Speaker 1: Following the collapse of the Grand Chaco and Empire, refugees
Speaker 1: founded eight thriving new towns along the Galisteo River of
Speaker 1: New Mexico, but ultimately found it difficult to sustain an
Speaker 1: arid climate civilization across the next five hundred years. I'm
Speaker 1: Dan Flores and this is the American West, brought to
Speaker 1: you by Velvet Buck, Crafted for those who live off
Speaker 1: the beaten path, where the hunt meets the harvest, and
Speaker 1: every glass tells a story. Enjoy responsibly, West of Everything.
Speaker 1: Thinking of a podcast about the American West and my
Speaker 1: own take on its history has had me trying to
Speaker 1: understand recently why the West resonates with us the way
Speaker 1: it does. Apologies to New England, New York, the South,
Speaker 1: the Midwest, but the West seems to fascinate the world
Speaker 1: in a way no other American region can. Why are
Speaker 1: their television channels devoted twenty four to seven to playing
Speaker 1: seventy five year old Western movies, so a John Wayne
Speaker 1: fix is available at just about any sleepless three am.
Speaker 1: Why does a contemporary soap opera Western like Yellowstone succeed
Speaker 1: with so many people? Why do Germans dress up and
Speaker 1: play act being residents of the West on their vacation
Speaker 1: weekends in European forest. How does back at the Ranch
Speaker 1: Bootstore in Santa Fe sell five thousand dollars cowboy boots
Speaker 1: that will never see a stirrup? Why is there a
Speaker 1: cowboy poets gathering in Nevada every winter? Why a gene
Speaker 1: Autrey Museum in la a Buffalo Bill Historical Museum in Cody,
Speaker 1: a National Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City?
Speaker 2: And why?
Speaker 1: Maybe this is the most serious question here, does the
Speaker 1: phrase just like the Wild West cause all of us
Speaker 1: to imagine entire freedom of action, a whole lack of restraint,
Speaker 1: a free for all. Nobody is regulating all that reverence
Speaker 1: and fascination for the West happens for good reason, because
Speaker 1: of its sunshine and the public lands that provide remarkable
Speaker 1: access to the surrounding landscape. The West is a great
Speaker 1: place to live in the present, but as we all know,
Speaker 1: it's the past of the West that's the key to
Speaker 1: its magic. Those of us who live in the West
Speaker 1: may love various aspects of the modern world out the door,
Speaker 1: but we all absolutely adore the old West, the frontier.
Speaker 1: We've absorbed it by watching films by john Ford and
Speaker 1: Quentin Tarantino, reading novels by Louis Lamore and Cormac McCarthy,
Speaker 1: and histories by Steven Ambrose and Hampton Sides. Of course,
Speaker 1: there are many versions of the West, and all of
Speaker 1: us have a personal preference for our favorite version. Clearly,
Speaker 1: for john Ford or Quentin Tarantino, it's the Cowboy West
Speaker 1: of so many hundreds of Western movies.
Speaker 2: For others, it's the West.
Speaker 1: Of town building and Wyatt Earp's or Marshall Dillon's imposition
Speaker 1: of law and order, or of settlers versus railroads are
Speaker 1: the gunfighter stories that Tarantino obviously also loves and loves
Speaker 1: to invert. And of course there's the Indian Wars West
Speaker 1: of a few hundred movies and a few thousand paintings.
Speaker 1: But as a modern Westerner, a writer and historian who
Speaker 1: is interested most in the West, remarkable landscapes and animals,
Speaker 1: the West that does it for me is one most
Speaker 1: people may not think of as iconic. I'm most drawn
Speaker 1: to what Western artist Charlie Russell, in one of his
Speaker 1: magnificent paintings, called when the Land belonged to God? For me,
Speaker 1: the West that speaks to my deepest soul is the
Speaker 1: West either side of Lewis and Clark. How the kind
Speaker 1: of natural West they saw came to be and lasted
Speaker 1: for so long? Plus what has happened to that version
Speaker 1: of the West in the centuries since Lewis and Clark
Speaker 1: saw it. That's the West I try to understand. To me,
Speaker 1: that's the true West, a natural West, one that's west
Speaker 1: of everything else. In part, my West is a kind
Speaker 1: of a first contact West, a theme of much science
Speaker 1: fiction and fascination with exploring places like Mars in the
Speaker 1: next few decades. It's about travel to strange places, new
Speaker 1: country and new animals, the meeting place of an exotic,
Speaker 1: ancient world and modernity. Come to think of it, the
Speaker 1: natural West is not only our future on Mars, it's
Speaker 1: also our deep past. When modern humans left Africa more
Speaker 1: than fi fifty thousand years ago and began to explore
Speaker 1: the rest of the Earth, America's West, in many ways,
Speaker 1: was a last earthly experience of that first contact moment
Speaker 1: in human history when new people's first meet. Everybody experiences
Speaker 1: first contact, but usually only one side sees the natural
Speaker 1: world as new and exotic, a new world. The resident
Speaker 1: people tend to think invasion, and so it is. Yet
Speaker 1: all of us have ancestors who bequeathed us more than
Speaker 1: twenty thousand years of first contact experiences in North America.
Speaker 1: So I think I come by a fascination for stories
Speaker 1: like this naturally, and of.
Speaker 2: Course so do you.
Speaker 1: Those of us who are in love with the natural
Speaker 1: West are usually attracted to the world of native people,
Speaker 1: to natural landscapes, and to wild animals. Being intrigued by
Speaker 1: the native West is self evidently at the core of
Speaker 1: Western fascination, judging by the volume and quality of Western
Speaker 1: landscape art and the way the Western landscape becomes a
Speaker 1: character in so many films. Judging by the number of
Speaker 1: Crown Jewel national parks in the West, the same can
Speaker 1: be said of the Western landscape. But let's say at
Speaker 1: the outset. The West I'm talking about is not synonymous
Speaker 1: with the frontier.
Speaker 2: When the Old World came to North America.
Speaker 1: Every place on the continent had a frontier, a meeting
Speaker 1: point between what existed and what was coming. But the
Speaker 1: natural West of which I speak is not defined by
Speaker 1: a moment in time a frontier. It's a place, a
Speaker 1: region of plains, mountains, and deserts, on the sunset side
Speaker 1: of the Mississippi River. The timeframe of the natural West
Speaker 1: is not just its frontier stage. The story of this
Speaker 1: West is much more ancient, and it also takes place
Speaker 1: more recently than the frontier. Because the past does not
Speaker 1: remain in the past, but affects us in our own time.
Speaker 1: The story of the West continues beyond the frontier and
Speaker 1: into the twenty first century. Many of the Western stories
Speaker 1: I've written about and will tell in this podcast are
Speaker 1: the stories of the West's wildlife, very much an ignored
Speaker 1: topic in the West and elsewhere. The cow and the sheep,
Speaker 1: and to a certain extent, even the saddled horse, are
Speaker 1: the animals we associate with the West of trail driving, ranching,
Speaker 1: town building, But I have to observe that not one
Speaker 1: of them appears in Charlie Russell's When the Land Belonged
Speaker 1: to God. Russell's timeless scene of a bison herd flanked
Speaker 1: by gray wolves pouring over a divide in a landscape
Speaker 1: we old worlders would one day call Montana implied that
Speaker 1: the divine world in the West was a Native America.
Speaker 1: So let's start there, but not necessarily at its beginning.
Speaker 1: At least not yet. Let's commence our exploration of the
Speaker 1: natural West slightly later in time. We'll return to beginnings
Speaker 1: in the next episodes with a story that makes the
Speaker 1: point that the West is not new, but a very
Speaker 1: old place. This story stretches our imaginations, suggests how central
Speaker 1: and fragile Western ecologies have always been to human life here,
Speaker 1: and illustrates the longevity of the human experience in a
Speaker 1: country where reflexively still thinking of as the newest part
Speaker 1: of America. On a sun drenched November afternoon, I sit
Speaker 1: in t shirt and shorts a few feet from the
Speaker 1: edge of a canyon rimrock, looking through four hundred feet
Speaker 1: of transparent desert air on a thousand year old city.
Speaker 1: My wife Sarah is pulling a bottle of water from
Speaker 1: her pack. A few feet away. Various friends are scattered
Speaker 1: along rock cairn marked trails through the uplands behind us,
Speaker 1: where the faint indentation of ancient highways four hundred miles
Speaker 1: of them, extend to horizons miles distant. The whole country
Speaker 1: sagebrush uplands, the canyon floor, the enclosing rimrocks, and the
Speaker 1: ruins with odd names that lie in every direction below
Speaker 1: is a uniform tannish brown, the color of dust or
Speaker 1: perhaps the color of abandonment. During the time of the
Speaker 1: Crusades in Europe, this spot and another on the east
Speaker 1: bank of the Mississippi River just across from today Saint Louis,
Speaker 1: held the two largest cities in North America, both religious centers,
Speaker 1: with a ceremonial effigy mound of lizards and serpents, and
Speaker 1: a stone hinge like circle of upright timbers planted to
Speaker 1: mark out soices and equinoxes.
Speaker 2: The city in the Eastern Woods today we call it Kahokia.
Speaker 1: Probably held a fairly permanent population of thirty thousand people,
Speaker 1: larger than London at that time. I first saw Kahokia
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen nineties with a girlfriend who had
Speaker 1: Missouri roots and insisted we visit the place. I'd seen mounds,
Speaker 1: but never anything on the scale of Monks Mound towering
Speaker 1: up out of the American bottoms like an earth and
Speaker 1: Chichenitsan pyramid. After three hundred years of urban life, an
Speaker 1: earthquake mostly destroyed Kahokia City, but not before its population
Speaker 1: had gone through twenty thousand trees and almost all the
Speaker 1: wildlife for scores of miles around. As for the city
Speaker 1: whose ruins lay below us now either side of ten
Speaker 1: centuries ago. From eight hundred AD to eleven forty AD,
Speaker 1: it was the Vatican of the American Desert. We call
Speaker 1: it Chaco, and it's another of our UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Speaker 1: Chaco was the closest Native America ever got to an
Speaker 1: empire like those of the Aztecs, Mayans, or Incas. But
Speaker 1: this was not an empire of warrior armies and conquered provinces.
Speaker 1: It was an empire of priests who organized many thousands
Speaker 1: of scattered farming hamlets across fifty thousand square miles of
Speaker 1: today's four corners into an economic and religious network. No
Speaker 1: European principality of the age matched it. What the priest's
Speaker 1: promised was direct intervention with the deities who controlled rain,
Speaker 1: crops and animals, those grand imponderables whose presence made life
Speaker 1: good and whose absence ruined it. The city of Chaco
Speaker 1: housed the priests, their families, and a resident population of thousands.
Speaker 1: It stored and distributed surplus crops. Then at solstices and
Speaker 1: other special times of year, it hosted grand ceremonies, to
Speaker 1: which the outlying residents made holy pilgrimages. At those times,
Speaker 1: Choco gathered a population of some forty thousand. Looking down
Speaker 1: now on its buildings and avenues, one suspects both the
Speaker 1: ceremonies and the nightlife must have been epic. Choco America
Speaker 1: almost seems foreign in the modern United States, as if
Speaker 1: lifted from the Middle East. The agricultural revolution arrived in
Speaker 1: this region thirteen hundred years before the city existed, and
Speaker 1: pollen studies indicate this development produced two immediate environmental effects.
Speaker 1: Human populations skyrocketed, and crops that needed to be boiled
Speaker 1: before you could eat them meant that daily cooking fires
Speaker 1: soon reduced a robust pinions juniper woodland to desert. This
Speaker 1: became a world in need of priests who could intervene
Speaker 1: with the gods. Sitting and admiring the sprawling, hemispheric architecture
Speaker 1: of Chaco's largest structure, Pueblo Benito, as its lines and
Speaker 1: shadows shimmer in the afternoon sun, I know this is
Speaker 1: a place that reveals much about humanity. Sarah passes the
Speaker 1: water bottle over to me, and reading my mind, sums
Speaker 1: it up.
Speaker 2: It wasn't until the eighteen eighties that anyone built a
Speaker 2: larger building than that in America. In its time, the
Speaker 2: city lasted longer than Washington, d C. Has so far.
Speaker 1: Chaco and its satellite hamlets survive, in fact, for three
Speaker 1: hundred and forty years. The shorthand version of its collapse
Speaker 1: is that it all ended with a series of droughts
Speaker 1: across the Southwest, and that's true, but the many archaeologists
Speaker 1: who have interpreted Chaco know that much more happened here.
Speaker 1: When the rain stopped coming, the farmers seemed to act abruptly,
Speaker 1: dropping their digging sticks in the fields, turning their backs
Speaker 1: on the grand religious gatherings at Chaco, and relocating.
Speaker 2: Across the southwest.
Speaker 1: Some went north to what we now call Mesa Verdi's
Speaker 1: Cliff Palace in present Colorado. Most of the people who
Speaker 1: abandoned the Chaco and world congregated along the Upper Rio Grand,
Speaker 1: eventually founding towns still home to their descendants, the Pueblo peoples,
Speaker 1: famous for their apartment like villages, geometrically painted pottery, and
Speaker 1: turquoise jewelry. Why did Choco collapse in what sounds.
Speaker 2: Like a fit of peak.
Speaker 1: The evidence and ultimately the response of the pueblos afterwards
Speaker 1: points to a crisis we should recognize. Down there in
Speaker 1: Pueblo Bonito, a single room out of six hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty rooms yielded the remains of fourteen people whose funerary
Speaker 1: items indicated they represented Chaco's religious and political elites. In
Speaker 1: the room were flutes, ceremonial staffs, thousands of pieces of
Speaker 1: turquoise jewelry, cont shell trumpets from America's west coast, the
Speaker 1: remains of macaw parrots from the tropics, The oldest burial
Speaker 1: dated to eight hundred a d. And the last from
Speaker 1: Choco's abandonment. So those fourteen span the entire life of
Speaker 1: the city, and.
Speaker 2: Not just that.
Speaker 1: The genetics of nine of the fourteen showed them to
Speaker 1: be descended from the same matrilineal line from a woman
Speaker 1: who evidently had been there at Chaco's founding. Disparities in
Speaker 1: wealth and quality of life, along with the resentments they produce,
Speaker 1: are familiar to modern Americans. Isotope comparisons of the bones
Speaker 1: of the priestly class in Choco's great houses with those
Speaker 1: of farmers from the villages indicates that the elites consumed
Speaker 1: far more protein from the meat of deer and prong horns.
Speaker 1: They were better fed, grew almost two inches taller, suffered
Speaker 1: less from disease, had three times the survival rate for
Speaker 1: children under five, and lived longer. They were also conspicuous
Speaker 1: consumers of high status goods, from beautiful pots to copper bells,
Speaker 1: from turquoise jewelry to parrots. In the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: an early archaeologist working in Chaco shipped more than seventy
Speaker 1: thousand high status items just from Pueblo Benito to the
Speaker 1: American Museum of Natural History. The farming class suffered this
Speaker 1: gap between rich and poor as long as the elites
Speaker 1: delivered on their promise to make it rain. But when
Speaker 1: drought came and the priests were powerless to stop it,
Speaker 1: the lower classes attacked and killed many in the upper class.
Speaker 1: They also embraced a new belief, the Kachina religion. By
Speaker 1: the year eleven sixty, massive three story public buildings like
Speaker 1: Chetro Kettle, a four hundred room great house in Chako
Speaker 1: that was built with fifty million sandstone blocks, twenty six
Speaker 1: thousand timbers and extended for four hundred and fifty feet
Speaker 1: beneath a canyon wall, stood completely abandoned as for animal
Speaker 1: life in the Chacoan region. Diet studies in the collapses
Speaker 1: aftermath implied that rabbits and rodents were almost the only
Speaker 1: huntable animals left. Their need for protein perhaps explains why
Speaker 1: some of the new villages were founded close to the
Speaker 1: bison planes. One March afternoon in the early two thousands,
Speaker 1: I opened the passenger door of a pickup, stretched out
Speaker 1: a hiking boot to the ground, and had one of
Speaker 1: those small steps for man moments until I exited that
Speaker 1: pickup and began to walk on a surface that spoke,
Speaker 1: it crunched, it crinkled. I'd never had the kind of
Speaker 1: visceral understanding of America's ancient past I was now experiencing.
Speaker 1: I was walking into a place known to Southwestern archaeologists
Speaker 1: as the San Lazaro Ruins. With every step, my boots
Speaker 1: were landing on broken shards of Indian pottery half a
Speaker 1: foot deep. That brought a profound realization. I was walking
Speaker 1: on ground that humans long before me had lived on
Speaker 1: for some three hundred years. In every direction, the ground
Speaker 1: underfoot was a thick, continuous surface of curving, angled, shattered pottery.
Speaker 1: The pieces set at all angles and drawing the eye
Speaker 1: with painted zigzags and designs in blacks and reds. This
Speaker 1: is how the people who lived here seven hundred years
Speaker 1: ago must have experienced a stroll around their town. I thought,
Speaker 1: it's how the pioneers of archaeology in the West, the
Speaker 1: Adolf Bandeliers, the Alfred Kidters and Edgar Hewletts, no doubt
Speaker 1: felt the first time they walked across the ruins of
Speaker 1: Chaco or Mesa Verdi, or the country I was in now,
Speaker 1: the Galistaloe River country south of Santa Fe.
Speaker 2: I was having this experience.
Speaker 1: Because I've become friends with a remarkable Santa Fe character
Speaker 1: named Forrest Finn. Among many aspects of Finn's world that
Speaker 1: seemed more than improbable was that he actually owned the
Speaker 1: ground where the ruins of San Lazaro stood. That's why
Speaker 1: we were here. He was proudly showing off his possession
Speaker 1: of the largest ancestral pueblo village site in the Santa
Speaker 1: Fe area. A native Texan and a former Vietnam fighter
Speaker 1: pilot who survived being shot down to become a successful
Speaker 1: art gallery owner in Santa Fe. Fenn was in his
Speaker 1: late seventies. Then his body leaned his silvery hair still
Speaker 1: in a military buzz cut.
Speaker 2: When we struck up a friendship, I.
Speaker 1: Found him garrulous, hugely energetic, and, despite a slender education,
Speaker 1: fiercely opinionated.
Speaker 2: True to his Texas roots.
Speaker 1: Those opinions included a hatred for the federal government and
Speaker 1: a distrust of educated elites. Although he could occasionally be
Speaker 1: impressed by experts, Fenn was as dedicated to Old West
Speaker 1: history as fundamentalists are in Old Time religion. His home
Speaker 1: came across as a combination museum, archive, and archaeology lab.
Speaker 1: He outdid anyone in my experience with his boyish, hucked
Speaker 1: finn like romance about Western adventure, which led him to
Speaker 1: invest prodigious energy in several seriously crazy projects that made
Speaker 1: many people WinCE. One was acquiring and doing amateur excavations
Speaker 1: at a major site like San Lazaro. The last of
Speaker 1: Forrest's grand ideas, when he was in his eighties, got
Speaker 1: him national exposure that wasn't always admiring. He buried a
Speaker 1: treasure chest containing more than two million dollars of precious
Speaker 1: artifacts from around the world in a secret location in
Speaker 1: the West, then self published a book featuring a page
Speaker 1: of verse offering clues to its hiding spot. More than
Speaker 1: one person died, and untold thousands trecked the West's vast
Speaker 1: public lands in search of a treasure that to forest
Speaker 1: offered ordinary folks a chance to reprise a classic Old
Speaker 1: West opportunity, finding loot and.
Speaker 2: Making a mint off nature.
Speaker 1: San Lazaro had once been one of eight major Indian
Speaker 1: towns that post Choco spread across the Galiso River near
Speaker 1: where Spain would found Santa Fe in the year sixteen ten.
Speaker 1: The entire four corners is lousy with the surviving ruins
Speaker 1: of advanced farming civilizations that made the Southwest into one
Speaker 1: of the most densely lived in parts of North America
Speaker 1: a thousand years ago, long before Europeans came here, other
Speaker 1: humans hoped and dreamed, lived, loved, and died, and left
Speaker 1: their mark on this oldest place in America. In fact,
Speaker 1: eight hundred years ago there was a far larger population
Speaker 1: of people living in the Galisseo River country than actually
Speaker 1: live here. Now that's a claim few other American regions
Speaker 1: can make. A great drought in the Southwest, the most
Speaker 1: severe one in the past thousand years, was the apparent
Speaker 1: approximate cause that brought them here. In a sense, they
Speaker 1: were religious refugees fleeing that hereditary religious class that had
Speaker 1: insisted they could intervene with the gods to send life
Speaker 1: saving rain. So the search for a new center place
Speaker 1: led some of the former Choco Puebloans to the beautiful,
Speaker 1: wind swept Galisteo Country. Here's what they found. A high
Speaker 1: desert with three hundred and twenty days of annual sunshine,
Speaker 1: prompting their name for it, placed near the sun, rainfall
Speaker 1: that rarely reached to double figures but still made for
Speaker 1: green mountains and dwarf forests. A river, albeit small, with
Speaker 1: spring fed tributaries sometimes flowing water, sowable ground, sandstone for bricks,
Speaker 1: and suitable soil to make adobes. A small mountain range
Speaker 1: long known and famous far and wide for its sky
Speaker 1: blue stones, ample firewood to boil their crops in the
Speaker 1: grassland basin. Bands of striped prong orn antelope, mule deer
Speaker 1: in the hills, and elk, sheep and bears in the mountains.
Speaker 1: Eagles soaring overhead, packs of gray wolves howling in the night,
Speaker 1: Lions slinking through the rocks, and sacred coyotes trotting by
Speaker 1: with a quick, sharp eyed look. Crystalline air for watching
Speaker 1: the sun's progress along the horizons, nights brilliant with jittering stars,
Speaker 1: the steady glow of traveler planets, and the occasional light
Speaker 1: that flies. The colonizers spoke two different pueblo and languages,
Speaker 1: Tanno and Caresson, so living near one another were bilingual.
Speaker 1: They wore garments made from the cotton they grew, and
Speaker 1: ornamented themselves with turquoise jewelry. The women wore their dark
Speaker 1: hair long, while men affected a bowl cut. They painted
Speaker 1: colorful designs on pottery known as Rio Grand glazeware that
Speaker 1: frequently included images of parrots or macaus, brilliantly mark birds,
Speaker 1: traded up from Mexico and not native to anywhere in
Speaker 1: the Southwest. Farm implements they fashioned from fire hardened juniper
Speaker 1: arrow points largely from local black obcitian glass, and their
Speaker 1: axe blades from an aluminum silica called fiber light. They
Speaker 1: mined in the high rockies nearby. Their domestic animals were
Speaker 1: dogs and turkeys. Their ancestors had domesticated turkeys around the
Speaker 1: year one thousand, when huntable wildlife near their villages declined
Speaker 1: and left them protein poor water manipulation and desert agriculture
Speaker 1: required cooperative effort, so these were town dwellers. They lived
Speaker 1: in apartment like rectangular buildings with flat roofs resting on
Speaker 1: massive support beams, with plastered walls, occasionally built of stacked stone,
Speaker 1: but more commonly in the Galileo country of puddled dried adobes.
Speaker 1: The buildings often were three to five stories, with entrances,
Speaker 1: cooking and daily life carried out on the top roof level.
Speaker 1: The lower levels accessed by descending ladders into rooms that
Speaker 1: featured gleaming, polished floors and walls, often painted with murals.
Speaker 1: The buildings commonly grouped around central plazas. The plazas highlighted
Speaker 1: circular underground ceremonial rooms known as kivas, with fireplaces, perimeter benches,
Speaker 1: and a central hold a sipapu. It was called representing
Speaker 1: humanity's point of emergence from a world below into.
Speaker 2: The present world.
Speaker 1: San Lazarro left the largest ruins of all the Galistale villages.
Speaker 1: Its ruins cover fifty seven acres and feature the outlines
Speaker 1: of twenty seven separate buildings, with one nine hundred and
Speaker 1: forty one ground floor rooms and a remarkable total of
Speaker 1: five thousand rooms. It was settled around twelve ninety, and,
Speaker 1: despite a pair of debilitating droughts in the fourteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: continued to grow for two hundred years, when its peak
Speaker 1: population was nearly two thousand people. That's six times the
Speaker 1: size of any twenty first century Galisteo valley town. By then,
Speaker 1: many local resources were likely depleted, and the town was
Speaker 1: abandoned in the early fifteen hundreds. The immediate catalyst to
Speaker 1: that exodus may have been something dramatic, for in fifteen
Speaker 1: eighty one, a Spanish party found the town half destroyed.
Speaker 1: Finn's most remarkable San Lazaro discovery, for which he had
Speaker 1: the good sense to call in professional archaeologists and native descendants,
Speaker 1: came in nineteen ninety two, when he unearthed two plastered
Speaker 1: Kachina masks and other stored sacred objects. The magnificent mask
Speaker 1: appeared to represent black bears and were likely associated with
Speaker 1: a bear clan or Medison society. Various dating techniques placed
Speaker 1: the masks a few years on either side of fifteen hundred.
Speaker 1: Kachina mask would be one of the most unlikely objects
Speaker 1: any Puebloan would ever abandon, whatever happened at San Lazarro
Speaker 1: around fifteen hundred must have come on remarkably suddenly when
Speaker 1: European colonizers arrived in the early sixteen hundreds and introduced
Speaker 1: fulsome news sources of protein. Four thousand sheep and one
Speaker 1: thousand goats arrived with those first Spanish settlers. Pueblo people
Speaker 1: fully reoccupied San Lazarro before long, though swelling resentment over
Speaker 1: having to provide crops and labor, and as Spanish suppression
Speaker 1: of the Kachina religion led San Lazaro's warriors to become
Speaker 1: leaders in the Great Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty, which
Speaker 1: drove the Europeans out of New Mexico for a dozen years.
Speaker 1: But the Pueblo citizens were alarmed at the possible consequences
Speaker 1: of this that everyone ended up fleeing San Lazaro, leaving
Speaker 1: a four hundred year old city to dissolve into silence
Speaker 1: and adobe. There were at least seven other similar, long
Speaker 1: lived towns in the Galileo country, harboring at various times
Speaker 1: several thousand more of these former Chocowans. Several were farther
Speaker 1: east and close to the high plains, where they had
Speaker 1: to survive a patchy rage after those Athabaskan speakers migrated
Speaker 1: in from the far north, but like the townspeople of
Speaker 1: San Lazaro, their inhabitants fled soon following the Pueblo Revolt,
Speaker 1: when the Spanish absence allowed for even more plains Indian raids,
Speaker 1: this time by Comanches thundering their horses through a rim
Speaker 1: rock break that still known today as Comanche Gap. The
Speaker 1: Spaniards called the westernmost Pueblo town they found than the
Speaker 1: Galileo country, San Marcos. It was near a little mountain
Speaker 1: range the newcomers named Los Surreals, the little hills that
Speaker 1: had been mined since the time of Chaco for lead
Speaker 1: use to glaze pottery, and for the ultimate trade item
Speaker 1: from the southwest, sky blue turquoise. One thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: Indian miners pulled turquoise or out of shafts in a
Speaker 1: minor cereals peak called Chalchi Wheedle, the name from the
Speaker 1: Aztec language, and a little mountain with an outsized reputation.
Speaker 1: An image of this little mountain graces the Temple of
Speaker 1: the Sun Pyramid in the Aztec capital of tenoch Teetlin.
Speaker 1: I've explored its ancient shafts sum but always with hair
Speaker 1: raising alarm and shock at the fearlessness of Indian miners.
Speaker 1: The fortunes of these towns flourished and ebbed as the
Speaker 1: centuries passed, when they were all occupied with unexploited resources available.
Speaker 1: In the thirteen hundreds and fourteen hundreds, the combined population
Speaker 1: of these Galileo River towns may have been more than
Speaker 1: six thousand, because rainfall was essential for their economy, yet
Speaker 1: droughts also strike the Galiseo. They made a science of
Speaker 1: cloud and wind study, no doubt hopeful as modern residents
Speaker 1: still are when grand anvil headed clouds full of moisture
Speaker 1: towered up from the mountain ranges in summertime. Their religion
Speaker 1: was less theocratic and more decentralized than at Chaco, and
Speaker 1: featured clan leaders dressed in the elaborate costuming representing Kachina emissaries.
Speaker 2: To the deities of nature.
Speaker 1: The Kachina religion lives on among their descendants today, although
Speaker 1: none of these towns survives today. Half of these Galiselo
Speaker 1: pueblos lasted longer than the United States has existed, but
Speaker 1: as is evident from a place like San Lazara, for
Speaker 1: all their successes, the Galistale Pueblins struggled with long term sustainability.
Speaker 1: The year round fires to boil their crops meant that
Speaker 1: firewood cutting and gathering pushed farther out year after year.
Speaker 1: One of the first scientists to investigate the ruins of
Speaker 1: their towns, Nels Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History,
Speaker 1: took a revelatory photograph of the San Lazaro site in
Speaker 1: nineteen twelve, one hundred and thirty two years after its abandonment.
Speaker 1: That photo showed a still barren landscape, almost entirely stripped
Speaker 1: of trees and shrubs, for two miles around. With the
Speaker 1: diaspora that followed Chaco's collapse, the new pueblo town of Pecos,
Speaker 1: northeast of the Galistaloe country, developed a mutualistic arrangement with
Speaker 1: planes hunters to trade Pueblo crop products for dried bison meat.
Speaker 1: There's no evidence these Galistdale villages ever managed something similar,
Speaker 1: so with eight towns and several thousand residents, huntable wildlife
Speaker 1: likely took a significant hit. One bit of evidence comes
Speaker 1: from Sand Lazaro's archaeology's astonishing number of bones and skulls,
Speaker 1: many of them cracked open to get at marrow or
Speaker 1: brains from the goats and sheep Spanish settlers introduced now
Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds. Protein was obviously a dietary addition. The
Speaker 1: Galisteo Pueblo residents were avid for. Their several hundred year
Speaker 1: inhabitation did leave the incoming Europeans a beautifully grass basin
Speaker 1: and valley and a healthy Galisto river that flowed over
Speaker 1: the surface of this landscape. The ecological changes that left
Speaker 1: exotic weeds and spreading junipers and produced a river that
Speaker 1: slashed arroyos and stream beds twenty five feet deep all
Speaker 1: came later with pasturage for new spains, horse herds, and
Speaker 1: flocks of sheep and goats, and when the Americans came
Speaker 1: with millions of cattle and renewed mining in the local mountains.
Speaker 1: Beyond walking across the broken pots at San Lazaro, my
Speaker 1: own most vivid experience of the lingering presence of this
Speaker 1: former Galistal world has come from hiking the remnant lava
Speaker 1: dykes that rise like black dragon backbones from the yellow
Speaker 1: grasslands here. Centuries ago, my Galistal neighbors lavishly adorned these
Speaker 1: lava boulders with petroglyphs, not a handful, not a few dozen,
Speaker 1: but with thousands of white outlined images carefully pecked into
Speaker 1: the black rock surfaces for capturing some of the essentials
Speaker 1: of their world and their presence. Nothing else brings them
Speaker 1: to life like these Today we call petroglyphs and pictrographs
Speaker 1: rock art, but of course they express a more specific
Speaker 1: cosmic meaning than any decorative or narrative art. Picking my
Speaker 1: way from boulder to boulder atop these dykes and keening
Speaker 1: morning winds, the images have sometimes given me a Sistine
Speaker 1: chapel feeling, at other times the open mouth reaction one
Speaker 1: has to the Las Vegas Strip. There are elaborately costumed
Speaker 1: Kachina figures on these rocks, and having once stood in
Speaker 1: freezing December weather in Zuni Pueblo and watched a towering
Speaker 1: Shaalako kachina clacking its two foot wooden beak while dancing
Speaker 1: a Solstice blessing inside a brand new home, it's hard
Speaker 1: for me to separate the sacred from the entertaining in
Speaker 1: these images. I also can't help imagining date nights and
Speaker 1: holding hands under a full moon, gobsmacked at white visions
Speaker 1: leaping out at you from the silvery black. The imagery
Speaker 1: is mind bending in variety and detail. There are mythical
Speaker 1: creatures like giant horn water serpents, but also real rattlesnakes,
Speaker 1: often too in tandem, underbird eagles, badgers, coyotes, bears, all
Speaker 1: revered animals the Pueblos preserved. There are gleaming four pointed planets,
Speaker 1: an endless variety of different cloud terraces, which is the
Speaker 1: home of the Kachina gods, and those appear in conjunction
Speaker 1: with water serpents, mountain lions, a woman's nether parts. There
Speaker 1: are faces with or without masks. Handprints link these zigzag lines, spirals,
Speaker 1: fields of dots, warrior figures protected by circular shields. While
Speaker 1: history and their struggles at sustainability mean the Pueblo people
Speaker 1: no longer live along the Galisal River, which is my
Speaker 1: home today, their descendants.
Speaker 2: Remain along the Rio Grande.
Speaker 1: Nearby, and I like to go to the annual ceremonies
Speaker 1: they open to the public. But like so much of
Speaker 1: the human story, the past here and even in Chaco
Speaker 1: somehow still seems just out of my grasp. We humans
Speaker 1: focus on the moments we exist in touching the past
Speaker 1: is the forever problem of history.
Speaker 3: I'm Steve Vanella. I'm joined here by Randall Williams. Hello,
Speaker 3: and we're gonna do a little thing where after we
Speaker 3: listen to Dan Florey's American West podcast, we get to
Speaker 3: come in. We have the privilege we get to come
Speaker 3: in and ask questions and hopefully for you listeners, some
Speaker 3: of the questions we asked might reflect some of the
Speaker 3: questions that you have and maybe we'll do a little
Speaker 3: thing or if you have questions, yeah, we will do this.
Speaker 3: Send your questions in and at some point we'll send
Speaker 3: your questions and at some point we'll be able to
Speaker 3: round up with Dan and get your questions answered. But
Speaker 3: in the meantime, here's our questions.
Speaker 4: And this is very familiar to us as former students
Speaker 4: of dance, so exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks to you guys for doing this, by the way,
Speaker 1: really appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's great. You got you want to start.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think in the start of this episode you're
Speaker 4: talking about many wests, and there's certain wests that have
Speaker 4: you know, lived on and on and pop culture, especially
Speaker 4: for Americans living in the twenty first century. But you
Speaker 4: kind of challenge people to understand the West as a
Speaker 4: much larger place than the West of cowboys and Indians
Speaker 4: and of overland trails and everything like that. So I wonder,
Speaker 4: what is it about the West that seems to have
Speaker 4: grabbed a hold of our imaginations, and what has particular
Speaker 4: about cowboy culture that's grabbed our imaginations? And then what
Speaker 4: do we gain by opening our eyes to through the
Speaker 4: deep time West.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I'm putting together a podcast here, twenty six
Speaker 1: episodes on it that will be about different kinds of
Speaker 1: things than most people think of when they think of
Speaker 1: Western history. They're no gunfights, they are no mining strikes,
Speaker 1: there's no Marshall Dylon. What I'm interested in is a
Speaker 1: different kind of West. And I think this is maybe
Speaker 1: the value of something like this, a part of the
Speaker 1: Western story that's not really been known or written about
Speaker 1: very much, and certainly not in pop culture portrayed so
Speaker 1: that people get to understand it. And what that West
Speaker 1: is is something I call the natural West, which is
Speaker 1: it's a West of the native people. It's a West
Speaker 1: of wildlife, abundance beyond imagining for wildlife and many, many
Speaker 1: different species, and it's a story of the West. That
Speaker 1: really hinges a lot of around kind of an initial
Speaker 1: reaction to a place that's different, new, and very unfamiliar
Speaker 1: to people coming out of the East in particular. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think people coming up, say from Mexico into New
Speaker 1: Mexico or California, don't see the West as being that different.
Speaker 1: Their usual reaction to the country farther north is that
Speaker 1: it's cold.
Speaker 2: But it's similar.
Speaker 3: That's an interesting point, man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's how they that's how they characterize it. Man,
Speaker 1: it's really cold.
Speaker 3: There kind of got similar thing going on as cold.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the country looks the same, but man, it's cold.
Speaker 1: But what I'm kind of interested in is the deep
Speaker 1: time story all the way back to the Pleistocene and
Speaker 1: the earliest people who were here and how they interacted
Speaker 1: with Western animals, because we have some pretty epic alterations
Speaker 1: that take place in this story. I mean, we lose
Speaker 1: a lot of animals ten thousand years ago. Then we
Speaker 1: have a period where we go for ten thousand years
Speaker 1: in the West and it looks as if native people
Speaker 1: in particular are pretty benevolent. I mean, there's only one
Speaker 1: extinction during that time period, and I try to try
Speaker 1: to figure out why that is how it happened that way,
Speaker 1: and then a lot of the rest of the episodes
Speaker 1: have to do with a kind of an exploratory first
Speaker 1: contact experience from people like Lewis and Clark, for example,
Speaker 1: and a whole host of people later in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: and also with what transpires in a West in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century with all this abundant wildlife where there are
Speaker 1: really no rules, no regulations. It's just kind of a
Speaker 1: free for all, and pretty much what you would predict
Speaker 1: for a free for all, things don't turn out all
Speaker 1: that great for a lot of the animals, and of
Speaker 1: course a lot of.
Speaker 2: The native people either.
Speaker 1: But it's those stories in contrast to Marshall Dillon and
Speaker 1: town building and the California gold Rush, the Mormon settlement
Speaker 1: of Utah, these are the things that I've been writing about.
Speaker 2: For thirty five years.
Speaker 1: Basically, I never was interested much because other people had
Speaker 1: already done it to write about the mining rushes or
Speaker 1: the Indian Wars. I was always looking for something different
Speaker 1: and new to write about that I thought would sort
Speaker 1: of tell us story that nobody quite knew yet. And
Speaker 1: that's really what this podcast does.
Speaker 3: This there's the thing I've wondered about there's an impression
Speaker 3: I have unsourced material about source material east versus West
Speaker 3: source material, and you might not share the same impression.
Speaker 3: But if you have this impression, maybe you can speak
Speaker 3: to it would be this is a very roundabout way
Speaker 3: of arriving at the point. But when Rand and I
Speaker 3: were reading about the long hunters, so this this group
Speaker 3: of Euro American deer skin hunters that were first pushing
Speaker 3: over the apple Achian Mountains and going into Kentucky, basically
Speaker 3: the country south of the Ohio River, west of the
Speaker 3: apple Aachian Range, south of the Ohio pushing into that area,
Speaker 3: and we kind of marvel at the paucity of materials
Speaker 3: and the and the the lack of sort of like
Speaker 3: the lack of natural observation, the lack of nature observation.
Speaker 3: What is there was collected like very deliberately by a
Speaker 3: historian who went and talked to some of the key players, children, spouses,
Speaker 3: grandchildren and try to put together a little history of
Speaker 3: these first euro Americans to push into this area. But
Speaker 3: there's just not a ton there. And that is at say,
Speaker 3: seventeen seventy six. Yeah, what happens that when you get
Speaker 3: what happens in the next thirty forty years where all
Speaker 3: of a sudden it seems like everyone is so literate. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and everyone is just observing and writing about trying to
Speaker 3: you know, writing about the sites they see, counting things right,
Speaker 3: like really putting a record down. Then now you can
Speaker 3: look at the West, and part of what's so inviting
Speaker 3: about it is there something, there's something there to read about. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's really hard to get Like you just when
Speaker 3: looking at people coming into Kentucky again for instance, coming
Speaker 3: into Kentucky, it's like there's hints of things where you're like,
Speaker 3: you gather it must have been really different, but there's
Speaker 3: no just vivid pictures of what they're seeing. Did people
Speaker 3: also learn to read and write? Like, like, how do
Speaker 3: you how do you explain that?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: I explained it in three ways, I guess. One is
Speaker 1: that starting in eighteen hundred, a lot of the expeditions
Speaker 1: into the West, or government expeditions, and those people are
Speaker 1: giving given specific instructions to keep a record, keep a
Speaker 1: really close record. I mean, Jefferson tells Lewis and Clark,
Speaker 1: for example, you know, any animals that you see that
Speaker 1: aren't found in the maritime states, collect them, write a description,
Speaker 1: learn them as much about their natural history as you can.
Speaker 1: And I think that's one of the things. I think
Speaker 1: another thing is that there are a lot of Europeans
Speaker 1: coming over in the early nineteenth century. The Thomas Nuttalls,
Speaker 1: the John Bradberry's and those guys tend to look at
Speaker 1: darkest North America sort of the way the Brits were
Speaker 1: looking at Africa. Then where Wow, man, this is some
Speaker 1: amazing part of the world that none of us has
Speaker 1: ever seen. And so we got to keep a record
Speaker 1: of all of it. We've got to, you know, we've
Speaker 1: got to preserve what it looks like. And I think
Speaker 1: really there was an actual market.
Speaker 2: For literary work about the West.
Speaker 1: Starting around probably as early as eighteen ten. And I
Speaker 1: think the you know, the Nicholas Biddle Journals of the
Speaker 1: Lewis and Clark Expedition, which came out in eighteen fourteen.
Speaker 2: I mean, those things sold like hotcakes in the East,
Speaker 2: and I.
Speaker 1: Think that made people understand that, wow, okay, all I
Speaker 1: gotta do is go out to the West, you know,
Speaker 1: and write some account. And it even led to I mean,
Speaker 1: and I have found two or three of these what
Speaker 1: were basically made up accounts by people who never actually
Speaker 1: went to the West, but they talked to people and
Speaker 1: read other people's stuff and sat down and wrote an
Speaker 1: account of their own journey.
Speaker 3: Like it was enough of a thing that there's value
Speaker 3: in faking one.
Speaker 1: Yes, there was, and you could sell a faked book.
Speaker 1: There's one particular guy, a guy named John Mayley, who
Speaker 1: wrote a faked book about an expedition he took up
Speaker 1: the Red River, and he sold it for like five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars or something, which, of course at the time
Speaker 1: was a huge sum of money. But the publisher he
Speaker 1: sold it to broke in the panic, the Depression of
Speaker 1: eighteen nineteen, and they never did publish it. So it
Speaker 1: kind of exists just as a manuscript which I have
Speaker 1: actually examined and examined closely enough to realize bullshit.
Speaker 2: This guy did not do any of this.
Speaker 3: But man, like, it's off your subject matter. But can
Speaker 3: you just imagine that if a century prior to Lewis
Speaker 3: and Clark you to have taken people with that mandate
Speaker 3: and that skill set, and you had said, I want
Speaker 3: you to cross over the range divide, I want you
Speaker 3: to descend the Ohio decend the Mississippi, come back overland, yeah,
Speaker 3: trace or whatever, and like do your thing, like right
Speaker 3: down about all this stuff, right down about all of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have to.
Speaker 4: I mean in that era, you really have to sort
Speaker 4: through what material there is to get glimpses of the
Speaker 4: natural world. And obviously there's a literature from the earlier
Speaker 4: colonial period.
Speaker 2: Of you know, English gentlemen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it doesn't William Bartram kind of very
Speaker 4: it reads is very sort of pre modern, not in
Speaker 4: the technical sense, but pre modern. I mean it's very
Speaker 4: It's like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you read that's true. You read like the account
Speaker 3: of Kabe's a Devaka. It feels like it's like an
Speaker 3: extended acid trip. You know, like you're kind of like, what, really,
Speaker 3: there's no way, I mean, that's you kind of like
Speaker 3: it doesn't paint a vivid picture. And I think that
Speaker 3: something you're right, Like, something happened linguistically where we got
Speaker 3: over this hump and all of a sudden you can
Speaker 3: understand what people are talking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's that a market emerged for it.
Speaker 1: There was a market, you know, America where we're interested
Speaker 1: in possibilities for making money, and here was this wild
Speaker 1: new country that everybody around the world, including all the Europeans,
Speaker 1: were really intrigued by, And so people began to realize, well, hell,
Speaker 1: I just you know, I try to I try to
Speaker 1: keep notes.
Speaker 2: Maybe I embellish a little bit.
Speaker 1: Even, And so I think that's kind of one of
Speaker 1: the explanations for what happens starting about eighteen hundred and
Speaker 1: eighteen ten, that suddenly you start getting a lot more
Speaker 1: primary source accounts. You have to use them, you know,
Speaker 1: with a grain of salt.
Speaker 2: Sometimes.
Speaker 3: I wasn't really aware of that, man, and you turned
Speaker 3: me on to that to be suspicious. In studying writing,
Speaker 3: we'd always in studying fiction writing, we always learned about
Speaker 3: the the unreliable narrator as a fictional device, right like
Speaker 3: you're reading a novel and the reader sort of becomes
Speaker 3: aware like that part of the thing is not to
Speaker 3: trust the narrator, which is common in movies and other stuff,
Speaker 3: right like it's built, it's built intension. I never thought
Speaker 3: of it in historical journals. I never thought of it.
Speaker 3: And I had read Tough Trip through Paradise, and I'd
Speaker 3: emailed you or ran in to you whatever it was,
Speaker 3: and asked you about tough trip through Paradise. I remember
Speaker 3: you said basically, you know, be careful. He plays a
Speaker 3: little I think he said something. He gets a little
Speaker 3: fast and loose, and some of the things don't quite
Speaker 3: add up, and I just read it like gospel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, well, I think one is inclined to
Speaker 1: do that until you began to realize that. You know,
Speaker 1: the classic one in the West is the account of
Speaker 1: James Ohio Patty, who you know. I mean that book
Speaker 1: was probably published ten different times in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: and so there are a bunch of different versions.
Speaker 2: He changed him up.
Speaker 3: Wait, we quote him, and had been warned about him, now,
Speaker 3: but we quote him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's got some good some good details. Yeah, he
Speaker 2: does have some good details.
Speaker 1: And I mean, who knows what I think, for example,
Speaker 1: with people like that, like Patty and maybe like John Maylee,
Speaker 1: is they actually did I think Melee knew enough to
Speaker 1: convince me that he had talked to people, he had talked.
Speaker 2: To people who knew about it.
Speaker 1: But when he started going up the Red River and
Speaker 1: started describing the landmarks, I mean I could tell by
Speaker 1: the time you got to about the third or fourth day,
Speaker 1: this guy ain't nowhere on any red rivers that.
Speaker 2: Existed then or now. I mean, so it was.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a market for stuff and it produces
Speaker 1: a huge abundance of material to use, but somehow you
Speaker 1: have to be careful.
Speaker 3: I'm reading one right now. It's like sixty years. It's
Speaker 3: a guy that wound up in Montana, wound up having
Speaker 3: he had a trading for it. He had a trading
Speaker 3: post in Missoula for a while. Can't member's name. Sixty years,
Speaker 3: a fighter and trader or something. And a lot of
Speaker 3: the stuff in there. There's a lot of stuff in
Speaker 3: there where you read it and you're like you accept
Speaker 3: as legit. Like some of the observations are ways they
Speaker 3: use things right, like little tricks of the trade. You're like,
Speaker 3: that has to come from a level of knowledge. But
Speaker 3: other parts of it, you know, he's talking about I
Speaker 3: sent Randall passage about Sharp's Buffalo rifles, and Randall's like
Speaker 3: they didn't exist, So he's a mystery later he's misremembering whatever,
Speaker 3: you know. I mean, he's like he feels like he
Speaker 3: had one at a time when he didn't actually have
Speaker 3: before Christian made a rifle. Yeah, but here's the thing,
Speaker 3: like my man fought in World War Two. Okay, my
Speaker 3: dad's long. Dad, my dad fought in World War Two.
Speaker 3: I could tell you he told me about getting and
Speaker 3: carrying around with him a Thompson submachine gun. Right now,
Speaker 3: I could go and put down like my dad was
Speaker 3: in World War two and had a Thompson sub machine gun.
Speaker 3: And he might be like, well, no, no, no, I didn't
Speaker 3: have it there. I had it later. But you know
Speaker 3: what I mean, Like like I just remember war Thompson
Speaker 3: submachine gun, and you can see someone later just out
Speaker 3: of expediency bleeding it together, just putting it all in there,
Speaker 3: and then someone later saying that that couldn't have been true. Yea,
Speaker 3: he wouldn't have had it.
Speaker 2: He don't know.
Speaker 3: He couldn't have had it at Anzio. He could have
Speaker 3: had it later in France, but he wouldn't have had
Speaker 3: it at Anzio.
Speaker 1: Well, it becomes these kinds of things become even more
Speaker 1: difficult when you're dealing like with in this particular or
Speaker 1: podcast with the people in Shako, where we have no
Speaker 1: written accounts. All we have to go on is archaeology
Speaker 1: and material culture objects and so and now genetics. Obviously,
Speaker 1: that story about the the fourteen people who are all
Speaker 1: related to one another buried in a single room in Puebloo.
Speaker 1: That makes the whole story of telling the deep time
Speaker 1: history of the West even more difficult, because now you
Speaker 1: don't really have you may have, I mean, and I
Speaker 1: have used them this way. There are great coyote stories
Speaker 1: going back thousands of years, and I have occasionally used
Speaker 1: a coyote story associated with a particular group that I
Speaker 1: think would make a point about them. But that's literally
Speaker 1: the only kind of storytelling you get. It's oral history,
Speaker 1: and so you have to you have to approach things
Speaker 1: that way, as you know, really carefully.
Speaker 3: But that's where my that's where my observation, I guess,
Speaker 3: falls apart because I was talking about the vivid descriptions,
Speaker 3: but when it comes to the Pueblo site, some of
Speaker 3: the ancient Pueblo sites, here's these really these guys doing
Speaker 3: really vivid descriptions, and they're stumped.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The vivid description is of someone being like, what in
Speaker 3: the hell happened here?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: You know what I mean, it's not even like a
Speaker 3: vivid they're just describing being awestruck by what they see
Speaker 3: as a ruin.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So what we're grappling with then is you know,
Speaker 1: so people got into Chaco in the eighteen fifties for
Speaker 1: the first time, eighteen fifties, eighteen sixties, and so we've
Speaker 1: essentially got one hundred and seventy years of archaeological speculation.
Speaker 1: And so the way you try to figure it out
Speaker 1: as you sort of track that story through to hopefully
Speaker 1: the most recent versions of well, here's what it kind
Speaker 1: of looks like what happened. But that kind of evidence
Speaker 1: is never quite as fool proof as Lewis and Clark
Speaker 1: saying today, for the first time we saw and shot
Speaker 1: a buffalo.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So the.
Speaker 1: Story of the West when you go back in time
Speaker 1: is based on a kind of an evidentiary base that
Speaker 1: you have to even be more careful with, but it's
Speaker 1: the only way we have to figure out what happens.
Speaker 3: Have you ever read Black Range Tales?
Speaker 2: I don't think so.
Speaker 3: It's a gold miner. He's knocking around New Mexico mostly
Speaker 3: eighteen sixties. But one of the things really stuck with
Speaker 3: me is here's this guy in the eighteen sixties and
Speaker 3: he's talking about basically trying to loot pueblo sites, and
Speaker 3: in the eighteen sixties. He's lamenting that all the good
Speaker 3: stuff's been hauled away. In the eighteen sixties. He describes
Speaker 3: like amazing things that other guys have carried off.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, yeah, well that's that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, that's been going on forever. As soon as
Speaker 1: those villages, like in the Galiseo Valley were abandoned, there's
Speaker 1: no question there were people out there poking around seeing
Speaker 1: what they could find.
Speaker 2: Instantly, yeah, just instantly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so who knows what all disappeared, but sometimes
Speaker 1: really great finds or you know, they remain. And I
Speaker 1: mean those Kachina masks that Forest Finn found there in
Speaker 1: San Lazarro Pueblo in nineteen ninety two. Man, that's a
Speaker 1: you just don't find that stuff in part because nobody
Speaker 1: ever leaves it. And something that we don't understand happened
Speaker 1: at San Lazaro around fifteen hundred that caused that population
Speaker 1: of that town to flee. So suddenly that either some
Speaker 1: you know, some magician, some healer, some shaman maybe got
Speaker 1: killed and couldn't go for his his goods, or some
Speaker 1: attack came so suddenly that everybody just fled. I mean,
Speaker 1: so sometimes you get lucky like that, and Forrest got
Speaker 1: pretty lucky on that one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it's.
Speaker 3: Like founding finding a modern day house where they didn't
Speaker 3: even take their passports.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's right, that's exactly right.
Speaker 3: Well damn man, I'm super excited for the series. I
Speaker 3: can't wait to learn all this stuff that's coming.
Speaker 2: So thanks, well thanks to you guys for joining me
Speaker 2: with this