May 6, 2025 • 57 mins
The American West fascinates people from around the world, but there are many different kinds of iconic western stories. Author Dan Flores has spent a career writing about what he calls the Natural West, stories about nature, animals, and people that span thousands of years of time in the western half of America. Although we reflexively think of history in America as new, this first episode emphasizes the West's true age by focusing on the great Chacoan Empire of a thousand years ago and what happened among its refugees in the Southwest in the wake of Chaco’s collapse from environmental causes.
Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck.
Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon.
MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips
Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters" and "Mountain Men"
Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube
Shop MeatEater Merch
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Following the collapse of the Grand Chaco and Empire, refugees
founded eight thriving new towns along the Galisteo River of
New Mexico, but ultimately found it difficult to sustain an
arid climate civilization across the next five hundred years. I'm
Dan Flores and this is the American West, brought to
(00:23):
you by Velvet Buck, Crafted for those who live off
the beaten path, where the hunt meets the harvest, and
every glass tells a story. Enjoy responsibly, West of Everything.
(00:57):
Thinking of a podcast about the American West and my
own take on its history has had me trying to
understand recently why the West resonates with us the way
it does. Apologies to New England, New York, the South,
the Midwest, but the West seems to fascinate the world
in a way no other American region can. Why are
(01:18):
their television channels devoted twenty four to seven to playing
seventy five year old Western movies, so a John Wayne
fix is available at just about any sleepless three am.
Why does a contemporary soap opera Western like Yellowstone succeed
with so many people? Why do Germans dress up and
play act being residents of the West on their vacation
(01:40):
weekends in European forest. How does back at the Ranch
Bootstore in Santa Fe sell five thousand dollars cowboy boots
that will never see a stirrup? Why is there a
cowboy poets gathering in Nevada every winter? Why a gene
Autrey Museum in la a Buffalo Bill Historical Museum in Cody,
a National Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City?
Speaker 2 (02:03):
And why?
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Maybe this is the most serious question here, does the
phrase just like the Wild West cause all of us
to imagine entire freedom of action, a whole lack of restraint,
a free for all. Nobody is regulating all that reverence
and fascination for the West happens for good reason, because
(02:24):
of its sunshine and the public lands that provide remarkable
access to the surrounding landscape. The West is a great
place to live in the present, but as we all know,
it's the past of the West that's the key to
its magic. Those of us who live in the West
may love various aspects of the modern world out the door,
but we all absolutely adore the old West, the frontier.
(02:51):
We've absorbed it by watching films by john Ford and
Quentin Tarantino, reading novels by Louis Lamore and Cormac McCarthy,
and histories by Steven Ambrose and Hampton Sides. Of course,
there are many versions of the West, and all of
us have a personal preference for our favorite version. Clearly,
for john Ford or Quentin Tarantino, it's the Cowboy West
(03:14):
of so many hundreds of Western movies.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
For others, it's the West.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Of town building and Wyatt Earp's or Marshall Dillon's imposition
of law and order, or of settlers versus railroads are
the gunfighter stories that Tarantino obviously also loves and loves
to invert. And of course there's the Indian Wars West
of a few hundred movies and a few thousand paintings.
(03:39):
But as a modern Westerner, a writer and historian who
is interested most in the West, remarkable landscapes and animals,
the West that does it for me is one most
people may not think of as iconic. I'm most drawn
to what Western artist Charlie Russell, in one of his
magnificent paintings, called when the Land belonged to God? For me,
(04:04):
the West that speaks to my deepest soul is the
West either side of Lewis and Clark. How the kind
of natural West they saw came to be and lasted
for so long? Plus what has happened to that version
of the West in the centuries since Lewis and Clark
saw it. That's the West I try to understand. To me,
(04:24):
that's the true West, a natural West, one that's west
of everything else. In part, my West is a kind
of a first contact West, a theme of much science
fiction and fascination with exploring places like Mars in the
next few decades. It's about travel to strange places, new
(04:45):
country and new animals, the meeting place of an exotic,
ancient world and modernity. Come to think of it, the
natural West is not only our future on Mars, it's
also our deep past. When modern humans left Africa more
than fi fifty thousand years ago and began to explore
the rest of the Earth, America's West, in many ways,
(05:06):
was a last earthly experience of that first contact moment
in human history when new people's first meet. Everybody experiences
first contact, but usually only one side sees the natural
world as new and exotic, a new world. The resident
people tend to think invasion, and so it is. Yet
(05:29):
all of us have ancestors who bequeathed us more than
twenty thousand years of first contact experiences in North America.
So I think I come by a fascination for stories
like this naturally, and of.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Course so do you.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Those of us who are in love with the natural
West are usually attracted to the world of native people,
to natural landscapes, and to wild animals. Being intrigued by
the native West is self evidently at the core of
Western fascination, judging by the volume and quality of Western
landscape art and the way the Western landscape becomes a
(06:03):
character in so many films. Judging by the number of
Crown Jewel national parks in the West, the same can
be said of the Western landscape. But let's say at
the outset. The West I'm talking about is not synonymous
with the frontier.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
When the Old World came to North America.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Every place on the continent had a frontier, a meeting
point between what existed and what was coming. But the
natural West of which I speak is not defined by
a moment in time a frontier. It's a place, a
region of plains, mountains, and deserts, on the sunset side
of the Mississippi River. The timeframe of the natural West
(06:45):
is not just its frontier stage. The story of this
West is much more ancient, and it also takes place
more recently than the frontier. Because the past does not
remain in the past, but affects us in our own time.
The story of the West continues beyond the frontier and
into the twenty first century. Many of the Western stories
(07:07):
I've written about and will tell in this podcast are
the stories of the West's wildlife, very much an ignored
topic in the West and elsewhere. The cow and the sheep,
and to a certain extent, even the saddled horse, are
the animals we associate with the West of trail driving, ranching,
town building, But I have to observe that not one
(07:27):
of them appears in Charlie Russell's When the Land Belonged
to God. Russell's timeless scene of a bison herd flanked
by gray wolves pouring over a divide in a landscape
we old worlders would one day call Montana implied that
the divine world in the West was a Native America.
(07:49):
So let's start there, but not necessarily at its beginning.
At least not yet. Let's commence our exploration of the
natural West slightly later in time. We'll return to beginnings
in the next episodes with a story that makes the
point that the West is not new, but a very
old place. This story stretches our imaginations, suggests how central
(08:13):
and fragile Western ecologies have always been to human life here,
and illustrates the longevity of the human experience in a
country where reflexively still thinking of as the newest part
of America. On a sun drenched November afternoon, I sit
(08:37):
in t shirt and shorts a few feet from the
edge of a canyon rimrock, looking through four hundred feet
of transparent desert air on a thousand year old city.
My wife Sarah is pulling a bottle of water from
her pack. A few feet away. Various friends are scattered
along rock cairn marked trails through the uplands behind us,
(08:58):
where the faint indentation of ancient highways four hundred miles
of them, extend to horizons miles distant. The whole country
sagebrush uplands, the canyon floor, the enclosing rimrocks, and the
ruins with odd names that lie in every direction below
is a uniform tannish brown, the color of dust or
(09:21):
perhaps the color of abandonment. During the time of the
Crusades in Europe, this spot and another on the east
bank of the Mississippi River just across from today Saint Louis,
held the two largest cities in North America, both religious centers,
(09:42):
with a ceremonial effigy mound of lizards and serpents, and
a stone hinge like circle of upright timbers planted to
mark out soices and equinoxes.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
The city in the Eastern Woods today we call it Kahokia.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Probably held a fairly permanent population of thirty thousand people,
larger than London at that time. I first saw Kahokia
in the early nineteen nineties with a girlfriend who had
Missouri roots and insisted we visit the place. I'd seen mounds,
but never anything on the scale of Monks Mound towering
up out of the American bottoms like an earth and
(10:18):
Chichenitsan pyramid. After three hundred years of urban life, an
earthquake mostly destroyed Kahokia City, but not before its population
had gone through twenty thousand trees and almost all the
wildlife for scores of miles around. As for the city
whose ruins lay below us now either side of ten
centuries ago. From eight hundred AD to eleven forty AD,
(10:42):
it was the Vatican of the American Desert. We call
it Chaco, and it's another of our UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Chaco was the closest Native America ever got to an
empire like those of the Aztecs, Mayans, or Incas. But
this was not an empire of warrior armies and conquered provinces.
(11:03):
It was an empire of priests who organized many thousands
of scattered farming hamlets across fifty thousand square miles of
today's four corners into an economic and religious network. No
European principality of the age matched it. What the priest's
promised was direct intervention with the deities who controlled rain,
(11:23):
crops and animals, those grand imponderables whose presence made life
good and whose absence ruined it. The city of Chaco
housed the priests, their families, and a resident population of thousands.
It stored and distributed surplus crops. Then at solstices and
other special times of year, it hosted grand ceremonies, to
(11:45):
which the outlying residents made holy pilgrimages. At those times,
Choco gathered a population of some forty thousand. Looking down
now on its buildings and avenues, one suspects both the
ceremonies and the nightlife must have been epic. Choco America
almost seems foreign in the modern United States, as if
lifted from the Middle East. The agricultural revolution arrived in
(12:09):
this region thirteen hundred years before the city existed, and
pollen studies indicate this development produced two immediate environmental effects.
Human populations skyrocketed, and crops that needed to be boiled
before you could eat them meant that daily cooking fires
soon reduced a robust pinions juniper woodland to desert. This
(12:30):
became a world in need of priests who could intervene
with the gods. Sitting and admiring the sprawling, hemispheric architecture
of Chaco's largest structure, Pueblo Benito, as its lines and
shadows shimmer in the afternoon sun, I know this is
a place that reveals much about humanity. Sarah passes the
water bottle over to me, and reading my mind, sums
(12:53):
it up.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
It wasn't until the eighteen eighties that anyone built a
larger building than that in America. In its time, the
city lasted longer than Washington, d C. Has so far.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Chaco and its satellite hamlets survive, in fact, for three
hundred and forty years. The shorthand version of its collapse
is that it all ended with a series of droughts
across the Southwest, and that's true, but the many archaeologists
who have interpreted Chaco know that much more happened here.
When the rain stopped coming, the farmers seemed to act abruptly,
(13:30):
dropping their digging sticks in the fields, turning their backs
on the grand religious gatherings at Chaco, and relocating.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Across the southwest.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Some went north to what we now call Mesa Verdi's
Cliff Palace in present Colorado. Most of the people who
abandoned the Chaco and world congregated along the Upper Rio Grand,
eventually founding towns still home to their descendants, the Pueblo peoples,
famous for their apartment like villages, geometrically painted pottery, and
(13:59):
turquoise jewelry. Why did Choco collapse in what sounds.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Like a fit of peak.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
The evidence and ultimately the response of the pueblos afterwards
points to a crisis we should recognize. Down there in
Pueblo Bonito, a single room out of six hundred and
fifty rooms yielded the remains of fourteen people whose funerary
items indicated they represented Chaco's religious and political elites. In
(14:28):
the room were flutes, ceremonial staffs, thousands of pieces of
turquoise jewelry, cont shell trumpets from America's west coast, the
remains of macaw parrots from the tropics, The oldest burial
dated to eight hundred a d. And the last from
Choco's abandonment. So those fourteen span the entire life of
(14:49):
the city, and.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Not just that.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
The genetics of nine of the fourteen showed them to
be descended from the same matrilineal line from a woman
who evidently had been there at Chaco's founding. Disparities in
wealth and quality of life, along with the resentments they produce,
are familiar to modern Americans. Isotope comparisons of the bones
(15:14):
of the priestly class in Choco's great houses with those
of farmers from the villages indicates that the elites consumed
far more protein from the meat of deer and prong horns.
They were better fed, grew almost two inches taller, suffered
less from disease, had three times the survival rate for
children under five, and lived longer. They were also conspicuous
(15:37):
consumers of high status goods, from beautiful pots to copper bells,
from turquoise jewelry to parrots. In the late eighteen hundreds,
an early archaeologist working in Chaco shipped more than seventy
thousand high status items just from Pueblo Benito to the
American Museum of Natural History. The farming class suffered this
(16:00):
gap between rich and poor as long as the elites
delivered on their promise to make it rain. But when
drought came and the priests were powerless to stop it,
the lower classes attacked and killed many in the upper class.
They also embraced a new belief, the Kachina religion. By
the year eleven sixty, massive three story public buildings like
(16:23):
Chetro Kettle, a four hundred room great house in Chako
that was built with fifty million sandstone blocks, twenty six
thousand timbers and extended for four hundred and fifty feet
beneath a canyon wall, stood completely abandoned as for animal
life in the Chacoan region. Diet studies in the collapses
(16:46):
aftermath implied that rabbits and rodents were almost the only
huntable animals left. Their need for protein perhaps explains why
some of the new villages were founded close to the
bison planes. One March afternoon in the early two thousands,
(17:09):
I opened the passenger door of a pickup, stretched out
a hiking boot to the ground, and had one of
those small steps for man moments until I exited that
pickup and began to walk on a surface that spoke,
it crunched, it crinkled. I'd never had the kind of
visceral understanding of America's ancient past I was now experiencing.
(17:33):
I was walking into a place known to Southwestern archaeologists
as the San Lazaro Ruins. With every step, my boots
were landing on broken shards of Indian pottery half a
foot deep. That brought a profound realization. I was walking
on ground that humans long before me had lived on
(17:54):
for some three hundred years. In every direction, the ground
underfoot was a thick, continuous surface of curving, angled, shattered pottery.
The pieces set at all angles and drawing the eye
with painted zigzags and designs in blacks and reds. This
is how the people who lived here seven hundred years
(18:15):
ago must have experienced a stroll around their town. I thought,
it's how the pioneers of archaeology in the West, the
Adolf Bandeliers, the Alfred Kidters and Edgar Hewletts, no doubt
felt the first time they walked across the ruins of
Chaco or Mesa Verdi, or the country I was in now,
the Galistaloe River country south of Santa Fe.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
I was having this experience.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Because I've become friends with a remarkable Santa Fe character
named Forrest Finn. Among many aspects of Finn's world that
seemed more than improbable was that he actually owned the
ground where the ruins of San Lazaro stood. That's why
we were here. He was proudly showing off his possession
of the largest ancestral pueblo village site in the Santa
(19:05):
Fe area. A native Texan and a former Vietnam fighter
pilot who survived being shot down to become a successful
art gallery owner in Santa Fe. Fenn was in his
late seventies. Then his body leaned his silvery hair still
in a military buzz cut.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
When we struck up a friendship, I.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Found him garrulous, hugely energetic, and, despite a slender education,
fiercely opinionated.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
True to his Texas roots.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Those opinions included a hatred for the federal government and
a distrust of educated elites. Although he could occasionally be
impressed by experts, Fenn was as dedicated to Old West
history as fundamentalists are in Old Time religion. His home
came across as a combination museum, archive, and archaeology lab.
(19:56):
He outdid anyone in my experience with his boyish, hucked
finn like romance about Western adventure, which led him to
invest prodigious energy in several seriously crazy projects that made
many people WinCE. One was acquiring and doing amateur excavations
at a major site like San Lazaro. The last of
(20:17):
Forrest's grand ideas, when he was in his eighties, got
him national exposure that wasn't always admiring. He buried a
treasure chest containing more than two million dollars of precious
artifacts from around the world in a secret location in
the West, then self published a book featuring a page
of verse offering clues to its hiding spot. More than
(20:40):
one person died, and untold thousands trecked the West's vast
public lands in search of a treasure that to forest
offered ordinary folks a chance to reprise a classic Old
West opportunity, finding loot and.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Making a mint off nature.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
San Lazaro had once been one of eight major Indian
towns that post Choco spread across the Galiso River near
where Spain would found Santa Fe in the year sixteen ten.
The entire four corners is lousy with the surviving ruins
of advanced farming civilizations that made the Southwest into one
(21:20):
of the most densely lived in parts of North America
a thousand years ago, long before Europeans came here, other
humans hoped and dreamed, lived, loved, and died, and left
their mark on this oldest place in America. In fact,
eight hundred years ago there was a far larger population
(21:41):
of people living in the Galisseo River country than actually
live here. Now that's a claim few other American regions
can make. A great drought in the Southwest, the most
severe one in the past thousand years, was the apparent
approximate cause that brought them here. In a sense, they
(22:01):
were religious refugees fleeing that hereditary religious class that had
insisted they could intervene with the gods to send life
saving rain. So the search for a new center place
led some of the former Choco Puebloans to the beautiful,
wind swept Galisteo Country. Here's what they found. A high
(22:24):
desert with three hundred and twenty days of annual sunshine,
prompting their name for it, placed near the sun, rainfall
that rarely reached to double figures but still made for
green mountains and dwarf forests. A river, albeit small, with
spring fed tributaries sometimes flowing water, sowable ground, sandstone for bricks,
(22:47):
and suitable soil to make adobes. A small mountain range
long known and famous far and wide for its sky
blue stones, ample firewood to boil their crops in the
grassland basin. Bands of striped prong orn antelope, mule deer
in the hills, and elk, sheep and bears in the mountains.
(23:08):
Eagles soaring overhead, packs of gray wolves howling in the night,
Lions slinking through the rocks, and sacred coyotes trotting by
with a quick, sharp eyed look. Crystalline air for watching
the sun's progress along the horizons, nights brilliant with jittering stars,
the steady glow of traveler planets, and the occasional light
(23:31):
that flies. The colonizers spoke two different pueblo and languages,
Tanno and Caresson, so living near one another were bilingual.
They wore garments made from the cotton they grew, and
ornamented themselves with turquoise jewelry. The women wore their dark
hair long, while men affected a bowl cut. They painted
(23:54):
colorful designs on pottery known as Rio Grand glazeware that
frequently included images of parrots or macaus, brilliantly mark birds,
traded up from Mexico and not native to anywhere in
the Southwest. Farm implements they fashioned from fire hardened juniper
arrow points largely from local black obcitian glass, and their
(24:15):
axe blades from an aluminum silica called fiber light. They
mined in the high rockies nearby. Their domestic animals were
dogs and turkeys. Their ancestors had domesticated turkeys around the
year one thousand, when huntable wildlife near their villages declined
and left them protein poor water manipulation and desert agriculture
(24:38):
required cooperative effort, so these were town dwellers. They lived
in apartment like rectangular buildings with flat roofs resting on
massive support beams, with plastered walls, occasionally built of stacked stone,
but more commonly in the Galileo country of puddled dried adobes.
The buildings often were three to five stories, with entrances,
(25:02):
cooking and daily life carried out on the top roof level.
The lower levels accessed by descending ladders into rooms that
featured gleaming, polished floors and walls, often painted with murals.
The buildings commonly grouped around central plazas. The plazas highlighted
circular underground ceremonial rooms known as kivas, with fireplaces, perimeter benches,
(25:28):
and a central hold a sipapu. It was called representing
humanity's point of emergence from a world below into.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
The present world.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
San Lazarro left the largest ruins of all the Galistale villages.
Its ruins cover fifty seven acres and feature the outlines
of twenty seven separate buildings, with one nine hundred and
forty one ground floor rooms and a remarkable total of
five thousand rooms. It was settled around twelve ninety, and,
(26:02):
despite a pair of debilitating droughts in the fourteen hundreds,
continued to grow for two hundred years, when its peak
population was nearly two thousand people. That's six times the
size of any twenty first century Galisteo valley town. By then,
many local resources were likely depleted, and the town was
(26:24):
abandoned in the early fifteen hundreds. The immediate catalyst to
that exodus may have been something dramatic, for in fifteen
eighty one, a Spanish party found the town half destroyed.
Finn's most remarkable San Lazaro discovery, for which he had
the good sense to call in professional archaeologists and native descendants,
(26:44):
came in nineteen ninety two, when he unearthed two plastered
Kachina masks and other stored sacred objects. The magnificent mask
appeared to represent black bears and were likely associated with
a bear clan or Medison society. Various dating techniques placed
the masks a few years on either side of fifteen hundred.
(27:08):
Kachina mask would be one of the most unlikely objects
any Puebloan would ever abandon, whatever happened at San Lazarro
around fifteen hundred must have come on remarkably suddenly when
European colonizers arrived in the early sixteen hundreds and introduced
fulsome news sources of protein. Four thousand sheep and one
(27:31):
thousand goats arrived with those first Spanish settlers. Pueblo people
fully reoccupied San Lazarro before long, though swelling resentment over
having to provide crops and labor, and as Spanish suppression
of the Kachina religion led San Lazaro's warriors to become
leaders in the Great Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty, which
(27:53):
drove the Europeans out of New Mexico for a dozen years.
But the Pueblo citizens were alarmed at the possible consequences
of this that everyone ended up fleeing San Lazaro, leaving
a four hundred year old city to dissolve into silence
and adobe. There were at least seven other similar, long
(28:19):
lived towns in the Galileo country, harboring at various times
several thousand more of these former Chocowans. Several were farther
east and close to the high plains, where they had
to survive a patchy rage after those Athabaskan speakers migrated
in from the far north, but like the townspeople of
San Lazaro, their inhabitants fled soon following the Pueblo Revolt,
(28:42):
when the Spanish absence allowed for even more plains Indian raids,
this time by Comanches thundering their horses through a rim
rock break that still known today as Comanche Gap. The
Spaniards called the westernmost Pueblo town they found than the
Galileo country, San Marcos. It was near a little mountain
(29:04):
range the newcomers named Los Surreals, the little hills that
had been mined since the time of Chaco for lead
use to glaze pottery, and for the ultimate trade item
from the southwest, sky blue turquoise. One thousand years ago,
Indian miners pulled turquoise or out of shafts in a
(29:25):
minor cereals peak called Chalchi Wheedle, the name from the
Aztec language, and a little mountain with an outsized reputation.
An image of this little mountain graces the Temple of
the Sun Pyramid in the Aztec capital of tenoch Teetlin.
I've explored its ancient shafts sum but always with hair
(29:46):
raising alarm and shock at the fearlessness of Indian miners.
The fortunes of these towns flourished and ebbed as the
centuries passed, when they were all occupied with unexploited resources available.
In the thirteen hundreds and fourteen hundreds, the combined population
of these Galileo River towns may have been more than
(30:07):
six thousand, because rainfall was essential for their economy, yet
droughts also strike the Galiseo. They made a science of
cloud and wind study, no doubt hopeful as modern residents
still are when grand anvil headed clouds full of moisture
towered up from the mountain ranges in summertime. Their religion
(30:29):
was less theocratic and more decentralized than at Chaco, and
featured clan leaders dressed in the elaborate costuming representing Kachina emissaries.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
To the deities of nature.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
The Kachina religion lives on among their descendants today, although
none of these towns survives today. Half of these Galiselo
pueblos lasted longer than the United States has existed, but
as is evident from a place like San Lazara, for
all their successes, the Galistale Pueblins struggled with long term sustainability.
(31:07):
The year round fires to boil their crops meant that
firewood cutting and gathering pushed farther out year after year.
One of the first scientists to investigate the ruins of
their towns, Nels Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History,
took a revelatory photograph of the San Lazaro site in
nineteen twelve, one hundred and thirty two years after its abandonment.
(31:31):
That photo showed a still barren landscape, almost entirely stripped
of trees and shrubs, for two miles around. With the
diaspora that followed Chaco's collapse, the new pueblo town of Pecos,
northeast of the Galistaloe country, developed a mutualistic arrangement with
planes hunters to trade Pueblo crop products for dried bison meat.
(31:55):
There's no evidence these Galistdale villages ever managed something similar,
so with eight towns and several thousand residents, huntable wildlife
likely took a significant hit. One bit of evidence comes
from Sand Lazaro's archaeology's astonishing number of bones and skulls,
many of them cracked open to get at marrow or
(32:16):
brains from the goats and sheep Spanish settlers introduced now
the sixteen hundreds. Protein was obviously a dietary addition. The
Galisteo Pueblo residents were avid for. Their several hundred year
inhabitation did leave the incoming Europeans a beautifully grass basin
and valley and a healthy Galisto river that flowed over
(32:39):
the surface of this landscape. The ecological changes that left
exotic weeds and spreading junipers and produced a river that
slashed arroyos and stream beds twenty five feet deep all
came later with pasturage for new spains, horse herds, and
flocks of sheep and goats, and when the Americans came
(33:00):
with millions of cattle and renewed mining in the local mountains.
Beyond walking across the broken pots at San Lazaro, my
own most vivid experience of the lingering presence of this
former Galistal world has come from hiking the remnant lava
(33:21):
dykes that rise like black dragon backbones from the yellow
grasslands here. Centuries ago, my Galistal neighbors lavishly adorned these
lava boulders with petroglyphs, not a handful, not a few dozen,
but with thousands of white outlined images carefully pecked into
the black rock surfaces for capturing some of the essentials
(33:44):
of their world and their presence. Nothing else brings them
to life like these Today we call petroglyphs and pictrographs
rock art, but of course they express a more specific
cosmic meaning than any decorative or narrative art. Picking my
way from boulder to boulder atop these dykes and keening
morning winds, the images have sometimes given me a Sistine
(34:08):
chapel feeling, at other times the open mouth reaction one
has to the Las Vegas Strip. There are elaborately costumed
Kachina figures on these rocks, and having once stood in
freezing December weather in Zuni Pueblo and watched a towering
Shaalako kachina clacking its two foot wooden beak while dancing
(34:29):
a Solstice blessing inside a brand new home, it's hard
for me to separate the sacred from the entertaining in
these images. I also can't help imagining date nights and
holding hands under a full moon, gobsmacked at white visions
leaping out at you from the silvery black. The imagery
(34:49):
is mind bending in variety and detail. There are mythical
creatures like giant horn water serpents, but also real rattlesnakes,
often too in tandem, underbird eagles, badgers, coyotes, bears, all
revered animals the Pueblos preserved. There are gleaming four pointed planets,
an endless variety of different cloud terraces, which is the
(35:13):
home of the Kachina gods, and those appear in conjunction
with water serpents, mountain lions, a woman's nether parts. There
are faces with or without masks. Handprints link these zigzag lines, spirals,
fields of dots, warrior figures protected by circular shields. While
(35:33):
history and their struggles at sustainability mean the Pueblo people
no longer live along the Galisal River, which is my
home today, their descendants.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Remain along the Rio Grande.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Nearby, and I like to go to the annual ceremonies
they open to the public. But like so much of
the human story, the past here and even in Chaco
somehow still seems just out of my grasp. We humans
focus on the moments we exist in touching the past
is the forever problem of history.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
I'm Steve Vanella. I'm joined here by Randall Williams. Hello,
(36:30):
and we're gonna do a little thing where after we
listen to Dan Florey's American West podcast, we get to
come in. We have the privilege we get to come
in and ask questions and hopefully for you listeners, some
of the questions we asked might reflect some of the
questions that you have and maybe we'll do a little
thing or if you have questions, yeah, we will do this.
(36:51):
Send your questions in and at some point we'll send
your questions and at some point we'll be able to
round up with Dan and get your questions answered. But
in the meantime, here's our questions.
Speaker 4 (37:00):
And this is very familiar to us as former students
of dance, so exactly.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah, thanks to you guys for doing this, by the way,
really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
Oh, it's great. You got you want to start.
Speaker 4 (37:15):
Yeah, I think in the start of this episode you're
talking about many wests, and there's certain wests that have
you know, lived on and on and pop culture, especially
for Americans living in the twenty first century. But you
(37:37):
kind of challenge people to understand the West as a
much larger place than the West of cowboys and Indians
and of overland trails and everything like that. So I wonder,
what is it about the West that seems to have
grabbed a hold of our imaginations, and what has particular
(38:00):
about cowboy culture that's grabbed our imaginations? And then what
do we gain by opening our eyes to through the
deep time West.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Yeah, So I'm putting together a podcast here, twenty six
episodes on it that will be about different kinds of
things than most people think of when they think of
Western history. They're no gunfights, they are no mining strikes,
(38:33):
there's no Marshall Dylon. What I'm interested in is a
different kind of West. And I think this is maybe
the value of something like this, a part of the
Western story that's not really been known or written about
very much, and certainly not in pop culture portrayed so
that people get to understand it. And what that West
(38:55):
is is something I call the natural West, which is
it's a West of the native people. It's a West
of wildlife, abundance beyond imagining for wildlife and many, many
different species, and it's a story of the West. That
(39:19):
really hinges a lot of around kind of an initial
reaction to a place that's different, new, and very unfamiliar
to people coming out of the East in particular. I mean,
I think people coming up, say from Mexico into New
Mexico or California, don't see the West as being that different.
(39:43):
Their usual reaction to the country farther north is that
it's cold.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
But it's similar.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
That's an interesting point, man.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yeah, that's how they that's how they characterize it. Man,
it's really cold.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
There kind of got similar thing going on as cold.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Yeah, the country looks the same, but man, it's cold.
But what I'm kind of interested in is the deep
time story all the way back to the Pleistocene and
the earliest people who were here and how they interacted
with Western animals, because we have some pretty epic alterations
(40:20):
that take place in this story. I mean, we lose
a lot of animals ten thousand years ago. Then we
have a period where we go for ten thousand years
in the West and it looks as if native people
in particular are pretty benevolent. I mean, there's only one
extinction during that time period, and I try to try
(40:40):
to figure out why that is how it happened that way,
and then a lot of the rest of the episodes
have to do with a kind of an exploratory first
contact experience from people like Lewis and Clark, for example,
and a whole host of people later in the nineteenth century,
and also with what transpires in a West in the
(41:05):
nineteenth century with all this abundant wildlife where there are
really no rules, no regulations. It's just kind of a
free for all, and pretty much what you would predict
for a free for all, things don't turn out all
that great for a lot of the animals, and of
course a lot of.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
The native people either.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
But it's those stories in contrast to Marshall Dillon and
town building and the California gold Rush, the Mormon settlement
of Utah, these are the things that I've been writing about.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
For thirty five years.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Basically, I never was interested much because other people had
already done it to write about the mining rushes or
the Indian Wars. I was always looking for something different
and new to write about that I thought would sort
of tell us story that nobody quite knew yet. And
(42:05):
that's really what this podcast does.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
This there's the thing I've wondered about there's an impression
I have unsourced material about source material east versus West
source material, and you might not share the same impression.
But if you have this impression, maybe you can speak
to it would be this is a very roundabout way
(42:29):
of arriving at the point. But when Rand and I
were reading about the long hunters, so this this group
of Euro American deer skin hunters that were first pushing
over the apple Achian Mountains and going into Kentucky, basically
the country south of the Ohio River, west of the
apple Aachian Range, south of the Ohio pushing into that area,
(42:52):
and we kind of marvel at the paucity of materials
and the and the the lack of sort of like
the lack of natural observation, the lack of nature observation.
What is there was collected like very deliberately by a
historian who went and talked to some of the key players, children, spouses,
(43:15):
grandchildren and try to put together a little history of
these first euro Americans to push into this area. But
there's just not a ton there. And that is at say,
seventeen seventy six. Yeah, what happens that when you get
what happens in the next thirty forty years where all
(43:36):
of a sudden it seems like everyone is so literate. Yeah,
and everyone is just observing and writing about trying to
you know, writing about the sites they see, counting things right,
like really putting a record down. Then now you can
look at the West, and part of what's so inviting
about it is there something, there's something there to read about. Yeah,
(44:01):
and it's really hard to get Like you just when
looking at people coming into Kentucky again for instance, coming
into Kentucky, it's like there's hints of things where you're like,
you gather it must have been really different, but there's
no just vivid pictures of what they're seeing. Did people
also learn to read and write? Like, like, how do
(44:22):
you how do you explain that?
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Well?
Speaker 1 (44:25):
I explained it in three ways, I guess. One is
that starting in eighteen hundred, a lot of the expeditions
into the West, or government expeditions, and those people are
giving given specific instructions to keep a record, keep a
really close record. I mean, Jefferson tells Lewis and Clark,
for example, you know, any animals that you see that
(44:47):
aren't found in the maritime states, collect them, write a description,
learn them as much about their natural history as you can.
And I think that's one of the things. I think
another thing is that there are a lot of Europeans
coming over in the early nineteenth century. The Thomas Nuttalls,
(45:07):
the John Bradberry's and those guys tend to look at
darkest North America sort of the way the Brits were
looking at Africa. Then where Wow, man, this is some
amazing part of the world that none of us has
ever seen. And so we got to keep a record
(45:29):
of all of it. We've got to, you know, we've
got to preserve what it looks like. And I think
really there was an actual market.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
For literary work about the West.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Starting around probably as early as eighteen ten. And I
think the you know, the Nicholas Biddle Journals of the
Lewis and Clark Expedition, which came out in eighteen fourteen.
Speaker 2 (45:56):
I mean, those things sold like hotcakes in the East,
and I.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
Think that made people understand that, wow, okay, all I
gotta do is go out to the West, you know,
and write some account. And it even led to I mean,
and I have found two or three of these what
were basically made up accounts by people who never actually
went to the West, but they talked to people and
(46:22):
read other people's stuff and sat down and wrote an
account of their own journey.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
Like it was enough of a thing that there's value
in faking one.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
Yes, there was, and you could sell a faked book.
There's one particular guy, a guy named John Mayley, who
wrote a faked book about an expedition he took up
the Red River, and he sold it for like five
thousand dollars or something, which, of course at the time
was a huge sum of money. But the publisher he
(46:53):
sold it to broke in the panic, the Depression of
eighteen nineteen, and they never did publish it. So it
kind of exists just as a manuscript which I have
actually examined and examined closely enough to realize bullshit.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
This guy did not do any of this.
Speaker 3 (47:10):
But man, like, it's off your subject matter. But can
you just imagine that if a century prior to Lewis
and Clark you to have taken people with that mandate
and that skill set, and you had said, I want
you to cross over the range divide, I want you
to descend the Ohio decend the Mississippi, come back overland, yeah,
(47:34):
trace or whatever, and like do your thing, like right
down about all this stuff, right down about all of it.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Yeah, you have to.
Speaker 4 (47:42):
I mean in that era, you really have to sort
through what material there is to get glimpses of the
natural world. And obviously there's a literature from the earlier
colonial period.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Of you know, English gentlemen.
Speaker 4 (48:00):
Yeah, I mean it doesn't William Bartram kind of very
it reads is very sort of pre modern, not in
the technical sense, but pre modern. I mean it's very
It's like.
Speaker 3 (48:11):
Yeah, you read that's true. You read like the account
of Kabe's a Devaka. It feels like it's like an
extended acid trip. You know, like you're kind of like, what, really,
there's no way, I mean, that's you kind of like
it doesn't paint a vivid picture. And I think that
something you're right, Like, something happened linguistically where we got
over this hump and all of a sudden you can
(48:33):
understand what people are talking about.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's that a market emerged for it.
There was a market, you know, America where we're interested
in possibilities for making money, and here was this wild
new country that everybody around the world, including all the Europeans,
were really intrigued by, And so people began to realize, well, hell,
(48:58):
I just you know, I try to I try to
keep notes.
Speaker 2 (49:01):
Maybe I embellish a little bit.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
Even, And so I think that's kind of one of
the explanations for what happens starting about eighteen hundred and
eighteen ten, that suddenly you start getting a lot more
primary source accounts. You have to use them, you know,
with a grain of salt.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
Sometimes.
Speaker 3 (49:21):
I wasn't really aware of that, man, and you turned
me on to that to be suspicious. In studying writing,
we'd always in studying fiction writing, we always learned about
the the unreliable narrator as a fictional device, right like
you're reading a novel and the reader sort of becomes
(49:42):
aware like that part of the thing is not to
trust the narrator, which is common in movies and other stuff,
right like it's built, it's built intension. I never thought
of it in historical journals. I never thought of it.
And I had read Tough Trip through Paradise, and I'd
emailed you or ran in to you whatever it was,
and asked you about tough trip through Paradise. I remember
(50:03):
you said basically, you know, be careful. He plays a
little I think he said something. He gets a little
fast and loose, and some of the things don't quite
add up, and I just read it like gospel.
Speaker 1 (50:14):
Yeah, you know, well, I think one is inclined to
do that until you began to realize that. You know,
the classic one in the West is the account of
James Ohio Patty, who you know. I mean that book
was probably published ten different times in the nineteenth century,
and so there are a bunch of different versions.
Speaker 2 (50:32):
He changed him up.
Speaker 3 (50:33):
Wait, we quote him, and had been warned about him, now,
but we quote him.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
Yeah, he's got some good some good details. Yeah, he
does have some good details.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
And I mean, who knows what I think, for example,
with people like that, like Patty and maybe like John Maylee,
is they actually did I think Melee knew enough to
convince me that he had talked to people, he had talked.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
To people who knew about it.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
But when he started going up the Red River and
started describing the landmarks, I mean I could tell by
the time you got to about the third or fourth day,
this guy ain't nowhere on any red rivers that.
Speaker 2 (51:09):
Existed then or now. I mean, so it was.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
You know, it's a market for stuff and it produces
a huge abundance of material to use, but somehow you
have to be careful.
Speaker 3 (51:21):
I'm reading one right now. It's like sixty years. It's
a guy that wound up in Montana, wound up having
he had a trading for it. He had a trading
post in Missoula for a while. Can't member's name. Sixty years,
a fighter and trader or something. And a lot of
the stuff in there. There's a lot of stuff in
there where you read it and you're like you accept
(51:44):
as legit. Like some of the observations are ways they
use things right, like little tricks of the trade. You're like,
that has to come from a level of knowledge. But
other parts of it, you know, he's talking about I
sent Randall passage about Sharp's Buffalo rifles, and Randall's like
they didn't exist, So he's a mystery later he's misremembering whatever,
(52:05):
you know. I mean, he's like he feels like he
had one at a time when he didn't actually have
before Christian made a rifle. Yeah, but here's the thing,
like my man fought in World War Two. Okay, my
dad's long. Dad, my dad fought in World War Two.
I could tell you he told me about getting and
carrying around with him a Thompson submachine gun. Right now,
(52:25):
I could go and put down like my dad was
in World War two and had a Thompson sub machine gun.
And he might be like, well, no, no, no, I didn't
have it there. I had it later. But you know
what I mean, Like like I just remember war Thompson
submachine gun, and you can see someone later just out
of expediency bleeding it together, just putting it all in there,
and then someone later saying that that couldn't have been true. Yea,
(52:47):
he wouldn't have had it.
Speaker 2 (52:48):
He don't know.
Speaker 3 (52:49):
He couldn't have had it at Anzio. He could have
had it later in France, but he wouldn't have had
it at Anzio.
Speaker 1 (52:54):
Well, it becomes these kinds of things become even more
difficult when you're dealing like with in this particular or
podcast with the people in Shako, where we have no
written accounts. All we have to go on is archaeology
and material culture objects and so and now genetics. Obviously,
(53:17):
that story about the the fourteen people who are all
related to one another buried in a single room in Puebloo.
That makes the whole story of telling the deep time
history of the West even more difficult, because now you
don't really have you may have, I mean, and I
have used them this way. There are great coyote stories
(53:38):
going back thousands of years, and I have occasionally used
a coyote story associated with a particular group that I
think would make a point about them. But that's literally
the only kind of storytelling you get. It's oral history,
and so you have to you have to approach things
(54:00):
that way, as you know, really carefully.
Speaker 3 (54:04):
But that's where my that's where my observation, I guess,
falls apart because I was talking about the vivid descriptions,
but when it comes to the Pueblo site, some of
the ancient Pueblo sites, here's these really these guys doing
really vivid descriptions, and they're stumped.
Speaker 2 (54:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (54:20):
The vivid description is of someone being like, what in
the hell happened here?
Speaker 2 (54:24):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (54:24):
You know what I mean, it's not even like a
vivid they're just describing being awestruck by what they see
as a ruin.
Speaker 1 (54:31):
Yeah, So what we're grappling with then is you know,
so people got into Chaco in the eighteen fifties for
the first time, eighteen fifties, eighteen sixties, and so we've
essentially got one hundred and seventy years of archaeological speculation.
And so the way you try to figure it out
as you sort of track that story through to hopefully
(54:54):
the most recent versions of well, here's what it kind
of looks like what happened. But that kind of evidence
is never quite as fool proof as Lewis and Clark
saying today, for the first time we saw and shot
a buffalo.
Speaker 2 (55:09):
Yeah, yeah, So the.
Speaker 1 (55:13):
Story of the West when you go back in time
is based on a kind of an evidentiary base that
you have to even be more careful with, but it's
the only way we have to figure out what happens.
Speaker 3 (55:29):
Have you ever read Black Range Tales?
Speaker 2 (55:31):
I don't think so.
Speaker 3 (55:32):
It's a gold miner. He's knocking around New Mexico mostly
eighteen sixties. But one of the things really stuck with
me is here's this guy in the eighteen sixties and
he's talking about basically trying to loot pueblo sites, and
in the eighteen sixties. He's lamenting that all the good
stuff's been hauled away. In the eighteen sixties. He describes
(55:57):
like amazing things that other guys have carried off.
Speaker 2 (56:00):
Yeah right, yeah, well that's that.
Speaker 1 (56:03):
Yeah, absolutely, that's been going on forever. As soon as
those villages, like in the Galiseo Valley were abandoned, there's
no question there were people out there poking around seeing
what they could find.
Speaker 2 (56:14):
Instantly, yeah, just instantly.
Speaker 1 (56:16):
Yeah, And so who knows what all disappeared, but sometimes
really great finds or you know, they remain. And I
mean those Kachina masks that Forest Finn found there in
San Lazarro Pueblo in nineteen ninety two. Man, that's a
you just don't find that stuff in part because nobody
(56:37):
ever leaves it. And something that we don't understand happened
at San Lazaro around fifteen hundred that caused that population
of that town to flee. So suddenly that either some
you know, some magician, some healer, some shaman maybe got
(57:02):
killed and couldn't go for his his goods, or some
attack came so suddenly that everybody just fled. I mean,
so sometimes you get lucky like that, and Forrest got
pretty lucky on that one.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
Yeah, that's it's.
Speaker 3 (57:19):
Like founding finding a modern day house where they didn't
even take their passports.
Speaker 2 (57:23):
Yeah that's right, that's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (57:25):
Well damn man, I'm super excited for the series. I
can't wait to learn all this stuff that's coming.
Speaker 2 (57:29):
So thanks, well thanks to you guys for joining me
with this
Following the collapse of the Grand Chaco and Empire, refugees
founded eight thriving new towns along the Galisteo River of
New Mexico, but ultimately found it difficult to sustain an
arid climate civilization across the next five hundred years. I'm
Dan Flores and this is the American West, brought to
(00:23):
you by Velvet Buck, Crafted for those who live off
the beaten path, where the hunt meets the harvest, and
every glass tells a story. Enjoy responsibly, West of Everything.
(00:57):
Thinking of a podcast about the American West and my
own take on its history has had me trying to
understand recently why the West resonates with us the way
it does. Apologies to New England, New York, the South,
the Midwest, but the West seems to fascinate the world
in a way no other American region can. Why are
(01:18):
their television channels devoted twenty four to seven to playing
seventy five year old Western movies, so a John Wayne
fix is available at just about any sleepless three am.
Why does a contemporary soap opera Western like Yellowstone succeed
with so many people? Why do Germans dress up and
play act being residents of the West on their vacation
(01:40):
weekends in European forest. How does back at the Ranch
Bootstore in Santa Fe sell five thousand dollars cowboy boots
that will never see a stirrup? Why is there a
cowboy poets gathering in Nevada every winter? Why a gene
Autrey Museum in la a Buffalo Bill Historical Museum in Cody,
a National Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City?
Speaker 2 (02:03):
And why?
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Maybe this is the most serious question here, does the
phrase just like the Wild West cause all of us
to imagine entire freedom of action, a whole lack of restraint,
a free for all. Nobody is regulating all that reverence
and fascination for the West happens for good reason, because
(02:24):
of its sunshine and the public lands that provide remarkable
access to the surrounding landscape. The West is a great
place to live in the present, but as we all know,
it's the past of the West that's the key to
its magic. Those of us who live in the West
may love various aspects of the modern world out the door,
but we all absolutely adore the old West, the frontier.
(02:51):
We've absorbed it by watching films by john Ford and
Quentin Tarantino, reading novels by Louis Lamore and Cormac McCarthy,
and histories by Steven Ambrose and Hampton Sides. Of course,
there are many versions of the West, and all of
us have a personal preference for our favorite version. Clearly,
for john Ford or Quentin Tarantino, it's the Cowboy West
(03:14):
of so many hundreds of Western movies.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
For others, it's the West.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Of town building and Wyatt Earp's or Marshall Dillon's imposition
of law and order, or of settlers versus railroads are
the gunfighter stories that Tarantino obviously also loves and loves
to invert. And of course there's the Indian Wars West
of a few hundred movies and a few thousand paintings.
(03:39):
But as a modern Westerner, a writer and historian who
is interested most in the West, remarkable landscapes and animals,
the West that does it for me is one most
people may not think of as iconic. I'm most drawn
to what Western artist Charlie Russell, in one of his
magnificent paintings, called when the Land belonged to God? For me,
(04:04):
the West that speaks to my deepest soul is the
West either side of Lewis and Clark. How the kind
of natural West they saw came to be and lasted
for so long? Plus what has happened to that version
of the West in the centuries since Lewis and Clark
saw it. That's the West I try to understand. To me,
(04:24):
that's the true West, a natural West, one that's west
of everything else. In part, my West is a kind
of a first contact West, a theme of much science
fiction and fascination with exploring places like Mars in the
next few decades. It's about travel to strange places, new
(04:45):
country and new animals, the meeting place of an exotic,
ancient world and modernity. Come to think of it, the
natural West is not only our future on Mars, it's
also our deep past. When modern humans left Africa more
than fi fifty thousand years ago and began to explore
the rest of the Earth, America's West, in many ways,
(05:06):
was a last earthly experience of that first contact moment
in human history when new people's first meet. Everybody experiences
first contact, but usually only one side sees the natural
world as new and exotic, a new world. The resident
people tend to think invasion, and so it is. Yet
(05:29):
all of us have ancestors who bequeathed us more than
twenty thousand years of first contact experiences in North America.
So I think I come by a fascination for stories
like this naturally, and of.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Course so do you.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Those of us who are in love with the natural
West are usually attracted to the world of native people,
to natural landscapes, and to wild animals. Being intrigued by
the native West is self evidently at the core of
Western fascination, judging by the volume and quality of Western
landscape art and the way the Western landscape becomes a
(06:03):
character in so many films. Judging by the number of
Crown Jewel national parks in the West, the same can
be said of the Western landscape. But let's say at
the outset. The West I'm talking about is not synonymous
with the frontier.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
When the Old World came to North America.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Every place on the continent had a frontier, a meeting
point between what existed and what was coming. But the
natural West of which I speak is not defined by
a moment in time a frontier. It's a place, a
region of plains, mountains, and deserts, on the sunset side
of the Mississippi River. The timeframe of the natural West
(06:45):
is not just its frontier stage. The story of this
West is much more ancient, and it also takes place
more recently than the frontier. Because the past does not
remain in the past, but affects us in our own time.
The story of the West continues beyond the frontier and
into the twenty first century. Many of the Western stories
(07:07):
I've written about and will tell in this podcast are
the stories of the West's wildlife, very much an ignored
topic in the West and elsewhere. The cow and the sheep,
and to a certain extent, even the saddled horse, are
the animals we associate with the West of trail driving, ranching,
town building, But I have to observe that not one
(07:27):
of them appears in Charlie Russell's When the Land Belonged
to God. Russell's timeless scene of a bison herd flanked
by gray wolves pouring over a divide in a landscape
we old worlders would one day call Montana implied that
the divine world in the West was a Native America.
(07:49):
So let's start there, but not necessarily at its beginning.
At least not yet. Let's commence our exploration of the
natural West slightly later in time. We'll return to beginnings
in the next episodes with a story that makes the
point that the West is not new, but a very
old place. This story stretches our imaginations, suggests how central
(08:13):
and fragile Western ecologies have always been to human life here,
and illustrates the longevity of the human experience in a
country where reflexively still thinking of as the newest part
of America. On a sun drenched November afternoon, I sit
(08:37):
in t shirt and shorts a few feet from the
edge of a canyon rimrock, looking through four hundred feet
of transparent desert air on a thousand year old city.
My wife Sarah is pulling a bottle of water from
her pack. A few feet away. Various friends are scattered
along rock cairn marked trails through the uplands behind us,
(08:58):
where the faint indentation of ancient highways four hundred miles
of them, extend to horizons miles distant. The whole country
sagebrush uplands, the canyon floor, the enclosing rimrocks, and the
ruins with odd names that lie in every direction below
is a uniform tannish brown, the color of dust or
(09:21):
perhaps the color of abandonment. During the time of the
Crusades in Europe, this spot and another on the east
bank of the Mississippi River just across from today Saint Louis,
held the two largest cities in North America, both religious centers,
(09:42):
with a ceremonial effigy mound of lizards and serpents, and
a stone hinge like circle of upright timbers planted to
mark out soices and equinoxes.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
The city in the Eastern Woods today we call it Kahokia.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Probably held a fairly permanent population of thirty thousand people,
larger than London at that time. I first saw Kahokia
in the early nineteen nineties with a girlfriend who had
Missouri roots and insisted we visit the place. I'd seen mounds,
but never anything on the scale of Monks Mound towering
up out of the American bottoms like an earth and
(10:18):
Chichenitsan pyramid. After three hundred years of urban life, an
earthquake mostly destroyed Kahokia City, but not before its population
had gone through twenty thousand trees and almost all the
wildlife for scores of miles around. As for the city
whose ruins lay below us now either side of ten
centuries ago. From eight hundred AD to eleven forty AD,
(10:42):
it was the Vatican of the American Desert. We call
it Chaco, and it's another of our UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Chaco was the closest Native America ever got to an
empire like those of the Aztecs, Mayans, or Incas. But
this was not an empire of warrior armies and conquered provinces.
(11:03):
It was an empire of priests who organized many thousands
of scattered farming hamlets across fifty thousand square miles of
today's four corners into an economic and religious network. No
European principality of the age matched it. What the priest's
promised was direct intervention with the deities who controlled rain,
(11:23):
crops and animals, those grand imponderables whose presence made life
good and whose absence ruined it. The city of Chaco
housed the priests, their families, and a resident population of thousands.
It stored and distributed surplus crops. Then at solstices and
other special times of year, it hosted grand ceremonies, to
(11:45):
which the outlying residents made holy pilgrimages. At those times,
Choco gathered a population of some forty thousand. Looking down
now on its buildings and avenues, one suspects both the
ceremonies and the nightlife must have been epic. Choco America
almost seems foreign in the modern United States, as if
lifted from the Middle East. The agricultural revolution arrived in
(12:09):
this region thirteen hundred years before the city existed, and
pollen studies indicate this development produced two immediate environmental effects.
Human populations skyrocketed, and crops that needed to be boiled
before you could eat them meant that daily cooking fires
soon reduced a robust pinions juniper woodland to desert. This
(12:30):
became a world in need of priests who could intervene
with the gods. Sitting and admiring the sprawling, hemispheric architecture
of Chaco's largest structure, Pueblo Benito, as its lines and
shadows shimmer in the afternoon sun, I know this is
a place that reveals much about humanity. Sarah passes the
water bottle over to me, and reading my mind, sums
(12:53):
it up.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
It wasn't until the eighteen eighties that anyone built a
larger building than that in America. In its time, the
city lasted longer than Washington, d C. Has so far.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Chaco and its satellite hamlets survive, in fact, for three
hundred and forty years. The shorthand version of its collapse
is that it all ended with a series of droughts
across the Southwest, and that's true, but the many archaeologists
who have interpreted Chaco know that much more happened here.
When the rain stopped coming, the farmers seemed to act abruptly,
(13:30):
dropping their digging sticks in the fields, turning their backs
on the grand religious gatherings at Chaco, and relocating.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Across the southwest.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Some went north to what we now call Mesa Verdi's
Cliff Palace in present Colorado. Most of the people who
abandoned the Chaco and world congregated along the Upper Rio Grand,
eventually founding towns still home to their descendants, the Pueblo peoples,
famous for their apartment like villages, geometrically painted pottery, and
(13:59):
turquoise jewelry. Why did Choco collapse in what sounds.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Like a fit of peak.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
The evidence and ultimately the response of the pueblos afterwards
points to a crisis we should recognize. Down there in
Pueblo Bonito, a single room out of six hundred and
fifty rooms yielded the remains of fourteen people whose funerary
items indicated they represented Chaco's religious and political elites. In
(14:28):
the room were flutes, ceremonial staffs, thousands of pieces of
turquoise jewelry, cont shell trumpets from America's west coast, the
remains of macaw parrots from the tropics, The oldest burial
dated to eight hundred a d. And the last from
Choco's abandonment. So those fourteen span the entire life of
(14:49):
the city, and.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Not just that.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
The genetics of nine of the fourteen showed them to
be descended from the same matrilineal line from a woman
who evidently had been there at Chaco's founding. Disparities in
wealth and quality of life, along with the resentments they produce,
are familiar to modern Americans. Isotope comparisons of the bones
(15:14):
of the priestly class in Choco's great houses with those
of farmers from the villages indicates that the elites consumed
far more protein from the meat of deer and prong horns.
They were better fed, grew almost two inches taller, suffered
less from disease, had three times the survival rate for
children under five, and lived longer. They were also conspicuous
(15:37):
consumers of high status goods, from beautiful pots to copper bells,
from turquoise jewelry to parrots. In the late eighteen hundreds,
an early archaeologist working in Chaco shipped more than seventy
thousand high status items just from Pueblo Benito to the
American Museum of Natural History. The farming class suffered this
(16:00):
gap between rich and poor as long as the elites
delivered on their promise to make it rain. But when
drought came and the priests were powerless to stop it,
the lower classes attacked and killed many in the upper class.
They also embraced a new belief, the Kachina religion. By
the year eleven sixty, massive three story public buildings like
(16:23):
Chetro Kettle, a four hundred room great house in Chako
that was built with fifty million sandstone blocks, twenty six
thousand timbers and extended for four hundred and fifty feet
beneath a canyon wall, stood completely abandoned as for animal
life in the Chacoan region. Diet studies in the collapses
(16:46):
aftermath implied that rabbits and rodents were almost the only
huntable animals left. Their need for protein perhaps explains why
some of the new villages were founded close to the
bison planes. One March afternoon in the early two thousands,
(17:09):
I opened the passenger door of a pickup, stretched out
a hiking boot to the ground, and had one of
those small steps for man moments until I exited that
pickup and began to walk on a surface that spoke,
it crunched, it crinkled. I'd never had the kind of
visceral understanding of America's ancient past I was now experiencing.
(17:33):
I was walking into a place known to Southwestern archaeologists
as the San Lazaro Ruins. With every step, my boots
were landing on broken shards of Indian pottery half a
foot deep. That brought a profound realization. I was walking
on ground that humans long before me had lived on
(17:54):
for some three hundred years. In every direction, the ground
underfoot was a thick, continuous surface of curving, angled, shattered pottery.
The pieces set at all angles and drawing the eye
with painted zigzags and designs in blacks and reds. This
is how the people who lived here seven hundred years
(18:15):
ago must have experienced a stroll around their town. I thought,
it's how the pioneers of archaeology in the West, the
Adolf Bandeliers, the Alfred Kidters and Edgar Hewletts, no doubt
felt the first time they walked across the ruins of
Chaco or Mesa Verdi, or the country I was in now,
the Galistaloe River country south of Santa Fe.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
I was having this experience.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Because I've become friends with a remarkable Santa Fe character
named Forrest Finn. Among many aspects of Finn's world that
seemed more than improbable was that he actually owned the
ground where the ruins of San Lazaro stood. That's why
we were here. He was proudly showing off his possession
of the largest ancestral pueblo village site in the Santa
(19:05):
Fe area. A native Texan and a former Vietnam fighter
pilot who survived being shot down to become a successful
art gallery owner in Santa Fe. Fenn was in his
late seventies. Then his body leaned his silvery hair still
in a military buzz cut.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
When we struck up a friendship, I.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Found him garrulous, hugely energetic, and, despite a slender education,
fiercely opinionated.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
True to his Texas roots.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Those opinions included a hatred for the federal government and
a distrust of educated elites. Although he could occasionally be
impressed by experts, Fenn was as dedicated to Old West
history as fundamentalists are in Old Time religion. His home
came across as a combination museum, archive, and archaeology lab.
(19:56):
He outdid anyone in my experience with his boyish, hucked
finn like romance about Western adventure, which led him to
invest prodigious energy in several seriously crazy projects that made
many people WinCE. One was acquiring and doing amateur excavations
at a major site like San Lazaro. The last of
(20:17):
Forrest's grand ideas, when he was in his eighties, got
him national exposure that wasn't always admiring. He buried a
treasure chest containing more than two million dollars of precious
artifacts from around the world in a secret location in
the West, then self published a book featuring a page
of verse offering clues to its hiding spot. More than
(20:40):
one person died, and untold thousands trecked the West's vast
public lands in search of a treasure that to forest
offered ordinary folks a chance to reprise a classic Old
West opportunity, finding loot and.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Making a mint off nature.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
San Lazaro had once been one of eight major Indian
towns that post Choco spread across the Galiso River near
where Spain would found Santa Fe in the year sixteen ten.
The entire four corners is lousy with the surviving ruins
of advanced farming civilizations that made the Southwest into one
(21:20):
of the most densely lived in parts of North America
a thousand years ago, long before Europeans came here, other
humans hoped and dreamed, lived, loved, and died, and left
their mark on this oldest place in America. In fact,
eight hundred years ago there was a far larger population
(21:41):
of people living in the Galisseo River country than actually
live here. Now that's a claim few other American regions
can make. A great drought in the Southwest, the most
severe one in the past thousand years, was the apparent
approximate cause that brought them here. In a sense, they
(22:01):
were religious refugees fleeing that hereditary religious class that had
insisted they could intervene with the gods to send life
saving rain. So the search for a new center place
led some of the former Choco Puebloans to the beautiful,
wind swept Galisteo Country. Here's what they found. A high
(22:24):
desert with three hundred and twenty days of annual sunshine,
prompting their name for it, placed near the sun, rainfall
that rarely reached to double figures but still made for
green mountains and dwarf forests. A river, albeit small, with
spring fed tributaries sometimes flowing water, sowable ground, sandstone for bricks,
(22:47):
and suitable soil to make adobes. A small mountain range
long known and famous far and wide for its sky
blue stones, ample firewood to boil their crops in the
grassland basin. Bands of striped prong orn antelope, mule deer
in the hills, and elk, sheep and bears in the mountains.
(23:08):
Eagles soaring overhead, packs of gray wolves howling in the night,
Lions slinking through the rocks, and sacred coyotes trotting by
with a quick, sharp eyed look. Crystalline air for watching
the sun's progress along the horizons, nights brilliant with jittering stars,
the steady glow of traveler planets, and the occasional light
(23:31):
that flies. The colonizers spoke two different pueblo and languages,
Tanno and Caresson, so living near one another were bilingual.
They wore garments made from the cotton they grew, and
ornamented themselves with turquoise jewelry. The women wore their dark
hair long, while men affected a bowl cut. They painted
(23:54):
colorful designs on pottery known as Rio Grand glazeware that
frequently included images of parrots or macaus, brilliantly mark birds,
traded up from Mexico and not native to anywhere in
the Southwest. Farm implements they fashioned from fire hardened juniper
arrow points largely from local black obcitian glass, and their
(24:15):
axe blades from an aluminum silica called fiber light. They
mined in the high rockies nearby. Their domestic animals were
dogs and turkeys. Their ancestors had domesticated turkeys around the
year one thousand, when huntable wildlife near their villages declined
and left them protein poor water manipulation and desert agriculture
(24:38):
required cooperative effort, so these were town dwellers. They lived
in apartment like rectangular buildings with flat roofs resting on
massive support beams, with plastered walls, occasionally built of stacked stone,
but more commonly in the Galileo country of puddled dried adobes.
The buildings often were three to five stories, with entrances,
(25:02):
cooking and daily life carried out on the top roof level.
The lower levels accessed by descending ladders into rooms that
featured gleaming, polished floors and walls, often painted with murals.
The buildings commonly grouped around central plazas. The plazas highlighted
circular underground ceremonial rooms known as kivas, with fireplaces, perimeter benches,
(25:28):
and a central hold a sipapu. It was called representing
humanity's point of emergence from a world below into.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
The present world.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
San Lazarro left the largest ruins of all the Galistale villages.
Its ruins cover fifty seven acres and feature the outlines
of twenty seven separate buildings, with one nine hundred and
forty one ground floor rooms and a remarkable total of
five thousand rooms. It was settled around twelve ninety, and,
(26:02):
despite a pair of debilitating droughts in the fourteen hundreds,
continued to grow for two hundred years, when its peak
population was nearly two thousand people. That's six times the
size of any twenty first century Galisteo valley town. By then,
many local resources were likely depleted, and the town was
(26:24):
abandoned in the early fifteen hundreds. The immediate catalyst to
that exodus may have been something dramatic, for in fifteen
eighty one, a Spanish party found the town half destroyed.
Finn's most remarkable San Lazaro discovery, for which he had
the good sense to call in professional archaeologists and native descendants,
(26:44):
came in nineteen ninety two, when he unearthed two plastered
Kachina masks and other stored sacred objects. The magnificent mask
appeared to represent black bears and were likely associated with
a bear clan or Medison society. Various dating techniques placed
the masks a few years on either side of fifteen hundred.
(27:08):
Kachina mask would be one of the most unlikely objects
any Puebloan would ever abandon, whatever happened at San Lazarro
around fifteen hundred must have come on remarkably suddenly when
European colonizers arrived in the early sixteen hundreds and introduced
fulsome news sources of protein. Four thousand sheep and one
(27:31):
thousand goats arrived with those first Spanish settlers. Pueblo people
fully reoccupied San Lazarro before long, though swelling resentment over
having to provide crops and labor, and as Spanish suppression
of the Kachina religion led San Lazaro's warriors to become
leaders in the Great Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty, which
(27:53):
drove the Europeans out of New Mexico for a dozen years.
But the Pueblo citizens were alarmed at the possible consequences
of this that everyone ended up fleeing San Lazaro, leaving
a four hundred year old city to dissolve into silence
and adobe. There were at least seven other similar, long
(28:19):
lived towns in the Galileo country, harboring at various times
several thousand more of these former Chocowans. Several were farther
east and close to the high plains, where they had
to survive a patchy rage after those Athabaskan speakers migrated
in from the far north, but like the townspeople of
San Lazaro, their inhabitants fled soon following the Pueblo Revolt,
(28:42):
when the Spanish absence allowed for even more plains Indian raids,
this time by Comanches thundering their horses through a rim
rock break that still known today as Comanche Gap. The
Spaniards called the westernmost Pueblo town they found than the
Galileo country, San Marcos. It was near a little mountain
(29:04):
range the newcomers named Los Surreals, the little hills that
had been mined since the time of Chaco for lead
use to glaze pottery, and for the ultimate trade item
from the southwest, sky blue turquoise. One thousand years ago,
Indian miners pulled turquoise or out of shafts in a
(29:25):
minor cereals peak called Chalchi Wheedle, the name from the
Aztec language, and a little mountain with an outsized reputation.
An image of this little mountain graces the Temple of
the Sun Pyramid in the Aztec capital of tenoch Teetlin.
I've explored its ancient shafts sum but always with hair
(29:46):
raising alarm and shock at the fearlessness of Indian miners.
The fortunes of these towns flourished and ebbed as the
centuries passed, when they were all occupied with unexploited resources available.
In the thirteen hundreds and fourteen hundreds, the combined population
of these Galileo River towns may have been more than
(30:07):
six thousand, because rainfall was essential for their economy, yet
droughts also strike the Galiseo. They made a science of
cloud and wind study, no doubt hopeful as modern residents
still are when grand anvil headed clouds full of moisture
towered up from the mountain ranges in summertime. Their religion
(30:29):
was less theocratic and more decentralized than at Chaco, and
featured clan leaders dressed in the elaborate costuming representing Kachina emissaries.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
To the deities of nature.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
The Kachina religion lives on among their descendants today, although
none of these towns survives today. Half of these Galiselo
pueblos lasted longer than the United States has existed, but
as is evident from a place like San Lazara, for
all their successes, the Galistale Pueblins struggled with long term sustainability.
(31:07):
The year round fires to boil their crops meant that
firewood cutting and gathering pushed farther out year after year.
One of the first scientists to investigate the ruins of
their towns, Nels Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History,
took a revelatory photograph of the San Lazaro site in
nineteen twelve, one hundred and thirty two years after its abandonment.
(31:31):
That photo showed a still barren landscape, almost entirely stripped
of trees and shrubs, for two miles around. With the
diaspora that followed Chaco's collapse, the new pueblo town of Pecos,
northeast of the Galistaloe country, developed a mutualistic arrangement with
planes hunters to trade Pueblo crop products for dried bison meat.
(31:55):
There's no evidence these Galistdale villages ever managed something similar,
so with eight towns and several thousand residents, huntable wildlife
likely took a significant hit. One bit of evidence comes
from Sand Lazaro's archaeology's astonishing number of bones and skulls,
many of them cracked open to get at marrow or
(32:16):
brains from the goats and sheep Spanish settlers introduced now
the sixteen hundreds. Protein was obviously a dietary addition. The
Galisteo Pueblo residents were avid for. Their several hundred year
inhabitation did leave the incoming Europeans a beautifully grass basin
and valley and a healthy Galisto river that flowed over
(32:39):
the surface of this landscape. The ecological changes that left
exotic weeds and spreading junipers and produced a river that
slashed arroyos and stream beds twenty five feet deep all
came later with pasturage for new spains, horse herds, and
flocks of sheep and goats, and when the Americans came
(33:00):
with millions of cattle and renewed mining in the local mountains.
Beyond walking across the broken pots at San Lazaro, my
own most vivid experience of the lingering presence of this
former Galistal world has come from hiking the remnant lava
(33:21):
dykes that rise like black dragon backbones from the yellow
grasslands here. Centuries ago, my Galistal neighbors lavishly adorned these
lava boulders with petroglyphs, not a handful, not a few dozen,
but with thousands of white outlined images carefully pecked into
the black rock surfaces for capturing some of the essentials
(33:44):
of their world and their presence. Nothing else brings them
to life like these Today we call petroglyphs and pictrographs
rock art, but of course they express a more specific
cosmic meaning than any decorative or narrative art. Picking my
way from boulder to boulder atop these dykes and keening
morning winds, the images have sometimes given me a Sistine
(34:08):
chapel feeling, at other times the open mouth reaction one
has to the Las Vegas Strip. There are elaborately costumed
Kachina figures on these rocks, and having once stood in
freezing December weather in Zuni Pueblo and watched a towering
Shaalako kachina clacking its two foot wooden beak while dancing
(34:29):
a Solstice blessing inside a brand new home, it's hard
for me to separate the sacred from the entertaining in
these images. I also can't help imagining date nights and
holding hands under a full moon, gobsmacked at white visions
leaping out at you from the silvery black. The imagery
(34:49):
is mind bending in variety and detail. There are mythical
creatures like giant horn water serpents, but also real rattlesnakes,
often too in tandem, underbird eagles, badgers, coyotes, bears, all
revered animals the Pueblos preserved. There are gleaming four pointed planets,
an endless variety of different cloud terraces, which is the
(35:13):
home of the Kachina gods, and those appear in conjunction
with water serpents, mountain lions, a woman's nether parts. There
are faces with or without masks. Handprints link these zigzag lines, spirals,
fields of dots, warrior figures protected by circular shields. While
(35:33):
history and their struggles at sustainability mean the Pueblo people
no longer live along the Galisal River, which is my
home today, their descendants.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Remain along the Rio Grande.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Nearby, and I like to go to the annual ceremonies
they open to the public. But like so much of
the human story, the past here and even in Chaco
somehow still seems just out of my grasp. We humans
focus on the moments we exist in touching the past
is the forever problem of history.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
I'm Steve Vanella. I'm joined here by Randall Williams. Hello,
(36:30):
and we're gonna do a little thing where after we
listen to Dan Florey's American West podcast, we get to
come in. We have the privilege we get to come
in and ask questions and hopefully for you listeners, some
of the questions we asked might reflect some of the
questions that you have and maybe we'll do a little
thing or if you have questions, yeah, we will do this.
(36:51):
Send your questions in and at some point we'll send
your questions and at some point we'll be able to
round up with Dan and get your questions answered. But
in the meantime, here's our questions.
Speaker 4 (37:00):
And this is very familiar to us as former students
of dance, so exactly.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah, thanks to you guys for doing this, by the way,
really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
Oh, it's great. You got you want to start.
Speaker 4 (37:15):
Yeah, I think in the start of this episode you're
talking about many wests, and there's certain wests that have
you know, lived on and on and pop culture, especially
for Americans living in the twenty first century. But you
(37:37):
kind of challenge people to understand the West as a
much larger place than the West of cowboys and Indians
and of overland trails and everything like that. So I wonder,
what is it about the West that seems to have
grabbed a hold of our imaginations, and what has particular
(38:00):
about cowboy culture that's grabbed our imaginations? And then what
do we gain by opening our eyes to through the
deep time West.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Yeah, So I'm putting together a podcast here, twenty six
episodes on it that will be about different kinds of
things than most people think of when they think of
Western history. They're no gunfights, they are no mining strikes,
(38:33):
there's no Marshall Dylon. What I'm interested in is a
different kind of West. And I think this is maybe
the value of something like this, a part of the
Western story that's not really been known or written about
very much, and certainly not in pop culture portrayed so
that people get to understand it. And what that West
(38:55):
is is something I call the natural West, which is
it's a West of the native people. It's a West
of wildlife, abundance beyond imagining for wildlife and many, many
different species, and it's a story of the West. That
(39:19):
really hinges a lot of around kind of an initial
reaction to a place that's different, new, and very unfamiliar
to people coming out of the East in particular. I mean,
I think people coming up, say from Mexico into New
Mexico or California, don't see the West as being that different.
(39:43):
Their usual reaction to the country farther north is that
it's cold.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
But it's similar.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
That's an interesting point, man.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yeah, that's how they that's how they characterize it. Man,
it's really cold.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
There kind of got similar thing going on as cold.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Yeah, the country looks the same, but man, it's cold.
But what I'm kind of interested in is the deep
time story all the way back to the Pleistocene and
the earliest people who were here and how they interacted
with Western animals, because we have some pretty epic alterations
(40:20):
that take place in this story. I mean, we lose
a lot of animals ten thousand years ago. Then we
have a period where we go for ten thousand years
in the West and it looks as if native people
in particular are pretty benevolent. I mean, there's only one
extinction during that time period, and I try to try
(40:40):
to figure out why that is how it happened that way,
and then a lot of the rest of the episodes
have to do with a kind of an exploratory first
contact experience from people like Lewis and Clark, for example,
and a whole host of people later in the nineteenth century,
and also with what transpires in a West in the
(41:05):
nineteenth century with all this abundant wildlife where there are
really no rules, no regulations. It's just kind of a
free for all, and pretty much what you would predict
for a free for all, things don't turn out all
that great for a lot of the animals, and of
course a lot of.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
The native people either.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
But it's those stories in contrast to Marshall Dillon and
town building and the California gold Rush, the Mormon settlement
of Utah, these are the things that I've been writing about.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
For thirty five years.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Basically, I never was interested much because other people had
already done it to write about the mining rushes or
the Indian Wars. I was always looking for something different
and new to write about that I thought would sort
of tell us story that nobody quite knew yet. And
(42:05):
that's really what this podcast does.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
This there's the thing I've wondered about there's an impression
I have unsourced material about source material east versus West
source material, and you might not share the same impression.
But if you have this impression, maybe you can speak
to it would be this is a very roundabout way
(42:29):
of arriving at the point. But when Rand and I
were reading about the long hunters, so this this group
of Euro American deer skin hunters that were first pushing
over the apple Achian Mountains and going into Kentucky, basically
the country south of the Ohio River, west of the
apple Aachian Range, south of the Ohio pushing into that area,
(42:52):
and we kind of marvel at the paucity of materials
and the and the the lack of sort of like
the lack of natural observation, the lack of nature observation.
What is there was collected like very deliberately by a
historian who went and talked to some of the key players, children, spouses,
(43:15):
grandchildren and try to put together a little history of
these first euro Americans to push into this area. But
there's just not a ton there. And that is at say,
seventeen seventy six. Yeah, what happens that when you get
what happens in the next thirty forty years where all
(43:36):
of a sudden it seems like everyone is so literate. Yeah,
and everyone is just observing and writing about trying to
you know, writing about the sites they see, counting things right,
like really putting a record down. Then now you can
look at the West, and part of what's so inviting
about it is there something, there's something there to read about. Yeah,
(44:01):
and it's really hard to get Like you just when
looking at people coming into Kentucky again for instance, coming
into Kentucky, it's like there's hints of things where you're like,
you gather it must have been really different, but there's
no just vivid pictures of what they're seeing. Did people
also learn to read and write? Like, like, how do
(44:22):
you how do you explain that?
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Well?
Speaker 1 (44:25):
I explained it in three ways, I guess. One is
that starting in eighteen hundred, a lot of the expeditions
into the West, or government expeditions, and those people are
giving given specific instructions to keep a record, keep a
really close record. I mean, Jefferson tells Lewis and Clark,
for example, you know, any animals that you see that
(44:47):
aren't found in the maritime states, collect them, write a description,
learn them as much about their natural history as you can.
And I think that's one of the things. I think
another thing is that there are a lot of Europeans
coming over in the early nineteenth century. The Thomas Nuttalls,
(45:07):
the John Bradberry's and those guys tend to look at
darkest North America sort of the way the Brits were
looking at Africa. Then where Wow, man, this is some
amazing part of the world that none of us has
ever seen. And so we got to keep a record
(45:29):
of all of it. We've got to, you know, we've
got to preserve what it looks like. And I think
really there was an actual market.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
For literary work about the West.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Starting around probably as early as eighteen ten. And I
think the you know, the Nicholas Biddle Journals of the
Lewis and Clark Expedition, which came out in eighteen fourteen.
Speaker 2 (45:56):
I mean, those things sold like hotcakes in the East,
and I.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
Think that made people understand that, wow, okay, all I
gotta do is go out to the West, you know,
and write some account. And it even led to I mean,
and I have found two or three of these what
were basically made up accounts by people who never actually
went to the West, but they talked to people and
(46:22):
read other people's stuff and sat down and wrote an
account of their own journey.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
Like it was enough of a thing that there's value
in faking one.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
Yes, there was, and you could sell a faked book.
There's one particular guy, a guy named John Mayley, who
wrote a faked book about an expedition he took up
the Red River, and he sold it for like five
thousand dollars or something, which, of course at the time
was a huge sum of money. But the publisher he
(46:53):
sold it to broke in the panic, the Depression of
eighteen nineteen, and they never did publish it. So it
kind of exists just as a manuscript which I have
actually examined and examined closely enough to realize bullshit.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
This guy did not do any of this.
Speaker 3 (47:10):
But man, like, it's off your subject matter. But can
you just imagine that if a century prior to Lewis
and Clark you to have taken people with that mandate
and that skill set, and you had said, I want
you to cross over the range divide, I want you
to descend the Ohio decend the Mississippi, come back overland, yeah,
(47:34):
trace or whatever, and like do your thing, like right
down about all this stuff, right down about all of it.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Yeah, you have to.
Speaker 4 (47:42):
I mean in that era, you really have to sort
through what material there is to get glimpses of the
natural world. And obviously there's a literature from the earlier
colonial period.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Of you know, English gentlemen.
Speaker 4 (48:00):
Yeah, I mean it doesn't William Bartram kind of very
it reads is very sort of pre modern, not in
the technical sense, but pre modern. I mean it's very
It's like.
Speaker 3 (48:11):
Yeah, you read that's true. You read like the account
of Kabe's a Devaka. It feels like it's like an
extended acid trip. You know, like you're kind of like, what, really,
there's no way, I mean, that's you kind of like
it doesn't paint a vivid picture. And I think that
something you're right, Like, something happened linguistically where we got
over this hump and all of a sudden you can
(48:33):
understand what people are talking about.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's that a market emerged for it.
There was a market, you know, America where we're interested
in possibilities for making money, and here was this wild
new country that everybody around the world, including all the Europeans,
were really intrigued by, And so people began to realize, well, hell,
(48:58):
I just you know, I try to I try to
keep notes.
Speaker 2 (49:01):
Maybe I embellish a little bit.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
Even, And so I think that's kind of one of
the explanations for what happens starting about eighteen hundred and
eighteen ten, that suddenly you start getting a lot more
primary source accounts. You have to use them, you know,
with a grain of salt.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
Sometimes.
Speaker 3 (49:21):
I wasn't really aware of that, man, and you turned
me on to that to be suspicious. In studying writing,
we'd always in studying fiction writing, we always learned about
the the unreliable narrator as a fictional device, right like
you're reading a novel and the reader sort of becomes
(49:42):
aware like that part of the thing is not to
trust the narrator, which is common in movies and other stuff,
right like it's built, it's built intension. I never thought
of it in historical journals. I never thought of it.
And I had read Tough Trip through Paradise, and I'd
emailed you or ran in to you whatever it was,
and asked you about tough trip through Paradise. I remember
(50:03):
you said basically, you know, be careful. He plays a
little I think he said something. He gets a little
fast and loose, and some of the things don't quite
add up, and I just read it like gospel.
Speaker 1 (50:14):
Yeah, you know, well, I think one is inclined to
do that until you began to realize that. You know,
the classic one in the West is the account of
James Ohio Patty, who you know. I mean that book
was probably published ten different times in the nineteenth century,
and so there are a bunch of different versions.
Speaker 2 (50:32):
He changed him up.
Speaker 3 (50:33):
Wait, we quote him, and had been warned about him, now,
but we quote him.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
Yeah, he's got some good some good details. Yeah, he
does have some good details.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
And I mean, who knows what I think, for example,
with people like that, like Patty and maybe like John Maylee,
is they actually did I think Melee knew enough to
convince me that he had talked to people, he had talked.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
To people who knew about it.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
But when he started going up the Red River and
started describing the landmarks, I mean I could tell by
the time you got to about the third or fourth day,
this guy ain't nowhere on any red rivers that.
Speaker 2 (51:09):
Existed then or now. I mean, so it was.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
You know, it's a market for stuff and it produces
a huge abundance of material to use, but somehow you
have to be careful.
Speaker 3 (51:21):
I'm reading one right now. It's like sixty years. It's
a guy that wound up in Montana, wound up having
he had a trading for it. He had a trading
post in Missoula for a while. Can't member's name. Sixty years,
a fighter and trader or something. And a lot of
the stuff in there. There's a lot of stuff in
there where you read it and you're like you accept
(51:44):
as legit. Like some of the observations are ways they
use things right, like little tricks of the trade. You're like,
that has to come from a level of knowledge. But
other parts of it, you know, he's talking about I
sent Randall passage about Sharp's Buffalo rifles, and Randall's like
they didn't exist, So he's a mystery later he's misremembering whatever,
(52:05):
you know. I mean, he's like he feels like he
had one at a time when he didn't actually have
before Christian made a rifle. Yeah, but here's the thing,
like my man fought in World War Two. Okay, my
dad's long. Dad, my dad fought in World War Two.
I could tell you he told me about getting and
carrying around with him a Thompson submachine gun. Right now,
(52:25):
I could go and put down like my dad was
in World War two and had a Thompson sub machine gun.
And he might be like, well, no, no, no, I didn't
have it there. I had it later. But you know
what I mean, Like like I just remember war Thompson
submachine gun, and you can see someone later just out
of expediency bleeding it together, just putting it all in there,
and then someone later saying that that couldn't have been true. Yea,
(52:47):
he wouldn't have had it.
Speaker 2 (52:48):
He don't know.
Speaker 3 (52:49):
He couldn't have had it at Anzio. He could have
had it later in France, but he wouldn't have had
it at Anzio.
Speaker 1 (52:54):
Well, it becomes these kinds of things become even more
difficult when you're dealing like with in this particular or
podcast with the people in Shako, where we have no
written accounts. All we have to go on is archaeology
and material culture objects and so and now genetics. Obviously,
(53:17):
that story about the the fourteen people who are all
related to one another buried in a single room in Puebloo.
That makes the whole story of telling the deep time
history of the West even more difficult, because now you
don't really have you may have, I mean, and I
have used them this way. There are great coyote stories
(53:38):
going back thousands of years, and I have occasionally used
a coyote story associated with a particular group that I
think would make a point about them. But that's literally
the only kind of storytelling you get. It's oral history,
and so you have to you have to approach things
(54:00):
that way, as you know, really carefully.
Speaker 3 (54:04):
But that's where my that's where my observation, I guess,
falls apart because I was talking about the vivid descriptions,
but when it comes to the Pueblo site, some of
the ancient Pueblo sites, here's these really these guys doing
really vivid descriptions, and they're stumped.
Speaker 2 (54:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (54:20):
The vivid description is of someone being like, what in
the hell happened here?
Speaker 2 (54:24):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (54:24):
You know what I mean, it's not even like a
vivid they're just describing being awestruck by what they see
as a ruin.
Speaker 1 (54:31):
Yeah, So what we're grappling with then is you know,
so people got into Chaco in the eighteen fifties for
the first time, eighteen fifties, eighteen sixties, and so we've
essentially got one hundred and seventy years of archaeological speculation.
And so the way you try to figure it out
as you sort of track that story through to hopefully
(54:54):
the most recent versions of well, here's what it kind
of looks like what happened. But that kind of evidence
is never quite as fool proof as Lewis and Clark
saying today, for the first time we saw and shot
a buffalo.
Speaker 2 (55:09):
Yeah, yeah, So the.
Speaker 1 (55:13):
Story of the West when you go back in time
is based on a kind of an evidentiary base that
you have to even be more careful with, but it's
the only way we have to figure out what happens.
Speaker 3 (55:29):
Have you ever read Black Range Tales?
Speaker 2 (55:31):
I don't think so.
Speaker 3 (55:32):
It's a gold miner. He's knocking around New Mexico mostly
eighteen sixties. But one of the things really stuck with
me is here's this guy in the eighteen sixties and
he's talking about basically trying to loot pueblo sites, and
in the eighteen sixties. He's lamenting that all the good
stuff's been hauled away. In the eighteen sixties. He describes
(55:57):
like amazing things that other guys have carried off.
Speaker 2 (56:00):
Yeah right, yeah, well that's that.
Speaker 1 (56:03):
Yeah, absolutely, that's been going on forever. As soon as
those villages, like in the Galiseo Valley were abandoned, there's
no question there were people out there poking around seeing
what they could find.
Speaker 2 (56:14):
Instantly, yeah, just instantly.
Speaker 1 (56:16):
Yeah, And so who knows what all disappeared, but sometimes
really great finds or you know, they remain. And I
mean those Kachina masks that Forest Finn found there in
San Lazarro Pueblo in nineteen ninety two. Man, that's a
you just don't find that stuff in part because nobody
(56:37):
ever leaves it. And something that we don't understand happened
at San Lazaro around fifteen hundred that caused that population
of that town to flee. So suddenly that either some
you know, some magician, some healer, some shaman maybe got
(57:02):
killed and couldn't go for his his goods, or some
attack came so suddenly that everybody just fled. I mean,
so sometimes you get lucky like that, and Forrest got
pretty lucky on that one.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
Yeah, that's it's.
Speaker 3 (57:19):
Like founding finding a modern day house where they didn't
even take their passports.
Speaker 2 (57:23):
Yeah that's right, that's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (57:25):
Well damn man, I'm super excited for the series. I
can't wait to learn all this stuff that's coming.
Speaker 2 (57:29):
So thanks, well thanks to you guys for joining me
with this
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com