1
00:00:01,360 --> 00:00:05,680
Speaker 1: Following the collapse of the Grand Chaco and Empire, refugees

2
00:00:05,760 --> 00:00:09,400
Speaker 1: founded eight thriving new towns along the Galisteo River of

3
00:00:09,440 --> 00:00:13,880
Speaker 1: New Mexico, but ultimately found it difficult to sustain an

4
00:00:13,920 --> 00:00:19,239
Speaker 1: arid climate civilization across the next five hundred years. I'm

5
00:00:19,360 --> 00:00:23,639
Speaker 1: Dan Flores and this is the American West, brought to

6
00:00:23,680 --> 00:00:27,000
Speaker 1: you by Velvet Buck, Crafted for those who live off

7
00:00:27,040 --> 00:00:30,360
Speaker 1: the beaten path, where the hunt meets the harvest, and

8
00:00:30,480 --> 00:00:47,520
Speaker 1: every glass tells a story. Enjoy responsibly, West of Everything.

9
00:00:57,920 --> 00:01:00,600
Speaker 1: Thinking of a podcast about the American West and my

10
00:01:00,720 --> 00:01:03,160
Speaker 1: own take on its history has had me trying to

11
00:01:03,240 --> 00:01:07,160
Speaker 1: understand recently why the West resonates with us the way

12
00:01:07,200 --> 00:01:11,240
Speaker 1: it does. Apologies to New England, New York, the South,

13
00:01:11,360 --> 00:01:14,440
Speaker 1: the Midwest, but the West seems to fascinate the world

14
00:01:14,560 --> 00:01:18,160
Speaker 1: in a way no other American region can. Why are

15
00:01:18,200 --> 00:01:21,280
Speaker 1: their television channels devoted twenty four to seven to playing

16
00:01:21,440 --> 00:01:25,040
Speaker 1: seventy five year old Western movies, so a John Wayne

17
00:01:25,040 --> 00:01:28,920
Speaker 1: fix is available at just about any sleepless three am.

18
00:01:29,440 --> 00:01:33,640
Speaker 1: Why does a contemporary soap opera Western like Yellowstone succeed

19
00:01:33,720 --> 00:01:37,039
Speaker 1: with so many people? Why do Germans dress up and

20
00:01:37,160 --> 00:01:40,160
Speaker 1: play act being residents of the West on their vacation

21
00:01:40,319 --> 00:01:44,200
Speaker 1: weekends in European forest. How does back at the Ranch

22
00:01:44,240 --> 00:01:48,440
Speaker 1: Bootstore in Santa Fe sell five thousand dollars cowboy boots

23
00:01:48,680 --> 00:01:51,680
Speaker 1: that will never see a stirrup? Why is there a

24
00:01:51,760 --> 00:01:55,800
Speaker 1: cowboy poets gathering in Nevada every winter? Why a gene

25
00:01:55,800 --> 00:02:00,080
Speaker 1: Autrey Museum in la a Buffalo Bill Historical Museum in Cody,

26
00:02:00,280 --> 00:02:03,000
Speaker 1: a National Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City?

27
00:02:03,360 --> 00:02:03,919
Speaker 2: And why?

28
00:02:04,360 --> 00:02:07,320
Speaker 1: Maybe this is the most serious question here, does the

29
00:02:07,360 --> 00:02:11,200
Speaker 1: phrase just like the Wild West cause all of us

30
00:02:11,240 --> 00:02:15,800
Speaker 1: to imagine entire freedom of action, a whole lack of restraint,

31
00:02:16,000 --> 00:02:20,639
Speaker 1: a free for all. Nobody is regulating all that reverence

32
00:02:20,680 --> 00:02:24,440
Speaker 1: and fascination for the West happens for good reason, because

33
00:02:24,440 --> 00:02:28,119
Speaker 1: of its sunshine and the public lands that provide remarkable

34
00:02:28,160 --> 00:02:31,560
Speaker 1: access to the surrounding landscape. The West is a great

35
00:02:31,600 --> 00:02:34,480
Speaker 1: place to live in the present, but as we all know,

36
00:02:34,720 --> 00:02:37,320
Speaker 1: it's the past of the West that's the key to

37
00:02:37,360 --> 00:02:40,080
Speaker 1: its magic. Those of us who live in the West

38
00:02:40,200 --> 00:02:43,400
Speaker 1: may love various aspects of the modern world out the door,

39
00:02:43,919 --> 00:02:48,480
Speaker 1: but we all absolutely adore the old West, the frontier.

40
00:02:51,600 --> 00:02:54,840
Speaker 1: We've absorbed it by watching films by john Ford and

41
00:02:54,919 --> 00:02:59,480
Speaker 1: Quentin Tarantino, reading novels by Louis Lamore and Cormac McCarthy,

42
00:02:59,760 --> 00:03:04,480
Speaker 1: and histories by Steven Ambrose and Hampton Sides. Of course,

43
00:03:04,520 --> 00:03:07,000
Speaker 1: there are many versions of the West, and all of

44
00:03:07,080 --> 00:03:10,640
Speaker 1: us have a personal preference for our favorite version. Clearly,

45
00:03:10,720 --> 00:03:13,800
Speaker 1: for john Ford or Quentin Tarantino, it's the Cowboy West

46
00:03:14,000 --> 00:03:16,200
Speaker 1: of so many hundreds of Western movies.

47
00:03:16,919 --> 00:03:18,600
Speaker 2: For others, it's the West.

48
00:03:18,280 --> 00:03:21,920
Speaker 1: Of town building and Wyatt Earp's or Marshall Dillon's imposition

49
00:03:22,040 --> 00:03:25,960
Speaker 1: of law and order, or of settlers versus railroads are

50
00:03:26,000 --> 00:03:30,760
Speaker 1: the gunfighter stories that Tarantino obviously also loves and loves

51
00:03:30,800 --> 00:03:34,800
Speaker 1: to invert. And of course there's the Indian Wars West

52
00:03:34,840 --> 00:03:38,040
Speaker 1: of a few hundred movies and a few thousand paintings.

53
00:03:39,760 --> 00:03:43,840
Speaker 1: But as a modern Westerner, a writer and historian who

54
00:03:43,880 --> 00:03:47,840
Speaker 1: is interested most in the West, remarkable landscapes and animals,

55
00:03:48,280 --> 00:03:50,800
Speaker 1: the West that does it for me is one most

56
00:03:50,800 --> 00:03:54,840
Speaker 1: people may not think of as iconic. I'm most drawn

57
00:03:54,920 --> 00:03:58,000
Speaker 1: to what Western artist Charlie Russell, in one of his

58
00:03:58,160 --> 00:04:03,920
Speaker 1: magnificent paintings, called when the Land belonged to God? For me,

59
00:04:04,040 --> 00:04:06,200
Speaker 1: the West that speaks to my deepest soul is the

60
00:04:06,240 --> 00:04:09,840
Speaker 1: West either side of Lewis and Clark. How the kind

61
00:04:09,880 --> 00:04:13,680
Speaker 1: of natural West they saw came to be and lasted

62
00:04:13,720 --> 00:04:16,920
Speaker 1: for so long? Plus what has happened to that version

63
00:04:16,920 --> 00:04:19,839
Speaker 1: of the West in the centuries since Lewis and Clark

64
00:04:19,960 --> 00:04:24,159
Speaker 1: saw it. That's the West I try to understand. To me,

65
00:04:24,320 --> 00:04:28,920
Speaker 1: that's the true West, a natural West, one that's west

66
00:04:29,000 --> 00:04:34,440
Speaker 1: of everything else. In part, my West is a kind

67
00:04:34,480 --> 00:04:38,000
Speaker 1: of a first contact West, a theme of much science

68
00:04:38,040 --> 00:04:41,640
Speaker 1: fiction and fascination with exploring places like Mars in the

69
00:04:41,680 --> 00:04:45,360
Speaker 1: next few decades. It's about travel to strange places, new

70
00:04:45,400 --> 00:04:48,640
Speaker 1: country and new animals, the meeting place of an exotic,

71
00:04:48,760 --> 00:04:52,479
Speaker 1: ancient world and modernity. Come to think of it, the

72
00:04:52,600 --> 00:04:56,080
Speaker 1: natural West is not only our future on Mars, it's

73
00:04:56,120 --> 00:04:59,640
Speaker 1: also our deep past. When modern humans left Africa more

74
00:04:59,640 --> 00:05:02,760
Speaker 1: than fi fifty thousand years ago and began to explore

75
00:05:02,800 --> 00:05:06,320
Speaker 1: the rest of the Earth, America's West, in many ways,

76
00:05:06,440 --> 00:05:10,680
Speaker 1: was a last earthly experience of that first contact moment

77
00:05:10,920 --> 00:05:17,400
Speaker 1: in human history when new people's first meet. Everybody experiences

78
00:05:17,440 --> 00:05:21,280
Speaker 1: first contact, but usually only one side sees the natural

79
00:05:21,320 --> 00:05:25,400
Speaker 1: world as new and exotic, a new world. The resident

80
00:05:25,440 --> 00:05:29,120
Speaker 1: people tend to think invasion, and so it is. Yet

81
00:05:29,160 --> 00:05:32,120
Speaker 1: all of us have ancestors who bequeathed us more than

82
00:05:32,200 --> 00:05:36,440
Speaker 1: twenty thousand years of first contact experiences in North America.

83
00:05:37,120 --> 00:05:39,679
Speaker 1: So I think I come by a fascination for stories

84
00:05:39,720 --> 00:05:41,400
Speaker 1: like this naturally, and of.

85
00:05:41,360 --> 00:05:42,039
Speaker 2: Course so do you.

86
00:05:43,480 --> 00:05:45,400
Speaker 1: Those of us who are in love with the natural

87
00:05:45,440 --> 00:05:48,680
Speaker 1: West are usually attracted to the world of native people,

88
00:05:49,200 --> 00:05:53,320
Speaker 1: to natural landscapes, and to wild animals. Being intrigued by

89
00:05:53,320 --> 00:05:56,200
Speaker 1: the native West is self evidently at the core of

90
00:05:56,279 --> 00:06:00,400
Speaker 1: Western fascination, judging by the volume and quality of Western

91
00:06:00,480 --> 00:06:03,640
Speaker 1: landscape art and the way the Western landscape becomes a

92
00:06:03,720 --> 00:06:06,599
Speaker 1: character in so many films. Judging by the number of

93
00:06:06,680 --> 00:06:10,200
Speaker 1: Crown Jewel national parks in the West, the same can

94
00:06:10,240 --> 00:06:13,880
Speaker 1: be said of the Western landscape. But let's say at

95
00:06:13,920 --> 00:06:17,839
Speaker 1: the outset. The West I'm talking about is not synonymous

96
00:06:17,880 --> 00:06:18,840
Speaker 1: with the frontier.

97
00:06:19,760 --> 00:06:22,640
Speaker 2: When the Old World came to North America.

98
00:06:22,400 --> 00:06:25,760
Speaker 1: Every place on the continent had a frontier, a meeting

99
00:06:25,800 --> 00:06:29,840
Speaker 1: point between what existed and what was coming. But the

100
00:06:29,960 --> 00:06:32,920
Speaker 1: natural West of which I speak is not defined by

101
00:06:33,040 --> 00:06:37,560
Speaker 1: a moment in time a frontier. It's a place, a

102
00:06:37,680 --> 00:06:41,760
Speaker 1: region of plains, mountains, and deserts, on the sunset side

103
00:06:41,839 --> 00:06:45,640
Speaker 1: of the Mississippi River. The timeframe of the natural West

104
00:06:45,800 --> 00:06:49,039
Speaker 1: is not just its frontier stage. The story of this

105
00:06:49,160 --> 00:06:52,119
Speaker 1: West is much more ancient, and it also takes place

106
00:06:52,200 --> 00:06:55,680
Speaker 1: more recently than the frontier. Because the past does not

107
00:06:55,760 --> 00:06:58,760
Speaker 1: remain in the past, but affects us in our own time.

108
00:06:59,240 --> 00:07:02,680
Speaker 1: The story of the West continues beyond the frontier and

109
00:07:02,839 --> 00:07:06,960
Speaker 1: into the twenty first century. Many of the Western stories

110
00:07:07,000 --> 00:07:09,840
Speaker 1: I've written about and will tell in this podcast are

111
00:07:09,880 --> 00:07:13,680
Speaker 1: the stories of the West's wildlife, very much an ignored

112
00:07:13,720 --> 00:07:17,440
Speaker 1: topic in the West and elsewhere. The cow and the sheep,

113
00:07:17,640 --> 00:07:20,280
Speaker 1: and to a certain extent, even the saddled horse, are

114
00:07:20,320 --> 00:07:24,240
Speaker 1: the animals we associate with the West of trail driving, ranching,

115
00:07:24,440 --> 00:07:27,440
Speaker 1: town building, But I have to observe that not one

116
00:07:27,440 --> 00:07:31,000
Speaker 1: of them appears in Charlie Russell's When the Land Belonged

117
00:07:31,040 --> 00:07:35,840
Speaker 1: to God. Russell's timeless scene of a bison herd flanked

118
00:07:35,840 --> 00:07:39,600
Speaker 1: by gray wolves pouring over a divide in a landscape

119
00:07:39,680 --> 00:07:43,840
Speaker 1: we old worlders would one day call Montana implied that

120
00:07:43,960 --> 00:07:47,520
Speaker 1: the divine world in the West was a Native America.

121
00:07:49,840 --> 00:07:53,640
Speaker 1: So let's start there, but not necessarily at its beginning.

122
00:07:54,000 --> 00:07:57,560
Speaker 1: At least not yet. Let's commence our exploration of the

123
00:07:57,680 --> 00:08:01,520
Speaker 1: natural West slightly later in time. We'll return to beginnings

124
00:08:01,560 --> 00:08:04,280
Speaker 1: in the next episodes with a story that makes the

125
00:08:04,320 --> 00:08:07,480
Speaker 1: point that the West is not new, but a very

126
00:08:07,560 --> 00:08:13,120
Speaker 1: old place. This story stretches our imaginations, suggests how central

127
00:08:13,240 --> 00:08:17,200
Speaker 1: and fragile Western ecologies have always been to human life here,

128
00:08:17,640 --> 00:08:20,840
Speaker 1: and illustrates the longevity of the human experience in a

129
00:08:20,880 --> 00:08:25,320
Speaker 1: country where reflexively still thinking of as the newest part

130
00:08:25,400 --> 00:08:37,560
Speaker 1: of America. On a sun drenched November afternoon, I sit

131
00:08:37,760 --> 00:08:40,240
Speaker 1: in t shirt and shorts a few feet from the

132
00:08:40,320 --> 00:08:43,960
Speaker 1: edge of a canyon rimrock, looking through four hundred feet

133
00:08:44,000 --> 00:08:47,680
Speaker 1: of transparent desert air on a thousand year old city.

134
00:08:48,679 --> 00:08:51,000
Speaker 1: My wife Sarah is pulling a bottle of water from

135
00:08:51,000 --> 00:08:54,320
Speaker 1: her pack. A few feet away. Various friends are scattered

136
00:08:54,320 --> 00:08:58,360
Speaker 1: along rock cairn marked trails through the uplands behind us,

137
00:08:58,640 --> 00:09:03,200
Speaker 1: where the faint indentation of ancient highways four hundred miles

138
00:09:03,200 --> 00:09:08,720
Speaker 1: of them, extend to horizons miles distant. The whole country

139
00:09:08,920 --> 00:09:13,760
Speaker 1: sagebrush uplands, the canyon floor, the enclosing rimrocks, and the

140
00:09:13,880 --> 00:09:16,920
Speaker 1: ruins with odd names that lie in every direction below

141
00:09:17,400 --> 00:09:21,360
Speaker 1: is a uniform tannish brown, the color of dust or

142
00:09:21,360 --> 00:09:30,240
Speaker 1: perhaps the color of abandonment. During the time of the

143
00:09:30,280 --> 00:09:33,680
Speaker 1: Crusades in Europe, this spot and another on the east

144
00:09:33,720 --> 00:09:36,960
Speaker 1: bank of the Mississippi River just across from today Saint Louis,

145
00:09:37,320 --> 00:09:42,640
Speaker 1: held the two largest cities in North America, both religious centers,

146
00:09:42,679 --> 00:09:46,680
Speaker 1: with a ceremonial effigy mound of lizards and serpents, and

147
00:09:46,760 --> 00:09:50,040
Speaker 1: a stone hinge like circle of upright timbers planted to

148
00:09:50,080 --> 00:09:52,280
Speaker 1: mark out soices and equinoxes.

149
00:09:52,720 --> 00:09:56,560
Speaker 2: The city in the Eastern Woods today we call it Kahokia.

150
00:09:56,120 --> 00:10:00,160
Speaker 1: Probably held a fairly permanent population of thirty thousand people,

151
00:10:00,480 --> 00:10:04,280
Speaker 1: larger than London at that time. I first saw Kahokia

152
00:10:04,320 --> 00:10:06,800
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen nineties with a girlfriend who had

153
00:10:06,880 --> 00:10:11,440
Speaker 1: Missouri roots and insisted we visit the place. I'd seen mounds,

154
00:10:11,640 --> 00:10:15,000
Speaker 1: but never anything on the scale of Monks Mound towering

155
00:10:15,080 --> 00:10:17,959
Speaker 1: up out of the American bottoms like an earth and

156
00:10:18,080 --> 00:10:22,720
Speaker 1: Chichenitsan pyramid. After three hundred years of urban life, an

157
00:10:22,720 --> 00:10:26,920
Speaker 1: earthquake mostly destroyed Kahokia City, but not before its population

158
00:10:27,000 --> 00:10:30,080
Speaker 1: had gone through twenty thousand trees and almost all the

159
00:10:30,120 --> 00:10:34,120
Speaker 1: wildlife for scores of miles around. As for the city

160
00:10:34,120 --> 00:10:37,800
Speaker 1: whose ruins lay below us now either side of ten

161
00:10:37,920 --> 00:10:42,160
Speaker 1: centuries ago. From eight hundred AD to eleven forty AD,

162
00:10:42,600 --> 00:10:46,160
Speaker 1: it was the Vatican of the American Desert. We call

163
00:10:46,200 --> 00:10:50,880
Speaker 1: it Chaco, and it's another of our UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

164
00:10:51,880 --> 00:10:54,880
Speaker 1: Chaco was the closest Native America ever got to an

165
00:10:54,880 --> 00:10:59,240
Speaker 1: empire like those of the Aztecs, Mayans, or Incas. But

166
00:10:59,320 --> 00:11:02,840
Speaker 1: this was not an empire of warrior armies and conquered provinces.

167
00:11:03,120 --> 00:11:06,560
Speaker 1: It was an empire of priests who organized many thousands

168
00:11:06,640 --> 00:11:10,840
Speaker 1: of scattered farming hamlets across fifty thousand square miles of

169
00:11:10,920 --> 00:11:15,400
Speaker 1: today's four corners into an economic and religious network. No

170
00:11:15,480 --> 00:11:19,440
Speaker 1: European principality of the age matched it. What the priest's

171
00:11:19,480 --> 00:11:22,880
Speaker 1: promised was direct intervention with the deities who controlled rain,

172
00:11:23,240 --> 00:11:28,120
Speaker 1: crops and animals, those grand imponderables whose presence made life

173
00:11:28,160 --> 00:11:32,360
Speaker 1: good and whose absence ruined it. The city of Chaco

174
00:11:32,520 --> 00:11:37,040
Speaker 1: housed the priests, their families, and a resident population of thousands.

175
00:11:37,400 --> 00:11:41,560
Speaker 1: It stored and distributed surplus crops. Then at solstices and

176
00:11:41,640 --> 00:11:45,120
Speaker 1: other special times of year, it hosted grand ceremonies, to

177
00:11:45,160 --> 00:11:49,640
Speaker 1: which the outlying residents made holy pilgrimages. At those times,

178
00:11:49,720 --> 00:11:54,080
Speaker 1: Choco gathered a population of some forty thousand. Looking down

179
00:11:54,080 --> 00:11:57,040
Speaker 1: now on its buildings and avenues, one suspects both the

180
00:11:57,120 --> 00:12:01,760
Speaker 1: ceremonies and the nightlife must have been epic. Choco America

181
00:12:01,880 --> 00:12:04,719
Speaker 1: almost seems foreign in the modern United States, as if

182
00:12:04,800 --> 00:12:09,000
Speaker 1: lifted from the Middle East. The agricultural revolution arrived in

183
00:12:09,040 --> 00:12:12,720
Speaker 1: this region thirteen hundred years before the city existed, and

184
00:12:12,840 --> 00:12:17,760
Speaker 1: pollen studies indicate this development produced two immediate environmental effects.

185
00:12:18,400 --> 00:12:22,560
Speaker 1: Human populations skyrocketed, and crops that needed to be boiled

186
00:12:22,600 --> 00:12:25,560
Speaker 1: before you could eat them meant that daily cooking fires

187
00:12:25,960 --> 00:12:30,480
Speaker 1: soon reduced a robust pinions juniper woodland to desert. This

188
00:12:30,559 --> 00:12:33,400
Speaker 1: became a world in need of priests who could intervene

189
00:12:33,440 --> 00:12:39,199
Speaker 1: with the gods. Sitting and admiring the sprawling, hemispheric architecture

190
00:12:39,240 --> 00:12:43,360
Speaker 1: of Chaco's largest structure, Pueblo Benito, as its lines and

191
00:12:43,440 --> 00:12:46,360
Speaker 1: shadows shimmer in the afternoon sun, I know this is

192
00:12:46,400 --> 00:12:50,440
Speaker 1: a place that reveals much about humanity. Sarah passes the

193
00:12:50,480 --> 00:12:53,120
Speaker 1: water bottle over to me, and reading my mind, sums

194
00:12:53,160 --> 00:12:53,520
Speaker 1: it up.

195
00:12:54,200 --> 00:12:56,920
Speaker 2: It wasn't until the eighteen eighties that anyone built a

196
00:12:57,040 --> 00:13:00,280
Speaker 2: larger building than that in America. In its time, the

197
00:13:00,320 --> 00:13:03,960
Speaker 2: city lasted longer than Washington, d C. Has so far.

198
00:13:07,000 --> 00:13:11,280
Speaker 1: Chaco and its satellite hamlets survive, in fact, for three

199
00:13:11,360 --> 00:13:14,959
Speaker 1: hundred and forty years. The shorthand version of its collapse

200
00:13:15,080 --> 00:13:17,440
Speaker 1: is that it all ended with a series of droughts

201
00:13:17,440 --> 00:13:21,760
Speaker 1: across the Southwest, and that's true, but the many archaeologists

202
00:13:21,760 --> 00:13:25,080
Speaker 1: who have interpreted Chaco know that much more happened here.

203
00:13:25,880 --> 00:13:30,040
Speaker 1: When the rain stopped coming, the farmers seemed to act abruptly,

204
00:13:30,400 --> 00:13:33,600
Speaker 1: dropping their digging sticks in the fields, turning their backs

205
00:13:33,640 --> 00:13:37,920
Speaker 1: on the grand religious gatherings at Chaco, and relocating.

206
00:13:37,240 --> 00:13:38,479
Speaker 2: Across the southwest.

207
00:13:39,160 --> 00:13:41,679
Speaker 1: Some went north to what we now call Mesa Verdi's

208
00:13:41,679 --> 00:13:45,400
Speaker 1: Cliff Palace in present Colorado. Most of the people who

209
00:13:45,480 --> 00:13:49,520
Speaker 1: abandoned the Chaco and world congregated along the Upper Rio Grand,

210
00:13:49,640 --> 00:13:54,720
Speaker 1: eventually founding towns still home to their descendants, the Pueblo peoples,

211
00:13:54,880 --> 00:13:59,440
Speaker 1: famous for their apartment like villages, geometrically painted pottery, and

212
00:13:59,440 --> 00:14:04,040
Speaker 1: turquoise jewelry. Why did Choco collapse in what sounds.

213
00:14:03,679 --> 00:14:04,720
Speaker 2: Like a fit of peak.

214
00:14:05,520 --> 00:14:09,280
Speaker 1: The evidence and ultimately the response of the pueblos afterwards

215
00:14:09,520 --> 00:14:13,320
Speaker 1: points to a crisis we should recognize. Down there in

216
00:14:13,360 --> 00:14:17,160
Speaker 1: Pueblo Bonito, a single room out of six hundred and

217
00:14:17,200 --> 00:14:22,280
Speaker 1: fifty rooms yielded the remains of fourteen people whose funerary

218
00:14:22,400 --> 00:14:28,440
Speaker 1: items indicated they represented Chaco's religious and political elites. In

219
00:14:28,480 --> 00:14:32,520
Speaker 1: the room were flutes, ceremonial staffs, thousands of pieces of

220
00:14:32,560 --> 00:14:36,800
Speaker 1: turquoise jewelry, cont shell trumpets from America's west coast, the

221
00:14:36,920 --> 00:14:41,040
Speaker 1: remains of macaw parrots from the tropics, The oldest burial

222
00:14:41,160 --> 00:14:43,960
Speaker 1: dated to eight hundred a d. And the last from

223
00:14:44,040 --> 00:14:49,480
Speaker 1: Choco's abandonment. So those fourteen span the entire life of

224
00:14:49,520 --> 00:14:51,000
Speaker 1: the city, and.

225
00:14:50,960 --> 00:14:51,600
Speaker 2: Not just that.

226
00:14:52,040 --> 00:14:55,440
Speaker 1: The genetics of nine of the fourteen showed them to

227
00:14:55,480 --> 00:14:59,920
Speaker 1: be descended from the same matrilineal line from a woman

228
00:15:00,160 --> 00:15:06,000
Speaker 1: who evidently had been there at Chaco's founding. Disparities in

229
00:15:06,080 --> 00:15:09,600
Speaker 1: wealth and quality of life, along with the resentments they produce,

230
00:15:09,840 --> 00:15:14,440
Speaker 1: are familiar to modern Americans. Isotope comparisons of the bones

231
00:15:14,440 --> 00:15:17,600
Speaker 1: of the priestly class in Choco's great houses with those

232
00:15:17,640 --> 00:15:21,600
Speaker 1: of farmers from the villages indicates that the elites consumed

233
00:15:21,800 --> 00:15:25,400
Speaker 1: far more protein from the meat of deer and prong horns.

234
00:15:26,000 --> 00:15:29,520
Speaker 1: They were better fed, grew almost two inches taller, suffered

235
00:15:29,600 --> 00:15:32,920
Speaker 1: less from disease, had three times the survival rate for

236
00:15:33,000 --> 00:15:37,720
Speaker 1: children under five, and lived longer. They were also conspicuous

237
00:15:37,760 --> 00:15:42,440
Speaker 1: consumers of high status goods, from beautiful pots to copper bells,

238
00:15:42,640 --> 00:15:46,960
Speaker 1: from turquoise jewelry to parrots. In the late eighteen hundreds,

239
00:15:47,000 --> 00:15:51,160
Speaker 1: an early archaeologist working in Chaco shipped more than seventy

240
00:15:51,280 --> 00:15:55,800
Speaker 1: thousand high status items just from Pueblo Benito to the

241
00:15:55,840 --> 00:16:00,160
Speaker 1: American Museum of Natural History. The farming class suffered this

242
00:16:00,200 --> 00:16:02,800
Speaker 1: gap between rich and poor as long as the elites

243
00:16:02,920 --> 00:16:06,040
Speaker 1: delivered on their promise to make it rain. But when

244
00:16:06,120 --> 00:16:09,280
Speaker 1: drought came and the priests were powerless to stop it,

245
00:16:09,320 --> 00:16:13,000
Speaker 1: the lower classes attacked and killed many in the upper class.

246
00:16:13,720 --> 00:16:19,320
Speaker 1: They also embraced a new belief, the Kachina religion. By

247
00:16:19,360 --> 00:16:23,760
Speaker 1: the year eleven sixty, massive three story public buildings like

248
00:16:23,880 --> 00:16:27,760
Speaker 1: Chetro Kettle, a four hundred room great house in Chako

249
00:16:28,160 --> 00:16:33,080
Speaker 1: that was built with fifty million sandstone blocks, twenty six

250
00:16:33,160 --> 00:16:37,360
Speaker 1: thousand timbers and extended for four hundred and fifty feet

251
00:16:37,400 --> 00:16:42,520
Speaker 1: beneath a canyon wall, stood completely abandoned as for animal

252
00:16:42,560 --> 00:16:46,160
Speaker 1: life in the Chacoan region. Diet studies in the collapses

253
00:16:46,240 --> 00:16:50,160
Speaker 1: aftermath implied that rabbits and rodents were almost the only

254
00:16:50,320 --> 00:16:54,560
Speaker 1: huntable animals left. Their need for protein perhaps explains why

255
00:16:54,640 --> 00:16:57,560
Speaker 1: some of the new villages were founded close to the

256
00:16:57,560 --> 00:17:09,440
Speaker 1: bison planes. One March afternoon in the early two thousands,

257
00:17:09,720 --> 00:17:12,680
Speaker 1: I opened the passenger door of a pickup, stretched out

258
00:17:12,720 --> 00:17:15,119
Speaker 1: a hiking boot to the ground, and had one of

259
00:17:15,160 --> 00:17:20,840
Speaker 1: those small steps for man moments until I exited that

260
00:17:20,920 --> 00:17:24,000
Speaker 1: pickup and began to walk on a surface that spoke,

261
00:17:24,560 --> 00:17:27,800
Speaker 1: it crunched, it crinkled. I'd never had the kind of

262
00:17:27,880 --> 00:17:31,960
Speaker 1: visceral understanding of America's ancient past I was now experiencing.

263
00:17:33,160 --> 00:17:36,680
Speaker 1: I was walking into a place known to Southwestern archaeologists

264
00:17:37,040 --> 00:17:41,919
Speaker 1: as the San Lazaro Ruins. With every step, my boots

265
00:17:41,960 --> 00:17:46,040
Speaker 1: were landing on broken shards of Indian pottery half a

266
00:17:46,119 --> 00:17:50,520
Speaker 1: foot deep. That brought a profound realization. I was walking

267
00:17:50,600 --> 00:17:53,919
Speaker 1: on ground that humans long before me had lived on

268
00:17:54,160 --> 00:17:58,360
Speaker 1: for some three hundred years. In every direction, the ground

269
00:17:58,440 --> 00:18:04,360
Speaker 1: underfoot was a thick, continuous surface of curving, angled, shattered pottery.

270
00:18:04,680 --> 00:18:07,960
Speaker 1: The pieces set at all angles and drawing the eye

271
00:18:08,040 --> 00:18:12,760
Speaker 1: with painted zigzags and designs in blacks and reds. This

272
00:18:12,800 --> 00:18:15,600
Speaker 1: is how the people who lived here seven hundred years

273
00:18:15,640 --> 00:18:19,840
Speaker 1: ago must have experienced a stroll around their town. I thought,

274
00:18:20,640 --> 00:18:23,960
Speaker 1: it's how the pioneers of archaeology in the West, the

275
00:18:23,960 --> 00:18:28,399
Speaker 1: Adolf Bandeliers, the Alfred Kidters and Edgar Hewletts, no doubt

276
00:18:28,400 --> 00:18:31,080
Speaker 1: felt the first time they walked across the ruins of

277
00:18:31,160 --> 00:18:35,080
Speaker 1: Chaco or Mesa Verdi, or the country I was in now,

278
00:18:35,520 --> 00:18:39,120
Speaker 1: the Galistaloe River country south of Santa Fe.

279
00:18:40,840 --> 00:18:42,600
Speaker 2: I was having this experience.

280
00:18:42,119 --> 00:18:45,520
Speaker 1: Because I've become friends with a remarkable Santa Fe character

281
00:18:45,720 --> 00:18:49,960
Speaker 1: named Forrest Finn. Among many aspects of Finn's world that

282
00:18:50,080 --> 00:18:54,000
Speaker 1: seemed more than improbable was that he actually owned the

283
00:18:54,080 --> 00:18:57,880
Speaker 1: ground where the ruins of San Lazaro stood. That's why

284
00:18:57,920 --> 00:19:01,520
Speaker 1: we were here. He was proudly showing off his possession

285
00:19:01,880 --> 00:19:05,800
Speaker 1: of the largest ancestral pueblo village site in the Santa

286
00:19:05,800 --> 00:19:10,080
Speaker 1: Fe area. A native Texan and a former Vietnam fighter

287
00:19:10,119 --> 00:19:13,680
Speaker 1: pilot who survived being shot down to become a successful

288
00:19:13,800 --> 00:19:17,000
Speaker 1: art gallery owner in Santa Fe. Fenn was in his

289
00:19:17,119 --> 00:19:21,439
Speaker 1: late seventies. Then his body leaned his silvery hair still

290
00:19:21,520 --> 00:19:22,920
Speaker 1: in a military buzz cut.

291
00:19:23,680 --> 00:19:25,320
Speaker 2: When we struck up a friendship, I.

292
00:19:25,280 --> 00:19:30,080
Speaker 1: Found him garrulous, hugely energetic, and, despite a slender education,

293
00:19:30,560 --> 00:19:31,800
Speaker 1: fiercely opinionated.

294
00:19:32,480 --> 00:19:33,960
Speaker 2: True to his Texas roots.

295
00:19:34,160 --> 00:19:37,639
Speaker 1: Those opinions included a hatred for the federal government and

296
00:19:37,720 --> 00:19:41,919
Speaker 1: a distrust of educated elites. Although he could occasionally be

297
00:19:42,000 --> 00:19:46,720
Speaker 1: impressed by experts, Fenn was as dedicated to Old West

298
00:19:46,880 --> 00:19:51,200
Speaker 1: history as fundamentalists are in Old Time religion. His home

299
00:19:51,280 --> 00:19:55,760
Speaker 1: came across as a combination museum, archive, and archaeology lab.

300
00:19:56,320 --> 00:19:59,760
Speaker 1: He outdid anyone in my experience with his boyish, hucked

301
00:19:59,760 --> 00:20:03,199
Speaker 1: finn like romance about Western adventure, which led him to

302
00:20:03,240 --> 00:20:08,080
Speaker 1: invest prodigious energy in several seriously crazy projects that made

303
00:20:08,240 --> 00:20:13,280
Speaker 1: many people WinCE. One was acquiring and doing amateur excavations

304
00:20:13,440 --> 00:20:16,960
Speaker 1: at a major site like San Lazaro. The last of

305
00:20:17,040 --> 00:20:20,280
Speaker 1: Forrest's grand ideas, when he was in his eighties, got

306
00:20:20,359 --> 00:20:25,280
Speaker 1: him national exposure that wasn't always admiring. He buried a

307
00:20:25,320 --> 00:20:28,960
Speaker 1: treasure chest containing more than two million dollars of precious

308
00:20:29,080 --> 00:20:32,520
Speaker 1: artifacts from around the world in a secret location in

309
00:20:32,560 --> 00:20:36,080
Speaker 1: the West, then self published a book featuring a page

310
00:20:36,119 --> 00:20:40,200
Speaker 1: of verse offering clues to its hiding spot. More than

311
00:20:40,240 --> 00:20:44,399
Speaker 1: one person died, and untold thousands trecked the West's vast

312
00:20:44,400 --> 00:20:47,680
Speaker 1: public lands in search of a treasure that to forest

313
00:20:48,200 --> 00:20:52,480
Speaker 1: offered ordinary folks a chance to reprise a classic Old

314
00:20:52,520 --> 00:20:55,960
Speaker 1: West opportunity, finding loot and.

315
00:20:55,880 --> 00:20:57,439
Speaker 2: Making a mint off nature.

316
00:21:00,119 --> 00:21:04,000
Speaker 1: San Lazaro had once been one of eight major Indian

317
00:21:04,080 --> 00:21:08,200
Speaker 1: towns that post Choco spread across the Galiso River near

318
00:21:08,240 --> 00:21:12,000
Speaker 1: where Spain would found Santa Fe in the year sixteen ten.

319
00:21:12,760 --> 00:21:16,400
Speaker 1: The entire four corners is lousy with the surviving ruins

320
00:21:16,600 --> 00:21:20,800
Speaker 1: of advanced farming civilizations that made the Southwest into one

321
00:21:20,840 --> 00:21:23,960
Speaker 1: of the most densely lived in parts of North America

322
00:21:24,200 --> 00:21:28,560
Speaker 1: a thousand years ago, long before Europeans came here, other

323
00:21:28,680 --> 00:21:33,320
Speaker 1: humans hoped and dreamed, lived, loved, and died, and left

324
00:21:33,359 --> 00:21:37,200
Speaker 1: their mark on this oldest place in America. In fact,

325
00:21:37,280 --> 00:21:41,040
Speaker 1: eight hundred years ago there was a far larger population

326
00:21:41,160 --> 00:21:45,560
Speaker 1: of people living in the Galisseo River country than actually

327
00:21:45,600 --> 00:21:49,680
Speaker 1: live here. Now that's a claim few other American regions

328
00:21:49,680 --> 00:21:54,920
Speaker 1: can make. A great drought in the Southwest, the most

329
00:21:54,960 --> 00:21:58,080
Speaker 1: severe one in the past thousand years, was the apparent

330
00:21:58,080 --> 00:22:01,520
Speaker 1: approximate cause that brought them here. In a sense, they

331
00:22:01,520 --> 00:22:06,480
Speaker 1: were religious refugees fleeing that hereditary religious class that had

332
00:22:06,480 --> 00:22:09,879
Speaker 1: insisted they could intervene with the gods to send life

333
00:22:09,920 --> 00:22:13,600
Speaker 1: saving rain. So the search for a new center place

334
00:22:14,040 --> 00:22:17,680
Speaker 1: led some of the former Choco Puebloans to the beautiful,

335
00:22:17,920 --> 00:22:24,080
Speaker 1: wind swept Galisteo Country. Here's what they found. A high

336
00:22:24,119 --> 00:22:27,760
Speaker 1: desert with three hundred and twenty days of annual sunshine,

337
00:22:28,040 --> 00:22:32,280
Speaker 1: prompting their name for it, placed near the sun, rainfall

338
00:22:32,320 --> 00:22:35,399
Speaker 1: that rarely reached to double figures but still made for

339
00:22:35,520 --> 00:22:40,399
Speaker 1: green mountains and dwarf forests. A river, albeit small, with

340
00:22:40,600 --> 00:22:47,360
Speaker 1: spring fed tributaries sometimes flowing water, sowable ground, sandstone for bricks,

341
00:22:47,440 --> 00:22:51,800
Speaker 1: and suitable soil to make adobes. A small mountain range

342
00:22:51,880 --> 00:22:55,280
Speaker 1: long known and famous far and wide for its sky

343
00:22:55,440 --> 00:23:00,280
Speaker 1: blue stones, ample firewood to boil their crops in the

344
00:23:00,280 --> 00:23:04,760
Speaker 1: grassland basin. Bands of striped prong orn antelope, mule deer

345
00:23:04,800 --> 00:23:08,120
Speaker 1: in the hills, and elk, sheep and bears in the mountains.

346
00:23:08,600 --> 00:23:12,560
Speaker 1: Eagles soaring overhead, packs of gray wolves howling in the night,

347
00:23:13,080 --> 00:23:17,040
Speaker 1: Lions slinking through the rocks, and sacred coyotes trotting by

348
00:23:17,160 --> 00:23:21,200
Speaker 1: with a quick, sharp eyed look. Crystalline air for watching

349
00:23:21,240 --> 00:23:26,600
Speaker 1: the sun's progress along the horizons, nights brilliant with jittering stars,

350
00:23:27,040 --> 00:23:31,480
Speaker 1: the steady glow of traveler planets, and the occasional light

351
00:23:31,600 --> 00:23:37,040
Speaker 1: that flies. The colonizers spoke two different pueblo and languages,

352
00:23:37,400 --> 00:23:42,040
Speaker 1: Tanno and Caresson, so living near one another were bilingual.

353
00:23:42,680 --> 00:23:45,600
Speaker 1: They wore garments made from the cotton they grew, and

354
00:23:45,800 --> 00:23:50,000
Speaker 1: ornamented themselves with turquoise jewelry. The women wore their dark

355
00:23:50,040 --> 00:23:54,280
Speaker 1: hair long, while men affected a bowl cut. They painted

356
00:23:54,320 --> 00:23:58,639
Speaker 1: colorful designs on pottery known as Rio Grand glazeware that

357
00:23:58,760 --> 00:24:02,800
Speaker 1: frequently included images of parrots or macaus, brilliantly mark birds,

358
00:24:02,840 --> 00:24:05,639
Speaker 1: traded up from Mexico and not native to anywhere in

359
00:24:05,680 --> 00:24:10,720
Speaker 1: the Southwest. Farm implements they fashioned from fire hardened juniper

360
00:24:11,280 --> 00:24:15,440
Speaker 1: arrow points largely from local black obcitian glass, and their

361
00:24:15,520 --> 00:24:20,080
Speaker 1: axe blades from an aluminum silica called fiber light. They

362
00:24:20,200 --> 00:24:24,520
Speaker 1: mined in the high rockies nearby. Their domestic animals were

363
00:24:24,600 --> 00:24:28,600
Speaker 1: dogs and turkeys. Their ancestors had domesticated turkeys around the

364
00:24:28,680 --> 00:24:33,119
Speaker 1: year one thousand, when huntable wildlife near their villages declined

365
00:24:33,359 --> 00:24:38,640
Speaker 1: and left them protein poor water manipulation and desert agriculture

366
00:24:38,760 --> 00:24:43,520
Speaker 1: required cooperative effort, so these were town dwellers. They lived

367
00:24:43,560 --> 00:24:47,800
Speaker 1: in apartment like rectangular buildings with flat roofs resting on

368
00:24:48,000 --> 00:24:53,000
Speaker 1: massive support beams, with plastered walls, occasionally built of stacked stone,

369
00:24:53,400 --> 00:24:57,639
Speaker 1: but more commonly in the Galileo country of puddled dried adobes.

370
00:24:58,359 --> 00:25:02,679
Speaker 1: The buildings often were three to five stories, with entrances,

371
00:25:02,800 --> 00:25:06,560
Speaker 1: cooking and daily life carried out on the top roof level.

372
00:25:06,920 --> 00:25:11,320
Speaker 1: The lower levels accessed by descending ladders into rooms that

373
00:25:11,440 --> 00:25:16,200
Speaker 1: featured gleaming, polished floors and walls, often painted with murals.

374
00:25:16,920 --> 00:25:21,359
Speaker 1: The buildings commonly grouped around central plazas. The plazas highlighted

375
00:25:21,480 --> 00:25:28,520
Speaker 1: circular underground ceremonial rooms known as kivas, with fireplaces, perimeter benches,

376
00:25:28,880 --> 00:25:33,400
Speaker 1: and a central hold a sipapu. It was called representing

377
00:25:33,480 --> 00:25:37,760
Speaker 1: humanity's point of emergence from a world below into.

378
00:25:37,520 --> 00:25:38,439
Speaker 2: The present world.

379
00:25:41,400 --> 00:25:45,000
Speaker 1: San Lazarro left the largest ruins of all the Galistale villages.

380
00:25:45,520 --> 00:25:49,159
Speaker 1: Its ruins cover fifty seven acres and feature the outlines

381
00:25:49,200 --> 00:25:53,439
Speaker 1: of twenty seven separate buildings, with one nine hundred and

382
00:25:53,480 --> 00:25:57,399
Speaker 1: forty one ground floor rooms and a remarkable total of

383
00:25:57,520 --> 00:26:02,159
Speaker 1: five thousand rooms. It was settled around twelve ninety, and,

384
00:26:02,200 --> 00:26:05,879
Speaker 1: despite a pair of debilitating droughts in the fourteen hundreds,

385
00:26:06,280 --> 00:26:09,119
Speaker 1: continued to grow for two hundred years, when its peak

386
00:26:09,200 --> 00:26:13,840
Speaker 1: population was nearly two thousand people. That's six times the

387
00:26:13,920 --> 00:26:20,360
Speaker 1: size of any twenty first century Galisteo valley town. By then,

388
00:26:20,520 --> 00:26:24,159
Speaker 1: many local resources were likely depleted, and the town was

389
00:26:24,200 --> 00:26:28,119
Speaker 1: abandoned in the early fifteen hundreds. The immediate catalyst to

390
00:26:28,160 --> 00:26:31,640
Speaker 1: that exodus may have been something dramatic, for in fifteen

391
00:26:31,680 --> 00:26:35,320
Speaker 1: eighty one, a Spanish party found the town half destroyed.

392
00:26:36,320 --> 00:26:40,160
Speaker 1: Finn's most remarkable San Lazaro discovery, for which he had

393
00:26:40,160 --> 00:26:44,199
Speaker 1: the good sense to call in professional archaeologists and native descendants,

394
00:26:44,640 --> 00:26:48,639
Speaker 1: came in nineteen ninety two, when he unearthed two plastered

395
00:26:48,720 --> 00:26:54,359
Speaker 1: Kachina masks and other stored sacred objects. The magnificent mask

396
00:26:54,520 --> 00:26:58,399
Speaker 1: appeared to represent black bears and were likely associated with

397
00:26:58,480 --> 00:27:03,600
Speaker 1: a bear clan or Medison society. Various dating techniques placed

398
00:27:03,640 --> 00:27:07,800
Speaker 1: the masks a few years on either side of fifteen hundred.

399
00:27:08,560 --> 00:27:12,119
Speaker 1: Kachina mask would be one of the most unlikely objects

400
00:27:12,400 --> 00:27:17,480
Speaker 1: any Puebloan would ever abandon, whatever happened at San Lazarro

401
00:27:17,600 --> 00:27:22,800
Speaker 1: around fifteen hundred must have come on remarkably suddenly when

402
00:27:22,840 --> 00:27:27,400
Speaker 1: European colonizers arrived in the early sixteen hundreds and introduced

403
00:27:27,520 --> 00:27:31,280
Speaker 1: fulsome news sources of protein. Four thousand sheep and one

404
00:27:31,280 --> 00:27:35,679
Speaker 1: thousand goats arrived with those first Spanish settlers. Pueblo people

405
00:27:35,920 --> 00:27:41,280
Speaker 1: fully reoccupied San Lazarro before long, though swelling resentment over

406
00:27:41,359 --> 00:27:45,359
Speaker 1: having to provide crops and labor, and as Spanish suppression

407
00:27:45,480 --> 00:27:49,600
Speaker 1: of the Kachina religion led San Lazaro's warriors to become

408
00:27:49,720 --> 00:27:53,280
Speaker 1: leaders in the Great Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty, which

409
00:27:53,359 --> 00:27:56,879
Speaker 1: drove the Europeans out of New Mexico for a dozen years.

410
00:27:57,640 --> 00:28:02,399
Speaker 1: But the Pueblo citizens were alarmed at the possible consequences

411
00:28:02,400 --> 00:28:06,879
Speaker 1: of this that everyone ended up fleeing San Lazaro, leaving

412
00:28:06,920 --> 00:28:10,480
Speaker 1: a four hundred year old city to dissolve into silence

413
00:28:10,520 --> 00:28:18,960
Speaker 1: and adobe. There were at least seven other similar, long

414
00:28:19,000 --> 00:28:22,879
Speaker 1: lived towns in the Galileo country, harboring at various times

415
00:28:23,119 --> 00:28:27,800
Speaker 1: several thousand more of these former Chocowans. Several were farther

416
00:28:27,920 --> 00:28:30,560
Speaker 1: east and close to the high plains, where they had

417
00:28:30,560 --> 00:28:34,879
Speaker 1: to survive a patchy rage after those Athabaskan speakers migrated

418
00:28:34,920 --> 00:28:38,360
Speaker 1: in from the far north, but like the townspeople of

419
00:28:38,400 --> 00:28:42,400
Speaker 1: San Lazaro, their inhabitants fled soon following the Pueblo Revolt,

420
00:28:42,640 --> 00:28:46,800
Speaker 1: when the Spanish absence allowed for even more plains Indian raids,

421
00:28:47,000 --> 00:28:51,000
Speaker 1: this time by Comanches thundering their horses through a rim

422
00:28:51,160 --> 00:28:57,160
Speaker 1: rock break that still known today as Comanche Gap. The

423
00:28:57,200 --> 00:29:00,240
Speaker 1: Spaniards called the westernmost Pueblo town they found than the

424
00:29:00,280 --> 00:29:04,560
Speaker 1: Galileo country, San Marcos. It was near a little mountain

425
00:29:04,680 --> 00:29:09,200
Speaker 1: range the newcomers named Los Surreals, the little hills that

426
00:29:09,320 --> 00:29:12,480
Speaker 1: had been mined since the time of Chaco for lead

427
00:29:12,680 --> 00:29:16,280
Speaker 1: use to glaze pottery, and for the ultimate trade item

428
00:29:16,400 --> 00:29:21,720
Speaker 1: from the southwest, sky blue turquoise. One thousand years ago,

429
00:29:21,840 --> 00:29:25,640
Speaker 1: Indian miners pulled turquoise or out of shafts in a

430
00:29:25,680 --> 00:29:30,040
Speaker 1: minor cereals peak called Chalchi Wheedle, the name from the

431
00:29:30,080 --> 00:29:34,160
Speaker 1: Aztec language, and a little mountain with an outsized reputation.

432
00:29:35,120 --> 00:29:37,960
Speaker 1: An image of this little mountain graces the Temple of

433
00:29:38,000 --> 00:29:42,360
Speaker 1: the Sun Pyramid in the Aztec capital of tenoch Teetlin.

434
00:29:43,200 --> 00:29:46,680
Speaker 1: I've explored its ancient shafts sum but always with hair

435
00:29:46,800 --> 00:29:51,040
Speaker 1: raising alarm and shock at the fearlessness of Indian miners.

436
00:29:52,720 --> 00:29:55,360
Speaker 1: The fortunes of these towns flourished and ebbed as the

437
00:29:55,400 --> 00:30:00,520
Speaker 1: centuries passed, when they were all occupied with unexploited resources available.

438
00:30:00,680 --> 00:30:04,400
Speaker 1: In the thirteen hundreds and fourteen hundreds, the combined population

439
00:30:04,480 --> 00:30:06,880
Speaker 1: of these Galileo River towns may have been more than

440
00:30:07,000 --> 00:30:11,360
Speaker 1: six thousand, because rainfall was essential for their economy, yet

441
00:30:11,440 --> 00:30:15,000
Speaker 1: droughts also strike the Galiseo. They made a science of

442
00:30:15,120 --> 00:30:19,240
Speaker 1: cloud and wind study, no doubt hopeful as modern residents

443
00:30:19,240 --> 00:30:23,320
Speaker 1: still are when grand anvil headed clouds full of moisture

444
00:30:23,640 --> 00:30:28,760
Speaker 1: towered up from the mountain ranges in summertime. Their religion

445
00:30:29,040 --> 00:30:33,200
Speaker 1: was less theocratic and more decentralized than at Chaco, and

446
00:30:33,320 --> 00:30:40,360
Speaker 1: featured clan leaders dressed in the elaborate costuming representing Kachina emissaries.

447
00:30:39,840 --> 00:30:41,200
Speaker 2: To the deities of nature.

448
00:30:41,880 --> 00:30:49,560
Speaker 1: The Kachina religion lives on among their descendants today, although

449
00:30:49,600 --> 00:30:53,160
Speaker 1: none of these towns survives today. Half of these Galiselo

450
00:30:53,200 --> 00:30:57,680
Speaker 1: pueblos lasted longer than the United States has existed, but

451
00:30:57,760 --> 00:31:00,640
Speaker 1: as is evident from a place like San Lazara, for

452
00:31:00,800 --> 00:31:06,280
Speaker 1: all their successes, the Galistale Pueblins struggled with long term sustainability.

453
00:31:07,040 --> 00:31:09,959
Speaker 1: The year round fires to boil their crops meant that

454
00:31:10,120 --> 00:31:14,360
Speaker 1: firewood cutting and gathering pushed farther out year after year.

455
00:31:15,200 --> 00:31:17,960
Speaker 1: One of the first scientists to investigate the ruins of

456
00:31:18,000 --> 00:31:22,000
Speaker 1: their towns, Nels Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History,

457
00:31:22,360 --> 00:31:26,080
Speaker 1: took a revelatory photograph of the San Lazaro site in

458
00:31:26,200 --> 00:31:30,560
Speaker 1: nineteen twelve, one hundred and thirty two years after its abandonment.

459
00:31:31,360 --> 00:31:36,720
Speaker 1: That photo showed a still barren landscape, almost entirely stripped

460
00:31:36,760 --> 00:31:40,760
Speaker 1: of trees and shrubs, for two miles around. With the

461
00:31:40,840 --> 00:31:45,400
Speaker 1: diaspora that followed Chaco's collapse, the new pueblo town of Pecos,

462
00:31:45,680 --> 00:31:50,400
Speaker 1: northeast of the Galistaloe country, developed a mutualistic arrangement with

463
00:31:50,480 --> 00:31:55,040
Speaker 1: planes hunters to trade Pueblo crop products for dried bison meat.

464
00:31:55,600 --> 00:31:59,840
Speaker 1: There's no evidence these Galistdale villages ever managed something similar,

465
00:32:00,280 --> 00:32:04,560
Speaker 1: so with eight towns and several thousand residents, huntable wildlife

466
00:32:04,760 --> 00:32:08,400
Speaker 1: likely took a significant hit. One bit of evidence comes

467
00:32:08,400 --> 00:32:13,720
Speaker 1: from Sand Lazaro's archaeology's astonishing number of bones and skulls,

468
00:32:14,080 --> 00:32:16,520
Speaker 1: many of them cracked open to get at marrow or

469
00:32:16,560 --> 00:32:21,320
Speaker 1: brains from the goats and sheep Spanish settlers introduced now

470
00:32:21,360 --> 00:32:25,800
Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds. Protein was obviously a dietary addition. The

471
00:32:25,840 --> 00:32:30,520
Speaker 1: Galisteo Pueblo residents were avid for. Their several hundred year

472
00:32:30,560 --> 00:32:35,520
Speaker 1: inhabitation did leave the incoming Europeans a beautifully grass basin

473
00:32:35,720 --> 00:32:39,800
Speaker 1: and valley and a healthy Galisto river that flowed over

474
00:32:39,840 --> 00:32:44,160
Speaker 1: the surface of this landscape. The ecological changes that left

475
00:32:44,200 --> 00:32:47,960
Speaker 1: exotic weeds and spreading junipers and produced a river that

476
00:32:48,080 --> 00:32:52,280
Speaker 1: slashed arroyos and stream beds twenty five feet deep all

477
00:32:52,360 --> 00:32:56,440
Speaker 1: came later with pasturage for new spains, horse herds, and

478
00:32:56,520 --> 00:32:59,920
Speaker 1: flocks of sheep and goats, and when the Americans came

479
00:33:00,160 --> 00:33:10,880
Speaker 1: with millions of cattle and renewed mining in the local mountains.

480
00:33:10,920 --> 00:33:14,360
Speaker 1: Beyond walking across the broken pots at San Lazaro, my

481
00:33:14,480 --> 00:33:17,240
Speaker 1: own most vivid experience of the lingering presence of this

482
00:33:17,320 --> 00:33:21,040
Speaker 1: former Galistal world has come from hiking the remnant lava

483
00:33:21,160 --> 00:33:25,280
Speaker 1: dykes that rise like black dragon backbones from the yellow

484
00:33:25,320 --> 00:33:31,280
Speaker 1: grasslands here. Centuries ago, my Galistal neighbors lavishly adorned these

485
00:33:31,360 --> 00:33:35,800
Speaker 1: lava boulders with petroglyphs, not a handful, not a few dozen,

486
00:33:36,160 --> 00:33:40,760
Speaker 1: but with thousands of white outlined images carefully pecked into

487
00:33:40,800 --> 00:33:44,680
Speaker 1: the black rock surfaces for capturing some of the essentials

488
00:33:44,720 --> 00:33:48,040
Speaker 1: of their world and their presence. Nothing else brings them

489
00:33:48,080 --> 00:33:53,120
Speaker 1: to life like these Today we call petroglyphs and pictrographs

490
00:33:53,360 --> 00:33:56,800
Speaker 1: rock art, but of course they express a more specific

491
00:33:56,920 --> 00:34:01,520
Speaker 1: cosmic meaning than any decorative or narrative art. Picking my

492
00:34:01,560 --> 00:34:04,320
Speaker 1: way from boulder to boulder atop these dykes and keening

493
00:34:04,400 --> 00:34:08,000
Speaker 1: morning winds, the images have sometimes given me a Sistine

494
00:34:08,160 --> 00:34:12,000
Speaker 1: chapel feeling, at other times the open mouth reaction one

495
00:34:12,080 --> 00:34:16,520
Speaker 1: has to the Las Vegas Strip. There are elaborately costumed

496
00:34:16,600 --> 00:34:20,080
Speaker 1: Kachina figures on these rocks, and having once stood in

497
00:34:20,120 --> 00:34:24,640
Speaker 1: freezing December weather in Zuni Pueblo and watched a towering

498
00:34:24,719 --> 00:34:29,440
Speaker 1: Shaalako kachina clacking its two foot wooden beak while dancing

499
00:34:29,480 --> 00:34:33,200
Speaker 1: a Solstice blessing inside a brand new home, it's hard

500
00:34:33,239 --> 00:34:36,560
Speaker 1: for me to separate the sacred from the entertaining in

501
00:34:36,640 --> 00:34:40,920
Speaker 1: these images. I also can't help imagining date nights and

502
00:34:41,040 --> 00:34:45,200
Speaker 1: holding hands under a full moon, gobsmacked at white visions

503
00:34:45,320 --> 00:34:49,440
Speaker 1: leaping out at you from the silvery black. The imagery

504
00:34:49,520 --> 00:34:53,360
Speaker 1: is mind bending in variety and detail. There are mythical

505
00:34:53,360 --> 00:34:58,120
Speaker 1: creatures like giant horn water serpents, but also real rattlesnakes,

506
00:34:58,280 --> 00:35:03,680
Speaker 1: often too in tandem, underbird eagles, badgers, coyotes, bears, all

507
00:35:03,800 --> 00:35:09,160
Speaker 1: revered animals the Pueblos preserved. There are gleaming four pointed planets,

508
00:35:09,440 --> 00:35:13,040
Speaker 1: an endless variety of different cloud terraces, which is the

509
00:35:13,080 --> 00:35:16,360
Speaker 1: home of the Kachina gods, and those appear in conjunction

510
00:35:16,520 --> 00:35:21,040
Speaker 1: with water serpents, mountain lions, a woman's nether parts. There

511
00:35:21,080 --> 00:35:26,799
Speaker 1: are faces with or without masks. Handprints link these zigzag lines, spirals,

512
00:35:26,960 --> 00:35:33,000
Speaker 1: fields of dots, warrior figures protected by circular shields. While

513
00:35:33,120 --> 00:35:36,840
Speaker 1: history and their struggles at sustainability mean the Pueblo people

514
00:35:36,960 --> 00:35:40,279
Speaker 1: no longer live along the Galisal River, which is my

515
00:35:40,440 --> 00:35:43,200
Speaker 1: home today, their descendants.

516
00:35:42,680 --> 00:35:44,680
Speaker 2: Remain along the Rio Grande.

517
00:35:44,400 --> 00:35:47,600
Speaker 1: Nearby, and I like to go to the annual ceremonies

518
00:35:47,640 --> 00:35:50,719
Speaker 1: they open to the public. But like so much of

519
00:35:50,719 --> 00:35:54,160
Speaker 1: the human story, the past here and even in Chaco

520
00:35:54,800 --> 00:35:59,560
Speaker 1: somehow still seems just out of my grasp. We humans

521
00:35:59,600 --> 00:36:03,680
Speaker 1: focus on the moments we exist in touching the past

522
00:36:04,000 --> 00:36:16,040
Speaker 1: is the forever problem of history.

523
00:36:09,719 --> 00:36:29,399
Speaker 3: I'm Steve Vanella. I'm joined here by Randall Williams. Hello,

524
00:36:30,080 --> 00:36:32,359
Speaker 3: and we're gonna do a little thing where after we

525
00:36:32,440 --> 00:36:36,840
Speaker 3: listen to Dan Florey's American West podcast, we get to

526
00:36:36,840 --> 00:36:38,480
Speaker 3: come in. We have the privilege we get to come

527
00:36:38,520 --> 00:36:42,319
Speaker 3: in and ask questions and hopefully for you listeners, some

528
00:36:42,360 --> 00:36:44,120
Speaker 3: of the questions we asked might reflect some of the

529
00:36:44,239 --> 00:36:47,560
Speaker 3: questions that you have and maybe we'll do a little

530
00:36:47,600 --> 00:36:51,000
Speaker 3: thing or if you have questions, yeah, we will do this.

531
00:36:51,760 --> 00:36:55,040
Speaker 3: Send your questions in and at some point we'll send

532
00:36:55,040 --> 00:36:56,440
Speaker 3: your questions and at some point we'll be able to

533
00:36:56,600 --> 00:36:58,520
Speaker 3: round up with Dan and get your questions answered. But

534
00:36:58,560 --> 00:36:59,960
Speaker 3: in the meantime, here's our questions.

535
00:37:00,640 --> 00:37:03,440
Speaker 4: And this is very familiar to us as former students

536
00:37:03,440 --> 00:37:04,920
Speaker 4: of dance, so exactly.

537
00:37:05,680 --> 00:37:08,040
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks to you guys for doing this, by the way,

538
00:37:08,200 --> 00:37:09,040
Speaker 1: really appreciate it.

539
00:37:09,080 --> 00:37:14,360
Speaker 3: Oh, it's great. You got you want to start.

540
00:37:15,560 --> 00:37:22,279
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think in the start of this episode you're

541
00:37:22,360 --> 00:37:27,360
Speaker 4: talking about many wests, and there's certain wests that have

542
00:37:28,800 --> 00:37:31,880
Speaker 4: you know, lived on and on and pop culture, especially

543
00:37:31,960 --> 00:37:37,239
Speaker 4: for Americans living in the twenty first century. But you

544
00:37:37,360 --> 00:37:40,920
Speaker 4: kind of challenge people to understand the West as a

545
00:37:41,000 --> 00:37:44,719
Speaker 4: much larger place than the West of cowboys and Indians

546
00:37:44,719 --> 00:37:48,720
Speaker 4: and of overland trails and everything like that. So I wonder,

547
00:37:51,320 --> 00:37:54,960
Speaker 4: what is it about the West that seems to have

548
00:37:55,000 --> 00:38:00,840
Speaker 4: grabbed a hold of our imaginations, and what has particular

549
00:38:00,880 --> 00:38:03,920
Speaker 4: about cowboy culture that's grabbed our imaginations? And then what

550
00:38:04,000 --> 00:38:07,560
Speaker 4: do we gain by opening our eyes to through the

551
00:38:07,600 --> 00:38:08,560
Speaker 4: deep time West.

552
00:38:10,760 --> 00:38:16,680
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I'm putting together a podcast here, twenty six

553
00:38:16,800 --> 00:38:22,040
Speaker 1: episodes on it that will be about different kinds of

554
00:38:22,040 --> 00:38:25,759
Speaker 1: things than most people think of when they think of

555
00:38:26,160 --> 00:38:30,840
Speaker 1: Western history. They're no gunfights, they are no mining strikes,

556
00:38:33,400 --> 00:38:38,160
Speaker 1: there's no Marshall Dylon. What I'm interested in is a

557
00:38:38,239 --> 00:38:40,240
Speaker 1: different kind of West. And I think this is maybe

558
00:38:40,280 --> 00:38:43,239
Speaker 1: the value of something like this, a part of the

559
00:38:43,400 --> 00:38:48,000
Speaker 1: Western story that's not really been known or written about

560
00:38:48,160 --> 00:38:51,880
Speaker 1: very much, and certainly not in pop culture portrayed so

561
00:38:51,920 --> 00:38:55,440
Speaker 1: that people get to understand it. And what that West

562
00:38:55,560 --> 00:38:59,400
Speaker 1: is is something I call the natural West, which is

563
00:39:00,360 --> 00:39:04,400
Speaker 1: it's a West of the native people. It's a West

564
00:39:04,640 --> 00:39:12,879
Speaker 1: of wildlife, abundance beyond imagining for wildlife and many, many

565
00:39:12,880 --> 00:39:18,440
Speaker 1: different species, and it's a story of the West. That

566
00:39:19,719 --> 00:39:24,480
Speaker 1: really hinges a lot of around kind of an initial

567
00:39:25,160 --> 00:39:31,400
Speaker 1: reaction to a place that's different, new, and very unfamiliar

568
00:39:31,560 --> 00:39:34,920
Speaker 1: to people coming out of the East in particular. I mean,

569
00:39:34,960 --> 00:39:39,160
Speaker 1: I think people coming up, say from Mexico into New

570
00:39:39,200 --> 00:39:43,880
Speaker 1: Mexico or California, don't see the West as being that different.

571
00:39:43,920 --> 00:39:46,960
Speaker 1: Their usual reaction to the country farther north is that

572
00:39:47,040 --> 00:39:48,080
Speaker 1: it's cold.

573
00:39:48,480 --> 00:39:50,240
Speaker 2: But it's similar.

574
00:39:50,480 --> 00:39:51,680
Speaker 3: That's an interesting point, man.

575
00:39:51,840 --> 00:39:54,040
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's how they that's how they characterize it. Man,

576
00:39:54,080 --> 00:39:54,880
Speaker 1: it's really cold.

577
00:39:55,040 --> 00:39:57,640
Speaker 3: There kind of got similar thing going on as cold.

578
00:39:58,800 --> 00:40:01,520
Speaker 1: Yeah, the country looks the same, but man, it's cold.

579
00:40:02,440 --> 00:40:08,160
Speaker 1: But what I'm kind of interested in is the deep

580
00:40:08,320 --> 00:40:12,520
Speaker 1: time story all the way back to the Pleistocene and

581
00:40:12,600 --> 00:40:16,560
Speaker 1: the earliest people who were here and how they interacted

582
00:40:16,600 --> 00:40:20,040
Speaker 1: with Western animals, because we have some pretty epic alterations

583
00:40:20,080 --> 00:40:23,320
Speaker 1: that take place in this story. I mean, we lose

584
00:40:23,360 --> 00:40:25,840
Speaker 1: a lot of animals ten thousand years ago. Then we

585
00:40:25,880 --> 00:40:27,840
Speaker 1: have a period where we go for ten thousand years

586
00:40:28,040 --> 00:40:31,000
Speaker 1: in the West and it looks as if native people

587
00:40:31,080 --> 00:40:36,000
Speaker 1: in particular are pretty benevolent. I mean, there's only one

588
00:40:36,040 --> 00:40:40,719
Speaker 1: extinction during that time period, and I try to try

589
00:40:40,719 --> 00:40:43,759
Speaker 1: to figure out why that is how it happened that way,

590
00:40:44,360 --> 00:40:47,120
Speaker 1: and then a lot of the rest of the episodes

591
00:40:47,560 --> 00:40:51,240
Speaker 1: have to do with a kind of an exploratory first

592
00:40:51,400 --> 00:40:56,200
Speaker 1: contact experience from people like Lewis and Clark, for example,

593
00:40:57,160 --> 00:40:59,880
Speaker 1: and a whole host of people later in the nineteenth century,

594
00:41:00,440 --> 00:41:05,080
Speaker 1: and also with what transpires in a West in the

595
00:41:05,160 --> 00:41:09,000
Speaker 1: nineteenth century with all this abundant wildlife where there are

596
00:41:09,080 --> 00:41:12,960
Speaker 1: really no rules, no regulations. It's just kind of a

597
00:41:13,040 --> 00:41:17,360
Speaker 1: free for all, and pretty much what you would predict

598
00:41:17,840 --> 00:41:20,719
Speaker 1: for a free for all, things don't turn out all

599
00:41:20,760 --> 00:41:23,279
Speaker 1: that great for a lot of the animals, and of

600
00:41:23,320 --> 00:41:23,960
Speaker 1: course a lot of.

601
00:41:23,880 --> 00:41:25,160
Speaker 2: The native people either.

602
00:41:25,480 --> 00:41:32,480
Speaker 1: But it's those stories in contrast to Marshall Dillon and

603
00:41:32,600 --> 00:41:38,800
Speaker 1: town building and the California gold Rush, the Mormon settlement

604
00:41:38,840 --> 00:41:43,560
Speaker 1: of Utah, these are the things that I've been writing about.

605
00:41:43,360 --> 00:41:45,360
Speaker 2: For thirty five years.

606
00:41:45,400 --> 00:41:49,920
Speaker 1: Basically, I never was interested much because other people had

607
00:41:49,920 --> 00:41:54,520
Speaker 1: already done it to write about the mining rushes or

608
00:41:54,760 --> 00:41:58,120
Speaker 1: the Indian Wars. I was always looking for something different

609
00:41:58,480 --> 00:42:01,759
Speaker 1: and new to write about that I thought would sort

610
00:42:01,800 --> 00:42:05,759
Speaker 1: of tell us story that nobody quite knew yet. And

611
00:42:05,800 --> 00:42:07,640
Speaker 1: that's really what this podcast does.

612
00:42:08,680 --> 00:42:11,960
Speaker 3: This there's the thing I've wondered about there's an impression

613
00:42:11,960 --> 00:42:18,320
Speaker 3: I have unsourced material about source material east versus West

614
00:42:18,440 --> 00:42:22,840
Speaker 3: source material, and you might not share the same impression.

615
00:42:22,960 --> 00:42:24,640
Speaker 3: But if you have this impression, maybe you can speak

616
00:42:24,680 --> 00:42:29,399
Speaker 3: to it would be this is a very roundabout way

617
00:42:29,400 --> 00:42:31,880
Speaker 3: of arriving at the point. But when Rand and I

618
00:42:31,920 --> 00:42:35,400
Speaker 3: were reading about the long hunters, so this this group

619
00:42:35,520 --> 00:42:39,840
Speaker 3: of Euro American deer skin hunters that were first pushing

620
00:42:39,880 --> 00:42:44,800
Speaker 3: over the apple Achian Mountains and going into Kentucky, basically

621
00:42:45,040 --> 00:42:48,480
Speaker 3: the country south of the Ohio River, west of the

622
00:42:48,520 --> 00:42:51,640
Speaker 3: apple Aachian Range, south of the Ohio pushing into that area,

623
00:42:52,000 --> 00:42:56,120
Speaker 3: and we kind of marvel at the paucity of materials

624
00:42:57,480 --> 00:43:02,880
Speaker 3: and the and the the lack of sort of like

625
00:43:03,400 --> 00:43:08,040
Speaker 3: the lack of natural observation, the lack of nature observation.

626
00:43:08,920 --> 00:43:11,480
Speaker 3: What is there was collected like very deliberately by a

627
00:43:11,560 --> 00:43:15,759
Speaker 3: historian who went and talked to some of the key players, children, spouses,

628
00:43:15,840 --> 00:43:18,440
Speaker 3: grandchildren and try to put together a little history of

629
00:43:18,440 --> 00:43:21,440
Speaker 3: these first euro Americans to push into this area. But

630
00:43:21,520 --> 00:43:26,120
Speaker 3: there's just not a ton there. And that is at say,

631
00:43:27,719 --> 00:43:33,160
Speaker 3: seventeen seventy six. Yeah, what happens that when you get

632
00:43:33,280 --> 00:43:36,239
Speaker 3: what happens in the next thirty forty years where all

633
00:43:36,280 --> 00:43:40,960
Speaker 3: of a sudden it seems like everyone is so literate. Yeah,

634
00:43:41,000 --> 00:43:45,200
Speaker 3: and everyone is just observing and writing about trying to

635
00:43:45,360 --> 00:43:50,479
Speaker 3: you know, writing about the sites they see, counting things right,

636
00:43:50,640 --> 00:43:54,279
Speaker 3: like really putting a record down. Then now you can

637
00:43:54,320 --> 00:43:56,240
Speaker 3: look at the West, and part of what's so inviting

638
00:43:56,280 --> 00:44:01,040
Speaker 3: about it is there something, there's something there to read about. Yeah,

639
00:44:01,200 --> 00:44:04,240
Speaker 3: and it's really hard to get Like you just when

640
00:44:04,320 --> 00:44:07,399
Speaker 3: looking at people coming into Kentucky again for instance, coming

641
00:44:07,400 --> 00:44:13,120
Speaker 3: into Kentucky, it's like there's hints of things where you're like,

642
00:44:13,239 --> 00:44:15,279
Speaker 3: you gather it must have been really different, but there's

643
00:44:15,360 --> 00:44:20,200
Speaker 3: no just vivid pictures of what they're seeing. Did people

644
00:44:20,239 --> 00:44:22,400
Speaker 3: also learn to read and write? Like, like, how do

645
00:44:22,440 --> 00:44:24,200
Speaker 3: you how do you explain that?

646
00:44:25,080 --> 00:44:25,319
Speaker 2: Well?

647
00:44:25,680 --> 00:44:28,960
Speaker 1: I explained it in three ways, I guess. One is

648
00:44:29,000 --> 00:44:32,880
Speaker 1: that starting in eighteen hundred, a lot of the expeditions

649
00:44:32,880 --> 00:44:36,319
Speaker 1: into the West, or government expeditions, and those people are

650
00:44:36,400 --> 00:44:40,080
Speaker 1: giving given specific instructions to keep a record, keep a

651
00:44:40,160 --> 00:44:44,720
Speaker 1: really close record. I mean, Jefferson tells Lewis and Clark,

652
00:44:44,760 --> 00:44:47,319
Speaker 1: for example, you know, any animals that you see that

653
00:44:47,360 --> 00:44:50,640
Speaker 1: aren't found in the maritime states, collect them, write a description,

654
00:44:51,280 --> 00:44:53,640
Speaker 1: learn them as much about their natural history as you can.

655
00:44:53,840 --> 00:44:56,360
Speaker 1: And I think that's one of the things. I think

656
00:44:56,440 --> 00:45:01,320
Speaker 1: another thing is that there are a lot of Europeans

657
00:45:01,920 --> 00:45:07,360
Speaker 1: coming over in the early nineteenth century. The Thomas Nuttalls,

658
00:45:07,440 --> 00:45:13,640
Speaker 1: the John Bradberry's and those guys tend to look at

659
00:45:13,920 --> 00:45:17,560
Speaker 1: darkest North America sort of the way the Brits were

660
00:45:17,640 --> 00:45:23,160
Speaker 1: looking at Africa. Then where Wow, man, this is some

661
00:45:23,440 --> 00:45:26,440
Speaker 1: amazing part of the world that none of us has

662
00:45:26,480 --> 00:45:29,440
Speaker 1: ever seen. And so we got to keep a record

663
00:45:29,920 --> 00:45:32,320
Speaker 1: of all of it. We've got to, you know, we've

664
00:45:32,360 --> 00:45:36,960
Speaker 1: got to preserve what it looks like. And I think

665
00:45:38,120 --> 00:45:43,760
Speaker 1: really there was an actual market.

666
00:45:43,280 --> 00:45:47,279
Speaker 2: For literary work about the West.

667
00:45:47,520 --> 00:45:50,799
Speaker 1: Starting around probably as early as eighteen ten. And I

668
00:45:50,840 --> 00:45:54,000
Speaker 1: think the you know, the Nicholas Biddle Journals of the

669
00:45:54,080 --> 00:45:56,640
Speaker 1: Lewis and Clark Expedition, which came out in eighteen fourteen.

670
00:45:56,840 --> 00:45:59,680
Speaker 2: I mean, those things sold like hotcakes in the East,

671
00:45:59,840 --> 00:46:00,279
Speaker 2: and I.

672
00:46:00,200 --> 00:46:03,719
Speaker 1: Think that made people understand that, wow, okay, all I

673
00:46:03,719 --> 00:46:05,920
Speaker 1: gotta do is go out to the West, you know,

674
00:46:06,000 --> 00:46:10,960
Speaker 1: and write some account. And it even led to I mean,

675
00:46:10,960 --> 00:46:14,560
Speaker 1: and I have found two or three of these what

676
00:46:14,640 --> 00:46:19,240
Speaker 1: were basically made up accounts by people who never actually

677
00:46:19,320 --> 00:46:22,279
Speaker 1: went to the West, but they talked to people and

678
00:46:22,320 --> 00:46:25,279
Speaker 1: read other people's stuff and sat down and wrote an

679
00:46:25,320 --> 00:46:27,400
Speaker 1: account of their own journey.

680
00:46:27,480 --> 00:46:30,120
Speaker 3: Like it was enough of a thing that there's value

681
00:46:30,120 --> 00:46:30,959
Speaker 3: in faking one.

682
00:46:31,120 --> 00:46:34,640
Speaker 1: Yes, there was, and you could sell a faked book.

683
00:46:35,000 --> 00:46:40,480
Speaker 1: There's one particular guy, a guy named John Mayley, who

684
00:46:40,520 --> 00:46:44,480
Speaker 1: wrote a faked book about an expedition he took up

685
00:46:44,520 --> 00:46:48,279
Speaker 1: the Red River, and he sold it for like five

686
00:46:48,360 --> 00:46:50,480
Speaker 1: thousand dollars or something, which, of course at the time

687
00:46:50,600 --> 00:46:53,799
Speaker 1: was a huge sum of money. But the publisher he

688
00:46:53,880 --> 00:46:57,200
Speaker 1: sold it to broke in the panic, the Depression of

689
00:46:57,239 --> 00:47:00,400
Speaker 1: eighteen nineteen, and they never did publish it. So it

690
00:47:00,480 --> 00:47:03,080
Speaker 1: kind of exists just as a manuscript which I have

691
00:47:03,239 --> 00:47:07,160
Speaker 1: actually examined and examined closely enough to realize bullshit.

692
00:47:07,480 --> 00:47:09,080
Speaker 2: This guy did not do any of this.

693
00:47:10,800 --> 00:47:13,160
Speaker 3: But man, like, it's off your subject matter. But can

694
00:47:13,200 --> 00:47:16,440
Speaker 3: you just imagine that if a century prior to Lewis

695
00:47:16,440 --> 00:47:20,960
Speaker 3: and Clark you to have taken people with that mandate

696
00:47:21,360 --> 00:47:24,000
Speaker 3: and that skill set, and you had said, I want

697
00:47:24,040 --> 00:47:26,080
Speaker 3: you to cross over the range divide, I want you

698
00:47:26,160 --> 00:47:34,560
Speaker 3: to descend the Ohio decend the Mississippi, come back overland, yeah,

699
00:47:34,760 --> 00:47:38,920
Speaker 3: trace or whatever, and like do your thing, like right

700
00:47:38,960 --> 00:47:41,200
Speaker 3: down about all this stuff, right down about all of it.

701
00:47:41,360 --> 00:47:41,960
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have to.

702
00:47:42,080 --> 00:47:46,000
Speaker 4: I mean in that era, you really have to sort

703
00:47:46,080 --> 00:47:50,200
Speaker 4: through what material there is to get glimpses of the

704
00:47:50,280 --> 00:47:54,840
Speaker 4: natural world. And obviously there's a literature from the earlier

705
00:47:54,880 --> 00:47:56,080
Speaker 4: colonial period.

706
00:47:55,840 --> 00:47:58,760
Speaker 2: Of you know, English gentlemen.

707
00:48:00,520 --> 00:48:03,200
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it doesn't William Bartram kind of very

708
00:48:03,239 --> 00:48:07,000
Speaker 4: it reads is very sort of pre modern, not in

709
00:48:07,040 --> 00:48:10,720
Speaker 4: the technical sense, but pre modern. I mean it's very

710
00:48:10,960 --> 00:48:11,239
Speaker 4: It's like.

711
00:48:11,320 --> 00:48:14,520
Speaker 3: Yeah, you read that's true. You read like the account

712
00:48:14,520 --> 00:48:17,400
Speaker 3: of Kabe's a Devaka. It feels like it's like an

713
00:48:17,440 --> 00:48:21,360
Speaker 3: extended acid trip. You know, like you're kind of like, what, really,

714
00:48:21,440 --> 00:48:23,520
Speaker 3: there's no way, I mean, that's you kind of like

715
00:48:23,960 --> 00:48:26,319
Speaker 3: it doesn't paint a vivid picture. And I think that

716
00:48:26,440 --> 00:48:31,280
Speaker 3: something you're right, Like, something happened linguistically where we got

717
00:48:31,320 --> 00:48:33,120
Speaker 3: over this hump and all of a sudden you can

718
00:48:33,320 --> 00:48:35,160
Speaker 3: understand what people are talking about.

719
00:48:35,320 --> 00:48:40,919
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's that a market emerged for it.

720
00:48:41,520 --> 00:48:44,760
Speaker 1: There was a market, you know, America where we're interested

721
00:48:44,800 --> 00:48:48,640
Speaker 1: in possibilities for making money, and here was this wild

722
00:48:48,760 --> 00:48:53,440
Speaker 1: new country that everybody around the world, including all the Europeans,

723
00:48:53,440 --> 00:48:57,839
Speaker 1: were really intrigued by, And so people began to realize, well, hell,

724
00:48:58,280 --> 00:49:00,880
Speaker 1: I just you know, I try to I try to

725
00:49:00,960 --> 00:49:01,480
Speaker 1: keep notes.

726
00:49:01,600 --> 00:49:03,080
Speaker 2: Maybe I embellish a little bit.

727
00:49:03,000 --> 00:49:07,920
Speaker 1: Even, And so I think that's kind of one of

728
00:49:07,920 --> 00:49:12,600
Speaker 1: the explanations for what happens starting about eighteen hundred and

729
00:49:12,600 --> 00:49:16,200
Speaker 1: eighteen ten, that suddenly you start getting a lot more

730
00:49:16,600 --> 00:49:19,440
Speaker 1: primary source accounts. You have to use them, you know,

731
00:49:19,520 --> 00:49:20,279
Speaker 1: with a grain of salt.

732
00:49:20,320 --> 00:49:20,600
Speaker 2: Sometimes.

733
00:49:21,080 --> 00:49:24,399
Speaker 3: I wasn't really aware of that, man, and you turned

734
00:49:24,440 --> 00:49:28,480
Speaker 3: me on to that to be suspicious. In studying writing,

735
00:49:28,520 --> 00:49:31,840
Speaker 3: we'd always in studying fiction writing, we always learned about

736
00:49:31,960 --> 00:49:39,000
Speaker 3: the the unreliable narrator as a fictional device, right like

737
00:49:39,719 --> 00:49:42,600
Speaker 3: you're reading a novel and the reader sort of becomes

738
00:49:42,600 --> 00:49:45,440
Speaker 3: aware like that part of the thing is not to

739
00:49:45,480 --> 00:49:49,040
Speaker 3: trust the narrator, which is common in movies and other stuff,

740
00:49:49,080 --> 00:49:52,640
Speaker 3: right like it's built, it's built intension. I never thought

741
00:49:52,640 --> 00:49:55,759
Speaker 3: of it in historical journals. I never thought of it.

742
00:49:55,800 --> 00:49:58,759
Speaker 3: And I had read Tough Trip through Paradise, and I'd

743
00:49:58,760 --> 00:50:00,839
Speaker 3: emailed you or ran in to you whatever it was,

744
00:50:00,920 --> 00:50:03,560
Speaker 3: and asked you about tough trip through Paradise. I remember

745
00:50:03,600 --> 00:50:08,520
Speaker 3: you said basically, you know, be careful. He plays a

746
00:50:08,520 --> 00:50:10,439
Speaker 3: little I think he said something. He gets a little

747
00:50:10,520 --> 00:50:12,479
Speaker 3: fast and loose, and some of the things don't quite

748
00:50:12,480 --> 00:50:14,760
Speaker 3: add up, and I just read it like gospel.

749
00:50:14,960 --> 00:50:16,920
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, well, I think one is inclined to

750
00:50:16,960 --> 00:50:19,120
Speaker 1: do that until you began to realize that. You know,

751
00:50:19,160 --> 00:50:22,200
Speaker 1: the classic one in the West is the account of

752
00:50:22,280 --> 00:50:26,240
Speaker 1: James Ohio Patty, who you know. I mean that book

753
00:50:26,320 --> 00:50:30,680
Speaker 1: was probably published ten different times in the nineteenth century,

754
00:50:30,920 --> 00:50:32,800
Speaker 1: and so there are a bunch of different versions.

755
00:50:32,800 --> 00:50:33,600
Speaker 2: He changed him up.

756
00:50:33,719 --> 00:50:36,560
Speaker 3: Wait, we quote him, and had been warned about him, now,

757
00:50:36,719 --> 00:50:37,799
Speaker 3: but we quote him.

758
00:50:37,880 --> 00:50:41,960
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's got some good some good details. Yeah, he

759
00:50:41,960 --> 00:50:43,000
Speaker 2: does have some good details.

760
00:50:43,040 --> 00:50:45,360
Speaker 1: And I mean, who knows what I think, for example,

761
00:50:45,640 --> 00:50:48,880
Speaker 1: with people like that, like Patty and maybe like John Maylee,

762
00:50:49,080 --> 00:50:51,840
Speaker 1: is they actually did I think Melee knew enough to

763
00:50:51,920 --> 00:50:55,600
Speaker 1: convince me that he had talked to people, he had talked.

764
00:50:55,360 --> 00:50:56,920
Speaker 2: To people who knew about it.

765
00:50:57,239 --> 00:51:00,160
Speaker 1: But when he started going up the Red River and

766
00:51:00,200 --> 00:51:04,120
Speaker 1: started describing the landmarks, I mean I could tell by

767
00:51:04,160 --> 00:51:06,480
Speaker 1: the time you got to about the third or fourth day,

768
00:51:07,320 --> 00:51:09,600
Speaker 1: this guy ain't nowhere on any red rivers that.

769
00:51:09,960 --> 00:51:13,839
Speaker 2: Existed then or now. I mean, so it was.

770
00:51:14,320 --> 00:51:17,400
Speaker 1: You know, it's a market for stuff and it produces

771
00:51:17,719 --> 00:51:20,640
Speaker 1: a huge abundance of material to use, but somehow you

772
00:51:20,640 --> 00:51:21,240
Speaker 1: have to be careful.

773
00:51:21,719 --> 00:51:26,640
Speaker 3: I'm reading one right now. It's like sixty years. It's

774
00:51:26,680 --> 00:51:30,759
Speaker 3: a guy that wound up in Montana, wound up having

775
00:51:30,840 --> 00:51:32,480
Speaker 3: he had a trading for it. He had a trading

776
00:51:32,480 --> 00:51:35,360
Speaker 3: post in Missoula for a while. Can't member's name. Sixty years,

777
00:51:35,400 --> 00:51:39,239
Speaker 3: a fighter and trader or something. And a lot of

778
00:51:39,280 --> 00:51:40,840
Speaker 3: the stuff in there. There's a lot of stuff in

779
00:51:40,880 --> 00:51:44,640
Speaker 3: there where you read it and you're like you accept

780
00:51:44,680 --> 00:51:47,719
Speaker 3: as legit. Like some of the observations are ways they

781
00:51:47,840 --> 00:51:51,759
Speaker 3: use things right, like little tricks of the trade. You're like,

782
00:51:51,840 --> 00:51:54,279
Speaker 3: that has to come from a level of knowledge. But

783
00:51:54,400 --> 00:51:56,799
Speaker 3: other parts of it, you know, he's talking about I

784
00:51:56,840 --> 00:52:00,560
Speaker 3: sent Randall passage about Sharp's Buffalo rifles, and Randall's like

785
00:52:00,600 --> 00:52:05,640
Speaker 3: they didn't exist, So he's a mystery later he's misremembering whatever,

786
00:52:05,680 --> 00:52:07,719
Speaker 3: you know. I mean, he's like he feels like he

787
00:52:07,840 --> 00:52:09,840
Speaker 3: had one at a time when he didn't actually have

788
00:52:10,160 --> 00:52:13,359
Speaker 3: before Christian made a rifle. Yeah, but here's the thing,

789
00:52:13,520 --> 00:52:15,160
Speaker 3: like my man fought in World War Two. Okay, my

790
00:52:15,200 --> 00:52:17,239
Speaker 3: dad's long. Dad, my dad fought in World War Two.

791
00:52:17,280 --> 00:52:20,480
Speaker 3: I could tell you he told me about getting and

792
00:52:20,520 --> 00:52:25,719
Speaker 3: carrying around with him a Thompson submachine gun. Right now,

793
00:52:25,960 --> 00:52:27,920
Speaker 3: I could go and put down like my dad was

794
00:52:27,920 --> 00:52:29,959
Speaker 3: in World War two and had a Thompson sub machine gun.

795
00:52:30,080 --> 00:52:32,359
Speaker 3: And he might be like, well, no, no, no, I didn't

796
00:52:32,400 --> 00:52:34,000
Speaker 3: have it there. I had it later. But you know

797
00:52:34,040 --> 00:52:36,640
Speaker 3: what I mean, Like like I just remember war Thompson

798
00:52:36,680 --> 00:52:40,160
Speaker 3: submachine gun, and you can see someone later just out

799
00:52:40,160 --> 00:52:44,839
Speaker 3: of expediency bleeding it together, just putting it all in there,

800
00:52:44,840 --> 00:52:47,640
Speaker 3: and then someone later saying that that couldn't have been true. Yea,

801
00:52:47,760 --> 00:52:48,640
Speaker 3: he wouldn't have had it.

802
00:52:48,680 --> 00:52:49,400
Speaker 2: He don't know.

803
00:52:49,520 --> 00:52:51,400
Speaker 3: He couldn't have had it at Anzio. He could have

804
00:52:51,400 --> 00:52:53,239
Speaker 3: had it later in France, but he wouldn't have had

805
00:52:53,239 --> 00:52:53,880
Speaker 3: it at Anzio.

806
00:52:54,120 --> 00:52:56,680
Speaker 1: Well, it becomes these kinds of things become even more

807
00:52:56,760 --> 00:53:00,160
Speaker 1: difficult when you're dealing like with in this particular or

808
00:53:00,239 --> 00:53:06,200
Speaker 1: podcast with the people in Shako, where we have no

809
00:53:06,320 --> 00:53:11,120
Speaker 1: written accounts. All we have to go on is archaeology

810
00:53:11,600 --> 00:53:17,279
Speaker 1: and material culture objects and so and now genetics. Obviously,

811
00:53:17,600 --> 00:53:20,920
Speaker 1: that story about the the fourteen people who are all

812
00:53:20,960 --> 00:53:24,120
Speaker 1: related to one another buried in a single room in Puebloo.

813
00:53:24,480 --> 00:53:28,920
Speaker 1: That makes the whole story of telling the deep time

814
00:53:29,120 --> 00:53:31,640
Speaker 1: history of the West even more difficult, because now you

815
00:53:31,680 --> 00:53:34,360
Speaker 1: don't really have you may have, I mean, and I

816
00:53:34,400 --> 00:53:38,280
Speaker 1: have used them this way. There are great coyote stories

817
00:53:38,320 --> 00:53:41,960
Speaker 1: going back thousands of years, and I have occasionally used

818
00:53:42,320 --> 00:53:46,560
Speaker 1: a coyote story associated with a particular group that I

819
00:53:46,560 --> 00:53:50,920
Speaker 1: think would make a point about them. But that's literally

820
00:53:50,960 --> 00:53:55,480
Speaker 1: the only kind of storytelling you get. It's oral history,

821
00:53:56,080 --> 00:53:59,680
Speaker 1: and so you have to you have to approach things

822
00:54:00,360 --> 00:54:03,800
Speaker 1: that way, as you know, really carefully.

823
00:54:04,440 --> 00:54:06,560
Speaker 3: But that's where my that's where my observation, I guess,

824
00:54:06,640 --> 00:54:09,040
Speaker 3: falls apart because I was talking about the vivid descriptions,

825
00:54:09,280 --> 00:54:12,640
Speaker 3: but when it comes to the Pueblo site, some of

826
00:54:12,640 --> 00:54:16,239
Speaker 3: the ancient Pueblo sites, here's these really these guys doing

827
00:54:16,239 --> 00:54:19,080
Speaker 3: really vivid descriptions, and they're stumped.

828
00:54:19,320 --> 00:54:19,720
Speaker 2: Yeah.

829
00:54:20,320 --> 00:54:23,000
Speaker 3: The vivid description is of someone being like, what in

830
00:54:23,040 --> 00:54:23,919
Speaker 3: the hell happened here?

831
00:54:24,600 --> 00:54:24,799
Speaker 2: Yeah?

832
00:54:24,840 --> 00:54:25,960
Speaker 3: You know what I mean, it's not even like a

833
00:54:26,040 --> 00:54:30,399
Speaker 3: vivid they're just describing being awestruck by what they see

834
00:54:30,440 --> 00:54:31,000
Speaker 3: as a ruin.

835
00:54:31,320 --> 00:54:35,279
Speaker 1: Yeah, So what we're grappling with then is you know,

836
00:54:35,480 --> 00:54:38,880
Speaker 1: so people got into Chaco in the eighteen fifties for

837
00:54:38,880 --> 00:54:41,680
Speaker 1: the first time, eighteen fifties, eighteen sixties, and so we've

838
00:54:41,800 --> 00:54:46,799
Speaker 1: essentially got one hundred and seventy years of archaeological speculation.

839
00:54:47,560 --> 00:54:49,919
Speaker 1: And so the way you try to figure it out

840
00:54:50,000 --> 00:54:54,400
Speaker 1: as you sort of track that story through to hopefully

841
00:54:54,440 --> 00:54:58,759
Speaker 1: the most recent versions of well, here's what it kind

842
00:54:58,760 --> 00:55:02,440
Speaker 1: of looks like what happened. But that kind of evidence

843
00:55:02,600 --> 00:55:06,120
Speaker 1: is never quite as fool proof as Lewis and Clark

844
00:55:06,200 --> 00:55:09,120
Speaker 1: saying today, for the first time we saw and shot

845
00:55:09,120 --> 00:55:09,640
Speaker 1: a buffalo.

846
00:55:09,760 --> 00:55:11,600
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So the.

847
00:55:13,080 --> 00:55:16,160
Speaker 1: Story of the West when you go back in time

848
00:55:16,840 --> 00:55:23,480
Speaker 1: is based on a kind of an evidentiary base that

849
00:55:23,640 --> 00:55:27,239
Speaker 1: you have to even be more careful with, but it's

850
00:55:27,280 --> 00:55:29,240
Speaker 1: the only way we have to figure out what happens.

851
00:55:29,440 --> 00:55:31,200
Speaker 3: Have you ever read Black Range Tales?

852
00:55:31,719 --> 00:55:32,440
Speaker 2: I don't think so.

853
00:55:32,600 --> 00:55:37,440
Speaker 3: It's a gold miner. He's knocking around New Mexico mostly

854
00:55:39,560 --> 00:55:43,400
Speaker 3: eighteen sixties. But one of the things really stuck with

855
00:55:43,400 --> 00:55:46,120
Speaker 3: me is here's this guy in the eighteen sixties and

856
00:55:46,160 --> 00:55:49,879
Speaker 3: he's talking about basically trying to loot pueblo sites, and

857
00:55:49,960 --> 00:55:52,439
Speaker 3: in the eighteen sixties. He's lamenting that all the good

858
00:55:52,440 --> 00:55:57,799
Speaker 3: stuff's been hauled away. In the eighteen sixties. He describes

859
00:55:57,840 --> 00:56:00,719
Speaker 3: like amazing things that other guys have carried off.

860
00:56:00,800 --> 00:56:03,239
Speaker 2: Yeah right, yeah, well that's that.

861
00:56:03,360 --> 00:56:07,000
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, that's been going on forever. As soon as

862
00:56:07,040 --> 00:56:11,040
Speaker 1: those villages, like in the Galiseo Valley were abandoned, there's

863
00:56:11,080 --> 00:56:13,840
Speaker 1: no question there were people out there poking around seeing

864
00:56:13,840 --> 00:56:14,480
Speaker 1: what they could find.

865
00:56:14,680 --> 00:56:16,280
Speaker 2: Instantly, yeah, just instantly.

866
00:56:16,920 --> 00:56:20,200
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so who knows what all disappeared, but sometimes

867
00:56:20,239 --> 00:56:23,279
Speaker 1: really great finds or you know, they remain. And I

868
00:56:23,280 --> 00:56:27,200
Speaker 1: mean those Kachina masks that Forest Finn found there in

869
00:56:27,280 --> 00:56:30,320
Speaker 1: San Lazarro Pueblo in nineteen ninety two. Man, that's a

870
00:56:31,480 --> 00:56:37,160
Speaker 1: you just don't find that stuff in part because nobody

871
00:56:37,320 --> 00:56:43,920
Speaker 1: ever leaves it. And something that we don't understand happened

872
00:56:44,480 --> 00:56:50,480
Speaker 1: at San Lazaro around fifteen hundred that caused that population

873
00:56:50,600 --> 00:56:55,560
Speaker 1: of that town to flee. So suddenly that either some

874
00:56:56,719 --> 00:57:02,080
Speaker 1: you know, some magician, some healer, some shaman maybe got

875
00:57:02,200 --> 00:57:08,120
Speaker 1: killed and couldn't go for his his goods, or some

876
00:57:08,239 --> 00:57:12,839
Speaker 1: attack came so suddenly that everybody just fled. I mean,

877
00:57:13,520 --> 00:57:16,240
Speaker 1: so sometimes you get lucky like that, and Forrest got

878
00:57:16,400 --> 00:57:17,440
Speaker 1: pretty lucky on that one.

879
00:57:17,800 --> 00:57:19,840
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it's.

880
00:57:19,720 --> 00:57:22,080
Speaker 3: Like founding finding a modern day house where they didn't

881
00:57:22,080 --> 00:57:23,200
Speaker 3: even take their passports.

882
00:57:23,280 --> 00:57:25,560
Speaker 2: Yeah that's right, that's exactly right.

883
00:57:25,600 --> 00:57:27,760
Speaker 3: Well damn man, I'm super excited for the series. I

884
00:57:27,760 --> 00:57:29,880
Speaker 3: can't wait to learn all this stuff that's coming.

885
00:57:29,960 --> 00:57:32,400
Speaker 2: So thanks, well thanks to you guys for joining me

886
00:57:32,440 --> 00:57:32,600
Speaker 2: with this