WEBVTT - Ep. 01: West of Everything 0:00:01.360 --> 0:00:05.680 Following the collapse of the Grand Chaco and Empire, refugees 0:00:05.760 --> 0:00:09.400 founded eight thriving new towns along the Galisteo River of 0:00:09.440 --> 0:00:13.880 New Mexico, but ultimately found it difficult to sustain an 0:00:13.920 --> 0:00:19.239 arid climate civilization across the next five hundred years. I'm 0:00:19.360 --> 0:00:23.639 Dan Flores and this is the American West, brought to 0:00:23.680 --> 0:00:27.000 you by Velvet Buck, Crafted for those who live off 0:00:27.040 --> 0:00:30.360 the beaten path, where the hunt meets the harvest, and 0:00:30.480 --> 0:00:47.520 every glass tells a story. Enjoy responsibly, West of Everything. 0:00:57.920 --> 0:01:00.600 Thinking of a podcast about the American West and my 0:01:00.720 --> 0:01:03.160 own take on its history has had me trying to 0:01:03.240 --> 0:01:07.160 understand recently why the West resonates with us the way 0:01:07.200 --> 0:01:11.240 it does. Apologies to New England, New York, the South, 0:01:11.360 --> 0:01:14.440 the Midwest, but the West seems to fascinate the world 0:01:14.560 --> 0:01:18.160 in a way no other American region can. Why are 0:01:18.200 --> 0:01:21.280 their television channels devoted twenty four to seven to playing 0:01:21.440 --> 0:01:25.040 seventy five year old Western movies, so a John Wayne 0:01:25.040 --> 0:01:28.920 fix is available at just about any sleepless three am. 0:01:29.440 --> 0:01:33.640 Why does a contemporary soap opera Western like Yellowstone succeed 0:01:33.720 --> 0:01:37.039 with so many people? Why do Germans dress up and 0:01:37.160 --> 0:01:40.160 play act being residents of the West on their vacation 0:01:40.319 --> 0:01:44.200 weekends in European forest. How does back at the Ranch 0:01:44.240 --> 0:01:48.440 Bootstore in Santa Fe sell five thousand dollars cowboy boots 0:01:48.680 --> 0:01:51.680 that will never see a stirrup? Why is there a 0:01:51.760 --> 0:01:55.800 cowboy poets gathering in Nevada every winter? Why a gene 0:01:55.800 --> 0:02:00.080 Autrey Museum in la a Buffalo Bill Historical Museum in Cody, 0:02:00.280 --> 0:02:03.000 a National Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City? 0:02:03.360 --> 0:02:03.919 And why? 0:02:04.360 --> 0:02:07.320 Maybe this is the most serious question here, does the 0:02:07.360 --> 0:02:11.200 phrase just like the Wild West cause all of us 0:02:11.240 --> 0:02:15.800 to imagine entire freedom of action, a whole lack of restraint, 0:02:16.000 --> 0:02:20.639 a free for all. Nobody is regulating all that reverence 0:02:20.680 --> 0:02:24.440 and fascination for the West happens for good reason, because 0:02:24.440 --> 0:02:28.119 of its sunshine and the public lands that provide remarkable 0:02:28.160 --> 0:02:31.560 access to the surrounding landscape. The West is a great 0:02:31.600 --> 0:02:34.480 place to live in the present, but as we all know, 0:02:34.720 --> 0:02:37.320 it's the past of the West that's the key to 0:02:37.360 --> 0:02:40.080 its magic. Those of us who live in the West 0:02:40.200 --> 0:02:43.400 may love various aspects of the modern world out the door, 0:02:43.919 --> 0:02:48.480 but we all absolutely adore the old West, the frontier. 0:02:51.600 --> 0:02:54.840 We've absorbed it by watching films by john Ford and 0:02:54.919 --> 0:02:59.480 Quentin Tarantino, reading novels by Louis Lamore and Cormac McCarthy, 0:02:59.760 --> 0:03:04.480 and histories by Steven Ambrose and Hampton Sides. Of course, 0:03:04.520 --> 0:03:07.000 there are many versions of the West, and all of 0:03:07.080 --> 0:03:10.640 us have a personal preference for our favorite version. Clearly, 0:03:10.720 --> 0:03:13.800 for john Ford or Quentin Tarantino, it's the Cowboy West 0:03:14.000 --> 0:03:16.200 of so many hundreds of Western movies. 0:03:16.919 --> 0:03:18.600 For others, it's the West. 0:03:18.280 --> 0:03:21.920 Of town building and Wyatt Earp's or Marshall Dillon's imposition 0:03:22.040 --> 0:03:25.960 of law and order, or of settlers versus railroads are 0:03:26.000 --> 0:03:30.760 the gunfighter stories that Tarantino obviously also loves and loves 0:03:30.800 --> 0:03:34.800 to invert. And of course there's the Indian Wars West 0:03:34.840 --> 0:03:38.040 of a few hundred movies and a few thousand paintings. 0:03:39.760 --> 0:03:43.840 But as a modern Westerner, a writer and historian who 0:03:43.880 --> 0:03:47.840 is interested most in the West, remarkable landscapes and animals, 0:03:48.280 --> 0:03:50.800 the West that does it for me is one most 0:03:50.800 --> 0:03:54.840 people may not think of as iconic. I'm most drawn 0:03:54.920 --> 0:03:58.000 to what Western artist Charlie Russell, in one of his 0:03:58.160 --> 0:04:03.920 magnificent paintings, called when the Land belonged to God? For me, 0:04:04.040 --> 0:04:06.200 the West that speaks to my deepest soul is the 0:04:06.240 --> 0:04:09.840 West either side of Lewis and Clark. How the kind 0:04:09.880 --> 0:04:13.680 of natural West they saw came to be and lasted 0:04:13.720 --> 0:04:16.920 for so long? Plus what has happened to that version 0:04:16.920 --> 0:04:19.839 of the West in the centuries since Lewis and Clark 0:04:19.960 --> 0:04:24.159 saw it. That's the West I try to understand. To me, 0:04:24.320 --> 0:04:28.920 that's the true West, a natural West, one that's west 0:04:29.000 --> 0:04:34.440 of everything else. In part, my West is a kind 0:04:34.480 --> 0:04:38.000 of a first contact West, a theme of much science 0:04:38.040 --> 0:04:41.640 fiction and fascination with exploring places like Mars in the 0:04:41.680 --> 0:04:45.360 next few decades. It's about travel to strange places, new 0:04:45.400 --> 0:04:48.640 country and new animals, the meeting place of an exotic, 0:04:48.760 --> 0:04:52.479 ancient world and modernity. Come to think of it, the 0:04:52.600 --> 0:04:56.080 natural West is not only our future on Mars, it's 0:04:56.120 --> 0:04:59.640 also our deep past. When modern humans left Africa more 0:04:59.640 --> 0:05:02.760 than fi fifty thousand years ago and began to explore 0:05:02.800 --> 0:05:06.320 the rest of the Earth, America's West, in many ways, 0:05:06.440 --> 0:05:10.680 was a last earthly experience of that first contact moment 0:05:10.920 --> 0:05:17.400 in human history when new people's first meet. Everybody experiences 0:05:17.440 --> 0:05:21.280 first contact, but usually only one side sees the natural 0:05:21.320 --> 0:05:25.400 world as new and exotic, a new world. The resident 0:05:25.440 --> 0:05:29.120 people tend to think invasion, and so it is. Yet 0:05:29.160 --> 0:05:32.120 all of us have ancestors who bequeathed us more than 0:05:32.200 --> 0:05:36.440 twenty thousand years of first contact experiences in North America. 0:05:37.120 --> 0:05:39.679 So I think I come by a fascination for stories 0:05:39.720 --> 0:05:41.400 like this naturally, and of. 0:05:41.360 --> 0:05:42.039 Course so do you. 0:05:43.480 --> 0:05:45.400 Those of us who are in love with the natural 0:05:45.440 --> 0:05:48.680 West are usually attracted to the world of native people, 0:05:49.200 --> 0:05:53.320 to natural landscapes, and to wild animals. Being intrigued by 0:05:53.320 --> 0:05:56.200 the native West is self evidently at the core of 0:05:56.279 --> 0:06:00.400 Western fascination, judging by the volume and quality of Western 0:06:00.480 --> 0:06:03.640 landscape art and the way the Western landscape becomes a 0:06:03.720 --> 0:06:06.599 character in so many films. Judging by the number of 0:06:06.680 --> 0:06:10.200 Crown Jewel national parks in the West, the same can 0:06:10.240 --> 0:06:13.880 be said of the Western landscape. But let's say at 0:06:13.920 --> 0:06:17.839 the outset. The West I'm talking about is not synonymous 0:06:17.880 --> 0:06:18.840 with the frontier. 0:06:19.760 --> 0:06:22.640 When the Old World came to North America. 0:06:22.400 --> 0:06:25.760 Every place on the continent had a frontier, a meeting 0:06:25.800 --> 0:06:29.840 point between what existed and what was coming. But the 0:06:29.960 --> 0:06:32.920 natural West of which I speak is not defined by 0:06:33.040 --> 0:06:37.560 a moment in time a frontier. It's a place, a 0:06:37.680 --> 0:06:41.760 region of plains, mountains, and deserts, on the sunset side 0:06:41.839 --> 0:06:45.640 of the Mississippi River. The timeframe of the natural West 0:06:45.800 --> 0:06:49.039 is not just its frontier stage. The story of this 0:06:49.160 --> 0:06:52.119 West is much more ancient, and it also takes place 0:06:52.200 --> 0:06:55.680 more recently than the frontier. Because the past does not 0:06:55.760 --> 0:06:58.760 remain in the past, but affects us in our own time. 0:06:59.240 --> 0:07:02.680 The story of the West continues beyond the frontier and 0:07:02.839 --> 0:07:06.960 into the twenty first century. Many of the Western stories 0:07:07.000 --> 0:07:09.840 I've written about and will tell in this podcast are 0:07:09.880 --> 0:07:13.680 the stories of the West's wildlife, very much an ignored 0:07:13.720 --> 0:07:17.440 topic in the West and elsewhere. The cow and the sheep, 0:07:17.640 --> 0:07:20.280 and to a certain extent, even the saddled horse, are 0:07:20.320 --> 0:07:24.240 the animals we associate with the West of trail driving, ranching, 0:07:24.440 --> 0:07:27.440 town building, But I have to observe that not one 0:07:27.440 --> 0:07:31.000 of them appears in Charlie Russell's When the Land Belonged 0:07:31.040 --> 0:07:35.840 to God. Russell's timeless scene of a bison herd flanked 0:07:35.840 --> 0:07:39.600 by gray wolves pouring over a divide in a landscape 0:07:39.680 --> 0:07:43.840 we old worlders would one day call Montana implied that 0:07:43.960 --> 0:07:47.520 the divine world in the West was a Native America. 0:07:49.840 --> 0:07:53.640 So let's start there, but not necessarily at its beginning. 0:07:54.000 --> 0:07:57.560 At least not yet. Let's commence our exploration of the 0:07:57.680 --> 0:08:01.520 natural West slightly later in time. We'll return to beginnings 0:08:01.560 --> 0:08:04.280 in the next episodes with a story that makes the 0:08:04.320 --> 0:08:07.480 point that the West is not new, but a very 0:08:07.560 --> 0:08:13.120 old place. This story stretches our imaginations, suggests how central 0:08:13.240 --> 0:08:17.200 and fragile Western ecologies have always been to human life here, 0:08:17.640 --> 0:08:20.840 and illustrates the longevity of the human experience in a 0:08:20.880 --> 0:08:25.320 country where reflexively still thinking of as the newest part 0:08:25.400 --> 0:08:37.560 of America. On a sun drenched November afternoon, I sit 0:08:37.760 --> 0:08:40.240 in t shirt and shorts a few feet from the 0:08:40.320 --> 0:08:43.960 edge of a canyon rimrock, looking through four hundred feet 0:08:44.000 --> 0:08:47.680 of transparent desert air on a thousand year old city. 0:08:48.679 --> 0:08:51.000 My wife Sarah is pulling a bottle of water from 0:08:51.000 --> 0:08:54.320 her pack. A few feet away. Various friends are scattered 0:08:54.320 --> 0:08:58.360 along rock cairn marked trails through the uplands behind us, 0:08:58.640 --> 0:09:03.200 where the faint indentation of ancient highways four hundred miles 0:09:03.200 --> 0:09:08.720 of them, extend to horizons miles distant. The whole country 0:09:08.920 --> 0:09:13.760 sagebrush uplands, the canyon floor, the enclosing rimrocks, and the 0:09:13.880 --> 0:09:16.920 ruins with odd names that lie in every direction below 0:09:17.400 --> 0:09:21.360 is a uniform tannish brown, the color of dust or 0:09:21.360 --> 0:09:30.240 perhaps the color of abandonment. During the time of the 0:09:30.280 --> 0:09:33.680 Crusades in Europe, this spot and another on the east 0:09:33.720 --> 0:09:36.960 bank of the Mississippi River just across from today Saint Louis, 0:09:37.320 --> 0:09:42.640 held the two largest cities in North America, both religious centers, 0:09:42.679 --> 0:09:46.680 with a ceremonial effigy mound of lizards and serpents, and 0:09:46.760 --> 0:09:50.040 a stone hinge like circle of upright timbers planted to 0:09:50.080 --> 0:09:52.280 mark out soices and equinoxes. 0:09:52.720 --> 0:09:56.560 The city in the Eastern Woods today we call it Kahokia. 0:09:56.120 --> 0:10:00.160 Probably held a fairly permanent population of thirty thousand people, 0:10:00.480 --> 0:10:04.280 larger than London at that time. I first saw Kahokia 0:10:04.320 --> 0:10:06.800 in the early nineteen nineties with a girlfriend who had 0:10:06.880 --> 0:10:11.440 Missouri roots and insisted we visit the place. I'd seen mounds, 0:10:11.640 --> 0:10:15.000 but never anything on the scale of Monks Mound towering 0:10:15.080 --> 0:10:17.959 up out of the American bottoms like an earth and 0:10:18.080 --> 0:10:22.720 Chichenitsan pyramid. After three hundred years of urban life, an 0:10:22.720 --> 0:10:26.920 earthquake mostly destroyed Kahokia City, but not before its population 0:10:27.000 --> 0:10:30.080 had gone through twenty thousand trees and almost all the 0:10:30.120 --> 0:10:34.120 wildlife for scores of miles around. As for the city 0:10:34.120 --> 0:10:37.800 whose ruins lay below us now either side of ten 0:10:37.920 --> 0:10:42.160 centuries ago. From eight hundred AD to eleven forty AD, 0:10:42.600 --> 0:10:46.160 it was the Vatican of the American Desert. We call 0:10:46.200 --> 0:10:50.880 it Chaco, and it's another of our UNESCO World Heritage Sites. 0:10:51.880 --> 0:10:54.880 Chaco was the closest Native America ever got to an 0:10:54.880 --> 0:10:59.240 empire like those of the Aztecs, Mayans, or Incas. But 0:10:59.320 --> 0:11:02.840 this was not an empire of warrior armies and conquered provinces. 0:11:03.120 --> 0:11:06.560 It was an empire of priests who organized many thousands 0:11:06.640 --> 0:11:10.840 of scattered farming hamlets across fifty thousand square miles of 0:11:10.920 --> 0:11:15.400 today's four corners into an economic and religious network. No 0:11:15.480 --> 0:11:19.440 European principality of the age matched it. What the priest's 0:11:19.480 --> 0:11:22.880 promised was direct intervention with the deities who controlled rain, 0:11:23.240 --> 0:11:28.120 crops and animals, those grand imponderables whose presence made life 0:11:28.160 --> 0:11:32.360 good and whose absence ruined it. The city of Chaco 0:11:32.520 --> 0:11:37.040 housed the priests, their families, and a resident population of thousands. 0:11:37.400 --> 0:11:41.560 It stored and distributed surplus crops. Then at solstices and 0:11:41.640 --> 0:11:45.120 other special times of year, it hosted grand ceremonies, to 0:11:45.160 --> 0:11:49.640 which the outlying residents made holy pilgrimages. At those times, 0:11:49.720 --> 0:11:54.080 Choco gathered a population of some forty thousand. Looking down 0:11:54.080 --> 0:11:57.040 now on its buildings and avenues, one suspects both the 0:11:57.120 --> 0:12:01.760 ceremonies and the nightlife must have been epic. Choco America 0:12:01.880 --> 0:12:04.719 almost seems foreign in the modern United States, as if 0:12:04.800 --> 0:12:09.000 lifted from the Middle East. The agricultural revolution arrived in 0:12:09.040 --> 0:12:12.720 this region thirteen hundred years before the city existed, and 0:12:12.840 --> 0:12:17.760 pollen studies indicate this development produced two immediate environmental effects. 0:12:18.400 --> 0:12:22.560 Human populations skyrocketed, and crops that needed to be boiled 0:12:22.600 --> 0:12:25.560 before you could eat them meant that daily cooking fires 0:12:25.960 --> 0:12:30.480 soon reduced a robust pinions juniper woodland to desert. This 0:12:30.559 --> 0:12:33.400 became a world in need of priests who could intervene 0:12:33.440 --> 0:12:39.199 with the gods. Sitting and admiring the sprawling, hemispheric architecture 0:12:39.240 --> 0:12:43.360 of Chaco's largest structure, Pueblo Benito, as its lines and 0:12:43.440 --> 0:12:46.360 shadows shimmer in the afternoon sun, I know this is 0:12:46.400 --> 0:12:50.440 a place that reveals much about humanity. Sarah passes the 0:12:50.480 --> 0:12:53.120 water bottle over to me, and reading my mind, sums 0:12:53.160 --> 0:12:53.520 it up. 0:12:54.200 --> 0:12:56.920 It wasn't until the eighteen eighties that anyone built a 0:12:57.040 --> 0:13:00.280 larger building than that in America. In its time, the 0:13:00.320 --> 0:13:03.960 city lasted longer than Washington, d C. Has so far. 0:13:07.000 --> 0:13:11.280 Chaco and its satellite hamlets survive, in fact, for three 0:13:11.360 --> 0:13:14.959 hundred and forty years. The shorthand version of its collapse 0:13:15.080 --> 0:13:17.440 is that it all ended with a series of droughts 0:13:17.440 --> 0:13:21.760 across the Southwest, and that's true, but the many archaeologists 0:13:21.760 --> 0:13:25.080 who have interpreted Chaco know that much more happened here. 0:13:25.880 --> 0:13:30.040 When the rain stopped coming, the farmers seemed to act abruptly, 0:13:30.400 --> 0:13:33.600 dropping their digging sticks in the fields, turning their backs 0:13:33.640 --> 0:13:37.920 on the grand religious gatherings at Chaco, and relocating. 0:13:37.240 --> 0:13:38.479 Across the southwest. 0:13:39.160 --> 0:13:41.679 Some went north to what we now call Mesa Verdi's 0:13:41.679 --> 0:13:45.400 Cliff Palace in present Colorado. Most of the people who 0:13:45.480 --> 0:13:49.520 abandoned the Chaco and world congregated along the Upper Rio Grand, 0:13:49.640 --> 0:13:54.720 eventually founding towns still home to their descendants, the Pueblo peoples, 0:13:54.880 --> 0:13:59.440 famous for their apartment like villages, geometrically painted pottery, and 0:13:59.440 --> 0:14:04.040 turquoise jewelry. Why did Choco collapse in what sounds. 0:14:03.679 --> 0:14:04.720 Like a fit of peak. 0:14:05.520 --> 0:14:09.280 The evidence and ultimately the response of the pueblos afterwards 0:14:09.520 --> 0:14:13.320 points to a crisis we should recognize. Down there in 0:14:13.360 --> 0:14:17.160 Pueblo Bonito, a single room out of six hundred and 0:14:17.200 --> 0:14:22.280 fifty rooms yielded the remains of fourteen people whose funerary 0:14:22.400 --> 0:14:28.440 items indicated they represented Chaco's religious and political elites. In 0:14:28.480 --> 0:14:32.520 the room were flutes, ceremonial staffs, thousands of pieces of 0:14:32.560 --> 0:14:36.800 turquoise jewelry, cont shell trumpets from America's west coast, the 0:14:36.920 --> 0:14:41.040 remains of macaw parrots from the tropics, The oldest burial 0:14:41.160 --> 0:14:43.960 dated to eight hundred a d. And the last from 0:14:44.040 --> 0:14:49.480 Choco's abandonment. So those fourteen span the entire life of 0:14:49.520 --> 0:14:51.000 the city, and. 0:14:50.960 --> 0:14:51.600 Not just that. 0:14:52.040 --> 0:14:55.440 The genetics of nine of the fourteen showed them to 0:14:55.480 --> 0:14:59.920 be descended from the same matrilineal line from a woman 0:15:00.160 --> 0:15:06.000 who evidently had been there at Chaco's founding. Disparities in 0:15:06.080 --> 0:15:09.600 wealth and quality of life, along with the resentments they produce, 0:15:09.840 --> 0:15:14.440 are familiar to modern Americans. Isotope comparisons of the bones 0:15:14.440 --> 0:15:17.600 of the priestly class in Choco's great houses with those 0:15:17.640 --> 0:15:21.600 of farmers from the villages indicates that the elites consumed 0:15:21.800 --> 0:15:25.400 far more protein from the meat of deer and prong horns. 0:15:26.000 --> 0:15:29.520 They were better fed, grew almost two inches taller, suffered 0:15:29.600 --> 0:15:32.920 less from disease, had three times the survival rate for 0:15:33.000 --> 0:15:37.720 children under five, and lived longer. They were also conspicuous 0:15:37.760 --> 0:15:42.440 consumers of high status goods, from beautiful pots to copper bells, 0:15:42.640 --> 0:15:46.960 from turquoise jewelry to parrots. In the late eighteen hundreds, 0:15:47.000 --> 0:15:51.160 an early archaeologist working in Chaco shipped more than seventy 0:15:51.280 --> 0:15:55.800 thousand high status items just from Pueblo Benito to the 0:15:55.840 --> 0:16:00.160 American Museum of Natural History. The farming class suffered this 0:16:00.200 --> 0:16:02.800 gap between rich and poor as long as the elites 0:16:02.920 --> 0:16:06.040 delivered on their promise to make it rain. But when 0:16:06.120 --> 0:16:09.280 drought came and the priests were powerless to stop it, 0:16:09.320 --> 0:16:13.000 the lower classes attacked and killed many in the upper class. 0:16:13.720 --> 0:16:19.320 They also embraced a new belief, the Kachina religion. By 0:16:19.360 --> 0:16:23.760 the year eleven sixty, massive three story public buildings like 0:16:23.880 --> 0:16:27.760 Chetro Kettle, a four hundred room great house in Chako 0:16:28.160 --> 0:16:33.080 that was built with fifty million sandstone blocks, twenty six 0:16:33.160 --> 0:16:37.360 thousand timbers and extended for four hundred and fifty feet 0:16:37.400 --> 0:16:42.520 beneath a canyon wall, stood completely abandoned as for animal 0:16:42.560 --> 0:16:46.160 life in the Chacoan region. Diet studies in the collapses 0:16:46.240 --> 0:16:50.160 aftermath implied that rabbits and rodents were almost the only 0:16:50.320 --> 0:16:54.560 huntable animals left. Their need for protein perhaps explains why 0:16:54.640 --> 0:16:57.560 some of the new villages were founded close to the 0:16:57.560 --> 0:17:09.440 bison planes. One March afternoon in the early two thousands, 0:17:09.720 --> 0:17:12.680 I opened the passenger door of a pickup, stretched out 0:17:12.720 --> 0:17:15.119 a hiking boot to the ground, and had one of 0:17:15.160 --> 0:17:20.840 those small steps for man moments until I exited that 0:17:20.920 --> 0:17:24.000 pickup and began to walk on a surface that spoke, 0:17:24.560 --> 0:17:27.800 it crunched, it crinkled. I'd never had the kind of 0:17:27.880 --> 0:17:31.960 visceral understanding of America's ancient past I was now experiencing. 0:17:33.160 --> 0:17:36.680 I was walking into a place known to Southwestern archaeologists 0:17:37.040 --> 0:17:41.919 as the San Lazaro Ruins. With every step, my boots 0:17:41.960 --> 0:17:46.040 were landing on broken shards of Indian pottery half a 0:17:46.119 --> 0:17:50.520 foot deep. That brought a profound realization. I was walking 0:17:50.600 --> 0:17:53.919 on ground that humans long before me had lived on 0:17:54.160 --> 0:17:58.360 for some three hundred years. In every direction, the ground 0:17:58.440 --> 0:18:04.360 underfoot was a thick, continuous surface of curving, angled, shattered pottery. 0:18:04.680 --> 0:18:07.960 The pieces set at all angles and drawing the eye 0:18:08.040 --> 0:18:12.760 with painted zigzags and designs in blacks and reds. This 0:18:12.800 --> 0:18:15.600 is how the people who lived here seven hundred years 0:18:15.640 --> 0:18:19.840 ago must have experienced a stroll around their town. I thought, 0:18:20.640 --> 0:18:23.960 it's how the pioneers of archaeology in the West, the 0:18:23.960 --> 0:18:28.399 Adolf Bandeliers, the Alfred Kidters and Edgar Hewletts, no doubt 0:18:28.400 --> 0:18:31.080 felt the first time they walked across the ruins of 0:18:31.160 --> 0:18:35.080 Chaco or Mesa Verdi, or the country I was in now, 0:18:35.520 --> 0:18:39.120 the Galistaloe River country south of Santa Fe. 0:18:40.840 --> 0:18:42.600 I was having this experience. 0:18:42.119 --> 0:18:45.520 Because I've become friends with a remarkable Santa Fe character 0:18:45.720 --> 0:18:49.960 named Forrest Finn. Among many aspects of Finn's world that 0:18:50.080 --> 0:18:54.000 seemed more than improbable was that he actually owned the 0:18:54.080 --> 0:18:57.880 ground where the ruins of San Lazaro stood. That's why 0:18:57.920 --> 0:19:01.520 we were here. He was proudly showing off his possession 0:19:01.880 --> 0:19:05.800 of the largest ancestral pueblo village site in the Santa 0:19:05.800 --> 0:19:10.080 Fe area. A native Texan and a former Vietnam fighter 0:19:10.119 --> 0:19:13.680 pilot who survived being shot down to become a successful 0:19:13.800 --> 0:19:17.000 art gallery owner in Santa Fe. Fenn was in his 0:19:17.119 --> 0:19:21.439 late seventies. Then his body leaned his silvery hair still 0:19:21.520 --> 0:19:22.920 in a military buzz cut. 0:19:23.680 --> 0:19:25.320 When we struck up a friendship, I. 0:19:25.280 --> 0:19:30.080 Found him garrulous, hugely energetic, and, despite a slender education, 0:19:30.560 --> 0:19:31.800 fiercely opinionated. 0:19:32.480 --> 0:19:33.960 True to his Texas roots. 0:19:34.160 --> 0:19:37.639 Those opinions included a hatred for the federal government and 0:19:37.720 --> 0:19:41.919 a distrust of educated elites. Although he could occasionally be 0:19:42.000 --> 0:19:46.720 impressed by experts, Fenn was as dedicated to Old West 0:19:46.880 --> 0:19:51.200 history as fundamentalists are in Old Time religion. His home 0:19:51.280 --> 0:19:55.760 came across as a combination museum, archive, and archaeology lab. 0:19:56.320 --> 0:19:59.760 He outdid anyone in my experience with his boyish, hucked 0:19:59.760 --> 0:20:03.199 finn like romance about Western adventure, which led him to 0:20:03.240 --> 0:20:08.080 invest prodigious energy in several seriously crazy projects that made 0:20:08.240 --> 0:20:13.280 many people WinCE. One was acquiring and doing amateur excavations 0:20:13.440 --> 0:20:16.960 at a major site like San Lazaro. The last of 0:20:17.040 --> 0:20:20.280 Forrest's grand ideas, when he was in his eighties, got 0:20:20.359 --> 0:20:25.280 him national exposure that wasn't always admiring. He buried a 0:20:25.320 --> 0:20:28.960 treasure chest containing more than two million dollars of precious 0:20:29.080 --> 0:20:32.520 artifacts from around the world in a secret location in 0:20:32.560 --> 0:20:36.080 the West, then self published a book featuring a page 0:20:36.119 --> 0:20:40.200 of verse offering clues to its hiding spot. More than 0:20:40.240 --> 0:20:44.399 one person died, and untold thousands trecked the West's vast 0:20:44.400 --> 0:20:47.680 public lands in search of a treasure that to forest 0:20:48.200 --> 0:20:52.480 offered ordinary folks a chance to reprise a classic Old 0:20:52.520 --> 0:20:55.960 West opportunity, finding loot and. 0:20:55.880 --> 0:20:57.439 Making a mint off nature. 0:21:00.119 --> 0:21:04.000 San Lazaro had once been one of eight major Indian 0:21:04.080 --> 0:21:08.200 towns that post Choco spread across the Galiso River near 0:21:08.240 --> 0:21:12.000 where Spain would found Santa Fe in the year sixteen ten. 0:21:12.760 --> 0:21:16.400 The entire four corners is lousy with the surviving ruins 0:21:16.600 --> 0:21:20.800 of advanced farming civilizations that made the Southwest into one 0:21:20.840 --> 0:21:23.960 of the most densely lived in parts of North America 0:21:24.200 --> 0:21:28.560 a thousand years ago, long before Europeans came here, other 0:21:28.680 --> 0:21:33.320 humans hoped and dreamed, lived, loved, and died, and left 0:21:33.359 --> 0:21:37.200 their mark on this oldest place in America. In fact, 0:21:37.280 --> 0:21:41.040 eight hundred years ago there was a far larger population 0:21:41.160 --> 0:21:45.560 of people living in the Galisseo River country than actually 0:21:45.600 --> 0:21:49.680 live here. Now that's a claim few other American regions 0:21:49.680 --> 0:21:54.920 can make. A great drought in the Southwest, the most 0:21:54.960 --> 0:21:58.080 severe one in the past thousand years, was the apparent 0:21:58.080 --> 0:22:01.520 approximate cause that brought them here. In a sense, they 0:22:01.520 --> 0:22:06.480 were religious refugees fleeing that hereditary religious class that had 0:22:06.480 --> 0:22:09.879 insisted they could intervene with the gods to send life 0:22:09.920 --> 0:22:13.600 saving rain. So the search for a new center place 0:22:14.040 --> 0:22:17.680 led some of the former Choco Puebloans to the beautiful, 0:22:17.920 --> 0:22:24.080 wind swept Galisteo Country. Here's what they found. A high 0:22:24.119 --> 0:22:27.760 desert with three hundred and twenty days of annual sunshine, 0:22:28.040 --> 0:22:32.280 prompting their name for it, placed near the sun, rainfall 0:22:32.320 --> 0:22:35.399 that rarely reached to double figures but still made for 0:22:35.520 --> 0:22:40.399 green mountains and dwarf forests. A river, albeit small, with 0:22:40.600 --> 0:22:47.360 spring fed tributaries sometimes flowing water, sowable ground, sandstone for bricks, 0:22:47.440 --> 0:22:51.800 and suitable soil to make adobes. A small mountain range 0:22:51.880 --> 0:22:55.280 long known and famous far and wide for its sky 0:22:55.440 --> 0:23:00.280 blue stones, ample firewood to boil their crops in the 0:23:00.280 --> 0:23:04.760 grassland basin. Bands of striped prong orn antelope, mule deer 0:23:04.800 --> 0:23:08.120 in the hills, and elk, sheep and bears in the mountains. 0:23:08.600 --> 0:23:12.560 Eagles soaring overhead, packs of gray wolves howling in the night, 0:23:13.080 --> 0:23:17.040 Lions slinking through the rocks, and sacred coyotes trotting by 0:23:17.160 --> 0:23:21.200 with a quick, sharp eyed look. Crystalline air for watching 0:23:21.240 --> 0:23:26.600 the sun's progress along the horizons, nights brilliant with jittering stars, 0:23:27.040 --> 0:23:31.480 the steady glow of traveler planets, and the occasional light 0:23:31.600 --> 0:23:37.040 that flies. The colonizers spoke two different pueblo and languages, 0:23:37.400 --> 0:23:42.040 Tanno and Caresson, so living near one another were bilingual. 0:23:42.680 --> 0:23:45.600 They wore garments made from the cotton they grew, and 0:23:45.800 --> 0:23:50.000 ornamented themselves with turquoise jewelry. The women wore their dark 0:23:50.040 --> 0:23:54.280 hair long, while men affected a bowl cut. They painted 0:23:54.320 --> 0:23:58.639 colorful designs on pottery known as Rio Grand glazeware that 0:23:58.760 --> 0:24:02.800 frequently included images of parrots or macaus, brilliantly mark birds, 0:24:02.840 --> 0:24:05.639 traded up from Mexico and not native to anywhere in 0:24:05.680 --> 0:24:10.720 the Southwest. Farm implements they fashioned from fire hardened juniper 0:24:11.280 --> 0:24:15.440 arrow points largely from local black obcitian glass, and their 0:24:15.520 --> 0:24:20.080 axe blades from an aluminum silica called fiber light. They 0:24:20.200 --> 0:24:24.520 mined in the high rockies nearby. Their domestic animals were 0:24:24.600 --> 0:24:28.600 dogs and turkeys. Their ancestors had domesticated turkeys around the 0:24:28.680 --> 0:24:33.119 year one thousand, when huntable wildlife near their villages declined 0:24:33.359 --> 0:24:38.640 and left them protein poor water manipulation and desert agriculture 0:24:38.760 --> 0:24:43.520 required cooperative effort, so these were town dwellers. They lived 0:24:43.560 --> 0:24:47.800 in apartment like rectangular buildings with flat roofs resting on 0:24:48.000 --> 0:24:53.000 massive support beams, with plastered walls, occasionally built of stacked stone, 0:24:53.400 --> 0:24:57.639 but more commonly in the Galileo country of puddled dried adobes. 0:24:58.359 --> 0:25:02.679 The buildings often were three to five stories, with entrances, 0:25:02.800 --> 0:25:06.560 cooking and daily life carried out on the top roof level. 0:25:06.920 --> 0:25:11.320 The lower levels accessed by descending ladders into rooms that 0:25:11.440 --> 0:25:16.200 featured gleaming, polished floors and walls, often painted with murals. 0:25:16.920 --> 0:25:21.359 The buildings commonly grouped around central plazas. The plazas highlighted 0:25:21.480 --> 0:25:28.520 circular underground ceremonial rooms known as kivas, with fireplaces, perimeter benches, 0:25:28.880 --> 0:25:33.400 and a central hold a sipapu. It was called representing 0:25:33.480 --> 0:25:37.760 humanity's point of emergence from a world below into. 0:25:37.520 --> 0:25:38.439 The present world. 0:25:41.400 --> 0:25:45.000 San Lazarro left the largest ruins of all the Galistale villages. 0:25:45.520 --> 0:25:49.159 Its ruins cover fifty seven acres and feature the outlines 0:25:49.200 --> 0:25:53.439 of twenty seven separate buildings, with one nine hundred and 0:25:53.480 --> 0:25:57.399 forty one ground floor rooms and a remarkable total of 0:25:57.520 --> 0:26:02.159 five thousand rooms. It was settled around twelve ninety, and, 0:26:02.200 --> 0:26:05.879 despite a pair of debilitating droughts in the fourteen hundreds, 0:26:06.280 --> 0:26:09.119 continued to grow for two hundred years, when its peak 0:26:09.200 --> 0:26:13.840 population was nearly two thousand people. That's six times the 0:26:13.920 --> 0:26:20.360 size of any twenty first century Galisteo valley town. By then, 0:26:20.520 --> 0:26:24.159 many local resources were likely depleted, and the town was 0:26:24.200 --> 0:26:28.119 abandoned in the early fifteen hundreds. The immediate catalyst to 0:26:28.160 --> 0:26:31.640 that exodus may have been something dramatic, for in fifteen 0:26:31.680 --> 0:26:35.320 eighty one, a Spanish party found the town half destroyed. 0:26:36.320 --> 0:26:40.160 Finn's most remarkable San Lazaro discovery, for which he had 0:26:40.160 --> 0:26:44.199 the good sense to call in professional archaeologists and native descendants, 0:26:44.640 --> 0:26:48.639 came in nineteen ninety two, when he unearthed two plastered 0:26:48.720 --> 0:26:54.359 Kachina masks and other stored sacred objects. The magnificent mask 0:26:54.520 --> 0:26:58.399 appeared to represent black bears and were likely associated with 0:26:58.480 --> 0:27:03.600 a bear clan or Medison society. Various dating techniques placed 0:27:03.640 --> 0:27:07.800 the masks a few years on either side of fifteen hundred. 0:27:08.560 --> 0:27:12.119 Kachina mask would be one of the most unlikely objects 0:27:12.400 --> 0:27:17.480 any Puebloan would ever abandon, whatever happened at San Lazarro 0:27:17.600 --> 0:27:22.800