Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything, alright. First off, if you're listening to
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Speaker 1: We have a thing where it's like show notes, right,
Speaker 1: so you can find links to books ideas articles that
Speaker 1: spring out of that selection is inspired by conversations we have.
Speaker 1: You're on the show because we're constantly getting things that
Speaker 1: people like, Yeah, you guys are talking about some book.
Speaker 1: I didn't really catch what book it was. I don't
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Speaker 1: kinds of cool stuff. And we got a new media podcast,
Speaker 1: t shirt out and go leave your review, which is
Speaker 1: real helpful. Now watch this segue, get ready, because when
Speaker 1: you go there, you'll find notes about books and whatnot.
Speaker 1: And some of those books are written by our guest,
Speaker 1: Dan Flores, whose house we're in right now. Can I
Speaker 1: see the road you live on? Uh? You almost see? Well,
Speaker 1: you can? I mean, so we're seventeen miles southwest of
Speaker 1: Santa Fe, New Mexico, not in Madrid. Now, we're not
Speaker 1: in uh Madrid, We're not in Syria's uh but kind
Speaker 1: of in the vicinity and within looking distance of what
Speaker 1: might be the oldest mine a turquoise mine, the oldest
Speaker 1: mine in North America. Yeah, very possibly the oldest mine
Speaker 1: and what is now the United States. I mean, we're
Speaker 1: sitting here on the couch looking out the screen door,
Speaker 1: and that mine is in view about four miles away.
Speaker 1: It's called Chalcey wheedle, which is an Aztec word. Um.
Speaker 1: Not that the the Aztec Indians lived here, this was
Speaker 1: Pueblo country, but the Pueblos traded turquoise all the way
Speaker 1: down into Central America, and uh, that turquoise made a
Speaker 1: really big splash among the Aztecs, who have a glyph
Speaker 1: for this little mountain where the mine is in the
Speaker 1: Temple of the Sun in Mexico City or or did
Speaker 1: have it. And so, yeah, this is a pretty major
Speaker 1: site for ancient North American archaeology. What did the what
Speaker 1: did the people here call it? Well, is that not known? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think they don't. I'm not sure what the
Speaker 1: word was that the Pueblo Indians had for. But there
Speaker 1: was a pueblo here about five or six miles away
Speaker 1: that was basically a pueblo of miners responsible for mining
Speaker 1: the turquoise in the Surreos Hills. That pueblo was called
Speaker 1: sam Marcus Pueblo and it was part of the Chaco
Speaker 1: Canyon complex a thousand years ago, and this part of
Speaker 1: the world there was a major civilization that was basically
Speaker 1: orchestrated by a place we now called Choco, which is
Speaker 1: a National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico. And it
Speaker 1: had far flung communities all over this part of the world,
Speaker 1: all the way over into Arizona present day Colorado, Utah,
Speaker 1: New Mexico. And this was a mining town that was
Speaker 1: part of that complex. Is it uh? Is it true
Speaker 1: to that Chocko ca. I think he told me this before,
Speaker 1: that it Chaco Canyon in present day. We didn't really
Speaker 1: understand it until you get up above it and aircraft
Speaker 1: and look down on it to understand how it's configured. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think uh, I mean I might have said something
Speaker 1: like that and some of our conversations from years ago
Speaker 1: when we were in Missoula. And the reason that's the
Speaker 1: case is because what archaeologists have learned about Choco fairly
Speaker 1: recently in the last twenty five or so years, is
Speaker 1: that a lot of the buildings Pueblo Benito, for example,
Speaker 1: which was kind of the Indian version of the Vatican
Speaker 1: really uh in North America thousand years ago. It was
Speaker 1: laid out according to solstices and equinoxes. The sun rises
Speaker 1: over the Chaco Valley at solstice and equinox, and so
Speaker 1: the lines of the buildings were laid out in that way.
Speaker 1: And what archaeologists realized when I mean, I think they
Speaker 1: knew this for quite a while, but looking down on
Speaker 1: it from aerial views, they realized that this is a
Speaker 1: civilization that built an elaborate road network across the Southwest.
Speaker 1: And um, I mean, you can kind of see those
Speaker 1: roads when you're on the ground, when you're over there
Speaker 1: hiking around the cliffs, but you can really see them,
Speaker 1: I think, a lot better from the air. And what
Speaker 1: people realize looking down on the Chaco and Complex from
Speaker 1: the air was that these roads were built, probably for
Speaker 1: religious reasons, just straight as an arrow across the landscape.
Speaker 1: And so unlike modern road engineers who will take roads
Speaker 1: around mountains and follow streams up canyons and things, these
Speaker 1: guys just for whatever the reason, they shot these roads
Speaker 1: straight through the countryside, and if a butte got in
Speaker 1: the way, they just went right over the top of
Speaker 1: it and maintain that straight line. And these were roads
Speaker 1: that were used. I mean people were hauling the vegas,
Speaker 1: the beams that they used to build all these giant
Speaker 1: constructions in Chaco from the Chusca Mountains fifty miles away
Speaker 1: over these roads. And these guys who were basically pissing
Speaker 1: these logs from the mountains, great big Ponderosa pines, who
Speaker 1: are having to go up and down the topography because
Speaker 1: the roads just went straight, and there was probably a
Speaker 1: reason for it. I mean, it wasn't just done because
Speaker 1: that's like the practical way to build a road, because
Speaker 1: it's not practical. No, it's not really practical. I mean
Speaker 1: what you would you know, what animals do and what
Speaker 1: most road engineers to do is you see a beaute
Speaker 1: in front of you, you go around. But so that's
Speaker 1: what Steve, you might have a little of that blood
Speaker 1: in you, because that's kind of the way you hike. YEA.
Speaker 1: Most of us tend to go around and with the
Speaker 1: flow of the landscape, and when you see a beaut
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, just go right up and over it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's why they call me the inconsiderate mountain Go higher
Speaker 1: and considerate mountain go hiker. And and Dan, you were
Speaker 1: saying that some of that, so some of the turquoise
Speaker 1: taken out of here. You you're saying that, uh, there
Speaker 1: was awareness of this mind all the way down in
Speaker 1: the Aztec Empire, and that it seems as though, just
Speaker 1: based on faunnel remains, that these guys were getting maccaws
Speaker 1: and things from the jungles and they had those materials
Speaker 1: up here and in turn their rocks their turn turquoise
Speaker 1: was down there. Yeah, it was. It was a luxury
Speaker 1: good trade. I mean, we don't think, you know, of
Speaker 1: native people so much in the context of luxury goods,
Speaker 1: but I mean they were, you know, they were just
Speaker 1: like us. They were motivated by the same human nature
Speaker 1: impulses that we are to express status. And so turquoise,
Speaker 1: both turquoise and the things that the Pueblo people in
Speaker 1: the American Southwest traded farther south for turquoise were all
Speaker 1: luxury goods. And the mccause I mean, and this is
Speaker 1: a kind of a phenomenon of this part of the
Speaker 1: world because you can go into Santa Fe. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've got some scattered around here. There's a pot with
Speaker 1: McCaw feathers in it right there, and most of the
Speaker 1: shops in Santa fe still today you can go in
Speaker 1: and buy mccaugh feathers, because this is a bird we've
Speaker 1: known for the last thousand years around here, that was
Speaker 1: a sacred bird to the native people. They doesn't range here, obviously,
Speaker 1: this is a desert. They haul these things live up
Speaker 1: from the jungles of Central America, and the priests kept
Speaker 1: them in cages and treated them as kind of sacred beings.
Speaker 1: I think because of the brilliant plumage, the coloration of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, it's a for their beautiful song. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, this is out the inconsistency between a macaw
Speaker 1: his appearance in his song where it sounds like like
Speaker 1: he's the most beautiful bird and he sounds like like
Speaker 1: a dying what I had imagined a disease dying tero
Speaker 1: dactyle to sound like. But we're just down in South
Speaker 1: America with some mkushi guys and they still hunt mccaus
Speaker 1: with the feathers. Yeah, I don't doubt it. And now
Speaker 1: you're like, we're in the world where's like we have
Speaker 1: dies and all these fabrics and you can buy like
Speaker 1: blaze pink ship on the internet, right, But they're like still, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: those feathers are amazing looking. And they were saying that
Speaker 1: macaus are difficult to hunt the hum of the bow.
Speaker 1: They're difficult to hunt. But there's a particular type of
Speaker 1: of date tree or I'm sorry, a particular type of
Speaker 1: palm that has like a date like fruit on it,
Speaker 1: and they said that the macaws like those so much
Speaker 1: that you need to watch for one of those trees
Speaker 1: the fruit, and that's the only time that a macaw
Speaker 1: will let down his guard. And if you wait under
Speaker 1: the tree, you might get a macaw with your bow.
Speaker 1: And the rig they use, it's just a little barbed
Speaker 1: point that they try to hit the macaw with it
Speaker 1: and then the tip falls away from the arrow, but
Speaker 1: it's connected to the arrow shaft with a piece of string.
Speaker 1: And then McCaw get tangled up and they were able
Speaker 1: to climb up, able to climb up and get it
Speaker 1: and get their feathers. And they still produced. They still
Speaker 1: out of the cause and two cans and stuff. They
Speaker 1: produced ceremonial head dresses. Yeah, well that was you know,
Speaker 1: even a thousand years ago, and quite likely farther back
Speaker 1: than that, because there are macaus on the rock art
Speaker 1: all around us. I mean there's a rock art site
Speaker 1: UM about twelve miles away from here, uh that has
Speaker 1: a hole kind of base relief of Macau's painted on it,
Speaker 1: and it Petroglyph National Monument, which is out west of
Speaker 1: Albuquerque on the Mesa on the west side of the
Speaker 1: Real Grand River. UM. I mean, I've seen Macau's painted
Speaker 1: there too, And some of this rock art is older
Speaker 1: than the Chaco and civilization, so that indicates to me
Speaker 1: that there's been a fascination with Macau's and obviously a
Speaker 1: trade going down all the way into Central America from
Speaker 1: the southwest for longer than the Chaco and civilization existed
Speaker 1: in this part of the world. Another interesting connection between
Speaker 1: New Mexico and and maybe further south is that the
Speaker 1: first time a European described buffalo or bison, it was
Speaker 1: Cortez or one of his chroniclers ran into it in
Speaker 1: Montezuma's personal collection and his zoo, maybe five six hundred
Speaker 1: miles south of maybe more than that, south of the
Speaker 1: furthest southern point that the animal could have range. That's right,
Speaker 1: because they didn't. They clearly didn't cross the Chihuahuan Desert,
Speaker 1: which is hundreds of miles of pure desert now, and
Speaker 1: we think that bison did uh range sporadically down in
Speaker 1: the northern Chihuahua state into some of the grasslands there.
Speaker 1: So definitely in Sonora, Sonora, Chihuahua, but not as far
Speaker 1: south as so that would have had. That would have
Speaker 1: been an animal that courtez some that probably was taken
Speaker 1: as a calf down to the courts of the Estet
Speaker 1: capital and became part of the officials was gifted to
Speaker 1: him or traded to him some probably. Yeah, that's always
Speaker 1: been my thought about it. You know, there's nothing I
Speaker 1: want to I want to talk more about that stuff,
Speaker 1: but they want to ask you about you mention this
Speaker 1: one time and you haven't explained to me yet. You
Speaker 1: were saying that you're gonna tell me or could tell me.
Speaker 1: We're open to discussing why uh why people's houses are
Speaker 1: seventy two degrees. The thing I often tease my wife
Speaker 1: about is, I'm like, I've identified my wife's like general
Speaker 1: comfort range. I'm like, there's a four degree window on
Speaker 1: which you don't you that you don't take steps to
Speaker 1: like change your clothes to accommodate, And she like from
Speaker 1: sixty eight to seventy two. When it falls outside of
Speaker 1: that four degree thing, I always find she's doing something
Speaker 1: to like, she's like losing layers or gaining laryerous to
Speaker 1: keep up with it. Yeah, well, I used to pose
Speaker 1: this question to classes at the University of Montana, and
Speaker 1: I would often do it at the end of the
Speaker 1: first class meeting, sort of for further cogitation after they
Speaker 1: left the class. So I want you to think about
Speaker 1: this question. Why is it that, no matter whether you
Speaker 1: live in Tucson, Arizona, or in Fairbanks, Alaska, you set
Speaker 1: the thermostat of your house when it's when it can
Speaker 1: be controlled at seventy two degrees And we do this
Speaker 1: all around the world. So why do we do this?
Speaker 1: And I will say that I don't know that anybody
Speaker 1: ever came back on the second day of class and
Speaker 1: said I know the answer to that. But if you
Speaker 1: think about it, it's a fairly obvious one. We are
Speaker 1: native as a species to only one part of the world,
Speaker 1: and we've colonized every where else. And so in order
Speaker 1: for us, in fact, to colonize out of equatorial Africa,
Speaker 1: I mean, we had to invent sown clothing we basically
Speaker 1: had to harness fire in order to keep ourselves warm.
Speaker 1: We had to build structures to keep ourselves either warm
Speaker 1: or cool. And once we had those things, once, once
Speaker 1: we had clothing and structures, we were in fire. We
Speaker 1: were able then to spread around the world, to go
Speaker 1: into northern Europe, to go into Scandinavia, to spread into Polynesia,
Speaker 1: to end up crossing Siberia into North America. But everywhere
Speaker 1: we went, that migration hasn't been long enough. It's only
Speaker 1: taken place in the last forty five thousand years. We
Speaker 1: haven't gone anywhere long enough to actually change who we
Speaker 1: originally are as a species. And so what we've had
Speaker 1: to do is to take our original habit hat with
Speaker 1: us everywhere we've gone. And of course what it's meant
Speaker 1: is that if you live in Canada, are you live
Speaker 1: in Scandinavia, we have to consume an enormous amount of
Speaker 1: energy in order to keep ourselves warm to live in
Speaker 1: places like that, or if you live in Phoenix, Arizona,
Speaker 1: we have to consume an enormous amount of energy to
Speaker 1: cool ourselves. Because what we're doing everywhere we go, and
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to do this when we go to
Speaker 1: Mars too in another couple of decades. We've got to
Speaker 1: set the thermostat at seventies because that's the ambient temperature
Speaker 1: under which we evolved as a species, and that's why
Speaker 1: we are only comfortable in your wife's four degree range
Speaker 1: from six eight and seventy two. So we've got to
Speaker 1: recreate that everywhere we go. I read somewhere there's something
Speaker 1: about the human migrations around the world, and it was
Speaker 1: like to come at least the current on standing to
Speaker 1: come into what's now the Western Hemisphere, to come into
Speaker 1: the New World. The scholar the scholarly consensus is still
Speaker 1: that the first Americans passed across the Bearing Land Bridge,
Speaker 1: and to get to that point you needed to be
Speaker 1: able to live in the Arctic. Okay, so you're you're
Speaker 1: passing through the Arctic. People didn't get here until and
Speaker 1: the number could change through time, but it's sort of
Speaker 1: generally it's considered to be that people's first step foot
Speaker 1: here fourteen fifteen thousand years ago. That could change by
Speaker 1: a handful of years um as more sites emerge, but
Speaker 1: that the limiting factor what kept us out of here
Speaker 1: was that our our movement up into Siberia, which allowed
Speaker 1: us to come across into Alaska, was sort of stalled
Speaker 1: out until the invention of the eyed needle. Yeah, at
Speaker 1: which point, yeah, son clothing, Like once the archaeological record
Speaker 1: in Eurasia starts to turn up son close thing with
Speaker 1: the eye needle, and then people are ready to shoot
Speaker 1: up and crossover, and that that very likely was a
Speaker 1: female invention. I mean, you know, we pride ourselves as
Speaker 1: men on Okay, we invented at adols and things to
Speaker 1: be able to hunt more effectively, but the the eyde
Speaker 1: needle was probably an invention of women sitting there working
Speaker 1: hides and figuring out how to attach them one to
Speaker 1: the other and make an effect fitted clothing. Because what
Speaker 1: you need is clothing that's going to fit tightly enough
Speaker 1: around you that it maintains your body heat. And so
Speaker 1: we had to create sown clothing before we could ever
Speaker 1: basically not not even just live in these northern latitudes
Speaker 1: are extremely for southerly latitudes in the Southern hemisphere, but
Speaker 1: even to travel through them, because we suffered from frostbite
Speaker 1: so easily. I mean, we're basically semi equatorial apes and
Speaker 1: we have a hard time functioning in these really cold situations.
Speaker 1: I was just reading. I'm reading a book about d
Speaker 1: extinctions and it's written by a geneticist. It's about the
Speaker 1: possibility of like de extinction bringing back through people. Hear
Speaker 1: the word cloning is just like not at all like
Speaker 1: what they would do to to to recreate a passenger
Speaker 1: pigeon or recreate a mammoth is not at all has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with ship you saw on Jurassic Park.
Speaker 1: It's it's way more nuanced than complex. But Um, in it,
Speaker 1: she was explaining that the authors explaining that the wooly
Speaker 1: mammoth is about as far removed from the Asian elephant
Speaker 1: as we are from Chimp's meaning about we're about like
Speaker 1: genetically about nine eight percent the same, but there's still
Speaker 1: two percent pretty major man, Yeah, t percent at you
Speaker 1: Mozart and Einstein. Yeah, so you know an everything, And
Speaker 1: this is gonna lead to a question I want to
Speaker 1: ask you about. But Um, when I read about the
Speaker 1: people in the New World, like I've read the books
Speaker 1: that the anthropologist, the paleo anthropologist David Meltzer and and
Speaker 1: David Meltzer talks about that passageway that humans when humans
Speaker 1: went through the Arctic and passed through Siberian into Alaska first,
Speaker 1: Like important to realize that they weren't like thinking like, hey,
Speaker 1: let's go to America. There was no there was no
Speaker 1: like end the goal. They weren't like you, weren't like
Speaker 1: you were kind of you were going somewhere on a
Speaker 1: maybe a daily basis, but there was no like, hey,
Speaker 1: let's go colonize, like on the burying what's not the
Speaker 1: bearing what we think of when we look at like
Speaker 1: Burringia or what's not the burying land bridge, It's reasonable
Speaker 1: to think that generations might have been born and died
Speaker 1: on that land chunk with no concept of them being
Speaker 1: coming from somewhere and going somewhere. I mean, for one thing,
Speaker 1: it's six hundred miles wide. I mean we call it
Speaker 1: a bridge, and so that makes you think of it
Speaker 1: as this this narrow passageway from one continent to another.
Speaker 1: But at the time when h the the oceans were
Speaker 1: at their lowest, ebb Beringia was six d miles wide.
Speaker 1: So I mean it was you know, as wide as
Speaker 1: present day Texas. You wouldn't be crossing through Austin and
Speaker 1: San Antonio and think that Texarkana and El Paso were
Speaker 1: the edges of a bridge. I mean, I think probably
Speaker 1: you're exactly right. There would have been whole generations of
Speaker 1: people who would have just thought of that as a homeland.
Speaker 1: But I think what would have motivated them to go
Speaker 1: in the direction that carried them into North America is
Speaker 1: that I mean, I think this is one of the
Speaker 1: reasons we left Africa and began moving around the world,
Speaker 1: is that we were endlessly looking for places that other
Speaker 1: people hadn't been yet, because that meant the resources were rich,
Speaker 1: the animals were stupid, they hadn't been hunted yet, and
Speaker 1: so what you're looking for is a place where, wow,
Speaker 1: I haven't seen any other human camps for the last
Speaker 1: several days I have, I don't see smoke from campfires
Speaker 1: up ahead, And so you go in the direction where
Speaker 1: there appears to be an absence of prior human activity,
Speaker 1: and that's what naturally led them finally into North America.
Speaker 1: That that's kind of what I wanted to get out
Speaker 1: to ask you about is so of your feelings on that,
Speaker 1: because you just can't discount the idea that some point
Speaker 1: there was like some element of curiosity because population levels
Speaker 1: like like, for instance, there's this there's this idea that
Speaker 1: the reason that Native Americans were so susceptible to European
Speaker 1: diseases when when when Europeans arrived much later, it was
Speaker 1: because they had passed through this like big disease free
Speaker 1: corridor where you didn't have like in the Arctic, it
Speaker 1: was cold enough and it wasn't densely populated, so communicable diseases.
Speaker 1: Like people lost contact with communicable diseases and and lost
Speaker 1: their ability to tolerate them. So you can't be like, oh,
Speaker 1: like the Arctic was so filled up with people that
Speaker 1: there was warfare, right, It probably wasn't like that. It's
Speaker 1: probably just people moving. I think it was people moving.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know around like bacall And and uh,
Speaker 1: Russia there did seem to be where we think some
Speaker 1: of the Siberian populations that ended up in North America
Speaker 1: and became the ancestors of Native people. That I mean,
Speaker 1: there is some evidence of uh, you know, possible conflict
Speaker 1: that might have sent some groups on the move, but
Speaker 1: like like like over resources, probably over resources. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that's probably the ultimate motivation for these migrations
Speaker 1: that carried us around the world, is that, as I said,
Speaker 1: a few minutes ago. I think human populations were sort
Speaker 1: of endlessly looking for places where the resources were going
Speaker 1: to be available solely to them and they weren't going
Speaker 1: to have to compete with other people for them, and
Speaker 1: so that would have that would have drawn people in
Speaker 1: these grand migrations northward, for example, out of Africa, through Turkey,
Speaker 1: around the Black Sea, all the way up into northern Europe.
Speaker 1: Originally because I mean anatomically modern humans us Holmo sapiens,
Speaker 1: we realized when we got there, the first people who
Speaker 1: arrived there found only Neanderthals. There, only these you know,
Speaker 1: I mean related hominins, but at least not us. And
Speaker 1: I think that's what fueled the migration into North America too.
Speaker 1: I will say, though, I mean, I'm I'm completely with
Speaker 1: you on this impulse that we have to see what's
Speaker 1: down the river and around the next mountain range. And
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's why, you know, we're that
Speaker 1: kind of species. We've been doing this kind of spread
Speaker 1: out of our homeland and around the planet for so long.
Speaker 1: I mean, and not just our species, but prior hominant
Speaker 1: species like Neanderthals have done it, that it's part of
Speaker 1: our genetic legacy to to go and see what's there.
Speaker 1: I think that's why we we're gonna end up going
Speaker 1: to Mars uh and probably in other places in the
Speaker 1: Solar System as well. But I think that's why everybody
Speaker 1: is so excited about Mars at the moment. Is I mean,
Speaker 1: this is just one of those genetic pulls that we've
Speaker 1: had as a species, and I think it's been It's
Speaker 1: a tribute to us in a lot of ways. It's
Speaker 1: one of them, maybe the most noble things that we
Speaker 1: have about us. It's that we are curious enough that
Speaker 1: we want to go see what it's like somewhere else,
Speaker 1: even though we know, in the case of Mars, we're
Speaker 1: gonna have to wear helmets and suits and we've got
Speaker 1: to live inside polyurethane structures and you know, but I
Speaker 1: think people crossing uh Siberia and the the Baryngia and
Speaker 1: into North America said, Okay, we're gonna have to bundle
Speaker 1: up like you've never worn clothing before, and we've got
Speaker 1: to invent tight fitted clothing with you know, with eyed needles. Um.
Speaker 1: But if we need the technology to enable us to
Speaker 1: go there, damn it, we're gonna invent it because this
Speaker 1: is who we are. To me. It's one of our
Speaker 1: great tributes, our attributes as a species. The guy that
Speaker 1: I'm interested in his story get is the guy that's
Speaker 1: coming down the coastline. Like people used to be big
Speaker 1: on this idea that there was the ice free corridor
Speaker 1: that would have dumped the like the first the first
Speaker 1: Americans to hit what is now the Lower forty eight.
Speaker 1: There used to be this idea and made you can
Speaker 1: speak to other this idea is dead dead or kind
Speaker 1: of dead? Is uh? That they would have hit that
Speaker 1: they would have emerged on the Great Plains south of Edmonton,
Speaker 1: Alberta through what this idea that there's this ice free
Speaker 1: corridor where everything to the east was glaciated and the
Speaker 1: coastline was glaciated and the Rockies were glaciated, but you
Speaker 1: had this this dry chunk of land that would have
Speaker 1: just eventually funneled human traffic down with this little belt
Speaker 1: and spilled them out onto the primo hunting grounds of
Speaker 1: the Lower forty eight and from their reeked havoc on
Speaker 1: willie mammoths and mask dons. And now it seems that
Speaker 1: there's a lot more thinking or or that this a
Speaker 1: more fashionable idea. The people were coming down the coasts
Speaker 1: and probably had basic boat technology. But I'm interested in
Speaker 1: the feller and there was a first like like if
Speaker 1: you had a time machine you could go see if
Speaker 1: you're standing in any place, any place, and you're standing
Speaker 1: in California on the beach, there's a time you could
Speaker 1: have gone back in time and seeing the first dude
Speaker 1: or more likely a family group coming down the shore
Speaker 1: right and would have happened what happened. And I'm interesting
Speaker 1: the guy coming down the shore that hits like a
Speaker 1: calving glacier. So here he is never been here before.
Speaker 1: He's on this coastline and all he can see ahead
Speaker 1: of him is here's an ice field, alright, which still
Speaker 1: they still exist to day around you know, southeast Alaska,
Speaker 1: and there's a calving glacier. And he's like, kids, um,
Speaker 1: here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna trust that this ends,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna battle out and around and see what's
Speaker 1: on the other side. Because that was a leap and
Speaker 1: ship like that had to been happening. I think that's
Speaker 1: probably in a way, it's that's the you know, and
Speaker 1: and and Christian and Jewish theology. That's the Adam myth.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's it's the first man, the first woman
Speaker 1: to see the world. And you know, in that myth,
Speaker 1: Adam gets to name all the animals even and so
Speaker 1: you can extrapolate, you know, from the Bible and the
Speaker 1: Book of Genesis to your you know, captain of his
Speaker 1: boat with his family going around this calving glacier and
Speaker 1: hoping there's something on the other side, and landing on
Speaker 1: the other side and finding some land and seeing animals
Speaker 1: that they've never seen before, and getting to name the
Speaker 1: animals and so like be like hunting Yellowstone Park. That's right,
Speaker 1: that's with no park rangers, with no park rangers, and
Speaker 1: and all these new beasts. Because I mean that's one
Speaker 1: of the things that as we went went around the
Speaker 1: world we confronted not everything was the same. I mean,
Speaker 1: we were seeing this this grand diversity of life on
Speaker 1: a planet that was billions of years old, where life
Speaker 1: had evolved as a result of shifting uh and continents
Speaker 1: breaking apart, so that we ended up with everywhere you
Speaker 1: went there were there was there were different life forms.
Speaker 1: You saw birds that you had never seen before, you
Speaker 1: saw animals you had never seen before, And I think
Speaker 1: that's probably one of the things, Especially people who were
Speaker 1: as closely tuned to nature and observing nature as these
Speaker 1: folks would have been because they lived off the natural world,
Speaker 1: I think that would have been an ultimate fascination to
Speaker 1: land on the other side of a Calvin glacier and
Speaker 1: see a whole host of creatures you had never seen before. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like with the first guy idea, after people had after
Speaker 1: people had passed through the Arctic and started coming south,
Speaker 1: they were probably hundreds of generations removed from snakes. Alaska
Speaker 1: has no snakes, so you can imagine that there was there. Again,
Speaker 1: there was like a guy. That's the thing I always
Speaker 1: returned to, is you get like you get when you
Speaker 1: think about history, you always think of it becomes faceless, right,
Speaker 1: But there was like a person who had no idea
Speaker 1: that a rattlesnake, right was like bad ship. And he
Speaker 1: would have had to have have been like the guy who
Speaker 1: made it and to the point where there is one
Speaker 1: and saw that first one. Yeah, that's like what you're
Speaker 1: and and there was no thing. There's no cultural No,
Speaker 1: they did have cultural awareness, but their cultural awareness is
Speaker 1: probably more confined to like a stead of experiences by
Speaker 1: just a handful of past generations like you weren't like
Speaker 1: always reading about wildlife on other continents now in some
Speaker 1: like real time way. Yeah, and I think that would
Speaker 1: have been tremendously exciting. I mean, it excites me to
Speaker 1: think about it too. Step into a brand new world.
Speaker 1: I mean, and I I've read enough. For example, you know,
Speaker 1: just from in a sort of a minor key version
Speaker 1: of this, people passing in the nineteenth century from the
Speaker 1: woodlands of the east onto the Great Plains and encountering
Speaker 1: for the first time pronghorn antelope, for example, or coyotes,
Speaker 1: or huge herds of bison. They may have seen bison
Speaker 1: in small numbers in the woodlands in eighteen hundred, but
Speaker 1: getting two hundred miles farther west out of the grasslands
Speaker 1: and seeing herds that spread to the limits of the horizon.
Speaker 1: I mean. And and those people, of course left us
Speaker 1: a written account, and so you can read how exciting
Speaker 1: they found that. I mean, you know, John James Ottobon,
Speaker 1: who spent his entire life studying nature, hunting animals, shooting birds,
Speaker 1: painting birds, gets to a new setting on the Missouri
Speaker 1: River on the Great Plains in eighteen forty three, and
Speaker 1: I mean, I've always loved this passage. He wrote his
Speaker 1: wife that summer about all these animals he was seeing
Speaker 1: that he had never seen before, and finally close one
Speaker 1: of his letters with the line, I've got to stop right.
Speaker 1: I'm too excited to write anymore. I can't say anything else,
Speaker 1: I mean, And so there was that excitement is palpable
Speaker 1: through the written word of what people left us, you know,
Speaker 1: in the last hundred and fifty or two hundred years.
Speaker 1: So it must have been the same thing when someone
Speaker 1: emerged into North America and saw, you know, giant herds
Speaker 1: of camels for the first time, or I mean, they
Speaker 1: would have seen wild horses, no doubt plies the seen
Speaker 1: horses in Baryngia, and they would have seen mammoths and
Speaker 1: mastodons in in Baryngia, but they probably wouldn't have seen
Speaker 1: giant ground sloughs or hyenas or camels. And so they
Speaker 1: emerged into settings where they they saw creatures like that
Speaker 1: must have been exciting as hell. Some people have I
Speaker 1: think a hard time with the camel thing like that.
Speaker 1: We have like camelids on the great plants, but it's
Speaker 1: really like you kind of take for game like the
Speaker 1: in the Andies that you have llamas, alpacas, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then something and then those are like domestic versions of
Speaker 1: some wild things. But yeah, so when you think about that,
Speaker 1: it's like not as surprising that we did have a
Speaker 1: number of camel species on the Great Plants and du
Speaker 1: hunting for him and dudes were hunting them. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: had one humped camels and not the double humped camels
Speaker 1: of of Africa. But the camels from South America had
Speaker 1: migrated u up the the Andes chain, crossed into North
Speaker 1: America and basically spread across the plains as far probably
Speaker 1: as the Canadian border, at least Montana. I mean, they
Speaker 1: were animals that could exist at fairly high latitudes in
Speaker 1: the Andes and so they could take fairly cold weather.
Speaker 1: So coming out of I mean, if these early UH inhabitants,
Speaker 1: these early arrivals in North America either came from the
Speaker 1: coast in land or emerged from an ice free corridor.
Speaker 1: And I don't think the ice free quarter is totally dead.
Speaker 1: I think they're dead now. I don't think it's dead.
Speaker 1: I think there are plenty of people who still believe
Speaker 1: that's the case, but I think they would have encountered
Speaker 1: as soon as they emerged from that quarter a suite
Speaker 1: of animals that they had never seen before. And I
Speaker 1: love the description I read fairly recently about um who
Speaker 1: these people might have been. I mean, we don't know,
Speaker 1: for example, if if the dates go back to fifteen
Speaker 1: sixteen thousand years, I mean we we haven't really assigned
Speaker 1: a name to maybe the first three or four thousand
Speaker 1: years of arrivals, because they didn't seem to leave a
Speaker 1: technology like the later Clovis people lad. But the Closed
Speaker 1: people left us thirteen thousand years ago and down to
Speaker 1: about eleven thousand years ago. I mean, they left us
Speaker 1: a technology that seems to make it apparent that uh.
Speaker 1: In the words of a recent scholar who described them,
Speaker 1: he described them as nor Are in hemisphere wild people,
Speaker 1: kind of like Vikings, but coming out of Siberia. And
Speaker 1: these were people who would who it was probably a
Speaker 1: very male dominated society, maybe dominated by warriors or hunters,
Speaker 1: and they were people who would have thrown themselves, uh
Speaker 1: into this new setting. And you know, if Paul Martin
Speaker 1: is right with his plies to scene the Bloods Creek hypothesis,
Speaker 1: Craig hypothesis. I mean, it would have only taken them
Speaker 1: three or four hundred years to go all the way
Speaker 1: from the vicinity of Edmonton down to the tip of
Speaker 1: South America to Tyral del Fuego and wipe out millions
Speaker 1: of animals along the way. That's the thing that's so
Speaker 1: puzzling about. There's two that you just brought up that
Speaker 1: that maybe you can speak to a little bit. Is
Speaker 1: uh One the way Clovis, the Clovis culture, they have
Speaker 1: this like diagnostic spear point. Okay, so when you when
Speaker 1: you excavate an old site and you find this spear point,
Speaker 1: the spear point is so peculiar. It's called a fluted
Speaker 1: spear point, where they would knock a channel out of
Speaker 1: each face of the projectile point. Um, it's it's so
Speaker 1: peculiar that it's regarded as diagnostic. And there are many
Speaker 1: projectile points there this way where people made it for
Speaker 1: a long time. They made it the same way every time,
Speaker 1: and then they moved on and started making different points
Speaker 1: that they're probably using in different ways and stopped making
Speaker 1: them that way. So when you find a clothe what
Speaker 1: what how you know a Clovis site, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like what did their spear point technology look like? Whoever
Speaker 1: arrived from There's nothing like trying to think out how
Speaker 1: to put this. There's nothing like the Clovis technology in Asia.
Speaker 1: So people think that it either is an American invention,
Speaker 1: that the people that first came down and colonized the
Speaker 1: New World, colonize what we now think of as a
Speaker 1: Lower forty eight and elsewhere, that they sort of coalesced
Speaker 1: into or developed into the Clovis culture and developed this
Speaker 1: projectile point suitable to the type of hunting they found here,
Speaker 1: or like an anthropological conspiracy theory is that the paleolithic
Speaker 1: people of Europe who quinn who Some whould argue it's coincidence,
Speaker 1: someone would argue it's not coincidence, who had a point
Speaker 1: kind of like the Clovis point much earlier, thirty forty
Speaker 1: years ago. They were making a point and hunting the
Speaker 1: same suite of mega fauna in Europe with a projectile
Speaker 1: point that's kind of similar. So there's this idea that
Speaker 1: these fellers uh hopped in some skin boats and came over.
Speaker 1: It's called I think it's called the salutary and hypothesis
Speaker 1: or the salute connection came over, showed the people here,
Speaker 1: what's up. The Europeans came, showed the people here, what's up?
Speaker 1: How to do this deal? They died out, and then
Speaker 1: what we regard as Native Americans came down afterward or
Speaker 1: had picked up their tricks of the trade from these
Speaker 1: European seafarers. What do you is that? What do you
Speaker 1: think of that? I mean, like, based on your career
Speaker 1: long exposure to this stuff, well, I mean it is
Speaker 1: in a way. I mean, it's a it's kind of
Speaker 1: a conspiracy theory, but it's a conspiracy theory that actually
Speaker 1: got a national geographic and so you've got to have
Speaker 1: some bona fides, some credentials to to make it into
Speaker 1: a magazine of that ilk um you know. I I
Speaker 1: some people call it racist. Well, I mean if you
Speaker 1: make the argument that, you know, it's the Europeans who
Speaker 1: kind of invent everything important and the Native people just
Speaker 1: glom onto the critical technological elements, then it does have
Speaker 1: sort of overtones of uh at least a kind of
Speaker 1: an ethnocentrism um word. Yeah, you know, so I I
Speaker 1: realized that we've not yet found a kind of a
Speaker 1: precursor to Clovish technology in Siberia, and frankly, I wonder
Speaker 1: if that's just because you know, there hasn't been great
Speaker 1: archaeology done yet in Siberia and that we're gonna find it. Um.
Speaker 1: I tend to think myself that this is somewhat coincidental
Speaker 1: in part because of the difference in time frames. The
Speaker 1: salutary In point, as you mentioned, is like a thirty
Speaker 1: thousand year old point. Uh. It's one of the points
Speaker 1: that you know, anatomically modern humans had in Europe within
Speaker 1: ten thousand years or fifteen thousand years of coming out
Speaker 1: of Africa. Uh. And the Clovis point, of course, occurs
Speaker 1: in time almost twenty thousand years later. So it's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that that the time frame connections make
Speaker 1: me think it would be hard to to come up
Speaker 1: with the linkage, although you know you could. I suppose
Speaker 1: it's in the ram of possibility to argue that some Clovis,
Speaker 1: that maybe these Europeans got into North America left some sites,
Speaker 1: and people who became Clovis found those sites and attempted
Speaker 1: to emulate this kind of technology and did so very successfully.
Speaker 1: I don't know right now what the explanation for this
Speaker 1: particular gular mystery is. But one of the things I
Speaker 1: really love about science in all its forms is that
Speaker 1: we endlessly have mysteries. And you know the mysteries. I mean,
Speaker 1: in my career, Uh, quite a number of mysteries have
Speaker 1: been solved, but there are plenty of them out there
Speaker 1: that and all the time I've been doing this, we
Speaker 1: never have figured out what the answer is. And so
Speaker 1: that's kind of the great thing about all this is
Speaker 1: that there are things still to be resolved in the future. Uh,
Speaker 1: that other generations, uh maybe can come up with a
Speaker 1: really fine explanation for this is one that I have
Speaker 1: to say, you know, I can't come up with a
Speaker 1: plausible explanation for why the Salutary and culture and Point,
Speaker 1: which is a big game hunting culture, resembles the Clovis
Speaker 1: culture of twenty thousand years later in terms of some
Speaker 1: not just superficial but fairly close similarities of the technology. Uh.
Speaker 1: The one thing I will say about the two groups
Speaker 1: is that even though they're separated in time by almost
Speaker 1: twenty thousand years, they kind of seem to have the
Speaker 1: same effect on the fauna of the places they inhabit.
Speaker 1: I mean, it looks to me as if we finally
Speaker 1: invented agriculture in Europe because essentially people ultimately killed off
Speaker 1: all the major animals. And I think at a chronology
Speaker 1: that occurs at a later point in time in North America,
Speaker 1: because we entered we humans entered North America later in time.
Speaker 1: The same pattern follows. The big animals once our presence
Speaker 1: is fully established, uh in a location are going to
Speaker 1: go away. They disappear. And we began, in what's called
Speaker 1: the archaic phase, to sort of spread into too smaller
Speaker 1: micro habitats and hunt smaller animals like deer and elk
Speaker 1: and so forth. But eventually everywhere we go we're kind
Speaker 1: of forced in the direction ultimately of adopting agriculture. Because
Speaker 1: we tend to over hunt animals, we tend to ultimately
Speaker 1: take them out, so it's simply not as easy to
Speaker 1: live as a hunter anymore. And uh, we end up
Speaker 1: becoming farmers. You know. I want to get back that
Speaker 1: and and press you on a part of that, but uh,
Speaker 1: before I don't want to bring out like you're talking about,
Speaker 1: the mysteries is kind of the greatest mystery to me
Speaker 1: about the peopling of the New World, probably the greatest
Speaker 1: mystery to everyone is that we have we've most people
Speaker 1: have settled on this idea of the Bearing Land Bridge
Speaker 1: as the entry point. But the oldest rock solid site
Speaker 1: we have, Okay, the oldest site that like archaeologists and
Speaker 1: anthropologists just universe really agree on as being the oldest
Speaker 1: human settlement site in the New World is in Patagonia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is. And how much ship is missing between right,
Speaker 1: like it really, you know, And if you talk to
Speaker 1: anthro apologies about making more fines, they're not always like
Speaker 1: super optimistic about that we're gonna make more fines because
Speaker 1: there's been so much just like we've done so much
Speaker 1: road building and so much excavating and stuff that like
Speaker 1: that like the stuff that's gonna get found has maybe
Speaker 1: kind of been found, you know, you don't you don't
Speaker 1: feel like people are like in the Arctic, like in
Speaker 1: Siberia right now, there's a lot of enthusiasm about what's
Speaker 1: the next thing that's gonna thaw out of the perma frost,
Speaker 1: you know, like we don't even know, like mysteries are
Speaker 1: going to continue to like we're gonna be excited about
Speaker 1: what's to come, but most people are like not real
Speaker 1: excited about the prospect of finding really good intact iron
Speaker 1: ad paleo sites, but the oldest one we have is
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands of miles from the point of entry.
Speaker 1: So between Baryngia in Chili, it's like, where were those
Speaker 1: people hanging out? Well, I think that that site in Patagonia,
Speaker 1: which you know, the latest dates I've read for it, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, seemed to place it between fourteen and sixteen
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, that it very likely is good evidence
Speaker 1: that people were working their way down the coastlines. And
Speaker 1: I think the reason we don't have intervening sites along
Speaker 1: the coastlines is that as a result of the end
Speaker 1: of the Wisconsin ice Age and the rise of the oceans,
Speaker 1: many of those camp sites have ended up off shore
Speaker 1: and buried probably under two hundred feet of water. And
Speaker 1: so what we get then is an inland site in Chile.
Speaker 1: But they're probably were campsites, fairly regular campsites along the
Speaker 1: coast leading down to that that particular point, and we've
Speaker 1: just we've lost them as a result of the rise
Speaker 1: of the seas. A detail I like about that site,
Speaker 1: as they seem to have had tent steaks, tethering, some
Speaker 1: sort of tent structure with a strip of mastodon hyde,
Speaker 1: which is a nice detail. No, it's wonderful in it
Speaker 1: um but so so again what you jump in? What
Speaker 1: you gotta do? Why is it? Like you mentioned that
Speaker 1: we could have hunter gatherer cultures that went ten thousand
Speaker 1: years without over hunting, Like, what is it to happen?
Speaker 1: Like if we accept that some species were driven to
Speaker 1: extinction with the arrival of humans, right, and we like
Speaker 1: and as debatable, but let's just say that that was
Speaker 1: like it almost certainly was a contributing cause, right that
Speaker 1: that a lot of these big animals, mammoth masodonds, like
Speaker 1: their demise is contemporary at least contemporaneous with the arrival
Speaker 1: of people, suspiciously so suspiciously. So but then what why
Speaker 1: did how did we then go ten thousand years about
Speaker 1: losing a continuous stream of creatures? Well, I think you know,
Speaker 1: so again, this is kind of the plasto stine extinctions
Speaker 1: are are one of our big mysteries. And there are
Speaker 1: a big mystery in part because this is our most
Speaker 1: profound ecological disturbance since humans arrived in North America. I mean,
Speaker 1: we talk all the time these days about the effect
Speaker 1: that modern society has on wildlife on the habitat destruction.
Speaker 1: But I mean we lost thirty two genera of large
Speaker 1: animals in the plies to sine. I mean charismatic big species,
Speaker 1: Africa type analog animals, and hundreds of smaller ones. And
Speaker 1: so it was a kind of a sea change for
Speaker 1: North America. And suspiciously we arrived at just the time
Speaker 1: that this was happening, we humans did. But the other
Speaker 1: thing that happened, of course, is that this was the
Speaker 1: end of the Wisconsin ice Age, and so the climate
Speaker 1: was changing. And that's one of the great debates is
Speaker 1: whether or not climate was the primary cause, whether or
Speaker 1: not humans entering a landscape that had humans had not
Speaker 1: evolved in, had not been in before, where the animals
Speaker 1: had not evolved any kind of ability to resist us
Speaker 1: as hunters. I mean, that kind of thing is a
Speaker 1: debate that has been going on now for more than
Speaker 1: a century, and it's very likely that nobody is ever
Speaker 1: going to definitively resolve it. Some people argue that, okay,
Speaker 1: it's partly climate, and it's partly the human fluence. The
Speaker 1: best example we've got for the human influence is probably
Speaker 1: with the mammoths um Paul Martin and his his great
Speaker 1: book the you know, really the last book he wrote,
Speaker 1: and and the book that if people want to read
Speaker 1: about this, I think I would encourage them to read,
Speaker 1: is called The Twilight of the Mammoths. And Martin was
Speaker 1: the major advocate of Plistocene overkill, but he did concede
Speaker 1: that the best evidence we have is for this single species.
Speaker 1: For some species, we don't have very much evidence of
Speaker 1: human overkill at all because it doesn't turn up. It
Speaker 1: doesn't turn up in campsites, it doesn't turn up at
Speaker 1: camp sites. We don't find archaeological sites where people were
Speaker 1: processing horses, for example, and horses during the Plistocene seemed
Speaker 1: to have comprised in some places, like twenty of the
Speaker 1: biomass of large animals. They became extinct, and yet we've
Speaker 1: barely found any kind of archaeological sites at all that
Speaker 1: indicate that, in contrast to the Solutrean people in Europe
Speaker 1: who were run them over cliffs, we were running over
Speaker 1: cliffs and corralling them. Mostly what they were doing was
Speaker 1: corralling them and killing them, and they nearly wiped out
Speaker 1: Europe's horses. In fact, some people believed that it was
Speaker 1: only the domestication of the last few horses that enabled
Speaker 1: Europe's horses to survive extinction. But unlike those solutary and
Speaker 1: hunters in Europe, I mean, we, the North American hunters,
Speaker 1: don't seem to have produced the kind of archaeological sites
Speaker 1: that show, at least so far, a large scale destruction
Speaker 1: of horses. And yet horses became extinct here. So I mean,
Speaker 1: we're still puzzling this out as to exactly what happened.
Speaker 1: But we somehow lost all these animals. Probably humans were
Speaker 1: involved in some significant way for at least some of them,
Speaker 1: and once they were gone, what we essentially had to
Speaker 1: do was to reinvent ourselves. Two, to make the step
Speaker 1: from being Paleolithic big game hunters to the step of
Speaker 1: beginning to hunt smaller animals, beginning to rely more on
Speaker 1: gathering fruits and food stuffs from the plant world, and
Speaker 1: sort of instead of doing probably what the Clovis and
Speaker 1: fulsome people did was, which was to migrate widely across
Speaker 1: the landscape in search of animal herds, we had to
Speaker 1: start settling down into local habitats and I think and
Speaker 1: learning probably learning plant life too. That's exactly. The reason
Speaker 1: I think, to answer the question you pose to sort
Speaker 1: of launch this, why we don't just keep causing extinctions
Speaker 1: is because once we settle down and start living locally,
Speaker 1: we start learning landscapes at a more intimate level. And
Speaker 1: what we begin to learn is the the classic law
Speaker 1: of a bology, Lee Bigg's law, which argues that you
Speaker 1: have to to base your population for sheer survival on
Speaker 1: the worst years that you experience in your landscape rather
Speaker 1: than the best years. If you calibrate your population based
Speaker 1: on the best years, then when the worst years come along,
Speaker 1: you're going to be devastated. And so these archaic people
Speaker 1: who survive for seven or eight thousand years without wiping
Speaker 1: animals out and with with a very effective functioning kind
Speaker 1: of economy seem to do it because they become consciously
Speaker 1: aware of what a local habitat is capable of providing.
Speaker 1: Not that they don't trade with people from other settings,
Speaker 1: but they understand what it's like to live locally, and
Speaker 1: that gives them these kind of packets of cultural information
Speaker 1: about what the local habitat is capable of producing and
Speaker 1: what the limits are in both directions, the best years
Speaker 1: and the good years and what they seem to have done, frankly,
Speaker 1: was to have deliberately control their populations, mostly by engaging
Speaker 1: and infanticide, by killing excess babies when they were born,
Speaker 1: a kind of a form of abortion really kind of
Speaker 1: a draconian form of abortion that enabled them to keep
Speaker 1: their populations small enough that they weren't wiped out whenever
Speaker 1: bad years or a sequence of bad years came along.
Speaker 1: But starvation was still like certainly a factor in these societies. Oh,
Speaker 1: I think people certainly suffered from starvation. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think we've gotten genetic evidence today of people with you know,
Speaker 1: some of the groups in the Southwest. Native people in
Speaker 1: the Southwest have what's called starvation gene, where basically, uh,
Speaker 1: in contemporary times eating modern foods, they tend to become
Speaker 1: quite a beast because they had been in their past.
Speaker 1: Their populations selected for a type, a kind of a
Speaker 1: genetic type that was capable of storing food to enable
Speaker 1: them to get past these starving and lane times. And today,
Speaker 1: when they've got abundant food, they tend to if they're
Speaker 1: not careful, they become pretty OBEs. You know, this brings
Speaker 1: us something We touched on this a little bit before,
Speaker 1: But I'd like you to to to explain it more
Speaker 1: because that balance you arguing one of your and one
Speaker 1: of your papers, and the paper has been cited many, many,
Speaker 1: many times. You are like that that balance the people achieved,
Speaker 1: that that ten thousand year balance the people achieved between
Speaker 1: um humans and animals that they were hunting, was disturbed
Speaker 1: or interrupted by the introduction of the horse. Yeah, maybe unsustainably.
Speaker 1: So can you sketch that out for people? Yeah? I think, Uh,
Speaker 1: And this is what I argue in this long dure
Speaker 1: a story of of Native people in North America. I
Speaker 1: think the coming of Europeans bringing with them I mean,
Speaker 1: and I think it's a suite of things. I think
Speaker 1: it's it's not just the horse. I think it's the
Speaker 1: arrival of the market economy, which, as the Europeans introduce it,
Speaker 1: it essentially compels people who had been who had sort
Speaker 1: of lived off a diversity of resources in a landscape
Speaker 1: to specialize in the resources Let's say bison robes that
Speaker 1: the market economy wanted. The market economy might not have
Speaker 1: been interested in all the things they produced. It was
Speaker 1: interested in one or two things. And the market economy,
Speaker 1: as Europeans introduced it into North America five years ago,
Speaker 1: was very interested in the skins of animals, and so
Speaker 1: it tended to as European traders approached native people, they
Speaker 1: brought with them not only a desire to have these
Speaker 1: native people specialized in a particular product out of their
Speaker 1: resource base, but the Europeans also brought with them the
Speaker 1: goods of the industrial revolution, because Europe had gone through
Speaker 1: this progression of reaching a point where you couldn't live
Speaker 1: by hunting animals alone, and therefore having to become hunter
Speaker 1: gatherers and then eventually farmers. Europe, having been occupied by
Speaker 1: humans out of Africa forty five thousand years ago, had
Speaker 1: reached that sequence earlier in time than people in the
Speaker 1: America's had, having been occupied by a migration out of
Speaker 1: Africa only fifteen thousand year yars ago, And so the
Speaker 1: whole chronology of Europeans had carried their pattern through these
Speaker 1: various kinds of economies farther along to the point where
Speaker 1: they had begun to produce an industrial revolution metal goods.
Speaker 1: They produced iron, for example, and native people's all over
Speaker 1: the world who had not yet reached the iron age
Speaker 1: when they were first exposed to iron implements, knives, hatchets, axes, metal,
Speaker 1: arrow points, spear points. They were absolutely captivated by those goods.
Speaker 1: I mean. One of those stories I've often told is
Speaker 1: how when Captain Cook appeared off the coast of the
Speaker 1: island of Kawaii in the Hawaiian Islands in the seventeen eighties,
Speaker 1: the Natives who had been ex supposed to nails as
Speaker 1: a result of driftwood coming ashore. When they went out
Speaker 1: to meet cooked ships, they clamored aboard, and Cook's men
Speaker 1: reported that the Polynesians immediately started pulling the nails out
Speaker 1: of every plank on the ships, and they finally had
Speaker 1: to had to push them overboard and make them go
Speaker 1: back ashore because they were afraid they were gonna dismantle
Speaker 1: the damn vessels they were so eager to get metal.
Speaker 1: Another story I told I think I told this to
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan when I did the podcast with him, is
Speaker 1: about uh. I was once a an editor for a
Speaker 1: journal called ethno History, and we received a manuscript that
Speaker 1: was basically the editor journal of an early trader who
Speaker 1: was in the Amazonian basin. And this fellow had said
Speaker 1: he that he had replaced a trader who had been
Speaker 1: working among the native people for two or three decades,
Speaker 1: and when he asked the question of his predecessor, how
Speaker 1: do I get people who have never been exposed to
Speaker 1: the European trade to trade with us? This guy said,
Speaker 1: it's as simple as anything. You just go into an
Speaker 1: area where Europeans haven't been before and tie an axe
Speaker 1: to a tree, and a month later go back. And
Speaker 1: he wrote in his journal that he did this several times,
Speaker 1: and when he would go back, there would be throngs
Speaker 1: of people gathered around, hoping for another example of this
Speaker 1: kind of miraculous metal that they had found hanging from
Speaker 1: a tree. It's in some way, it's it's still happening
Speaker 1: right now though, because if you read about groups first
Speaker 1: contact groups coming out of the jungle in Peru, in Brazil,
Speaker 1: it's like oftentimes they're they're they're coming out to the
Speaker 1: rivers machetes and pots. Yes, that's it, it's metalware, it's metal. Well,
Speaker 1: I agree that stuff is nice. It's nice, and so
Speaker 1: I mean here in in the southwest, among these pueblo
Speaker 1: and people who made these gorgeous pots, I mean, and
Speaker 1: they made them hundreds of years before the Spaniards ever
Speaker 1: arrived here, and of course now sell them. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've got pots from the various pueblos all over the
Speaker 1: house here. They sell them in Santa fe Uh to
Speaker 1: people who want um to take home some beautiful object
Speaker 1: from the cultures of the Southwest. But when the Spaniards
Speaker 1: arrived with metal, these Pueblo people almost completely lost the art,
Speaker 1: and some of them at least of making pots, because hell,
Speaker 1: here's a metal pan. I don't really need a pot anymore.
Speaker 1: Here is an object made of metal that these Europeans
Speaker 1: will trade to me, and I don't have to engage
Speaker 1: in the painstaking work of making a ceramic pot. I mean,
Speaker 1: I was just telling the story to a group of
Speaker 1: people a few days ago about how uh Adolph Bandalier,
Speaker 1: the archaeologists who came out to what is now a
Speaker 1: Bandalia National Monument in the eighteen eighties, hired Indians to
Speaker 1: help him dig up some of the sites, and they
Speaker 1: were unearthing pot shards there, and those people took them
Speaker 1: back to pueblos like Sanduel Defonso Pueblo and showed these
Speaker 1: pot sharks to people like Maria Martinez, who became the
Speaker 1: first of the great modern celebrated pottery makers again in
Speaker 1: Pueblo and New Mexico. So it's like fixing up an
Speaker 1: old car. It's like fixing up an old car and
Speaker 1: learning how to do it again, basically reacquiring the skill
Speaker 1: to be able to do it, but having the availability
Speaker 1: of metal they had they had lost it. So when
Speaker 1: Native people confronted these kinds of things, this market impulse
Speaker 1: to specialize in particular resources, plus the availability of goods
Speaker 1: that were made of metal I mean, and those included things,
Speaker 1: of course, like the implements of war, like firearms. So
Speaker 1: if you trade someone a firearm, I mean, in the
Speaker 1: first few firearms that are traded a Native people are
Speaker 1: usually status goods, kind of like the turquoise we were
Speaker 1: talking about a minute ago. Only the head men end
Speaker 1: up with guns. But once you get them a gun,
Speaker 1: I mean, think of it. They can't produce powder, they
Speaker 1: can't produce flints or percussion caps. Later on, they don't
Speaker 1: have molds to make lead bullets, and they don't have
Speaker 1: gunsmiths to work on the gun if it breaks, And
Speaker 1: so suddenly they're snagged by the market economy. They've become
Speaker 1: dependent on it. From the point at which they start
Speaker 1: using guns they now have to have someone supply them
Speaker 1: with gunpowder, with cap percussion caps, with lead balls, and
Speaker 1: from that point on basically tell us what you want
Speaker 1: us to harvest for the market economy, and we'll do it.
Speaker 1: I mean in the way. Another factor had to have have been,
Speaker 1: like when you talk about that reliance to what it
Speaker 1: would have meant to neighboring groups that you were in
Speaker 1: warfare with, well, I mean, I was just gonna say
Speaker 1: that would add your that would like add to your
Speaker 1: incentive to acquire this stuff. It does, and it means
Speaker 1: that the people who don't acquire it who and there
Speaker 1: were some groups, for example, who who sort of saw, okay,
Speaker 1: this is a this is kind of a zero sum game,
Speaker 1: because if we get caught in this, we're never gonna
Speaker 1: get out of it. We're always gonna have to have
Speaker 1: these these goods, and we're just gonna go further and
Speaker 1: further and further into this kind of economy, and we're
Speaker 1: going to forever be pulled out of our ancient traditions.
Speaker 1: And so occasionally you would have a band or a
Speaker 1: tribe led by someone who would sort of see the
Speaker 1: consequence inst is and say, okay, I'm not gonna do it.
Speaker 1: But the people in the next valley, if they did it,
Speaker 1: and they armed themselves with with guns, and they had
Speaker 1: the resources that the European traders gave them as opposed
Speaker 1: to the group that was resisting entering the trade. I
Speaker 1: mean it became an unequal struggle and the group that
Speaker 1: resisted ended up being overpowered and overcome by those who
Speaker 1: cooperated with the market economy. You know, things you're saying
Speaker 1: keep resonating me with With this article, I've been bringing
Speaker 1: up a lot, lady by the journalist John Lee Anderson
Speaker 1: who who wrote this piece in The New Yorker about
Speaker 1: this group, this Amerindian group who's in the process right
Speaker 1: now of coming into contact with the wider world. And um,
Speaker 1: you know they're they're living the borderlands Team Prue and
Speaker 1: Brazil and the young ones will come out and are
Speaker 1: interacting and and the young ones that even explain because
Speaker 1: through some through various translators, they're able to communicate, and
Speaker 1: the young ones explain, Um, when we get close, you know,
Speaker 1: when we go back, the old people burned the clothes.
Speaker 1: Like there's that resistance built in where they're they're they're
Speaker 1: talking about people, Um, other generations being like, don't get
Speaker 1: tangled up with these people. But it's irresistible. It's irresistible.
Speaker 1: They're coming out of the jungle naked. Yeah, it's irresistible.
Speaker 1: And you know, so there, I think we can identify
Speaker 1: with it if we just understand that everybody is motivated
Speaker 1: by the same human nature, regardless of the cultural overlays
Speaker 1: that we have. These people that that you've just described
Speaker 1: from South America and that I was describing basically sort
Speaker 1: of using North American and examples from the eighteenth and
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, these they're just like us. And so we
Speaker 1: can if we think about it, we can find ourselves
Speaker 1: in exactly that kind of situation. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: we probably do, you know, in our modern lives on
Speaker 1: almost a daily basis, it's hard to resist a damn
Speaker 1: cell phone. I mean, I know a handful of people
Speaker 1: who say, Okay, I'm not gonna have one of those things.
Speaker 1: But I mean, you're kind of disadvantaging yourself in a
Speaker 1: way if you resist the march of modern technology. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: if all your buddies are out drinking nowadays, you can't
Speaker 1: find them without a phone. You can't on a bar,
Speaker 1: and everyone went there and stayed there. But now you'd
Speaker 1: never catch up with them, That's right, you gotta text
Speaker 1: them and find them. And so you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: it's the same principle at work, and I think it's
Speaker 1: been at work among us for two hundred thousand years
Speaker 1: and maybe in I mean that that that's as far
Speaker 1: back as we know right now that our own species
Speaker 1: has existed. You know, if we knew more about the Neanderthals,
Speaker 1: it probably was at work among them as well, these
Speaker 1: same principles. So do you feel that, like like, and
Speaker 1: I know you focus a lot of your scholarly attention, um,
Speaker 1: not exclusively, but a lot of it on bison. Do
Speaker 1: you feel that, let's say, just the market had been introduced,
Speaker 1: would they have wound up at in the same place
Speaker 1: that we did eventually, where we had effectively ecologically speaking,
Speaker 1: we had exterminated the animal. Well, I think it would
Speaker 1: have been possible. Yeah. So, I mean Native people obviously
Speaker 1: they have an economy. They haven't exchanged economy before Europeans
Speaker 1: ever arrived. I mean, we know that there were trading
Speaker 1: networks just like I was describing. For this Turko is
Speaker 1: going from the mountain out the door here all the
Speaker 1: way down into Central America and the Caribbean. There were
Speaker 1: trade networks that stretched all over the America's so that
Speaker 1: people that were producing goods, sometimes utilitarians, sometimes status goods,
Speaker 1: were able to trade for things they their local area
Speaker 1: didn't produce, uh, and that they wanted, that they desired.
Speaker 1: And so that had been going on for for thousands
Speaker 1: and thousands of years in the Americans. And that's probably
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not an economist, but I don't doubt
Speaker 1: that that may not be the first step toward what
Speaker 1: ultimately becomes kind of a global market economy where everybody
Speaker 1: specializes in something and you have trade networks that spanned
Speaker 1: the world. I think in some ways what native people
Speaker 1: in the Americans were engaging in was kind of a
Speaker 1: prototypical version of that. But uh, and of course they
Speaker 1: they also had what the market, you know, is characterized
Speaker 1: by in our own time, where some people accumulate lots
Speaker 1: of things for purposes of status, and so again to
Speaker 1: make these native people who were here for thousands of
Speaker 1: years kind of more humanly understandable to us now, I mean,
Speaker 1: over in Chocko Canyon, when they were doing excavations over there,
Speaker 1: they discovered that the difference between the elites and the
Speaker 1: peasant population in Chocko Canyon, and the elites were probably
Speaker 1: priests and their families, was so dramatic that in some
Speaker 1: instances the elites had such better food, such better nutrition,
Speaker 1: that they were living twice as long as peasants who
Speaker 1: were working the fields only of a few hundred yards away.
Speaker 1: And there are instances where well, there was there was
Speaker 1: one uh vault where evidently the wife or the wives
Speaker 1: of one particular priest in Chaco at one stage of
Speaker 1: the high development of that civilization. Uh, this room was
Speaker 1: found with sixty thousand pieces of turquoise jewelry. I mean,
Speaker 1: so this is a woman who was the Choco and
Speaker 1: version of Amelda Marcos with all of her hundreds of shoes.
Speaker 1: I mean, no individual needs sixty thou pieces of turquoise jewelry.
Speaker 1: But that was kind of a status statement on the
Speaker 1: part of native people. So in other words, I'm saying
Speaker 1: that they also had that. It's not that they were
Speaker 1: trying to make everybody somehow democratically equal. There were status divisions,
Speaker 1: but they hadn't reached the point that the capitalists market had,
Speaker 1: where so much of the natural world has been converted
Speaker 1: into kind of soulless commodities when Native people confronted the
Speaker 1: capitalists market economy. For the Europeans, the animals whose hides
Speaker 1: they were trading for had no real relevance in Christian religion.
Speaker 1: Those animals lacked souls, they didn't have a plan uh
Speaker 1: in guard God's larger scheme of things. The Native people, though,
Speaker 1: still accorded kind of sacred rights to a lot of
Speaker 1: those uh animal species that Europeans saw is just kind
Speaker 1: of a congress of resources. So one of the places
Speaker 1: where you have a kind of a jarring difference is
Speaker 1: there where the European point of view is that you know,
Speaker 1: these are just resources. These things are kind of inert
Speaker 1: matter of These animals are alive, but they're just dumb
Speaker 1: brutes and their lives don't really matter. And Native people,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, they sometimes struggle with this trade
Speaker 1: exchange because they still did regard these animals as being sacred,
Speaker 1: soul filled uh ken really to them. So it was
Speaker 1: that's part of the psychic kind of disaster that I
Speaker 1: think Native people go through in the eighteenth and nineteen centuries.
Speaker 1: And this happens all over the world and it'll be
Speaker 1: happening in among these groups that that New York or
Speaker 1: journalists would described was describing in South America too. It
Speaker 1: induces a kind of a a psychological crisis that undermines
Speaker 1: your worldview. And I think it's one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that Native people in the America's and I mean they
Speaker 1: had almost no choice but to participate in the market economy,
Speaker 1: but it really kind of rendered a catastrophic effect on
Speaker 1: them ultimately, from which I think some people have yet
Speaker 1: to recover. Are you through with the book Keepers of
Speaker 1: the Game? He he does a good job in there
Speaker 1: with the impacts of the beaver trade a native populations
Speaker 1: where here you have an ant like like like the
Speaker 1: bison or buffalo loose so large in the mythology of
Speaker 1: the tribes, I mean on the planes if you just
Speaker 1: look at like artwork and belief systems and oral traditions.
Speaker 1: But he talks about these groups in the Northeast that
Speaker 1: didn't really pay that much attention to the beaver. You know,
Speaker 1: it was it was like a reliable resource when you
Speaker 1: needed it, but it wasn't like this defining thing. And
Speaker 1: in Keepers of the Game he gets into some of
Speaker 1: their uh, some of the people's like just kind of
Speaker 1: puzzlement about why is it that they're so interested in
Speaker 1: the animal, and kind of the awakening to the idea
Speaker 1: that you could get a lot of money and get
Speaker 1: a lot of goods from this thing that we had
Speaker 1: really paid that much attention to before. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: like the guy who says, the guy who's like been
Speaker 1: stomping on Morrel's down in his cotton would grow up
Speaker 1: his whole life and never thought about them. One day
Speaker 1: some guy knocks on his door. He's like, you know,
Speaker 1: he's just like really ship man. Yeah, they're everywhere, They're everywhere,
Speaker 1: but people really want these things. Yeah, I think, uh
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, that's a very interesting book. Calvin
Speaker 1: Martin was the guy who wrote it, trying to that yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh you know, and his his argument was a
Speaker 1: really intriguing one because he kind of argued against some
Speaker 1: of the things. I was just explaining that the fur
Speaker 1: trade had an economic basis. He argued that it was
Speaker 1: based on it it was Indians participated in it for
Speaker 1: spiritual or religious reasons rather than economic reasons. And what
Speaker 1: he came up with was this very interesting idea that
Speaker 1: on the eve of the arrival of the Europeans, uh
Speaker 1: In the in the northeast, um Indians began contracting disease,
Speaker 1: and they were diseases they had never encountered before. And
Speaker 1: what Calvin Martin argued was that from uh itiner at
Speaker 1: European fishermen, they were being exposed, these native people being
Speaker 1: exposed for the first time to European diseases against which
Speaker 1: they had no immunity influenza, and they're dying of these
Speaker 1: diseases that their shamans can't cure, that they've never encountered before.
Speaker 1: And in their religious traditions they had uh Some of
Speaker 1: these Algonquin speaking people of that region had this tradition
Speaker 1: that they had a sacred pack with the animals, and
Speaker 1: the animals were supposed to keep humans healthy. And so
Speaker 1: Martin argued in that book that the circumstances of when
Speaker 1: these people were getting these diseases without ever having seen
Speaker 1: Europeans necessarily before, these are diseases that had worked inland
Speaker 1: with no explanation other than their own cultural beliefs, that
Speaker 1: they blamed the animals for those diseases and therefore engaged.
Speaker 1: And he found one Jesuit priest who said the Indians
Speaker 1: are engaging in a war against the animals and retaliation
Speaker 1: for making them sick, and they discover that these Europeans
Speaker 1: want the skins of those same animals. So it was
Speaker 1: kind of a blockbuster idea when it came out, which
Speaker 1: was in about nineteen eighty. But I have to say,
Speaker 1: was it was it Lampoon? Well, it wont a bunch
Speaker 1: of prizes when it came out as being this very
Speaker 1: imaginative and new inter rotation of why Indians participated in
Speaker 1: the fur trade. But what happened very interestingly is that
Speaker 1: another very famous anthropologist named Shepherd Craik came along three
Speaker 1: or four years later and called on a bunch of
Speaker 1: his anthropologist friends to see if they could find some
Speaker 1: evidence anywhere else in North America that something similar had happened.
Speaker 1: And they couldn't find any evidence anywhere that there had
Speaker 1: been another incident like this, And so Craik published a
Speaker 1: book consisting of all the studies of himself and his
Speaker 1: anthropos anthropologist friends trying to extrapolate Calvin Martin's argument elsewhere
Speaker 1: and finding no reason, uh that it seemed to work
Speaker 1: anywhere else. And he basically said, I think Calvin Martin
Speaker 1: took one document and he basically leveraged it into this
Speaker 1: argument hut without having additional supporting evidence for it. And
Speaker 1: it looks like he leveraged it too much. When you've
Speaker 1: put out your ideas, um and published them and previously
Speaker 1: in in journals and now in popular books, some of
Speaker 1: them are kind of controversial. Like what sort of negative
Speaker 1: feedback or or criticisms do you get when you call
Speaker 1: him to question something such as, you know, the relationship
Speaker 1: between Native Americans and buffalo when you call him the
Speaker 1: question that it was maybe a little more complex than
Speaker 1: we are taught in elementary school. Yeah, you must, you
Speaker 1: must get some you must get attacked. I will say
Speaker 1: it kind of worked like this, and yeah, I you know,
Speaker 1: not necessarily attacked. But I've had some interesting experien arians
Speaker 1: is um particularly I mean I first published, um, that
Speaker 1: bison ecology article in the journal American History, and so
Speaker 1: sort of in the aftermath that, uh, some big news outlets,
Speaker 1: uh you know, found out about it, and the New
Speaker 1: York Times did a story about my interpretation what had
Speaker 1: happened to the to the bison and so um. This
Speaker 1: was in the early nineties. I just got to the
Speaker 1: University of Montana UH to teach the history of the
Speaker 1: West there. And one day I was I was at
Speaker 1: home in my apartment. I hadn't moved out in the
Speaker 1: Bitter Root Valley and I was still living in Missooli
Speaker 1: in a little apartment. I was screwing around with something
Speaker 1: in the and the phone rang, just you know, And
Speaker 1: so I picked up the phone. And I mean, I
Speaker 1: would say it that way because the truth is, with
Speaker 1: a cell phone, I mean, I don't keep the ringer
Speaker 1: onto my phone, so a phone ringing is an unusual
Speaker 1: thing for me. This was back in the nineties before
Speaker 1: I had a cell phone, so I actually had a
Speaker 1: landline and still didn't ring very much. And I don't
Speaker 1: talk on the phone a whole lot. But the phone rang,
Speaker 1: and I picked up the phone, and this sonorous, deep
Speaker 1: voice says, is this Dan Flores? And I said, yes
Speaker 1: it is. And and the voice on the other hand said, well,
Speaker 1: this is Vine Deloria. I have just read your article
Speaker 1: on bison ecology. And what I thought he was going
Speaker 1: to say next is that, you know, you son of
Speaker 1: a bitch, How in the world could you ever argue,
Speaker 1: UH that Indians were involved in the destruction of the
Speaker 1: Bison because Vine Deloria, I mean for the members of
Speaker 1: your audience who don't know who Vine Gloria is. He was,
Speaker 1: I'm guilty this. I'm waiting to hear. Okay, so let
Speaker 1: me tell who he was. He's was one of the
Speaker 1: most outspoken Native writers in the period, from probably the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies through vind Vine died about just a few
Speaker 1: years ago, so he was still alive into the twenty
Speaker 1: first century, but especially from about the nineteen seventies. He
Speaker 1: wrote books like God Has Read and Customer Died for
Speaker 1: Your Sins Yes. And he was teaching in the law
Speaker 1: school at the University of Colorado and Boulder when he
Speaker 1: called me, and what he said was, I would like
Speaker 1: for you to come to Boulder as my guest, because
Speaker 1: every year I have a gathering of people from the
Speaker 1: tribes and we discussed the relationship between Native people and animals,
Speaker 1: and I want you to come to the next one
Speaker 1: is my personal guest, the next one I'm having. It
Speaker 1: was just a couple of months away. But what I
Speaker 1: expected him to say was, I want you to speak
Speaker 1: to the assembled group. He said, I want to tell you,
Speaker 1: I don't want you to say a word when you come,
Speaker 1: I want you to come as my guest. You can
Speaker 1: sit right beside me. I'll introduce you to everybody there.
Speaker 1: But I don't want you to say a word. I
Speaker 1: want you to listen to what people say. And I said,
Speaker 1: I would be very happy to do that. And so
Speaker 1: I went to Boulder and UH set up beside Vindeloria.
Speaker 1: Out of the group of about thirty five people, there
Speaker 1: was one other white guy in the audience. Uh. And
Speaker 1: did you know his sorry interrupt his motive or what
Speaker 1: did you think his motive at that? Well? I I
Speaker 1: thought what his motive was and I and I was
Speaker 1: right about it. He he just wanted me to hear
Speaker 1: what Native people said about their relationship with animals. Um,
Speaker 1: but not in an adversarial way, not an anniversary show,
Speaker 1: you buddy, you know. And what he actually said to
Speaker 1: me when I was there is Uh. He said, that
Speaker 1: piece you did is the most interesting piece I've read
Speaker 1: that anybody has ever done on bison. He said interesting.
Speaker 1: He didn't say the most accurate, the best. He said
Speaker 1: he found it interesting. Now, Delia went on over the
Speaker 1: next few years as friends of mine in the profession
Speaker 1: began to adopt my argument about what happened to bison,
Speaker 1: And for the sake of your readers, I'll just say
Speaker 1: that the bison ecology article from was basically a recasting
Speaker 1: of what happened to bison in the West, and it
Speaker 1: argued that, in opposition to our simplistic view that we
Speaker 1: had had for a long time, that after the Civil War,
Speaker 1: white hide hunters had gone out and slaughtered these animals,
Speaker 1: slaughtered forty million of them are sixty million of them
Speaker 1: in the space of about twenty five years, and that
Speaker 1: was what had happened to them. I argued that in fact,
Speaker 1: the decline of bison had begun much earlier than that
Speaker 1: that it was caused by multiple reasons, in part a
Speaker 1: changing climate in the nineteenth century that produced the end
Speaker 1: of the Little Ice Age and therefore less conducive conditions
Speaker 1: to having large herds of bison on the grasslands of
Speaker 1: the Great Plains because the grasslands weren't as productive anymore.
Speaker 1: I argued that competition from horses for grass and water.
Speaker 1: As horse numbers had grown, wild horses and Indian horse
Speaker 1: herds had competed with bison, and that had drawn the
Speaker 1: numbers of bison down. That introduced European livestock diseases like anthrax,
Speaker 1: for example, and bovine tuberculosis had gotten among the herds
Speaker 1: as a result of UH, the overall on trails, taking
Speaker 1: oxen across the west and spreading these diseases, that that
Speaker 1: had reduced the numbers, and that there was in effect
Speaker 1: a whole host of reasons, but that one of the
Speaker 1: reasons was also that Native people had gotten involved in
Speaker 1: the market economy and had begun hunting bison not just
Speaker 1: for subsistence, but in order to produce bison robes for
Speaker 1: the market economy. And so among these various causes, the
Speaker 1: role of Indians in the hunt was one of them.
Speaker 1: And other scholars in the field of Western history, within
Speaker 1: the next five or six years, UH, people like Elliott
Speaker 1: West at the University of Arkansas and Drew Eisenberg, who
Speaker 1: at the time was at Princeton. Yeah, I read one
Speaker 1: of his books, Yeah, began writing books and articles basically
Speaker 1: using this same interpretation. And so during the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: I would say by probably two thousand and five, about
Speaker 1: fifteen years after I published that article, essentially just about
Speaker 1: everybody in the field had adopted that argument, and so
Speaker 1: it's become the standard argument for what happened to bison
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century now has has replaced this earlier,
Speaker 1: more simplistic view that we had for a long time.
Speaker 1: And so as that's happened, one of the things I've
Speaker 1: noticed is that I haven't it's been a long time
Speaker 1: actually since anyone from the Native community has, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of stopped me in an elevator or at a
Speaker 1: conference or something and wanted to express some concern that
Speaker 1: I was dissing how Indians had interacted with bison. So
Speaker 1: I think the Native people, over time, and there have
Speaker 1: been some of them I've talked to who I mean,
Speaker 1: they were very perceptive about all this, and they understood
Speaker 1: that this very likely was absolutely what happened, because they
Speaker 1: had gotten enough evidence from their own traditions that people
Speaker 1: had hunted buffalo in fact for the market. Uh. So
Speaker 1: I think that even the Native people, I mean, there's
Speaker 1: no doubt if you you know, they're always as I've
Speaker 1: learned from writing Coyote America, I mean, there are people
Speaker 1: who are gonna troll you whenever they don't agree with
Speaker 1: your particular interpretation. So they're probably some trollers still out
Speaker 1: there on this this particular line of argument, but it's
Speaker 1: become the primary explanation for what happened to bison. But
Speaker 1: and it's not entirely isolated, because there's there's this idea
Speaker 1: it Europeans wiped out Muscos in Alaska without ever stepping
Speaker 1: foot on the land, just by saying, hey, if you
Speaker 1: get a minute, we'd like meat and hides. That's exactly Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that was all that it took. Yeah. Well, so,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'll give you another example that's directly related.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a part of the bison story. I mean,
Speaker 1: we had argued that it was the hide hunt, wide
Speaker 1: hide hunters after the Civil War that had wiped out
Speaker 1: bison in the United States. There never was a white
Speaker 1: hide hunt in Canada. Canadian bison were hunted only by
Speaker 1: Native people and by the may Tee. And yet the
Speaker 1: same thing, explain explain. The Maytee are a group of
Speaker 1: Uh mixed blood Canadian people who were French from their
Speaker 1: European backgrounds Um and several different tribes of Sinnaboins and
Speaker 1: Uh Sue and speaking people's Uh from the Indian background.
Speaker 1: And they had become a kind of a third culture
Speaker 1: in Canada. And they had but they had an almost
Speaker 1: like industrial precision to their hunts they did, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, and they had the same I mean, when
Speaker 1: you read their traditions from the Indian side of the mix,
Speaker 1: they had inherited many of the same explanations of the
Speaker 1: sacredness of the animal and the use of all the
Speaker 1: parts of it and everything that you find among the
Speaker 1: the Lakotas or the Cheyennes, or whichever group farther south
Speaker 1: you want to study. All of that was intact. But
Speaker 1: indeed they did have a kind of an industrial approach.
Speaker 1: They went out in carts, uh the famous Red River carts,
Speaker 1: out onto the plane and hunted bison and hauled the
Speaker 1: products back to places like Ottawa, for example, and sold them.
Speaker 1: But there was never a white hide hunt in Canada,
Speaker 1: and yet the exact same thing happened to bison there
Speaker 1: has happened in the States. Interesting about those guys that
Speaker 1: I read about was they would on the northern planes
Speaker 1: in the winter, when things started to freeze up, they
Speaker 1: would dig these giant pits and fill them full of
Speaker 1: quarters like bison quarters, wait till it all FROs good,
Speaker 1: and then bury that stuff. And they'd be eating frozen
Speaker 1: meat into July digging it out of those the ground.
Speaker 1: I mean if you think about it in the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century and earlier, I mean all the way back to
Speaker 1: the time of you know, head smashed in in Alberta,
Speaker 1: which where bison jumps go back ten thousand years. I mean.
Speaker 1: The great problem with killing large numbers of animals like
Speaker 1: bison is how do you preserve them? Because if you
Speaker 1: if you drive four hundred bison off a cliff and
Speaker 1: Alberta in August, I mean, you can only dry and
Speaker 1: salt a small percentage of the animals if you don't
Speaker 1: have a way to refrigerate those carcasses. And obviously ten
Speaker 1: thousand years ago or even two hundred years ago, they didn't,
Speaker 1: And so you had to be very circumspect about trying
Speaker 1: to drive enough and or small enough group of animals
Speaker 1: off a cliff that you didn't end up wasting an
Speaker 1: enormous quantity of that kill simply because you lack the
Speaker 1: ability to preserve enough of the meat. But there seems
Speaker 1: to be cases where it's spun out of control, like
Speaker 1: the Southernmost jump. I believe this is the Southernmost jump
Speaker 1: on fire Shelter used a couple of times, and one time,
Speaker 1: it worked real well, and it got its name because
Speaker 1: all those rotting carcasses combusted and a spontaneous combustion, hundreds
Speaker 1: of animals and some small number were as they say
Speaker 1: in the archaeological parlance, disarticulated, I think is the word
Speaker 1: they disarticulated for. But then, but even then it was
Speaker 1: like there was probably so few people and such strong
Speaker 1: resources that you did there was no need to even
Speaker 1: like consider finiteness now, and there were you know, they
Speaker 1: were even arguments some people who did Boston jumps set
Speaker 1: so you can't really let any of them get away
Speaker 1: because if one of them gets away, they're gonna go
Speaker 1: tell the other bison what your stratagem was. And so
Speaker 1: when you jump them, you've got to make sure that
Speaker 1: you kill every one of them that goes off the jump.
Speaker 1: Nobody sense because look at like the power of the
Speaker 1: lead cow and a herd of elk who carries institutional
Speaker 1: knowledge about where to go. And we know that there
Speaker 1: are damn sure a lot of cow elk running around
Speaker 1: that are twenty years old who have done big migrations
Speaker 1: that many times they put together where it's okay to
Speaker 1: be where it's not okay to be and how to
Speaker 1: respond to certain stimuli. And yeah, they are creatures that
Speaker 1: figure out what to do and what not to do.
Speaker 1: So I could totally see that you have a population
Speaker 1: in a valley that would get to be like, uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not going on push this off that We're not
Speaker 1: We're not gonna do that, and you know, and I
Speaker 1: think that that harkens back to what is best called
Speaker 1: native science. I mean, it's an observation that native people
Speaker 1: made prop a blife from real life examples. We let
Speaker 1: that cow get away, and damn it, the next time
Speaker 1: we tried to drive, I heard off that cliff some
Speaker 1: cow looked like the same one, swerved him away and
Speaker 1: took him off in a different direction. And so I
Speaker 1: think it's it's kind of an observational uh kind of effect,
Speaker 1: which is a version of science where you observe and
Speaker 1: effect and you you related to a cause and you say, okay,
Speaker 1: that's why that happened. So kyote America. So that made
Speaker 1: the best seller that that was the New York Times bestseller. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the paperback is about to come out, and as one
Speaker 1: of my friends uh has put it, I cinema, the
Speaker 1: dust jacket of it and it's got New York Times
Speaker 1: best Seller across the top. And it also was a
Speaker 1: finalist for the E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Prize
Speaker 1: from Pan America. And so they put a big badge
Speaker 1: on the front and my my buddy wrote me back
Speaker 1: when I sent it to him. He said, Man, that
Speaker 1: coyote is wearing an awful lot of blaying this time around.
Speaker 1: Who told you on that? Like, who who didn't like
Speaker 1: the ideas in there? Like what sort of person was
Speaker 1: upset by the ideas of Well, it's been kind of
Speaker 1: and I'm basing this on the reviews on Amazon. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: so right, but please yeah, but you've been reading those well,
Speaker 1: I mean I yeah, I do look at him because
Speaker 1: because I'm interested in that. Uh yeah, that just that
Speaker 1: could be just like okay, never mind, Yeah, it's right.
Speaker 1: It's somebody who's having a bad day. I mean, I
Speaker 1: had somebody write a review the other day that went
Speaker 1: something like, there was a review of American Serengetti and
Speaker 1: this guy says, or this person says, I think it
Speaker 1: was a guy says this is on Amazon says this
Speaker 1: book is flawlessly written. It's a quick read. It it's
Speaker 1: just It's marvelous from start to to end. Three stars
Speaker 1: out of five. Yeah. Yeah, well you know why. He
Speaker 1: was probably pissed because it took an extra day. Okay
Speaker 1: are you familiar are you for with Poco pads? Okay,
Speaker 1: so Poco pads. This guy with Jack's welding. Jack's plastic
Speaker 1: welding makes a like a sleeping pad. Okay, a very
Speaker 1: heavy duty sealed welding raft. Yeah, you can use it
Speaker 1: to as a bench cover. Um, the heaviest ship. Not
Speaker 1: a backpack raft, but indestructible sleeping pad that when you
Speaker 1: get away, you just dried off the top. So I
Speaker 1: was looking at it. I was not at the super
Speaker 1: there's the biggest one there, and I see it, like
Speaker 1: and you know, everybody knows these are great pads. But
Speaker 1: it's got a it's got like a two and a
Speaker 1: half star review. Okay, so, um, that's weird how it
Speaker 1: had because it's only been reviewed a couple of times.
Speaker 1: And I read him in like five stars, five stars.
Speaker 1: And some guy who's mad at Amazon about some delivery
Speaker 1: problem that he had had in the past and had
Speaker 1: given Amazon a one star review. Um, but gave it
Speaker 1: to Jack's plastic Welding, who hasn't sold many of these
Speaker 1: pads and therefore gave the illusion of this being a
Speaker 1: shitty pet. That's an example. But I don't think that
Speaker 1: when you read the reviews, I don't think you're capturing
Speaker 1: the general conversation around something. Well, yeah, I would agree
Speaker 1: with you absolutely on that. I mean, the reviews are
Speaker 1: you know, they're a slice, but they do give you,
Speaker 1: I mean one of the things that you know, Amazon
Speaker 1: reviews I think do give you as a as a author.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit of an impression of how something
Speaker 1: is getting received. And so to me, for something like
Speaker 1: Coyote America, Uh, what I kind of say is that
Speaker 1: there are camps of takes on a book like that,
Speaker 1: and I relate that to the fact that coyotes themselves
Speaker 1: are extremely political. Political is being gluten intolerant. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so the fact that this is an astonishingly political animal
Speaker 1: means that there are people who have picked that book
Speaker 1: up or ordered it from Amazon and didn't really look
Speaker 1: too closely at what was going to be in it
Speaker 1: and opened it up and said, well, and this is
Speaker 1: what some people have said. I was expecting a bunch
Speaker 1: of animal stories like Ernest Thompson Seaton used to ride
Speaker 1: a hundred years ago, and instead I had to read
Speaker 1: about how I mean and I had just I had.
Speaker 1: I was forced into reading this. This author forced me
Speaker 1: to read how kyotes have been poisoned relentlessly for decades,
Speaker 1: and I just I didn't want to read that, but
Speaker 1: he forced me to read it. One star out of five.
Speaker 1: So if listeners want to go, we Uh interviewed Dan Uh.
Speaker 1: I believe episode thirty four or thirty six. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: haven't wait, can you? I was gonna say thirty three,
Speaker 1: but yeah, when he scrolled through it will say Seattle, Washington,
Speaker 1: and they'll say Dann Flores. But it was thirties somewhere
Speaker 1: right now. I might come back and tell you what
Speaker 1: it wasn't a second here. And we talked at length
Speaker 1: about both the Dan's books that were calling at the
Speaker 1: time Coyote America, I call him kyotes. We talked about that.
Speaker 1: Dan tells me um during that interview why I call
Speaker 1: him coyotes, Why he calls him coyotes? And he said
Speaker 1: something that I have I have referred to quite a
Speaker 1: number of times since, which was that anybody who shoots
Speaker 1: one never calls it a coyote. Yeah, yeah, anyone who's
Speaker 1: killed one calls the kayo, which I'm sure there's some deviations,
Speaker 1: just like there are political conservatives who are gluten and tolerant,
Speaker 1: but generally it's a left wing disease, so there's some
Speaker 1: variation there. But uh so go listen to that. If
Speaker 1: you want to hear about the two books, you have
Speaker 1: two boks go at the same time. American Serengetti and
Speaker 1: and you're in America Cowardy America and Coardy America is
Speaker 1: now coming out in paperback, and American Serengetti is already
Speaker 1: in paperback. And they're both also in audio CD form too,
Speaker 1: So check those out, and check out the interview that
Speaker 1: we did. Did you find the number? You've been off
Speaker 1: a quiet yet? Just listening? Just listening, Go back and
Speaker 1: listen to episode thirty three, which was really was one
Speaker 1: of It was a very pop of the episode for us.
Speaker 1: People loved it. That was demanded and demanded more. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was really Uh the first interview I did for
Speaker 1: either one of those books, um, because they hadn't come
Speaker 1: out now, they hadn't come out yet. I mean I
Speaker 1: I ended up getting an interview on Morning America or
Speaker 1: a good Morning, uh morning edition I'm sorry on NPR
Speaker 1: with David Green uh for the Coyote book. Uh, and
Speaker 1: quite a number of other things on various regional NPR
Speaker 1: stations and so forth, and another podcast or two. But
Speaker 1: that was the one that you did, was the first one.
Speaker 1: Do you mind real quick? Um, just sketching out with
Speaker 1: each of those books, just so people understand. Yeah, Cayote
Speaker 1: America is, um, a biography of the animal in effect,
Speaker 1: is what it is. It's an attempt to write a
Speaker 1: biography of the coyote from its evolution in North America,
Speaker 1: which goes back to the the beginnings of the canad
Speaker 1: family five point three million years ago, through it's long
Speaker 1: roller coaster like history in America, including about ten thousand
Speaker 1: years of time when it was revered as a principal
Speaker 1: deity by the native people of the American West everywhere
Speaker 1: that coyotes were found. UM. And I do a chapter
Speaker 1: called Old Man America in the book which takes on
Speaker 1: that story and and relates uh in my own prose
Speaker 1: four different what I think are sort of representative old
Speaker 1: Man coyote stories, which are, if if one stops to
Speaker 1: think about it, this is the oldest literature in North America.
Speaker 1: This is our our oldest body of literally stories. They
Speaker 1: were handed down orally and then finally set down UH
Speaker 1: in print at the beginning of the twentieth century. So
Speaker 1: the story can the Coyotes biography continues from that through
Speaker 1: its UH first encounters with Europeans in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: people like Lewis and Clark Uh Mark Twain didn't quite
Speaker 1: know what to call it. Yeah, they don't. In fact,
Speaker 1: the coyote has called for most of the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: the prairie wolf. That's the name that Lewis and Clark
Speaker 1: gave it, and so for most Americans through about the
Speaker 1: eighteen seventies or eighteen eighties, that's what the coyote was called.
Speaker 1: But by the middle of the century, as as American
Speaker 1: settlement had begun to get out to the Southwest to
Speaker 1: places like here Santa Fe, New Mexico, they encountered people
Speaker 1: who were using the old Aztec word for the animal
Speaker 1: that had been hispanicized into coyote. And so by the
Speaker 1: time Mark Twain and rights Roughing in in eighteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: coyote has become at least among people who read his books.
Speaker 1: UH kind of the accepted form of pronunciation, although a
Speaker 1: two syllable form had survived in much of the rural
Speaker 1: parts of the country as a result of the mountain
Speaker 1: men who were in the Southwest and who encountered that
Speaker 1: that same sort of transition from prairie wolf to a
Speaker 1: new form, and they called it. I think they thought
Speaker 1: coyote was a little bit too fancy. They called it
Speaker 1: a coyote. If you're from Arkansas, maybe coyote sounds a
Speaker 1: little fancy. So uh, anyway, we ended up with two
Speaker 1: different pronunciations, one sort of in the rural middle part
Speaker 1: of the country and then around the coast, uh coyote.
Speaker 1: And of course when the Wily Coyote cartoons come along,
Speaker 1: they began to convert a lot of people who uh
Speaker 1: hadn't thought about how they were going to pronounce the
Speaker 1: animal's name and the kai yote pronouncers. But anyway, the
Speaker 1: story goes on through our attempts in the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is an animal that we actually in
Speaker 1: the United States attempted to exterminate through a federal agency
Speaker 1: known as the Bureau of Biological Survey. It's still around now.
Speaker 1: It's called wildlife services, and this agency poisoned and invented
Speaker 1: poisons for the purpose millions and millions of coyotes in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, only to have us discover and this
Speaker 1: is the rare environmental story that goes in this kind
Speaker 1: of direction, that no matter what we did, we not
Speaker 1: only couldn't get rid of coyotes, we not only couldn't
Speaker 1: exterminate them, but in fact, our efforts to do so
Speaker 1: ended up spreading them out of the West across all
Speaker 1: of the rest of the United States. And so they
Speaker 1: now ended up in every single state except for a
Speaker 1: white uh, and are in every large and small city
Speaker 1: in the United States. They've even moved into urban areas.
Speaker 1: So um, it's the story of I argue in the
Speaker 1: book kind of really America's other than us, probably the
Speaker 1: most interesting mammal in North American history. No other creature
Speaker 1: has a biography that even approaches uh, something like the
Speaker 1: coyote has. And I kind of ended with talking about
Speaker 1: uh wily coyote and what effect Wily has had on
Speaker 1: American culture more than you would think. And even Walt Disney,
Speaker 1: who helped sort of change attitudes towards coyotes in the
Speaker 1: sixties seventies and uh those decades by doing six different
Speaker 1: pro coyote Disney films in those years. So that's what
Speaker 1: that book is about. American Serengetti is a book that's
Speaker 1: about the region of the United States, the American Great
Speaker 1: Plains that once was the analog of East Africa, the
Speaker 1: Massaia Mara and the Serengetti with I mean, it was
Speaker 1: one of the ecological wonders of the world up until
Speaker 1: about nineteen hundred or so, with this marvelous aggregate of
Speaker 1: large grazing animals, the bison that we've been talking about
Speaker 1: a lot tonight, Uh, that you, of course have written
Speaker 1: about in a very successful book, and I've written about
Speaker 1: some too. And along with bison, wild horses that were
Speaker 1: reintroduced having evolved on the Great Plains, reintroduced by Europeans
Speaker 1: back to America thousands of years after they had become extinct,
Speaker 1: and that just spread in uh an instant across this
Speaker 1: old ecological homeland of theirs uh prong horn antelope, gray wolves,
Speaker 1: grizzly bears, which we think of them as mountain animals now,
Speaker 1: but they were originally were a Great Lanes animals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: didn't Custer kill one in South Dakota, Custer Kill one
Speaker 1: in South Dakota. And one of the stories I tell
Speaker 1: people when I talk about this book is everybody has
Speaker 1: seen The Revenant with Leonardo Dicac that oh my god,
Speaker 1: you're ruined my night. Well, I mean the story that story, Yeah,
Speaker 1: opened the dank gass BC forest instead of where it
Speaker 1: belongs rightfully on the Willow line by Perian Zones. The
Speaker 1: American West was just like people should be hung for that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: on the great planes. This story was a real story.
Speaker 1: It happened to you glass, but it happened out on
Speaker 1: the planes rather than in the glass. Had no child, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he had not not exact revenge. He had no Indian
Speaker 1: child's and did not take revenge. Confronted the people that
Speaker 1: left him, and was satisfied knowing that they had to
Speaker 1: live the rest of their lives that he was still
Speaker 1: alive and they had left him. Yeah, with the guilt
Speaker 1: of having left him. But it happened down on the
Speaker 1: plains because that's where the grizzly bears were. So anyway,
Speaker 1: this is a book about all these these creatures of
Speaker 1: the Great Plains uh in the primarily the eighteenth and
Speaker 1: nineteen centuries, and uh, I sort of take them one
Speaker 1: at a time. I do prong horns in a chapter,
Speaker 1: wild horses in a chapter, gray wolves in a chapter, uh,
Speaker 1: grizzly bears and a chapter, bison in a chapter, and
Speaker 1: I do a chapter on coyotes, which were the jackals
Speaker 1: of the planes too. And then the book finally ends
Speaker 1: up going to our possibilities in the twenty first century,
Speaker 1: primarily through what's known as the American Pray Reserve Project
Speaker 1: in Montana of trying to recreate and rewild on Americans
Speaker 1: serengetti that will ultimately have all those animals in place
Speaker 1: again in a wildlife park that will be we hope,
Speaker 1: something like twice the size of Yelso it's a long
Speaker 1: term project, but it's spent under wife for about fifteen years,
Speaker 1: not not without speaking of controversy. Now without controversy itself,
Speaker 1: plenty of controversy surrounding it, to be sure, weirdly seems
Speaker 1: to be like the main story that is picked up
Speaker 1: in the media is the controversy, at which imagine a
Speaker 1: lot of ideas probably go through that phase. I would
Speaker 1: like to remind people when I'm talking, when I when
Speaker 1: I do when I give public lectures and I'm talking
Speaker 1: about the conservation history of this country, I always like
Speaker 1: to remind people how pissed everyone was at Theodore Roosevelt
Speaker 1: for laying out the national forest system. Pissed and then
Speaker 1: a couple of years go by and they carve his
Speaker 1: face in a big giant mountain. But at the time,
Speaker 1: live it. Yeah, I live it, I mean, and live
Speaker 1: it for I mean, when he set aside the Grand
Speaker 1: Canyon as a national mon month, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: so we've got a review of the national monuments going
Speaker 1: on now, all the way back to the Escalante Grand
Speaker 1: Staircase in years and three, reviewing George W. Bush's Monuments
Speaker 1: review and Clinton's monuments as well on Obama's monuments. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: when Teddy Roosevelt decided that the Grand Kenyon he was
Speaker 1: going to set aside as a national monument, I mean,
Speaker 1: there were people who were absolutely furious at the idea.
Speaker 1: And of course it's basically a world class site. Became
Speaker 1: a National Park fourteen years later and is a world
Speaker 1: class site. So I mean, what I really would love
Speaker 1: to see, I think it's this American Prayers Air Project
Speaker 1: is the great conservation project of the twenty one century.
Speaker 1: It's gonna take decades, but I would love to see
Speaker 1: it as our version of Yellowstone National Park. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're the first country ever creates a national park system,
Speaker 1: the United States is, but we passed over the Great
Speaker 1: Plains in doing it, and I think now is our
Speaker 1: opportunity to circle back and take this area that once
Speaker 1: was one of the great spectacles of the world in
Speaker 1: terms of wild animals, and do like Africa has done
Speaker 1: and acquire for ourselves. Uh, this marvelous historic Great Plains
Speaker 1: animal park. Yeah, I should touch. Actually I brought up
Speaker 1: the idea of it, of its controversial nature, and I should.
Speaker 1: Rather than leaving that hangout, I just want to explain
Speaker 1: a couple of points about it. Where you already have
Speaker 1: some large federally managed landscapes up there. So you have
Speaker 1: the Charles M. Russell Refuge along the Missouri Breaks, and
Speaker 1: you have some some monument, some some national monument, national
Speaker 1: monument that was designated on the Clinton administration, the Missouri
Speaker 1: Breaks National Monument. And what what the Prayer Reserve is
Speaker 1: doing is taking money. And critics of it always like
Speaker 1: to point out that it's generally outside money. It's money
Speaker 1: that's very important for people to express for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: that they're taking money from people donated around the country
Speaker 1: to buy land that just comes up for sale. So
Speaker 1: we're talking about willing seller willing buyer. This is not
Speaker 1: it's not no one's like getting land for free. It's
Speaker 1: not the government giving anyone land. It's just they're starting
Speaker 1: out with existing parcels of public land. And when properties
Speaker 1: come up for sale in the vicinity, they go and
Speaker 1: say what you're asking for the place, The person names
Speaker 1: the price they're asking and it goes to auction or Hawevard.
Speaker 1: Also happens in the American Prayer Reserve buys the land,
Speaker 1: so the seller got exactly what they're after. They got
Speaker 1: market value for the land. Oftentimes the land you'll you'll
Speaker 1: also attain grazing rights on joining pieces of land, and
Speaker 1: so they will take over grazing rights and an opt
Speaker 1: to not opt to not always exercise them through the
Speaker 1: grazing of cattle. So they do have a program out
Speaker 1: there that deals with grazing cattle on land. The criticism
Speaker 1: comes from people who look and they say that and
Speaker 1: the and it's understandable, and yeah, and I think you
Speaker 1: need to be sympathetic to it, where someone's like, so
Speaker 1: my great grandfather, my grandfather, my father invested very heavily
Speaker 1: in this idea and sacrifice a tremendous amount um of
Speaker 1: work and effort to make the desert bloom right that
Speaker 1: that we came in and raise cattle and help feed
Speaker 1: the nation and establish an economy that would allow either
Speaker 1: to be schools and towns. And we built this out
Speaker 1: of nothing. And to now have someone say thanks, but
Speaker 1: no thanks, it's insulting to people. Um, the American praiser
Speaker 1: at one time used to it has this long line
Speaker 1: of ideas that are kind of strung out. At one time.
Speaker 1: There's this idea the Buffalo Commons, which is similar. Remember
Speaker 1: the writer Bill Kittridge in his book Hole in the Sky,
Speaker 1: Um pointed out that going to Jordan, Montana and mentioning
Speaker 1: the Buffalo Commons was a sure fire way to get
Speaker 1: your ask it. So that when I said, that's the
Speaker 1: controversial part is it's controversial and spirit only. It's not
Speaker 1: that someone's like stealing someone's lands, just someone's saying, like,
Speaker 1: how can you come and act like what we've done
Speaker 1: here isn't the best thing for the country. How can
Speaker 1: you say that you want to tear up our roads,
Speaker 1: raise our buildings, rip out our fences because what was
Speaker 1: here before us is more precious to you than what
Speaker 1: we created. Like, that's the idea. And I don't even
Speaker 1: really need to articulate the other side, because the other
Speaker 1: side has to do with, you know, more n like
Speaker 1: some fairly unassailable notions of of wildlife, habitat and and
Speaker 1: in this case, free market economies. But that kind of
Speaker 1: sketches out for you why it pisses people off, is yeah,
Speaker 1: um yeah, I think that's that's a good expression of it,
Speaker 1: you know, And like you, I think we can all
Speaker 1: be sympathetic to that. Um you know. I mean I
Speaker 1: come from Louisiana, where my grandfather and my father and
Speaker 1: my brother were all in the oil business. But that
Speaker 1: is a business in Louisiana that uh doesn't It doesn't
Speaker 1: have a continuing application into the future. It's not. I mean,
Speaker 1: primarily the oil resources are depleted, and so in my generation,
Speaker 1: there's no possibility to continue to do that. I mean,
Speaker 1: it might be possible, I suppose at some point to
Speaker 1: go in and frack or horizontal drill and manage to
Speaker 1: extract those resources. But what I'm saying is I'm from
Speaker 1: a generation that can't do what my father, my grandfather
Speaker 1: ended up doing for their livelihood. I think in Montana,
Speaker 1: on these ranches, there is a sense that they can
Speaker 1: continue to do this, and so that's I think, as
Speaker 1: as you said, Steven, that's kind of why there's a
Speaker 1: a sort of a spiritual resistance among some people to it.
Speaker 1: Um I would say, you know, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: that it's a good thing to remember that this is
Speaker 1: not a federal project. This is not the federal government
Speaker 1: coming in and creating a new national park or a
Speaker 1: national monument. This is private enterprise doing what it's always
Speaker 1: done in America, taking private land and then doing what
Speaker 1: they want to do with it. So it can be
Speaker 1: in a way, the American Prayer Reserve can be defended
Speaker 1: as part of this traditional kind of private enterprise, capitalist approach.
Speaker 1: It's just that what they want to do with it
Speaker 1: is not what private uh developers have often attempted to do.
Speaker 1: So it seems fishy. Two people, Yeah, it seems quietly
Speaker 1: bought a ranch and then over time people realize that
Speaker 1: you didn't run cattle on it, and that you tore
Speaker 1: up the fences. Um, it might go unnoticed. But articulating
Speaker 1: a grand vision, yeah, makes people uneasy. Um and you
Speaker 1: But anyways, you probably explain a lot of this, But
Speaker 1: I do. I mean I and I try to place
Speaker 1: this whole story in the context of how in the
Speaker 1: twentieth century we tried on numerous occasions, realizing that the
Speaker 1: great planes had been passed over for a kind of
Speaker 1: an African or Yellowstone like wildlife park. We tried on
Speaker 1: several occasions to make it happen, and uh, and every
Speaker 1: instance up and down the plains from West Texas to Montana,
Speaker 1: we've failed so far. And so this attempt by the
Speaker 1: American Prayer Reserve is probably the most promising attempt that
Speaker 1: we've had in a long time, and it's taking the
Speaker 1: the possibility on in a whole new way by doing
Speaker 1: this kind of private enterprise buying up ranches when they
Speaker 1: come up for sale, with the idea of ultimately cooperating
Speaker 1: with the managers of the federal lands that are in
Speaker 1: the vicinity along the Missouri River and somehow managing this
Speaker 1: as a whole in order to reintroduce all these classic
Speaker 1: animals that we sort of thoughtlessly, heedlessly a century Ago
Speaker 1: obliterated from the landscape. I mean, we did it almost
Speaker 1: without a second thought a hundred years ago, and now
Speaker 1: we're rethinking what we did and hoping that we can
Speaker 1: somehow restore this. And so, as I said to me
Speaker 1: and those of us who are conservation thinking kind of people,
Speaker 1: this is one of the most exciting things that's happening
Speaker 1: in the West these days. You know, uh, when you
Speaker 1: talk about doing without thinking about it. I recently had
Speaker 1: occasion to speak with the with the conservation leader Jim Pozits,
Speaker 1: and he spells out that time of us realizing what
Speaker 1: we were doing through the story of Theodore Roosevelt, the
Speaker 1: first buffalo he killed and the second buffalo he killed,
Speaker 1: and sort of how he how he interpreted those two actions,
Speaker 1: one being near is it Medina Madora, Madora, North Dakota,
Speaker 1: and one around Henry's Lake. Um. The second time and
Speaker 1: sort of the first one he does award dance around,
Speaker 1: dance surrounded right, and the second one um, and by
Speaker 1: this time there are like none left. And the second
Speaker 1: trip he has a conservation epiphany. UM. And that's one
Speaker 1: of the many things that makes that guy's life interesting
Speaker 1: that ties into things we're talking about is being this
Speaker 1: trans like one of these guys who was alive at
Speaker 1: this like very transitional moment where he was in some
Speaker 1: ways engaged with the end or kind of aware of
Speaker 1: the end, and then was one of the people who said, like, whoa,
Speaker 1: at just the right moment, I mean, just the right moment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it became the seed when he became president for
Speaker 1: those National Bison Refuges that he set up, and the
Speaker 1: first one in southwestern Oklahoma, the Witch of Toam Mountain Ones,
Speaker 1: and then the next one in when they did that one,
Speaker 1: they were trucking animals from the Bronx Zoo. That's how
Speaker 1: bad things got. When they were trying to set up
Speaker 1: some buffalo parks in the West, they were they were
Speaker 1: getting animals from the Bronx Zoo and shipping them by
Speaker 1: rail back out west. Well, William T. Hornaday, who was
Speaker 1: the director of the Bronx Zoo, had had the foresight,
Speaker 1: I mean, he had written the first great book about
Speaker 1: what had happened to bison extermination oftermination of the American bison. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he had had the foresight to start through people
Speaker 1: like Buffalo Jones and Kansas Charles. Buffalo Jones who had
Speaker 1: and a former buffalo hunter, and then was stricken by
Speaker 1: guilt and said, as a result of my wickedness and
Speaker 1: killing so many, now I'm going to try to do
Speaker 1: everything I can to save the last few that are there.
Speaker 1: Not roped him and fed him on cow's milk. He
Speaker 1: did and provided Hornaday with some of these animals that
Speaker 1: went to the Bronx Zoo. So one of the reasons,
Speaker 1: as you know well and have written about, they were
Speaker 1: trading them around, of course, is they were trying to
Speaker 1: make sure, I mean, the the animal population of bison
Speaker 1: had had gotten so small that they were afraid of
Speaker 1: genetic bottlenecking, and so they were trying to spread the
Speaker 1: few animals that they had left widely to get as
Speaker 1: dispersed a number of genes from the original population. In
Speaker 1: these particular little groups of animals they were trying to
Speaker 1: build herds up from. There was a there was a
Speaker 1: hunter during the big slaughter in the southern plains. There
Speaker 1: was a hunter that was who grew sickened to buy
Speaker 1: it like what buffalo Jones later clan grew sickened by
Speaker 1: it and swore to call it off. But then in
Speaker 1: the morning he explained how he was hearing all the gunfire.
Speaker 1: It was like, funk, man, they're doing it. They're gonna
Speaker 1: do it whether I'm there or not, and jump back in. Yeh.
Speaker 1: Not too many of those buffalo hunters ever seemed to
Speaker 1: express much remorse, you know, and some of them actually
Speaker 1: became pretty combative about what they had done, you know.
Speaker 1: That's the interesting thing is like when Hornaday was out
Speaker 1: trying to get someone, he was trying to collect specimens.
Speaker 1: So at first he was trying to collect dead ones.
Speaker 1: And he he took the Northern Pacific I just recently
Speaker 1: made its way to Miles City, Montana, and Hornday took
Speaker 1: it out and then struck off with a wagon and
Speaker 1: cart and a guide he was traveling with, and they
Speaker 1: went up into the Pumpkin Creek area to see if
Speaker 1: he could shoot a handful as zoo specimens. And he's
Speaker 1: riding through the bone fields trying to find one. And
Speaker 1: in his book he points out that there was still eyes,
Speaker 1: there were still hide hunters in Miles City convinced, and
Speaker 1: that was like, that was I should put out. That
Speaker 1: was the last of them, That was the last big congregation,
Speaker 1: and I think it was killed. They started killing it
Speaker 1: in the Winner. The summer of eighty two, I think
Speaker 1: a bunch were killed on one of the reservations. Some
Speaker 1: of the Sioux got there where they gave them some
Speaker 1: of their guns back and let him leave the reservation
Speaker 1: to go on one last hunt, and they killed a
Speaker 1: thousand and then that was it to the point where
Speaker 1: Horny was out scrounging around hoping to find a couple.
Speaker 1: He points out that many of the people in Miles
Speaker 1: City were hide hunters who just were waiting for the
Speaker 1: next big push to come down out of Canada. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well some of them. And they had seen I heard
Speaker 1: cross the medicine line into Canada, and they were convinced
Speaker 1: that that herd was coming back soon. And I think,
Speaker 1: as harned, he says, he already knew when they were
Speaker 1: telling him that what had happened to that hurt because
Speaker 1: the mate had wiped out, that had gotten onto it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were that herd was already gone. But these hunters,
Speaker 1: I mean, and he he met one guy sitting around
Speaker 1: a campfire one night, Doc something or other who wandered
Speaker 1: into his campfire and sat down, And this guy was
Speaker 1: firmly convinced that all he had to do was sit
Speaker 1: around and wait for a few weeks or a few
Speaker 1: months or maybe the next year, and there was a
Speaker 1: gigantic herd or bison that was gonna come down from
Speaker 1: Canada and it would all resume. And instead, as he explains,
Speaker 1: these guys kind of fell into shopkeepers ranchers and they
Speaker 1: had to retrain. Eventually they never did come back. Well,
Speaker 1: when they did come back, they came from the east
Speaker 1: by rail. That's right. Yeah, Yeah, all those guys had
Speaker 1: to retrain. And so this is yet another one of
Speaker 1: those says in American history where the resources finally gone
Speaker 1: and you just have you have to face it. You
Speaker 1: gotta retrain and do something else. Yeah, there's another one
Speaker 1: you might know about. To another little remnant herd is
Speaker 1: the story from the story of the guys Sam walking Kyo.
Speaker 1: Sam walking coyote perhaps had gone, had gotten in a
Speaker 1: fight with his wife or divorced from his wife, and
Speaker 1: gone out to the Milk River and hunted and somehow
Speaker 1: came back home with a couple calves. Calves that followed him,
Speaker 1: and that became the source animals for what is still
Speaker 1: the National Bison Refuge for National Bises at the reserve refuge.
Speaker 1: It's uh, I think it's properly a refuge, just they're
Speaker 1: they're supposed to be administered by the Fishing Wildlife Service
Speaker 1: as a National wildlife refuge. And that so that became
Speaker 1: sam walking coyotes, animals from the milk became that source herd.
Speaker 1: Then later that heard in the Flathead Valley became the
Speaker 1: source herd for the original Alaska introductions, not reintroductions, but
Speaker 1: introductions as those animals spun off and the Canadian herds too, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think the Canadian government ended up buying
Speaker 1: that for that wild herd, and that and that was
Speaker 1: the I can't remember the name of that what that
Speaker 1: what that herd when that sprang off with that herd
Speaker 1: became all right, So check out dance books. You learn
Speaker 1: about all kinds of stuff. Um and uh and and
Speaker 1: and dan was hugely influential and and um fostering my
Speaker 1: interest in these subjects. Uh. Yeah, you haven't said ship
Speaker 1: are you building? Are you like built up with like
Speaker 1: bent up thoughts? Had those nice thoughts when we took
Speaker 1: our teat break there earlier, But um, which were that
Speaker 1: dan us talking about the the trade goods? You know
Speaker 1: that the market brought across the Atlantic and we're just
Speaker 1: down in Guyana, and how the parallels were so similar,
Speaker 1: Like they're still using their native bows, arrows. They like
Speaker 1: making a lot of that stuff, and they're they're big
Speaker 1: on um, like they know the importance I think now
Speaker 1: of sort of keeping that culture around because people like
Speaker 1: us are interested in that, you know, and there's value
Speaker 1: to that. But the one thing that has changed is
Speaker 1: like the metal, right, like they like files and machetes,
Speaker 1: and when the machete wears out, they turned that into
Speaker 1: ah an arrow point. I think you were saying right,
Speaker 1: you talked to Roving about how he made Did he
Speaker 1: ever learn how to make the points? I don't know.
Speaker 1: He remembers people using um where their bow and arrow
Speaker 1: gear was all native material. Now the only non native
Speaker 1: material is tip, which is steel. But he remembers the
Speaker 1: people using the basically a point made from cut from bamboo,
Speaker 1: and we saw those in Bolivia, those bamboo tips. So
Speaker 1: in one generation, that entire progression he's experienced. Yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: check this out. So I was there five or six
Speaker 1: years ago, and they do they hunt for fish with bows.
Speaker 1: It's one of the main ways they fish is bow fishing.
Speaker 1: I was down there five or six years ago, trying
Speaker 1: to sell them on polarized sunglasses. Okay, not ever already
Speaker 1: put them on, but check this ship out and put
Speaker 1: these you can see those fish well there didn't like
Speaker 1: the field, okay. And also shoes didn't want shoes five
Speaker 1: or six later, five or six years later. I'm not
Speaker 1: I'm not, I'm not even kind of joking. Everybody polarized
Speaker 1: sunglasses all day long, and and inn five or six
Speaker 1: years shoes, so you sing replicate me and many other
Speaker 1: people and many other people liking But it was just
Speaker 1: like it was. They were, you know what it is,
Speaker 1: and and the honest brought us up earlier it was
Speaker 1: ego tourism. We're just a constant, steady exposure to well
Speaker 1: healed outsiders who are coming down, and a lot of
Speaker 1: them like because it was still cutting edge location. A
Speaker 1: lot of them industry folks, okay, who come down with
Speaker 1: tons of ship and and just like, hey man, I
Speaker 1: brought a bunch of sunglasses done when I got back.
Speaker 1: When I went down the first time, the first thing
Speaker 1: I did when I got home was sent down. I'm
Speaker 1: not kidding. I sent down a shipload of files because
Speaker 1: they were talking about what a bitch it was to
Speaker 1: get a file, and that's how they made their fish
Speaker 1: points and ship and files were the dope, right, But
Speaker 1: it was very expensive to get a file and hard
Speaker 1: to find a file, and I sent down files. Now,
Speaker 1: I also point out that um, my main friend on there,
Speaker 1: he has an email address, so it's all very confused
Speaker 1: where he has an email address but makes his own
Speaker 1: bows and arrows from native jungle material. And if he
Speaker 1: wants to catch a fish, he goes to a to
Speaker 1: a palm and finds the fruit on the ground and
Speaker 1: cuts the fruit out open and pulls out a larva
Speaker 1: and takes the larva and puts it on a hook
Speaker 1: and catches the fish and uses that fish to catch
Speaker 1: another fish, and that fish catches the big fish that
Speaker 1: he eats, and he hunts and fishes. He hunts, fishes
Speaker 1: and farms year round except for on occasion when dudes
Speaker 1: like us go down and want to go out and
Speaker 1: see how they do ship, and them taking guys like
Speaker 1: me out to show how they do ship corrupts how
Speaker 1: they do ship absolutely or from their perspective, it doesn't
Speaker 1: krupt at all. It's just great stuff to know. It's
Speaker 1: the same way if someone came to me and they're like, hey, man,
Speaker 1: um uh, you know you guys wash your dishes by
Speaker 1: hand every night. Why not when you buy a new house,
Speaker 1: fit that sun bitch out with a dishwasher. And I'm like, hey,
Speaker 1: that's a great idea. These dishwashers are sweet. So from like,
Speaker 1: it's like a kind of colonialism, not colonialism, but it's
Speaker 1: like a colonial perspective to sort of be like, I
Speaker 1: hold the power to decide that you will or will
Speaker 1: not be exposed to these new materials. In fact, they're
Speaker 1: down there like, hey, you know, it turns out I
Speaker 1: got these polarized sunglasses in They're great because I can
Speaker 1: see fish and shoot them better the innocent It's it's
Speaker 1: what it is I think is I would just say
Speaker 1: two things. I think what you're just driving is a
Speaker 1: perfect description of probably what happened in the eighteenth and
Speaker 1: nineteenth centuries when Europeans went around the world and contacted
Speaker 1: indigenous peoples in the way we were talking about with
Speaker 1: how the market transformed the buffalo hunt, uh in the
Speaker 1: eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I think this is just a
Speaker 1: kind of a microcosm description of it. And the other
Speaker 1: thing I think I would say is that you know,
Speaker 1: we're all in the same boat because technology is proceeding
Speaker 1: so rapidly all around us that we're all getting introduced,
Speaker 1: not on a daily basis, necessarily, but maybe on a
Speaker 1: monthly basis to new technologies that we can either accept
Speaker 1: or reject. But if we reject them, a lot of
Speaker 1: times we end up kind of disadvantaging ourselves because compared
Speaker 1: to everybody, Yeah, it shifts without you and it leaves
Speaker 1: you behind. And so I think the truth is we're
Speaker 1: all in this same boat. The world is going at
Speaker 1: hyper speed. Technology can easily leave somebody behind in their
Speaker 1: lifetime or either maybe in a decade or in a
Speaker 1: couple of years. And so we're finding ourselves sort of
Speaker 1: living that same experience that you've just been describing then
Speaker 1: and that I was describing earlier from centuries ago. Um,
Speaker 1: and it's happening all around us. Yeah, I think I
Speaker 1: hijacked your concluding thought. No, you never do that, what
Speaker 1: are you talking about? No? Uh, yeah, it is like
Speaker 1: it's a perfect paralleox. And now, instead of like other
Speaker 1: the other tribes saying no, I don't want the tools
Speaker 1: or the metal, you know the machetes. They're sort of
Speaker 1: like Romans groups like very much adopted the eco tourism
Speaker 1: and that's giving them wealth and like helping his village prosper.
Speaker 1: It's like the school there, I mean it took us
Speaker 1: actually didn't take that long to get there. We got
Speaker 1: there from New York in twenty four hours to the
Speaker 1: village itself, um, and that included a couple of hour
Speaker 1: boat ride, you know. But inside the village, when you
Speaker 1: go by the school, the school, it's like you look
Speaker 1: in the window and you're like, oh, well, it looks
Speaker 1: like every other school I've seen recently, you know, kids
Speaker 1: just well and they were in uniform and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: half high high teacher to pupil ratio. But he was
Speaker 1: telling us that the other you know, camps along the
Speaker 1: river hadn't really got gotten into that yet. And it's
Speaker 1: created some jealousy, you know, their village is actually growing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well not just jealousy, but even inspired a a curse
Speaker 1: from a nearby shaman. Yeah. Well, I think, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's happening at differential rates for everybody, but I
Speaker 1: think we're all kind of caught in it. And maybe
Speaker 1: it's useful to see indigenous people's confronting it because that
Speaker 1: kind of is a mirror back on how all the
Speaker 1: rest office are having to grapple with the speed of
Speaker 1: technological change. My handful of experiences down there has um
Speaker 1: change in a remarkable way. How I view parts of
Speaker 1: our portions of our own nation's history that I'm interested in.
Speaker 1: All the parallels. Someone could very easily come in and
Speaker 1: point out that there that they're false comparisons, false analogies.
Speaker 1: But um uh, because it's not perfect, the timelines aren't perfect.
Speaker 1: But it's just fascinating, particularly the evolving relationships of people
Speaker 1: and animals and the market influence and to see people
Speaker 1: um going through a very speedy version of what we
Speaker 1: went through of within a single generation being engaged and
Speaker 1: being introduced to market hunting, engaging in market hunting, realizing
Speaker 1: where market hunting is going, and looking for a sustainable
Speaker 1: model to have that play out in a person's lifetime.
Speaker 1: You're seeing like like in some way, you're seeing a
Speaker 1: hundred years of American history can pressed down really tightly
Speaker 1: in part because of the technology you're talking about, where
Speaker 1: ideas can cycle in so quickly. Yeah, it's both ideas
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, the goods, the technical, logical, uh
Speaker 1: possibilities all at the same time. And I think you're
Speaker 1: exactly right. We're seeing it in a sort of a
Speaker 1: hyper drive microcosm, replicating the last five years of world
Speaker 1: history but happening in the space of a few years. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's good or bad. Any other
Speaker 1: final things. Yeah, that's intense. That's my final thought. Dan,
Speaker 1: anything you'd like to add, Thanks for having me on
Speaker 1: and say thanks for coming. Thanks to both you guys
Speaker 1: for being here. This makes it easy to do a
Speaker 1: podcast when we're sitting here on my couch. Yeah. Again,
Speaker 1: I want to thank you, and I really want to
Speaker 1: implore I really hope people do go check out your books,
Speaker 1: especially if if you've always you know, if you tend
Speaker 1: to only and I'm guilting this too, if you tend
Speaker 1: to only view a wild life from the perspective of
Speaker 1: hunting right and through that kind of media, I think
Speaker 1: it's helpful to to to step into um a historian
Speaker 1: like a trained historian shoes and look at wildlife a
Speaker 1: little bit because it, uh, it adds a layer to
Speaker 1: it that you don't get in the kind of normal
Speaker 1: conversations about wildlife and wildlife management that we engage in UM,
Speaker 1: where we're talking about like what we're doing now, what's
Speaker 1: going on now, threats at wildlife habitat now to step
Speaker 1: back and go like, oh, so that's the that's how
Speaker 1: we arrived at where we're at. Those are the things
Speaker 1: that shaped our understandings, the mistakes we've made, the successes
Speaker 1: we've had. UM. I think it's really enlightening. So yeah,
Speaker 1: hopefully you go check out Dan's uh not just his
Speaker 1: not just his books, but if you want to dig
Speaker 1: into the deep web, you'll find some of your academic
Speaker 1: pieces from your your past life as a peer reviewed journal,
Speaker 1: peer reviewed historian. So again that Dan, thank you very
Speaker 1: much for joining him. Thank you man and also Man,
Speaker 1: I just want to remind everyone please UM go and
Speaker 1: give go and give a big gas five star review.
Speaker 1: Me need your podcast. Thank you very much,