Speaker 1: If this is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast, you
Speaker 1: can't predict anything.
Speaker 2: The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
Speaker 2: Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
Speaker 2: for ELK. First Light has performance apparel to support every
Speaker 2: hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light
Speaker 2: dot com, f I R S T L I T
Speaker 2: E dot com. Before we start today's show, we'd like
Speaker 2: to touch on, uh, doctor Randall's hair a little bit. Yes,
Speaker 2: you got screwed at the barber.
Speaker 3: I don't want to say screwed, but there's a miscommunication.
Speaker 3: I was going for a more minimalist touch up and
Speaker 3: we ended up.
Speaker 2: You wanted to keep your length in the back.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I wanted to keep my length in the back,
Speaker 4: and I was.
Speaker 2: I was.
Speaker 4: I'd sort of made peace with it.
Speaker 3: And then Seth showed me the other day a photo
Speaker 3: from when we were out doing the SIG shoot and
Speaker 3: I saw that.
Speaker 2: Flow and I just just blown in the wind.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I missed it so badly.
Speaker 2: The reason I winded you talk about that is Corey
Speaker 2: just had interesting observation that there's a river you like
Speaker 2: to fish, and you say that the river never fishes
Speaker 2: good two days in a row. Yeah, So if you
Speaker 2: have a great day, you know not to go back.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you better pick another stream for sure.
Speaker 2: Because it can't fish two days in a row.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And he's proposing that if you get a great haircut somewhere,
Speaker 2: don't go back because it's gonna not be good. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because one of the odds, lightning's not gonna strike twice,
Speaker 2: never in the same spot. Hell about fishing, it goes
Speaker 2: in weeks, week on, week off. So if you're like,
Speaker 2: if people are up fishing at our fish shack and
Speaker 2: you call up, the last thing you want to hear
Speaker 2: because if you're going up, like let's say they're up
Speaker 2: there last week of July, you're going first week August.
Speaker 2: What you want? You think you want hot reports, You
Speaker 2: don't want horrible report.
Speaker 4: You make that phone call wanting some bitching and moaning.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they're like, oh my god, it's on fire.
Speaker 2: You're like, I'm not even gonna go now. Yeah, because
Speaker 2: this is gonna be the it'll die, it'll be the dead.
Speaker 2: I'll be there for the dead week. You want it
Speaker 2: to be that no one's catching nothing, then you're gonna
Speaker 2: go up and have a phenomenal time. Yeah.
Speaker 5: No, that's the same with this little riffle that I'm
Speaker 5: speaking of. Just easty here. M.
Speaker 2: You just winked at me. Does that mean it's not
Speaker 2: easty here? No? Uh. Joined today by the esteemed professor,
Speaker 2: former professor of American history, current author of all kinds
Speaker 2: of books, New York Times best selling author Dan Floores.
Speaker 2: It's been on the show a handful of times in
Speaker 2: the past. I'll just come flat out and say, he's
Speaker 2: my most He's my favorite historian, one of America's most
Speaker 2: celebrated historians. Uh. Eleven books if you listen to a
Speaker 2: Rogan's podcast. Dan's been on Rogan's podcast a couple of
Speaker 2: times talking about his book as well. Started his career
Speaker 2: as not started you were a writer but also a teacher. Yeah.
Speaker 6: I basically started as a freelance magazine writer before I
Speaker 6: went off. And you know, I did the strange thing
Speaker 6: of getting a PhD. Relate yeah, and becoming Yeah, you
Speaker 6: guys can relate Randall can relate that know.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 2: Not only that, but I took when I was in
Speaker 2: graduate school, I took a class with Professor Floories, and
Speaker 2: Randall took presumably many classes, a handful of a handful
Speaker 2: of classes. And now Dan is doing a were Dan
Speaker 2: is doing a podcast our podcast network called The American
Speaker 2: West with Dan floy'es. We're going to talk about some
Speaker 2: of the themes that will emerge in that podcast. As
Speaker 2: he tells a I would say an unconventional telling of
Speaker 2: the American West. Don't get into enormous detail. But how
Speaker 2: would you describe your approach because you were an environmental historian?
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's right. I trained to be an environmental historian.
Speaker 6: And for people who don't know what that is, it's
Speaker 6: basically somebody who studies and writes about and taught classes
Speaker 6: too about the relationship between people and nature. So that's
Speaker 6: a pretty big topic. You know, allows for a lot
Speaker 6: of things, and what it doesn't do much because I
Speaker 6: also taught the American West, it doesn't do much of
Speaker 6: the standard American West stuff, you know. I mean I
Speaker 6: never did really talk much about mining strikes and the
Speaker 6: overall and trail migrations and Indian wars and gunfights and
Speaker 6: all that. I was interested in in stuff that pertained
Speaker 6: to the kind of environmental relationship between people and the
Speaker 6: natural world in the West and in the country. And
Speaker 6: so that's that's really what this podcast boils down to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fewer okay corrals and more more wildlife.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 2: Being a wildlife. Uh pigeon catching controversy in New York
Speaker 2: And this makes sense to me. The price, Like my
Speaker 2: boy sells pigeons to dog trainers.
Speaker 7: Oh now he's now he's onto selling them.
Speaker 2: Oh he's made he makes good money selling pigeons.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, No, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2: I thought, well, this year he just did a if
Speaker 2: you go from seven dollars to eight dollars, what percent
Speaker 2: increases that.
Speaker 4: That's a tough one to figure out.
Speaker 2: One I told him, say tariffs did it?
Speaker 7: And wait, how twelve? How much does he is that?
Speaker 6: How much?
Speaker 2: Your head?
Speaker 6: Dan, I think that's right.
Speaker 7: Wait does he is that? How much he sells them for?
Speaker 2: He just he just he just uh he had a
Speaker 2: new client mm hmm. And and he was saying what
Speaker 2: because last year he was getting seven a piece and
Speaker 2: he had a new client. He just threw out eight
Speaker 2: and out of blank, take as many as I can get.
Speaker 2: So point being, it doesn't surprise me. Now what what?
Speaker 2: So he gets pigeons out of grain silos because guys
Speaker 2: are storing grain. Last thing, you want his pigeons in
Speaker 2: the grain. You know, you don't want I'm shitting in
Speaker 2: the grain. So he gets them out of grain silos
Speaker 2: and whatnot, out of barns and people use them for
Speaker 2: dog training.
Speaker 6: Oh I didn't.
Speaker 7: I thought he got paid to capture them. I didn't
Speaker 7: realize that he was turning them around.
Speaker 2: He would pay to get him. Okay, but I'm saying,
Speaker 2: picture now that a pigeons worth that amount of money. Okay.
Speaker 2: Some guy has thought to himself apparently, well, not where
Speaker 2: are there a lot of pigeons? And he has noted
Speaker 2: that in Brooklyn there's a lot of pigeons, and some
Speaker 2: guys are taking some industrial pigeon catching strategies to these
Speaker 2: parks in Brooklyn, which is really causing a lot of
Speaker 2: distress for logo pigeon lovers. It's a little bit weird
Speaker 2: because I think that I don't know if New York does.
Speaker 2: But there's a thing called a vatroll. There's a there's
Speaker 2: a poison that municipalities will use on pigeons. It's kind
Speaker 2: of like an un you know. So I think that
Speaker 2: for them to see a guy jump out and net
Speaker 2: a bunch, it's probably like doubt be disturbing by I mean,
Speaker 2: if you looked at the darker side, there's like a
Speaker 2: darker side the pigeon removal that they're probably not aware
Speaker 2: of pigeons being a non native bird. But pitches have
Speaker 2: been there. I mean the French delivered introduced pigeons along
Speaker 2: the Saint Lawrence, I think the late fifteen hundred. I
Speaker 2: mean there's been pigeons on the ground. Street pigeons. It's
Speaker 2: Lenaian name. If you see a pigeon flying around town,
Speaker 2: it's Lenaian name. Is Columba, Olivia, I believe is what
Speaker 2: it is. And people are worked up because guys are
Speaker 2: catching these things and they're probably like the guests are
Speaker 2: selling them into the pigeon market. Some guy cleared one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty out of a park.
Speaker 7: Bushwick. I thought this was going the direction of roller pigeons,
Speaker 7: which is why I paid attention. Jordan Siller sent me this.
Speaker 2: This is a dude selling. This is a dude selling
Speaker 2: pigeons for some purpose. I used to on occasion when
Speaker 2: I lived in Brooklyn and I would go down and
Speaker 2: I would just nab them and put them in my pockets.
Speaker 2: And I'm not kidding you. We would grab them and
Speaker 2: we would make patas with them, me and my chef
Speaker 2: buddy and I just put them right in my pockets.
Speaker 2: We got all kinds of videos of it.
Speaker 7: Oh my gosh, we need to put this together. This
Speaker 7: is a new episode. Well, what what's the hand grabbing pigeons?
Speaker 2: You just put a little bit of and you just
Speaker 2: put them and I'd always want to leave the scene
Speaker 2: with them alive. So we just put them in our
Speaker 2: pockets and make little pat tays with them. Your pockets
Speaker 2: all bounce garment is best for any kind of coat,
Speaker 2: like a down puffy type, and put them in your pockets.
Speaker 5: But uh, kangaroo.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the thing that came mind, they came on here
Speaker 2: if any person, like if you went to any I
Speaker 2: shouldn't say any If you went to most wildlife managers
Speaker 2: and you ask them if you could wave a magic
Speaker 2: wand and it would make street pigeons disappear, they would
Speaker 2: wave the wand. You know, but then you get into
Speaker 2: like different things like I used to go to even
Speaker 2: farmers and ranchers that like would hate wild pigs. But
Speaker 2: you'd say, if I could wave a magic wand and
Speaker 2: a wild pig would never ever ever again walk on
Speaker 2: your property? Would you want me to wave it? And
Speaker 2: they think and go, no, I just don't want as many,
Speaker 2: you know. Uh, so that's going on there. You can
Speaker 2: get stung though, if you're the guy doing this. Mm hmm,
Speaker 2: if you're listening to you, if you're listening, they are
Speaker 2: fixing to they're fixing to get you under animal cruelty.
Speaker 5: So they haven't caught this person yet, huh. I wonder
Speaker 5: how their diving.
Speaker 2: But if he's getting let's say he's getting New York prices,
Speaker 2: mm hmm.
Speaker 7: I feel like he's getting.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, let's say he's getting ten bucks per Does
Speaker 2: that mean Jimmy gets to I'm just saying he's making like,
Speaker 2: you know, making money. Yeah, he's like the last of
Speaker 2: the old New York market. Huns. Uh. There's the thing
Speaker 2: I found out about Buddy Mine told me about it.
Speaker 2: Have you ever heard old man Randall to ask you
Speaker 2: about this?
Speaker 7: We like started talking about it the other day.
Speaker 2: The International Order of Saint Hubertus.
Speaker 3: That's how I pronounce it not a expert though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know how. This was never on my radarm.
Speaker 2: You know why you don't know about it, same reason
Speaker 2: I don't know about it.
Speaker 4: I'm not a member.
Speaker 2: You have to be asked.
Speaker 6: To join.
Speaker 2: The International Order of Saint Hubertus is a true nightly order.
Speaker 2: I mean you can look at their website. They even
Speaker 2: do that thing where like you'll have the first letter
Speaker 2: of a paragraph and you put it in a red
Speaker 2: box like once upon a time. Oh yeah, like the
Speaker 2: old m I mean that's when you know it's legit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, there's got to be a technical term
Speaker 3: for that, no doubt.
Speaker 2: The International Order of Saint Hubertus is a true nightly order.
Speaker 2: In the historical tradition. The Order is under the royal
Speaker 2: protection of His Majesty, King Juan Carlos of Spain, the
Speaker 2: grand Master Emeritus in his Imperial and Royal Highness, Archduke
Speaker 2: Andreas Salvatore von Habsburg, Lovingren of Austria, and our current
Speaker 2: grand Master is His Imperial and Royal Highness Istevon von
Speaker 2: Habsburg Lothringen, Archduke of Austria, Prince of Hungary. The International
Speaker 2: Order of Saint Hubertus is comprised of an international group
Speaker 2: of individuals Ordun's Brothers, who are passionate about the sports
Speaker 2: of hunting and fishing, and who are vitally interested and
Speaker 2: actively involved in the preservation of wildlife its habitat in
Speaker 2: the tradition of ethical hunting and fish. They got members
Speaker 2: who are dedicated to upland bird hunting, duck hunting, and
Speaker 2: hunters of quote larger and big game. Never been asked
Speaker 2: if Brandley was asked to be in this and I don't,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna be pised.
Speaker 7: No.
Speaker 4: I was just thinking we should start our own secret order.
Speaker 2: Here's what they stand for.
Speaker 3: That's okay, instead of skull and bones, we'll just go
Speaker 3: with skulls and skulls.
Speaker 2: Here's what they stand for. To promote sportsmanlike conduct and
Speaker 2: hunting and fishing. To foster good fellowship among sportsmen from
Speaker 2: all over the world. To teach and preserve sound traditional
Speaker 2: hunting and fishing customs. To encourage wildlife conservation, and to
Speaker 2: help protect in dangered species from extinction. To promote the
Speaker 2: concept of hunting and fishing as an intangible cultural heritage
Speaker 2: of humanity. To endeavor to ensure that the economic benefits
Speaker 2: derived from sports, hunting and fishing, support the regions where
Speaker 2: these activities are carried out, and to strive to enhance
Speaker 2: respect the responsible hunters and fishermen. If I get into that,
Speaker 2: I'm you know, I don't have any tattoos. I'm getting
Speaker 2: that it's got a crest.
Speaker 5: Where's that is going on your lower back?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 5: That's where it has to go.
Speaker 2: Put the first one?
Speaker 7: Then?
Speaker 2: Yeah, now expenser, who ran out of place to put them?
Speaker 2: He said?
Speaker 4: He said, with no small amount of judgment.
Speaker 2: Before you get in a dank, Can you, guys tell
Speaker 2: us about your added hunt? But can I start by
Speaker 2: telling about how controversial it is? Yeah? Are you familiar
Speaker 2: with the controversy? Mm hmm.
Speaker 5: Well is it similar to asking folks if they want
Speaker 5: to get rid of pigs?
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 5: And if you most of them would say no because
Speaker 5: they're you know, they turned quite a profit.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So people like you guys, the people you guys
Speaker 2: getting all excited flying all around the country to hunt
Speaker 2: a dad are killing big horns.
Speaker 7: Not exactly, I think.
Speaker 2: You hate big horn sheep.
Speaker 7: Thanks for putting us in a box.
Speaker 2: Tell us about your trip.
Speaker 5: I don't think that's true.
Speaker 2: No, no, No, I'm joking. I want to want to start
Speaker 2: paraphrasing half a Finger.
Speaker 7: Yeah, oh yeah, we're definitely gonna address that. That's part
Speaker 7: of the that's part of the conservation.
Speaker 2: I'm being too, I'm being I'm being.
Speaker 5: By promoting hunting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, meaning that a dad are there. They're there are
Speaker 2: sheep species from North Africa, North Africa, and they run wild,
Speaker 2: and they run wild in Texas.
Speaker 5: Not a sheep, they're odd.
Speaker 6: They're closer, more closer, they're closer to oats.
Speaker 2: Oh, I guess that's where I got that. So not
Speaker 2: a true sheep.
Speaker 5: Correct, obviously related, but not not a true sheep.
Speaker 2: They've gone feral. They do quite well in Texas, and
Speaker 2: people point out that it's been pointed out, not not
Speaker 2: just pointed out. I think it's According to half a Finger,
Speaker 2: it's like an objective reality that awed ad are detrimental
Speaker 2: to big horn sheep recovery. So, in all fairness, do
Speaker 2: not mean to overblow it. Halfle Finger has pointed out
Speaker 2: he feels that there is like an increasing popularity in
Speaker 2: awed hunting because you can hunt around, you don't have
Speaker 2: any kind of bag limits, Like it's kind of the
Speaker 2: you know, it's like the the you know, it's like
Speaker 2: the wild West of Awdad hunting.
Speaker 7: Right now, You're not going to get a sheep probably
Speaker 7: ever in your life. So if you want to try
Speaker 7: for something adjacent to it.
Speaker 2: Go down in the desert and you know, run around
Speaker 2: in the rim rocks. They're down there. And he feels
Speaker 2: that as this gains popular larity land managers, landowners will
Speaker 2: become incentivized to host awed AD on their properties, and
Speaker 2: he feels that this could lead to a net loss
Speaker 2: in suitable big horn habitat. But I was hunting, oh Dad,
Speaker 2: when you guess when your mommy's was wiping your noses?
Speaker 2: How old fifty one?
Speaker 7: So Steve made it cool before it was cool.
Speaker 2: No, I went one time, I went two times.
Speaker 7: I'm just trying to be cute.
Speaker 2: I went two times and I was not. I guess
Speaker 2: I was. I wasn't really aware of the issue. But anyways,
Speaker 2: tell about you guys trip. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, a couple of weeks ago, Karin and I and
Speaker 5: Karin's significant other Matt, were hosted by doctor Phil of Retzki, the.
Speaker 7: Duck Doctor DNA doc now now odd AD DNA doc
Speaker 7: also Turkey DNA doc Yep, he's got all the names.
Speaker 5: He hosted us down in West Texas on UTEPS, the
Speaker 5: Indio Research Station.
Speaker 7: Yep, he's at the Yeah. So so we weren't at
Speaker 7: you know, uh RAN for research for it. Yeah, University
Speaker 7: of Texas at El Paso has a research facility that's
Speaker 7: about thirty five or forty it's forty thousand.
Speaker 5: That's where we were, right on the Rio Grande.
Speaker 2: All these details.
Speaker 5: We're looking at Mexico, the mountains in Mexico the whole time, glorious,
Speaker 5: stunning country. He wanted us to come down in February
Speaker 5: or January when it was cooler, and the best time
Speaker 5: we could pull it off was in early April, and
Speaker 5: so odds were that it was going to be hot
Speaker 5: while we were down there, but we got really lucky
Speaker 5: with a cold front that rolled in just days before
Speaker 5: we landed. And if they were still trying to squeak
Speaker 5: out of that cold front, and I don't think it
Speaker 5: ever got above seventy degrees. We hunted two days and
Speaker 5: we did our best to help the conservation aspect and
Speaker 5: tried to just shoot and use at first was our
Speaker 5: main objective.
Speaker 2: So this facility is hostile to the odd ads.
Speaker 5: I mean, they've just made themselves at home.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they're a desert big horn that roam in and out.
Speaker 5: But this is just south of the Elephant Mountains, I believe,
Speaker 5: which has a herd of bighorn sheep and they'll bleed
Speaker 5: over into this ranch. But the odd ad have made
Speaker 5: themselves at home. There weren't a lot of odd ad around,
Speaker 5: or at least they weren't easy to find. We made
Speaker 5: it look easy in two days, but it was because
Speaker 5: the weather was so nice. We were able to hunt
Speaker 5: all day, glass them up in the morning and take
Speaker 5: hours to get in within rifle range, and you know,
Speaker 5: slowly pack them out without worrying about wasting any of
Speaker 5: the meat.
Speaker 3: But the university does want to get rid of them
Speaker 3: or reduce the numbers.
Speaker 5: Well, that's kind of the general vibe in West Texas
Speaker 5: is to keep the numbers reduced for desert big horn.
Speaker 5: Sheet You're never going to be able to get rid
Speaker 5: of odd ad just because they've made themselves at home
Speaker 5: and they do so well in that landscape. But yeah,
Speaker 5: desert big horns certainly sit higher on the pedestal down there,
Speaker 5: but odd ad are very close because of the outfitting
Speaker 5: opportunity the trophy hunting big air quotes.
Speaker 2: Can you pass that that thing down here so I
Speaker 2: can look at it?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I can't have fifty pounds. Corey shot it really
Speaker 7: really huge sand Graham, So Steve, like, I guess your
Speaker 7: hand doesn't even fit around the the whole horn there.
Speaker 7: But yeah, just more on that. You know, the phil
Speaker 7: Phil's lab, he's he's trying to figure out certain new
Speaker 7: techniques to test aspects of the odd ads. So like
Speaker 7: they everyone that we shot, we collectively got four. They
Speaker 7: all got nasal swabbed. Uh and uh, they all got
Speaker 7: a piece of meat cut out of them for testing
Speaker 7: for various diseases and such. But to my understanding, that
Speaker 7: research facility is potential grounds for desert big horn reintroductions.
Speaker 7: Oh really, so there are it would be possible to
Speaker 7: put together some kind of study or tests to see
Speaker 7: how many females would need to be taken out of
Speaker 7: the population in order to accommodate I don't really know
Speaker 7: the right language, but you know, to accommodate number exactly exactly?
Speaker 2: Are you counting up that he's like eleven or twelve
Speaker 2: years old?
Speaker 5: That's what we guesstimated somewhere between ten and thirteen. It's
Speaker 5: so hard to tell.
Speaker 2: I mean, well, the yeah, the annually ier rubbed off
Speaker 2: on the outer very smooth. Now.
Speaker 5: I also brought in that you that I shot, which
Speaker 5: was an older at you as well and just as
Speaker 5: beautiful of a trophy. And the meat is ten times better.
Speaker 2: Because he has a real bad eating reputation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, which I don't understand. Well, it's just like people
Speaker 5: who say antelope aren't good to eat, or sagey mule deer.
Speaker 5: You know, they just don't know how to cook more
Speaker 5: than cereal.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I felt like the meat flavor is so incredibly mild.
Speaker 7: I mean I shot the little list of them. Of
Speaker 7: the four, I thought that I was aiming at a you,
Speaker 7: and then it ended up being a small ram that
Speaker 7: was termed us a subadult. You can kind of like
Speaker 7: lift it with one hand. And I haven't eaten off of.
Speaker 7: I ate a little bit of his heart, but the
Speaker 7: meat is much like lighter pink and seems tender as
Speaker 7: heck because it because he's really young. But we threw
Speaker 7: ribs on the grill one of the days and our
Speaker 7: first night at dinner at doctor Phil's house, he'd just
Speaker 7: forget what cut, but he just grilled it up and
Speaker 7: it you know, he he he says it's like sirloin
Speaker 7: to him, and I thought it was absolutely delicious. So
Speaker 7: kind of riffing off of Jesse Griffiths, you know, Eat
Speaker 7: a hog, Save the world.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 7: Phil's new tagline is save a sheep, Eat an odd ad.
Speaker 5: So yeah, he whipped up a again. I don't know
Speaker 5: what cut it was, but an odd ad steak and
Speaker 5: an elk steak. I couldn't tell the difference.
Speaker 7: It was real. It was really good. It just you
Speaker 7: even smell the meat and it doesn't it's it's yeah,
Speaker 7: it's just really it's really clean.
Speaker 2: They got a bad reputation, Yeah they do.
Speaker 6: I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't know. It's like reputations aren't really based on
Speaker 2: that much. Yeahs based on what some dude said about it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and then some dud parrots what he said.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and then that just you know, it's a total
Speaker 7: that goes out.
Speaker 2: So how did you guys see all together?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 5: Well, the group that Karin and I both got uh
Speaker 5: are adult and sub adult rams.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 5: There were twenty three in that group, and then I
Speaker 5: guess we saw two other solo Rams and another small group,
Speaker 5: so we probably saw close to fifty in two days.
Speaker 5: Two full days of hunting though, and then sun up
Speaker 5: till sundown.
Speaker 7: When you were goutting yours in the field, Matt and
Speaker 7: I went off on a on a little nearby knob
Speaker 7: and there were probably like ten in that group. So
Speaker 7: they're around, they're they're there. Their behavior is interesting, like
Speaker 7: if you you know, like Corey, Corey shot first and
Speaker 7: then I shot.
Speaker 5: Second into those chivalrous of you those four hundred yards.
Speaker 7: Yeah, no, no, I didn't. You know, we we we
Speaker 7: had hiked in. Corey was so awesome the entire time.
Speaker 7: But we what we haven't covered is that I was
Speaker 7: like tremendous dead weight on that hunt. This is the hardest.
Speaker 7: It was so hard for me, not not just physically
Speaker 7: and it was hot and it was but just the
Speaker 7: terrain is punishing. Like I think it was you who
Speaker 7: said at some point, Steve, like even the thorns have
Speaker 7: thorns down there. I mean, you're not going to grab
Speaker 7: onto anything. It's so like Shaley and every step, like
Speaker 7: the rocks, that everything is just you know, shifting under
Speaker 7: your feet, so you can't get on stable ground. And
Speaker 7: I knew I'd always had like a little bit of
Speaker 7: a fear of heights and incline, but oh goodness, I
Speaker 7: mean this I was, I like shut down at point,
Speaker 7: so I can't, can't not courier Phil or Matt like.
Speaker 7: I had my handheld quite a bit through this experience.
Speaker 2: Literally your handheld.
Speaker 7: Well, yes, at one point literally my hand was out.
Speaker 5: We were on the highest point of the ranch.
Speaker 7: So literally my hand was out.
Speaker 5: Which I think was about six thousand feet And to
Speaker 5: get the two sheep out, it took us eight and
Speaker 5: a half hours to pack out, by far, the most
Speaker 5: brutal packout I've ever been.
Speaker 7: Probably let's let's shave a third of the time off
Speaker 7: because they stopped and waited for my ass a lot.
Speaker 5: But yeah, it was so hot though we had to
Speaker 5: stop again. It probably wasn't seventy degrees, but there's zero
Speaker 5: shade and we were I'll admit, we were out of
Speaker 5: water by two o'clock. I mean we were sipping the
Speaker 5: last little bits of our water on our way out
Speaker 5: of there. It got a little touch and.
Speaker 2: Go towards the end there.
Speaker 7: Definitely got in my head about that. But you know,
Speaker 7: they they don't like, you know, maybe deer elk like
Speaker 7: they'd be gone, but I took a long time between
Speaker 7: or after his shot, and I didn't get mine with
Speaker 7: the first shot, and there were still other odd ad
Speaker 7: hanging out. So their behavior is weird. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 7: you were saying they didn't know where the shot came from.
Speaker 7: But it's not like one shot and they were all gone,
Speaker 7: so they hung around, presented other opportunities to you know.
Speaker 2: I find it interesting how the different states look at
Speaker 2: their attitude about the animal. In New Mexico, it's a
Speaker 2: draw it's a draw tag and you don't draw it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like I put it in.
Speaker 7: I put it in every year for New Mexico audit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I put it every year.
Speaker 7: Huh.
Speaker 2: My buddy, My buddy's got a spot. He says, they
Speaker 2: go there and sometimes you see like you'll be looking
Speaker 2: at a hillside yep, and at first you don't think
Speaker 2: there's anything there, but once you start looking, he's like
Speaker 2: there'd be like thirty forty of them on the hillside.
Speaker 2: And every time they draw a permit, every time one
Speaker 2: of his bodies draws a permit, they just get an
Speaker 2: odd ad. I've been applying now for I think ten
Speaker 2: years in New Mexican, you know, next doesn't do the
Speaker 2: points right. I've been applying in ten years, ten years
Speaker 2: to drawn aud ad tag in New Mexico. I've never
Speaker 2: drawn it. So it's like they've kind of became like
Speaker 2: an honorary. They're sort of the thing they're managed, you know,
Speaker 2: like you look at with Texas wild hogs. Texas is
Speaker 2: so serious about wild hogs they dropped any license requirement
Speaker 2: you need. There is no license requirement for hogs obviously,
Speaker 2: no season, no bag limit, no license requirement. You go
Speaker 2: to California to hunt hogs, you gotta tag full big
Speaker 2: game license and you need to tag the hog. Just
Speaker 2: like different states have really different attitudes about how to
Speaker 2: treat and handle right not native.
Speaker 7: Wild And then I think that also maybe goes back
Speaker 7: to what Heffelfinger is saying, like there's obviously probably a
Speaker 7: delicate balance between the state Wildlife agency and then the
Speaker 7: the you know, the ranches that that sell odd ad
Speaker 7: hunts and just having to be careful about.
Speaker 2: You know, well, yeah, the ranch control, the ranch controls
Speaker 2: the access. Another way that like another interesting way that
Speaker 2: New Mexico handles this issues with the you know, the
Speaker 2: IBEX in the Florida Mountains, the Florida where you can
Speaker 2: stand on one end of the Florida Mountains and see
Speaker 2: the other end. It's like a containable little mountain range.
Speaker 2: Maybe I don't know, Maybe am I wrong? Could you
Speaker 2: walk around the Florida Mountains in two days?
Speaker 6: Maybe? Yeah, if you were a good in shape hiker.
Speaker 2: Yeah, are you like picture you like like standing and
Speaker 2: be like there they.
Speaker 4: Are, like you see the island in the entirety.
Speaker 2: There's ibecks in the Florida Mountains or non native so
Speaker 2: another non native species. Uh, it's very hard to draw
Speaker 2: an ibex tag in the Florida Mountains. There's actually a
Speaker 2: thing where that's like a once in a wh lifetime
Speaker 2: if you draw for a billy or a ram whatever
Speaker 2: they call them. Meanwhile, their management strategy is it's always
Speaker 2: ibex season, not in the Florida Mountains.
Speaker 5: If they exit the mountains then it's full.
Speaker 2: So like it's like it's they're like, this is the
Speaker 2: ibec's place. You have to apply and probably will never
Speaker 2: get a chance to hunt it. As soon as one
Speaker 2: of them soccer steps out of those hills. It's just
Speaker 2: you just got to go get a tag and go
Speaker 2: for it, so you just come up. They have these
Speaker 2: little I don't know, man, they're kind of weighing like interest.
Speaker 2: People are very interested in it. They're kind of weighing
Speaker 2: interest against other ecological considerations when they figure out how
Speaker 2: to do it. Like in Florida they have that island
Speaker 2: with the sandbar on it and you have to draw
Speaker 2: tagged on a sandbar on the island. I'm guessing if
Speaker 2: those sandbar were cut loose on the main Florida peninsula,
Speaker 2: they'd have a very different attitude about the sandbars, you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, super cool animal. If anybody's thinking about hunting, one
Speaker 5: shoot an you or two before you shoot a ram.
Speaker 7: Yeah. I think heavy Finger is like for every ram
Speaker 7: anyone takes, you need to shoot like that.
Speaker 2: I like to miss I misrepresented something Hefflefinger told me
Speaker 2: every day.
Speaker 4: And then he doesn't call you out on it, which
Speaker 4: is a nice thing.
Speaker 7: But I'll just plug Phil's lab again. It's the Population
Speaker 7: Evolutionary Genetics Lab at UTEP University of Texas at El Paso.
Speaker 7: And if anyone feels like, you know, donating some tax
Speaker 7: deductible UH monies to their research lab, and I think
Speaker 7: they'll probably end up doing more on odd AD and
Speaker 7: looking at desert big Horn, the potential for reintroduction that's
Speaker 7: giving to dot utep dot edu forward slash conservation. You
Speaker 7: probably did not retain that information. I will put a
Speaker 7: link in the show notes.
Speaker 2: And what was the episode he came on, what do
Speaker 2: we call their wild ducks?
Speaker 7: Really wild? That was the first episode a year or
Speaker 7: two ago.
Speaker 2: So if you remember back, he's yeah, if you remember back,
Speaker 2: we did an episode where in some places it's so
Speaker 2: weird this even allowed in some places you can like
Speaker 2: pen raise mallards, like pretend mallards and cut them loose
Speaker 2: to kind of have like a pretend duck hunt. But
Speaker 2: then those pen raise ducks are breeding into our wild
Speaker 2: duck populations and affecting their behavior, screwing up migration patterns,
Speaker 2: life cycles, fitness.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 2: And he came on to talk about how through the
Speaker 2: through their genetic survey work, they're able to see from
Speaker 2: these reintroductions from not these from the pen raised operations,
Speaker 2: they're able to see a genetics spread as the genetics
Speaker 2: of those ducks expand outward. And how far into how
Speaker 2: far I guess it would be, how far west they're
Speaker 2: finding traces of these ducks. Michael Chamberlain is beginning a
Speaker 2: new thing on wild turkeys, the impact of you know,
Speaker 2: people get all excited when they shoot a white turkey,
Speaker 2: real excited. Usually what's happened is you've shot a turkey.
Speaker 2: People love it. But what's probably happened is you shot
Speaker 2: someone's turkey, right, you shot someone's fair old turkey. And
Speaker 2: so there's a new project coming out what we're going
Speaker 2: to start looking at the impacts of domestic turkeys finding
Speaker 2: their way into wild turkeys and interbreeding into wild turkey populations.
Speaker 5: Well, as Karin mentioned, while we were out there, Phil
Speaker 5: took meat samples and he was trying to figure out
Speaker 5: because there was two different strains of odd ad that
Speaker 5: were introduced to Texas originally back in the fifties, I believe,
Speaker 5: And now we're trying to figure out which strain were
Speaker 5: we hunting and harvesting and could they be hybrid strains?
Speaker 5: Could the two different groups have you know, blended together
Speaker 5: and made a hybrid odd ad?
Speaker 2: Who caught him loose in the first place?
Speaker 5: Yea, And Texas Parks and Wildlife was yeah, because yeah
Speaker 5: it was. And now they're you know, people very much
Speaker 5: don't like Texas Parks and Wildlife because they're you know,
Speaker 5: aerial gunning odd ad to help with desert big horn
Speaker 5: sheep just because they have to. If you want to
Speaker 5: protect the sheep, you gotta minimize the odd ad population.
Speaker 3: It's funny that we I think, like generally you could
Speaker 3: say that wildlife management has this dark period and then
Speaker 3: there's a turning point and then there's sort of the
Speaker 3: good old days of post Pittman Robertson and we figured
Speaker 3: it out, you know. But so many of these non
Speaker 3: native introductions carried on until fairly late in the twentieth century,
Speaker 3: like and not all of them are necessarily have the
Speaker 3: same ecological implications, but like Himalayan snowcocker, like in the seventies,
Speaker 3: you know, and you think about now non natives are
Speaker 3: such an issue for us, but it's it's really not
Speaker 3: all that long ago.
Speaker 2: Now, I mean Hungary like Hungarian party and American partridge, right, right,
Speaker 2: But some well, so you can hunt turkeys in forty
Speaker 2: United States. Turkeys are native to thirty eight states. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, like some stuff is right, there's no some
Speaker 2: stuff there's no like demonstrated deleterious effects.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, And that's that. I mean, I recognize that.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it's funny how quickly we've we've shifted with
Speaker 3: some of these species in recognizing the impacts.
Speaker 4: You know, even in the fishing world.
Speaker 2: There is one last introduction I want to do. Whenever
Speaker 2: I'm in Hawaii, I always think on those hot lava rocks.
Speaker 2: Just think how much rattlesnake could love it there. That's
Speaker 2: all right, you know what I mean. It's the last introduction.
Speaker 4: Ten thousand pet dogs and Hawaiian thrown.
Speaker 2: A male and a female rattlesnake on the ConA coast.
Speaker 2: I just feel like they'd be so happy. It'd be
Speaker 2: so much to eat hot rocks.
Speaker 4: I have zero interest in rattlesnake being happy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no kidding. When I'm standing on one of
Speaker 2: those hot live rocks, I can just picture to the sound.
Speaker 7: We really need some TS agents to follow.
Speaker 2: You and make sure I'm not.
Speaker 7: So.
Speaker 6: You know, Hawaii is the only state in the Union
Speaker 6: where coyotes have not colonized. Is that right?
Speaker 2: It is?
Speaker 6: It's the only one.
Speaker 2: Maybe I'll do that too, well, very popular.
Speaker 6: Those endangered anaise would would not be around for very
Speaker 6: long if coyotes ever got there. What is that underheard
Speaker 6: that it's a goose. It looks like it's a species
Speaker 6: of goose. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's got It's got another
Speaker 6: name though, right I've ever heard is Nane, which is
Speaker 6: probably the Hawaiian name. Yeah, I mean probably you know,
Speaker 6: Anglo missionaries maybe called them geese, but yeah, I think uh,
Speaker 6: I think they're generally known by nine.
Speaker 5: The Yeah, I believe it's a dance to the whip
Speaker 5: and Nane.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 5: But one conversation we had on a rock when we
Speaker 5: were with this genetics scientists out there. We were talking
Speaker 5: about like, at what point in evolution is an animal
Speaker 5: native versus invasive?
Speaker 2: You know, Dan's got some Yeah, Dan's been on the
Speaker 2: show making his case for wild horses. Do you feel
Speaker 2: like remaking because you know what I was gonna ask
Speaker 2: you about. First, We're gonna give you a pick, Okay,
Speaker 2: I was gonna ask you to tell everyone the story
Speaker 2: of the other Lewis and.
Speaker 6: Clark their listen clock experts, or.
Speaker 2: You can you can try to sell you can try
Speaker 2: to you can sell everybody on the horse as as
Speaker 2: a native American animal. Well, the horse is good, he's
Speaker 2: taken that he's taken b I'll say the.
Speaker 6: Horse is quick because the horse and its ancestors have
Speaker 6: been here for fifty six million years. Okay, they have
Speaker 6: only been absent for about eight thousand years, and so,
Speaker 6: you know, and I've talked to paleontologists in Canada who
Speaker 6: say from the fossils they have of the last horses
Speaker 6: in America that are ten eleven thousand years old that
Speaker 6: they had, they can't tell the difference readily between those
Speaker 6: and the horses that Europeans brought from the Old World
Speaker 6: over there. And so I mean that's I think what
Speaker 6: you can say about the horse is the horse is
Speaker 6: either an exotic with an asterisk, or it's a native
Speaker 6: with an asterisk. And I prefer the native with an asterisk,
Speaker 6: because I tend to think in terms of deep history
Speaker 6: and long time, and so an animal that's been here
Speaker 6: for fifty six million years and only gone for a
Speaker 6: wink of an eye time, to me is a native animal.
Speaker 6: I mean, that's why they went while so readily and
Speaker 6: so quickly when they were reintroduced in the West. The
Speaker 6: primary problem, of course, is that they were reintroduced without
Speaker 6: their plaistosine predators accompanying them. And so that's why we're
Speaker 6: having such difficulty in controlling them, is we don't have
Speaker 6: you know, big hunting hyenas and American cheetahs and all
Speaker 6: these cats, particularly that preyed on horse folds. But yeah,
Speaker 6: this is an animal that you know, although it's created
Speaker 6: a huge kind of outcry and by a lot of
Speaker 6: people as a non native, I mean, it's actually an
Speaker 6: animal that's been here for a long time. So yeah,
Speaker 6: that one's pretty quick, pretty quick story.
Speaker 2: It's compelling. It's compelling. Now talk about the tell folks
Speaker 2: about the other Lewis and Clark.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this is a story that I know most Americans
Speaker 6: do not know. And it has to do with something
Speaker 6: called historical memory. Because there are some things you know,
Speaker 6: and you know this when you study history. Randall I
Speaker 6: knows it very well. Some things we remember and make
Speaker 6: a part of the ongoing story of the country, and
Speaker 6: some things that are swept under the rug. And so
Speaker 6: at a time when the United States was a brand
Speaker 6: new country, that's the period when Lewis and Clark, Jefferson
Speaker 6: Lewis and Clark into the West eighteen four and eighteen
Speaker 6: to eighteen six, we were a country with you know,
Speaker 6: a little bit of a self esteem problem because we
Speaker 6: were brand new. The Brits were still sort of acting
Speaker 6: like at any moment they were going to reinvade and
Speaker 6: take the colonies back. And so Jefferson after the Louisiana
Speaker 6: Purchase of eighteen oh three. I mean, if you think
Speaker 6: about the Lewis and Clark expedition and the map in
Speaker 6: your mind that you remember from school of the Louisiana Purchase,
Speaker 6: one of the things that will quickly occur to you
Speaker 6: is that why was Jefferson interested in only exploring the
Speaker 6: northern piece of it? Why didn't he have some interest
Speaker 6: in all the rest, which was a much larger chunk
Speaker 6: of ground. To be sure, the southern boundary was less
Speaker 6: set than the northern boundary because Jefferson tried to claim
Speaker 6: that the southern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase with the
Speaker 6: real Grand River, and of course here is Spain with
Speaker 6: colonies in Texas and New Mexico on the north side
Speaker 6: of the Rio Grand who contested.
Speaker 2: That it's weird because he wanted being kind of right.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, well, I mean like over time, yeah.
Speaker 6: Ultimately that's how it played out. But so after to
Speaker 6: get to the story, here. After the Lewis and Clark
Speaker 6: expedition was underway, Jefferson set about preparing an expedition to
Speaker 6: go into the southern parts of the Louisiana Purchase. And
Speaker 6: the river that he decided was the very best river
Speaker 6: to explore in the north, it was the Missouri and
Speaker 6: the Columbia, obviously those two. In the south, what he
Speaker 6: decided to do was to explore the Red River. That's
Speaker 6: the river that is the boundary today between Texas and Oklahoma.
Speaker 6: And he picked that river because he thought it came
Speaker 6: out of the Southern Rockies near Santa Fe. And so
Speaker 6: what he was organizing as a second expedition was to
Speaker 6: send a party up the Red River to its source
Speaker 6: in the Southern Rockies near Santa Fe, and then the
Speaker 6: party would cross over to the Arkansas, also believed to
Speaker 6: be to have its headwaters in the southern mountains, and
Speaker 6: to come back to civilization down the Arkansas River. So
Speaker 6: this was not going to be an expedition that went
Speaker 6: all the way to the coasts the way Lewis and
Speaker 6: Clark's was planned. Because there was no idea of a
Speaker 6: northwest passage in the southern reaches of the West and
Speaker 6: of course, that's what Lewis and Clark were looking for.
Speaker 6: They were trying to find the fable Northwest passage for commerce.
Speaker 6: So anyway, the second expedition was essentially based on a
Speaker 6: flawed premise. Jefferson and just about everybody else who made
Speaker 6: maps of the West at the time followed Alexander von
Speaker 6: Humboldt's map of the West, which he had put together.
Speaker 2: Probably in that order of hubert Us with that name.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Alexander von Humboldt's.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he's a major. He's a Prussian naturalist who explored
Speaker 6: South America. Had a ton of students who followed in
Speaker 6: his wake, like Prince Maximilian on the Rose area was
Speaker 6: one of humboldt students, and he's the guy who comes
Speaker 6: up with all kinds of sort of early notions about ecology.
Speaker 6: So von Humboldt had put together a map of the
Speaker 6: West from sources in the archives in Mexico, and he
Speaker 6: saw that there was a river coming out of the
Speaker 6: southern Rockies near Santa Fe that flowed eastward. And the
Speaker 6: French in Louisiana knew there was this river, the Red
Speaker 6: River in their part of the world, that flowed from
Speaker 6: the west, and so von Humboldt put those two together
Speaker 6: and told Jefferson that the Red River headed in the
Speaker 6: southern Rockies and you could send a party up it
Speaker 6: and it would take them all the way into what
Speaker 6: is now New Mexico and Colorado. The problem with that
Speaker 6: was that von Humboldt did not have any sources that
Speaker 6: actually tied those two rivers together, and so the river
Speaker 6: that he saw in New Mexico heading near Santa Fe
Speaker 6: was actually the Pacer which is a tributary of the
Speaker 6: Rio Grande, and the Red River that Jefferson sent his
Speaker 6: party up heads in what we now call the Yano
Speaker 6: Westacado Plateau. It comes out of Palo Duro Canyon, which
Speaker 6: most people have heard of, this big giant canyon that's
Speaker 6: on the eastern side of this plateau in West Texas
Speaker 6: and New Mexico. So it was a river that actually
Speaker 6: didn't head in mountains. It would have led the explorers,
Speaker 6: the American explorers, out into the middle of the southern
Speaker 6: high plains and left them still like ten days travel
Speaker 6: from New Mexico from Santa Fe. Anyway, Jefferson didn't know that,
Speaker 6: and he insisted that the Red was the River that
Speaker 6: he wanted to explore because there were all sorts of
Speaker 6: wonderful stories about what was up at the headwaters of
Speaker 6: the Red River. So he put together this expedition in
Speaker 6: eighteen oh six, two years after Lewis and Clark set out.
Speaker 6: As Lewis and Clark were returning from the Pacific, Jefferson
Speaker 6: put together the party of more than fifty fifty people,
Speaker 6: including a military escort led by a guy named Captain
Speaker 6: John Sparks, who was a close friend of Meriwether Lewis's
Speaker 6: and William Clark's. They had all grown up in Virginia,
Speaker 6: and Jefferson selected an Irish basically he was a geographer
Speaker 6: named Thomas Freeman to lead the expedition, and he picked
Speaker 6: as the first American trained naturalists to explore in the West,
Speaker 6: a young man he knew from Virginia. His name was
Speaker 6: Peter Custis, and he was just about to get a
Speaker 6: doctorate in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. So the
Speaker 6: expedition is known to the people who know about it
Speaker 6: as the Freeman and Custis Expedition up the Red River
Speaker 6: in eighteen oh six, and these guys starting, they.
Speaker 2: Had fifty dudes. They had fifty dudes Lewis and Clark,
Speaker 2: well forty forty.
Speaker 6: Yeah, about forty forty two, I think is the top
Speaker 6: figure because the one guy died and they sent one
Speaker 6: guy back for bad behavior. But Congress also, interestingly about
Speaker 6: this second expedition, appropriated twice the money for it that
Speaker 6: they appropriated for Lewis and Clark. Now, you know, people
Speaker 6: who know about the expeditions know that Meriwether Lewis actually
Speaker 6: spent a whole lot more money than Congress had appropriated
Speaker 6: for him. But this second expedition had twice the funds appropriated.
Speaker 6: Jefferson referred to it as the Grand Expedition, and it
Speaker 6: set out up the Red River in April of eighteen
Speaker 6: oh six, reached the last point of civilization on the
Speaker 6: Red the town of Nakotash, which was an old French
Speaker 6: town on the Red River in central Louisiana. And then,
Speaker 6: and we've talked about this, Steve, I know, because you've
Speaker 6: been interested in it. One of the things they had
Speaker 6: to do to get on the Red River above Necklish
Speaker 6: was to detour around what we think is probably the
Speaker 6: biggest logjam anywhere in North America. It was called the
Speaker 6: great Raft, and this thing extended for about one hundred
Speaker 6: and forty miles up the Red River, and so it
Speaker 6: was impossible to travel on the river, and they had
Speaker 6: to go through all these balues and swamps around to
Speaker 6: the east of it to get around the raft and
Speaker 6: back to the river. So they did that, and they
Speaker 6: were above the Great Raft in the early summer of
Speaker 6: eighteen oh six and getting ready to head west.
Speaker 2: I got addy pause, Yeah, sure, can you remind me
Speaker 2: how did they end up getting rid of that raft?
Speaker 6: It took the invention of nitro glycerin now when nitro
Speaker 6: was invented in the eighteen sixties, eighteen early eighteen seventies.
Speaker 6: Actually it was possible for a guy named Captain Henry
Speaker 6: Shreve for whom Shreveport is named to go out with
Speaker 6: what he called snag boats and the raft apart enough
Speaker 6: to place charges of nitro under it, and they basically
Speaker 6: blew it apart.
Speaker 2: Just sent all that out.
Speaker 6: Took it took them ten years to do it. Yeah,
Speaker 6: but yeah, it was a gigantic chance. Wow man. Yeah,
Speaker 6: it took the invention of a new explosive device, essentially
Speaker 6: nitro to do it. So anyway, this expedition is on
Speaker 6: the Red River, and they're headed west and they're bound
Speaker 6: for Santa Fe. And they have all these, you know,
Speaker 6: wonderful objectives that they're going to do. And Peter Custis
Speaker 6: is doing natural history. I mean he you know, Marriwether
Speaker 6: Lewis is kind of self trained as a nationalist. Peter
Speaker 6: Custis was trained in a university. And they get about
Speaker 6: six hundred and fifty miles up the Red River and
Speaker 6: round a bend and discover a Spanish force four times
Speaker 6: their size a arrayed across the river. And they hear
Speaker 6: that another this Spanish force is from Texas, and they
Speaker 6: hear that another Spanish force, the largest one ever sent
Speaker 6: out from Santa Fe, is coming down the upper Red River.
Speaker 6: And so Spain determines that it is not going to
Speaker 6: allow the Americans to explore into country where the boundary
Speaker 6: has not been resolved between the United States and Spain.
Speaker 6: And Jefferson had included in his letter of instructions to
Speaker 6: both Meriwether Lewis and to Thomas Freeman a line that said,
Speaker 6: if you are if your further progress is opposed by
Speaker 6: a force authorized or not authorized by a nation. In
Speaker 6: other words, either an Indian group or some force force
Speaker 6: authorized by a nation. I would I want you to
Speaker 6: turn back with the information you've already gathered rather than
Speaker 6: attempt to go forward, because I don't want to risk
Speaker 6: the lives of American citizens in a confrontation with an
Speaker 6: overwhelming force. Whether Lewis never confronted anything like that, because
Speaker 6: even the Spaniards tried to stop Lewis and Clark, but
Speaker 6: they were so far to the north the Spanish forces
Speaker 6: could never find them on the Missouri and they sent
Speaker 6: several expeditions out to stop Lewis and Clark.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hold on that for a minute. Yeah, Like why
Speaker 2: does no one talk about where these Spanish guys? How
Speaker 2: can you hear the stories about the Spanish guys trying
Speaker 2: to find Lewis and Clark, Like where were they looking?
Speaker 2: They were?
Speaker 6: They were launched primarily from Texas. I mean San Antonio
Speaker 6: had the biggest presidios of any of the Spanish colonies
Speaker 6: and what were known as the Provincia's internals than the
Speaker 6: internal provinces of the north, and so they were launched
Speaker 6: from there, but they never got The one that got
Speaker 6: fartherest never got out of what is now present day,
Speaker 6: Kansas never even got really to the to the Missouri Rial.
Speaker 2: What obstacles were preventing them from getting up there.
Speaker 6: Usually poor planning, poor execution, leaders who were not up
Speaker 6: to the task, and on at least one of the
Speaker 6: groups encountered an opposing force of Native people that turned
Speaker 6: them back. So they were those forces that were trying
Speaker 6: to intercept Lewis and Clark were, you know, they didn't
Speaker 6: really get close, but the Red River was a lot
Speaker 6: closer to these Spanish presidios in Texas, and they successfully
Speaker 6: got a two hundred man force led by a guy
Speaker 6: named Captain Francisco Vianna, and they put up a perimeter
Speaker 6: across the Red River and Freeman and his party round
Speaker 6: of Ben they see this Spanish force. They stopped for
Speaker 6: three days and have a diplomatic conference with parlay with
Speaker 6: the leader of the Spanish force. And this Spanish leader,
Speaker 6: h Vianna, was basically he was polite, but he was firm.
Speaker 6: My orders are you are not to be allowed to
Speaker 6: progress any farther on the river. And so Freeman consulted
Speaker 6: his orders from Jefferson, which said, if you're confronted by
Speaker 6: an overwhelming force, I want you to turn back with
Speaker 6: the information you have, and the Americans turned around and
Speaker 6: went back. And so what I would say about this
Speaker 6: is that the reason you've never heard of it, and
Speaker 6: nobody else, really very much in America has ever heard
Speaker 6: of this expedition is because at a time when the
Speaker 6: United States had a little bit of a self esteem
Speaker 6: problem as a young country, we were perfectly willing to
Speaker 6: celebrate the success of Lewis and Clark getting to the Pacific.
Speaker 6: But the second Presidential expedition being turned around by a
Speaker 6: foreign power and told to retrograde to American territory, that
Speaker 6: was one that I mean, even Jefferson was willing to
Speaker 6: just sort of sweep under the rug effectively effectively. So yeah,
Speaker 6: I did a talk one time at the two hundredth
Speaker 6: anniversary of Lewis and Clark and Saint Louis under the Arts,
Speaker 6: hosted by the National Park Service, and they asked me
Speaker 6: to talk about this expedition, and immediately before me there
Speaker 6: was this Hispanic historian from I think he was from
Speaker 6: Arizona who got up and did a talk and his
Speaker 6: whole talk was about, man, I really wish some Spanish
Speaker 6: force had managed to stop Lewis and Clark that would
Speaker 6: have really changed. And I got up after this guy said,
Speaker 6: you know, I'm going to make all your dreams come
Speaker 6: true because it happened exactly that way, but with another party,
Speaker 6: with the second expedition.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So it's one of those kind of unknown stories.
Speaker 6: And you know, the podcast I'm doing for you guys
Speaker 6: is a lot of it is like that. It's the
Speaker 6: Western stories that you've not really ever heard or been
Speaker 6: exposed to with a lot of emphasis as we were
Speaker 6: saying a few minutes ago, on wildlife, on native people,
Speaker 6: on the landscapes, the great landforms of the West, and
Speaker 6: all that. But that's what I've tried to do with
Speaker 6: most of my career is sort of work on things
Speaker 6: that other people hadn't done already.
Speaker 2: If if you had to say, like, what are some
Speaker 2: of the things that people miss the most? What are
Speaker 2: some of the most common misses that people have about
Speaker 2: the American West? Is it like the antiquity or.
Speaker 6: I think that's very definitely one. I mean the West,
Speaker 6: And if you in the Southwest in particular, you can't
Speaker 6: miss this because of all the ruins all over the
Speaker 6: the Southwest. As you know, when you and I were
Speaker 6: at Chaco a few months ago and the time we
Speaker 6: went to the Clovis side. I mean, there are these
Speaker 6: unmistakably ancient still visible. There's still visible evidence of people
Speaker 6: having lived in the West for thousands and thousands and
Speaker 6: thousands of years. And in a lot of the rest
Speaker 6: of the country because of higher humidity and dense forests
Speaker 6: and rainfall, I mean, evidence of long term occupation is
Speaker 6: often really much more difficult to see. But in the
Speaker 6: arid part of North America, it's still there and it's
Speaker 6: still visible, and so that antiquity is a part of it.
Speaker 6: I mean our sense about American history as well. I
Speaker 6: mean it's only you know, four hundred years old. We've
Speaker 6: only been here since the sixteen hundreds, and wow, this
Speaker 6: is a brand new place. Well, the truth is, of course,
Speaker 6: the story of America. Is it right now? We think
Speaker 6: at least twenty three thousand years old, that's when we
Speaker 6: have evidence for the first people getting over here. So
Speaker 6: one of the things I tried to do in this
Speaker 6: podcast is at least spend some of it the first
Speaker 6: two or three episodes talking about these really ancient occupations
Speaker 6: and how people lived and their interactions with the natural
Speaker 6: world and wildlife and all that, because it's a story
Speaker 6: that I think really shapes the future if you believe.
Speaker 6: And I always make this argument about history is that
Speaker 6: the past doesn't stay in the past. We're occupying a
Speaker 6: world that was shaped by our ancestors, by other humans,
Speaker 6: and the world that we're in right now is what
Speaker 6: it is in large part because of what they did.
Speaker 6: And that's kind of one of my themes. I think
Speaker 6: in this podcast.
Speaker 2: At the end of Dan's podcast episodes, what we've been
Speaker 2: doing is we've been doing a little Q and A
Speaker 2: where Dan does his material. It's kind of a in
Speaker 2: the best way possible lecture format. You take a subject,
Speaker 2: talk about it, but then the subjects bleed into each other. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and at the end me and Randall to ask questions.
Speaker 2: In the spirit of that, Randall, I'd like to point
Speaker 2: the next question, Oh I didn't whatever you think is
Speaker 2: the most interesting thing? Oh not, I'll do it.
Speaker 3: I mean, Dan, I think this is not necessarily specific
Speaker 3: to the podcast, but I think people would probably be
Speaker 3: interested to just hear your story about how you grew.
Speaker 4: Up and.
Speaker 3: You've got some You've got some sort of an interesting
Speaker 3: past that some might not maybe expect from a professor
Speaker 3: of history and published author.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well uh so, uh, at least on my dad's side.
Speaker 6: My mom's side of the family was you know, pretty
Speaker 6: much sort of standard Anglo Scott's American through the Upper
Speaker 6: Southern States and into the Midwest and all. And so
Speaker 6: that's part of my lenn Is but probably the more
Speaker 6: interesting one in part because that's where I grew up
Speaker 6: and I still have family there is from Louisiana because
Speaker 6: that town Nacotish I mentioned a few minutes ago, which
Speaker 6: is the you know, I always have fun telling people this,
Speaker 6: that's the oldest European town in Louisiana, not New Orleans. Yeah,
Speaker 6: Nacotash is four years older than New Orleans. I was
Speaker 6: found in seventeen fourteen and my ancestors got there in
Speaker 6: seventeen sixteen. So yeah, so we've been in Louisiana for
Speaker 6: a very very long time.
Speaker 2: But I had what brought them there, do you know?
Speaker 6: Well, I had two different sides of the of the
Speaker 6: story in Louisiana, and I don't know why my French
Speaker 6: ancestors showed up. And that's the predominant line in that
Speaker 6: side of my family. But there, I mean, my last
Speaker 6: name is Flores, which is a Spanish name. And the
Speaker 6: reason I have that name is because when the French
Speaker 6: founded Nacotash in seventeen fourteen, the Spaniards farther west were
Speaker 6: so alarmed at this French incursion because they were afraid
Speaker 6: the French were going to go up the Red River
Speaker 6: into the West, and they were absolutely right about that.
Speaker 6: That they plunked down ten miles away from Nakotish a
Speaker 6: little presidio manned by about twenty five or thirty young soldiers.
Speaker 6: And these guys, one of whom was my ancestor, the
Speaker 6: Flores's ancestor. Here they were in the Louisiana wilderness with
Speaker 6: no available potential marriage partners, and so my sees except
Speaker 6: the enemies ten miles away. So my ancestor married it
Speaker 6: to a French family in Nacotish. And so you guys
Speaker 6: ain't all bad, Yeah, they absolutely they were Catholics at least. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So yeah, So we got absorbed into the French story
Speaker 6: in Louisiana. And I think the reason I probably grew
Speaker 6: up being fascinated with the West is because one of
Speaker 6: the stories that we always talked about in the family
Speaker 6: was there were some groups four or five generations back
Speaker 6: who were traders to the Indians in the west, and
Speaker 6: so I grew up hearing stories about Pierre Lafitte, Pierre
Speaker 6: Bouie Lafitte, who was my great grandfather four times back,
Speaker 6: and he had been a sort of a major player
Speaker 6: in the Indian trade to the west out of Nakotash
Speaker 6: and had gone I don't know if he ever got
Speaker 6: all the way up to the Wichita villages far up
Speaker 6: the Red River, but he certainly was a pretty major
Speaker 6: player in Indian trade in Louisiana, and I knew that
Speaker 6: they had gone west. So I kind of grew up
Speaker 6: with the idea of, you know, the west was always
Speaker 6: this part of the country that beckoned. And when I
Speaker 6: was four years old, my family went on a National
Speaker 6: park tour and one of the places they went was
Speaker 6: into New Mexico. And so by the time I was
Speaker 6: about ten or eleven, I was having these dreams of
Speaker 6: these beautiful blue skies, cottonball clouds, sand dunes, red cliffs.
Speaker 6: Had no idea where that had come from until I
Speaker 6: was about thirty seven and thirty eight years old, and
Speaker 6: I was back in Louisiana for a family reunion and
Speaker 6: I mentioned to an ad of mine, you know, I've
Speaker 6: always had these strange dreams. That's why about the West.
Speaker 6: That's why I ended up going west. And she said, well,
Speaker 6: I wonder if that had anything to do with that
Speaker 6: National Park tour we took you on to New Mexico
Speaker 6: when you were four. Oh, I guess maybe it did.
Speaker 6: And you know, so it's the kind of thing that
Speaker 6: you sort of forget but clearly colors your subconscious for
Speaker 6: a long time. So that was part of it. And
Speaker 6: as soon as I know, I was able to drive
Speaker 6: a car and my parents would let me go out overnight,
Speaker 6: first thing I did was drive five hundred mise to
Speaker 6: the west, just to see what the country was like. Yeah,
Speaker 6: And I've never forgotten how exciting it was when night
Speaker 6: fell on the first time on that drive, and I
Speaker 6: could see the lights of towns thirty and forty miles away,
Speaker 6: because growing up in Louisiana, you can't see forty feet away.
Speaker 6: The vegetation is so dense, And it was very exciting
Speaker 6: to be able to see, ye see country.
Speaker 3: And you spent a fair bit of time running around
Speaker 3: outside in your in your youth, right.
Speaker 6: Oh, I did, Yeah, I grew up in a little
Speaker 6: small town where the woods were, you know, one hundred
Speaker 6: yards away and so, and we didn't have enough guys
Speaker 6: in the town to field one baseball team, let alone
Speaker 6: two baseball teams to play one another. So what I
Speaker 6: got to do for recreation was essentially read books and
Speaker 6: roam around in the woods. And you know, and I
Speaker 6: certainly grew up hunting. I didn't wasn't too interested in fishing,
Speaker 6: but I was certainly interested in hunting. And I did
Speaker 6: that through a lot of my teen years into my
Speaker 6: early twenties. And you know, as Randall knows, when I
Speaker 6: was living in Montana. I mean, I can't say that
Speaker 6: I ever actually hunted, but three times, because I wanted
Speaker 6: venison in my freezer, I bought a deer tag and
Speaker 6: shot a little you know, yearling or four corn mule
Speaker 6: deer buck out the window of my living room out
Speaker 6: in the horse.
Speaker 2: I remember when when I first met you, I remember
Speaker 2: you telling me that, and you're very careful not overplay
Speaker 2: the circumstances.
Speaker 6: And so I couldn't say that was a hunt. That
Speaker 6: was more harvesting a deer for the freezer. That was uh,
Speaker 6: you know, but I I still I mean I was
Speaker 6: in my forties and fifties and I still remember how
Speaker 6: to do it at least.
Speaker 4: Well, you also wrote for Field and Stream and you know.
Speaker 6: Field and Stream, Sports of Feel an Outdoor Life. Yeah,
Speaker 6: those are when I started as a writer. That's who
Speaker 6: I wrote for. That was the magazine world that I knew.
Speaker 6: And so I was an English major as an undergraduate
Speaker 6: and had an English professor and a creative writing course
Speaker 6: when I was a junior who had us write things
Speaker 6: that we thought, you know, you might approach a magazine
Speaker 6: for query, a magazine about And I had the fun
Speaker 6: of writing a piece and before the semester was over,
Speaker 6: going into his office and saying Sports a Field just
Speaker 6: bought that. That's that piece I wrote for you back
Speaker 6: in February. And so that was very fun. And I
Speaker 6: had a you know, just like you did Steve at
Speaker 6: Outdoor what's the magazine outside. I had an editor at
Speaker 6: Sports of Feel in particular, who I guess saw some
Speaker 6: potential and me, and he gave me a few pointers
Speaker 6: and took the first three or four things I wrote,
Speaker 6: and introduced me to editors at Field and Stream and
Speaker 6: Outdoor Life, and I ended up finally for outdoor Life.
Speaker 6: Before I went to graduate school and got a PhD
Speaker 6: in history, I wrote a conservation column for outdoor Life
Speaker 6: for their regional pages. They had these pages in Outdoor
Speaker 6: Life that were designated for particular regions. And I wrote
Speaker 6: a conservation column for the one on what was known
Speaker 6: as the Mid South. And I wrote a conservation column
Speaker 6: for Louisiana Woods and waters. So this was all before
Speaker 6: I ever went to went to graduate school. And you
Speaker 6: know what, the professor thing, I.
Speaker 2: Got a lot of friends who wind up being that
Speaker 2: there into occupation professionally. They wind up into occupation they
Speaker 2: would have had no idea existed when they were a kid. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean you asked your kid what they wanted to
Speaker 2: do and be like detective fireman, veterinarian. Right, And then
Speaker 2: people have jobs that they don't even they don't find
Speaker 2: out a lot of times, you don't even know what
Speaker 2: you're doing was a thing until you're in your twenties.
Speaker 2: In your thirties, you probably had You probably didn't use
Speaker 2: the word growing up. I want to be an environmental historian.
Speaker 6: You you were absolutely right. I never once said that.
Speaker 6: I So I was not the first person in my
Speaker 6: family to go to college. My dad had had gone
Speaker 6: to college, but so I knew something about university life,
Speaker 6: a little bit about it. But I actually went to
Speaker 6: college on an athletic scholarship and with the idea because
Speaker 6: my dad had played semi pro baseball and he wanted
Speaker 6: me to be a baseball player, and with the idea
Speaker 6: of actually doing that. And it didn't last. I didn't
Speaker 6: play baseball in college for more than two years. We
Speaker 6: got a new coach and I didn't like one another,
Speaker 6: and so that was start of the end of that.
Speaker 6: But what I had sort of discovered, and I'm a
Speaker 6: baseball player who's an English major is a little bit
Speaker 6: of an unusual character. And I began to meet professors
Speaker 6: who started pointing me in the direction of where I went.
Speaker 6: And one of them was this guy, this creative writing
Speaker 6: guy I mentioned who when I talked to him about
Speaker 6: my future, I said, I want to be a writer.
Speaker 6: This is my idea. I've always thought, you know, as
Speaker 6: a kid growing up reading books, that's what I wanted
Speaker 6: to do. He said, well, most people who write usually
Speaker 6: do something else as a day job. And I said, well,
Speaker 6: like what he said, Well, I mean, like me. This
Speaker 6: guy wrote Western novels. He said like me, I mean,
Speaker 6: you're a professor, and they actually reward you for writing
Speaker 6: books when you're a professor, And that put the idea
Speaker 6: into my head for the very first time that well, okay,
Speaker 6: so I think maybe what I'll do is I'll go
Speaker 6: ultimately to graduate school and become a professor of some kind,
Speaker 6: and then that will enable me or give me enough
Speaker 6: time to be able to write too. So that's kind
Speaker 6: of what I did. But you're exactly right. As a kid,
Speaker 6: I never said I'm going to grow up and you know,
Speaker 6: be an environmental historian at the University of Montana.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that never happened.
Speaker 2: One of the things I've picked up through my relationship
Speaker 2: with you and talking to you about American history and
Speaker 2: it also I also kind of absorbed it a little
Speaker 2: bit from reading and conversations with the historian Elliott West.
Speaker 2: Is this thing about the West, right, I think that
Speaker 2: if you fall into the into the trap, maybe that's
Speaker 2: not the best word for it, but if you fall
Speaker 2: into the mindset that the West was just sitting there untouched, right,
Speaker 2: whereas Elliott West put it, like Native Americans were just
Speaker 2: in the static they were just basically waiting for Europeans
Speaker 2: to show up in this static state, and then you
Speaker 2: get this idea that then and then Lewis and Clark
Speaker 2: go out there. No one had been there before them.
Speaker 2: They go out there, and then it's just like this
Speaker 2: tidal wave is unleashed, and it all happens like that.
Speaker 2: It all happens through the eighteen hundreds. That sense of
Speaker 2: how Western history went for me really started to fall
Speaker 2: apart when I learned that from the time the first
Speaker 2: European descended the Mississippi. Okay, so from the time the
Speaker 2: first European descended the Mississippi, it was one hundred years
Speaker 2: until the next European descended the Mississippi, or, as Elliott
Speaker 2: West pointed out one of his essays, when Lewis and
Speaker 2: Clark hit the Great Planes, there were people there were
Speaker 2: name of Americans on the Great Plains whose parents had
Speaker 2: been to Paris and come home. And then you start
Speaker 2: realizing that this the job of understanding contact, right of
Speaker 2: understanding European contact, isn't like this little like blip through
Speaker 2: the eighteen hundreds. It's centuries long.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, Elliott steers you correctly. I mean that's been
Speaker 6: one of the things that even in my own career,
Speaker 6: you know, I mean I started out being trained to
Speaker 6: do a more classic kind of Western history, where really
Speaker 6: it does kind of begin with, you know, with Lewis
Speaker 6: and Clark, or maybe if you start being imaginative about it, Okay,
Speaker 6: it starts with, you know, Spanish settlements in New Mexico.
Speaker 6: I mean, so the place where I live, you know,
Speaker 6: Santa Fe Is it's about ten years ago, fifteen years
Speaker 6: ago now it celebrated its four hundredth anniversary as a town.
Speaker 6: Santa Fe was founded in sixteen ten. That's almost two
Speaker 6: hundred years before Lewis and Clark.
Speaker 2: That's incredible, man, Yeah, there's already you go from today
Speaker 2: like to under I always like to understand this. Okay,
Speaker 2: it's twenty twenty five. Okay, if you go that distance
Speaker 2: of time, think about where that puts you. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, the distance between the distance between Lewis and
Speaker 2: Clark and the northern plains and the founding of Santa Fe,
Speaker 2: the founding of a European like kind of cosmopolitan city
Speaker 2: in New Mexico, was the distance that separates us from
Speaker 2: eighteen twenty five from eighteen twenty five. Yeah, at a
Speaker 2: time when we were just now starting to try steamboats
Speaker 2: on the Western River. Yeah, so it's that kind of distance,
Speaker 2: and so you have to, you know, as a historian,
Speaker 2: you start learning to incorporate that into your thinking. And
Speaker 2: once I started having the fun of doing that, I
Speaker 2: started pushing it back farther and farther because it became evident.
Speaker 2: So historians primarily rely on written documents, right, but if
Speaker 2: you decide, okay, in this environmental history, and I was
Speaker 2: trained to do this, you don't just rely on the
Speaker 2: written documents. You also rely on archaeology and palaeontology and
Speaker 2: ecology and all these other fields. And if you start
Speaker 2: using those, then suddenly the past starts getting deeper and
Speaker 2: deeper and deeper for you. I mean, you can't come
Speaker 2: up with a great quote from anybody from you know,
Speaker 2: ten thousand years ago. You don't know exactly what we
Speaker 2: call people Clovis and Folsome. We don't really know what
Speaker 2: their names actually were for themselves, because we named them
Speaker 2: after the towns where their archaeologists first found remains of them.
Speaker 2: So it's a kind.
Speaker 6: Of a deep time past that's not perfect, but it
Speaker 6: allows you to think in terms of a really deep
Speaker 6: and ancient history. And when you start doing that, that's
Speaker 6: kind of how I translated the human past in America,
Speaker 6: going back twenty three thousand years to start thinking about
Speaker 6: the past of the animals here, because many of the
Speaker 6: animals in North America, I mean, like horses and their
Speaker 6: ancestors fifty six million years back, Camels or another family
Speaker 6: of animals that had their origins in America and died
Speaker 6: out here while surviving in the rest of the world,
Speaker 6: they go back forty six million years. Passenger pigeons went
Speaker 6: back fifteen million years. Bison actually, which we of course
Speaker 6: is now our national mammal in America. We have concluded
Speaker 6: that probably the oldest arrival of bison in North America
Speaker 6: was only about four hundred thousand years ago, so they're
Speaker 6: actually quite recent arrivals compared to something like passenger pigeons.
Speaker 6: Mammoths got here seventeen million years ago. So doing that
Speaker 6: deep time for humans, I think it was a ready
Speaker 6: step from that to start looking at all these animals
Speaker 6: around us. And as we were talking yesterday, talking to
Speaker 6: you and Randall both about this, I mean, one of
Speaker 6: the things I've decided to do because I couldn't see
Speaker 6: that anybody else was really doing it in writing Western
Speaker 6: history was to start taking the animals seriously, to stop
Speaker 6: thinking about them as Okay, beavers are just you know,
Speaker 6: there's just this lumping animal that everybody that produced the
Speaker 6: beaver trade and start actually looking at So what did
Speaker 6: the presence of beaver's over five million to seven million
Speaker 6: years that's how we think they've been here? What did
Speaker 6: that do in North America? And you began to realize, well,
Speaker 6: hell man beaver ecology totally transformed the continent. They made
Speaker 6: it a much more humid and wetter place. And when
Speaker 6: we started extracting them from the world, it suddenly dried
Speaker 6: out a lot of America because it undermined an ecology
Speaker 6: that they had built up over a really long period
Speaker 6: of time. So taking the animals seriously, I think has
Speaker 6: probably been a step towards, you know, just revising the
Speaker 6: whole story of the West in America.
Speaker 2: You know, one of the biggest gaps that puzzles me.
Speaker 2: And I think it'd be like a it'd be a
Speaker 2: cool book and there would not be any quotes in it,
Speaker 2: like you said, But like personally, I folk a lot
Speaker 2: of tension on and I love reading about and talking
Speaker 2: with experts on the Ice Age, the first Americans, the
Speaker 2: Clovis culture, fullsome culture, different migration theories. That's of great
Speaker 2: interest to me. And then you have where we talked
Speaker 2: about some of these the first Europeans to make the
Speaker 2: way in the Southwest and they encounter, probably to their surprise, cities.
Speaker 2: I mean cities.
Speaker 6: Yeah, absolute cities where where there were cities if you
Speaker 6: go back a thousand years, there were cities in the
Speaker 6: American Southwest that.
Speaker 2: Were that were bigger than London, like more people living
Speaker 2: in them, you know what I mean, architecture, religious facilities,
Speaker 2: irrigated crop lands, like how did we get from how
Speaker 2: did you get from? These bands?
Speaker 7: Do?
Speaker 2: I mean these like bands of thirty or forty or
Speaker 2: fifty hunters running around with stone tip tools, like how
Speaker 2: do you get to the cities? Now? I don't think
Speaker 2: that that's understood. I mean it's probably it's understood, but
Speaker 2: I don't think that's like that people like that narrative hasn't.
Speaker 6: Been told now. I think it hasn't, certainly not for
Speaker 6: kind of public consumption. I mean among the the archaeologists,
Speaker 6: you know, David Stewart with his book Anassauzi America. I mean,
Speaker 6: I think he probably told that story. I mean I
Speaker 6: certainly rely on his treatment quite a bit in trying
Speaker 6: to analyze that and to get from I mean, we
Speaker 6: start with Paleolithic big game hunters like the Clovis and
Speaker 6: fulsome people. And once those animals are gone, and they're
Speaker 6: gone by about ten thousand, nine thousand years ago, essentially
Speaker 6: what you get is a long period of hunter gatherers
Speaker 6: where the focus is on smaller animals. I mean, there's
Speaker 6: still deer and elk and things out there, and so
Speaker 6: the big game is smaller, and there's an enhanced focus
Speaker 6: on vegetable products, on plant foods, and so the hunter
Speaker 6: gatherer the very name implies that you've got a new
Speaker 6: focus on plants. You're beginning to rely some and once
Speaker 6: the focus on plants is there, then you're set up
Speaker 6: for some human genius at some point to say, well,
Speaker 6: you know this particular plant that produces this thing we
Speaker 6: now call teocente, which produces this little tiny corn cob,
Speaker 6: But sometimes there's a slightly bigger one. Is there some
Speaker 6: way that we can take the plants that make the
Speaker 6: slightly bigger ones, and if the next generation the corn
Speaker 6: cob is even a little bit bigger than that plant
Speaker 6: those and of course what they're doing is that they're
Speaker 6: domesticating plants. And I think the reason we reached that
Speaker 6: stage because we reached it in the Old World many
Speaker 6: thousands of years before this happened in the Americas. The
Speaker 6: reason being, of course, is the Americas are settled by
Speaker 6: humans a lot later than say, Europe and Asia get
Speaker 6: settled by humans, and so the whole process over time
Speaker 6: is an accelerated rate in the Old World compared to
Speaker 6: the Americas. But what happened in both places, I think
Speaker 6: to push us in the direction ultimately of crops and
Speaker 6: domesticated animals, is that as the human population grew, relying
Speaker 6: on hunting got harder and harder to do because animals
Speaker 6: became more and more difficult to find. And you finally
Speaker 6: reach a point I think where everybody knew when during
Speaker 6: hunting and gathering stages, that you had to keep the
Speaker 6: human population low. And one of the ways they did
Speaker 6: that was basically they engaged in not only abortions, but infanticide.
Speaker 6: Whenever a band of one hundred and twenty people they
Speaker 6: had too many children one year. I mean, the leaders
Speaker 6: knew if we let this go on, we are screwing
Speaker 6: ourselves to the hilt, and so we've got to control
Speaker 6: our population. And that became obviously a psychological burden for people,
Speaker 6: especially for women who were carrying kids, babies. So everybody
Speaker 6: is looking for a way to escape it. And the
Speaker 6: domestication of crops and animals became away. It's hard to
Speaker 6: grow the population now just by relying on hunting, because
Speaker 6: we've thinned the animals to the point where we can't
Speaker 6: really grow the human population. But what if we start
Speaker 6: domesticating things. What if we start domesticating plants and growing
Speaker 6: them ourselves. What if we take these wild goats, these
Speaker 6: gazelles in the Old World, in North America, wild turkeys
Speaker 6: become the primary domesticated animal. What if we take these
Speaker 6: and raise them? And that allows us then to avoid
Speaker 6: this the speed bump of having to sew assiduously keep
Speaker 6: the population down, and that then produces, of course, the
Speaker 6: Great agricultural Revolution, the so called Neolithic Revolution in the
Speaker 6: Old World and five thousand years later in the Americas.
Speaker 6: And so those cities that you and I have walked
Speaker 6: around in Chaco Canyon Historic Park, of course is the
Speaker 6: primary and most dramatic one in North America. Those cities
Speaker 6: resulted from the evolution basically of hunting and gathering culture
Speaker 6: into an agricultural sort of in Choco's case, an empire
Speaker 6: really of hundreds of small farmers growing corn, beans and
Speaker 6: squash that they had imported up from Mexico, because Mexico
Speaker 6: in North America was where the first domestication of plants
Speaker 6: took place, and that domestication then enabled larger populations that
Speaker 6: were capable of producing a city like Chaco, which you know,
Speaker 6: Chaco was such a dramatic and large place, huge buildings.
Speaker 6: There were not buildings the size of those built in
Speaker 6: Chaco in North America until the eighteen eighties. I mean,
Speaker 6: we don't have any buildings the size of something like
Speaker 6: Pueblo Benito until, you know, only basically one hundred and
Speaker 6: fifty years ago in the United States. But this is
Speaker 6: a story. It's sort of like that, you know, that
Speaker 6: other Lewis and Clark expedition and story I was telling.
Speaker 6: It's not one that plays to historical memory in America.
Speaker 6: I mean, I've talked to a lot of people who
Speaker 6: go to Chaco who are utterly shocked to find the
Speaker 6: ruins of that place. Because grew up on the East coast,
Speaker 6: nobody ever talks about the fact that there was giant city.
Speaker 2: People lived in tents.
Speaker 6: Yeah, people lived in tents and guns and yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Was gonna I think I told you about this for
Speaker 2: do you remember that the I think he's a physiologist.
Speaker 2: Jared Diamond wrote that he wrote a book Guns, Germs
Speaker 2: and Steel Steel. Did he pass away?
Speaker 6: Jared Diamond, I don't think he has passed away. No,
Speaker 6: I think he's he's still around.
Speaker 2: He kind of begins with this question, I think I
Speaker 2: told you about this forward. Was it Who was it
Speaker 2: that took on the Incins? Was it Bizarro? Yeah?
Speaker 6: Zaro.
Speaker 2: He begins with this question like, why was it that
Speaker 2: Pizarro came from Spain to attack the Incans? Why didn't
Speaker 2: I don't know who the leader the Incans was. Why
Speaker 2: didn't the Incan Empire go and attack Spain? And I
Speaker 2: think that there's a point if you'd have gone, if
Speaker 2: you'd have been, like, if you'd have visited Earth right
Speaker 2: at that time of the ascendancy of Chaco, you might
Speaker 2: have been like, I think someday these people are gonna
Speaker 2: go and find Europe do you know. I mean, it
Speaker 2: would have seemed like it was head in that direction.
Speaker 2: But then there's certain things like that misses, like the wheel.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they don't know, they do not, there's no And
Speaker 6: so one of the strange things about the wheel is
Speaker 6: that they're actually figurines, little small figurines in Aztec Mexico
Speaker 6: that show wheels, but there's not an application of the
Speaker 6: wheel in any kind of of utility form because they
Speaker 6: have not proceeded to the domestication of a beast of
Speaker 6: burden that would pull a wheeled vehicle. And so, yeah,
Speaker 6: the wheel is a very strange one. But I mean
Speaker 6: your question is is really on the mark because at
Speaker 6: the same time that Chako was at its height, it's
Speaker 6: about just roughly a thousand years ago. I mean, all
Speaker 6: those great cities in the Mayan Empire on the Yucatan
Speaker 6: Peninsula were also at their height, and uh ten oach
Speaker 6: teat line, which is what Mexico city. I think. Well,
Speaker 6: I mean, you may be, it may be more accurate
Speaker 6: than I am.
Speaker 2: But the people that could answer that question, that's what
Speaker 2: I call a reading word.
Speaker 6: It it's a reading word. But that city was also
Speaker 6: I mean, it was absolutely at its height and in
Speaker 6: many respects these big cities of meso America. You know,
Speaker 6: I mean you guys have probably been to Chichenizza and
Speaker 6: seen the pyramid there, which I mean the first time
Speaker 6: I went there, you could steal climate. They won't let
Speaker 6: you climb it any won't. No, they won't let you
Speaker 6: go up the steps to the top anymore, you know.
Speaker 6: And it is precipitously steep, there's no question. But you know,
Speaker 6: I had the fun fifteen or so years ago climbing
Speaker 6: to the top of you know, this Temple of cuckl Khan,
Speaker 6: the Temple of Venus, and I mean, holy cow, man,
Speaker 6: that's just it's impressive as hell when you're there. But
Speaker 6: we come out of a you know, a Western European
Speaker 6: kind of sensibility that we were on top of the world.
Speaker 6: We were the leaders of civilization. I mean Western Europe
Speaker 6: is I mean, that's what guns, germs and steel about
Speaker 6: is about his argument, Jared Diamond's argument in that book
Speaker 6: is that the reason Western Europe managed to prevail over
Speaker 6: all those other places is that it happened to sit
Speaker 6: at the far end of the largest land mass on Earth, Eurasia,
Speaker 6: also connected to Africa, and so Europeans got to benefit
Speaker 6: from all the human inventions that took place all over
Speaker 6: Eurasia and Africa. The flow was smooth, The flow was smooth,
Speaker 6: and everything that was invented in China gunpowder managed to
Speaker 6: get to Western Europe, whereas the Americas are completely isolated
Speaker 6: from the rest of the world, not only from the
Speaker 6: ideas of the rest of the world, but you know,
Speaker 6: as we all know, from the diseases that evolved through
Speaker 6: the domestication of animals and living with domesticated animals, Europeans
Speaker 6: old worlders ended up developing all sorts of really pretty
Speaker 6: horrific diseases and when they brought them over to the
Speaker 6: America's I mean, what really conquered the Americas. This is
Speaker 6: the germs part of guns, germs and steel, is these
Speaker 6: these exotic diseases that native people had absolutely no immunity to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know another one about to not Tillon. Yeah,
Speaker 2: when you think about sort of your if you don't
Speaker 2: have the luxury of spending a lot of time studying
Speaker 2: history and you get this idea of you know, people
Speaker 2: living in tents and small scale habitations, that that's what
Speaker 2: Europeans found. It always struck me that when they when
Speaker 2: they when the Spanish got there, they had zoos. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they had zoos with I mean not foreign animals from
Speaker 2: other continents, but they had zoos holding animals like bison
Speaker 2: from places that they wouldn't even the residents of those
Speaker 2: cities could have gone and seen animals on the streets
Speaker 2: that they would have no prayer of encountering in normal life.
Speaker 2: Things collected from far away, from far to the south,
Speaker 2: from far to the north, broad and you could go like,
Speaker 2: where's that from you? It'd be like as weird as
Speaker 2: when you take your kids they see a giraffe. That
Speaker 2: people would have that experience and see it like yeah,
Speaker 2: like they would have, you know, a jaguar, they would
Speaker 2: have a buffalo, they would have birds from South America.
Speaker 6: Well, it's pretty clear that, you know, aggregates of charismatic
Speaker 6: and intriguing animals from the far edges of human knowledge
Speaker 6: a symbol together for public viewing. In effect, the word,
Speaker 6: of course, our word is zoo. That is a very
Speaker 6: human impulse. I mean, and you know, we have no
Speaker 6: idea it's possible that the Clovis people had something like that,
Speaker 6: but as you pointed out, we certainly do know that
Speaker 6: the Aztecs, which had an empire that stretched for hundreds
Speaker 6: thousands of miles in every direction, they were doing that
Speaker 6: very thing. They were collecting animals out at the far
Speaker 6: reaches of their empire and bringing them to the citadel
Speaker 6: city of the empire and assembling them into zoos for
Speaker 6: you know, for the public entertainment of their citizenry. I mean,
Speaker 6: that's that's so, you know. I mean, I've I've have
Speaker 6: argued in my books, especially in Wild New World, the
Speaker 6: most recent one that which is a book about, you know,
Speaker 6: the long term story of humans and animals in North America,
Speaker 6: that this is something and I know I derived this
Speaker 6: from Paul Shepherd, from reading Paul Shepard many years ago,
Speaker 6: that this fact, with the natural history of the living
Speaker 6: world around us, is something that is impossibly ancient in
Speaker 6: the human story. Every time we look back into the past,
Speaker 6: we find examples of it, and it survives today. And
Speaker 6: one of the ways it survives, I mean, I don't
Speaker 6: have children myself. I know you do, though, and I'll
Speaker 6: bet this happened with you, because it happens with it.
Speaker 6: Every time I visit somebody's home and they have young kids,
Speaker 6: and they show me the nursery, there are always little
Speaker 6: elephants and buffaloes and monkeys, and so what that is
Speaker 6: getting at is that it's knowledge about natural history and
Speaker 6: about other living creatures. That is the very first step
Speaker 6: in kind of the organization of the brain, in creating
Speaker 6: a taxonomy of the world around you, you know. And
Speaker 6: then when for little boys in particular, when you get
Speaker 6: to be eight or ten years old, you know, you
Speaker 6: start collecting hot wheeled cars and things like that, and
Speaker 6: that provides you with the next step of taxonomy. But
Speaker 6: that human desire to kind of organize everything into an
Speaker 6: understandable world really starts with animals. And that's why we
Speaker 6: do this with toddlers. The first thing you teach them
Speaker 6: really is the difference between well, this is a picture
Speaker 6: of an elephant. It has this long trunk and it
Speaker 6: has and this is a picture of a horse, it
Speaker 6: has this tail. And that probably you know, is something
Speaker 6: we humans have been doing for two million years.
Speaker 2: Have you ever thought about why American? Why American people
Speaker 2: when they put a mobile above the crib? Why is
Speaker 2: it African fauna generally?
Speaker 6: Now, that's that's a good question, you know, And why
Speaker 6: is it elephants allisons and giraffes. I mean, because they're
Speaker 6: so distinguishable. They're distinguishable, you know, interestingly of course there
Speaker 6: it's the living Pleistocene that we're showing them, and so
Speaker 6: there may be you know, I mean, Randall, take it away, man.
Speaker 6: You should you should maybe do a piece on on
Speaker 6: the evolution of something like that.
Speaker 3: I was just thinking when you were talking about animals,
Speaker 3: and it's like, yeah, why don't we just hang you know,
Speaker 3: desks and chairs around them.
Speaker 2: This is your world, this is what you'll have, keyboards,
Speaker 2: a keyboard.
Speaker 6: On the phone.
Speaker 2: It must be some deep like the African fauna must
Speaker 2: be some like deep thing about the cradle of you know,
Speaker 2: like you're speaking to some deep genetic memory of the
Speaker 2: cradle of Africa or something easy to tell apart.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I also think it's like those are real animals,
Speaker 3: you know, like they're big, they're toothy, they got wild horns.
Speaker 3: There's something about I don't know, there's something about that,
Speaker 3: the exoticism of those creatures compared to what we see
Speaker 3: around us today.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I still look at something like an ibex and
Speaker 3: I'm just like, that's an animal.
Speaker 6: When I was writing Well New World, I kept encountering
Speaker 6: over and over again the stories, especially when you get
Speaker 6: to the twentieth century, when most of the charismatic animals
Speaker 6: in North America are gone by that time, are reduced
Speaker 6: to such small numbers that you hardly ever have a
Speaker 6: chance to see them. I kept encountering over and over
Speaker 6: again these people who become really prominent conservationists in the
Speaker 6: United States, you know, and found all sorts of organizations
Speaker 6: from the Sierra Club on who acquired their fascination for
Speaker 6: nature and for the wild by going to Africa. And
Speaker 6: they came back from Africa and decided, Okay, we're going
Speaker 6: to try to do something like that. And it's kind
Speaker 6: of an insides vary size and variety and an indication,
Speaker 6: you know. And of course Africa, as a result of
Speaker 6: the big game parks there, preserve these animals so that
Speaker 6: people could go and see them. But it speaks in
Speaker 6: a way to the fact, you know, to Thro's lament
Speaker 6: back in the eighteen fifties that he lived in this
Speaker 6: impoverished world because his ancestors in New England had already
Speaker 6: taken out all these animals that he wanted to watch.
Speaker 6: Because he kept, you know, these meticulous notes about when
Speaker 6: the birds, particular species of birds arrive in the spring,
Speaker 6: and when they nest, and when the beavers are hatching
Speaker 6: their or having their kits, and when. So he goes
Speaker 6: through all this process and realizes, oh my god, I'm
Speaker 6: missing the lynx, I'm missing the moose, I'm missing black bears.
Speaker 6: Those have all been taken out. He could read the
Speaker 6: accounts of of the first colonists in New England who
Speaker 6: are describing pigeon flights and huge numbers of wolves, and
Speaker 6: here he sits in the eighteen fifties and all of
Speaker 6: that is gone, and he feels like, as he says,
Speaker 6: I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth,
Speaker 6: except demigods have come along before me and plucked from
Speaker 6: the heavens the best of the stars. And so I think,
Speaker 6: in some ways, what I kept running into with all
Speaker 6: these American conservationists who had to go to Africa first
Speaker 6: before they were realizing how important it was to you know,
Speaker 6: campaign on behalf of nature in America has something to
Speaker 6: do with the fact that we lost so much of
Speaker 6: the magic in North America. And it's like, in order
Speaker 6: to get it you had to go somewhere else.
Speaker 2: To glimpse it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, in order to glimpse it and understand.
Speaker 2: You know, we've touched on this in the past. It's
Speaker 2: kind of like a like a conundrum of history and
Speaker 2: talking about Native people's We talked about this when we're
Speaker 2: talking about like Choco society and things. Is there there
Speaker 2: is a sort of a custody battle, a cultural custody
Speaker 2: battle about you know, like whose story is what right?
Speaker 2: Like do if you're not Native American, do you have
Speaker 2: a right to a write r I g h T
Speaker 2: to write w R I T E about Native culture?
Speaker 2: And and and as you're telling like when you're talking
Speaker 2: about it, is there a cult like a like a
Speaker 2: European bias, a colonial bias? You won't get it right.
Speaker 2: And when we've talked about this, I don't think you don't.
Speaker 2: You don't punt on it, but you have a point,
Speaker 2: as you said, like there's human history, right, Like as
Speaker 2: a human being, you're interested in human history, and human
Speaker 2: history travels all around the world. And it's weird to
Speaker 2: put this is my word is not yours. I'd like
Speaker 2: to speak on it, but it's weird that you would
Speaker 2: then start drawing sort of like borders of where your
Speaker 2: interest in human history can't go, you know, like, how
Speaker 2: have you grapped? Because you've had to be challenged about
Speaker 2: that being a history, Like in teaching and writing about
Speaker 2: the America West and teaching about Native peoples, you had
Speaker 2: to have encountered the sentiment of like, well, who are
Speaker 2: you to go telling people about that?
Speaker 6: You know, yeah, I would, I would say so. One
Speaker 6: of the the probably important steps in my career was
Speaker 6: I I published an article and a really fancy academic journal,
Speaker 6: the Journal of American History, in nineteen ninety two about
Speaker 6: what Happened to the Buffalo, And it was a complete
Speaker 6: recasting of the story and for the first time. And
Speaker 6: this was a period of time the nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties,
Speaker 6: probably back to the nineteen seventies when a lot of
Speaker 6: people in the environmental movement were sort of using Native
Speaker 6: people as you know, here were our stand ins for
Speaker 6: conservation living, environmental living. I mean, you all remember the
Speaker 6: famous ad where the Indian steps out of his canoe
Speaker 6: onto the shore of Manhattan Island and he steps out
Speaker 6: and there's trash all underfoot and a tear rolls down
Speaker 6: his face. Well, that particular piece that I did about
Speaker 6: what happened to Buffalo was it was not only a
Speaker 6: complete recasting of the story and kind of an environmental
Speaker 6: telling of the story. I pulled in things that nobody
Speaker 6: had ever pulled in before, like when horses were reintroduced
Speaker 6: into the Americas and went wild. I mean, they obviously
Speaker 6: were drinking the water and grazing the grass that bison
Speaker 6: had also been subsisting on, and so they had an effect.
Speaker 6: And there were whole numbers of things that I plugged
Speaker 6: into that story that I told. A changing climate. In
Speaker 6: the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a drought
Speaker 6: that lasted for like fifteen years on the Great Plains
Speaker 6: and reduced the numbers of Buffalo and there so I
Speaker 6: went through this whole sequence of five or six sort
Speaker 6: of new and compelling. Obviously they were compelling because a
Speaker 6: lot of other historians, like Elliott West sort of immediately
Speaker 6: picked up on this, these compelling reasons for what happened.
Speaker 6: And one of the things I also did was I
Speaker 6: pointed out, which you know, people were kind of shy
Speaker 6: about doing at the time, that Native people had been
Speaker 6: seduced into the market economy. And just as we were
Speaker 6: talking about this yesterday, it was a situation where Europeans
Speaker 6: were offering a transformative technology metalware guns, and if you
Speaker 6: didn't do it in exchange for bison robes, and if
Speaker 6: you didn't participate in it and everybody else, all the
Speaker 6: other native groups around you did, you ended up disadvantaging
Speaker 6: yourself to the point where you might not survive. Whereas
Speaker 6: the southern Cheyennes just down the way, we're going to
Speaker 6: do very well because they, in fact were participating in
Speaker 6: the market trade.
Speaker 2: And they're now armed with guns.
Speaker 6: And they're armed with guns, and they're armed with all
Speaker 6: sorts of metal tools. And so I talked about that,
Speaker 6: and so what that meant, of course, was that in
Speaker 6: nineteen ninety two an article comes out that recasts the
Speaker 6: whole story about what happened to Buffalo in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 6: and it also talks about the Indian role in it. Well, immediately,
Speaker 6: as you might suspect, had various Native people get in
Speaker 6: touch with me and say exactly what you were referring
Speaker 6: to a few minutes ago, what gives you the right
Speaker 6: to say this, to write about this. One of the
Speaker 6: people who did so was Vinedaloria and Vine Deloria, who
Speaker 6: was a very famous Indian author. In those days he
Speaker 6: was at the University of Colorado. He was famous for
Speaker 6: books like God Has Read Custarded for Your Sins, and
Speaker 6: Vinedaloria called me up and said, I read your piece
Speaker 6: and I think it's really good. And what I want
Speaker 6: you to do, if you would, is come down to
Speaker 6: the University of Colorado and spend three days with me.
Speaker 6: We're having a conference. I'm bringing in the wildlife managers
Speaker 6: from a bunch of the western reservations and I want
Speaker 6: you to come down, but I I don't want you
Speaker 6: to speak. I don't need you to tell them the
Speaker 6: story that you just wrote about Buffalo. I just want
Speaker 6: you to come down here and sit beside me and
Speaker 6: listen to them. And I said, okay, I will do it,
Speaker 6: and that's exactly what I did, and so I never
Speaker 6: find Laurie never asked me to speak, And for three
Speaker 6: days I sat right beside him, sort of in the
Speaker 6: protection of this guy who was his illumining figure, and
Speaker 6: listened to all these wildlife managers talk about the Native
Speaker 6: approach to managing wildlife. And of course what he was
Speaker 6: interested in having me do is to understand the Native
Speaker 6: approach to managing wildlife. But what I brought away from
Speaker 6: that particular experience, And I have said this in every
Speaker 6: book that I have written that includes a section on
Speaker 6: Native people since and on all kinds of other people.
Speaker 6: Is that, just as you inferred a few minutes ago,
Speaker 6: I'm interested in the human story, and I think as
Speaker 6: a human I have a perfect right to write about humans,
Speaker 6: an right to be able to write about humans, regardless
Speaker 6: of their culture. And I think in a way, the
Speaker 6: whole impulse was, you know, I'm an Italian American. Only
Speaker 6: I can write about Italian Americans. Only I can write
Speaker 6: about Christopher Columbus or something. I think that's a stage
Speaker 6: in our development that probably is kind of dropping away
Speaker 6: some because I think, to me, the argument that we're
Speaker 6: all human beings and that we should be interested in
Speaker 6: the human story everywhere among every group of people, we
Speaker 6: all come from the same source. We're all part of
Speaker 6: the evolutionary river, the Darwinian River. That's the stronger argument here,
Speaker 6: and so I stand by that.
Speaker 2: It'd be a uh. I think it'd be in many ways,
Speaker 2: you know, an impoverished world if you weren't able to
Speaker 2: bring all those different perspectives to things. You know.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think like.
Speaker 2: That big picture of like the human story is pretty
Speaker 2: compelling when you imagine that when when Allen, when humans
Speaker 2: spread all around the world and they started to meet
Speaker 2: back up, they were meeting back up, you know what
Speaker 2: I mean, you sort of lose sight of that that
Speaker 2: like that people these groups moved around and it was
Speaker 2: so long they kind of forgot about each other, They
Speaker 2: lost track of each other. But then all a sudden
Speaker 2: they come back and they're like, wow, yeah.
Speaker 6: Look what you did with your time. Yeah, you guys
Speaker 6: got so tan, and everybody is fascinated you know, everybody
Speaker 6: is fascinated by by everybody else. I mean, that's part
Speaker 6: of the whole first contact, you know, notion, is that
Speaker 6: we get to see these people who maybe thirty thousand
Speaker 6: years ago we actually knew some of their ancestors or
Speaker 6: our ancestors knew their ancestors, and now once again we're
Speaker 6: meeting up and seeing them, and wow, look what you
Speaker 6: guys did with your time and your place, and it's
Speaker 6: absolutely fascinating. I mean, that's sort of the whole premise
Speaker 6: of cultural anthropology is that, oh my god, you know,
Speaker 6: humans have sort of fractured into tens of thousands of
Speaker 6: cultural groups, with all these different deities and all these
Speaker 6: different ideas of creation, and wow, isn't it incredible to
Speaker 6: sort of listen to what you guys have to say
Speaker 6: about what you think is going on with human life?
Speaker 6: So yeah, I mean that's because like you, and I think,
Speaker 6: like all of us sitting around the table, and probably
Speaker 6: most of the people listening to this, I'm fascinated with
Speaker 6: all those differences. Yeah, I would say the stronger argument
Speaker 6: is it's the human story that compels us, and nobody
Speaker 6: has any kind of lock on a particular one. I mean,
Speaker 6: I'm certainly willing to conceive that some people might not
Speaker 6: want to share the details of their religious practices and
Speaker 6: ceremonies and all that. That's everybody's perfect right. But the
Speaker 6: bigger story, I think is ours for understanding, because that's
Speaker 6: how we managed to figure out who we are.
Speaker 2: I took this class one time, called the Structure of
Speaker 2: Modern English, and in it the guy had said the professor,
Speaker 2: I can't remember who taught that class. But instead, if
Speaker 2: at the end of the Civil War, if you had
Speaker 2: built an impenetrable barrier along the Mason Dixon Line, that
Speaker 2: at this point those two populations wouldn't be able to another,
Speaker 2: you wouldn't communicate anymore. So you imagine that little gap
Speaker 2: and that kind of like so when you imagine these
Speaker 2: these these peoples getting separated. He's talking about not being
Speaker 2: able to communicate in one hundred years, a couple hundred years.
Speaker 2: Imagine these groups of people separating and you get to
Speaker 2: watch what like ten thousand years of being subject to
Speaker 2: different climates and then different founder effects. Just it could
Speaker 2: be as small as personality differences. That's a very good point, absolutely,
Speaker 2: And the wildly different directions people go in terms of religion.
Speaker 2: You see these crazy themes animism, you know, all these
Speaker 2: cultures holding out of the ideas that that landscape features
Speaker 2: have a sort of spirit or personality. You see these
Speaker 2: continuities that they'll that folks will eventually figure out agriculture
Speaker 2: if they can, they'll get better and better at launching projectiles, right,
Speaker 2: They'll like a lot of them will figure out vertical wall, right,
Speaker 2: but on the wheel.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but other things are just so different, man, Yeah,
Speaker 6: other things are so different. Now, that's a that's a
Speaker 6: really great argument, and that's why it's fascinating to explore
Speaker 6: it and to approach all of it with a curious
Speaker 6: and open mind and to allow yourself to be completely
Speaker 6: intrigued without you know, without falling back on the kind
Speaker 6: of where Okay, so our ideas are better than than
Speaker 6: their ideas. I mean, it's not a case of better,
Speaker 6: it's a case of different. And how did you guys
Speaker 6: arrive at this particular notion. But there are some obviously
Speaker 6: some commonalities that are all over the planet, and you know,
Speaker 6: the old animistic religion ideas that you just mentioned, where
Speaker 6: there are deities in wild animals, and there are deities
Speaker 6: in landforms and all of that that it's so widespread
Speaker 6: as part of the European tradition too. The Druids, for example,
Speaker 6: of only twelve hundred and fifteen hundred years ago in
Speaker 6: Western Europe are certainly practitioners of that kind of animistic
Speaker 6: approach to religion. So it's something that is so widespread
Speaker 6: that it's clear it probably dates back a very very
Speaker 6: long time. I argue while a New World in fact,
Speaker 6: that the idea that native people have of being kin
Speaker 6: to other animals, to the European line about that when
Speaker 6: in a different direction where humans are we're the only
Speaker 6: ones created in the image of God and the only
Speaker 6: ones with an everlasting soul, and everything else is different.
Speaker 6: And that actually is an anomaly compared to the idea
Speaker 6: that which is kind of a proto Darwinian idea that
Speaker 6: we're all related to one another, we're all part of
Speaker 6: the same kind of kinship order. And it requires somebody
Speaker 6: like Darwin using science in the nineteenth century to finally
Speaker 6: bring the European world back to that recognition because it
Speaker 6: had gone in a sort of an unusual direction with
Speaker 6: the notion while humans are completely different from everything else
Speaker 6: out there, I mean, we're we're special, we're exceptional, and
Speaker 6: everything else that's something else.
Speaker 2: While rather than being entangled in this kind of elaborate
Speaker 2: give and take relationship where you had to show you
Speaker 2: had to show honor to other species or else all
Speaker 2: the species would deprive you of the benefits of their youth.
Speaker 6: Since it, yeah, that's it, and that I think is
Speaker 6: very old in the human experience.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm going to I'm going to close with a
Speaker 2: couple of details here. The American westl Dan Floyd's will
Speaker 2: premiere May six. You can find it anywhere you find
Speaker 2: your podcast. It'll pop up every other Tuesday, m h Yeah,
Speaker 2: on its own and it'll be in at in the
Speaker 2: history category if you're if you're shopping around, I have
Speaker 2: here short show description and then show description. But the
Speaker 2: short show description is only two lines shorter. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: do the big dog the Dog. Dan Floy celebrates the
Speaker 2: American West by chronicling the heroes, scoundrels, and events that
Speaker 2: shaped its history, from the Battle of Adobe Walls to
Speaker 2: the Mountain Metals Massacre. What goes back more than that?
Speaker 2: Where's the other one?
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's got to be the other one. That sounds
Speaker 6: like an.
Speaker 2: Early longtime Western author Dan Floorries presents a big picture
Speaker 2: history of an American West you've never encountered, Covering a
Speaker 2: vast span in a Western America whose landscapes and wild
Speaker 2: animals drew people from around the world. This podcast tells
Speaker 2: a news story of our most fascinating region to give
Speaker 2: people a sense. The series opens up with kind of
Speaker 2: an overview. It's called West of Everything opens up with
Speaker 2: some of the deep antiquity and some and introduced to
Speaker 2: some of the broader themes. Episode two is Clovisia. Is
Speaker 2: that how you like pronounce that?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Clovisia The beautiful about the early human cultures Clovis cultures,
Speaker 2: Ravens and Coyotes. America is episode three, and that gets
Speaker 2: into that that long period we talked about between early
Speaker 2: arriving humans, what happened between then in European contact, and
Speaker 2: how did people seem to have developed.
Speaker 6: A very.
Speaker 2: I'll call it harmonious or static environment, static relationship with
Speaker 2: the natural world. All of a sudden, we go ten
Speaker 2: thousand years and there's like one extinction. Yeah, and ten
Speaker 2: thousand years of human history in the New World. There's
Speaker 2: one extinction, that's right, and then man, we get busy
Speaker 2: un extinctions. It changes after that. Uh old Man America
Speaker 2: is a story of kind of why does the coyote
Speaker 2: or the coyote, why does the coyote come in as
Speaker 2: such a complex religious figure in Native American culture? The
Speaker 2: Wild New World of the American Serengetti is episode five
Speaker 2: about you know, everybody's idea of the Serengetti in Africa,
Speaker 2: about that that was the perception that people who arrived
Speaker 2: on the Grand Plains had at first. It was it
Speaker 2: was it was it was a Sarngetti of its time.
Speaker 2: Survivors from a Lost World Episode six talks about the
Speaker 2: American prong horn there's an episode on something we touched
Speaker 2: on today, Jefferson's other Lewis and Clark and that, Uh,
Speaker 2: that's the seven.
Speaker 6: Episodes, it's the first seven.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so a lot of stuff if you're a fan
Speaker 2: of American history, if you're a fan of the West,
Speaker 2: which is a lot of stuff that you probably don't
Speaker 2: know about, but that will really shape your understanding of
Speaker 2: these other big moments and put those other big moments
Speaker 2: into context.
Speaker 6: I think my favorite phrase for something like this is
Speaker 6: that it will rearrange the furniture in your head.
Speaker 2: So when you get to be like I do reading
Speaker 2: about the battle a Little Bighorn, you'll have a much
Speaker 2: more expansive view of how that. You'll have a instead
Speaker 2: of a those few days that led up to that,
Speaker 2: you'll have a what are the thousands of years that
Speaker 2: led to this moment? Yeah? Yeah, all right, thank you
Speaker 2: Dan for coming on. Can't wait for the show.
Speaker 6: Thanks for all of this. I appreciate it. Man.
Speaker 7: Everyone subscribe to the new feed. Very important. Thank you.