,760
Speaker 2: Wealth four centuries ago.

96
00:06:59,400 --> 00:07:04,080
Speaker 1: Religion was the ultimate explanation of all things for almost

97
00:07:04,120 --> 00:07:09,640
Speaker 1: all humans. Like Native peoples, Europeans in America generally understood

98
00:07:09,680 --> 00:07:14,280
Speaker 1: animals in supernatural terms, but for Europeans the terms were

99
00:07:14,320 --> 00:07:19,720
Speaker 1: their own. Our colonial ancestors most certainly didn't regard animals.

100
00:07:19,200 --> 00:07:21,960
Speaker 2: As close kin the way native people did.

101
00:07:22,600 --> 00:07:26,000
Speaker 1: For them, only humans were godlike and exceptional.

102
00:07:26,840 --> 00:07:28,520
Speaker 2: But European religions did.

103
00:07:28,400 --> 00:07:32,440
Speaker 1: Argue that all animals had a divine origin, which meant

104
00:07:32,560 --> 00:07:37,320
Speaker 1: they had existed unchanged since their moment of creation. That

105
00:07:37,440 --> 00:07:40,760
Speaker 1: meant that no animal species had ever disappeared in the past,

106
00:07:41,040 --> 00:07:42,800
Speaker 1: nor could any species ever.

107
00:07:42,640 --> 00:07:44,600
Speaker 2: Disappear now or in the future.

108
00:07:45,480 --> 00:07:51,080
Speaker 1: Extinction, in other words, was impossible in a divinely created world.

109
00:07:51,800 --> 00:07:55,560
Speaker 1: The Bible was the primary source for settler ideas about

110
00:07:55,600 --> 00:07:58,840
Speaker 1: the animals they found in America, but European views about

111
00:07:58,840 --> 00:08:01,120
Speaker 1: animals actually went back farther into.

112
00:08:00,960 --> 00:08:02,080
Speaker 2: Old World history.

113
00:08:02,920 --> 00:08:06,520
Speaker 1: It's hard to say just how far back. The Greeks

114
00:08:06,560 --> 00:08:09,720
Speaker 1: are an obvious reference, but it's difficult not to suspect

115
00:08:09,720 --> 00:08:12,920
Speaker 1: that much of Greek knowledge may have come from preliterate times.

116
00:08:13,760 --> 00:08:18,480
Speaker 1: Plato and Aristotle likely were codifying into written form ideas

117
00:08:18,520 --> 00:08:22,160
Speaker 1: that many generations of earlier Eurasians had thought.

118
00:08:22,160 --> 00:08:23,880
Speaker 2: First.

119
00:08:25,320 --> 00:08:30,400
Speaker 1: Plato and Aristotle began with an essential premise, though there

120
00:08:30,480 --> 00:08:34,240
Speaker 1: must be a deity, an invisible reality now missing in action,

121
00:08:34,679 --> 00:08:38,240
Speaker 1: who had created the earth and everything on it. Plato

122
00:08:38,360 --> 00:08:42,280
Speaker 1: investigated a critical distinction in this idea, that humans were

123
00:08:42,360 --> 00:08:46,920
Speaker 1: earthy and animal like, but clearly separate from other animals.

124
00:08:47,800 --> 00:08:51,200
Speaker 1: The explanation for that separation must lie in a difference

125
00:08:51,200 --> 00:08:56,840
Speaker 1: between us and them Ergo, an invisible and individual spirit

126
00:08:56,960 --> 00:08:59,960
Speaker 1: in humans that permitted us a connection to the des

127
00:09:01,480 --> 00:09:06,360
Speaker 1: looking at the orderliness and beauty around him. Aristotle's contribution

128
00:09:06,559 --> 00:09:08,440
Speaker 1: was to sketch out that order into one of the

129
00:09:08,440 --> 00:09:12,040
Speaker 1: most important intellectual ideas in Western thought. He called it

130
00:09:12,120 --> 00:09:16,800
Speaker 1: the Great Chain of Being, with all divinely created life

131
00:09:16,960 --> 00:09:22,280
Speaker 1: occupying descending links in the chain arranged in descending order

132
00:09:22,320 --> 00:09:27,920
Speaker 1: of perfection. Perfection translated into how useful a particular species

133
00:09:28,120 --> 00:09:32,040
Speaker 1: was to humans. You can say that for two thousand

134
00:09:32,080 --> 00:09:32,840
Speaker 1: years in.

135
00:09:32,760 --> 00:09:35,040
Speaker 2: One part of the Earth at least, this.

136
00:09:35,000 --> 00:09:39,320
Speaker 1: Became a deeply internalized imagining of how the world worked.

137
00:09:39,720 --> 00:09:44,480
Speaker 1: It was a big reassuring idea. The vast majority of

138
00:09:44,480 --> 00:09:47,320
Speaker 1: Europeans who migrated to the Americas in the sixteen hundreds

139
00:09:47,360 --> 00:09:52,960
Speaker 1: brought with them a Middle Eastern herding culture's book, the Bible,

140
00:09:53,400 --> 00:09:57,800
Speaker 1: that answered any questions they had about their proper relationship

141
00:09:57,840 --> 00:10:02,199
Speaker 1: with animals. At the beginning of the Old Testament, Genesis

142
00:10:02,240 --> 00:10:06,239
Speaker 1: one twenty eight, God gives Adam on behalf of humanity,

143
00:10:06,640 --> 00:10:12,360
Speaker 1: dominion over everything that lives. In Genesis nine two and three,

144
00:10:12,760 --> 00:10:15,800
Speaker 1: the Sacred Book goes on to say, the fear of

145
00:10:15,840 --> 00:10:18,840
Speaker 1: you and the dread of you shall be upon every

146
00:10:18,920 --> 00:10:22,120
Speaker 1: beasts of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air.

147
00:10:22,679 --> 00:10:28,360
Speaker 1: Into your hand are they delivered. The next line, every

148
00:10:28,480 --> 00:10:32,080
Speaker 1: moving thing that liveth shall be meet for you was

149
00:10:32,120 --> 00:10:36,280
Speaker 1: the Judaeo Christian stamp of approval on self interested human

150
00:10:36,400 --> 00:10:42,480
Speaker 1: use of animals. Genesis one twenty seven clarified things even further.

151
00:10:43,240 --> 00:10:46,480
Speaker 1: God had made humans and no other creatures on earth

152
00:10:46,960 --> 00:10:51,120
Speaker 1: in his own image, giving humans something that set us

153
00:10:51,160 --> 00:10:55,560
Speaker 1: apart from all the rest of creation, an immortal soul

154
00:10:55,720 --> 00:11:00,720
Speaker 1: that promised life after death. It was an easy mitelection size, then,

155
00:11:01,080 --> 00:11:05,360
Speaker 1: for Europeans to settle on the soul as the possession

156
00:11:05,600 --> 00:11:08,359
Speaker 1: that made for human exceptionalism.

157
00:11:08,679 --> 00:11:09,679
Speaker 2: There was also.

158
00:11:09,480 --> 00:11:13,720
Speaker 1: Something else new in the West, an argument for self

159
00:11:13,800 --> 00:11:17,640
Speaker 1: interest whose British author Adam Smith had presented to the

160
00:11:17,679 --> 00:11:21,920
Speaker 1: world the very year the US was born, seventeen seventy six.

161
00:11:23,000 --> 00:11:28,040
Speaker 1: Smith's argument for capitalism rested atop a colonial economic system

162
00:11:28,400 --> 00:11:32,400
Speaker 1: evolving into what we now call the global market. So

163
00:11:32,520 --> 00:11:36,760
Speaker 1: by the early eighteen hundreds, the West's soulless wild animals

164
00:11:36,960 --> 00:11:39,800
Speaker 1: were now in the sights of an economic system that

165
00:11:39,920 --> 00:11:43,960
Speaker 1: for two hundred years had been converting American animals into

166
00:11:44,240 --> 00:11:50,800
Speaker 1: market commodities. In this system, ancient ecological relationships had no meaning.

167
00:11:51,480 --> 00:11:55,040
Speaker 1: Animals had no meaning beyond satisfying the desires of people

168
00:11:55,040 --> 00:11:58,320
Speaker 1: who killed them and others who made animal skins into

169
00:11:58,400 --> 00:12:01,199
Speaker 1: leather or use fur or tea their claws to make

170
00:12:01,240 --> 00:12:05,520
Speaker 1: statements about human fashions or status among peers. This was

171
00:12:05,559 --> 00:12:08,760
Speaker 1: an economy that made some who dealt in wild animals

172
00:12:08,920 --> 00:12:13,199
Speaker 1: very wealthy, our first millionaires. It also supported a colonial

173
00:12:13,240 --> 00:12:16,640
Speaker 1: working class. Some of those workers the new Americans, but

174
00:12:16,800 --> 00:12:20,040
Speaker 1: many of them natives who often did very well for

175
00:12:20,080 --> 00:12:24,959
Speaker 1: themselves killing animals for the trade. The West turn in

176
00:12:25,040 --> 00:12:27,840
Speaker 1: this system was now under way, and one of the

177
00:12:27,880 --> 00:12:32,560
Speaker 1: places it hit early was along the Pacific coasts. Here

178
00:12:32,760 --> 00:12:37,600
Speaker 1: sea otters and fur seals were attracting a frenzied exploitation

179
00:12:37,880 --> 00:12:41,960
Speaker 1: by the fur hunters of the US and several European nations.

180
00:12:43,040 --> 00:12:47,160
Speaker 1: Another was along interior rivers like the Missouri and Arkansas,

181
00:12:47,480 --> 00:12:50,880
Speaker 1: where beavers and many other species of fur bearers were

182
00:12:50,920 --> 00:12:54,880
Speaker 1: becoming the targets as agents of the American Fur Company,

183
00:12:55,160 --> 00:12:58,360
Speaker 1: the Missouri Fur Company and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company

184
00:12:58,760 --> 00:13:01,679
Speaker 1: established trading and rendezvous fairs.

185
00:13:02,600 --> 00:13:04,200
Speaker 2: The global market.

186
00:13:03,880 --> 00:13:09,000
Speaker 1: Economy had long offered America's native people a metalware firearm

187
00:13:09,080 --> 00:13:14,000
Speaker 1: technology that transformed their cultures if they would participate in it.

188
00:13:14,880 --> 00:13:18,320
Speaker 1: Despite warnings from some of their religious leaders, most native

189
00:13:18,320 --> 00:13:20,280
Speaker 1: people found it impossible to.

190
00:13:20,280 --> 00:13:21,880
Speaker 2: Resist this new wave.

191
00:13:22,840 --> 00:13:27,400
Speaker 1: If you did, you profoundly disadvantaged yourself among other tribes

192
00:13:27,600 --> 00:13:32,200
Speaker 1: that did create market ties. This wholesale change in the

193
00:13:32,240 --> 00:13:35,280
Speaker 1: world was now come to the West, and the region

194
00:13:35,440 --> 00:13:40,000
Speaker 1: quickly became a different place. A level of exploitation that

195
00:13:40,120 --> 00:13:44,080
Speaker 1: hadn't happened in ten thousand years was at hand, and

196
00:13:44,160 --> 00:13:51,920
Speaker 1: it would not be pretty. When Lewis and Clark spent

197
00:13:52,000 --> 00:13:55,360
Speaker 1: their winter at the mouth of the Columbia River, the

198
00:13:55,400 --> 00:13:59,400
Speaker 1: global economy's unquenchable appetite for America's animals was already a

199
00:13:59,440 --> 00:14:04,120
Speaker 1: presence on the Pacific coast. The prize the Pacific beaver

200
00:14:04,720 --> 00:14:10,240
Speaker 1: was the sea otter. Otters frequented the shorelines from Japan

201
00:14:10,559 --> 00:14:13,920
Speaker 1: to the Aleutians and down the Pacific coast to Baja

202
00:14:13,920 --> 00:14:18,240
Speaker 1: California in numbers that seemed large, although there were probably

203
00:14:18,320 --> 00:14:22,480
Speaker 1: fewer than three hundred thousand across their range. As ships

204
00:14:22,480 --> 00:14:24,800
Speaker 1: from Boston and New York began showing up on the

205
00:14:24,800 --> 00:14:29,000
Speaker 1: West coast, words spread among satyrs of several nations that

206
00:14:29,240 --> 00:14:32,520
Speaker 1: prime sea otter pelts had sold for one hundred and

207
00:14:32,520 --> 00:14:37,120
Speaker 1: twenty dollars apiece in China. One American trader said the

208
00:14:37,160 --> 00:14:40,080
Speaker 1: fur of the sea otter was so luxurious in the

209
00:14:40,200 --> 00:14:45,360
Speaker 1: hand two point six million hairs per square inch, that

210
00:14:45,760 --> 00:14:50,080
Speaker 1: accepting a beautiful woman and a lovely infant, it.

211
00:14:50,160 --> 00:14:52,240
Speaker 2: Was the most extraordinary thing on earth.

212
00:14:53,640 --> 00:14:59,560
Speaker 1: Like humans, like wolves, sea otters are keystone carnivores. Ancient

213
00:14:59,640 --> 00:15:04,320
Speaker 1: eCos systems had formed around sea otter predation, and so

214
00:15:04,520 --> 00:15:07,960
Speaker 1: long as the six foot long otters were present, the

215
00:15:08,040 --> 00:15:13,640
Speaker 1: ecosystems held together and possibly appealing, these one hundred pound

216
00:15:13,720 --> 00:15:18,680
Speaker 1: members of the family Mastilla day, which includes wolverines, badgers,

217
00:15:18,760 --> 00:15:23,560
Speaker 1: and weasels, evolved as hunters of fish and sea urchins

218
00:15:23,600 --> 00:15:28,760
Speaker 1: in shallow shoreline celt beds. Otters kept those kelp forests

219
00:15:28,840 --> 00:15:33,320
Speaker 1: healthy by devouring as many as one thousand sea urchins

220
00:15:33,360 --> 00:15:38,680
Speaker 1: a day. Just as we are, sea otters are tool users.

221
00:15:39,600 --> 00:15:42,440
Speaker 1: At some point in their evolution, otters developed a culture

222
00:15:42,760 --> 00:15:45,640
Speaker 1: utilizing rocks of a certain size and shape to break

223
00:15:45,720 --> 00:15:49,200
Speaker 1: open the shells of their prey. There were even variations

224
00:15:49,280 --> 00:15:53,000
Speaker 1: handed down among regional populations, some otters making do with

225
00:15:53,080 --> 00:15:55,600
Speaker 1: a single rock, others using two at once.

226
00:15:56,760 --> 00:15:57,840
Speaker 2: Tools were critical.

227
00:15:58,400 --> 00:16:02,400
Speaker 1: As hunters of cold position shorelines, sea otters need to

228
00:16:02,440 --> 00:16:05,440
Speaker 1: consume as much as twenty five percent of their weight

229
00:16:05,600 --> 00:16:10,080
Speaker 1: in food daily to stay warm. Important to what befell

230
00:16:10,160 --> 00:16:13,480
Speaker 1: them is that they do not become sexually mature until

231
00:16:13,520 --> 00:16:16,840
Speaker 1: they are several years old, bear only a single pop

232
00:16:16,880 --> 00:16:20,680
Speaker 1: at a time, and sometimes spend a year without producing offspring.

233
00:16:21,600 --> 00:16:25,600
Speaker 1: In prime feeding grounds, undisturbed otter colonies can increase their

234
00:16:25,680 --> 00:16:29,360
Speaker 1: numbers by twenty percent a year no more. By the

235
00:16:29,360 --> 00:16:34,080
Speaker 1: turn of the nineteenth century, they were undergoing an extreme disturbance.

236
00:16:37,960 --> 00:16:42,360
Speaker 1: In seventeen seventy eight, the global traveler English explorer James

237
00:16:42,360 --> 00:16:46,400
Speaker 1: Cook sail the shores of Oregon and Washington to Vancouver Island,

238
00:16:46,680 --> 00:16:50,360
Speaker 1: finding Native peoples who rush to his ships with otter skins,

239
00:16:50,800 --> 00:16:53,800
Speaker 1: hoping to trade for any kind of metal, even nails.

240
00:16:54,800 --> 00:16:58,360
Speaker 1: The next year, after Pacific Islanders killed Cook in a

241
00:16:58,480 --> 00:17:02,000
Speaker 1: shallow bay of the Big Eye in Hawaii, his men

242
00:17:02,120 --> 00:17:06,760
Speaker 1: sold twenty of those pelts for forty dollars apiece in Canton, China.

243
00:17:07,560 --> 00:17:09,760
Speaker 1: That wasn't one hundred and twenty dollars, but it was

244
00:17:09,800 --> 00:17:13,800
Speaker 1: good enough. The American Robert Gray happened on the mouth

245
00:17:13,840 --> 00:17:16,760
Speaker 1: of the Columbia River and traded for otter and seal

246
00:17:16,880 --> 00:17:19,800
Speaker 1: furs up and down the West Coast. The very next year.

247
00:17:20,640 --> 00:17:24,520
Speaker 1: After circumnavigating the planet, Gray would return to Boston in

248
00:17:24,560 --> 00:17:28,520
Speaker 1: seventeen ninety, having sold his hall in China for an

249
00:17:28,560 --> 00:17:33,320
Speaker 1: astonishing twenty one thousand dollars the equivalent of seven hundred

250
00:17:33,320 --> 00:17:38,119
Speaker 1: and twenty five thousand dollars today. At that point, the

251
00:17:38,280 --> 00:17:42,600
Speaker 1: Great Otter First Seal Rush was on a destruction of nature,

252
00:17:42,640 --> 00:17:47,280
Speaker 1: contemplated today with profound unease, although it was clearly conducted

253
00:17:47,320 --> 00:17:51,199
Speaker 1: without any sentiment whatsoever at the time, it took the

254
00:17:51,359 --> 00:17:56,320
Speaker 1: Russian Garrisene privle Off just two years seventeen eighty six

255
00:17:56,400 --> 00:18:00,040
Speaker 1: and seventeen eighty seven to kill seven thousand otters and

256
00:18:00,080 --> 00:18:04,040
Speaker 1: obliterate every last one on the islands now named for him.

257
00:18:04,800 --> 00:18:10,160
Speaker 1: That was made possible by biological first contact. Most otters

258
00:18:10,160 --> 00:18:13,160
Speaker 1: and fur seals had never seen a human before. They

259
00:18:13,160 --> 00:18:17,160
Speaker 1: were trusting and tame, and with no empathy for living creatures.

260
00:18:17,160 --> 00:18:22,200
Speaker 1: The hunters violated their innocence when Russia's professional fur hunters,

261
00:18:22,440 --> 00:18:26,080
Speaker 1: the pro Mishlniki, descended on America in the wake of

262
00:18:26,160 --> 00:18:30,480
Speaker 1: these reports, they added the next horrifying step, the force

263
00:18:30,640 --> 00:18:34,200
Speaker 1: conscription of the Alutes and other native peoples into an

264
00:18:34,280 --> 00:18:38,359
Speaker 1: animal killing labor force, as had happened in the East.

265
00:18:38,840 --> 00:18:42,240
Speaker 1: On the mainland, a lucrative exchange of furs for metal

266
00:18:42,280 --> 00:18:46,399
Speaker 1: technology could seduce native people into killing animals for the market,

267
00:18:47,040 --> 00:18:50,280
Speaker 1: but Russian traders lacked goods of sufficient quality to pull

268
00:18:50,320 --> 00:18:55,600
Speaker 1: that off, so they resorted to subterfuge, sometimes kidnapping family

269
00:18:55,640 --> 00:19:00,520
Speaker 1: members to force native men to pursue otters for them.

270
00:19:00,840 --> 00:19:05,720
Speaker 1: If in eighteen hundred, naturalists or American presidents doubted extinction

271
00:19:05,960 --> 00:19:10,200
Speaker 1: was possible by eighteen twenty, the fallacy of that position

272
00:19:10,320 --> 00:19:14,280
Speaker 1: was becoming all too clear, first in the East and

273
00:19:14,359 --> 00:19:18,240
Speaker 1: the south, now on the Pacific coast. North America was

274
00:19:18,320 --> 00:19:22,400
Speaker 1: losing its animals at a frightening rate. Hunters from several

275
00:19:22,480 --> 00:19:26,400
Speaker 1: nations wiped out otter and fursial colonies with a speed

276
00:19:26,520 --> 00:19:30,080
Speaker 1: no one could hold in the mind. Demand in China

277
00:19:30,160 --> 00:19:35,320
Speaker 1: seemed insatiable, and while otters lasted, American ship captains unloading

278
00:19:35,440 --> 00:19:39,760
Speaker 1: twenty thousand skins a year there in search of laborers

279
00:19:39,760 --> 00:19:43,920
Speaker 1: to harvest the otters farther south. In eighteen twelve, American

280
00:19:44,040 --> 00:19:49,120
Speaker 1: ship captains invited Alexander Baranoff of the Russian American Company

281
00:19:49,480 --> 00:19:53,960
Speaker 1: to send allut hunters down the California coast, with Americans

282
00:19:54,000 --> 00:19:57,199
Speaker 1: hauling the take to China and splitting the profits with

283
00:19:57,320 --> 00:20:02,240
Speaker 1: the Russian trappers. In the the next act, Yankee sealers

284
00:20:02,480 --> 00:20:06,680
Speaker 1: slaughtered more than seventy three thousand fur seals on the

285
00:20:06,720 --> 00:20:11,560
Speaker 1: Farallone Islands off San Francisco Bay. That got their Russians

286
00:20:11,600 --> 00:20:15,720
Speaker 1: attention and led them to establish their famous trading posts

287
00:20:15,760 --> 00:20:20,080
Speaker 1: and fort at Bodega Bay, from which their conscripted native

288
00:20:20,200 --> 00:20:25,719
Speaker 1: laborers killed eighty thousand animals in just one season, but

289
00:20:25,760 --> 00:20:28,840
Speaker 1: the seals were so tame and numerous that no native

290
00:20:28,960 --> 00:20:34,280
Speaker 1: labor force proved really necessary. Using clubs or knives, European

291
00:20:34,359 --> 00:20:38,440
Speaker 1: and American seal hunters murdered the animals themselves, stripped off

292
00:20:38,480 --> 00:20:43,240
Speaker 1: the pelts, and left the discarded carcasses to seabirds, condors, coyotes,

293
00:20:43,320 --> 00:20:46,439
Speaker 1: and bears, then sold the pelts for a dollar apiece

294
00:20:46,480 --> 00:20:51,920
Speaker 1: in China, less desirable and more numerous than otters. First

295
00:20:51,920 --> 00:20:55,760
Speaker 1: seals lasted along the Pacific coasts into the eighteen forties,

296
00:20:56,560 --> 00:21:00,479
Speaker 1: but otters were so pursued and their colonies so stated

297
00:21:00,840 --> 00:21:03,879
Speaker 1: that by the eighteen twenties there weren't enough left for

298
00:21:04,000 --> 00:21:08,159
Speaker 1: hunters to justify chasing down the final few, and that

299
00:21:08,400 --> 00:21:14,440
Speaker 1: saved them. One of gorg Steller's few discoveries, the Pleistocene giant,

300
00:21:14,600 --> 00:21:18,679
Speaker 1: now known as the Stellar's sea cow, had the unhappy

301
00:21:18,720 --> 00:21:22,280
Speaker 1: distinction of being the first of these specific creatures the

302
00:21:22,400 --> 00:21:27,440
Speaker 1: hunters pushed into total extinction. Sea cows were gone by

303
00:21:27,520 --> 00:21:31,040
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty eight, and if the agents of the market

304
00:21:31,080 --> 00:21:34,639
Speaker 1: could easily have located them, their other targets would have

305
00:21:34,680 --> 00:21:39,240
Speaker 1: followed suit. But tiny remnants of otters and fur seals

306
00:21:39,520 --> 00:21:44,240
Speaker 1: at least remained alive in a few hidden inconvenient spots

307
00:21:44,480 --> 00:21:49,719
Speaker 1: the hunters missed. Now that same pattern rooted in our

308
00:21:49,840 --> 00:21:54,800
Speaker 1: predatory evolution and released afresh by market self interest was

309
00:21:54,840 --> 00:21:55,960
Speaker 1: about to play out.

310
00:21:56,080 --> 00:22:05,280
Speaker 2: In the Inland West.

311
00:22:06,480 --> 00:22:08,439
Speaker 1: Like most of us, I live in the valley of

312
00:22:08,480 --> 00:22:12,560
Speaker 1: a river. It's called the Rio Galisteo, a stream that

313
00:22:12,720 --> 00:22:16,720
Speaker 1: runs sometimes and seeps into the sands most of the time,

314
00:22:17,359 --> 00:22:21,800
Speaker 1: just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Galisteo is

315
00:22:21,880 --> 00:22:25,880
Speaker 1: no grand water course, but it does string a cottonwood

316
00:22:26,040 --> 00:22:29,800
Speaker 1: corridor through the high desert, and the celebrated American naturalist

317
00:22:29,880 --> 00:22:33,440
Speaker 1: Aldo Leopold once used it as an example of how

318
00:22:33,600 --> 00:22:38,159
Speaker 1: waterways were ruined when Europeans brought their domestic stock to

319
00:22:38,200 --> 00:22:42,600
Speaker 1: the West. Leopold told the story of a drunken immigrant

320
00:22:42,680 --> 00:22:46,320
Speaker 1: who in eighteen forty nine was able to walk across

321
00:22:46,359 --> 00:22:50,719
Speaker 1: the Rio Galistaeo successfully on a twenty foot board plank.

322
00:22:51,560 --> 00:22:55,400
Speaker 1: Yet in the twentieth century, he wrote, the Galisteo had

323
00:22:55,480 --> 00:22:59,680
Speaker 1: sliced its stream bed into so many eroded gullies known

324
00:22:59,720 --> 00:23:03,320
Speaker 1: as a royos, that a drunk wouldn't stand a snowball's

325
00:23:03,400 --> 00:23:07,520
Speaker 1: chance of making the far bank. In many places, a

326
00:23:07,600 --> 00:23:11,280
Speaker 1: twentieth century plank across the Rio Galisteo would have to

327
00:23:11,359 --> 00:23:14,880
Speaker 1: span two hundred and fifty feet of torn up stream bed.

328
00:23:16,440 --> 00:23:19,160
Speaker 1: I've little doubt the cow and the sheep made their

329
00:23:19,200 --> 00:23:23,119
Speaker 1: contribution to this ecological set piece. But I also know

330
00:23:23,240 --> 00:23:25,600
Speaker 1: the nationalists arrived too late in New Mexico to see

331
00:23:25,600 --> 00:23:27,240
Speaker 1: what else had happened here.

332
00:23:27,400 --> 00:23:28,560
Speaker 2: In an earlier time.

333
00:23:29,880 --> 00:23:33,440
Speaker 1: Heading on the flanks of Thompson Peak in the Southern Rockies,

334
00:23:33,840 --> 00:23:37,040
Speaker 1: the Galistaalo was one of the streams the Western trappers

335
00:23:37,080 --> 00:23:40,840
Speaker 1: we call mountain men, pit clean of beavers in the

336
00:23:40,880 --> 00:23:44,920
Speaker 1: eighteen twenties. Drawn to the southern Mountains in the wake

337
00:23:44,960 --> 00:23:49,520
Speaker 1: of Mexico's success throwing off Spanish rule, then the Republic

338
00:23:49,600 --> 00:23:53,920
Speaker 1: of Mexico's opening of the Southwest to outside trade. Trappers

339
00:23:53,920 --> 00:23:56,480
Speaker 1: from the States began to operate out of Santa Fe

340
00:23:56,600 --> 00:24:01,240
Speaker 1: and Taos shortly after eighteen twenty one. They fanned out

341
00:24:01,280 --> 00:24:03,560
Speaker 1: across the mountains all the way to the high parks

342
00:24:03,560 --> 00:24:07,719
Speaker 1: of Colorado, and they made astonishingly quick work of every

343
00:24:07,800 --> 00:24:12,240
Speaker 1: beaver colony they could find. One party of trappers cashed

344
00:24:12,280 --> 00:24:16,320
Speaker 1: in fifty thousand dollars in New Mexico Firs in Saint

345
00:24:16,400 --> 00:24:20,760
Speaker 1: Louis in eighteen thirty one, local authorities tried to control

346
00:24:20,840 --> 00:24:24,720
Speaker 1: the carnage with a law banning non resident trapping.

347
00:24:25,520 --> 00:24:27,159
Speaker 2: The Americans ignored it.

348
00:24:28,160 --> 00:24:31,960
Speaker 1: By eighteen thirty two, trappers were even scouring the nearby

349
00:24:32,119 --> 00:24:34,640
Speaker 1: high plains in their rush to deep.

350
00:24:34,359 --> 00:24:36,680
Speaker 2: Beaver every last trickle of water.

351
00:24:39,760 --> 00:24:43,080
Speaker 1: Set aside for a moment, the predictability of it, all

352
00:24:43,600 --> 00:24:46,240
Speaker 1: the deaths of wild animals in return for a brief

353
00:24:46,400 --> 00:24:50,480
Speaker 1: few years of profits, and take the long view. As

354
00:24:50,480 --> 00:24:53,600
Speaker 1: it had done in the East, Beaver removal in the

355
00:24:53,640 --> 00:24:59,880
Speaker 1: West abruptly terminated millennia of hydraulic engineering. A world where

356
00:25:00,040 --> 00:25:04,400
Speaker 1: beavers had turned Western rivers into ribbons of damned ponds

357
00:25:04,640 --> 00:25:09,400
Speaker 1: and year round water storage now yielded to flashing runoffs

358
00:25:09,400 --> 00:25:13,080
Speaker 1: that cut gullies and arroyos in places like New Mexico.

359
00:25:14,160 --> 00:25:17,680
Speaker 1: Leopold may have blamed sheep and cows, but the destruction

360
00:25:17,920 --> 00:25:21,800
Speaker 1: of the West beavers also appears visible on the land

361
00:25:22,160 --> 00:25:27,520
Speaker 1: even two centuries later, along with the practical extinction of

362
00:25:27,640 --> 00:25:32,119
Speaker 1: bison in the while the extirpation of millions of beavers

363
00:25:32,200 --> 00:25:35,600
Speaker 1: in just three short decades is at least an event

364
00:25:35,720 --> 00:25:40,640
Speaker 1: modern Americans recall from the West's slaughter house century eighteen

365
00:25:40,720 --> 00:25:45,840
Speaker 1: twenty to nineteen twenty. The Western beaver hunt was merely

366
00:25:45,920 --> 00:25:49,720
Speaker 1: an extension of beaver mania that had gathered momentum from

367
00:25:49,760 --> 00:25:52,959
Speaker 1: the time of Henry Hudson. But by the time the

368
00:25:52,960 --> 00:25:56,359
Speaker 1: beaver trade moved west, the US was already giving it

369
00:25:56,440 --> 00:26:01,680
Speaker 1: a peculiarly American cast. In neighboring Canada, the British Crown

370
00:26:01,880 --> 00:26:06,200
Speaker 1: planned and regulated the fur trade, granting a government sanctioned

371
00:26:06,280 --> 00:26:10,240
Speaker 1: monopoly to the Hudson's Bay Company right next door to

372
00:26:10,280 --> 00:26:14,800
Speaker 1: the US. This offered lessons in efficiency, decent treatment of

373
00:26:14,840 --> 00:26:19,120
Speaker 1: the labor force, and even some conservation of the target animals.

374
00:26:19,960 --> 00:26:24,440
Speaker 1: But back in seventeen sixty three, King George's similar attempts

375
00:26:24,440 --> 00:26:29,240
Speaker 1: to regulate wild animals in the American colonies had infuriated everyone.

376
00:26:29,320 --> 00:26:33,280
Speaker 1: For Virginia and New York, the American approach to market

377
00:26:33,359 --> 00:26:38,240
Speaker 1: capitalism was too freewheeling an anti regulation to be patient

378
00:26:38,359 --> 00:26:42,760
Speaker 1: with a setup like Canada's, so America went for no

379
00:26:42,960 --> 00:26:48,000
Speaker 1: market planning beyond the natural laws of Adam Smith capitalism.

380
00:26:48,760 --> 00:26:52,760
Speaker 1: In that clear space, the country's first big business enterprise,

381
00:26:53,240 --> 00:26:58,040
Speaker 1: immigrant John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company made a heroic

382
00:26:58,119 --> 00:27:02,320
Speaker 1: effort to dominate the fur trade by out competing everyone else.

383
00:27:04,080 --> 00:27:07,240
Speaker 1: The son of a butcher in the German town of Waldorf,

384
00:27:07,680 --> 00:27:12,399
Speaker 1: Johann Jacob, arrived in America in seventeen eighty three, after

385
00:27:12,520 --> 00:27:17,159
Speaker 1: first spending a stretch in London mastering English. In eighteen

386
00:27:17,200 --> 00:27:21,000
Speaker 1: oh eight, Astre founded the American Fur Company and began

387
00:27:21,080 --> 00:27:24,520
Speaker 1: his quest to control the fur market. He built and

388
00:27:24,520 --> 00:27:27,840
Speaker 1: supplied trading posts, first in the Great Lakes Country, then

389
00:27:27,920 --> 00:27:32,680
Speaker 1: in the West. Vying with Astro's behemoth was a myriad

390
00:27:32,720 --> 00:27:36,640
Speaker 1: of small private enterprises. They were eager and could wreak

391
00:27:36,680 --> 00:27:41,440
Speaker 1: havoc on animals, but weren't always professionally run. One of

392
00:27:41,480 --> 00:27:46,760
Speaker 1: the most notable was Manuel Lisa's Missouri Fur Company. The

393
00:27:46,840 --> 00:27:50,120
Speaker 1: Wilderness trading post that Lisa pioneered in the Missouri River

394
00:27:50,160 --> 00:27:53,600
Speaker 1: country as early as eighteen o eight were the walmarts

395
00:27:53,600 --> 00:27:58,200
Speaker 1: and targets of their day. They provided the native labor force,

396
00:27:58,440 --> 00:28:03,280
Speaker 1: handy box stores for European technology, as well as warehouses

397
00:28:03,280 --> 00:28:07,400
Speaker 1: for the gathered firs. River barges ferried the body parts

398
00:28:07,440 --> 00:28:11,040
Speaker 1: from Beaver's River otters and muskrats down river to state

399
00:28:11,119 --> 00:28:16,359
Speaker 1: side markets. After Astro's wildly ambitious attempt to monopolize the

400
00:28:16,359 --> 00:28:21,240
Speaker 1: Pacific coast trade collapsed, the British seized his Astoria post

401
00:28:21,400 --> 00:28:23,119
Speaker 1: at the mouth of the Columbia In the War of

402
00:28:23,119 --> 00:28:28,159
Speaker 1: eighteen twelve. The American Fur Company refocused on the interior West.

403
00:28:29,200 --> 00:28:32,800
Speaker 1: Soon enough, it put its chips on a new technological innovation,

404
00:28:33,000 --> 00:28:35,960
Speaker 1: the steamboat, which could haul more trade goods up river,

405
00:28:36,359 --> 00:28:40,040
Speaker 1: as well as heavy quantities of firs now including even

406
00:28:40,160 --> 00:28:45,320
Speaker 1: bulky bison robes, back to civilization where demand seemed insatiable.

407
00:28:47,920 --> 00:28:52,320
Speaker 1: Astor's corporate design even extended to healthcare for his labor force,

408
00:28:53,240 --> 00:28:56,880
Speaker 1: since Indian trade partners laid low by disease would never

409
00:28:56,920 --> 00:29:00,800
Speaker 1: be able to generate profitable product. In the eighteen thirties,

410
00:29:00,960 --> 00:29:04,440
Speaker 1: Asture called on the government's brand new Bureau of Indian

411
00:29:04,440 --> 00:29:11,600
Speaker 1: Affairs to vaccinate native people against smallpox. Tragically, the eighteen

412
00:29:11,640 --> 00:29:16,320
Speaker 1: thirties was too late. One of Asher's steamboats making an

413
00:29:16,360 --> 00:29:20,360
Speaker 1: annual supply run in eighteen thirty seven, the Saint Peter's

414
00:29:20,640 --> 00:29:23,880
Speaker 1: discovered on the way upriver that it had passengers falling

415
00:29:23,920 --> 00:29:27,720
Speaker 1: ill with the dreaded pox. Instead of doing the moral

416
00:29:27,800 --> 00:29:30,800
Speaker 1: thing and turning back to Saint Louis. The Saint Peter's

417
00:29:30,880 --> 00:29:34,760
Speaker 1: continued its run, attempting to mitigate the danger by warning

418
00:29:34,840 --> 00:29:38,480
Speaker 1: Native people at every stop that a contagious disease was

419
00:29:38,560 --> 00:29:45,120
Speaker 1: on board. The Aricaras and Mandans were unimpressed. The Ascentiboiins

420
00:29:45,320 --> 00:29:48,800
Speaker 1: thought the announcement a hoax to preserve trade goods for

421
00:29:48,920 --> 00:29:49,520
Speaker 1: someone else.

422
00:29:50,440 --> 00:29:51,760
Speaker 2: The Blackfeet had.

423
00:29:51,560 --> 00:29:55,040
Speaker 1: Always refused to kill beaver's for the whites because beaver

424
00:29:55,200 --> 00:29:58,600
Speaker 1: with a capital B was one of their deities. Plus

425
00:29:58,640 --> 00:30:02,200
Speaker 1: they valued beaver ponds as critical sources of water on

426
00:30:02,240 --> 00:30:06,080
Speaker 1: the dry prairie. But they compensated by killing wolves for

427
00:30:06,120 --> 00:30:09,120
Speaker 1: the trade, and had plenty of wolf pelts and bison

428
00:30:09,200 --> 00:30:13,720
Speaker 1: robes on hand. The Blackfeet had suffered about with smallpox

429
00:30:13,800 --> 00:30:18,040
Speaker 1: in the seventeen eighties, but this band said their historians

430
00:30:18,240 --> 00:30:21,920
Speaker 1: had never heard of such a disease. By the time

431
00:30:22,000 --> 00:30:25,320
Speaker 1: the epidemic of eighteen thirty seven had run its course,

432
00:30:25,800 --> 00:30:31,520
Speaker 1: nearly twenty thousand Missouri River Indians had died disfiguring horrible deaths.

433
00:30:32,560 --> 00:30:35,480
Speaker 1: One of the most famous Indians in the West, interviewed

434
00:30:35,480 --> 00:30:39,200
Speaker 1: and painted by Western travelers across the previous decade, was

435
00:30:39,280 --> 00:30:45,920
Speaker 1: the mandan headman. Mototape forbears a strikingly handsome, middle aged

436
00:30:45,960 --> 00:30:51,520
Speaker 1: war leader. Mototape impressed observers as free, generous, elegant, and

437
00:30:51,680 --> 00:30:56,600
Speaker 1: gentlemanly in his deportment. He had survived a warrior's life,

438
00:30:56,960 --> 00:31:00,480
Speaker 1: but the invisible virus struck him down without the slightest

439
00:31:00,560 --> 00:31:06,080
Speaker 1: care for his bravery or grace. Motodepey blamed the traders.

440
00:31:07,320 --> 00:31:10,240
Speaker 1: I do not fear death, he is supposed to have said,

441
00:31:10,840 --> 00:31:14,280
Speaker 1: but to die with my face rotten, that even the

442
00:31:14,400 --> 00:31:20,320
Speaker 1: wolves will shrink with horror at seeing me. Jacob Halsey,

443
00:31:20,400 --> 00:31:24,720
Speaker 1: who oversaw the American Fur Company's Fort Union post, put

444
00:31:24,760 --> 00:31:27,760
Speaker 1: the moment in terms asture in the American Fur Company

445
00:31:27,800 --> 00:31:34,000
Speaker 1: could best appreciate. The losses, he wrote, would be incalculable,

446
00:31:34,440 --> 00:31:40,720
Speaker 1: as our most profitable Indians have died. The most remembered

447
00:31:40,760 --> 00:31:43,680
Speaker 1: part of the beaver story in the West centers on

448
00:31:43,840 --> 00:31:48,360
Speaker 1: William Ashley's and Andrew Henry's Rocky Mountain Fur Company, whose

449
00:31:48,360 --> 00:31:51,120
Speaker 1: reassessment of how to attack beavers would have won a

450
00:31:51,200 --> 00:31:54,960
Speaker 1: business school's prize for thinking outside the box, had such

451
00:31:55,000 --> 00:32:00,920
Speaker 1: a prize existed. Posts and steamboats were expensive. The Blackfeet

452
00:32:01,240 --> 00:32:04,320
Speaker 1: several other planes tribes refused to kill beavers because of

453
00:32:04,320 --> 00:32:08,960
Speaker 1: their ecological importance. But since colonial times America had been

454
00:32:09,000 --> 00:32:11,960
Speaker 1: full of men who fled towns in farms and marriages

455
00:32:12,320 --> 00:32:15,240
Speaker 1: and desired nothing so much as to spend their lives

456
00:32:15,280 --> 00:32:19,960
Speaker 1: camping and hunting, a life that seemed natural. So why

457
00:32:20,000 --> 00:32:24,240
Speaker 1: not sidestep the Indian labor force altogether and have such

458
00:32:24,320 --> 00:32:28,440
Speaker 1: men trapped for beavers and otters themselves, like Kick Carson

459
00:32:28,480 --> 00:32:31,040
Speaker 1: and others were doing out of Santa Fe and Taos.

460
00:32:31,920 --> 00:32:34,240
Speaker 1: They could remain in the West year round, and the

461
00:32:34,320 --> 00:32:37,320
Speaker 1: new company would use overland wagons to supply them at

462
00:32:37,320 --> 00:32:41,800
Speaker 1: an annual rendezvous site somewhere out west, then wagon the

463
00:32:41,840 --> 00:32:46,360
Speaker 1: accumulated loop back to Saint Louis. It worked, at least

464
00:32:46,360 --> 00:32:48,320
Speaker 1: it worked for a few years as long as the

465
00:32:48,360 --> 00:32:53,160
Speaker 1: animals lasted. Although barely aware of it. Ashley's and Henry's

466
00:32:53,160 --> 00:32:57,960
Speaker 1: Mountain Men became players in animal geopolitics because they could

467
00:32:57,960 --> 00:33:01,720
Speaker 1: clear streams of beaver so quickly. The American trappers were

468
00:33:01,840 --> 00:33:06,640
Speaker 1: endlessly pushing onto new streams farther west, which threatened British

469
00:33:06,640 --> 00:33:11,880
Speaker 1: colonial claims. So in eighteen twenty four, at London's request,

470
00:33:12,440 --> 00:33:16,600
Speaker 1: the Hudson's Bay Company sent trapping brigades into the Rockies

471
00:33:16,640 --> 00:33:21,440
Speaker 1: with instructions to ruin the country to create a fur

472
00:33:21,560 --> 00:33:26,840
Speaker 1: desert that would turn the Americans back for millions of years.

473
00:33:26,880 --> 00:33:29,880
Speaker 1: The streams that ran snowmelt through the canyons of ranges

474
00:33:29,960 --> 00:33:32,760
Speaker 1: like the Bitter Roots, the lim Hies, and the Wasatch

475
00:33:33,280 --> 00:33:37,840
Speaker 1: had known beaver colonies at roughly half mile intervals, one

476
00:33:37,920 --> 00:33:42,560
Speaker 1: hundred colonies dams and ponds for every fifty miles of

477
00:33:42,600 --> 00:33:46,680
Speaker 1: a stream and its side creeks. But British brigade leaders

478
00:33:46,760 --> 00:33:51,800
Speaker 1: Peter skeen Ogden, John Wirk and Alexander Ross, with fifteen

479
00:33:51,880 --> 00:33:55,040
Speaker 1: or so trappers, plus native wives or girlfriends to do

480
00:33:55,120 --> 00:33:58,680
Speaker 1: the cooking and pelt preparation, were easily up to the

481
00:33:58,720 --> 00:34:04,120
Speaker 1: task of obliterating all the West Slope beavers. Ross described

482
00:34:04,280 --> 00:34:08,520
Speaker 1: how his brigade of twenty with two hundred and twelve

483
00:34:08,560 --> 00:34:11,440
Speaker 1: traps would scatter their sets up the length of a

484
00:34:11,440 --> 00:34:15,040
Speaker 1: mountain stream in an afternoon on a typical creek in

485
00:34:15,080 --> 00:34:18,360
Speaker 1: the Bitter Roots that catch ninety five beavers the following

486
00:34:18,400 --> 00:34:22,960
Speaker 1: morning and another sixty that afternoon. That usually got every

487
00:34:23,000 --> 00:34:26,640
Speaker 1: animal in the drainage, then on to the next canyon

488
00:34:26,800 --> 00:34:31,399
Speaker 1: and repeat, especially during the spring when female beavers were

489
00:34:31,440 --> 00:34:37,239
Speaker 1: pregnant or already had kits that ruined things proper. This

490
00:34:37,520 --> 00:34:40,800
Speaker 1: wasn't the all boys world of the seal otter hunt,

491
00:34:41,000 --> 00:34:44,160
Speaker 1: as the women who went on these pursuits were major players,

492
00:34:44,520 --> 00:34:47,800
Speaker 1: with the skills to dress pelts and keep everyone clothed

493
00:34:47,840 --> 00:34:51,120
Speaker 1: and fed and pointed in the right direction. With that

494
00:34:51,280 --> 00:34:55,560
Speaker 1: kind of female assistance, from eighteen twenty three to eighteen

495
00:34:55,719 --> 00:35:01,480
Speaker 1: forty one, the British brigades destroyed thirty five thousand Western

496
00:35:01,600 --> 00:35:12,759
Speaker 1: beavers and drained an estimated six thousand beaver ponds. By

497
00:35:12,840 --> 00:35:16,440
Speaker 1: now everyone knew what the end of this looked like.

498
00:35:17,320 --> 00:35:20,720
Speaker 1: There was no chance beavers and river otters could last

499
00:35:20,920 --> 00:35:24,040
Speaker 1: any longer than white tailed deer had in the East.

500
00:35:24,520 --> 00:35:28,200
Speaker 1: What they wouldn't have understood, but we do, is how

501
00:35:28,239 --> 00:35:32,480
Speaker 1: the extraction of sea otters and beavers was devastating finally

502
00:35:32,520 --> 00:35:37,880
Speaker 1: balanced American ecologies hundreds of thousands of years old. Without

503
00:35:37,960 --> 00:35:42,239
Speaker 1: otters to hold them in check, sea urching populations exploded

504
00:35:42,600 --> 00:35:46,680
Speaker 1: then mowed down whole kelp forests, whose loss, in turn

505
00:35:46,800 --> 00:35:50,840
Speaker 1: threatened the red algae reefs that grew those waving stands

506
00:35:50,840 --> 00:35:56,280
Speaker 1: of kelp obliterating every beaver on stream after stream didn't

507
00:35:56,360 --> 00:36:01,520
Speaker 1: just deprive the native people of traditional camps, remade drainage

508
00:36:01,560 --> 00:36:05,760
Speaker 1: systems all over the continent, altering growth patterns for willows

509
00:36:05,800 --> 00:36:10,960
Speaker 1: and cottonwoods, destroying wetland's favored by waterfowl, raccoons, and moose,

510
00:36:11,440 --> 00:36:16,840
Speaker 1: in effect drying out America. But the stories we tell ourselves.

511
00:36:18,880 --> 00:36:23,520
Speaker 1: These mountain men, with their rendezvous gatherings, combination hardware stores,

512
00:36:23,520 --> 00:36:26,239
Speaker 1: and all night raves except in leather and at the

513
00:36:26,280 --> 00:36:30,719
Speaker 1: foot of the Wind River mountains, became American working class heroes.

514
00:36:31,719 --> 00:36:36,279
Speaker 1: Back East, Daniel Boone's biographers had already devised a romantic

515
00:36:36,360 --> 00:36:40,640
Speaker 1: take on the masculine American hunter. Now the West broadcast

516
00:36:40,719 --> 00:36:44,400
Speaker 1: the Boon model as bigger than live figures Kick Carson,

517
00:36:44,600 --> 00:36:49,840
Speaker 1: Jim Bridger, Buffalo Bill Cody. Literary types like James Fenimore Cooper,

518
00:36:49,920 --> 00:36:54,960
Speaker 1: and Washington Irving became their biographers, as did Herman Melville

519
00:36:54,960 --> 00:36:58,200
Speaker 1: of the whale Hunters in one of his first books,

520
00:36:58,239 --> 00:37:02,680
Speaker 1: Teddy Roosevelt, playing these men were the first to become Americans.

521
00:37:03,120 --> 00:37:08,279
Speaker 1: Even the historian Frederick Jackson Turner echoed that Turner's frontier

522
00:37:08,360 --> 00:37:13,000
Speaker 1: thesis made a Darwinian claim that it was wilderness life

523
00:37:13,239 --> 00:37:16,799
Speaker 1: with all those dead animals that turned Europeans into Americans.

524
00:37:17,880 --> 00:37:22,080
Speaker 1: These heroes out of the adventureland of early America, in fact.

525
00:37:21,800 --> 00:37:23,680
Speaker 2: Were detached, stoic killers.

526
00:37:24,080 --> 00:37:27,120
Speaker 1: Some of them, yes, were expected capitalists, but most were

527
00:37:27,160 --> 00:37:30,319
Speaker 1: not even that they were killing animals because it was

528
00:37:30,480 --> 00:37:33,520
Speaker 1: ancient human skill, and many of them were doing so

529
00:37:33,560 --> 00:37:35,040
Speaker 1: because apparently they didn't know.

530
00:37:35,040 --> 00:37:36,280
Speaker 2: How to do much else.

531
00:37:37,600 --> 00:37:41,640
Speaker 1: The truest, unvarnished characterization of them came from one of

532
00:37:41,680 --> 00:37:46,880
Speaker 1: their own appear albeit a literary one, named George Ruxton,

533
00:37:48,000 --> 00:37:51,560
Speaker 1: a British adventurer and novelists who trapped with the Mountain

534
00:37:51,600 --> 00:37:55,120
Speaker 1: Men out of Taos. Ruxton knew his colleague's first hand.

535
00:37:56,120 --> 00:37:59,879
Speaker 1: They made up a genus, he said, of men dec

536
00:38:00,040 --> 00:38:05,360
Speaker 1: stilled into a primitive state whose personalities assumed what he

537
00:38:05,520 --> 00:38:11,239
Speaker 1: said was a most singular cast of simplicity mingled with ferocity.

538
00:38:12,200 --> 00:38:15,680
Speaker 1: The Western hunters, he knew, rivaled the beasts of prey,

539
00:38:15,840 --> 00:38:18,440
Speaker 1: as he put it, and destroy human as well as

540
00:38:18,480 --> 00:38:21,480
Speaker 1: animal life with his little scruple, and as freely as

541
00:38:21,520 --> 00:38:25,279
Speaker 1: they exposed their own. So they were brave, so it

542
00:38:25,440 --> 00:38:30,359
Speaker 1: killers and true looking for animals, they examined every nook

543
00:38:30,400 --> 00:38:33,360
Speaker 1: and cranny of the continent and paved the way for

544
00:38:33,480 --> 00:38:37,759
Speaker 1: the settlement of the Western country. It seems to me

545
00:38:38,239 --> 00:38:43,760
Speaker 1: that romance about all this is misdirected. Though the West

546
00:38:43,920 --> 00:38:49,440
Speaker 1: afforded the mountain men freedom from all restraint, their response

547
00:38:49,520 --> 00:38:53,560
Speaker 1: to that freedom and here I'm using Ruxton's word, was

548
00:38:53,760 --> 00:39:13,000
Speaker 1: ransacking the West of its animal life. Dan.

549
00:39:13,080 --> 00:39:18,000
Speaker 3: In this episode, you kind of kick off what is

550
00:39:18,040 --> 00:39:22,640
Speaker 3: a real dominant arc in the history of you know,

551
00:39:22,719 --> 00:39:25,720
Speaker 3: sort of the long nineteenth century in the West, which

552
00:39:25,760 --> 00:39:32,600
Speaker 3: is just unmitigated exploitation of all kinds of resources. And

553
00:39:32,680 --> 00:39:36,520
Speaker 3: we've been working on, like as mentioned earlier, we've been

554
00:39:36,520 --> 00:39:41,439
Speaker 3: working on these histories of market hunters, and it's tough

555
00:39:41,440 --> 00:39:47,040
Speaker 3: for people to wrap their minds around these individuals committing

556
00:39:47,080 --> 00:39:50,680
Speaker 3: these really egregious atrocities of wildlife.

557
00:39:50,760 --> 00:39:51,480
Speaker 4: But then.

558
00:39:53,160 --> 00:39:54,719
Speaker 3: You know, you also have to look back at the

559
00:39:54,800 --> 00:39:57,439
Speaker 3: time and consider it in context, Like they're not that's

560
00:39:57,480 --> 00:40:00,279
Speaker 3: not what they're trying to do. They're doing I have

561
00:40:00,480 --> 00:40:03,600
Speaker 3: a very specific purpose in mind, and that is the

562
00:40:03,640 --> 00:40:07,280
Speaker 3: market requires this, the West provides it, and they're the intermediary.

563
00:40:08,760 --> 00:40:12,440
Speaker 3: I wonder how you sort of wrestle with that question

564
00:40:12,600 --> 00:40:16,240
Speaker 3: or that tension in your writing about this stuff.

565
00:40:16,400 --> 00:40:18,239
Speaker 4: Dan's mean to those guys sometimes.

566
00:40:17,960 --> 00:40:20,759
Speaker 3: I know, I know, I feel like you guys sit

567
00:40:20,880 --> 00:40:26,319
Speaker 3: on opposite sides of that.

568
00:40:25,040 --> 00:40:26,760
Speaker 4: Rude things about people.

569
00:40:27,520 --> 00:40:28,680
Speaker 2: Yeah, and some of the people.

570
00:40:28,719 --> 00:40:32,160
Speaker 1: I remember when you and I were a country bookshelf

571
00:40:32,239 --> 00:40:35,640
Speaker 1: talking about while in the world, you said, you just

572
00:40:35,760 --> 00:40:41,279
Speaker 1: hurt my feelings about some of these guys. Well, so

573
00:40:41,480 --> 00:40:43,399
Speaker 1: here's what I think. I think we've had, you know,

574
00:40:43,520 --> 00:40:52,120
Speaker 1: probably quite long historiography of romance about this period of

575
00:40:52,120 --> 00:40:52,920
Speaker 1: the American West.

576
00:40:53,440 --> 00:40:55,319
Speaker 2: So what I have.

577
00:40:55,360 --> 00:40:58,360
Speaker 1: Been attempting to do, and you know, trying not to

578
00:40:58,480 --> 00:41:01,400
Speaker 1: go too overboard with it, but what I've been trying

579
00:41:01,440 --> 00:41:06,880
Speaker 1: to do is to, for one thing, take the wildlife

580
00:41:06,920 --> 00:41:11,399
Speaker 1: of the West seriously and not assume that it's just this,

581
00:41:12,280 --> 00:41:15,880
Speaker 1: you know, just commodities in fur waiting to be exploited.

582
00:41:16,600 --> 00:41:19,520
Speaker 1: And so one of the things I've done with a

583
00:41:19,560 --> 00:41:21,160
Speaker 1: lot of my work is I try to get a

584
00:41:21,200 --> 00:41:24,160
Speaker 1: lot of natural history and so people can understand the

585
00:41:24,200 --> 00:41:29,600
Speaker 1: lives that these animals had, wolves by some prong horns

586
00:41:29,640 --> 00:41:35,040
Speaker 1: and so forth, and understand them as a legitimate part

587
00:41:35,040 --> 00:41:37,880
Speaker 1: of the West. Because I think, especially in the nineteenth century,

588
00:41:37,920 --> 00:41:41,719
Speaker 1: the trifecta of things that people are interested in then

589
00:41:41,800 --> 00:41:46,719
Speaker 1: and now were It was the landscapes, these almost alien,

590
00:41:47,480 --> 00:41:51,080
Speaker 1: arid landscapes that people coming out of Northern Europe or

591
00:41:51,080 --> 00:41:54,160
Speaker 1: the East had hardly ever been exposed to. People coming

592
00:41:54,200 --> 00:41:57,480
Speaker 1: out of the Mediterranean world had, but they also found

593
00:41:57,719 --> 00:42:01,560
Speaker 1: the West to be a very cold place. With landscapes,

594
00:42:01,600 --> 00:42:04,520
Speaker 1: they recognize. The other thing that everybody is interested in,

595
00:42:04,640 --> 00:42:06,840
Speaker 1: no matter where you came from to the west was

596
00:42:06,880 --> 00:42:10,000
Speaker 1: the native people who were here, and then the animals,

597
00:42:10,400 --> 00:42:12,600
Speaker 1: because for one thing, the animals of the West were

598
00:42:12,640 --> 00:42:15,680
Speaker 1: different from the animals that were anywhere else in the

599
00:42:15,719 --> 00:42:18,960
Speaker 1: country from the East, they were different from the animals

600
00:42:19,000 --> 00:42:24,120
Speaker 1: of Western Europe. There's a lot more Asian ad mixture

601
00:42:24,160 --> 00:42:27,720
Speaker 1: of creatures in the West, so these are unusual creatures

602
00:42:27,800 --> 00:42:30,960
Speaker 1: that fascinate a lot of people. So I've tried to

603
00:42:31,000 --> 00:42:36,239
Speaker 1: take the animals themselves seriously, and with the idea that

604
00:42:36,280 --> 00:42:39,760
Speaker 1: we've had a lot of romance written about this particular

605
00:42:39,840 --> 00:42:42,799
Speaker 1: time period, I have been trying to do it in

606
00:42:42,840 --> 00:42:47,560
Speaker 1: a way where you where readers of my books or

607
00:42:47,560 --> 00:42:50,120
Speaker 1: people who listen to this podcast are going to have

608
00:42:50,239 --> 00:42:54,080
Speaker 1: the furniture in their heads rearranged a little bit and

609
00:42:54,200 --> 00:42:56,600
Speaker 1: thinking about it. I mean, we're still going to have

610
00:42:57,200 --> 00:43:00,799
Speaker 1: Jim Bridger out there, as he's going to be a

611
00:43:00,840 --> 00:43:03,640
Speaker 1: Western hero. Kit Carson is going to be a hero

612
00:43:03,760 --> 00:43:06,759
Speaker 1: of sorts. Those people are still going to stand as

613
00:43:06,920 --> 00:43:11,360
Speaker 1: major figures in Western history. But I've been trying to

614
00:43:11,440 --> 00:43:15,880
Speaker 1: create a kind of a look at this period of

615
00:43:15,960 --> 00:43:20,279
Speaker 1: the West that gives you a slightly different angle of

616
00:43:20,360 --> 00:43:25,000
Speaker 1: approach to it. And when you look at things like so,

617
00:43:25,320 --> 00:43:28,520
Speaker 1: I would preface the ecological thing I'm about to say

618
00:43:28,560 --> 00:43:32,880
Speaker 1: by also pointing out that the science of ecology doesn't

619
00:43:32,960 --> 00:43:36,719
Speaker 1: exist until the twentieth century, and so none of these

620
00:43:36,760 --> 00:43:41,319
Speaker 1: people who, for example, are wiping out sea otters on

621
00:43:41,360 --> 00:43:45,759
Speaker 1: the Pacific coast, are taking out beaver colonies all over

622
00:43:45,800 --> 00:43:51,640
Speaker 1: the country understand that by doing so, they are wrecking

623
00:43:51,840 --> 00:43:56,600
Speaker 1: ecologies that formed probably half a million or a million

624
00:43:56,640 --> 00:43:59,200
Speaker 1: years before and have been in place for tens of

625
00:43:59,239 --> 00:44:03,239
Speaker 1: thousands of years. They don't think in ecological terms. All

626
00:44:03,239 --> 00:44:06,160
Speaker 1: they're thinking in terms of is there's a population of

627
00:44:06,200 --> 00:44:07,240
Speaker 1: sea otters out there.

628
00:44:07,320 --> 00:44:08,560
Speaker 2: We're going to go get them.

629
00:44:09,000 --> 00:44:11,600
Speaker 1: And what we know since then this is one of

630
00:44:11,640 --> 00:44:14,319
Speaker 1: those examples where you know, those of us down the

631
00:44:14,360 --> 00:44:18,279
Speaker 1: timeline understand more about what the consequences were than they did.

632
00:44:18,600 --> 00:44:22,520
Speaker 1: What we understand now is that they were wrecking ecologies

633
00:44:22,560 --> 00:44:26,719
Speaker 1: that produce all kinds of alterations across the West, And

634
00:44:27,200 --> 00:44:29,479
Speaker 1: as I tried to convey in writing about that little

635
00:44:29,560 --> 00:44:32,920
Speaker 1: river I live on down in New Mexico, the alterations

636
00:44:32,960 --> 00:44:37,000
Speaker 1: extend right down to our own time. I mean, I

637
00:44:37,080 --> 00:44:40,479
Speaker 1: live on a river that because all the beavers were

638
00:44:40,880 --> 00:44:44,240
Speaker 1: taken off of it in the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties.

639
00:44:44,880 --> 00:44:47,560
Speaker 1: The result was that without the beaver dams and the

640
00:44:47,600 --> 00:44:53,239
Speaker 1: ponds on it, that little stream eroded into crisscrossing arroyos

641
00:44:53,400 --> 00:44:56,759
Speaker 1: going in every single direction. And the result today is

642
00:44:56,800 --> 00:44:59,279
Speaker 1: that it's a completely different ecology. It's one of those

643
00:44:59,600 --> 00:45:01,040
Speaker 1: One of the things, as I say quite a bit

644
00:45:01,120 --> 00:45:04,400
Speaker 1: I know on this podcast, is the past doesn't stay.

645
00:45:04,120 --> 00:45:04,760
Speaker 2: In the past.

646
00:45:05,480 --> 00:45:08,799
Speaker 1: It extends into the present day. And so that's the

647
00:45:08,920 --> 00:45:12,000
Speaker 1: sort of thing I'm trying to to make people understand

648
00:45:12,040 --> 00:45:12,200
Speaker 1: with this.

649
00:45:13,160 --> 00:45:16,799
Speaker 5: I only became aware recently that that people used to

650
00:45:16,880 --> 00:45:21,920
Speaker 5: struggle with well, that Europeans used to struggle with the

651
00:45:22,120 --> 00:45:27,359
Speaker 5: concept of extinction. That it was I don't know who

652
00:45:27,400 --> 00:45:29,600
Speaker 5: debated what side of it, but that it was actually

653
00:45:29,640 --> 00:45:35,279
Speaker 5: debated could extinction be possible? Because how do you make

654
00:45:35,320 --> 00:45:39,960
Speaker 5: it conform to Genesis or how do you how do

655
00:45:39,960 --> 00:45:43,920
Speaker 5: you how do you conform extinction to the biblical creation story?

656
00:45:44,040 --> 00:45:46,440
Speaker 5: That I know the idea that people argued about this,

657
00:45:47,239 --> 00:45:51,239
Speaker 5: But what what do you see in recognizing that there

658
00:45:51,239 --> 00:45:55,080
Speaker 5: were dozens or hundreds of native religions and native cultures

659
00:45:55,120 --> 00:46:00,279
Speaker 5: and native systems of understanding? But do you see that

660
00:46:01,080 --> 00:46:05,240
Speaker 5: native people's had ideas of extinction?

661
00:46:06,520 --> 00:46:09,120
Speaker 4: Do? I mean, like, did they get it?

662
00:46:10,280 --> 00:46:10,520
Speaker 2: Well?

663
00:46:10,560 --> 00:46:15,960
Speaker 1: I think in America as a result of the pleistis

664
00:46:15,960 --> 00:46:19,839
Speaker 1: sin extinctions and obviously they happened far back in time

665
00:46:20,600 --> 00:46:24,239
Speaker 1: ten thousand, eleven thousand, and twelve thousand years before. I

666
00:46:24,280 --> 00:46:30,200
Speaker 1: think the native people then understood that animals disappear and

667
00:46:30,239 --> 00:46:32,720
Speaker 1: they completely go away and we don't ever see them again.

668
00:46:35,239 --> 00:46:38,680
Speaker 1: And so they I think they understood then that extinction

669
00:46:38,960 --> 00:46:42,160
Speaker 1: was real in the world. Whether or not, I mean,

670
00:46:42,160 --> 00:46:45,120
Speaker 1: the question for me and I have not been able

671
00:46:45,160 --> 00:46:48,799
Speaker 1: to answer, the question to my own satisfaction is whether

672
00:46:48,920 --> 00:46:56,240
Speaker 1: or not those memories extended down subsequent towards the present.

673
00:46:56,280 --> 00:46:57,799
Speaker 1: And I do not I don't have.

674
00:46:57,760 --> 00:46:59,160
Speaker 2: An answer for that.

675
00:47:00,080 --> 00:47:06,000
Speaker 1: But what you led with very the idea of extinction

676
00:47:06,200 --> 00:47:10,279
Speaker 1: very much was a debated topic in the eighteenth and

677
00:47:10,360 --> 00:47:16,400
Speaker 1: nineteenth centuries. It was debated particularly when when Europeans, especially

678
00:47:16,480 --> 00:47:21,439
Speaker 1: and then in America too, began excavating the remains of

679
00:47:22,280 --> 00:47:28,399
Speaker 1: plesissne animals and in some cases dinosaurs, but really more

680
00:47:28,400 --> 00:47:34,840
Speaker 1: frequently plesiscene animals, and as early palaeontologists tried to reassemble

681
00:47:34,960 --> 00:47:39,320
Speaker 1: those animals. What they began to realize is that nothing

682
00:47:39,480 --> 00:47:43,319
Speaker 1: like this lives anymore. What is the explanation for that?

683
00:47:43,440 --> 00:47:47,120
Speaker 1: And that set in motion about a century's worth of

684
00:47:47,200 --> 00:47:52,279
Speaker 1: debate about whether extinction was actually possible, and the Biblical

685
00:47:52,760 --> 00:47:59,080
Speaker 1: Judaeo Christian version was it's not possible. The world was

686
00:47:59,120 --> 00:48:04,160
Speaker 1: created by a dear It was created in perfection. Animals

687
00:48:04,200 --> 00:48:07,839
Speaker 1: created perfection exists exactly now as they did at the

688
00:48:07,840 --> 00:48:12,760
Speaker 1: moment of their creation, and in a perfect deity created world,

689
00:48:12,920 --> 00:48:16,680
Speaker 1: nothing will ever go away. Everything is going to remain.

690
00:48:17,080 --> 00:48:22,839
Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson believed that extinction was not possible in the

691
00:48:22,880 --> 00:48:28,520
Speaker 1: seventeen nineties, but he was persuaded by the naturalists in France,

692
00:48:29,000 --> 00:48:36,160
Speaker 1: particularly the com Bouffon, that extinction absolutely looks like it

693
00:48:36,239 --> 00:48:40,279
Speaker 1: can happen. We don't know why these animals disappeared. And

694
00:48:40,280 --> 00:48:44,160
Speaker 1: that's why Jefferson had instructions to both Lewis and Clark

695
00:48:44,239 --> 00:48:47,840
Speaker 1: and Freeman and Custis that Southern expedition when they went west,

696
00:48:48,280 --> 00:48:51,759
Speaker 1: look for mammoths, because we've found the bones.

697
00:48:51,480 --> 00:48:52,399
Speaker 2: Of mammoths in the east.

698
00:48:52,480 --> 00:48:55,120
Speaker 1: We can't find any east, but maybe they're still out

699
00:48:55,120 --> 00:48:59,920
Speaker 1: there in the west. But by the eighteen thirties and

700
00:49:00,000 --> 00:49:04,319
Speaker 1: in the eighteen forties, most scientists in both America and

701
00:49:04,440 --> 00:49:09,040
Speaker 1: Europe began to realize that, wow, these things, they really

702
00:49:09,080 --> 00:49:09,920
Speaker 1: have disappeared.

703
00:49:09,920 --> 00:49:10,960
Speaker 2: They're not here anymore.

704
00:49:11,160 --> 00:49:14,000
Speaker 1: And then we had the kind of crushing realization in

705
00:49:14,000 --> 00:49:16,879
Speaker 1: the eighteen forties of the extinction of the great Awk,

706
00:49:17,520 --> 00:49:21,560
Speaker 1: our northern hemisphere penguin, which was basically wiped out by

707
00:49:21,600 --> 00:49:28,480
Speaker 1: egg hunters. And suddenly there's a realization that absolutely animals

708
00:49:28,560 --> 00:49:31,480
Speaker 1: can disappear, and it looks like one of the reasons

709
00:49:31,520 --> 00:49:33,680
Speaker 1: they disappear is because of human exploitation.

710
00:49:34,680 --> 00:49:38,240
Speaker 4: I see examples where native cultures would have.

711
00:49:39,960 --> 00:49:40,600
Speaker 2: A meta.

712
00:49:42,440 --> 00:49:47,320
Speaker 5: They would understand extinction, but have a metaphysical idea about it,

713
00:49:47,440 --> 00:49:53,000
Speaker 5: like planes tribes. As the buffalo started to vanish, planes

714
00:49:53,040 --> 00:49:56,759
Speaker 5: tribes to be that they went back in that they

715
00:49:56,760 --> 00:49:58,520
Speaker 5: had come from the earth and they went back into

716
00:49:58,520 --> 00:50:01,680
Speaker 5: the earth. Fascinating to me is I was talking to

717
00:50:01,800 --> 00:50:05,080
Speaker 5: a guy. That's kind of one of the craziest conversations

718
00:50:05,120 --> 00:50:07,600
Speaker 5: I ever had with someone, because it felt like it

719
00:50:07,640 --> 00:50:10,239
Speaker 5: was time travel. I was taking new guy in Guyana,

720
00:50:10,960 --> 00:50:14,120
Speaker 5: a tribalman in Guyana, and they had always had a

721
00:50:14,239 --> 00:50:17,160
Speaker 5: herd of a couple hundred white lipped packery that lived

722
00:50:17,200 --> 00:50:23,680
Speaker 5: within striking distance of their village. They cleared out they

723
00:50:23,680 --> 00:50:26,160
Speaker 5: couldn't find them. It was a great resource for them,

724
00:50:27,800 --> 00:50:30,160
Speaker 5: he explained to me face to face. He explained to

725
00:50:30,200 --> 00:50:33,440
Speaker 5: me that there was another village and there was a

726
00:50:33,480 --> 00:50:36,640
Speaker 5: shaman in the village who is jealous of their village

727
00:50:36,640 --> 00:50:41,320
Speaker 5: for having such prosperity, and he had locked the packers

728
00:50:41,360 --> 00:50:45,200
Speaker 5: into a mountain. And like, there's no like this dude

729
00:50:45,239 --> 00:50:47,959
Speaker 5: would not have awareness of that idea on the Great

730
00:50:47,960 --> 00:50:51,720
Speaker 5: Plains of America that things were locked into the earth.

731
00:50:52,560 --> 00:50:55,239
Speaker 4: But it's like you're getting at its gone noess.

732
00:50:56,760 --> 00:50:58,799
Speaker 5: Right, and you have to have an explanation, but like

733
00:50:58,840 --> 00:51:02,120
Speaker 5: a different way of that, like it's gone yeah right,

734
00:51:02,160 --> 00:51:04,840
Speaker 5: it's just but a totally different worldview, you know, but

735
00:51:04,960 --> 00:51:06,319
Speaker 5: capturing the same sentiment that.

736
00:51:06,280 --> 00:51:10,320
Speaker 1: It's it's the same sentiment. It's a different cause effect

737
00:51:10,440 --> 00:51:17,560
Speaker 1: relationship than we would have with a scientific worldview. I mean,

738
00:51:17,600 --> 00:51:22,160
Speaker 1: the cause effect relationship for why things happened was different

739
00:51:22,280 --> 00:51:26,359
Speaker 1: among indigenous people. They had a different argument for this

740
00:51:26,440 --> 00:51:30,879
Speaker 1: is a consequence. The cause is completely something different, and

741
00:51:30,920 --> 00:51:36,320
Speaker 1: we would have the western, rational, scientific world looks for

742
00:51:36,680 --> 00:51:42,719
Speaker 1: an evidentiary cause for the consequence, and oftentimes the indigenous

743
00:51:42,719 --> 00:51:45,000
Speaker 1: world looks for kind of a what we would call

744
00:51:45,040 --> 00:51:48,040
Speaker 1: a supernatural explanation for why things happen.

745
00:51:49,840 --> 00:51:57,160
Speaker 6: Yeah, earlier you were talking about the mountainmen and the

746
00:51:57,800 --> 00:52:02,680
Speaker 6: hide hunters as being these initially glorified figures, and now

747
00:52:02,719 --> 00:52:05,000
Speaker 6: they've we've reassessed our view of them.

748
00:52:04,880 --> 00:52:10,680
Speaker 4: But inarguably quite fascinating. Yeah, yeah, but there.

749
00:52:10,880 --> 00:52:12,799
Speaker 3: I think what's interesting is when you look at this

750
00:52:12,880 --> 00:52:17,399
Speaker 3: in the aggregate, the whole pattern, there are these examples

751
00:52:17,520 --> 00:52:21,520
Speaker 3: of like the egg hunters with the Great Auk, and

752
00:52:21,520 --> 00:52:26,120
Speaker 3: and I think the one the one storyline that never

753
00:52:26,239 --> 00:52:30,719
Speaker 3: had really entered my consciousness until later in life was

754
00:52:31,440 --> 00:52:38,319
Speaker 3: the Sea Otter hunt. And especially under Russian control, I mean,

755
00:52:38,360 --> 00:52:45,040
Speaker 3: they're they're conscripting native people and and killing them and

756
00:52:45,080 --> 00:52:49,799
Speaker 3: torturing them to go kill otters for their fur, and

757
00:52:49,960 --> 00:52:54,680
Speaker 3: I it's it's just striking to me because it's in

758
00:52:54,800 --> 00:52:59,640
Speaker 3: keeping with this much larger pattern of of exploitation of wildlife.

759
00:52:59,640 --> 00:53:03,759
Speaker 3: But once you look at it and you see all

760
00:53:03,800 --> 00:53:08,640
Speaker 3: of the little, you know, unique aspects of it, then

761
00:53:08,680 --> 00:53:11,400
Speaker 3: you begin to sort of comprehend the larger picture. I

762
00:53:11,440 --> 00:53:13,600
Speaker 3: don't know if that makes sense, but you know, there's

763
00:53:13,600 --> 00:53:16,760
Speaker 3: some very familiar aspects to the story of wildlife depletion,

764
00:53:17,280 --> 00:53:23,680
Speaker 3: but there's also these outliers that are pretty horrific and

765
00:53:23,920 --> 00:53:26,360
Speaker 3: yet again in keeping with the ones that were maybe

766
00:53:26,400 --> 00:53:28,880
Speaker 3: more comfortable with as a culture talking about.

767
00:53:28,960 --> 00:53:31,400
Speaker 1: Yeah, that one is definitely an outlier because of the

768
00:53:31,400 --> 00:53:35,839
Speaker 1: conscription of the alliots and others. I mean, sometimes they

769
00:53:35,840 --> 00:53:40,520
Speaker 1: would kidnap a guy's family and hold his family ransom

770
00:53:41,120 --> 00:53:44,600
Speaker 1: so that he would go and do the otter hunt

771
00:53:45,040 --> 00:53:47,520
Speaker 1: for them. And the reason I think that one, really,

772
00:53:47,680 --> 00:53:51,400
Speaker 1: you know, strikes us as egregious as it is is

773
00:53:51,400 --> 00:53:55,040
Speaker 1: because what we're more used to is something like what happened,

774
00:53:55,480 --> 00:53:59,120
Speaker 1: you know, with the fur companies and the native people.

775
00:53:58,840 --> 00:54:00,520
Speaker 2: As clients of the fur companies.

776
00:54:00,520 --> 00:54:03,120
Speaker 1: And of course that one is a that one you

777
00:54:03,160 --> 00:54:07,160
Speaker 1: have to know about history some to wrap your mind

778
00:54:07,680 --> 00:54:11,360
Speaker 1: around to realize that native people, who we accord a

779
00:54:11,440 --> 00:54:14,160
Speaker 1: kind of a special consideration for the natural world, and

780
00:54:14,760 --> 00:54:18,239
Speaker 1: they almost always have it, there's no question. But they

781
00:54:18,239 --> 00:54:22,439
Speaker 1: were also confronted with people who had brought in a

782
00:54:22,480 --> 00:54:27,720
Speaker 1: brand new technology, a metal technology that if you didn't

783
00:54:27,800 --> 00:54:32,600
Speaker 1: participate in it, and your neighbors, your native neighbors down

784
00:54:32,600 --> 00:54:37,680
Speaker 1: the river did, then you were suddenly massively disadvantaged, because

785
00:54:37,719 --> 00:54:40,920
Speaker 1: if they got metal, if they got guns, if they

786
00:54:41,080 --> 00:54:46,080
Speaker 1: got knives made of steel, and they got arrow points

787
00:54:46,080 --> 00:54:51,160
Speaker 1: made of iron, then and you remained with your traditional

788
00:54:51,280 --> 00:54:57,440
Speaker 1: flint culture, you were massively disadvantaged in the world that

789
00:54:57,560 --> 00:54:59,960
Speaker 1: was happening around them. And so most people, all the

790
00:55:00,160 --> 00:55:04,040
Speaker 1: there were religious leaders who tried to stop this and said,

791
00:55:04,080 --> 00:55:08,279
Speaker 1: don't do it, don't join into this this hunt. Nonetheless,

792
00:55:08,480 --> 00:55:12,759
Speaker 1: most people did because they realized that the world had

793
00:55:12,840 --> 00:55:15,840
Speaker 1: changed so dramatically if they did not participate. And the

794
00:55:16,120 --> 00:55:21,000
Speaker 1: unfortunate result was that the market hunt usually usually pointed

795
00:55:21,040 --> 00:55:25,040
Speaker 1: out very specific things that it wanted. It didn't want

796
00:55:25,120 --> 00:55:28,120
Speaker 1: native people to, you know, offer them up there the

797
00:55:28,360 --> 00:55:32,560
Speaker 1: crops from their fields. It wanted the furs of beavers

798
00:55:32,600 --> 00:55:36,560
Speaker 1: and muskrats and otters, and so if you want to

799
00:55:36,600 --> 00:55:40,080
Speaker 1: play the game with the global market, that's what you

800
00:55:40,200 --> 00:55:42,520
Speaker 1: have to offer us in trade and will then set

801
00:55:42,560 --> 00:55:45,680
Speaker 1: you up with metalware. And so it's a it's a

802
00:55:45,760 --> 00:55:51,279
Speaker 1: part of a kind of a voluntary participation in the

803
00:55:51,320 --> 00:55:54,560
Speaker 1: market economy. Over most of the West, that is not

804
00:55:55,120 --> 00:55:57,960
Speaker 1: true of the otter thing we were just talking about,

805
00:55:58,000 --> 00:55:59,680
Speaker 1: where people were conscripted into it.

806
00:56:02,239 --> 00:56:07,000
Speaker 5: There's another question about the odd country or you're doing

807
00:56:07,040 --> 00:56:09,840
Speaker 5: sea otters. But to set it up, I'll point out that,

808
00:56:09,920 --> 00:56:12,240
Speaker 5: like if you look at a lot of the areas

809
00:56:12,480 --> 00:56:16,479
Speaker 5: as they marched across the country, you kind of come

810
00:56:16,560 --> 00:56:21,560
Speaker 5: for the fur and stay for the whatever. Right, So

811
00:56:21,680 --> 00:56:26,400
Speaker 5: these like guys that go across the Appalachian Mountains the

812
00:56:26,480 --> 00:56:34,440
Speaker 5: hunt deer, oftentimes those same individuals stay to get into agriculture,

813
00:56:35,280 --> 00:56:37,720
Speaker 5: stay to get into timber extraction whatever.

814
00:56:38,480 --> 00:56:40,960
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you go like or you know, you.

815
00:56:42,760 --> 00:56:45,399
Speaker 5: Hide hunters go out and out of that comes these

816
00:56:45,400 --> 00:56:48,160
Speaker 5: like cattle enterprises or whatever. Right, Like there's there's no

817
00:56:48,320 --> 00:56:53,319
Speaker 5: there's no gap. People show up oftentimes to extract fur,

818
00:56:54,239 --> 00:56:58,120
Speaker 5: and then they quickly they don't leave. You follow me,

819
00:56:58,160 --> 00:57:02,320
Speaker 5: like more people come in their footsteps. Are there exceptions

820
00:57:02,320 --> 00:57:05,359
Speaker 5: in that where there's a big gap, and like, what

821
00:57:05,360 --> 00:57:07,840
Speaker 5: what was it like when you came to the Pacific

822
00:57:07,920 --> 00:57:12,359
Speaker 5: coast for odds, like the Russians are down there? Like

823
00:57:12,520 --> 00:57:16,240
Speaker 5: after the odters, was there a retraction or was there

824
00:57:16,320 --> 00:57:18,760
Speaker 5: like a thing you stayed for you?

825
00:57:18,880 --> 00:57:22,160
Speaker 1: No, No, that probably was an exception because almost everybody

826
00:57:22,240 --> 00:57:25,960
Speaker 1: was coming by ship, and so they were when the

827
00:57:26,040 --> 00:57:30,400
Speaker 1: otter hunt was over, when they couldn't find anymore, when

828
00:57:30,400 --> 00:57:33,400
Speaker 1: the first seals were too depleted to continue, it was

829
00:57:33,640 --> 00:57:37,000
Speaker 1: you know, law of diminishing returns, there's no point in continuing.

830
00:57:37,800 --> 00:57:40,520
Speaker 1: They usually went back to wherever they were from, because

831
00:57:40,600 --> 00:57:43,439
Speaker 1: a ton of them were from Boston and New York.

832
00:57:43,520 --> 00:57:46,000
Speaker 4: And I mean then there was like a quiet there's

833
00:57:46,040 --> 00:57:48,160
Speaker 4: like an otterless quiet period.

834
00:57:48,320 --> 00:57:52,080
Speaker 1: There was, indeed, Yeah, and the twenties and and thirties

835
00:57:52,360 --> 00:57:55,200
Speaker 1: and forty I mean, otters don't start recovering until about

836
00:57:55,240 --> 00:57:59,200
Speaker 1: the eighteen eighties or eighteen nineties. The first seals, because

837
00:57:59,240 --> 00:58:02,200
Speaker 1: there had been more of them, they recover a little

838
00:58:02,200 --> 00:58:07,200
Speaker 1: bit more quickly. But there is also a kind of

839
00:58:07,240 --> 00:58:12,040
Speaker 1: a subsidence period after the demise of beavers in the

840
00:58:12,040 --> 00:58:18,000
Speaker 1: interior West, when that Husses Bay group of guys, I

841
00:58:18,040 --> 00:58:21,520
Speaker 1: was talking about go in and try to ruin the

842
00:58:21,600 --> 00:58:24,360
Speaker 1: country and trap all the beavers out of all the streams.

843
00:58:24,720 --> 00:58:27,840
Speaker 1: On the west side of the Continental Divide, there's a

844
00:58:28,080 --> 00:58:33,320
Speaker 1: period of about fifteen years or so where a lot

845
00:58:33,360 --> 00:58:37,160
Speaker 1: of the mountain men kind of are I mean, some

846
00:58:37,240 --> 00:58:41,240
Speaker 1: of them go west with the Oregon Trail folks who

847
00:58:41,280 --> 00:58:44,840
Speaker 1: settle in the Willamet River valley and become sheriffs and things.

848
00:58:46,240 --> 00:58:48,320
Speaker 1: And I'm going to talk in one of the upcoming

849
00:58:48,360 --> 00:58:52,040
Speaker 1: episodes about a next step that several of the mountain

850
00:58:52,080 --> 00:58:55,440
Speaker 1: men do. When their beavers are gone, a lot of

851
00:58:55,440 --> 00:59:00,560
Speaker 1: them turn to the horse trade, and they become traders

852
00:59:00,600 --> 00:59:02,840
Speaker 1: and horses. And one of the things that some of

853
00:59:02,880 --> 00:59:07,640
Speaker 1: the classic mountain men do Bill Sublett, for example, they

854
00:59:07,680 --> 00:59:12,080
Speaker 1: go to California and either trade for horses or catch

855
00:59:12,080 --> 00:59:16,720
Speaker 1: wild horses in the rolling golden hills of California, or

856
00:59:16,840 --> 00:59:22,080
Speaker 1: they sometimes they just steal them off Spanish ranches and

857
00:59:22,160 --> 00:59:28,320
Speaker 1: they drive them east from California and outfit Stephen Carney's

858
00:59:28,480 --> 00:59:32,520
Speaker 1: Army of the West, which needs mounts and remounts. Or

859
00:59:32,560 --> 00:59:35,640
Speaker 1: they take them to places like Fort Bridger and they

860
00:59:35,720 --> 00:59:40,760
Speaker 1: supply the wagon trains the Overlin trail folks with horses

861
00:59:40,760 --> 00:59:43,400
Speaker 1: with fresh stock to get all the way to the

862
00:59:43,400 --> 00:59:47,320
Speaker 1: west coast. So there's a there's a little bit of

863
00:59:47,360 --> 00:59:51,160
Speaker 1: a lag, but they usually find something like the buffalo hunters.

864
00:59:51,160 --> 00:59:55,320
Speaker 1: When the buffalo are gone, shit, you got prong horns,

865
00:59:55,560 --> 00:59:59,080
Speaker 1: you got elk, you got big horn sheep, they just

866
00:59:59,320 --> 01:00:03,240
Speaker 1: go after whatever is left and so and wolves because

867
01:00:03,240 --> 01:00:06,080
Speaker 1: they've learned now that you know, you can use strychnine

868
01:00:06,080 --> 01:00:07,200
Speaker 1: and you can poison wolves.

869
01:00:07,240 --> 01:00:09,120
Speaker 2: You can get a dollar a pelt for a wolf pelt,

870
01:00:09,160 --> 01:00:09,400
Speaker 2: and so.

871
01:00:10,080 --> 01:00:14,120
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they managed to segue into just a whatever

872
01:00:14,200 --> 01:00:17,120
Speaker 1: animals are left. Yeah, but the mountain Man, quite a

873
01:00:17,200 --> 01:00:18,680
Speaker 1: number of them become horse traders.

874
01:00:19,720 --> 01:00:22,240
Speaker 4: Are you familiar with a vicaro of the brush country?

875
01:00:22,320 --> 01:00:22,360
Speaker 1: No?

876
01:00:22,520 --> 01:00:24,880
Speaker 4: I am, Yeah, Yeah, that dude.

877
01:00:25,960 --> 01:00:29,760
Speaker 5: He hated the buffalo hunters because he was he felt

878
01:00:29,760 --> 01:00:34,480
Speaker 5: that they all became criminals, not all became sheriffs. Right.

879
01:00:35,120 --> 01:00:37,560
Speaker 3: And there's a line, and there's a line that we

880
01:00:37,680 --> 01:00:41,080
Speaker 3: cited in the Mountain En Project where like at the

881
01:00:41,080 --> 01:00:44,840
Speaker 3: eighteen thirty seven or eighteen thirty eight rendezvous, someone writes

882
01:00:45,640 --> 01:00:50,560
Speaker 3: a number of them have gone west to become horse thieves.

883
01:00:50,600 --> 01:00:53,240
Speaker 3: Such a thing has never been heard of until now. Yeah,

884
01:00:53,280 --> 01:00:55,640
Speaker 3: like it was just this invention of desperation.

885
01:00:55,720 --> 01:00:57,400
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that was the Bill Sublette thing.

886
01:00:57,440 --> 01:01:00,480
Speaker 1: I mean, he actually did that, and he regarded that

887
01:01:00,560 --> 01:01:03,440
Speaker 1: as one of his great coups. He went to California

888
01:01:03,480 --> 01:01:05,720
Speaker 1: and stole a bunch of Spanish horses and drove them

889
01:01:05,760 --> 01:01:09,200
Speaker 1: back to the planes to outfit the overland and to

890
01:01:09,280 --> 01:01:11,880
Speaker 1: Bent's Fort. Bent's Fort was one of the big sort

891
01:01:11,880 --> 01:01:15,720
Speaker 1: of receiving areas for Western horses. But that episode is

892
01:01:15,760 --> 01:01:18,320
Speaker 1: coming up. I'm going to tell the horse story. I

893
01:01:18,320 --> 01:01:19,960
Speaker 1: think it may be the next to one, in fact,

894
01:01:20,000 --> 01:01:22,760
Speaker 1: after this, where we'll turn to the horse trade in

895
01:01:22,800 --> 01:01:25,120
Speaker 1: the West, which is another one of those that's kind

896
01:01:25,120 --> 01:01:29,000
Speaker 1: of little known and unlike the sort of thing we've

897
01:01:29,040 --> 01:01:31,400
Speaker 1: been talking about. I mean, with the horse trade, the

898
01:01:31,480 --> 01:01:35,200
Speaker 1: idea was to get live animals back to the seventies,

899
01:01:35,760 --> 01:01:42,160
Speaker 1: and yeah, getting live animals back. And what made horses

900
01:01:42,160 --> 01:01:44,120
Speaker 1: really great is that they.

901
01:01:44,000 --> 01:01:45,240
Speaker 2: Got back there on their own.

902
01:01:45,320 --> 01:01:47,520
Speaker 1: You didn't have to load them on a steamboat or

903
01:01:48,080 --> 01:01:49,760
Speaker 1: you know, pack them up on the.

904
01:01:49,680 --> 01:01:50,720
Speaker 2: Back of a pack horse.

905
01:01:51,080 --> 01:01:54,920
Speaker 1: You could just drive them along and they got to market,

906
01:01:55,040 --> 01:01:55,960
Speaker 1: you know, on their own.

907
01:01:55,960 --> 01:02:00,959
Speaker 2: Accord. Good Randal, I'm good.

908
01:02:01,680 --> 01:02:04,640
Speaker 5: One last observation for you about my favorite part of that.

909
01:02:05,000 --> 01:02:07,760
Speaker 5: I can't remember the guy's name, Vacaro the Brush Country.

910
01:02:07,880 --> 01:02:09,680
Speaker 3: Is it j Frank Adobie.

911
01:02:09,840 --> 01:02:14,480
Speaker 5: Yeah, well no no, but it's like it's as told

912
01:02:14,520 --> 01:02:17,600
Speaker 5: you from a Vicaro of the Brush Country. But he's

913
01:02:17,640 --> 01:02:21,640
Speaker 5: talking about the King Ranch. Okay, he's talking about one

914
01:02:21,680 --> 01:02:26,440
Speaker 5: of the guys that would become a King Ranch. Guy

915
01:02:26,480 --> 01:02:36,280
Speaker 5: having experimenting with taking a like like injecting cattle with

916
01:02:36,480 --> 01:02:44,440
Speaker 5: brine into their vascular system to that you would somehow

917
01:02:44,800 --> 01:02:50,240
Speaker 5: preserve because it's like hot, it's humid down the Gold Country,

918
01:02:50,320 --> 01:02:53,560
Speaker 5: South Texas, like everything rots to dam fast. So he's

919
01:02:53,600 --> 01:02:56,160
Speaker 5: toying with the idea, how would you inject like a

920
01:02:56,280 --> 01:03:00,960
Speaker 5: brine into its as it's dying, into its askular system

921
01:03:01,000 --> 01:03:01,960
Speaker 5: and sort of pickle it.

922
01:03:02,800 --> 01:03:08,120
Speaker 1: This is basically salting the meats.

923
01:03:10,200 --> 01:03:13,440
Speaker 4: Tickles me endlessly. Man, it's like that. But he acknowledges

924
01:03:13,480 --> 01:03:15,360
Speaker 4: that they never got that perfected.

925
01:03:16,720 --> 01:03:19,840
Speaker 1: It's one of those things that appears on those redneck solutions.

926
01:03:21,880 --> 01:03:24,120
Speaker 4: Well, thank thanks for all the wisdom, Dan Man.

927
01:03:24,120 --> 01:03:25,080
Speaker 2: It's fun. Thanks guys.

928
01:03:25,080 --> 01:03:25,360
Speaker 5: Things