Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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Speaker 1: first light dot com. F I R S T L
Speaker 1: I T E dot com. All right, joined today by
Speaker 1: esteemed historian American historian Elliott West. Welcome on the show.
Speaker 2: Thank you, it's good to be here.
Speaker 1: I've had two I've had two, well, a lot of
Speaker 1: run ins with you work, but I've had two main
Speaker 1: run ins I want to tell you about. I'll tell
Speaker 1: you about. We got to cover some stuff that I'm
Speaker 1: gonna tell you about the runnings. Sure, and then I'm
Speaker 1: gonna tell you that doctor Randall here. Do you guys
Speaker 1: know each other? Just be just He has a genuine
Speaker 1: PhD in history. I heard he told me about he
Speaker 1: told how did he bring it up? Okay, so he
Speaker 1: didn't be like a little thing he might not know
Speaker 1: about me.
Speaker 3: No, No, he.
Speaker 2: Was quite modest.
Speaker 1: I heard there are I was reading today that there's
Speaker 1: this article in the Free Pressay now that brought up
Speaker 1: I'll tell the article. The article was a guy, a
Speaker 1: climatologist that just got there's a climatologist to row to
Speaker 1: op ed in Free Press about publishing in the journal Nature,
Speaker 1: m okay, and was saying that it was talking about
Speaker 1: how biased Nature is toward what they want to publish,
Speaker 1: and they were publishing about wildfires in California and how
Speaker 1: you need to de emphasize issues not fitting with climate
Speaker 1: change to get published in Nature, like they know what
Speaker 1: they want, right, So like this climatellogy is like absolutely,
Speaker 1: climate change is a big issue with wildfires in California,
Speaker 1: but there's all these other underlying things. Eighty percent of
Speaker 1: California wildfires are human caused. Okay, where is that. You're
Speaker 1: not going to write an article about changing human behaviors
Speaker 1: leading to wildfires, or electrical transmission leading to wildfires, or
Speaker 1: the need to bury electrical lines and not have overhead
Speaker 1: electrical lines due to wildfires and that's not gonna be
Speaker 1: of interest, right, climate change boom you're in. So they
Speaker 1: wrote this article in Free Press about what they had
Speaker 1: to leave out, like what you need to leave out
Speaker 1: to catch the eye of nature to fit what they want.
Speaker 1: You know, what they've decided is scientific. And if it's
Speaker 1: it's scientific, is you know, like of whale, a whale
Speaker 1: takes a wrong turn and goes up a river and
Speaker 1: dies in a river, you better say the climate change
Speaker 1: led to that whale going up that river, and then
Speaker 1: it'll be in the paper. Right. But anyways, they're saying,
Speaker 1: they're talking about there are like sixty times more PhDs.
Speaker 1: The hell is here? Pull this up CRN sixty times
Speaker 1: more PhDs now than in nineteen sixty No kidding, that's
Speaker 1: not right.
Speaker 4: May I wouldn't be surprised if it is.
Speaker 1: Meaning they just hand those things out like candy, and
Speaker 1: that was my experience.
Speaker 5: And there's no there's a lot more people and there's
Speaker 5: a lot more people going to higher education than like
Speaker 5: here hold back in the World War two.
Speaker 3: And a lot of fewer tenure track jobs.
Speaker 1: Well you know how they were Here's what they were blaming.
Speaker 1: So the point being, where is this dance? I can't
Speaker 1: can you find it?
Speaker 6: I mean, I don't I don't know if this is reputable.
Speaker 6: This is Historynewsnetwork dot org. I have no idea who's
Speaker 6: behind this organization? Are you familiar?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 1: Okay, so this is it about how many PhDs are
Speaker 1: running around?
Speaker 6: Yeah? History? Oh well, you know what, Actually this is
Speaker 6: specifically about history. History. Bachelor's degrees are falling sharply while
Speaker 6: doctoral degrees in the discipline continue to rise.
Speaker 1: We don't really think about a guy like Randall.
Speaker 5: He's not as he's not as unique as he as
Speaker 5: he thought he was.
Speaker 1: He's got to see his new bumper stick or asked
Speaker 1: me about my pH d, and then he's got that,
Speaker 1: he's got that plate mt pH D. Yeah, it's a joke.
Speaker 1: It's a joke.
Speaker 3: I made a terrible mistakes.
Speaker 2: It's a tough gig.
Speaker 3: It's like a big target on your back.
Speaker 1: A couple of things. So, oh, you know, darn thing
Speaker 1: about the Darth thing. I've been thinking about the news.
Speaker 1: I got a couple of notes I made in my
Speaker 1: little note thing about that. Someday historians should write an
Speaker 1: article about how much people love to talk about if
Speaker 1: you get, if something bad happens, you're in Yellstone National Park,
Speaker 1: how much people love talking about how dumb you are.
Speaker 1: It doesn't like I was on the plane ther day
Speaker 1: and so you know whatever, Like someone gets someone gets
Speaker 1: run over by a buffalo in the park, What is
Speaker 1: the story going to be? How how dumb they were?
Speaker 1: Do you know what I mean? People on the plane
Speaker 1: behind me are like those people. You know. It's like
Speaker 1: like I don't know, you know, I can see know
Speaker 1: Wait a minute, animal, dude.
Speaker 5: How many times of all people, I'm surprised you're walking
Speaker 5: into like a thin layer of like hot spring crust
Speaker 5: and falling through.
Speaker 7: I just especially to walk through like three dozen signs
Speaker 7: saying stop, don't you idiot?
Speaker 1: Don't I like my instinct is to my instinct is
Speaker 1: to be like, yeah, I can see that happening. The
Speaker 1: guy that cooked the chicken in the hot spring, you
Speaker 1: were supposed to get him on the show. Yeah, some
Speaker 1: guys tie a chicken on a rope and lower it
Speaker 1: in there and boil it, and everybody talks about all
Speaker 1: those they should know better. I'm like, that's it. It's
Speaker 1: like a totally interesting idea. Because Osborne Russell Journal of
Speaker 1: a Trapper, don't they talk about doing that? They do.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna put this, but I want to ask you thing.
Speaker 1: Because I endorse Born, I always endorsed Journal of Trapper
Speaker 1: and the thing I'll say about it is that historians
Speaker 1: like it, right, Oh yes, yeah, it's regarded he was
Speaker 1: regarded as spot on.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know what surprised me. You know another book
Speaker 1: I read, uh that I heard that historians are a
Speaker 1: little incredulous. Is Tough Trip through Paradise?
Speaker 2: Really?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Have you heard that he played a little fast
Speaker 1: and loose with.
Speaker 2: The I've never heard that. It's been years since I
Speaker 2: read it, but I loved doing I read it. In fact,
Speaker 2: I was overthrown through a Paradise valley the other day,
Speaker 2: just again, is that right? Beautiful country?
Speaker 1: So you can cite uh, Tough Trip through Paradise and
Speaker 1: it's like like historians will cite Tough Trip through Paradise
Speaker 1: and it's regarded as okay, sure, yeah, yeah. But historians
Speaker 1: love Journal of a Trapper.
Speaker 2: They do it really readings true a lot of a
Speaker 2: lot of the things that he says in there, and
Speaker 2: you know, jobs with the other material that we have
Speaker 2: on fur Trader and trappers and so forth. So I
Speaker 2: think it's sure good.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna keep endorse that was I getting that. Oh
Speaker 1: A lot of PhDs running around, uh, A lot.
Speaker 5: Of smart people and that's somehow Buffalo brilliant.
Speaker 1: A lot of brilliant people get goured by Buffalo and
Speaker 1: get blamed for being stupid when I think that they
Speaker 1: might have just been kind of.
Speaker 6: Like backing up into the like.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know, I'm gonna go over there
Speaker 1: and get close.
Speaker 6: To it, backing up into Buffalo with like selfie sticks.
Speaker 1: Okay, Brody, hear me out, Brody. We just worked on Okay,
Speaker 1: catch crayfish, count stars, and we encourage And what do
Speaker 1: we tell kids? What do we give tips kids? Tips
Speaker 1: on hot what to do getting close to critters, how
Speaker 1: to sneak up on stuff, but you don't got to
Speaker 1: sneak up on them.
Speaker 5: It's like you get out of the car and there's
Speaker 5: one stand in the park.
Speaker 8: I think the I think the problem that that's underlying
Speaker 8: all those stories is just that you somehow expect that
Speaker 8: people go into Yellowstone and not be stupid.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 8: It's like it's like that's the one place where people
Speaker 8: aren't supposed to break rules and just behave in all
Speaker 8: you know, and all types of I feel like you
Speaker 8: go anywhere in the world, people are doing stupid stuff.
Speaker 8: It's just that the stakes are higher when you have
Speaker 8: large animals around.
Speaker 1: But if here's the deal, if someone can to you,
Speaker 1: like like someone came to be someone here at work
Speaker 1: comes and that wouldn't be surprised if this happened. I
Speaker 1: come into work and someone's like, oh, you here, Chili
Speaker 1: got Gord by a mule deer, right, he got God
Speaker 1: by a meal deer. I wouldn't be like that, idiot.
Speaker 1: I'd just be like what, Yeah. I would automatically impulsively
Speaker 1: blame the person who got mauled by something for stupidity,
Speaker 1: the way they do if it's in the park.
Speaker 7: M hm.
Speaker 2: Well. The story I remember, though, was the woman who
Speaker 2: went up to buy some gup right in front of
Speaker 2: it with a flash camera, you know, took a close
Speaker 2: up of the of hiss head from the front. Sure,
Speaker 2: and she got Gord. What do you expect that she.
Speaker 4: Expected?
Speaker 1: I can't go.
Speaker 2: I think pictures blurred.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 1: The third thing I wanted to talk about, but I
Speaker 1: can't give too many details. I got a friend who's
Speaker 1: a prosecutor in this state. He's a county prosecutor, and
Speaker 1: he was telling me the other day about he had
Speaker 1: a thing he's working on where these guys in a
Speaker 1: trailer park, gotten to fight like this want being like
Speaker 1: a prosecuted issue. They got to fight over a last
Speaker 1: piece of fried chicken that someone then impregnated the chicken
Speaker 1: with glass shards of glass, and a fight broke out
Speaker 1: so bad the fight broke out, went over the fence
Speaker 1: and into I ninety and shut the highway down. No,
Speaker 1: no another for common. Here's the everything, this super important
Speaker 1: that I keep wanting to get to my body. One
Speaker 1: of my main best friends from growing up and we're
Speaker 1: still friends today. He comes up to our fishsheck every year.
Speaker 1: He has a new he's a teacher. Okay, he has
Speaker 1: a business, a summertime business of he's got a roving bar.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna explain this, damn it. Okay, if you live
Speaker 1: around Traverse City, Michigan, here's what you need to who
Speaker 1: you need to hire for your events. This is the
Speaker 1: this is so. This is a good, very good buddy,
Speaker 1: My Matt DROs from growing up, we still hang out.
Speaker 1: Was just with him and because he's a teacher, he
Speaker 1: has a summertime business he created called roaming Roaming Northern
Speaker 1: Michigan dot com. But it's not it's roaming. No. My
Speaker 1: so roaming Andi dot com. I'll revisit this in a minute.
Speaker 1: He has a camp or trailer that he rigged up
Speaker 1: as a bar. But when you have an event, you
Speaker 1: get married whatever, twenty fifth wedding anniversary bar mitzvah, I
Speaker 1: don't know. Uh. You call him, you place your liquor order,
Speaker 1: he picks it up. Okay, so he's not selling booze.
Speaker 1: You buy your booze for your event like you normally would.
Speaker 1: He then shows up with his motor home with all
Speaker 1: the mixers and specialty drinks that he crafts for your thing,
Speaker 1: pulls his camper in and then your guests go to
Speaker 1: the bar window to get cocktails.
Speaker 4: And there's no money change.
Speaker 1: In hands, No money changes hands. Fantastic, no money changes hands.
Speaker 1: He operates out of Traverse City, Michigan. Packages prices everything
Speaker 1: at the website Roaming nom Roaming n m I dot com.
Speaker 1: Matt Drose plan an event just to call him. I
Speaker 1: like it, Like if you're getting married somewhere else, get
Speaker 1: married there and call it roaming and go to Roamingnomi
Speaker 1: dot com and patronize my good friend's business. He likes
Speaker 1: to hunt and fish.
Speaker 5: He should start a franchise take over the country.
Speaker 1: Another thing I've been wanting to talk about. I invented
Speaker 1: an old saying. I'm the only guy I know that
Speaker 1: ever invented an old saying meaning, you know, like stitching
Speaker 1: time saves nine.
Speaker 6: Like you said you invented it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know. I thought of one that you'd think
Speaker 1: was old. And it has to do with like if
Speaker 1: you send your kids out to pick pole beans and
Speaker 1: he'd be like, pick every pole bean, and then you
Speaker 1: go out and look and there's pol beans they didn't
Speaker 1: pick because it's hard to find them. Or like you
Speaker 1: send your wife's friend out to pick pole beans and
Speaker 1: she's like, I got them all, and you go on looking.
Speaker 1: They didn't get them all. They didn't look carefully enough.
Speaker 1: The old saying I invented is is I could see
Speaker 1: applications and finance and other things. A fresh a fresh
Speaker 1: set of eyes will always find more beans.
Speaker 2: Hm hm.
Speaker 1: So right. So, like let's say someone's like whatever, I
Speaker 1: don't know. You know, you can see implications and finance whatever,
Speaker 1: fresh set eye, Yeah exactly, but your body's like, no,
Speaker 1: I glass that hillside good and you sit down and
Speaker 1: you're like, you know what, buddy, fresh set eyes always
Speaker 1: find more beans.
Speaker 2: It doesn't.
Speaker 1: There's a buck right over there. You don't think so
Speaker 1: Katie thinks is like useless. He knows my wife doesn't
Speaker 1: think it's a good saying, good old saying at all.
Speaker 1: A couple more dress you sounds like a real dor
Speaker 1: when you say you do, sound like a total dork
Speaker 1: when you say it. First set eyes always find more beans, Randall, I've.
Speaker 3: Never really thought about finding beans.
Speaker 1: Now I'm gonna work on it. Think about it, Phil.
Speaker 1: Maybe Phil can workshop that that's different. I got a
Speaker 1: lot more stuff written out here, but we got to
Speaker 1: get down to what we're talking about. Oh, so here's
Speaker 1: the deal.
Speaker 4: This is.
Speaker 1: Our esteem. Guests probably wondering why it is here, but
Speaker 1: we're gonna have a lot of time. We're gonna get
Speaker 1: to something from your state. Elliott. Were you born in Arkansas? No?
Speaker 2: I was born in Texas, in Dallas.
Speaker 1: Oh you're born in Dallas, Texas. But you're at University
Speaker 1: of Arkansas.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I've been there for well, retired a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2: At been I've been there for forty three, forty four years.
Speaker 1: Did they give you that? What's that good title you
Speaker 1: get when you retire? But you remain in good standing Americas?
Speaker 1: Are you emeretis?
Speaker 2: I'm emeritus?
Speaker 1: That's sweet man? Uh Randall have you heard of doubt?
Speaker 1: The best thing Randallsville tell me about his PhD is
Speaker 1: when he checks a book out from the library, he
Speaker 1: gets as long as he wants. That makes all while
Speaker 1: those librarians chasing after all the time, and you get that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: librarians aren't always after him for the seventy.
Speaker 8: Eight small, very very small privileges in life to make
Speaker 8: it all worth it.
Speaker 1: This is from Springdale, Arkansas. So September twenty third. We've
Speaker 1: talked about this the whole bunch. We actually for a
Speaker 1: while talked about that we were going to like start
Speaker 1: our own, which you never got around to. But this
Speaker 1: one's back on the World Champion Squirrel Cookoff, Springdale, Arkansas,
Speaker 1: September twenty third, in partnership with Arizona Fish and Game
Speaker 1: Free of vatkans Arkansas. What did I say, Arizona? I did,
Speaker 1: we probably can Arkansas. I feel, yeah, this is a
Speaker 1: lot of work. One state is not going to have
Speaker 1: a squirrel cookoff and be Arizona.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Springdale, Arkansas, September twenty third, in partnership with Oh, that's
Speaker 1: why I screwed up in partnership with Arkansas Fishing Game
Speaker 1: free event. It's a creative event and competitive cooking and
Speaker 1: squirrel dishes must contain eighty percent squirrel and be prepared
Speaker 1: on site. That's a good TIB because I've judged wild
Speaker 1: game cookoffs before where it's like the game part becomes
Speaker 1: an afterthought.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you could put like one squirrel in a pot
Speaker 5: of chili and be.
Speaker 1: Like that squirrel chili eighty percent squirrel, So you are
Speaker 1: showcasing squirrel. They have a Facebook deal. So when you're
Speaker 1: describing where to find something on Facebook, do you include
Speaker 1: like Facebook dot com? Or what do you write? How
Speaker 1: do you say?
Speaker 6: I guess, yeah, because I guess If you don't have Facebook,
Speaker 6: you can still type in this your URL and get there.
Speaker 1: Facebook dot com slash Squirrel Cookoff. We'll take you there.
Speaker 6: And it's organized by Clay's good friend. Clay's going to
Speaker 6: be there this year. I think he is. Yeah, I think.
Speaker 1: So Here's what I don't like. They're billing it. They're
Speaker 1: making it like a war on squirrels.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this squirrel has.
Speaker 1: Caused millions of dollars of damage. Listen, don't I still
Speaker 1: want people to go, But this is not about squirrels
Speaker 1: being bad.
Speaker 6: Come on, I don't know.
Speaker 8: Typically I think of these things as a celebration of
Speaker 8: the animal right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like house fires are caused by squirrels, They got
Speaker 5: all kinds of screams things.
Speaker 1: Listen, listen. I still want you to go to the
Speaker 1: squirrel Cookoff, but you need to go from a place
Speaker 1: of love, not from a place of go from a
Speaker 1: position of love for squirrels, not from a position of
Speaker 1: squirrel hatred. No.
Speaker 6: I think it's also that for anyone who needs like
Speaker 6: extra justification to, you know, push them over the edge
Speaker 6: if they might not otherwise attend they're being reminded did.
Speaker 1: But the last thing you want to create is like
Speaker 1: another a squirrel. There's a lot of things to love,
Speaker 1: like about hunting, but people like, well if I didn't hunt,
Speaker 1: it's kind of you.
Speaker 5: And they're like going after him the way people go
Speaker 5: after coyote.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exact things like that. It's strange.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know to do about all rearing endorsement. No, listen,
Speaker 1: I am all four. Do you see me pounding this table.
Speaker 1: I'm all for the squirrel Cookoff. I just think that
Speaker 1: it has been. It's from a place. I love that
Speaker 1: it approach the right. Never in my life seeing a
Speaker 1: squirrel and been like, dah, damn it a squirrel. Do
Speaker 1: you know what I mean?
Speaker 5: You need to go down there and enter a pine
Speaker 5: squirrel recipe with Jimmy.
Speaker 1: That'd be great idea. No one else pine squirrel carried away.
Speaker 1: I still like, I'm still mad at my mother for
Speaker 1: cutting some of the oak trees down in her yard
Speaker 1: because of squirrels, squirrel damage, the squirrel habitat uh. We
Speaker 1: recently had an episode where we were with the founder,
Speaker 1: the creator of the Merlin app at Cornell. Someone had
Speaker 1: a hot tip about the Merlin app. Get a bluetooth
Speaker 1: speaker and play back bird songs. This is very effective.
Speaker 1: I wish would have brought it up. I don't know
Speaker 1: if they do. They frown on it. Maybe they frown
Speaker 1: on it at Merlin. We'll have to see if they
Speaker 1: write in meaning it works. It's very effective to call
Speaker 1: in birds. In fact, we would so the over day.
Speaker 1: I'll sitting there with my boy in a little pop
Speaker 1: up blind. I'm gonna pull this up. I got a
Speaker 1: gripe with the Merlin app too, Just and I know
Speaker 1: they listened to the show it. This is the only
Speaker 1: bird I never they It does not pick up a
Speaker 1: It won't pick up a grade. JA listen to this.
Speaker 1: So here's from my Merlin app. I'm gonna turn it up.
Speaker 1: This is a recording I made this weekend. So that's
Speaker 1: a pine squirrel. Okay, but listen to them again. I
Speaker 1: hit him again and again and again with Merlin. Listen,
Speaker 1: care for the that's a great jay. Listen. It doesn't
Speaker 1: get it. It registers it. You see it show up. Obviously,
Speaker 1: it will not identify that thing. It's the only failure
Speaker 1: I've ever seen Merlin.
Speaker 7: I wonder if it's too short of no.
Speaker 1: He was going boom boom boom, and there's probably other vocalizations,
Speaker 1: but it will not detect that vocalization.
Speaker 7: That squirrel is really really upfront and loud.
Speaker 6: I wonder if it's like yeah that and it's audio.
Speaker 7: Clashing with a lot of the frequencies.
Speaker 1: Is my guest, you think so?
Speaker 7: I think so.
Speaker 6: It comes from an audio engineers.
Speaker 1: Here's my kids. Here's what you want to hear my
Speaker 1: kid criticizing.
Speaker 7: Me ursus, you're so what.
Speaker 1: You're so slow. He didn't like when we go to
Speaker 1: pick off a bird. He didn't like how long it'd
Speaker 1: take me to activate the app. It was frustrating. He
Speaker 1: thought you would just like let it run for hours
Speaker 1: on end, and I didn't like that approach.
Speaker 8: I mean, it seems like if you're playing on a
Speaker 8: bluetooth speaker, if there's someone else in the area using
Speaker 8: the Merlin app, that it could cause a feedback loop
Speaker 8: where all of a sudden there's a.
Speaker 1: Merlin's too smart. I've played bird, I've played recordings, and
Speaker 1: I haven't done it much. I've played recordings and something
Speaker 1: g's lost interesting. So if you play, we can do
Speaker 1: I don't know, try it right now, But if you
Speaker 1: play Merlin a recording of a bird, it won't flag
Speaker 1: the bird. I don't know if it's just because things
Speaker 1: are too compressed. If something's like too compressed, Phil probably
Speaker 1: answer that, what do you think of that is? Phil?
Speaker 7: Honestly, that kind of baffles me. I feel like it
Speaker 7: should be able to pick it out.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: However, we have a called the Bird Song Bible, and
Speaker 1: you type in bird calls and it's going through like
Speaker 1: a little chintzy little there's like a speaker baked into
Speaker 1: the book and it might be that that speaker just sucks.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but Merlin won't identify those birds. But
Speaker 1: I could run around with this. I could go into
Speaker 1: any area with pine squirrels. And we did it for
Speaker 1: we were just messing around this weekend. We would just
Speaker 1: walk into a spot and play that squirrel and just
Speaker 1: no sooner he shut up alst in the woods just
Speaker 1: come alive with like squirrels replying to it. Years ago,
Speaker 1: I was reading a thing where they they're working on
Speaker 1: his study with vervet monkeys who they have these different
Speaker 1: warning calls. These researchers realizing that they had that they
Speaker 1: have a warning call for a threat on the ground,
Speaker 1: and then they have a warning call for a threat
Speaker 1: from an avian predator, and they seem to have a
Speaker 1: different noise they make on the ground in the air.
Speaker 1: And they would record the calls and play it and
Speaker 1: monitor what evasive actions they took. If it's a thread
Speaker 1: on the ground, they would do one thing like bust
Speaker 1: into the tree. If it's an overhead threat, they would
Speaker 1: respond differently to it to like reduce their risk from
Speaker 1: a harpy eagle or the hell praise on them. I
Speaker 1: don't remember what it was the praise on them. It
Speaker 1: wouldn't be a harpy because that's South America, but these
Speaker 1: I think are Africa. Anyways, you could burn out. You
Speaker 1: could burn them out on a monkey. If you record
Speaker 1: a monkey doing a warning call and then start playing
Speaker 1: that monkey to his buddies all the time. After a
Speaker 1: while his buddies, he loses credibility with his buddies.
Speaker 3: The monkey he had cried eagle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's the monkey that cried and he's the monkey
Speaker 1: that cried wolf, and you could play it where everybody's like, oh, Bob,
Speaker 1: he always is doing that. An insurance so I was
Speaker 1: using the term inherent vice, which is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite movies. I like it. It's one of those rare
Speaker 1: instances where a movie is so much better than a book.
Speaker 1: Thomas Pinsion's Inherent Vice was made into a film, which
Speaker 1: was a wonderful movie. And we were talking about when
Speaker 1: we had David grant On. I think that's when we
Speaker 1: had David grant On. We're talking about the concept of
Speaker 1: inherent vice, which is a nautical term. Someone wrote in.
Speaker 1: A guy named Thomas wrote in from He's from an insurance.
Speaker 1: He's a marine insurance specialist got to say his name. Sure,
Speaker 1: he's the president of Alan Armott Agency, Inc. Marine Insurance Specialists.
Speaker 1: He says, Steve refers to inherent vice as things you
Speaker 1: can't control, like getting wet. Inherent vice is the ability
Speaker 1: of a thing to destroy itself health, fruit can rot,
Speaker 1: marijuana can actually light itself on fire, metal can rust.
Speaker 1: Getting wet would not be under inherent vice. Getting wet
Speaker 1: is an external.
Speaker 6: Factor caused by an external factor.
Speaker 1: Caused by an external factor. So like the idea of
Speaker 1: inherent vice and shipping, if the load gets wet, it's
Speaker 1: not like, Ah, that just happens. Someone screwed up when
Speaker 1: he gets wet. Then he goes on to say, never
Speaker 1: thought I would be the type to email a correction.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 1: Someone else rode in with another one. When we had
Speaker 1: the writer David Grant on about the wager, we talked
Speaker 1: about sayings that come from naval, the naval world. He says,
Speaker 1: you guys fell down a rabbit hole on ship terms
Speaker 1: and sayings on the podcast with David Grant. Here's another.
Speaker 1: Do you believe this?
Speaker 4: I'm wondering, I'm looking it up.
Speaker 6: I didn't look it up.
Speaker 1: He's saying that the word ship comes from the old days.
Speaker 5: I think he's off. You look it up origin Old English.
Speaker 5: I don't know how to how to pronounce it. S
Speaker 5: c I T t E of Germanic origin.
Speaker 1: Maybe bags of manure. Maybe maybe our maybe our steam
Speaker 1: guests has heard of this, bags of manure.
Speaker 2: I'm dealing it a lot, Okay.
Speaker 1: If you stored bags of manure within the depths of
Speaker 1: a ship, they could get seawater on makes them unusable.
Speaker 1: They would write s h I T on bags of
Speaker 1: nerve store high in transit.
Speaker 7: I don't know that sounds fake. Do you think it
Speaker 7: sounds fake?
Speaker 8: I've heard that before, but I don't. I mean the
Speaker 8: the etymology.
Speaker 4: Yeah it doesn't. It doesn't match up with but the
Speaker 4: google because.
Speaker 3: The German is shi.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Germans were using that word for us words.
Speaker 5: Ship first originally appeared around one thousand years ago and
Speaker 5: can be traced back to the old Norse origin skit
Speaker 5: skeeta skeeters.
Speaker 4: I'm just saying, there's like this gate.
Speaker 6: This guy might be wrong, but I kinda like this
Speaker 6: should feel.
Speaker 1: Pull it out of the show, leave it. Someone wrote
Speaker 1: in out that Krin likes this one. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Well, if you.
Speaker 1: Were tasked with the decision of picking four American authors
Speaker 1: to be etched into the side of a mountain. Who
Speaker 1: would they be. I'll just leave that one hanging for
Speaker 1: for listeners.
Speaker 6: Elliott West and rand.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: I was gonna tell you, yeah, uh, did you know
Speaker 1: that Randall reviewed your work? Hemagined they I.
Speaker 3: Did tell him that.
Speaker 1: Let's start with that. Randal set the scene for us. Well.
Speaker 8: I was in a graduate seminar taught by Dan and
Speaker 8: each week, each week you had to review a book
Speaker 8: and from a different period of time or I think
Speaker 8: some of them were probably thematic.
Speaker 1: Each week, yep, you read.
Speaker 8: So everybody in the seminar reads a book and reviews it,
Speaker 8: and then you get together on Monday or Tuesday or
Speaker 8: whenever the classes and you just explain your book and
Speaker 8: Dan kind of pieces them all together and explains how
Speaker 8: they're in conversation with one another. And that was kind
Speaker 8: of the structure of those seminars. But one week I
Speaker 8: had the pleasure of reviewing The Last Indian War, probably
Speaker 8: two years after it came out, and stuck with me.
Speaker 1: So, I would you like to share a passage with us?
Speaker 2: Mm?
Speaker 1: I mean, you proposed this to me didn't you that
Speaker 1: you'd share as.
Speaker 4: The passage.
Speaker 8: There's just there are a lot of things that are
Speaker 8: attributed to me in the course of a conversation having
Speaker 8: to do with my educational background that really have never
Speaker 8: once escaped my mouth.
Speaker 1: So but yeah, Crin, if you'd like to know, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna deny his Montana PhD license plate.
Speaker 9: Now.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's a memorable book. I think there are a couple. Uh,
Speaker 8: I just I appreciated. I always appreciate books that make
Speaker 8: a story that you think is a story about one
Speaker 8: thing speak to bigger stories and bigger narratives. And so
Speaker 8: that was one of those books that kind of opened
Speaker 8: my eyes to how the past is all and you know,
Speaker 8: different parts of the past during conversation with one another.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you?
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you have it pulled up?
Speaker 7: No?
Speaker 3: Don't?
Speaker 1: Should should read it? How long is the passage?
Speaker 3: It's I just shared. I don't need to read any
Speaker 3: of this.
Speaker 1: No, no, you don't. You know what you don't need
Speaker 1: to Randall? Was it a negative review, No, No, it
Speaker 1: was quite complimentary.
Speaker 8: I actually I only sent along the the excerpt excerpts
Speaker 8: from it because I I thought you might find them
Speaker 8: useful in preparation for our conversations.
Speaker 1: Why you shared them?
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, No, it wasn't a show and tell. If
Speaker 8: it was, I would have had a I would have
Speaker 8: had a photo of the original with the sticker at
Speaker 8: the top.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I thought you might find it.
Speaker 1: Oh you're trying to help me out as a host. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I appreciate that.
Speaker 8: Instead, I just put another great, big target on my back.
Speaker 1: I guess. So, elios, let's start out, how many when
Speaker 1: you look at your career as a historian and you've
Speaker 1: been in you've been in the biz, how long fifty
Speaker 1: years do you do you measure it? Do you measure
Speaker 1: your career as a historian in terms of how many
Speaker 1: books you've written?
Speaker 6: Like?
Speaker 1: You know what I mean? Like, how do you how
Speaker 1: do you sum it up? Right?
Speaker 2: Well, that would be one way I think. I think
Speaker 2: I think more in terms of teaching. Okay, how many
Speaker 2: teaching the public University of State university, so you have
Speaker 2: big classes. I tried to figure out. In fact, I
Speaker 2: dedicated a book of a few books ago to my students,
Speaker 2: and I said, I and figured out it's probably had
Speaker 2: somewhere between ten and twelve thousand students. Really, in terms
Speaker 2: of I've also worked.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of influence, that's a lot of you
Speaker 1: have them for a lot of hours.
Speaker 6: I do.
Speaker 2: Indeed, they would confirm that yes, captive, Oh my god,
Speaker 2: it's like I ever shut up, you know. But he
Speaker 2: also I try to work. I've tried to work a
Speaker 2: lot with public school teachers to encourage, you know, better
Speaker 2: teaching of American history.
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 2: I've had one hundred of them over the years, and
Speaker 2: they've had, of course, each one of them has said,
Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands of students.
Speaker 1: How do you think, how do you interact with public
Speaker 1: school teachers in what capacity?
Speaker 2: Well, there are different programs. One that I continue to
Speaker 2: work with the Guilder Laherman Institute in New York. It's
Speaker 2: a wonderful institute to encourage a good teaching of American history.
Speaker 2: And they sponsor seminars over the years, and I've done,
Speaker 2: oh gosh, probably ten or fifteen of those. And you
Speaker 2: meet with a week for a week with school teachers
Speaker 2: from all around the country, since some from abroad, and
Speaker 2: you choose a topic. I taught one I was mentioning
Speaker 2: a moment ago. Taught one in Missoula for four years
Speaker 2: on Lewis and Clark. So you have teachers come from
Speaker 2: all over the country, all over the world, and you
Speaker 2: try to have the seminars and in the place that
Speaker 2: you're teaching about, you know. So we would talk about
Speaker 2: Lewis and Clark and sort of pick that expedition apart,
Speaker 2: and then on a Wednesday, we'd go up a little
Speaker 2: low pass to the uh you know, to travelers Rest,
Speaker 2: and then up to the old Pass and then back
Speaker 2: and sort of around the country. So it's a it's
Speaker 2: a great way to encourage students to identify, not just
Speaker 2: in terms of new material, but you know the place itself,
Speaker 2: because you really can't, especially Western history, you can't understand
Speaker 2: the story if you don't don't know the place. You know,
Speaker 2: if you can't go there.
Speaker 1: What do you what do you think is wrong with
Speaker 1: how American? You know? If you said to be to
Speaker 1: do better at teaching American history, where do people fall
Speaker 1: short in teaching American history in your in your view.
Speaker 2: Well, until fairly recently, of course, you leave out a
Speaker 2: lot that's pertinent. Uh. I think we need to bring
Speaker 2: in more areas like environmental history, the kind of thing
Speaker 2: that your podcast deals with a great deal beyond that,
Speaker 2: I think you need to the you need to talk
Speaker 2: about the larger contexts, you know, to take something to
Speaker 2: Lewis and Clark. It's a fascinating story. It's an American epic,
Speaker 2: you know, it's like an American creation story. Almost You're
Speaker 2: caught up in this sort of a mythic pattern where
Speaker 2: you think this is an absolutely unique event, but in fact,
Speaker 2: you know, this is part of global exploration, you know,
Speaker 2: and something that was happening all over all over the
Speaker 2: planet Earth. And these were just two guys among many
Speaker 2: who we're doing this. You didn't understand in terms of
Speaker 2: what what does the expedition teach us about Indian peoples
Speaker 2: at that time? What does it teach us about science
Speaker 2: of that time?
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 2: So it's a big story. It's a big story. It's
Speaker 2: a distinctly American story. And the journals, of course are
Speaker 2: a masterpiece of American literature. So it's our story, but
Speaker 2: it's also the world's story, and I think it helps
Speaker 2: to put all of American history in that larger context
Speaker 2: if you can.
Speaker 1: You know, earlier I mentioned there's two areas where I
Speaker 1: had kind of the main two areas where I brushed
Speaker 1: up against your work over the years. Is years ago,
Speaker 1: I was going to write a book. I wanted to
Speaker 1: write a book about the nets Person War. Oh really yeah,
Speaker 1: Well I started working on it, my little what I
Speaker 1: was doing, and I got going on it. I was
Speaker 1: just going to walk that whole well, I use my packcraft.
Speaker 1: I just had a backpack with packraft in and I
Speaker 1: got started on it. I was going to walk and
Speaker 1: pack raft that whole route, and I got going on it,
Speaker 1: but just the the time, commitment and other things prevented me.
Speaker 1: So I read your book at the time, your book
Speaker 1: on the nets Pers War the other area, and this
Speaker 1: is kind of where one of the areas where I
Speaker 1: want to jump in talking to you. I talked about
Speaker 1: it on the show. Even you had an essay. It
Speaker 1: was collecting one of your books. It was one of
Speaker 1: your books that had like there was a collection of
Speaker 1: four or five bigger pieces. You had an essay about
Speaker 1: how old European involvement and influence on the Great Plains,
Speaker 1: how far back that went right? And in it you
Speaker 1: make the point and this kid just kind of I
Speaker 1: guess maybe I was aware of it but hadn't thought
Speaker 1: about it just blew my mind you're like when Lewis
Speaker 1: and Clark stepped down into the Great Plains, there were
Speaker 1: Native Americans on the Great Plains at that time who
Speaker 1: had been to Europe and met the King of France
Speaker 1: and came back home again on the Great Plains at
Speaker 1: the time Lewis and Clark, and in the American imagination,
Speaker 1: it's like that they it was just that they went
Speaker 1: into this place, this untouched, unhistoried. Yeah, and then you
Speaker 1: got into just the I think it was hundreds of
Speaker 1: years if you go back to people like these kind
Speaker 1: of like offshoots of the Coronado Expedition, that they were
Speaker 1: coming into an area that had been deeply influenced.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, they what you were talking about, these Indians
Speaker 2: from the Kansas area. Actually Kansas in Missouri had been
Speaker 2: to the court, the Court of France course of the
Speaker 2: fifteenth Now that was a but that was in seventeen twenty,
Speaker 2: seventeen twenty five, seventeen twenty six. This is a long
Speaker 2: time before Willison Clark. So the image I love to
Speaker 2: imagine might have happened was that at the time that
Speaker 2: we the American you know, the East West Frontier was
Speaker 2: edging its way into the interior. That's what Lewis and
Speaker 2: Clark would you'll be part of if you go back
Speaker 2: to when that when this was seventeen twenties. Yeah, there
Speaker 2: was a governor, territorial governor of coinial governor of Virginia,
Speaker 2: you know, who had a group of people he called
Speaker 2: a the the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, and they
Speaker 2: would they loved to go explored the far west, right
Speaker 2: and they and he would come back with this reports
Speaker 2: of this this magnificent river they had found in this
Speaker 2: beautiful valley that was the it was a shin of door,
Speaker 2: you know. And these are people who were you know,
Speaker 2: they were just south of Washington, d C. And they
Speaker 2: were talking about, you know, penetrating deep into the American interior.
Speaker 2: At the very time that they would be doing that
Speaker 2: and talking about going back home, you know, I'm sitting
Speaker 2: around drinking, drinking port smoking cigars at the very times
Speaker 2: that they're talking about going to the far West, there
Speaker 2: might well have been Indians in central Kansas reminiscing about Paris.
Speaker 2: The Women's So it's so that's that's the kind of
Speaker 2: thing that I'm talking about. The larger the larger context
Speaker 2: Lewis and Clark were not entering this plate of Lewis's
Speaker 2: famous quote, you know when they set off, and that's
Speaker 2: from the Mandan villages, you know, the and where the
Speaker 2: foot of civilized man has never trodden. No, there's been
Speaker 2: a lot of trotting going on before that.
Speaker 1: What do you think was the biggest at the time
Speaker 1: Lewis and Clark were encountering on the northern plains, tribes
Speaker 1: and and you know, in all fairness, they encountered people.
Speaker 1: They encountered people who hadn't directly interacted with euro Americans
Speaker 1: or Europeans.
Speaker 2: Person example, and this person listen, Clark with the first
Speaker 2: white people the this person had.
Speaker 1: Met yet they had horses. So what what do you
Speaker 1: think was the biggest prior to the actual arrival of
Speaker 1: what was use Europeans. I guess, prior to the rival
Speaker 1: of Europeans, this thingy iwa think about we had these
Speaker 1: there's these three huge impacts that that that preceded the
Speaker 1: actual presence of Europeans would be horses, metal and disease, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, would you is that a fair statement? And
Speaker 1: of those which do you think when when Lewis and
Speaker 1: Clark was a contact people. Which of those influences was
Speaker 1: most was probably most impactful in shaping what they experienced
Speaker 1: as you.
Speaker 2: Know Native America at that time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, at that horses horses, like they were seeing something
Speaker 1: different than what had been.
Speaker 2: That's right, well, and disease, you know, Lewis and Clark
Speaker 2: arrived when they when they go up through North Dakota
Speaker 2: what's today North Dakota, they talked about coming across these
Speaker 2: abandoned villages, a place called Double Ditch today. Well, those
Speaker 2: were abandoned because of smallpox that had appeared seventeen eighty,
Speaker 2: you know, twenty years more than twenty years before they
Speaker 2: were there devastated. There is, twenty thousand Indians in the
Speaker 2: Pacific Northwest died of smallpox because of it. That epidemic
Speaker 2: this started in the east, highly influential with the of
Speaker 2: the revolution. One of the reasons that we were able
Speaker 2: to hold off against the English is the English troops
Speaker 2: are devastated, you know, by malaria and by smallpox. So
Speaker 2: that was a great influence that preceded that preceded them.
Speaker 2: But so of course is maybe at least as much.
Speaker 2: In fact, there's a connection there. Smallpox, of course have
Speaker 2: been in the western hemisphere for a long form, the
Speaker 2: very early period, from the period of period of Cortez,
Speaker 2: and it made its way all the way under the
Speaker 2: American Southwest quite early. And so the sept peoples of
Speaker 2: the Southwest, Comanches and Apaches and Navajoes and others, have
Speaker 2: been devastated by smallpox for decades, decades before Lewis and Clark.
Speaker 2: But in seventeen eighty it swept up from the south
Speaker 2: out of Mexico and went from the east coast down
Speaker 2: to Mexico and then up into up into the Americas,
Speaker 2: and it hit the southwest again. But then then it
Speaker 2: goes all the way up the Missouri Valley, it goes
Speaker 2: all the way in the Pacific northwest, devastating, devastating the
Speaker 2: Indians there. Why why then, and not before horses courses smallpox.
Speaker 2: When you catch smallpox, we have about ten days to
Speaker 2: transmit it to another person. So when it arrived first
Speaker 2: in the Southwest early on, people's natural response was to panic,
Speaker 2: run away, run away, right, But it's literally running. They're
Speaker 2: on foot, and they by the time they reach these
Speaker 2: you know, virgin soil. By the time they reach people
Speaker 2: who have never been infected by this they're dead or
Speaker 2: they can no longer pass it along. So it was
Speaker 2: the slow movement of these people out of the southwest
Speaker 2: that that allowed the people farther north to be free
Speaker 2: of it. Then they came than the horses. Yeah, horses
Speaker 2: spreading first, that are around sixteen eighty, But by seventeen eighty,
Speaker 2: seventeen eighty, the horse cultures had flourished all the way
Speaker 2: had developed and flourished all the way across what's today,
Speaker 2: you know, the far away with the great planes in
Speaker 2: the Pacific Northwest. And so people now when they panic
Speaker 2: and they flee, they're doing it on horseback. And the
Speaker 2: horses allowed the transmission of smallpox and other diseases in
Speaker 2: ways that had never been before. So the horse, in
Speaker 2: that sense, you know, one on the one had a
Speaker 2: great benefit to these people, allowed them to revolutionize their life,
Speaker 2: you know, to this huge burst of power and creativity
Speaker 2: and expansion. But it also killed them.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm thinking about as you talked about
Speaker 1: that is the COVID exactly, COVID in the airplane.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right, you know, exactly right.
Speaker 1: You could have an epidemic go from isolated to global,
Speaker 1: and I don't know month.
Speaker 2: Weeks really in thinckt I've I've written a recent article
Speaker 2: on that, comparing uh the covid epidemic today to the
Speaker 2: cholera epidemics in the in the nineteenth century and making
Speaker 2: exactly that exactly that point. So this is really what
Speaker 2: I was talking about a moment ago about the horses
Speaker 2: in smallpox. That's really one step in what has of
Speaker 2: course become increasingly a fact of life. We're talking about
Speaker 2: the shrinkage, the effective shrinkage of the world through transportation.
Speaker 2: Horses were an important part of that. But that shrinkage
Speaker 2: of course continues. So these poor folks in Wuhan, China
Speaker 2: catch this disease, however they got it, uh three weeks
Speaker 2: later it's in uh it's in the seattle. Yes, it's
Speaker 2: just really quite astonishing, and you see it, of course
Speaker 2: over and over over West Nile virus just you know,
Speaker 2: name a disease that just hit this country in the
Speaker 2: last one hundred and fifty years, and that's how it
Speaker 2: got here.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Yeah, it's an interesting point. The way the
Speaker 1: horses did that. Do you think that we've talked about
Speaker 1: this in the past, that the way so horses being
Speaker 1: introduced by the Spanish. Was in your view, was that
Speaker 1: incident the Pueblo Revolt? Was that really in your mind?
Speaker 1: Was that really sort of the beginning of the spread
Speaker 1: of horses to all the nomadic what would become the
Speaker 1: nomadic bison, you know, the equestrian buffalo hunting tribes of
Speaker 1: the of the Great Plains. Like do you think if
Speaker 1: the Pueblo Revolt hadn't happened, would that have been delayed
Speaker 1: significantly by one hundred years? Or it seems like a.
Speaker 3: Very tidy, Yeah, neat and tidy explanation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is. It isn't it isn't It clearly had
Speaker 2: a very important impact that there had been the spread
Speaker 2: the horse. Horses had spread before sixteen eighty, but it
Speaker 2: was very localized command you said, Nava holes had them
Speaker 2: and used them very effectively, rating on the web levels
Speaker 2: and in the in the Spanish, So there it had
Speaker 2: sort of I think it was sort of a leakage.
Speaker 2: You know, the Spanish worked really hard to try to
Speaker 2: control those horses because they knew what they were. The
Speaker 2: horses allowed people kind of mobility and the power to
Speaker 2: maneuvering that they had never had before, and they could
Speaker 2: be used very effectively against the Spanish, and so they
Speaker 2: were you know, it was it was a capital offense,
Speaker 2: the capital offense to sell a horse to an Indian.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, i'd read that. But ever i'd read that
Speaker 1: they had tried that they really wanted to control information
Speaker 1: about horses and control dissemination of horses.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's absolutely true. But they you can, of course,
Speaker 2: by the time possible, But go ahead sixteen eighty. It's
Speaker 2: very clear. You know, the record shows very clear, very
Speaker 2: clearly that after sixteen eighty, horses spread very rapidly to
Speaker 2: the north, and they follow exactly those trading routes that
Speaker 2: the preseed Columbus. It's just just traditional trading routes that
Speaker 2: go up to first up through the Rockies incidentally interestingly,
Speaker 2: then into the Pacific Northwest. Nes Purse, you know, the
Speaker 2: Shoshotes and nis Purse had horses within thirty years of
Speaker 2: the Weber revolt. Thirty years, that's incredible. And then they
Speaker 2: spread from there out onto the plains. So so within
Speaker 2: one hundred years you go forward from sixteen eighty to
Speaker 2: seventy and eighty, horse cultures have developed everywhere in the
Speaker 2: West that they eventually would. It's done. It's a done
Speaker 2: deal in one hundred.
Speaker 5: Years by the time for that they made the horses
Speaker 5: made it up here to say Montana, what like, how
Speaker 5: did the tribes here? What was their understanding of where
Speaker 5: they came from? Like what was like they had to
Speaker 5: have some story or history about where these things that
Speaker 5: had never been there before.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're also the traditionals develop of course about where
Speaker 2: they are and quite often not universal, but quite often
Speaker 2: it's sort of a gift from God. And they're described
Speaker 2: as things like uh uh, like elk dogs, elk dogs
Speaker 2: because like an elk, they're big and powerful, right like
Speaker 2: a dog. They're domesticated. That's so I say, elk dog.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but there was there is no knowledge of them
Speaker 5: coming into some other culture, some other place.
Speaker 2: Just eventually there were It's quite clear where they're coming from.
Speaker 2: You once once it develops Lewis and Clark when they
Speaker 2: meet the Shoshone, that famous meeting, you know, where Chicagoya
Speaker 2: meets her brother and they're starving for horses. They have
Speaker 2: to have horses. They gone with canoes up the Missouri,
Speaker 2: you know, and to the to the to the what
Speaker 2: to get down the other side. They've got to have horses,
Speaker 2: and so the Shoshones were obvious sources and once they
Speaker 2: met them. But if you read those journals, during their
Speaker 2: meeting with the Shoshonees, they report seeing Spanish brands on
Speaker 2: some of the world. These are horses that notre live
Speaker 2: from the They weren't simply descendants of horses that have
Speaker 2: been spread northward. They had they had those particular horses
Speaker 2: had come from New Mexico. Seriously, Yeah, so this is
Speaker 2: a you know, it's a very vigorous vigorous Uh.
Speaker 1: That's so weird. I've never I feel like that'd be
Speaker 1: like am that'd be like a real talked about aspect
Speaker 1: of Lewis and Clark. I never heard that.
Speaker 2: It's true. Just read read the journalis Yeah.
Speaker 1: Spanish brands horses, horses up there.
Speaker 2: Ye huh in this case Montana.
Speaker 1: You know, I want to stay on a little bit
Speaker 1: of this. I want to talk to you. You've written
Speaker 1: a lot about mining. I want to talk about gold
Speaker 1: rushes and mining too, but I want to stay on
Speaker 1: this theme for a minute here. And you have a
Speaker 1: new book out which I have where is it sitting
Speaker 1: right in front of me? Continental Reckoning, huge book. It
Speaker 1: is yeah, the American West and the age of expansion.
Speaker 1: I make a habit, unlike most hosts. I make a
Speaker 1: habit of saying I read it, or I didn't read
Speaker 1: I haven't read it. However, I read the index and
Speaker 1: then use that to go in and check little certain
Speaker 1: things out. And I got to last that I was
Speaker 1: land never reading some passages you had about the Indian
Speaker 1: Wars in the West, and you kinda you treat it
Speaker 1: as victory there for the victory there for America was
Speaker 1: just a certainty. And not only that, but we talked
Speaker 1: about what we spent on the Indian Wars relative to
Speaker 1: other military endeavors. The human cost of the Indian Wars
Speaker 1: relative to other military endeavors really puts into perspective, meaning
Speaker 1: we you know, the Union, I can't remember what you had.
Speaker 1: I should find I should have taken a better note.
Speaker 1: But I mean the Union in a day in the
Speaker 1: Civil War, would I think that maybe this is how
Speaker 1: this support whatever you use. There were certain days during
Speaker 1: the Civil War the Union lost more soldiers and they
Speaker 1: were going to use than they were going to lose
Speaker 1: in the Indian Wars of the West.
Speaker 2: That's right, and Tetam of course which is the bloodiest
Speaker 2: battle of the Civil War, the bloodiest battle in American
Speaker 2: history in terms of losses. Now, this is strict, this
Speaker 2: is just on the Union side. Just didn't We're not
Speaker 2: talking about the Confederates. The Union lost more men in
Speaker 2: in this two square mile area over about nine hours.
Speaker 2: Then they lost over thirty years and two million acres
Speaker 2: square miles in the far West.
Speaker 1: That it just blows mica the amount of mental energy
Speaker 1: I have spent on the amount of mental energy I've
Speaker 1: spent on how Coster managed to get a couple couple
Speaker 1: hundred guys killed one day, and then you go and
Speaker 1: look at the Antietam like that'd be like a better
Speaker 1: place to spend your time. It's like, not how did
Speaker 1: a guy lose a couple hundred, but how do you
Speaker 1: lose thousands of people?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right in a blink of an eye.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but really it does it occupies this like I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean, I know they're big Civil War buffs,
Speaker 1: but just it's see, I guess because it went on
Speaker 1: so long. But you tell me, you kind of painted
Speaker 1: like it was sort of a light lift and ere
Speaker 1: that you get into. No, I mean just because the
Speaker 1: numbers like I didn't realize you were saying. You had
Speaker 1: to think that by the time some of the I
Speaker 1: think it was by the time a little Big Horn
Speaker 1: or by the time of the Nez Perce War in
Speaker 1: the Pacific Northwest, whites outnumbered Indians sixty to one. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was just I guess some of these statistics put
Speaker 1: in the perspective that it was probably not a thing
Speaker 1: like will we win. It's just like how quickly will
Speaker 1: we do this? Like how quickly will we perform this
Speaker 1: thing where we've set out to do? Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't a when you just look at the
Speaker 1: numbers of people moving into the west, it was just overwhelming.
Speaker 2: That's that's the point of course that I was trying
Speaker 2: to make there. Indians in the Far West were defeated.
Speaker 2: The military came in, you know, when things got really
Speaker 2: nasty and they had to step in. There was any
Speaker 2: other way to avoid it, to control this particular group
Speaker 2: of Indians. Most of of course didn't resist, like the
Speaker 2: Lakotas or commanities, realtives. Most just sort of, you know,
Speaker 2: saw riding on the walls. Okay, you know, we'll deal
Speaker 2: with it. But if you look at in those terms.
Speaker 2: Indian wars are just I like I use a metaphor
Speaker 2: of an Indian war. Indian wars were like a period
Speaker 2: at the end of a long paragraph. Wasn't the paragraph?
Speaker 2: The paragraph was this this juggernaut of settlement that comes.
Speaker 1: In, Yeah, and then like like you mentioned the disease issue,
Speaker 1: and then I was just like depopulating people and taking
Speaker 1: and eliminating cultural structure, eliminating cultural memory, and then you
Speaker 1: have this fragment that just gets overwhelmed by immigration.
Speaker 2: Right, that's right. And I think I mentioned before the
Speaker 2: need to put this in the larger context of environmental history,
Speaker 2: because what this was in these years, the period that
Speaker 2: I cover here, which is about eighteen forty eight or
Speaker 2: fifty two, about eighteen eighty was the greatest environmental transportation transformation,
Speaker 2: uh convulsion by far in American history. And I would
Speaker 2: argue that there are very few times in world history,
Speaker 2: you know, when an area that large have been so
Speaker 2: completely transformed, so so massively trans environmentally transformed. And that
Speaker 2: means of course that the whole, the whole way of
Speaker 2: living that Indians had had before that, you know, was uh,
Speaker 2: the legs were cut out from it.
Speaker 3: Root.
Speaker 2: You can't if you're if you're a hooting gathering people
Speaker 2: in California, just.
Speaker 1: The environmental destruction.
Speaker 2: Sure, sure, we just remake it. And you know we uh,
Speaker 2: the elimination of the bison and replacement of the replacement
Speaker 2: by by cattle, by ranching. You know, that's that's an obvious,
Speaker 2: dramatic example of it. But that could be that story
Speaker 2: could be told over and over and over and over
Speaker 2: throughout the throughout the far West. We simply transformed. We
Speaker 2: we remake the world environmentally when they come in, not
Speaker 2: just a number of people, it's this you make a
Speaker 2: new world. And this world is not the world that
Speaker 2: Indian people's had had been living in for generations, uh
Speaker 2: and knew how to deal with and how to support themselves.
Speaker 7: It's over.
Speaker 2: You know, what are you going to do? There's there's
Speaker 2: nothing you can do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I see your point, even outside of the US
Speaker 1: military involving themselves in certain issues like what really can
Speaker 1: be done?
Speaker 2: Nothing? Yeah, we've had to be overwhelmed.
Speaker 6: You.
Speaker 1: We've had Dan Florees on the show a couple of times,
Speaker 1: and he made a point about wildlife. Wildlife in the
Speaker 1: West specifically, which he spends a lot of his energy
Speaker 1: on and career, on and and telling the story about
Speaker 1: the destruction, He'll say, I've looked for it globally and
Speaker 1: and globally, I can find nothing that compares to the
Speaker 1: destruction of wildlife. That's right, and that occurred in the
Speaker 1: American wise.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this wonderful new book of dance, of course, wild
Speaker 2: New World. He makes that point over and over and over.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I've looked.
Speaker 2: It's not there, not there, It's just And that's that's
Speaker 2: an aspect of what I what I was just talking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what, uh is it fair to say that you're
Speaker 1: that's first book the last? The Last Indian War? Is
Speaker 1: that the name of the book?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: I remember that, right, I read it years ago. Uh,
Speaker 1: lay that out for us. Why why do you feel that,
Speaker 1: you know, why that name? What's the significance of that
Speaker 1: as the last one?
Speaker 2: I should start by saying that I am terrible coming
Speaker 2: up with titles, absolute absolute worst.
Speaker 1: You know, so I make titles for things don't even exist.
Speaker 2: I bet they're better than my uh my editor at
Speaker 2: the Oxford guar To Press came up with that. I thought, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's a good I called it. First of all, because
Speaker 2: I think it was. If you think of a war,
Speaker 2: you know, as a as an ongoing conflict between massed forces,
Speaker 2: it was, but there was no other Indian war in
Speaker 2: the far West like that that fits said definition, because.
Speaker 1: The feeding eighteen seventy seven, is that right.
Speaker 2: Eighteen seventy seven. Yeah, it fighting goes on, of course,
Speaker 2: like in the southwest of the Apaches. You know, they're
Speaker 2: not defeated until eighteen eighties. But is that a war?
Speaker 2: You know, it's more like a police action. You know,
Speaker 2: they're they're like gangs, right, They fight for a while
Speaker 2: and they come back into the reservation, rest up, You'll
Speaker 2: get some food, fathen their horses, and they go.
Speaker 1: Back out just small groups.
Speaker 2: And yeah, yeah, the next Perst War, you know, if
Speaker 2: you if you've forget about it, h you know, it
Speaker 2: was this ongoing, concerted effort over many months included sort
Speaker 2: of that also both sides, you know, engaging each other
Speaker 2: like in.
Speaker 1: Any seasoned civil war generals. That's right. Yeah, getting defeated.
Speaker 2: This purse just given I just kicked his rear. He
Speaker 2: was he was wounded severely wooted twice in his career.
Speaker 2: Once was at Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg. He was up
Speaker 2: there at that angle. You know, he was with the
Speaker 2: group you know that met the Confederates coming up and
Speaker 2: pick his charge, shot on the shoulder, and then he
Speaker 2: was severely wounded at the Battle of the Big Hole
Speaker 2: against the against the purse.
Speaker 1: Can you lay out how that? Can you lay out
Speaker 1: what that war was, how it started? I mean, you
Speaker 1: could do the big version of how it started. But
Speaker 1: then also it kind of had they had a beginning
Speaker 1: one day, right.
Speaker 2: Well, I think the first thing to say about it
Speaker 2: is that, as I mentioned a moment ago, Lewis and
Speaker 2: Clark were the first white people, the first your your
Speaker 2: Americans for them ever to meet, and in their own minds,
Speaker 2: they they formed a treaty with the Americans, and they
Speaker 2: promised to keep the peace with them. They promised to
Speaker 2: fight on our side against any any common enemies, and
Speaker 2: in their own minds they kept that treaty from that
Speaker 2: on that point will be eighteen o six.
Speaker 1: I mean they they came to an agreement with Lewis
Speaker 1: and Clark, like there was an exchange of gifts, and
Speaker 1: they came to be like, Okay, we're good.
Speaker 7: We got a deal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, of course, Lewis and Clark had set
Speaker 2: out there. One of the things they were told to
Speaker 2: do is to make these sorts of arrangements to them
Speaker 2: to open up trade and to sort of pacify the
Speaker 2: pacify the Pacific Northwest, which will allow the flow of
Speaker 2: trade up there. So they approached it with this and
Speaker 2: they said, this is what we'd like to do, you know,
Speaker 2: and the new persaid, great, that's great. Well, they don't
Speaker 2: have exchange gifts. The news person to this day are
Speaker 2: will tell you that there was a child produced out
Speaker 2: of that treaty arrangement from William Clark, a man who
Speaker 2: grew up named Daytime Smoke, who ended up fleeing with
Speaker 2: Chief Joseph h and dying in Oklahoma. William Clark's son,
Speaker 2: did he Yeah, yeah, I didn't know.
Speaker 1: So Clark's son was in Clark's son was present for
Speaker 1: the Nesberust War.
Speaker 2: They just per se that that that's right, and they
Speaker 2: argue that, you know it's part.
Speaker 1: Of it, you know, that would put him in that
Speaker 1: will put him in the seventies.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right, old man. And as was true
Speaker 2: of virtually what was that old man's name, Daytime Smoke.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm, and he had light colored hair.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, he said he had light light colored hair.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 2: I'm a little doobie about that because, uh you know, well,
Speaker 2: you know Clark had red hair, and so the point
Speaker 2: was that this was and theer make a big point
Speaker 2: of that, Well, this guy had hair just like well,
Speaker 2: red hair of course is a recessive gene. So you
Speaker 2: only get red hair if both of your parents have
Speaker 2: that in their genes. Right, how in the world did
Speaker 2: this this woman have red hair?
Speaker 6: God?
Speaker 2: So anyway, it's.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're questioning in questioning the hair color, are you
Speaker 1: questioning the whole premise?
Speaker 2: No, I think there's something to it. This is a
Speaker 2: standard arrangement, you know, when you make a deal like that.
Speaker 2: Uh you it's like it's like royal houses in Europe.
Speaker 2: You know, the prince prince from this house marries a
Speaker 2: princess in that house because you're sealing this deal between them.
Speaker 2: And this is the standard standard procedure among Indian peoples.
Speaker 2: And we know, you know, in terms of producing children.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 2: Wellim Clark really got down to business once he got back.
Speaker 2: I had a bunch of kids, so he was he
Speaker 2: was right. But anyway, so I think the point to
Speaker 2: make here is that in the nest perseise, they kept
Speaker 2: this friendship, this treat all the way, all the way
Speaker 2: from eighteen o six up until eighteen seventy six and
Speaker 2: seventy seven.
Speaker 1: Never waged war against the US.
Speaker 2: Never did, never did. There is no record that I
Speaker 2: could find any of a ness person killing a killing
Speaker 2: a white person. There are plenty of records of White's
Speaker 2: murdering nes Purse. Didn't do it, didn't do it. And
Speaker 2: yet they were the other side of the Last Indian War.
Speaker 2: The Last Indian War was against those people who had
Speaker 2: the longest friendly kept their word longer than any other
Speaker 2: Indian group in the entire or west. That's what makes
Speaker 2: this to me a very compelling and a very heartbreaking story.
Speaker 2: The reason they did it, the reason happened, was that
Speaker 2: they were forced by Oliver Howard Uh to leave there.
Speaker 1: He's a civil war guy, right, He's a civil war
Speaker 1: he was.
Speaker 2: Was he to doe with one arm, He was the
Speaker 2: one of one arm metrized. He was well. He was
Speaker 2: a Uh. He was a dedicated abolitionist. He resigned his
Speaker 2: position teaching up in Buden College to a fight for
Speaker 2: the war to end a slavery Oliver Howard was the
Speaker 2: head of the Freedman's Bureau.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 2: After the war, he founded what is today Howard University,
Speaker 2: you know, the leading African American university.
Speaker 1: That's that's that's him, yeah, huh.
Speaker 2: And so after the Civil War Howard went out went
Speaker 2: out to the west. The next person were divided, of course,
Speaker 2: into various bands.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: Some of those bands, two of them, I think, in
Speaker 2: eighteen sixty three, had made a treaty with the US,
Speaker 2: agreeing to a much smaller reservation using the tribal holdings
Speaker 2: by ninety percent. But this is only one one or
Speaker 2: two bands. One band really. The other bands had never
Speaker 2: agreed to it. They had left the treaty negotiations, and
Speaker 2: you had the government said everybody, all of these bands
Speaker 2: were bound by this treaty. They let it go. In fact,
Speaker 2: Howard at some point said, leave alone. You're not bothered anybody.
Speaker 2: They're living in this country, the Wallava. You know where
Speaker 2: the Walala is. Yeah, they were living in the Walla,
Speaker 2: which is a beautiful, beautiful country, but very isolated. So
Speaker 2: there was no pressure to open this up to settlement.
Speaker 2: So Howard says, you know, let it go. And then
Speaker 2: in eighteen seventy six seventy seven, the government said, no, No,
Speaker 2: that's it. This treaty holds. You've all got to come in.
Speaker 2: You've got to give up your home within within six weeks.
Speaker 2: You've got to get rid of all your cattle. You've
Speaker 2: got to leave your homeland. You've got to get all
Speaker 2: your people together, everybody, and you've got to come into
Speaker 2: this come into this reservation. This Why they did that
Speaker 2: is an interesting question.
Speaker 1: You another passage I read in your new book, Continental Reckoning,
Speaker 1: you talk about this, You explore this theme you're getting
Speaker 1: to right now, which is an inability or a lack
Speaker 1: of willingness on the part of US negotiators to understand
Speaker 1: the structures of tribal peoples and trying to impose on
Speaker 1: them this order of that you have a that you
Speaker 1: have this sort of like this president like figure that
Speaker 1: I will talk to and they'll agree, and then that
Speaker 1: that sort of covers me on all of these peoples
Speaker 1: that we imagine being under this leadership structure, to the
Speaker 1: point where I know that in the Ohio River country,
Speaker 1: the US government once bought a chunk of ground from
Speaker 1: a tribe that didn't occupy the chunk of ground oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll sell you.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: And then yeah, and then try to hold them to
Speaker 1: it and they're like, well, hold it, but we didn't
Speaker 1: the people that were there right, well we didn't agree
Speaker 1: to that. Well no, but we bought it from these
Speaker 1: other people. They said, they knew you.
Speaker 7: Exactly right.
Speaker 1: But again and again like that that failure, you know,
Speaker 1: I'd say, like a lack of It's probably not that
Speaker 1: they didn't understand it. It's probably they just didn't care.
Speaker 2: I think it was a bit of both. Uh. You
Speaker 2: gotta think from the from Washington's point of view, are
Speaker 2: we really these are treating You know, a treaty with
Speaker 2: an Indian tribe is like a treaty with France, a
Speaker 2: treaty with Germany or whatever, and it has to go
Speaker 2: through the same procedure. You have to get negotiate, it's
Speaker 2: got to be examined. But the Senate desk to approve it.
Speaker 2: Of course, are we really going to go through that
Speaker 2: whole procedure with every band in the Far West? That
Speaker 2: will work? And so I think in a very practical way,
Speaker 2: very cynical way, they said, okay, we'll just we'll just
Speaker 2: say that you have a governmental and a structure of
Speaker 2: collective authority like ours. We got a president. You got
Speaker 2: a president. We'll call him the head chief.
Speaker 1: And if you don't, if you don't find one, will
Speaker 1: find one.
Speaker 2: Will and will appoint one. And that happened over and
Speaker 2: over and over and over against and that's that is
Speaker 2: what that's what's going on within this perse Joseph uh
Speaker 2: used an argument exactly like you were just saying. He
Speaker 2: uses horse. He says. It's like coming in and you're
Speaker 2: saying saying to me, we just bought your horse. No
Speaker 2: we didn't. You didn't give me way. We paid that
Speaker 2: guy over there. Well it's not his horse.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, the way it goes, right, Yeah, So.
Speaker 2: At any point in eighteen seventy seven, then they forced
Speaker 2: them to move into this small reservation, to give up
Speaker 2: their homes, be crowded into this this small space, and
Speaker 2: then we're going to do it. They did it, and
Speaker 2: they came across the salmon. There's a rough this is
Speaker 2: late spring. Salmon was up and running, you know. But
Speaker 2: they got all the people across, they got what cattle
Speaker 2: they could across there, and they were camped near the
Speaker 2: reservation on the edge of the reservation. Literally the day
Speaker 2: before they were required to come onto the reservation. At
Speaker 2: that point, it finally snapped and a few young men
Speaker 2: wore who had grudges against a merchant and a couple
Speaker 2: of other whites would settle there in the in the valley,
Speaker 2: took off killed him. And that then was that just
Speaker 2: sort of like a you know, the match to tinder,
Speaker 2: But it was.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say what's interesting about it, but
Speaker 1: it's it's noteworthy that it was people that knew each other. Yep,
Speaker 1: like you're saying, I went to those sites, you know,
Speaker 1: but uh, it was, uh, they set out to get
Speaker 1: It was sort of like riding to this strange land
Speaker 1: and like invading strangers because they they settled grudges with
Speaker 1: people they had interacted with, of course, and in one
Speaker 1: case had some physical disputes with I think. But the
Speaker 1: fact that that would trigger not a police action, right,
Speaker 1: not like arrest warrants, Well, I guess they tried to
Speaker 1: do something like that, didn't they They tried to like
Speaker 1: arrest the people.
Speaker 2: And well, you know, like I say, when these young
Speaker 2: guys came back and it was clear what they had done,
Speaker 2: they were boasting about it, you know. Uh. At that point.
Speaker 2: Then a lot more men took off and it was nasty.
Speaker 2: It was a nasty bit of business. They killed a
Speaker 2: lot of folks, that raped a lot of women. It
Speaker 2: was an ugly, ugly thing.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: And at that point the leadership the the council, these
Speaker 2: leaders who had argued for peace, said look, we're not
Speaker 2: gonna win.
Speaker 7: We got to go in.
Speaker 2: At that point they said, well that's it. It will
Speaker 2: have to be war. Name of one of my chapters.
Speaker 2: It was a quote from one of these councils. They
Speaker 2: will have to be war.
Speaker 1: This is it.
Speaker 2: And then they went all after it. And as you said,
Speaker 2: they just kicked their ear. And in several places.
Speaker 1: It seems so so when you're looking at the country,
Speaker 1: it correct me if I'm messing this up. When you're
Speaker 1: looking at the country, like you imagine settlement starting in
Speaker 1: the east and sort of going like a wall to
Speaker 1: the west coast to the Pacific. But it actually did
Speaker 1: that to a sense. But it also skipped this chunk,
Speaker 1: you know, skip the great planes to some measure. So
Speaker 1: when the nets person get in this fight with the
Speaker 1: US army, they had east. They're going east to escape
Speaker 1: the army because they feel if they get out on
Speaker 1: the Great Plains.
Speaker 2: They're home free.
Speaker 1: No one's gonna care about them anymore. Because they used
Speaker 1: to go out there. They had for quite some time
Speaker 1: gone out there to hunt buffalo, and so they were
Speaker 1: sort of going what you'd imagine as going east. You'd
Speaker 1: imagine them sort of going into the eye of the
Speaker 1: storm of the US. But in their mind they would
Speaker 1: move east to get away from the US.
Speaker 2: That's right. And they were long time allies with the
Speaker 2: crows Absorba people, and they what they thought was, if
Speaker 2: we can get to the crows, if we can get
Speaker 2: out of here, they'll leave us alone. We'll get over
Speaker 2: the crow with our friends, and the crows will take
Speaker 2: us in and we'll let things settle down, and then
Speaker 2: we'll go back home. One of the fascinating aspects of
Speaker 2: his story is how the nest pers, on the one hand,
Speaker 2: were so beautifully adapted to the white presence there. This
Speaker 2: is in contradiction to what I said a moment ago.
Speaker 2: Their their environment was just fine for them, and they
Speaker 2: adapted to it beautifully. They were They were very prosperous,
Speaker 2: successful ranchers. Uh they were, you know, when they took
Speaker 2: off in this cattle cattle ranchers on this long retreat,
Speaker 2: they cashed a lot of their their their valuables, including
Speaker 2: silver tea sets. Yeah they were, yeah, they were. They
Speaker 2: were wealthier than the whites in the area. You know,
Speaker 2: they had lots of resources, had lots of money, and
Speaker 2: they have become very savvy in dealing with the whites
Speaker 2: in terms of economically economically, So the 's you've got
Speaker 2: that on the one hand, and yet on the other hand,
Speaker 2: in this larger perspective, they had this astonishingly naive view
Speaker 2: of larger white society, what of what they were really
Speaker 2: up against. Mmmm, there's this uh.
Speaker 1: You mean, it's just a naive view that you would
Speaker 1: somehow get out of this a lot or.
Speaker 2: Even beyond that, you know, uh, what are we dealing
Speaker 2: with here? One of the one of the counts, their transcripts,
Speaker 2: of course, of all of these negotiations with Howard and
Speaker 2: these others, and one of the uh Nesbur's banned leaders
Speaker 2: nat Ju. At one point you first read it, you
Speaker 2: think he's he's being facetious, he's being he's being uh,
Speaker 2: you know, he's being sarcastic. But I don't think so.
Speaker 2: He said, what is this? Who is who is this? Washington,
Speaker 2: you keep talking about. You keep saying. Washington says that
Speaker 2: you have this treaty, you got to do. Washington says,
Speaker 2: you go to who is that? Is it a person?
Speaker 2: Is it a house? He said, is it a house?
Speaker 2: So they, you know, on the one hand, they're so
Speaker 2: beautifully adapted to their aion environment. In the larger U,
Speaker 2: they've never the first time they become aware of the
Speaker 2: telegraph that existed was during the retreat over Lolo Pass.
Speaker 2: Was it really? Yeah, they had. The first time they
Speaker 2: ever saw or got onto a train was after the
Speaker 2: surrendery when they were taken they were taken over to
Speaker 2: the Fort Leavenworth.
Speaker 1: That was their first contact with the Yeah, experience, they
Speaker 1: know what they were. And so when they split, they
Speaker 1: had what about twelve hundred people about that and then
Speaker 1: five six thousand horses a.
Speaker 2: Bunch of horses.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they run this rolling gunfight and keep whipping,
Speaker 1: repeatedly whipping Civil War generals in like battles. And then
Speaker 1: one of the craziest things about sort of the one
Speaker 1: of the craziest collisions that you have this this semi
Speaker 1: nomadic tribe of hunter gatherers moving across the landscape and
Speaker 1: the lateness is they get to Yellowstone National Park, which
Speaker 1: is a park, try and get into a shootout at
Speaker 1: Mammoth Hot Springs with tourists.
Speaker 2: It's just like it blows your mind. It's they're just
Speaker 2: such a bizarre story. It's like it reminds me. You
Speaker 2: don't reminds me of Uh did you ever see the
Speaker 2: movie Blazing Saddles.
Speaker 9: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, kidding the very.
Speaker 2: The very end of it, when there's a big fight
Speaker 2: uh in the in the town and somebody pumps up
Speaker 2: against this you know what turns out to be.
Speaker 1: Uh scenery, Yeah, and then falls over.
Speaker 2: Well no, no, and then they break through and it's
Speaker 2: another movie going on next door, dom Delui know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you know something about that fighting over Intohigh ninety.
Speaker 2: And that's what this feels like. You know. It's like
Speaker 2: it's like these two stories that come together in this
Speaker 2: strange ways. One of the things there, you know William Sherman,
Speaker 2: who was head of the army in the West at
Speaker 2: that time. Uh, and of course the man who arguably
Speaker 2: was most influentially ending the Civil War, he ends up
Speaker 2: in charge of Indian policy out in the West. He's general,
Speaker 2: He's the general of the Army. He is the highest
Speaker 2: ranking military officer in the United States at that time.
Speaker 2: He's on a vacation in the Yellowstone Park. So William
Speaker 2: Sherman was at the time at the time that the
Speaker 2: nest person came in. So and somebody, you know, said,
Speaker 2: oh my god, you've got these Indians coming in here
Speaker 2: who had just been, you know, just been killing our
Speaker 2: soldiers over there, and all of a sudden, they're going
Speaker 2: in here. So they rushed to tell him, and he
Speaker 2: gets out just a day ors before they come right
Speaker 2: through there. So what if that hadn't happened. No, you know,
Speaker 2: Billy Sherman, you Winnam Sherman sitting around a you know,
Speaker 2: sipping whiskey and frowed trout. You know, some chief also
Speaker 2: shows up.
Speaker 1: You know, soaking his feet some hot.
Speaker 2: So it's you know, it's just a it's such a
Speaker 2: wonderful story on so many levels, the macro level, you
Speaker 2: know what I'll tell you about what's going on in
Speaker 2: the United States at that time, and then the even know,
Speaker 2: the mini level, you know, the micro level where you
Speaker 2: get these astonishing little stories and quirks. You know that
Speaker 2: things come together like that.
Speaker 1: Have you read have you read. Sorry, I was just
Speaker 1: going to say.
Speaker 8: I think one of the more striking things about it
Speaker 8: is just how sprawling geographically.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 8: Like I can't think of very many sort of episodic
Speaker 8: stories that start where they do and and cross over
Speaker 8: and then they're you know, through the breaks and headed
Speaker 8: up to Canada.
Speaker 3: It's like there aren't very many.
Speaker 8: I mean, there's Lewis and Clark, sure, but that's like
Speaker 8: years and years, you know, But like in terms of
Speaker 8: miles covered, this story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I try to figure out a way
Speaker 2: to illustrate that and think of it this way. At
Speaker 2: the end of the Civil War, there's this community in Virginia,
Speaker 2: central Virginia, and they decide, I don't want to live
Speaker 2: out of Union. Let's get out of here. So the
Speaker 2: whole town gets together and they head west, leaving the
Speaker 2: middle of Virginia. Right. Uh, like the s verse, this
Speaker 2: this was these were just warriors, of course. These are
Speaker 2: the entire men, women and children, old old folks, you know. Uh,
Speaker 2: pick up and move, pick up and go.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 2: And the army says, no, you got to you gotta
Speaker 2: stay here. So the army's chasing them, this this small
Speaker 2: southern town, right and they're leaving. They're hidden west from
Speaker 2: from central Virginia. If those if if that town had
Speaker 2: had had gone as far as this these as person
Speaker 2: did before they were caught up near the Canadian border,
Speaker 2: they would have gone from the middle of Virginia to Denver.
Speaker 1: Are you serious? Because they did? They did thirteen hundred
Speaker 1: miles or something, didn't they.
Speaker 2: Thirteen to fifteen hundred depending on how you measure it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think just engagement after engagement after engagement.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that parallel is almost too good to be true.
Speaker 2: It is true. Unlike many things that I've written, it
Speaker 2: is in fact true.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 8: I think one of the things that I remember from
Speaker 8: your from this book is you make the point that
Speaker 8: ex Confederates and Native people are the only Americans that
Speaker 8: have had citizenship forced on them at gunpoint.
Speaker 3: Oh right, Like there's so many.
Speaker 8: I mean, one of the main points in the book
Speaker 8: is just to understand the Indian Wars as part of
Speaker 8: this bigger project of nation making. And you know, you
Speaker 8: talk about greater reconstruction as eighteen forty five to eighteen
Speaker 8: eighty or so. Could you talk a little bit about that,
Speaker 8: like the the parallels that you see in the Indian
Speaker 8: Wars in the Civil War, because there are a lot
Speaker 8: of interrelated questions.
Speaker 2: And yeah, that was the larger theme of the last
Speaker 2: Indian Wars. It's a great story about it. It's an
Speaker 2: amazing story itself, the whole nes person stories. It is fascinating.
Speaker 2: What I tried to argue in this book because in
Speaker 2: a lot of books written on the war.
Speaker 1: In the person, what I try to one lesson there would.
Speaker 2: Have been it is a long walk. I got tired.
Speaker 7: I just drolled it, you know.
Speaker 2: But the larger point was that this is really a
Speaker 2: very revealing part of what I call the greater reconstruction.
Speaker 2: What I what I argue here is that something really
Speaker 2: important happens in the middle of the nineteenth century. We
Speaker 2: all agree on that in the middle of the nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: the national narrative shifts fundamentally onto a new track that
Speaker 2: will carry us into what we know as modern America. Right,
Speaker 2: we go up before eighteen fifty and look at America
Speaker 2: and look at in America in nineteen hundred. It's like
Speaker 2: it's like a different world. We've become a fundamentally different nation, society, people, culture, whatever.
Speaker 2: Why does that happen? What explains this traumatic shift. Well,
Speaker 2: the usual suspect, of course, and it's absolutely true, of course,
Speaker 2: is the Civil War itself. Civil war typically seen as
Speaker 2: this event, you know, that moves the United States in
Speaker 2: this dramatically, in this new direction. That's obviously, of course true.
Speaker 2: What I argue here is that expansion, the acquisition of
Speaker 2: one point two million square miles in three years eighteen
Speaker 2: forty five to eighteen forty eight.
Speaker 1: Oh, you open your book by saying, this spasm of
Speaker 1: expansion would be like if we right now, within a
Speaker 1: couple of years, the US annexed Mexico, Central America, portions
Speaker 1: of Brazil.
Speaker 2: From Columbia, about half of cour Yeah.
Speaker 1: Right, you're like, okay, so let's talk about how much
Speaker 1: how quickly the US grew. It has to be that
Speaker 1: if between now and three years from now we bought
Speaker 1: one basically everything south of US halfway down into South America,
Speaker 1: halfway halfway through, now we're going to incorporate that.
Speaker 2: Good luck with that, right It's uh and I think
Speaker 2: it's a pretty good I think it's a revealing parallel
Speaker 2: because you know, justice, if you if you drive south
Speaker 2: from mel Paso to the middle of globe, you're going
Speaker 2: to see a lot of people. You're going to see
Speaker 2: different culture, different languages, different traditions, different economies and so forth,
Speaker 2: and somehow we're going to bring all of that together
Speaker 2: into this this one thing the United States. Furthermore, uh,
Speaker 2: within two hundred hours of the signing of the Treaty
Speaker 2: of Wadeloupia Dolgo, which gave us, you know, the Mexico Session,
Speaker 2: two hundred hours before that goal was discovered in northern California,
Speaker 2: which turned out to be the by far, the greatest
Speaker 2: gold strike, most productive goal strike in human history up
Speaker 2: until that time.
Speaker 1: Is that coincidence?
Speaker 2: I think it is. You know, it's it's it's a
Speaker 2: kind of fact that that is born to create conspiracy theories, right,
Speaker 2: Oh really yeah, sure, But I don't see any evidence
Speaker 2: whatsoever that there was anything anything like. It was just pure,
Speaker 2: pure affected. The first chapter of the book I call
Speaker 2: the Great Coincidence. This is the greatest and most influential
Speaker 2: coincidence in American history by far, hands down.
Speaker 1: And they restate that to so people get this.
Speaker 2: I call the first chapter book the Great Coincidence, because
Speaker 2: I would I think it's incontestable that this coincidence of
Speaker 2: nine days within nine days, the United States acquiring California,
Speaker 2: acquiring the Pacific.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 2: This is part of the end of this three year expansion.
Speaker 2: Of course, within nine days we begin to this area
Speaker 2: begins to be revealed as the richest place on earth.
Speaker 2: It starts at the Gold Rush, but then from then
Speaker 2: all of course we discovered time after time after time
Speaker 2: after time. You know, it's like, you know, gods have
Speaker 2: said you need something, It's there. Yeah, it's there. The
Speaker 2: West is the great treasure house of the Western hemisphere.
Speaker 5: So think of it.
Speaker 2: Then think of the consequences it would follow expansion up
Speaker 2: until let's say eighteen eighty, And you can't tell me
Speaker 2: that those were not as important, is not as consequential
Speaker 2: as the changes it came because of the Civil War.
Speaker 2: So what I'm arguing is that we need to think
Speaker 2: of this great, this shift of the American narrative as
Speaker 2: a result of two things. The Civil War absolutely expansion,
Speaker 2: and what follows from expansion is number two. And those
Speaker 2: two things are their own stories, but they're also interacting.
Speaker 2: They're also interacting, and that's the point I think that
Speaker 2: I try to make. And the Last Newian War, what
Speaker 2: you can see in this story is this effort by
Speaker 2: the government Washington, where there's a person or a house
Speaker 2: or whatever, Washington trying to bring into into coherence, bring
Speaker 2: into a singularity this extraordinary continental nation.
Speaker 1: There.
Speaker 2: They do it beforece if they have to. They do
Speaker 2: it by expanding the role of the federal government. Uh
Speaker 2: and they uh and they do it as well by
Speaker 2: imposing a kind of order on it. Not just physical order,
Speaker 2: but an order of who is an American? Right, what
Speaker 2: do we mean by Americans? Well, in the East, it's emancipation.
Speaker 2: We free one million, four million persons from bondage, and
Speaker 2: we say you're going to be citizens now. Out west,
Speaker 2: it's Indians, right, it's Hispanics, it's it's others out there.
Speaker 2: We're telling them who they are. Yeah, right now in
Speaker 2: the East, Uh, the freed people wanted citizenship. Out west
Speaker 2: not so much. Right. But the government says, Okay, now
Speaker 2: we're going to uh same thing you did with the
Speaker 2: reconstruction of the South. We're going to give you land.
Speaker 2: That is, they're going to make you farmers, right, We're
Speaker 2: going to make you freeholders, independent family freeholders. We're going
Speaker 2: to uh teach your children, We're gonna we're gonna bring
Speaker 2: your children in our schools, and we're going to teach
Speaker 2: them the basics. Uh, starting with the English language. Everybody's
Speaker 2: gonna speak English, teaching the basics, including cultural basics. What
Speaker 2: an American is, right, and this is an important part
Speaker 2: of it. Uh, Christianity. We're going to make you Christians.
Speaker 2: America will be this Christian nation, right, Oliver Howard, you
Speaker 2: know this uh, devoted evangelical Christian. He was doing that
Speaker 2: in the south of the Freeman's Bureau, and when he
Speaker 2: went out west, he did it with Indias. Well you
Speaker 2: say that to the you know, to former slaves, and
Speaker 2: they say, great, we wanty citizens, We want land. We've
Speaker 2: been working your land for a long time. Give us
Speaker 2: a farm, give us forty acres and a mule.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: We want you to educate our children. We want to
Speaker 2: send our children at Hampton, you know, and to others.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 2: And we are we are Christians, of course, you know
Speaker 2: there's you know, Christianity was a fundamental part of slave culture.
Speaker 2: So they said, terrific. You go to the miss person,
Speaker 2: we want to make you farmers. I don't think so.
Speaker 2: Or you go to uh, you know, La Cotas and comanches. Uh,
Speaker 2: we get a farm in West Texas could no, we
Speaker 2: want to educate your children. We're already educating our children, right.
Speaker 2: We want you to be Christians? No, I don't think so. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we've got our own religions right. And the government says,
Speaker 2: you don't understand. This is not an offer, this is
Speaker 2: an order. You will become farmers, and we will take
Speaker 2: your children and teach them and you will become Christians.
Speaker 2: That's then the basis of what happens at West when
Speaker 2: the war, when when the military does step in, it's
Speaker 2: it's because the consequences of that, and that's what's going
Speaker 2: on with the with the Ness Purse. It's that final
Speaker 2: moment when Oliver Howard steps up and says, Okay, we've
Speaker 2: been overlooking all of us for a long time, you know,
Speaker 2: no longer. We got to do it. And that's what
Speaker 2: that's the trigger.
Speaker 5: It sets it off with the NETS person was there,
Speaker 5: like we talked about Washington and General Sherman was there,
Speaker 5: like finally a and of urgency to like this, this
Speaker 5: is it, We're done with this, like we need to
Speaker 5: establish control after decades of fighting these wars, it seems
Speaker 5: like it was like well established some stability here and
Speaker 5: then here and then like was it do you call
Speaker 5: it the last war? Because they finally decided like this
Speaker 5: is it, We're done Washington.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yes, exactly. And that's to me, that is
Speaker 2: a really interesting question. Why these people were no trouble
Speaker 2: to them, They were living in an area that very
Speaker 2: few whites wanted. Why why would you force it in?
Speaker 1: Why?
Speaker 2: The reason, I think an important reason was the little
Speaker 2: big worn.
Speaker 1: You know, Brody lost some relatives that a little big one.
Speaker 5: Is that right, there's a yeah, there's a couple like distant, distant, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Brody's brother, my older.
Speaker 2: Yeah, uh yeah. I think that that of course, was
Speaker 2: this this terrific humiliation for the government. You know, uh,
Speaker 2: the boy general, you know, this the darling of the
Speaker 2: uh uh not only gets killed, but it's it's this defeat,
Speaker 2: this this moment that uh. I think that was the
Speaker 2: that was the key to the government saying Okay, that's it.
Speaker 2: Everybody everywhere, it's gotta get under our knee. You know,
Speaker 2: you've got to You've got to play by the rules. Now,
Speaker 2: these are the new rules. That's the only only way
Speaker 2: I can I can think of because you look at
Speaker 2: the at the record, you know, the government suddenly just pivots.
Speaker 2: Before that, before this, they were saying, oh, well, you know,
Speaker 2: what's the problem. It'll it'll happen eventually. We'll just sort
Speaker 2: of kick the can down the.
Speaker 9: Road and uh.
Speaker 2: But all of a sudden, they all of a sudden
Speaker 2: they send word to Howard, Nope, you gotta do it.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 9: That was.
Speaker 1: I was sorry about all the mental energy I've spent
Speaker 1: on my life on the players who convened that fateful
Speaker 1: you know, June twenty fifth. And I think that a
Speaker 1: lot of historians have are argue now it's it's inescapable.
Speaker 1: It's like it's almost the definition of a pirate victory,
Speaker 1: to the point where after the great victory at Little Bighorn,
Speaker 1: rather than being emboldened and taking the fight to the
Speaker 1: next army, they disband like some people say, the probably
Speaker 1: the greatest gathering of planes tribes it was to ever occur,
Speaker 1: the numerically the greatest gathering to ever occur. The next
Speaker 1: day they disbanded, and they're like, man, it's hell to
Speaker 1: pay now. They disbanded and tried to melt into the landscape.
Speaker 1: Rather than being like, let's take Washington. You know, it
Speaker 1: was just oh, this is not gonna go over well,
Speaker 1: it's not good.
Speaker 2: It's not going to go well. I agree with that absolutely,
Speaker 2: and I think that again comes back to the larger
Speaker 2: point that I was making, that odds against them were
Speaker 2: so overwhelming. If you fight, you're gonna lose. It's gonna happen.
Speaker 2: We caught him at this point just by luck by
Speaker 2: This guy's a regrettable decision by and like you say, this,
Speaker 2: this huge gathering, maybe the Fort Laramie conference, a conference
Speaker 2: at eighteen fifty might have been, might have been larger
Speaker 2: than that. But but that was of course peaceful. As
Speaker 2: far as in the wartime, there's nothing nothing to match this. Okay,
Speaker 2: that's today, right, what now? Well, you know they're going
Speaker 2: to come after you.
Speaker 1: I want to I want to hate you. With a
Speaker 1: couple of details that came out of these is one
Speaker 1: of my favorite things of the perspective of the Native
Speaker 1: American fighters at Little Big Horn. A man named I
Speaker 1: can't remember feels gall one of them said in trying
Speaker 1: to explain the actions of the army, he said, we
Speaker 1: just thought they were all drunk. And the.
Speaker 2: Two men.
Speaker 1: Were asked how long it took? How long that battle
Speaker 1: took that that day, and one of them said, gall
Speaker 1: unk Papa Sue had said it lasted as long as
Speaker 1: it takes a hungry man to eat his dinner.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Another said, I'm paraphrasing. He said, you know when you're
Speaker 1: laying in your teepee and you're looking out the chimney
Speaker 1: hole and the sun hits one of the poles at
Speaker 1: the top, It took about as long as it takes
Speaker 1: the sun to move past that pole. That was all
Speaker 1: on that fight was And both uh and the later
Speaker 1: people both said, oh yeah, they're both saying it was
Speaker 1: about twenty minutes. Yeah, and probably longer than that, but
Speaker 1: not just they're talking about the hill. The hill hill
Speaker 1: were costers like there were his little gang water. Was
Speaker 1: that that that that portion yellow Wolf the Nez Perse
Speaker 1: He later met that guy. I can't remember who the
Speaker 1: hell he was. Yellow Wolf met some guy that then
Speaker 1: sat like yellow Wolf was one of the participants in
Speaker 1: the Nez Person War. He actually scaped. He's one of
Speaker 1: the very few that escaped into Canada. When they caught
Speaker 1: Chief Joseph near the border. He gave his famous from
Speaker 1: where the sun now stands, I will fight no more
Speaker 1: forever this dude named yellow Wolf had actually slipped out
Speaker 1: of there, made it to Canada, later came back down
Speaker 1: into the US.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there were a few hundred who made it.
Speaker 1: And he later met some guy that not only took
Speaker 1: down his life history, but they went and visited a
Speaker 1: bunch of places, and yellow Wolf takes this guy. He
Speaker 1: might have been German, I can't remember. Anyways, he takes
Speaker 1: this guy to the Little Big Horn battle site, not
Speaker 1: the Little Big Horn, the Big Horn, Big Hole, Big Hole,
Speaker 1: in the sight of the Big Hole battle and tells
Speaker 1: him and even shows him where it happened that a guy,
Speaker 1: a US soldier got shot through the forehead and was
Speaker 1: dead standing on his feet, and they challenged him on it,
Speaker 1: and he's like, no, he was at the end of
Speaker 1: the battle. He was standing dead, locked knees, standing dead.
Speaker 1: And I can never tell if that's true.
Speaker 2: It's it's funny. When I was writing the book, I
Speaker 2: have several stories like that in there in that book,
Speaker 2: and I wrestled with that. In the end, I just
Speaker 2: told it straight on, like what yellow Wolf, yellow Wolf
Speaker 2: and others there were. There were others like that at
Speaker 2: the Big Hole another one earlier on. Well, they were
Speaker 2: maneuvering within their home country. There in Idaho. Uh, they
Speaker 2: came upon a small patrol army patrol. Uh killed them all,
Speaker 2: but they said there was one guy in there who
Speaker 2: they kept shooting, kept shooting, shooting, shooting, but he wouldn't
Speaker 2: die cleaning the head. Instead, what he did was, uh
Speaker 2: sit on the ground and clucked like a chicken.
Speaker 1: I remember that. Yeah, Yeah, I don't know, is that true.
Speaker 2: I don't know whom I say. I wasn't there, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's certainly part of their tradition.
Speaker 1: Yellow Wolf was such an interesting dude.
Speaker 7: He had.
Speaker 1: He explains that he had kind of a personal obligation.
Speaker 1: If he encountered a grizzly, he had a personal obligation
Speaker 1: to mix it up with that bear and kill that bear.
Speaker 2: He was a fascinating guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and again he'd be like, oh, brother, here we go.
Speaker 1: He found one he had he had to.
Speaker 2: Go not again. Yeah, he's a fascinating guy. I begin
Speaker 2: and in the book with yellow Wolf, h end with
Speaker 2: his deaths. Yeah, when he tells his family, I'm dying
Speaker 2: tomorrow morning when the sun rises on the horizon, and
Speaker 2: he did, and the last thing he said is, my
Speaker 2: friends have come for me. Oh you see them right?
Speaker 1: Oh he did. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but the failure you're talking about. The name Laculis Quarter, Yeah,
Speaker 2: not a journalist Scotland and he was a He was
Speaker 2: a rancher out there and one day this Indian came
Speaker 2: up and his horse had been injured or pumping into
Speaker 2: a fence. I guess a barberar fence cut it badly,
Speaker 2: and so he asked mc quarter, will you take care
Speaker 2: of my horse? But you know, an Indian terms of
Speaker 2: course he will. You know, this is what you do
Speaker 2: if somebody it's not your enemy, says you got an
Speaker 2: injured horse, will you watch after him? And he said, uh,
Speaker 2: he said sure, And he came back the next year
Speaker 2: to claim his horse, and it's just fine. And they
Speaker 2: struck up a friendship and those two men spent the
Speaker 2: rest of their lives reconstructing that story. Oh yellow Wolf
Speaker 2: telling this to back quarter. Mcquarter's papers are at Washington
Speaker 2: State Archives, and I spent a long time in that
Speaker 2: archive going through these papers and it's uh there they're
Speaker 2: just a a treasure because it's the only case I
Speaker 2: know of where you have such a concentrated body of
Speaker 2: native testimony because illowilf of taking these others. Tell him
Speaker 2: your story, tell him your story. So you got all
Speaker 2: of these voices.
Speaker 1: And I think, if I remember right, it's people feel
Speaker 1: like that that there was enough of a friendship in
Speaker 1: the mcwarder, who I couldn't remember his name, mcward was reliable.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, absolutely, it became his lifelong passion that he.
Speaker 1: Wasn't distorting, I don't think trying to capture well, obviously
Speaker 1: obviously it was very sympathetic.
Speaker 2: I suppose you take that. But most of what he
Speaker 2: has in there is not his words at all. It's
Speaker 2: the words of the nest perse of his uh uh,
Speaker 2: the people who's interviewing. In fact, one of the things
Speaker 2: I ran across, uh stuff is really the collector is
Speaker 2: really kind of a mess.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 2: They worked a long time trying to organize it. He
Speaker 2: just sort of threw stuff in boxes. But I did
Speaker 2: run across this small slip of paper that had a
Speaker 2: thought about something about the war, you know, something just
Speaker 2: sort of came to him and he wrote this thought
Speaker 2: on this little slip of paper, and that was the
Speaker 2: last thing he ever did in his life. He was
Speaker 2: in the hospital dying and this came to him, and
Speaker 2: he wrote this on this slip of paper and then died.
Speaker 1: What was what did he write?
Speaker 2: I don't remember dying thought sorry, but as I remember,
Speaker 2: it wasn't truly consequent. It was just something popping too
Speaker 2: his head. It wasn't any great breakthrough or anything.
Speaker 1: You uh, you spent a lot of your career and
Speaker 1: a lot of your writing about mining, mining town's influence
Speaker 1: of mining. And I'm really paraphrasing, but in your book,
Speaker 1: you know, it kind of more or less says, you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of Native people's if when they find gold it's.
Speaker 2: Old that's right, or silver that's right. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, lay that out a little bit like just like
Speaker 1: we're like that, that thirst for gold. Yeah yeah, why
Speaker 1: is that? You know, you hear about gold in the
Speaker 1: Black Hills, California gold Rush, you Alaska gold Rush. Just
Speaker 1: really transformative, really transformative events. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Uh well, a couple of uh, you know, a couple
Speaker 2: of reasons are I think are sourve event when you
Speaker 2: think about it. First of all, there's no greater motivation
Speaker 2: motivator in American history than in a gold discovery. Nothing
Speaker 2: like that can can put people to the action. So
Speaker 2: quickly on such a scale. So for the one thing,
Speaker 2: what you get is thousands of people, you know, racing
Speaker 2: to this this particular place over a very very short
Speaker 2: span of time. Uh. Now, I mentioned before, you know,
Speaker 2: talk about what really defeated the Indians was the transform
Speaker 2: environmental transformation of their homelands. Nothing did that more dramatically
Speaker 2: faster on a greater scale than a gold or a
Speaker 2: silver strike. Thousands of people come into an area that
Speaker 2: has had a fairly small these one hundred gathering people,
Speaker 2: so we're real to be small, uh population up until
Speaker 2: that time that are always on the move. You know,
Speaker 2: they're semi nomadic, and they're on the move because they're
Speaker 2: they've choreographed their their life to be at the right
Speaker 2: place at the right time. You know, we've got to gather,
Speaker 2: got to fish the salmon at this particular month. You know,
Speaker 2: we've got to gather the camas bulbs at this particular
Speaker 2: this particular point we've got this is when the elkmar grat.
Speaker 2: We got to be there, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: that world is transformed. Right while the game is hunted out,
Speaker 2: the streams are polluted, the trees are cut, all the
Speaker 2: migration patterns are are totally disrupted. It's devastate, its convulsive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to interrupt you make to clarify another
Speaker 1: point you had said about even these huge areas, the
Speaker 1: specificity of some things that you would need. Meaning here
Speaker 1: you you're you're nomadic people with horses, and you live
Speaker 1: in the northern climates. What do you need in the
Speaker 1: winter right, access to timber, access to water grazing lands,
Speaker 1: which is going to be like big riparian bottoms. And
Speaker 1: you said, if there's a spot like that, everybody knows
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: It's a real vulnerability, you know. And that's the places
Speaker 1: that other people want.
Speaker 2: If you look at the history of Indian wars, when
Speaker 2: when those conflicts did occur, when the well, those campaigns
Speaker 2: did happen, and those battles did happen, Look at how
Speaker 2: many of them.
Speaker 1: Take place in the winter, right, because I know where
Speaker 1: they'll be.
Speaker 2: And of course turn that around, when when is the
Speaker 2: worst possible time to go up against the Indians. June
Speaker 2: twenty fifth, eighteen seventy six, they attack attract They attacked
Speaker 2: the Indians.
Speaker 1: All these winter massacres that they would the army would conduct.
Speaker 1: But then in the summertime. It's this different games.
Speaker 2: Summertime, they choose, you know, let's let's attack them within
Speaker 2: two days of the summer solstice. Brilliant. It doesn't work.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's right. It's the environmental angle of that,
Speaker 2: you know that you have to you have to take
Speaker 2: into account. But the other thing about mining rushes is
Speaker 2: most by far. Of course, strikes occur in mountains and
Speaker 2: in very isolated areas, but it's a long way from
Speaker 2: any white settlement. What that does, you know, once you
Speaker 2: let's strike occurs, and if it, if it proves to
Speaker 2: be worth it, what you do is immediately get this
Speaker 2: great movement into those places, which in turn is key
Speaker 2: to opening up the interior west UH to transportation, to
Speaker 2: access of others. So it creates these it's in other words,
Speaker 2: it's not a you mentioned before. The frontier is like
Speaker 2: a moving wall, right, that's the agricultural frontier. It's not
Speaker 2: the way, not the way the mining frontier works. It's
Speaker 2: it's the image I have is artillery shells you and
Speaker 2: then they I think it's a good image because the
Speaker 2: sort of the concussive is the concussive rings move outward
Speaker 2: from that you know, that's what kills them. That's what
Speaker 2: kills them. And what what it starts with with this
Speaker 2: is this, you know, ancient fascination with gold. It's goes
Speaker 2: back a long way. You know the Egyptians, you know,
Speaker 2: Egyptians called the breath of God gold. You know, there's
Speaker 2: something about gold that that that moves people into action,
Speaker 2: in the movement into nothing else, nothing else can. And
Speaker 2: it turns out that we have more of it than anybody.
Speaker 5: Else towards gold.
Speaker 6: You know that.
Speaker 2: What you hear, of course is they didn't care much
Speaker 2: about it. That's not true.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 2: In fact, there's a one very good a book that's
Speaker 2: being worked all the time. I've been madly uh in California.
Speaker 2: He wrote a book, American Genocide. You know that book.
Speaker 2: I haven't read it, but yeah, about California. And Ben
Speaker 2: is writing now on Indians and the gold rush. Once
Speaker 2: the strikes occur, they jump into it with both feet.
Speaker 2: Before that, I don't know, you know, I think they're
Speaker 2: just sort of sort of curiosity. They knew it was there,
Speaker 2: but they didn't, you know.
Speaker 1: And and Ian Frasier's Great Planes, he tells the story,
Speaker 1: maybe it's an apocryphal story.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: He tells a story about I think it was the
Speaker 1: Blackfeet finding bags of gold on a keel boat or
Speaker 1: some boat that they catch, they capture it, and they
Speaker 1: like the bags and leave the gold dust laying on
Speaker 1: the gravel.
Speaker 2: Bara, I've read heard that story. Well, I've read the
Speaker 2: book that I don't remember that story anything.
Speaker 1: I'd love to know if that's true. Man, he's pretty
Speaker 1: careful generally, you know. But that's what he said. But
Speaker 1: I got I got a practical gold rush question. I mean,
Speaker 1: I kind of know the answer, but be interested to
Speaker 1: see if you could explore it for a minute. Is
Speaker 1: if you tell me right now that oh so and
Speaker 1: so just found a ton of gold in Nebraska, Okay,
Speaker 1: I would think, oh, well, that's a guy's land. Good
Speaker 1: for him. I wouldn't think I'm gonna run over and
Speaker 1: get a bunch of it. What are the factors that
Speaker 1: it would be that that you could hear about.
Speaker 2: This in wherever the hell you're at, Philadelphia, wherever.
Speaker 1: And and have some plausible idea, like some rational idea
Speaker 1: that you would go there and then that you would
Speaker 1: get to pick some of it up.
Speaker 2: Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Like, how is this in terms of just the land
Speaker 1: ownership and the claiming it, and that the government, you know,
Speaker 1: whether or not they occupy it, the US has a
Speaker 1: sort of claim on it. How is it that you're
Speaker 1: gonna go and get some for yourself advertising? How do
Speaker 1: you get like where does that idea enter your head?
Speaker 1: I would never think if someone said, oh, so and
Speaker 1: so found a bunch of whatever, I would never be
Speaker 1: I'm going to go and take some.
Speaker 2: Well, I'll think, first of all, again with a spansion,
Speaker 2: the idea is, it's not Nebraska, it's not a farm.
Speaker 2: It's this place that we just got, I mean, half
Speaker 2: an hour ago, right, brand new, right, and it's could
Speaker 2: not be farther away from me than and still still
Speaker 2: be the jay in the United States. So I can
Speaker 2: imagine anything whatever I want to happen, that's gonna happen. Right.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's just like such a strange understanding of how you'd
Speaker 1: even get a sense of the spatial characteristics of where
Speaker 1: the stuff is. But to like bet your.
Speaker 2: Life on it, A lot of them did, and some
Speaker 2: of them lost the.
Speaker 5: Was there any government guidance like if you're going this
Speaker 5: is how you.
Speaker 2: Want to do it? Or was it us word of mouth,
Speaker 2: and well you you got to remember it now, Uh,
Speaker 2: the gold rush of eighteen forty eight forty nine. There
Speaker 2: have been over a migration before that at the Oregon
Speaker 2: and to California after the Oregon country out to the
Speaker 2: you know, central Valley, Sutter and so they knew the way, uh,
Speaker 2: and the way it was was well marked. By this
Speaker 2: time they were starting to have the stores along along
Speaker 2: the overland route. So how to get there was not
Speaker 2: it was not really much of a mystery. The mystery
Speaker 2: was once you get there, how do you deal with that?
Speaker 2: How do you how do you mind? Yeah, it's ever
Speaker 2: ever occurred to you? I think is part of the question. Oh, yes,
Speaker 2: you're asking. You know, you're a you know, you're a
Speaker 2: you're a clerk in in Cleveland, Ohio, and you're gonna
Speaker 2: go to California. You're gonna mind gold? Really?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're gonna be You're gonna be a placid miner.
Speaker 3: Or yeah, you're a tender.
Speaker 2: Reminds me of a Jethro Bodine in the Beverly hillbillage,
Speaker 2: I mean an atomic brain surgeon. He said, you know.
Speaker 7: What you know?
Speaker 2: Well, the people who taught them, of course, were the
Speaker 2: Mexicans in the South Americans. There have been gold gold
Speaker 2: mining in Peru and in Chile, in Mexico. So one
Speaker 2: of the things that I right about in the book,
Speaker 2: I think that most people don't think about are the
Speaker 2: forty eight Know, the discovery was made in late January
Speaker 2: eighteen forty eight. That discovery was not confirmed in the
Speaker 2: East until the following December.
Speaker 1: Got it forty eight.
Speaker 2: So consequently the Great Russias in forty nine. But by
Speaker 2: that time, of course, there were people mining gold out
Speaker 2: there from Mexico, from Chile, from Peru. Yeah, sure, from Australia.
Speaker 2: There were Australians there. There were Tasmanians before the fort
Speaker 2: and so these guys forty nine ers come out there
Speaker 2: and they say, one of the people, you know minding
Speaker 2: our gold, right, you're good. But they learned from him
Speaker 2: and from all the all the evidence of the South
Speaker 2: Americans who were there were very generous showing him how
Speaker 2: to do it, you know. So they learned from the
Speaker 2: forty eight ers, and then they kicked him out. Of
Speaker 2: course they're expelled.
Speaker 1: You know, we had you and I both have some
Speaker 1: lines and safd for interviews and ken Burns's uh, his
Speaker 1: his forthcoming The American Buffalo documentary, and uh, following that
Speaker 1: we had, I had occasion to interview him on this
Speaker 1: podcast along with his colleague Dayton Duncan, who your personal
Speaker 1: friends with. Yeah, And in talking to Dayton Duncan, it
Speaker 1: occurred to me that even though I thought I had,
Speaker 1: I had not watched The dust Bowl. I thought I did,
Speaker 1: but I was like, you know what, I actually didn't.
Speaker 1: So I just recently went and watched The dust Bowl.
Speaker 1: And speaking of human migrations the as much as we
Speaker 1: you know, earlier I kind of talked about there's these
Speaker 1: things in American history that absorble out of mental energy,
Speaker 1: and sometimes our fascination with them makes them seem overplayed
Speaker 1: in terms of actual impact. Perhaps far more people fled
Speaker 1: the dust Bowl, okay, which they in that documentary that
Speaker 1: described as the greatest human cause environmental tragedy in US history.
Speaker 1: Far more people fled the dust Bowl and went to
Speaker 1: California than ever went over the Oregon Trail. But we
Speaker 1: just don't when looking at how the country took shape, right,
Speaker 1: you don't go and look at that. No, No, like
Speaker 1: for that episode of people leaving Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico,
Speaker 1: southern Colorado.
Speaker 2: That's true.
Speaker 1: Who got all got billed as Oaki's right, all got
Speaker 1: lomped into?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a real canard.
Speaker 1: And and it was it dwarfed the Oregon Trail traffic.
Speaker 2: I hadn't heard that. I did watch that. I don't
Speaker 2: I don't remember that quote, that statistic, but it makes sense.
Speaker 7: Of course.
Speaker 2: The population is a lot of parts about. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it was. They're all you know, American history has all
Speaker 2: kinds of stories like that that we don't. We don't
Speaker 2: pay enough attention to the great migration out to California
Speaker 2: in World War two.
Speaker 1: Oh, I've paid zero attention to that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, including among blacks. You know, when you say the
Speaker 2: great migration among afric In Americans, you're.
Speaker 1: You're usually crucially to the industrial north.
Speaker 2: That's right leaving you know, as as cotton cultivation was
Speaker 2: was mechanized, this flight up to the Chicago into the
Speaker 2: area there. But then there was a second one that
Speaker 2: was in the twenties World War two, you know, with
Speaker 2: the uh boom of a defense industries and so forth
Speaker 2: on the on the Pacific coast. You know, jobs are
Speaker 2: waiting and a lot of poor black folks in the
Speaker 2: South you know, and they came out there. So the
Speaker 2: you know, the origins of the black presence presence on
Speaker 2: the Pacific coast. You know, it goes back to World
Speaker 2: War Two. Well, we don't, we don't think about.
Speaker 1: It because I brought that up. Let's close on if
Speaker 1: you don't mind, give me some of your thoughts on uh,
Speaker 1: give me some of your thoughts on on bison and
Speaker 1: the broader story of of you know, the near extermination
Speaker 1: of the bison just like whatever. You know, I know
Speaker 1: it's a huge question. But but areas of that saga,
Speaker 1: meaning the destruction, the recovery, what areas within that long
Speaker 1: story have caught your attention or you know, yeah, where
Speaker 1: have you spent your time in thinking about that animal?
Speaker 2: Well, I think I've written a fair amount on that.
Speaker 2: What really interested me was, once again, the larger context
Speaker 2: of it and the complexity complexity of it. I think
Speaker 2: we are mesmerized by this image of the buffalo hunters,
Speaker 2: of the white you know, high hunters, the buffalo runners.
Speaker 2: Of What we tend to forget was that the bison
Speaker 2: population was to had probably declined something like half from
Speaker 2: the eighteen twenties until eighteen seventy two. Or so when
Speaker 2: that starts and the decline comes partly from an environmental change,
Speaker 2: as I said before, the overland trails which destroyed these
Speaker 2: habitats that the bison had to have in the winter,
Speaker 2: just as just as the Indians did. Part of it
Speaker 2: from Indian people's who eagerly jump into this this global
Speaker 2: market economy selling robes and tongues.
Speaker 1: Me and Randall had an hour long fight about this day.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, who won. But but the lesson there is
Speaker 2: once again, how the globe is shrinking. These Indian people
Speaker 2: suddenly find, you know, great a lot of money and
Speaker 2: things and stuff because they were able to use this
Speaker 2: skill that they along had in a new way to
Speaker 2: sell these robes to people in uh in the East,
Speaker 2: in London, you know, in Paris there there we're seeing
Speaker 2: there really is this the shrinkage of the globe. The
Speaker 2: shrinkage of the globe and the expansion of modern capitalist
Speaker 2: market economy. You know, that is what that is what
Speaker 2: kills a buffalo, It starts to kill them. With the Indians, with.
Speaker 5: The white hide hunters, was there like a comparable rush
Speaker 5: like you like with the mining towns, like a burst
Speaker 5: of people had a west to.
Speaker 2: Go do this, sure, Uh, not on the numbers or
Speaker 2: the same scale. Yeah, sure, exactly. You know, I think
Speaker 2: Steve was saying before we talk about this, Uh, these
Speaker 2: were not were not you know, uh fly bonn uh
Speaker 2: fly blown Uh monsters. These are just young men on
Speaker 2: the move trying to make a buck, right, and this
Speaker 2: is a great way to do it.
Speaker 1: So sure, sure, yeah. Just like we had talked about
Speaker 1: with the impacts of the Civil War, like a good
Speaker 1: many of the people that got involved in that trade
Speaker 1: were I don't want to call them, maybe not literal
Speaker 1: refugees of the Civil War, but definitely people spun off,
Speaker 1: people spun off by the Civil War.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean this country, this country was chaos at
Speaker 2: the end of that war. And if you're a young man,
Speaker 2: you know, living in the South especially or or the
Speaker 2: north and subwly, this opportunity showed itself. Sure he did it,
Speaker 2: and they went on to become one of my early
Speaker 2: m A students wrote a book called thesis called Reconsidered.
Speaker 2: And what he did, Dave Dawson, what he did was
Speaker 2: follow these guys' lives to the extens that you can.
Speaker 2: These buffalo hunters, Oh really, what did they become? Bank presidents,
Speaker 2: the Kansas Historical Society, uh, sheriffs, candy salesman.
Speaker 6: Just.
Speaker 1: Winding up on the end of a rope.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, no, that these are perfectly perfectly responsible.
Speaker 2: It which makes.
Speaker 1: Candy businessman. No, it's it's well enough.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it makes it makes perfect sense. What do
Speaker 2: you think about it? You know they were just they're
Speaker 2: just jumping into something, makes some money and they turn
Speaker 2: around and use the money to do something.
Speaker 3: Else and chasing opportunity.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: One of the man who claims to have killed more
Speaker 2: bias than anybody else went on to become a cheap
Speaker 2: of police in Oklahoma City.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 2: And then to an early filmmaker.
Speaker 1: That Jay Wright Moore who was who knows.
Speaker 2: There's another fellow and he and he also raised race
Speaker 2: horses and his favorite name Chance won the Kentucky Derby
Speaker 2: eighteen ninety two.
Speaker 5: Seriously, that's sorry, project, it is I feel like you're disappointed.
Speaker 1: With this, Steve, like you just like.
Speaker 6: It was.
Speaker 1: It was just and I brought it up and I
Speaker 1: do not mean this as well. I think I I
Speaker 1: don't want to put any shade on the Dayton and
Speaker 1: ken Burns, the guys that worked on the Vice documentary.
Speaker 1: But when I was given my chance to comment on it,
Speaker 1: I had a couple factual minor, very minor minor factual thoughts,
Speaker 1: and I hadn't a thing I presented to him as
Speaker 1: I thought that totally respectfully, I expressed that I thought
Speaker 1: that they were really that they dehumanized the hide hunters,
Speaker 1: and that person who was not watching carefully might get
Speaker 1: the sense that they were motivated out, that they were sadists.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that they were doing it purely for the joy
Speaker 5: of killing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were like I know, I'm going to dedicate
Speaker 1: my life to is making sure there's no buffalo in
Speaker 1: the future. When it was a job again and again
Speaker 1: you see that that you know, like the the you know,
Speaker 1: you know how you know, like that saying freshet eyes
Speaker 1: always heard that was quite There was another say there's
Speaker 1: another saying. There's another saying that goes, uh, I hate
Speaker 1: the game, not the player.
Speaker 4: That's right, they happen to be I came.
Speaker 1: I came up that too, and and I feel that
Speaker 1: there's in in looking at what we just spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time on the hide, the deer hide, the
Speaker 1: deer skin, you know, the earlier version of the hide
Speaker 1: hunners was the white tailed deer runners of a century earlier.
Speaker 1: That you can look and say, like, man, what those
Speaker 1: guys did was rapacious and wanting. Yeah, But on an end,
Speaker 1: when you get down to the individual level, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of them have demonstrated a yeah I knew,
Speaker 1: I knew, I knew, but if I didn't But to
Speaker 1: say that, there's this one guy, maybe it was more
Speaker 1: one of these guys that said I woke up in
Speaker 1: the morning now and then and thought, am I really
Speaker 1: going to go do this again today? And he says,
Speaker 1: but I would hear the shooting, right, and if I
Speaker 1: didn't do it, it was getting done.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And it's easy to point a finger at them as
Speaker 5: a group because they were the last one standing when
Speaker 5: the bus buffalo disappeared, right, Yeah, So it's like those
Speaker 5: guys they put a real puctuation mark.
Speaker 1: But I do think that that that, yeah, hating the
Speaker 1: game and not the player, because I think a lot
Speaker 1: of these people were just they were just poor, desperate
Speaker 1: people who had no thing. They had no thing, And
Speaker 1: if you look at.
Speaker 8: If you look at miners, yes, you know, miners don't
Speaker 8: get the same judgment, right, And they're also yeah, you know,
Speaker 8: it's more indirect, it's not quite as dramatic. I think
Speaker 8: that's part of it is that like the near extermination of.
Speaker 3: The bison is just such a.
Speaker 8: It's such it's such right material for like a moral story,
Speaker 8: whereas like we don't say, you know, these coal miners
Speaker 8: were just doing it because they loved air pollution.
Speaker 1: You know, Yeah, this is this is a great and
Speaker 1: there's evil people that hated clean air.
Speaker 3: They could have done they could why didn't they stop?
Speaker 2: That's that's absolutely all. That's absolutely true. Your quote that
Speaker 2: you often here and there was used in the documentary
Speaker 2: of Frank Meyer.
Speaker 1: Meyer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I said, I can figure that.
Speaker 7: I figured.
Speaker 2: A bullllet you know, one shell. It costs me twenty
Speaker 2: five cents. But there's one shell I could I could
Speaker 2: kill this animal and I can get back, you know,
Speaker 2: three to five dollars, he said. So I figured it out.
Speaker 2: I don't figured it out and says I figured that
Speaker 2: I could make more money in a year than the
Speaker 2: president of the United States. That's what did it. It
Speaker 2: was the market that did it, both for the Indians
Speaker 2: and then then for these guys. That's what killed the bison.
Speaker 1: So what are you are you writing right now. This
Speaker 1: is a huge But dude, this is not big, This
Speaker 1: is not generous font I will say this is probably well,
Speaker 1: I mean, what a massive amount of work.
Speaker 3: This is probably.
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, I don't I'll write quite slowly. I mean,
Speaker 2: this took me. That took me twenty twenty five years
Speaker 2: to research and.
Speaker 1: Ow and I feel better. Well, you've done a lot
Speaker 1: of books.
Speaker 2: I've done a lot of books.
Speaker 8: Yeah, this is probably the only podcast in the world
Speaker 8: that has an inside source at the ms u R Hives.
Speaker 7: And so I have word.
Speaker 8: I have a word on good authority that you're still
Speaker 8: I was there, still digging, you're stiffing.
Speaker 1: Around the archives.
Speaker 7: I was there. I was there the other day.
Speaker 1: What are you working on now?
Speaker 2: You know, I'm not sure I'm gonna I know, I
Speaker 2: don't have another book me, at least not right now.
Speaker 2: But I like I like to write short articlests. Right now,
Speaker 2: I'm fascinating with Arctic exploration.
Speaker 1: I mean, I was hoping it's gonna be more ic.
Speaker 7: Anyway.
Speaker 2: This is just a I've just started reading up on
Speaker 2: it a lot. And uh, there was a fellow you
Speaker 2: probably know that was Dome. You know that name he
Speaker 2: was at Fort Ellis UH. He was early with the
Speaker 2: first expedition of Yellowstone, and he was in the Person
Speaker 2: War and Yellowstone, but he also signed on to UH
Speaker 2: as a as a part of a scheme to develop
Speaker 2: a colony up in the Arctic, up into the far
Speaker 2: northern UH near northern Greenland. And so this is his
Speaker 2: handwritten account of this expedition.
Speaker 4: Man, that sounds like a.
Speaker 8: Well, it's all it always seems like it's a coincidence
Speaker 8: that these guys are doing. You know, they have a
Speaker 8: foot in each one of these. But as you're pointing out,
Speaker 8: it's all part of the same project.
Speaker 2: It's all part of the same thing. Yeah. Anyway, I was,
Speaker 2: I was looking at the looking at that very funny,
Speaker 2: really interesting detailed description of that voyage. But the real
Speaker 2: gem of it is is introduction when he says this
Speaker 2: is a total disaster of failure, complete failure. It says, uh,
Speaker 2: we did not convert or kill any Indians in any
Speaker 2: any natives. Uh we We did not challenge the authenticity
Speaker 2: of any findings of anybody else. It's this literable sort
Speaker 2: of tongue in cheek jam the other guys who are
Speaker 2: going up. It's very funny.
Speaker 1: Well, stay tuned for that. And in the meantime, Continental
Speaker 1: Reckon if you want to be the guy in your
Speaker 1: social circle who knows the most about the American West,
Speaker 1: Continental Reckoning, the American West and the age of expansion,
Speaker 1: lifetime work, yep, yeah, yeah, it's it's it's fast moving.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you. Yeah, I try to cover a lot
Speaker 2: of ground. Yeah, well, you know, it was a journalism undergraduate.
Speaker 2: I came out of a journalist newspaper family, and I
Speaker 2: was drilled into My father was a very good editor,
Speaker 2: and he was you try to teach us as well
Speaker 2: as he could my brother's and me. You know, right, right,
Speaker 2: like a talk, right, it's a if you can't, if
Speaker 2: people can't, if you're not drawn to it, if I'm
Speaker 2: willing to read it, then what's the point. Yeah, So
Speaker 2: I try. I try to do that.
Speaker 1: I'd like to see you sit down and do the
Speaker 1: audiobook on that thing.
Speaker 2: It's a been contractor for that, and I thought, god,
Speaker 2: poor guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that would be man, that would be a it's
Speaker 1: a it's it's a healthy book. Like I said, as
Speaker 1: I you know, I can't I do it. I'm seriously
Speaker 1: gonna read the book and I'm just in preparation for today.
Speaker 1: Like I skimmed around and by doing that approach of
Speaker 1: looking in the index and finding things and you know,
Speaker 1: bouncing back and forth, uh, and went to a couple
Speaker 1: of areas in Western history that that I know well
Speaker 1: and like to read about. And your ability to what
Speaker 1: I thought was great about is your ability to not
Speaker 1: get bogged down into you know, at eight am at
Speaker 1: nine am, but just to sort of be like, at
Speaker 1: a large scale, where did like, where did this lead?
Speaker 1: What was this coming from? What does this really mean?
Speaker 9: You know?
Speaker 1: And then someone reading it could very easily use it
Speaker 1: as a jump off point to go find a lot
Speaker 1: of areas that they might want to explore, but just
Speaker 1: to get in the idea of how the country acquired
Speaker 1: and acquired and homogenized, maybe like how the country gobbled
Speaker 1: up so much stuff and sort of made it into
Speaker 1: this recognizable idea of America so fast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yep, that's that is really kind of breathtaking when
Speaker 2: you when you think of it in that larger perspective,
Speaker 2: how much happened so fast and with so many consequences.
Speaker 2: And that's what I'm You can say the same thing,
Speaker 2: of course about the Civil War. I'm saying you can
Speaker 2: say that about both of them together. Together, those events
Speaker 2: remade this country.
Speaker 1: So Elliott West again in the latest book, and he
Speaker 1: has many continental reckoning the American West and the age
Speaker 1: of expansion. Thank you very much for joining us.
Speaker 2: Thank you. It's great, great pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 9: Oh right on a seal, great shine like silver in
Speaker 9: the sun. Right right on alone, sweetheart. We're done beat
Speaker 9: this damn course today, taking a new one. Ride. We're
Speaker 9: done beat this day, am coarse today, So take a
Speaker 9: new one and ride on.
Speaker 8: Mm hmm.