September 9, 2025 • 63 mins
When Lewis & Clark saw the West in the first years of the 1800s it still preserved the healthy biodiversity of Native-managed ecologies in place for 10,000 years. Within thirty years, everything had changed. Americans arrived in the West with religious traditions that taught animals were created solely for human use. And they introduced an economic system that made western animals commodities in a global market, an economy that snagged Native people in the trade and created the first American millionaires. By 1840 ancient western ecologies evolved around sea otters, fur seals, beavers and many other species were collapsing in both the interior and on the coasts. For some the period produced romantic figures like the mountain men. Witnessing such destruction, however, even some of their peers saw the casual loss of the ancient West very differently.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Following the arrival of the global market economy in the
West in the early eighteen hundreds, important elements of the
biodiversity preserved by thousands of years of native management collapsed
in little more than three decades with exploitation of animals
that snared Native people, working class Americans, and produced the
(00:22):
country's first millionaires. I'm Dan Florries, and this is the
American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in barrel,
Velvet Buck arrives this summer just in time for the
season that calls us home. A portion of every bottle
supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters
(00:44):
and wildlife enjoy responsibly start of the endgame for the
ancient West. In the year nineteen sixty seven, a famed
(01:14):
American painter named Thomas Hart Benton laid down on canvas
perhaps the most poignant painting about the trajectory of the
nineteenth century American West any Western artist has produced. Benton
based Lewis and Clark at Eagle Creek on an eighteen
oh five account in the Explorer's Journals, and in a
further nine to reality on an actual place. The painting
(01:37):
dramatically captures all the hues and lines and rhythms of
the white cliffs of today's Upper Missouri River breaks National Monument.
But what makes Benton's canvas one of the West's great
paintings is not his use of explorer journals or his
abstract rendering of a well known Western locale. Instead, it's
the story the painting tells.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
In Lewis and.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Clark at Eagle Creek, the west of the previous ten
thousand years yet exists, and it looms over the arriving
Americans who appear a minor blip in the timeline of
a world that's impossibly ancient. That sense of a timelessness,
carried by a sensuous river amid the forms and colors
(02:22):
of immense space, dwarf any foreboding about the old world.
Having discovered this remote interior piece of the continent. Now
let the mind leap a quarter century ahead in time
from Lewis and Clark. When the decade of the eighteen
thirties dawns, A calm, confident American West has somehow contracted,
(02:45):
in both size and grand promise, the Western world that
had Lewis and Clark marveling, built by one hundred centuries
of native inhabitation and a magnificent diversity and abundance of
wild animals had been intact when the explorers past Eagle Creek.
But the eighteen thirties is the decade when any resistance
(03:05):
to high speed change becomes forever futile. For the West,
vastness and abundance were both shrinking. As the fame Maximilian
Bodmer expedition on the Missouri River documented so well, the
bigger world was beginning to rush. In history doesn't remain
(03:27):
in the past, so it's not a special insight to
realize that no time exists apart from what went before
or after human cause. Climate change hasn't popped into existence
in our twenty first century with no advanced warning, and
what we do about it or don't do, will likely
affect us and the planet for centuries to come. Still,
(03:50):
there are decades in the human story, the nineteen sixties,
for instance, when civil rights of all kinds, ecological concerns,
and a growing mistrust of war that do stand as
exceptional for North America west of the Mississippi River, and
especially for the region's environmental story. The long eighteen thirties decade,
(04:12):
which in truth spanned the years from the eighteen twenties
through the early eighteen forties was one of those exceptional
and memorable times. With his arrival, a West that had
been relatively quiescent for thousands of years was morphing into
something new so rapidly it shocked many who witnessed it.
(04:35):
Stories about the West, as we know have long dazzled world,
from Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West of more than a
century ago to today's Yellowstone The West stories fascinate because
they offer up an endemic world to human design, despite
our lingering romance for eighteen thirties accounts of mountain men
(04:55):
are the overlanders on the Oregon Trail. However, the West
ecological stories have never made much of a dent in
our historical memory of the region and its frontier. Nonetheless,
much of what happened in the Classic West actually centered
around an extensive ecological destruction of the West, Lewis and
Clark saw. The truth is that stories like the ones
(05:17):
that follow in this episode were central to Western history
and to the freedom of action we intitively associate with it.
To my mind, stories like this reveal important things that
romance about a kick Carson or a Narcissa Whitman obscures
from the big picture in roughly chronological order. Then consider
(05:38):
how these stories about Western ecologies offer a different way
to see the West in the early nineteenth century. At
the start of the eighteen thirty decade, the prevailing notion
about the West had been captured by the American Exploring
expedition led by Stephen Long, which in eighteen nineteen and
(05:59):
eighteen twenty had crossed the Great Plains to the Rocky
Mountains of Colorado. Intriguingly, Long's party was convinced that the
ancient quiescent world that scene was still the best future
for the West. The region they explored was almost wholly
unfit for cultivation, they claimed, and peculiarly adapted as arranged
(06:20):
for Buffalo's wild goats and other wild game and incalculable multitudes. Thus,
the West was best left as a frontier, which by
no means implied, however, that they believed the West should
be left untouched or to the native people or Spanish settlers.
That was because the American idea of a frontier rested
(06:43):
on the recent history of the Atlantic seaboard, the South
and the Mississippi valley. All these had initially functioned as
wild lands exploited for their animal.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Wealth four centuries ago.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Religion was the ultimate explanation of all things for almost
all humans. Like Native peoples, Europeans in America generally understood
animals in supernatural terms, but for Europeans the terms were
their own. Our colonial ancestors most certainly didn't regard animals.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
As close kin the way native people did.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
For them, only humans were godlike and exceptional.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
But European religions did.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Argue that all animals had a divine origin, which meant
they had existed unchanged since their moment of creation. That
meant that no animal species had ever disappeared in the past,
nor could any species ever.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Disappear now or in the future.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Extinction, in other words, was impossible in a divinely created world.
The Bible was the primary source for settler ideas about
the animals they found in America, but European views about
animals actually went back farther into.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Old World history.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
It's hard to say just how far back. The Greeks
are an obvious reference, but it's difficult not to suspect
that much of Greek knowledge may have come from preliterate times.
Plato and Aristotle likely were codifying into written form ideas
that many generations of earlier Eurasians had thought.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
First.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Plato and Aristotle began with an essential premise, though there
must be a deity, an invisible reality now missing in action,
who had created the earth and everything on it. Plato
investigated a critical distinction in this idea, that humans were
earthy and animal like, but clearly separate from other animals.
(08:47):
The explanation for that separation must lie in a difference
between us and them Ergo, an invisible and individual spirit
in humans that permitted us a connection to the des
looking at the orderliness and beauty around him. Aristotle's contribution
was to sketch out that order into one of the
(09:08):
most important intellectual ideas in Western thought. He called it
the Great Chain of Being, with all divinely created life
occupying descending links in the chain arranged in descending order
of perfection. Perfection translated into how useful a particular species
was to humans. You can say that for two thousand
(09:32):
years in.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
One part of the Earth at least, this.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Became a deeply internalized imagining of how the world worked.
It was a big reassuring idea. The vast majority of
Europeans who migrated to the Americas in the sixteen hundreds
brought with them a Middle Eastern herding culture's book, the Bible,
that answered any questions they had about their proper relationship
(09:57):
with animals. At the beginning of the Old Testament, Genesis
one twenty eight, God gives Adam on behalf of humanity,
dominion over everything that lives. In Genesis nine two and three,
the Sacred Book goes on to say, the fear of
you and the dread of you shall be upon every
(10:18):
beasts of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air.
Into your hand are they delivered. The next line, every
moving thing that liveth shall be meet for you was
the Judaeo Christian stamp of approval on self interested human
use of animals. Genesis one twenty seven clarified things even further.
(10:43):
God had made humans and no other creatures on earth
in his own image, giving humans something that set us
apart from all the rest of creation, an immortal soul
that promised life after death. It was an easy mitelection size, then,
for Europeans to settle on the soul as the possession
(11:05):
that made for human exceptionalism.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
There was also.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Something else new in the West, an argument for self
interest whose British author Adam Smith had presented to the
world the very year the US was born, seventeen seventy six.
Smith's argument for capitalism rested atop a colonial economic system
evolving into what we now call the global market. So
(11:32):
by the early eighteen hundreds, the West's soulless wild animals
were now in the sights of an economic system that
for two hundred years had been converting American animals into
market commodities. In this system, ancient ecological relationships had no meaning.
Animals had no meaning beyond satisfying the desires of people
(11:55):
who killed them and others who made animal skins into
leather or use fur or tea their claws to make
statements about human fashions or status among peers. This was
an economy that made some who dealt in wild animals
very wealthy, our first millionaires. It also supported a colonial
working class. Some of those workers the new Americans, but
(12:16):
many of them natives who often did very well for
themselves killing animals for the trade. The West turn in
this system was now under way, and one of the
places it hit early was along the Pacific coasts. Here
sea otters and fur seals were attracting a frenzied exploitation
(12:37):
by the fur hunters of the US and several European nations.
Another was along interior rivers like the Missouri and Arkansas,
where beavers and many other species of fur bearers were
becoming the targets as agents of the American Fur Company,
the Missouri Fur Company and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company
(12:58):
established trading and rendezvous fairs.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
The global market.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Economy had long offered America's native people a metalware firearm
technology that transformed their cultures if they would participate in it.
Despite warnings from some of their religious leaders, most native
people found it impossible to.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Resist this new wave.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
If you did, you profoundly disadvantaged yourself among other tribes
that did create market ties. This wholesale change in the
world was now come to the West, and the region
quickly became a different place. A level of exploitation that
hadn't happened in ten thousand years was at hand, and
(13:44):
it would not be pretty. When Lewis and Clark spent
their winter at the mouth of the Columbia River, the
global economy's unquenchable appetite for America's animals was already a
presence on the Pacific coast. The prize the Pacific beaver
(14:04):
was the sea otter. Otters frequented the shorelines from Japan
to the Aleutians and down the Pacific coast to Baja
California in numbers that seemed large, although there were probably
fewer than three hundred thousand across their range. As ships
from Boston and New York began showing up on the
(14:24):
West coast, words spread among satyrs of several nations that
prime sea otter pelts had sold for one hundred and
twenty dollars apiece in China. One American trader said the
fur of the sea otter was so luxurious in the
hand two point six million hairs per square inch, that
(14:45):
accepting a beautiful woman and a lovely infant, it.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Was the most extraordinary thing on earth.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Like humans, like wolves, sea otters are keystone carnivores. Ancient
eCos systems had formed around sea otter predation, and so
long as the six foot long otters were present, the
ecosystems held together and possibly appealing, these one hundred pound
(15:13):
members of the family Mastilla day, which includes wolverines, badgers,
and weasels, evolved as hunters of fish and sea urchins
in shallow shoreline celt beds. Otters kept those kelp forests
healthy by devouring as many as one thousand sea urchins
a day. Just as we are, sea otters are tool users.
(15:39):
At some point in their evolution, otters developed a culture
utilizing rocks of a certain size and shape to break
open the shells of their prey. There were even variations
handed down among regional populations, some otters making do with
a single rock, others using two at once.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Tools were critical.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
As hunters of cold position shorelines, sea otters need to
consume as much as twenty five percent of their weight
in food daily to stay warm. Important to what befell
them is that they do not become sexually mature until
they are several years old, bear only a single pop
at a time, and sometimes spend a year without producing offspring.
(16:21):
In prime feeding grounds, undisturbed otter colonies can increase their
numbers by twenty percent a year no more. By the
turn of the nineteenth century, they were undergoing an extreme disturbance.
In seventeen seventy eight, the global traveler English explorer James
(16:42):
Cook sail the shores of Oregon and Washington to Vancouver Island,
finding Native peoples who rush to his ships with otter skins,
hoping to trade for any kind of metal, even nails.
The next year, after Pacific Islanders killed Cook in a
shallow bay of the Big Eye in Hawaii, his men
sold twenty of those pelts for forty dollars apiece in Canton, China.
(17:07):
That wasn't one hundred and twenty dollars, but it was
good enough. The American Robert Gray happened on the mouth
of the Columbia River and traded for otter and seal
furs up and down the West Coast. The very next year.
After circumnavigating the planet, Gray would return to Boston in
seventeen ninety, having sold his hall in China for an
(17:28):
astonishing twenty one thousand dollars the equivalent of seven hundred
and twenty five thousand dollars today. At that point, the
Great Otter First Seal Rush was on a destruction of nature,
contemplated today with profound unease, although it was clearly conducted
without any sentiment whatsoever at the time, it took the
(17:51):
Russian Garrisene privle Off just two years seventeen eighty six
and seventeen eighty seven to kill seven thousand otters and
obliterate every last one on the islands now named for him.
That was made possible by biological first contact. Most otters
and fur seals had never seen a human before. They
(18:13):
were trusting and tame, and with no empathy for living creatures.
The hunters violated their innocence when Russia's professional fur hunters,
the pro Mishlniki, descended on America in the wake of
these reports, they added the next horrifying step, the force
conscription of the Alutes and other native peoples into an
(18:34):
animal killing labor force, as had happened in the East.
On the mainland, a lucrative exchange of furs for metal
technology could seduce native people into killing animals for the market,
but Russian traders lacked goods of sufficient quality to pull
that off, so they resorted to subterfuge, sometimes kidnapping family
(18:55):
members to force native men to pursue otters for them.
If in eighteen hundred, naturalists or American presidents doubted extinction
was possible by eighteen twenty, the fallacy of that position
was becoming all too clear, first in the East and
the south, now on the Pacific coast. North America was
(19:18):
losing its animals at a frightening rate. Hunters from several
nations wiped out otter and fursial colonies with a speed
no one could hold in the mind. Demand in China
seemed insatiable, and while otters lasted, American ship captains unloading
twenty thousand skins a year there in search of laborers
(19:39):
to harvest the otters farther south. In eighteen twelve, American
ship captains invited Alexander Baranoff of the Russian American Company
to send allut hunters down the California coast, with Americans
hauling the take to China and splitting the profits with
the Russian trappers. In the the next act, Yankee sealers
(20:02):
slaughtered more than seventy three thousand fur seals on the
Farallone Islands off San Francisco Bay. That got their Russians
attention and led them to establish their famous trading posts
and fort at Bodega Bay, from which their conscripted native
laborers killed eighty thousand animals in just one season, but
(20:25):
the seals were so tame and numerous that no native
labor force proved really necessary. Using clubs or knives, European
and American seal hunters murdered the animals themselves, stripped off
the pelts, and left the discarded carcasses to seabirds, condors, coyotes,
and bears, then sold the pelts for a dollar apiece
(20:46):
in China, less desirable and more numerous than otters. First
seals lasted along the Pacific coasts into the eighteen forties,
but otters were so pursued and their colonies so stated
that by the eighteen twenties there weren't enough left for
hunters to justify chasing down the final few, and that
(21:08):
saved them. One of gorg Steller's few discoveries, the Pleistocene giant,
now known as the Stellar's sea cow, had the unhappy
distinction of being the first of these specific creatures the
hunters pushed into total extinction. Sea cows were gone by
seventeen sixty eight, and if the agents of the market
(21:31):
could easily have located them, their other targets would have
followed suit. But tiny remnants of otters and fur seals
at least remained alive in a few hidden inconvenient spots
the hunters missed. Now that same pattern rooted in our
predatory evolution and released afresh by market self interest was
(21:54):
about to play out.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
In the Inland West.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Like most of us, I live in the valley of
a river. It's called the Rio Galisteo, a stream that
runs sometimes and seeps into the sands most of the time,
just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Galisteo is
no grand water course, but it does string a cottonwood
corridor through the high desert, and the celebrated American naturalist
(22:29):
Aldo Leopold once used it as an example of how
waterways were ruined when Europeans brought their domestic stock to
the West. Leopold told the story of a drunken immigrant
who in eighteen forty nine was able to walk across
the Rio Galistaeo successfully on a twenty foot board plank.
(22:51):
Yet in the twentieth century, he wrote, the Galisteo had
sliced its stream bed into so many eroded gullies known
as a royos, that a drunk wouldn't stand a snowball's
chance of making the far bank. In many places, a
twentieth century plank across the Rio Galisteo would have to
span two hundred and fifty feet of torn up stream bed.
(23:16):
I've little doubt the cow and the sheep made their
contribution to this ecological set piece. But I also know
the nationalists arrived too late in New Mexico to see
what else had happened here.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
In an earlier time.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Heading on the flanks of Thompson Peak in the Southern Rockies,
the Galistaalo was one of the streams the Western trappers
we call mountain men, pit clean of beavers in the
eighteen twenties. Drawn to the southern Mountains in the wake
of Mexico's success throwing off Spanish rule, then the Republic
of Mexico's opening of the Southwest to outside trade. Trappers
(23:53):
from the States began to operate out of Santa Fe
and Taos shortly after eighteen twenty one. They fanned out
across the mountains all the way to the high parks
of Colorado, and they made astonishingly quick work of every
beaver colony they could find. One party of trappers cashed
in fifty thousand dollars in New Mexico Firs in Saint
(24:16):
Louis in eighteen thirty one, local authorities tried to control
the carnage with a law banning non resident trapping.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
The Americans ignored it.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
By eighteen thirty two, trappers were even scouring the nearby
high plains in their rush to deep.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Beaver every last trickle of water.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Set aside for a moment, the predictability of it, all
the deaths of wild animals in return for a brief
few years of profits, and take the long view. As
it had done in the East, Beaver removal in the
West abruptly terminated millennia of hydraulic engineering. A world where
(25:00):
beavers had turned Western rivers into ribbons of damned ponds
and year round water storage now yielded to flashing runoffs
that cut gullies and arroyos in places like New Mexico.
Leopold may have blamed sheep and cows, but the destruction
of the West beavers also appears visible on the land
(25:22):
even two centuries later, along with the practical extinction of
bison in the while the extirpation of millions of beavers
in just three short decades is at least an event
modern Americans recall from the West's slaughter house century eighteen
twenty to nineteen twenty. The Western beaver hunt was merely
(25:45):
an extension of beaver mania that had gathered momentum from
the time of Henry Hudson. But by the time the
beaver trade moved west, the US was already giving it
a peculiarly American cast. In neighboring Canada, the British Crown
planned and regulated the fur trade, granting a government sanctioned
(26:06):
monopoly to the Hudson's Bay Company right next door to
the US. This offered lessons in efficiency, decent treatment of
the labor force, and even some conservation of the target animals.
But back in seventeen sixty three, King George's similar attempts
to regulate wild animals in the American colonies had infuriated everyone.
(26:29):
For Virginia and New York, the American approach to market
capitalism was too freewheeling an anti regulation to be patient
with a setup like Canada's, so America went for no
market planning beyond the natural laws of Adam Smith capitalism.
In that clear space, the country's first big business enterprise,
(26:53):
immigrant John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company made a heroic
effort to dominate the fur trade by out competing everyone else.
The son of a butcher in the German town of Waldorf,
Johann Jacob, arrived in America in seventeen eighty three, after
first spending a stretch in London mastering English. In eighteen
(27:17):
oh eight, Astre founded the American Fur Company and began
his quest to control the fur market. He built and
supplied trading posts, first in the Great Lakes Country, then
in the West. Vying with Astro's behemoth was a myriad
of small private enterprises. They were eager and could wreak
havoc on animals, but weren't always professionally run. One of
(27:41):
the most notable was Manuel Lisa's Missouri Fur Company. The
Wilderness trading post that Lisa pioneered in the Missouri River
country as early as eighteen o eight were the walmarts
and targets of their day. They provided the native labor force,
handy box stores for European technology, as well as warehouses
(28:03):
for the gathered firs. River barges ferried the body parts
from Beaver's River otters and muskrats down river to state
side markets. After Astro's wildly ambitious attempt to monopolize the
Pacific coast trade collapsed, the British seized his Astoria post
at the mouth of the Columbia In the War of
eighteen twelve. The American Fur Company refocused on the interior West.
(28:29):
Soon enough, it put its chips on a new technological innovation,
the steamboat, which could haul more trade goods up river,
as well as heavy quantities of firs now including even
bulky bison robes, back to civilization where demand seemed insatiable.
Astor's corporate design even extended to healthcare for his labor force,
(28:53):
since Indian trade partners laid low by disease would never
be able to generate profitable product. In the eighteen thirties,
Asture called on the government's brand new Bureau of Indian
Affairs to vaccinate native people against smallpox. Tragically, the eighteen
thirties was too late. One of Asher's steamboats making an
(29:16):
annual supply run in eighteen thirty seven, the Saint Peter's
discovered on the way upriver that it had passengers falling
ill with the dreaded pox. Instead of doing the moral
thing and turning back to Saint Louis. The Saint Peter's
continued its run, attempting to mitigate the danger by warning
Native people at every stop that a contagious disease was
(29:38):
on board. The Aricaras and Mandans were unimpressed. The Ascentiboiins
thought the announcement a hoax to preserve trade goods for
someone else.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
The Blackfeet had.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Always refused to kill beaver's for the whites because beaver
with a capital B was one of their deities. Plus
they valued beaver ponds as critical sources of water on
the dry prairie. But they compensated by killing wolves for
the trade, and had plenty of wolf pelts and bison
robes on hand. The Blackfeet had suffered about with smallpox
(30:13):
in the seventeen eighties, but this band said their historians
had never heard of such a disease. By the time
the epidemic of eighteen thirty seven had run its course,
nearly twenty thousand Missouri River Indians had died disfiguring horrible deaths.
One of the most famous Indians in the West, interviewed
(30:35):
and painted by Western travelers across the previous decade, was
the mandan headman. Mototape forbears a strikingly handsome, middle aged
war leader. Mototape impressed observers as free, generous, elegant, and
gentlemanly in his deportment. He had survived a warrior's life,
(30:56):
but the invisible virus struck him down without the slightest
care for his bravery or grace. Motodepey blamed the traders.
I do not fear death, he is supposed to have said,
but to die with my face rotten, that even the
wolves will shrink with horror at seeing me. Jacob Halsey,
(31:20):
who oversaw the American Fur Company's Fort Union post, put
the moment in terms asture in the American Fur Company
could best appreciate. The losses, he wrote, would be incalculable,
as our most profitable Indians have died. The most remembered
(31:40):
part of the beaver story in the West centers on
William Ashley's and Andrew Henry's Rocky Mountain Fur Company, whose
reassessment of how to attack beavers would have won a
business school's prize for thinking outside the box, had such
a prize existed. Posts and steamboats were expensive. The Blackfeet
(32:01):
several other planes tribes refused to kill beavers because of
their ecological importance. But since colonial times America had been
full of men who fled towns in farms and marriages
and desired nothing so much as to spend their lives
camping and hunting, a life that seemed natural. So why
not sidestep the Indian labor force altogether and have such
(32:24):
men trapped for beavers and otters themselves, like Kick Carson
and others were doing out of Santa Fe and Taos.
They could remain in the West year round, and the
new company would use overland wagons to supply them at
an annual rendezvous site somewhere out west, then wagon the
accumulated loop back to Saint Louis. It worked, at least
(32:46):
it worked for a few years as long as the
animals lasted. Although barely aware of it. Ashley's and Henry's
Mountain Men became players in animal geopolitics because they could
clear streams of beaver so quickly. The American trappers were
endlessly pushing onto new streams farther west, which threatened British
(33:06):
colonial claims. So in eighteen twenty four, at London's request,
the Hudson's Bay Company sent trapping brigades into the Rockies
with instructions to ruin the country to create a fur
desert that would turn the Americans back for millions of years.
(33:26):
The streams that ran snowmelt through the canyons of ranges
like the Bitter Roots, the lim Hies, and the Wasatch
had known beaver colonies at roughly half mile intervals, one
hundred colonies dams and ponds for every fifty miles of
a stream and its side creeks. But British brigade leaders
Peter skeen Ogden, John Wirk and Alexander Ross, with fifteen
(33:51):
or so trappers, plus native wives or girlfriends to do
the cooking and pelt preparation, were easily up to the
task of obliterating all the West Slope beavers. Ross described
how his brigade of twenty with two hundred and twelve
traps would scatter their sets up the length of a
mountain stream in an afternoon on a typical creek in
(34:15):
the Bitter Roots that catch ninety five beavers the following
morning and another sixty that afternoon. That usually got every
animal in the drainage, then on to the next canyon
and repeat, especially during the spring when female beavers were
pregnant or already had kits that ruined things proper. This
(34:37):
wasn't the all boys world of the seal otter hunt,
as the women who went on these pursuits were major players,
with the skills to dress pelts and keep everyone clothed
and fed and pointed in the right direction. With that
kind of female assistance, from eighteen twenty three to eighteen
forty one, the British brigades destroyed thirty five thousand Western
(35:01):
beavers and drained an estimated six thousand beaver ponds. By
now everyone knew what the end of this looked like.
There was no chance beavers and river otters could last
any longer than white tailed deer had in the East.
(35:24):
What they wouldn't have understood, but we do, is how
the extraction of sea otters and beavers was devastating finally
balanced American ecologies hundreds of thousands of years old. Without
otters to hold them in check, sea urching populations exploded
then mowed down whole kelp forests, whose loss, in turn
(35:46):
threatened the red algae reefs that grew those waving stands
of kelp obliterating every beaver on stream after stream didn't
just deprive the native people of traditional camps, remade drainage
systems all over the continent, altering growth patterns for willows
and cottonwoods, destroying wetland's favored by waterfowl, raccoons, and moose,
(36:11):
in effect drying out America. But the stories we tell ourselves.
These mountain men, with their rendezvous gatherings, combination hardware stores,
and all night raves except in leather and at the
foot of the Wind River mountains, became American working class heroes.
(36:31):
Back East, Daniel Boone's biographers had already devised a romantic
take on the masculine American hunter. Now the West broadcast
the Boon model as bigger than live figures Kick Carson,
Jim Bridger, Buffalo Bill Cody. Literary types like James Fenimore Cooper,
and Washington Irving became their biographers, as did Herman Melville
(36:54):
of the whale Hunters in one of his first books,
Teddy Roosevelt, playing these men were the first to become Americans.
Even the historian Frederick Jackson Turner echoed that Turner's frontier
thesis made a Darwinian claim that it was wilderness life
with all those dead animals that turned Europeans into Americans.
(37:17):
These heroes out of the adventureland of early America, in fact.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Were detached, stoic killers.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Some of them, yes, were expected capitalists, but most were
not even that they were killing animals because it was
ancient human skill, and many of them were doing so
because apparently they didn't know.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
How to do much else.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
The truest, unvarnished characterization of them came from one of
their own appear albeit a literary one, named George Ruxton,
a British adventurer and novelists who trapped with the Mountain
Men out of Taos. Ruxton knew his colleague's first hand.
They made up a genus, he said, of men dec
(38:00):
stilled into a primitive state whose personalities assumed what he
said was a most singular cast of simplicity mingled with ferocity.
The Western hunters, he knew, rivaled the beasts of prey,
as he put it, and destroy human as well as
animal life with his little scruple, and as freely as
(38:21):
they exposed their own. So they were brave, so it
killers and true looking for animals, they examined every nook
and cranny of the continent and paved the way for
the settlement of the Western country. It seems to me
that romance about all this is misdirected. Though the West
(38:43):
afforded the mountain men freedom from all restraint, their response
to that freedom and here I'm using Ruxton's word, was
ransacking the West of its animal life. Dan.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
In this episode, you kind of kick off what is
a real dominant arc in the history of you know,
sort of the long nineteenth century in the West, which
is just unmitigated exploitation of all kinds of resources. And
we've been working on, like as mentioned earlier, we've been
(39:36):
working on these histories of market hunters, and it's tough
for people to wrap their minds around these individuals committing
these really egregious atrocities of wildlife.
Speaker 4 (39:50):
But then.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
You know, you also have to look back at the
time and consider it in context, Like they're not that's
not what they're trying to do. They're doing I have
a very specific purpose in mind, and that is the
market requires this, the West provides it, and they're the intermediary.
I wonder how you sort of wrestle with that question
or that tension in your writing about this stuff.
Speaker 4 (40:16):
Dan's mean to those guys sometimes.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
I know, I know, I feel like you guys sit
on opposite sides of that.
Speaker 4 (40:25):
Rude things about people.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Yeah, and some of the people.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
I remember when you and I were a country bookshelf
talking about while in the world, you said, you just
hurt my feelings about some of these guys. Well, so
here's what I think. I think we've had, you know,
probably quite long historiography of romance about this period of
(40:52):
the American West.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
So what I have.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
Been attempting to do, and you know, trying not to
go too overboard with it, but what I've been trying
to do is to, for one thing, take the wildlife
of the West seriously and not assume that it's just this,
you know, just commodities in fur waiting to be exploited.
(41:16):
And so one of the things I've done with a
lot of my work is I try to get a
lot of natural history and so people can understand the
lives that these animals had, wolves by some prong horns
and so forth, and understand them as a legitimate part
of the West. Because I think, especially in the nineteenth century,
(41:37):
the trifecta of things that people are interested in then
and now were It was the landscapes, these almost alien,
arid landscapes that people coming out of Northern Europe or
the East had hardly ever been exposed to. People coming
out of the Mediterranean world had, but they also found
the West to be a very cold place. With landscapes,
(42:01):
they recognize. The other thing that everybody is interested in,
no matter where you came from to the west was
the native people who were here, and then the animals,
because for one thing, the animals of the West were
different from the animals that were anywhere else in the
country from the East, they were different from the animals
of Western Europe. There's a lot more Asian ad mixture
(42:24):
of creatures in the West, so these are unusual creatures
that fascinate a lot of people. So I've tried to
take the animals themselves seriously, and with the idea that
we've had a lot of romance written about this particular
time period, I have been trying to do it in
a way where you where readers of my books or
(42:47):
people who listen to this podcast are going to have
the furniture in their heads rearranged a little bit and
thinking about it. I mean, we're still going to have
Jim Bridger out there, as he's going to be a
Western hero. Kit Carson is going to be a hero
of sorts. Those people are still going to stand as
major figures in Western history. But I've been trying to
(43:11):
create a kind of a look at this period of
the West that gives you a slightly different angle of
approach to it. And when you look at things like so,
I would preface the ecological thing I'm about to say
by also pointing out that the science of ecology doesn't
(43:32):
exist until the twentieth century, and so none of these
people who, for example, are wiping out sea otters on
the Pacific coast, are taking out beaver colonies all over
the country understand that by doing so, they are wrecking
ecologies that formed probably half a million or a million
(43:56):
years before and have been in place for tens of
thousands of years. They don't think in ecological terms. All
they're thinking in terms of is there's a population of
sea otters out there.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
We're going to go get them.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
And what we know since then this is one of
those examples where you know, those of us down the
timeline understand more about what the consequences were than they did.
What we understand now is that they were wrecking ecologies
that produce all kinds of alterations across the West, And
as I tried to convey in writing about that little
(44:29):
river I live on down in New Mexico, the alterations
extend right down to our own time. I mean, I
live on a river that because all the beavers were
taken off of it in the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties.
The result was that without the beaver dams and the
ponds on it, that little stream eroded into crisscrossing arroyos
(44:53):
going in every single direction. And the result today is
that it's a completely different ecology. It's one of those
One of the things, as I say quite a bit
I know on this podcast, is the past doesn't stay.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
In the past.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
It extends into the present day. And so that's the
sort of thing I'm trying to to make people understand
with this.
Speaker 5 (45:13):
I only became aware recently that that people used to
struggle with well, that Europeans used to struggle with the
concept of extinction. That it was I don't know who
debated what side of it, but that it was actually
debated could extinction be possible? Because how do you make
(45:35):
it conform to Genesis or how do you how do
you how do you conform extinction to the biblical creation story?
That I know the idea that people argued about this,
But what what do you see in recognizing that there
were dozens or hundreds of native religions and native cultures
and native systems of understanding? But do you see that
(46:01):
native people's had ideas of extinction?
Speaker 4 (46:06):
Do? I mean, like, did they get it?
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Well?
Speaker 1 (46:10):
I think in America as a result of the pleistis
sin extinctions and obviously they happened far back in time
ten thousand, eleven thousand, and twelve thousand years before. I
think the native people then understood that animals disappear and
they completely go away and we don't ever see them again.
(46:35):
And so they I think they understood then that extinction
was real in the world. Whether or not, I mean,
the question for me and I have not been able
to answer, the question to my own satisfaction is whether
or not those memories extended down subsequent towards the present.
(46:56):
And I do not I don't have.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
An answer for that.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
But what you led with very the idea of extinction
very much was a debated topic in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. It was debated particularly when when Europeans, especially
and then in America too, began excavating the remains of
(47:22):
plesissne animals and in some cases dinosaurs, but really more
frequently plesiscene animals, and as early palaeontologists tried to reassemble
those animals. What they began to realize is that nothing
like this lives anymore. What is the explanation for that?
(47:43):
And that set in motion about a century's worth of
debate about whether extinction was actually possible, and the Biblical
Judaeo Christian version was it's not possible. The world was
created by a dear It was created in perfection. Animals
(48:04):
created perfection exists exactly now as they did at the
moment of their creation, and in a perfect deity created world,
nothing will ever go away. Everything is going to remain.
Thomas Jefferson believed that extinction was not possible in the
seventeen nineties, but he was persuaded by the naturalists in France,
(48:29):
particularly the com Bouffon, that extinction absolutely looks like it
can happen. We don't know why these animals disappeared. And
that's why Jefferson had instructions to both Lewis and Clark
and Freeman and Custis that Southern expedition when they went west,
look for mammoths, because we've found the bones.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Of mammoths in the east.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
We can't find any east, but maybe they're still out
there in the west. But by the eighteen thirties and
in the eighteen forties, most scientists in both America and
Europe began to realize that, wow, these things, they really
have disappeared.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
They're not here anymore.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
And then we had the kind of crushing realization in
the eighteen forties of the extinction of the great Awk,
our northern hemisphere penguin, which was basically wiped out by
egg hunters. And suddenly there's a realization that absolutely animals
can disappear, and it looks like one of the reasons
(49:31):
they disappear is because of human exploitation.
Speaker 4 (49:34):
I see examples where native cultures would have.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
A meta.
Speaker 5 (49:42):
They would understand extinction, but have a metaphysical idea about it,
like planes tribes. As the buffalo started to vanish, planes
tribes to be that they went back in that they
had come from the earth and they went back into
the earth. Fascinating to me is I was talking to
a guy. That's kind of one of the craziest conversations
(50:05):
I ever had with someone, because it felt like it
was time travel. I was taking new guy in Guyana,
a tribalman in Guyana, and they had always had a
herd of a couple hundred white lipped packery that lived
within striking distance of their village. They cleared out they
couldn't find them. It was a great resource for them,
(50:27):
he explained to me face to face. He explained to
me that there was another village and there was a
shaman in the village who is jealous of their village
for having such prosperity, and he had locked the packers
into a mountain. And like, there's no like this dude
would not have awareness of that idea on the Great
(50:47):
Plains of America that things were locked into the earth.
Speaker 4 (50:52):
But it's like you're getting at its gone noess.
Speaker 5 (50:56):
Right, and you have to have an explanation, but like
a different way of that, like it's gone yeah right,
it's just but a totally different worldview, you know, but
capturing the same sentiment that.
Speaker 1 (51:06):
It's it's the same sentiment. It's a different cause effect
relationship than we would have with a scientific worldview. I mean,
the cause effect relationship for why things happened was different
among indigenous people. They had a different argument for this
(51:26):
is a consequence. The cause is completely something different, and
we would have the western, rational, scientific world looks for
an evidentiary cause for the consequence, and oftentimes the indigenous
world looks for kind of a what we would call
a supernatural explanation for why things happen.
Speaker 6 (51:49):
Yeah, earlier you were talking about the mountainmen and the
hide hunters as being these initially glorified figures, and now
they've we've reassessed our view of them.
Speaker 4 (52:04):
But inarguably quite fascinating. Yeah, yeah, but there.
Speaker 3 (52:10):
I think what's interesting is when you look at this
in the aggregate, the whole pattern, there are these examples
of like the egg hunters with the Great Auk, and
and I think the one the one storyline that never
had really entered my consciousness until later in life was
(52:31):
the Sea Otter hunt. And especially under Russian control, I mean,
they're they're conscripting native people and and killing them and
torturing them to go kill otters for their fur, and
I it's it's just striking to me because it's in
(52:54):
keeping with this much larger pattern of of exploitation of wildlife.
But once you look at it and you see all
of the little, you know, unique aspects of it, then
you begin to sort of comprehend the larger picture. I
don't know if that makes sense, but you know, there's
some very familiar aspects to the story of wildlife depletion,
(53:17):
but there's also these outliers that are pretty horrific and
yet again in keeping with the ones that were maybe
more comfortable with as a culture talking about.
Speaker 1 (53:28):
Yeah, that one is definitely an outlier because of the
conscription of the alliots and others. I mean, sometimes they
would kidnap a guy's family and hold his family ransom
so that he would go and do the otter hunt
for them. And the reason I think that one, really,
you know, strikes us as egregious as it is is
(53:51):
because what we're more used to is something like what happened,
you know, with the fur companies and the native people.
Speaker 2 (53:58):
As clients of the fur companies.
Speaker 1 (54:00):
And of course that one is a that one you
have to know about history some to wrap your mind
around to realize that native people, who we accord a
kind of a special consideration for the natural world, and
they almost always have it, there's no question. But they
were also confronted with people who had brought in a
(54:22):
brand new technology, a metal technology that if you didn't
participate in it, and your neighbors, your native neighbors down
the river did, then you were suddenly massively disadvantaged, because
if they got metal, if they got guns, if they
got knives made of steel, and they got arrow points
(54:46):
made of iron, then and you remained with your traditional
flint culture, you were massively disadvantaged in the world that
was happening around them. And so most people, all the
there were religious leaders who tried to stop this and said,
don't do it, don't join into this this hunt. Nonetheless,
(55:08):
most people did because they realized that the world had
changed so dramatically if they did not participate. And the
unfortunate result was that the market hunt usually usually pointed
out very specific things that it wanted. It didn't want
native people to, you know, offer them up there the
crops from their fields. It wanted the furs of beavers
(55:32):
and muskrats and otters, and so if you want to
play the game with the global market, that's what you
have to offer us in trade and will then set
you up with metalware. And so it's a it's a
part of a kind of a voluntary participation in the
market economy. Over most of the West, that is not
(55:55):
true of the otter thing we were just talking about,
where people were conscripted into it.
Speaker 5 (56:02):
There's another question about the odd country or you're doing
sea otters. But to set it up, I'll point out that,
like if you look at a lot of the areas
as they marched across the country, you kind of come
for the fur and stay for the whatever. Right, So
these like guys that go across the Appalachian Mountains the
(56:26):
hunt deer, oftentimes those same individuals stay to get into agriculture,
stay to get into timber extraction whatever.
Speaker 4 (56:38):
Yeah, so you go like or you know, you.
Speaker 5 (56:42):
Hide hunters go out and out of that comes these
like cattle enterprises or whatever. Right, Like there's there's no
there's no gap. People show up oftentimes to extract fur,
and then they quickly they don't leave. You follow me,
like more people come in their footsteps. Are there exceptions
in that where there's a big gap, and like, what
(57:05):
what was it like when you came to the Pacific
coast for odds, like the Russians are down there? Like
after the odters, was there a retraction or was there
like a thing you stayed for you?
Speaker 1 (57:18):
No, No, that probably was an exception because almost everybody
was coming by ship, and so they were when the
otter hunt was over, when they couldn't find anymore, when
the first seals were too depleted to continue, it was
you know, law of diminishing returns, there's no point in continuing.
They usually went back to wherever they were from, because
(57:40):
a ton of them were from Boston and New York.
Speaker 4 (57:43):
And I mean then there was like a quiet there's
like an otterless quiet period.
Speaker 1 (57:48):
There was, indeed, Yeah, and the twenties and and thirties
and forty I mean, otters don't start recovering until about
the eighteen eighties or eighteen nineties. The first seals, because
there had been more of them, they recover a little
bit more quickly. But there is also a kind of
a subsidence period after the demise of beavers in the
(58:12):
interior West, when that Husses Bay group of guys, I
was talking about go in and try to ruin the
country and trap all the beavers out of all the streams.
On the west side of the Continental Divide, there's a
period of about fifteen years or so where a lot
(58:33):
of the mountain men kind of are I mean, some
of them go west with the Oregon Trail folks who
settle in the Willamet River valley and become sheriffs and things.
And I'm going to talk in one of the upcoming
episodes about a next step that several of the mountain
men do. When their beavers are gone, a lot of
(58:55):
them turn to the horse trade, and they become traders
and horses. And one of the things that some of
the classic mountain men do Bill Sublett, for example, they
go to California and either trade for horses or catch
wild horses in the rolling golden hills of California, or
(59:16):
they sometimes they just steal them off Spanish ranches and
they drive them east from California and outfit Stephen Carney's
Army of the West, which needs mounts and remounts. Or
they take them to places like Fort Bridger and they
supply the wagon trains the Overlin trail folks with horses
(59:40):
with fresh stock to get all the way to the
west coast. So there's a there's a little bit of
a lag, but they usually find something like the buffalo hunters.
When the buffalo are gone, shit, you got prong horns,
you got elk, you got big horn sheep, they just
go after whatever is left and so and wolves because
(01:00:03):
they've learned now that you know, you can use strychnine
and you can poison wolves.
Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
You can get a dollar a pelt for a wolf pelt,
and so.
Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
Yeah, so they managed to segue into just a whatever
animals are left. Yeah, but the mountain Man, quite a
number of them become horse traders.
Speaker 4 (01:00:19):
Are you familiar with a vicaro of the brush country?
Speaker 1 (01:00:22):
No?
Speaker 4 (01:00:22):
I am, Yeah, Yeah, that dude.
Speaker 5 (01:00:25):
He hated the buffalo hunters because he was he felt
that they all became criminals, not all became sheriffs. Right.
Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
And there's a line, and there's a line that we
cited in the Mountain En Project where like at the
eighteen thirty seven or eighteen thirty eight rendezvous, someone writes
a number of them have gone west to become horse thieves.
Such a thing has never been heard of until now. Yeah,
like it was just this invention of desperation.
Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
Yeah, well that was the Bill Sublette thing.
Speaker 1 (01:00:57):
I mean, he actually did that, and he regarded that
as one of his great coups. He went to California
and stole a bunch of Spanish horses and drove them
back to the planes to outfit the overland and to
Bent's Fort. Bent's Fort was one of the big sort
of receiving areas for Western horses. But that episode is
coming up. I'm going to tell the horse story. I
(01:01:18):
think it may be the next to one, in fact,
after this, where we'll turn to the horse trade in
the West, which is another one of those that's kind
of little known and unlike the sort of thing we've
been talking about. I mean, with the horse trade, the
idea was to get live animals back to the seventies,
and yeah, getting live animals back. And what made horses
(01:01:42):
really great is that they.
Speaker 2 (01:01:44):
Got back there on their own.
Speaker 1 (01:01:45):
You didn't have to load them on a steamboat or
you know, pack them up on the.
Speaker 2 (01:01:49):
Back of a pack horse.
Speaker 1 (01:01:51):
You could just drive them along and they got to market,
you know, on their own.
Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
Accord. Good Randal, I'm good.
Speaker 5 (01:02:01):
One last observation for you about my favorite part of that.
I can't remember the guy's name, Vacaro the Brush Country.
Speaker 3 (01:02:07):
Is it j Frank Adobie.
Speaker 5 (01:02:09):
Yeah, well no no, but it's like it's as told
you from a Vicaro of the Brush Country. But he's
talking about the King Ranch. Okay, he's talking about one
of the guys that would become a King Ranch. Guy
having experimenting with taking a like like injecting cattle with
(01:02:36):
brine into their vascular system to that you would somehow
preserve because it's like hot, it's humid down the Gold Country,
South Texas, like everything rots to dam fast. So he's
toying with the idea, how would you inject like a
brine into its as it's dying, into its askular system
(01:03:01):
and sort of pickle it.
Speaker 1 (01:03:02):
This is basically salting the meats.
Speaker 4 (01:03:10):
Tickles me endlessly. Man, it's like that. But he acknowledges
that they never got that perfected.
Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
It's one of those things that appears on those redneck solutions.
Speaker 4 (01:03:21):
Well, thank thanks for all the wisdom, Dan Man.
Speaker 2 (01:03:24):
It's fun. Thanks guys.
Speaker 5 (01:03:25):
Things
Following the arrival of the global market economy in the
West in the early eighteen hundreds, important elements of the
biodiversity preserved by thousands of years of native management collapsed
in little more than three decades with exploitation of animals
that snared Native people, working class Americans, and produced the
(00:22):
country's first millionaires. I'm Dan Florries, and this is the
American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in barrel,
Velvet Buck arrives this summer just in time for the
season that calls us home. A portion of every bottle
supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters
(00:44):
and wildlife enjoy responsibly start of the endgame for the
ancient West. In the year nineteen sixty seven, a famed
(01:14):
American painter named Thomas Hart Benton laid down on canvas
perhaps the most poignant painting about the trajectory of the
nineteenth century American West any Western artist has produced. Benton
based Lewis and Clark at Eagle Creek on an eighteen
oh five account in the Explorer's Journals, and in a
further nine to reality on an actual place. The painting
(01:37):
dramatically captures all the hues and lines and rhythms of
the white cliffs of today's Upper Missouri River breaks National Monument.
But what makes Benton's canvas one of the West's great
paintings is not his use of explorer journals or his
abstract rendering of a well known Western locale. Instead, it's
the story the painting tells.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
In Lewis and.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Clark at Eagle Creek, the west of the previous ten
thousand years yet exists, and it looms over the arriving
Americans who appear a minor blip in the timeline of
a world that's impossibly ancient. That sense of a timelessness,
carried by a sensuous river amid the forms and colors
(02:22):
of immense space, dwarf any foreboding about the old world.
Having discovered this remote interior piece of the continent. Now
let the mind leap a quarter century ahead in time
from Lewis and Clark. When the decade of the eighteen
thirties dawns, A calm, confident American West has somehow contracted,
(02:45):
in both size and grand promise, the Western world that
had Lewis and Clark marveling, built by one hundred centuries
of native inhabitation and a magnificent diversity and abundance of
wild animals had been intact when the explorers past Eagle Creek.
But the eighteen thirties is the decade when any resistance
(03:05):
to high speed change becomes forever futile. For the West,
vastness and abundance were both shrinking. As the fame Maximilian
Bodmer expedition on the Missouri River documented so well, the
bigger world was beginning to rush. In history doesn't remain
(03:27):
in the past, so it's not a special insight to
realize that no time exists apart from what went before
or after human cause. Climate change hasn't popped into existence
in our twenty first century with no advanced warning, and
what we do about it or don't do, will likely
affect us and the planet for centuries to come. Still,
(03:50):
there are decades in the human story, the nineteen sixties,
for instance, when civil rights of all kinds, ecological concerns,
and a growing mistrust of war that do stand as
exceptional for North America west of the Mississippi River, and
especially for the region's environmental story. The long eighteen thirties decade,
(04:12):
which in truth spanned the years from the eighteen twenties
through the early eighteen forties was one of those exceptional
and memorable times. With his arrival, a West that had
been relatively quiescent for thousands of years was morphing into
something new so rapidly it shocked many who witnessed it.
(04:35):
Stories about the West, as we know have long dazzled world,
from Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West of more than a
century ago to today's Yellowstone The West stories fascinate because
they offer up an endemic world to human design, despite
our lingering romance for eighteen thirties accounts of mountain men
(04:55):
are the overlanders on the Oregon Trail. However, the West
ecological stories have never made much of a dent in
our historical memory of the region and its frontier. Nonetheless,
much of what happened in the Classic West actually centered
around an extensive ecological destruction of the West, Lewis and
Clark saw. The truth is that stories like the ones
(05:17):
that follow in this episode were central to Western history
and to the freedom of action we intitively associate with it.
To my mind, stories like this reveal important things that
romance about a kick Carson or a Narcissa Whitman obscures
from the big picture in roughly chronological order. Then consider
(05:38):
how these stories about Western ecologies offer a different way
to see the West in the early nineteenth century. At
the start of the eighteen thirty decade, the prevailing notion
about the West had been captured by the American Exploring
expedition led by Stephen Long, which in eighteen nineteen and
(05:59):
eighteen twenty had crossed the Great Plains to the Rocky
Mountains of Colorado. Intriguingly, Long's party was convinced that the
ancient quiescent world that scene was still the best future
for the West. The region they explored was almost wholly
unfit for cultivation, they claimed, and peculiarly adapted as arranged
(06:20):
for Buffalo's wild goats and other wild game and incalculable multitudes. Thus,
the West was best left as a frontier, which by
no means implied, however, that they believed the West should
be left untouched or to the native people or Spanish settlers.
That was because the American idea of a frontier rested
(06:43):
on the recent history of the Atlantic seaboard, the South
and the Mississippi valley. All these had initially functioned as
wild lands exploited for their animal.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Wealth four centuries ago.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Religion was the ultimate explanation of all things for almost
all humans. Like Native peoples, Europeans in America generally understood
animals in supernatural terms, but for Europeans the terms were
their own. Our colonial ancestors most certainly didn't regard animals.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
As close kin the way native people did.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
For them, only humans were godlike and exceptional.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
But European religions did.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Argue that all animals had a divine origin, which meant
they had existed unchanged since their moment of creation. That
meant that no animal species had ever disappeared in the past,
nor could any species ever.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Disappear now or in the future.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Extinction, in other words, was impossible in a divinely created world.
The Bible was the primary source for settler ideas about
the animals they found in America, but European views about
animals actually went back farther into.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Old World history.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
It's hard to say just how far back. The Greeks
are an obvious reference, but it's difficult not to suspect
that much of Greek knowledge may have come from preliterate times.
Plato and Aristotle likely were codifying into written form ideas
that many generations of earlier Eurasians had thought.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
First.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Plato and Aristotle began with an essential premise, though there
must be a deity, an invisible reality now missing in action,
who had created the earth and everything on it. Plato
investigated a critical distinction in this idea, that humans were
earthy and animal like, but clearly separate from other animals.
(08:47):
The explanation for that separation must lie in a difference
between us and them Ergo, an invisible and individual spirit
in humans that permitted us a connection to the des
looking at the orderliness and beauty around him. Aristotle's contribution
was to sketch out that order into one of the
(09:08):
most important intellectual ideas in Western thought. He called it
the Great Chain of Being, with all divinely created life
occupying descending links in the chain arranged in descending order
of perfection. Perfection translated into how useful a particular species
was to humans. You can say that for two thousand
(09:32):
years in.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
One part of the Earth at least, this.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Became a deeply internalized imagining of how the world worked.
It was a big reassuring idea. The vast majority of
Europeans who migrated to the Americas in the sixteen hundreds
brought with them a Middle Eastern herding culture's book, the Bible,
that answered any questions they had about their proper relationship
(09:57):
with animals. At the beginning of the Old Testament, Genesis
one twenty eight, God gives Adam on behalf of humanity,
dominion over everything that lives. In Genesis nine two and three,
the Sacred Book goes on to say, the fear of
you and the dread of you shall be upon every
(10:18):
beasts of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air.
Into your hand are they delivered. The next line, every
moving thing that liveth shall be meet for you was
the Judaeo Christian stamp of approval on self interested human
use of animals. Genesis one twenty seven clarified things even further.
(10:43):
God had made humans and no other creatures on earth
in his own image, giving humans something that set us
apart from all the rest of creation, an immortal soul
that promised life after death. It was an easy mitelection size, then,
for Europeans to settle on the soul as the possession
(11:05):
that made for human exceptionalism.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
There was also.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Something else new in the West, an argument for self
interest whose British author Adam Smith had presented to the
world the very year the US was born, seventeen seventy six.
Smith's argument for capitalism rested atop a colonial economic system
evolving into what we now call the global market. So
(11:32):
by the early eighteen hundreds, the West's soulless wild animals
were now in the sights of an economic system that
for two hundred years had been converting American animals into
market commodities. In this system, ancient ecological relationships had no meaning.
Animals had no meaning beyond satisfying the desires of people
(11:55):
who killed them and others who made animal skins into
leather or use fur or tea their claws to make
statements about human fashions or status among peers. This was
an economy that made some who dealt in wild animals
very wealthy, our first millionaires. It also supported a colonial
working class. Some of those workers the new Americans, but
(12:16):
many of them natives who often did very well for
themselves killing animals for the trade. The West turn in
this system was now under way, and one of the
places it hit early was along the Pacific coasts. Here
sea otters and fur seals were attracting a frenzied exploitation
(12:37):
by the fur hunters of the US and several European nations.
Another was along interior rivers like the Missouri and Arkansas,
where beavers and many other species of fur bearers were
becoming the targets as agents of the American Fur Company,
the Missouri Fur Company and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company
(12:58):
established trading and rendezvous fairs.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
The global market.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Economy had long offered America's native people a metalware firearm
technology that transformed their cultures if they would participate in it.
Despite warnings from some of their religious leaders, most native
people found it impossible to.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Resist this new wave.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
If you did, you profoundly disadvantaged yourself among other tribes
that did create market ties. This wholesale change in the
world was now come to the West, and the region
quickly became a different place. A level of exploitation that
hadn't happened in ten thousand years was at hand, and
(13:44):
it would not be pretty. When Lewis and Clark spent
their winter at the mouth of the Columbia River, the
global economy's unquenchable appetite for America's animals was already a
presence on the Pacific coast. The prize the Pacific beaver
(14:04):
was the sea otter. Otters frequented the shorelines from Japan
to the Aleutians and down the Pacific coast to Baja
California in numbers that seemed large, although there were probably
fewer than three hundred thousand across their range. As ships
from Boston and New York began showing up on the
(14:24):
West coast, words spread among satyrs of several nations that
prime sea otter pelts had sold for one hundred and
twenty dollars apiece in China. One American trader said the
fur of the sea otter was so luxurious in the
hand two point six million hairs per square inch, that
(14:45):
accepting a beautiful woman and a lovely infant, it.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Was the most extraordinary thing on earth.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Like humans, like wolves, sea otters are keystone carnivores. Ancient
eCos systems had formed around sea otter predation, and so
long as the six foot long otters were present, the
ecosystems held together and possibly appealing, these one hundred pound
(15:13):
members of the family Mastilla day, which includes wolverines, badgers,
and weasels, evolved as hunters of fish and sea urchins
in shallow shoreline celt beds. Otters kept those kelp forests
healthy by devouring as many as one thousand sea urchins
a day. Just as we are, sea otters are tool users.
(15:39):
At some point in their evolution, otters developed a culture
utilizing rocks of a certain size and shape to break
open the shells of their prey. There were even variations
handed down among regional populations, some otters making do with
a single rock, others using two at once.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Tools were critical.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
As hunters of cold position shorelines, sea otters need to
consume as much as twenty five percent of their weight
in food daily to stay warm. Important to what befell
them is that they do not become sexually mature until
they are several years old, bear only a single pop
at a time, and sometimes spend a year without producing offspring.
(16:21):
In prime feeding grounds, undisturbed otter colonies can increase their
numbers by twenty percent a year no more. By the
turn of the nineteenth century, they were undergoing an extreme disturbance.
In seventeen seventy eight, the global traveler English explorer James
(16:42):
Cook sail the shores of Oregon and Washington to Vancouver Island,
finding Native peoples who rush to his ships with otter skins,
hoping to trade for any kind of metal, even nails.
The next year, after Pacific Islanders killed Cook in a
shallow bay of the Big Eye in Hawaii, his men
sold twenty of those pelts for forty dollars apiece in Canton, China.
(17:07):
That wasn't one hundred and twenty dollars, but it was
good enough. The American Robert Gray happened on the mouth
of the Columbia River and traded for otter and seal
furs up and down the West Coast. The very next year.
After circumnavigating the planet, Gray would return to Boston in
seventeen ninety, having sold his hall in China for an
(17:28):
astonishing twenty one thousand dollars the equivalent of seven hundred
and twenty five thousand dollars today. At that point, the
Great Otter First Seal Rush was on a destruction of nature,
contemplated today with profound unease, although it was clearly conducted
without any sentiment whatsoever at the time, it took the
(17:51):
Russian Garrisene privle Off just two years seventeen eighty six
and seventeen eighty seven to kill seven thousand otters and
obliterate every last one on the islands now named for him.
That was made possible by biological first contact. Most otters
and fur seals had never seen a human before. They
(18:13):
were trusting and tame, and with no empathy for living creatures.
The hunters violated their innocence when Russia's professional fur hunters,
the pro Mishlniki, descended on America in the wake of
these reports, they added the next horrifying step, the force
conscription of the Alutes and other native peoples into an
(18:34):
animal killing labor force, as had happened in the East.
On the mainland, a lucrative exchange of furs for metal
technology could seduce native people into killing animals for the market,
but Russian traders lacked goods of sufficient quality to pull
that off, so they resorted to subterfuge, sometimes kidnapping family
(18:55):
members to force native men to pursue otters for them.
If in eighteen hundred, naturalists or American presidents doubted extinction
was possible by eighteen twenty, the fallacy of that position
was becoming all too clear, first in the East and
the south, now on the Pacific coast. North America was
(19:18):
losing its animals at a frightening rate. Hunters from several
nations wiped out otter and fursial colonies with a speed
no one could hold in the mind. Demand in China
seemed insatiable, and while otters lasted, American ship captains unloading
twenty thousand skins a year there in search of laborers
(19:39):
to harvest the otters farther south. In eighteen twelve, American
ship captains invited Alexander Baranoff of the Russian American Company
to send allut hunters down the California coast, with Americans
hauling the take to China and splitting the profits with
the Russian trappers. In the the next act, Yankee sealers
(20:02):
slaughtered more than seventy three thousand fur seals on the
Farallone Islands off San Francisco Bay. That got their Russians
attention and led them to establish their famous trading posts
and fort at Bodega Bay, from which their conscripted native
laborers killed eighty thousand animals in just one season, but
(20:25):
the seals were so tame and numerous that no native
labor force proved really necessary. Using clubs or knives, European
and American seal hunters murdered the animals themselves, stripped off
the pelts, and left the discarded carcasses to seabirds, condors, coyotes,
and bears, then sold the pelts for a dollar apiece
(20:46):
in China, less desirable and more numerous than otters. First
seals lasted along the Pacific coasts into the eighteen forties,
but otters were so pursued and their colonies so stated
that by the eighteen twenties there weren't enough left for
hunters to justify chasing down the final few, and that
(21:08):
saved them. One of gorg Steller's few discoveries, the Pleistocene giant,
now known as the Stellar's sea cow, had the unhappy
distinction of being the first of these specific creatures the
hunters pushed into total extinction. Sea cows were gone by
seventeen sixty eight, and if the agents of the market
(21:31):
could easily have located them, their other targets would have
followed suit. But tiny remnants of otters and fur seals
at least remained alive in a few hidden inconvenient spots
the hunters missed. Now that same pattern rooted in our
predatory evolution and released afresh by market self interest was
(21:54):
about to play out.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
In the Inland West.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Like most of us, I live in the valley of
a river. It's called the Rio Galisteo, a stream that
runs sometimes and seeps into the sands most of the time,
just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Galisteo is
no grand water course, but it does string a cottonwood
corridor through the high desert, and the celebrated American naturalist
(22:29):
Aldo Leopold once used it as an example of how
waterways were ruined when Europeans brought their domestic stock to
the West. Leopold told the story of a drunken immigrant
who in eighteen forty nine was able to walk across
the Rio Galistaeo successfully on a twenty foot board plank.
(22:51):
Yet in the twentieth century, he wrote, the Galisteo had
sliced its stream bed into so many eroded gullies known
as a royos, that a drunk wouldn't stand a snowball's
chance of making the far bank. In many places, a
twentieth century plank across the Rio Galisteo would have to
span two hundred and fifty feet of torn up stream bed.
(23:16):
I've little doubt the cow and the sheep made their
contribution to this ecological set piece. But I also know
the nationalists arrived too late in New Mexico to see
what else had happened here.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
In an earlier time.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Heading on the flanks of Thompson Peak in the Southern Rockies,
the Galistaalo was one of the streams the Western trappers
we call mountain men, pit clean of beavers in the
eighteen twenties. Drawn to the southern Mountains in the wake
of Mexico's success throwing off Spanish rule, then the Republic
of Mexico's opening of the Southwest to outside trade. Trappers
(23:53):
from the States began to operate out of Santa Fe
and Taos shortly after eighteen twenty one. They fanned out
across the mountains all the way to the high parks
of Colorado, and they made astonishingly quick work of every
beaver colony they could find. One party of trappers cashed
in fifty thousand dollars in New Mexico Firs in Saint
(24:16):
Louis in eighteen thirty one, local authorities tried to control
the carnage with a law banning non resident trapping.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
The Americans ignored it.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
By eighteen thirty two, trappers were even scouring the nearby
high plains in their rush to deep.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Beaver every last trickle of water.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Set aside for a moment, the predictability of it, all
the deaths of wild animals in return for a brief
few years of profits, and take the long view. As
it had done in the East, Beaver removal in the
West abruptly terminated millennia of hydraulic engineering. A world where
(25:00):
beavers had turned Western rivers into ribbons of damned ponds
and year round water storage now yielded to flashing runoffs
that cut gullies and arroyos in places like New Mexico.
Leopold may have blamed sheep and cows, but the destruction
of the West beavers also appears visible on the land
(25:22):
even two centuries later, along with the practical extinction of
bison in the while the extirpation of millions of beavers
in just three short decades is at least an event
modern Americans recall from the West's slaughter house century eighteen
twenty to nineteen twenty. The Western beaver hunt was merely
(25:45):
an extension of beaver mania that had gathered momentum from
the time of Henry Hudson. But by the time the
beaver trade moved west, the US was already giving it
a peculiarly American cast. In neighboring Canada, the British Crown
planned and regulated the fur trade, granting a government sanctioned
(26:06):
monopoly to the Hudson's Bay Company right next door to
the US. This offered lessons in efficiency, decent treatment of
the labor force, and even some conservation of the target animals.
But back in seventeen sixty three, King George's similar attempts
to regulate wild animals in the American colonies had infuriated everyone.
(26:29):
For Virginia and New York, the American approach to market
capitalism was too freewheeling an anti regulation to be patient
with a setup like Canada's, so America went for no
market planning beyond the natural laws of Adam Smith capitalism.
In that clear space, the country's first big business enterprise,
(26:53):
immigrant John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company made a heroic
effort to dominate the fur trade by out competing everyone else.
The son of a butcher in the German town of Waldorf,
Johann Jacob, arrived in America in seventeen eighty three, after
first spending a stretch in London mastering English. In eighteen
(27:17):
oh eight, Astre founded the American Fur Company and began
his quest to control the fur market. He built and
supplied trading posts, first in the Great Lakes Country, then
in the West. Vying with Astro's behemoth was a myriad
of small private enterprises. They were eager and could wreak
havoc on animals, but weren't always professionally run. One of
(27:41):
the most notable was Manuel Lisa's Missouri Fur Company. The
Wilderness trading post that Lisa pioneered in the Missouri River
country as early as eighteen o eight were the walmarts
and targets of their day. They provided the native labor force,
handy box stores for European technology, as well as warehouses
(28:03):
for the gathered firs. River barges ferried the body parts
from Beaver's River otters and muskrats down river to state
side markets. After Astro's wildly ambitious attempt to monopolize the
Pacific coast trade collapsed, the British seized his Astoria post
at the mouth of the Columbia In the War of
eighteen twelve. The American Fur Company refocused on the interior West.
(28:29):
Soon enough, it put its chips on a new technological innovation,
the steamboat, which could haul more trade goods up river,
as well as heavy quantities of firs now including even
bulky bison robes, back to civilization where demand seemed insatiable.
Astor's corporate design even extended to healthcare for his labor force,
(28:53):
since Indian trade partners laid low by disease would never
be able to generate profitable product. In the eighteen thirties,
Asture called on the government's brand new Bureau of Indian
Affairs to vaccinate native people against smallpox. Tragically, the eighteen
thirties was too late. One of Asher's steamboats making an
(29:16):
annual supply run in eighteen thirty seven, the Saint Peter's
discovered on the way upriver that it had passengers falling
ill with the dreaded pox. Instead of doing the moral
thing and turning back to Saint Louis. The Saint Peter's
continued its run, attempting to mitigate the danger by warning
Native people at every stop that a contagious disease was
(29:38):
on board. The Aricaras and Mandans were unimpressed. The Ascentiboiins
thought the announcement a hoax to preserve trade goods for
someone else.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
The Blackfeet had.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Always refused to kill beaver's for the whites because beaver
with a capital B was one of their deities. Plus
they valued beaver ponds as critical sources of water on
the dry prairie. But they compensated by killing wolves for
the trade, and had plenty of wolf pelts and bison
robes on hand. The Blackfeet had suffered about with smallpox
(30:13):
in the seventeen eighties, but this band said their historians
had never heard of such a disease. By the time
the epidemic of eighteen thirty seven had run its course,
nearly twenty thousand Missouri River Indians had died disfiguring horrible deaths.
One of the most famous Indians in the West, interviewed
(30:35):
and painted by Western travelers across the previous decade, was
the mandan headman. Mototape forbears a strikingly handsome, middle aged
war leader. Mototape impressed observers as free, generous, elegant, and
gentlemanly in his deportment. He had survived a warrior's life,
(30:56):
but the invisible virus struck him down without the slightest
care for his bravery or grace. Motodepey blamed the traders.
I do not fear death, he is supposed to have said,
but to die with my face rotten, that even the
wolves will shrink with horror at seeing me. Jacob Halsey,
(31:20):
who oversaw the American Fur Company's Fort Union post, put
the moment in terms asture in the American Fur Company
could best appreciate. The losses, he wrote, would be incalculable,
as our most profitable Indians have died. The most remembered
(31:40):
part of the beaver story in the West centers on
William Ashley's and Andrew Henry's Rocky Mountain Fur Company, whose
reassessment of how to attack beavers would have won a
business school's prize for thinking outside the box, had such
a prize existed. Posts and steamboats were expensive. The Blackfeet
(32:01):
several other planes tribes refused to kill beavers because of
their ecological importance. But since colonial times America had been
full of men who fled towns in farms and marriages
and desired nothing so much as to spend their lives
camping and hunting, a life that seemed natural. So why
not sidestep the Indian labor force altogether and have such
(32:24):
men trapped for beavers and otters themselves, like Kick Carson
and others were doing out of Santa Fe and Taos.
They could remain in the West year round, and the
new company would use overland wagons to supply them at
an annual rendezvous site somewhere out west, then wagon the
accumulated loop back to Saint Louis. It worked, at least
(32:46):
it worked for a few years as long as the
animals lasted. Although barely aware of it. Ashley's and Henry's
Mountain Men became players in animal geopolitics because they could
clear streams of beaver so quickly. The American trappers were
endlessly pushing onto new streams farther west, which threatened British
(33:06):
colonial claims. So in eighteen twenty four, at London's request,
the Hudson's Bay Company sent trapping brigades into the Rockies
with instructions to ruin the country to create a fur
desert that would turn the Americans back for millions of years.
(33:26):
The streams that ran snowmelt through the canyons of ranges
like the Bitter Roots, the lim Hies, and the Wasatch
had known beaver colonies at roughly half mile intervals, one
hundred colonies dams and ponds for every fifty miles of
a stream and its side creeks. But British brigade leaders
Peter skeen Ogden, John Wirk and Alexander Ross, with fifteen
(33:51):
or so trappers, plus native wives or girlfriends to do
the cooking and pelt preparation, were easily up to the
task of obliterating all the West Slope beavers. Ross described
how his brigade of twenty with two hundred and twelve
traps would scatter their sets up the length of a
mountain stream in an afternoon on a typical creek in
(34:15):
the Bitter Roots that catch ninety five beavers the following
morning and another sixty that afternoon. That usually got every
animal in the drainage, then on to the next canyon
and repeat, especially during the spring when female beavers were
pregnant or already had kits that ruined things proper. This
(34:37):
wasn't the all boys world of the seal otter hunt,
as the women who went on these pursuits were major players,
with the skills to dress pelts and keep everyone clothed
and fed and pointed in the right direction. With that
kind of female assistance, from eighteen twenty three to eighteen
forty one, the British brigades destroyed thirty five thousand Western
(35:01):
beavers and drained an estimated six thousand beaver ponds. By
now everyone knew what the end of this looked like.
There was no chance beavers and river otters could last
any longer than white tailed deer had in the East.
(35:24):
What they wouldn't have understood, but we do, is how
the extraction of sea otters and beavers was devastating finally
balanced American ecologies hundreds of thousands of years old. Without
otters to hold them in check, sea urching populations exploded
then mowed down whole kelp forests, whose loss, in turn
(35:46):
threatened the red algae reefs that grew those waving stands
of kelp obliterating every beaver on stream after stream didn't
just deprive the native people of traditional camps, remade drainage
systems all over the continent, altering growth patterns for willows
and cottonwoods, destroying wetland's favored by waterfowl, raccoons, and moose,
(36:11):
in effect drying out America. But the stories we tell ourselves.
These mountain men, with their rendezvous gatherings, combination hardware stores,
and all night raves except in leather and at the
foot of the Wind River mountains, became American working class heroes.
(36:31):
Back East, Daniel Boone's biographers had already devised a romantic
take on the masculine American hunter. Now the West broadcast
the Boon model as bigger than live figures Kick Carson,
Jim Bridger, Buffalo Bill Cody. Literary types like James Fenimore Cooper,
and Washington Irving became their biographers, as did Herman Melville
(36:54):
of the whale Hunters in one of his first books,
Teddy Roosevelt, playing these men were the first to become Americans.
Even the historian Frederick Jackson Turner echoed that Turner's frontier
thesis made a Darwinian claim that it was wilderness life
with all those dead animals that turned Europeans into Americans.
(37:17):
These heroes out of the adventureland of early America, in fact.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Were detached, stoic killers.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Some of them, yes, were expected capitalists, but most were
not even that they were killing animals because it was
ancient human skill, and many of them were doing so
because apparently they didn't know.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
How to do much else.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
The truest, unvarnished characterization of them came from one of
their own appear albeit a literary one, named George Ruxton,
a British adventurer and novelists who trapped with the Mountain
Men out of Taos. Ruxton knew his colleague's first hand.
They made up a genus, he said, of men dec
(38:00):
stilled into a primitive state whose personalities assumed what he
said was a most singular cast of simplicity mingled with ferocity.
The Western hunters, he knew, rivaled the beasts of prey,
as he put it, and destroy human as well as
animal life with his little scruple, and as freely as
(38:21):
they exposed their own. So they were brave, so it
killers and true looking for animals, they examined every nook
and cranny of the continent and paved the way for
the settlement of the Western country. It seems to me
that romance about all this is misdirected. Though the West
(38:43):
afforded the mountain men freedom from all restraint, their response
to that freedom and here I'm using Ruxton's word, was
ransacking the West of its animal life. Dan.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
In this episode, you kind of kick off what is
a real dominant arc in the history of you know,
sort of the long nineteenth century in the West, which
is just unmitigated exploitation of all kinds of resources. And
we've been working on, like as mentioned earlier, we've been
(39:36):
working on these histories of market hunters, and it's tough
for people to wrap their minds around these individuals committing
these really egregious atrocities of wildlife.
Speaker 4 (39:50):
But then.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
You know, you also have to look back at the
time and consider it in context, Like they're not that's
not what they're trying to do. They're doing I have
a very specific purpose in mind, and that is the
market requires this, the West provides it, and they're the intermediary.
I wonder how you sort of wrestle with that question
or that tension in your writing about this stuff.
Speaker 4 (40:16):
Dan's mean to those guys sometimes.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
I know, I know, I feel like you guys sit
on opposite sides of that.
Speaker 4 (40:25):
Rude things about people.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Yeah, and some of the people.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
I remember when you and I were a country bookshelf
talking about while in the world, you said, you just
hurt my feelings about some of these guys. Well, so
here's what I think. I think we've had, you know,
probably quite long historiography of romance about this period of
(40:52):
the American West.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
So what I have.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
Been attempting to do, and you know, trying not to
go too overboard with it, but what I've been trying
to do is to, for one thing, take the wildlife
of the West seriously and not assume that it's just this,
you know, just commodities in fur waiting to be exploited.
(41:16):
And so one of the things I've done with a
lot of my work is I try to get a
lot of natural history and so people can understand the
lives that these animals had, wolves by some prong horns
and so forth, and understand them as a legitimate part
of the West. Because I think, especially in the nineteenth century,
(41:37):
the trifecta of things that people are interested in then
and now were It was the landscapes, these almost alien,
arid landscapes that people coming out of Northern Europe or
the East had hardly ever been exposed to. People coming
out of the Mediterranean world had, but they also found
the West to be a very cold place. With landscapes,
(42:01):
they recognize. The other thing that everybody is interested in,
no matter where you came from to the west was
the native people who were here, and then the animals,
because for one thing, the animals of the West were
different from the animals that were anywhere else in the
country from the East, they were different from the animals
of Western Europe. There's a lot more Asian ad mixture
(42:24):
of creatures in the West, so these are unusual creatures
that fascinate a lot of people. So I've tried to
take the animals themselves seriously, and with the idea that
we've had a lot of romance written about this particular
time period, I have been trying to do it in
a way where you where readers of my books or
(42:47):
people who listen to this podcast are going to have
the furniture in their heads rearranged a little bit and
thinking about it. I mean, we're still going to have
Jim Bridger out there, as he's going to be a
Western hero. Kit Carson is going to be a hero
of sorts. Those people are still going to stand as
major figures in Western history. But I've been trying to
(43:11):
create a kind of a look at this period of
the West that gives you a slightly different angle of
approach to it. And when you look at things like so,
I would preface the ecological thing I'm about to say
by also pointing out that the science of ecology doesn't
(43:32):
exist until the twentieth century, and so none of these
people who, for example, are wiping out sea otters on
the Pacific coast, are taking out beaver colonies all over
the country understand that by doing so, they are wrecking
ecologies that formed probably half a million or a million
(43:56):
years before and have been in place for tens of
thousands of years. They don't think in ecological terms. All
they're thinking in terms of is there's a population of
sea otters out there.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
We're going to go get them.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
And what we know since then this is one of
those examples where you know, those of us down the
timeline understand more about what the consequences were than they did.
What we understand now is that they were wrecking ecologies
that produce all kinds of alterations across the West, And
as I tried to convey in writing about that little
(44:29):
river I live on down in New Mexico, the alterations
extend right down to our own time. I mean, I
live on a river that because all the beavers were
taken off of it in the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties.
The result was that without the beaver dams and the
ponds on it, that little stream eroded into crisscrossing arroyos
(44:53):
going in every single direction. And the result today is
that it's a completely different ecology. It's one of those
One of the things, as I say quite a bit
I know on this podcast, is the past doesn't stay.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
In the past.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
It extends into the present day. And so that's the
sort of thing I'm trying to to make people understand
with this.
Speaker 5 (45:13):
I only became aware recently that that people used to
struggle with well, that Europeans used to struggle with the
concept of extinction. That it was I don't know who
debated what side of it, but that it was actually
debated could extinction be possible? Because how do you make
(45:35):
it conform to Genesis or how do you how do
you how do you conform extinction to the biblical creation story?
That I know the idea that people argued about this,
But what what do you see in recognizing that there
were dozens or hundreds of native religions and native cultures
and native systems of understanding? But do you see that
(46:01):
native people's had ideas of extinction?
Speaker 4 (46:06):
Do? I mean, like, did they get it?
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Well?
Speaker 1 (46:10):
I think in America as a result of the pleistis
sin extinctions and obviously they happened far back in time
ten thousand, eleven thousand, and twelve thousand years before. I
think the native people then understood that animals disappear and
they completely go away and we don't ever see them again.
(46:35):
And so they I think they understood then that extinction
was real in the world. Whether or not, I mean,
the question for me and I have not been able
to answer, the question to my own satisfaction is whether
or not those memories extended down subsequent towards the present.
(46:56):
And I do not I don't have.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
An answer for that.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
But what you led with very the idea of extinction
very much was a debated topic in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. It was debated particularly when when Europeans, especially
and then in America too, began excavating the remains of
(47:22):
plesissne animals and in some cases dinosaurs, but really more
frequently plesiscene animals, and as early palaeontologists tried to reassemble
those animals. What they began to realize is that nothing
like this lives anymore. What is the explanation for that?
(47:43):
And that set in motion about a century's worth of
debate about whether extinction was actually possible, and the Biblical
Judaeo Christian version was it's not possible. The world was
created by a dear It was created in perfection. Animals
(48:04):
created perfection exists exactly now as they did at the
moment of their creation, and in a perfect deity created world,
nothing will ever go away. Everything is going to remain.
Thomas Jefferson believed that extinction was not possible in the
seventeen nineties, but he was persuaded by the naturalists in France,
(48:29):
particularly the com Bouffon, that extinction absolutely looks like it
can happen. We don't know why these animals disappeared. And
that's why Jefferson had instructions to both Lewis and Clark
and Freeman and Custis that Southern expedition when they went west,
look for mammoths, because we've found the bones.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Of mammoths in the east.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
We can't find any east, but maybe they're still out
there in the west. But by the eighteen thirties and
in the eighteen forties, most scientists in both America and
Europe began to realize that, wow, these things, they really
have disappeared.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
They're not here anymore.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
And then we had the kind of crushing realization in
the eighteen forties of the extinction of the great Awk,
our northern hemisphere penguin, which was basically wiped out by
egg hunters. And suddenly there's a realization that absolutely animals
can disappear, and it looks like one of the reasons
(49:31):
they disappear is because of human exploitation.
Speaker 4 (49:34):
I see examples where native cultures would have.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
A meta.
Speaker 5 (49:42):
They would understand extinction, but have a metaphysical idea about it,
like planes tribes. As the buffalo started to vanish, planes
tribes to be that they went back in that they
had come from the earth and they went back into
the earth. Fascinating to me is I was talking to
a guy. That's kind of one of the craziest conversations
(50:05):
I ever had with someone, because it felt like it
was time travel. I was taking new guy in Guyana,
a tribalman in Guyana, and they had always had a
herd of a couple hundred white lipped packery that lived
within striking distance of their village. They cleared out they
couldn't find them. It was a great resource for them,
(50:27):
he explained to me face to face. He explained to
me that there was another village and there was a
shaman in the village who is jealous of their village
for having such prosperity, and he had locked the packers
into a mountain. And like, there's no like this dude
would not have awareness of that idea on the Great
(50:47):
Plains of America that things were locked into the earth.
Speaker 4 (50:52):
But it's like you're getting at its gone noess.
Speaker 5 (50:56):
Right, and you have to have an explanation, but like
a different way of that, like it's gone yeah right,
it's just but a totally different worldview, you know, but
capturing the same sentiment that.
Speaker 1 (51:06):
It's it's the same sentiment. It's a different cause effect
relationship than we would have with a scientific worldview. I mean,
the cause effect relationship for why things happened was different
among indigenous people. They had a different argument for this
(51:26):
is a consequence. The cause is completely something different, and
we would have the western, rational, scientific world looks for
an evidentiary cause for the consequence, and oftentimes the indigenous
world looks for kind of a what we would call
a supernatural explanation for why things happen.
Speaker 6 (51:49):
Yeah, earlier you were talking about the mountainmen and the
hide hunters as being these initially glorified figures, and now
they've we've reassessed our view of them.
Speaker 4 (52:04):
But inarguably quite fascinating. Yeah, yeah, but there.
Speaker 3 (52:10):
I think what's interesting is when you look at this
in the aggregate, the whole pattern, there are these examples
of like the egg hunters with the Great Auk, and
and I think the one the one storyline that never
had really entered my consciousness until later in life was
(52:31):
the Sea Otter hunt. And especially under Russian control, I mean,
they're they're conscripting native people and and killing them and
torturing them to go kill otters for their fur, and
I it's it's just striking to me because it's in
(52:54):
keeping with this much larger pattern of of exploitation of wildlife.
But once you look at it and you see all
of the little, you know, unique aspects of it, then
you begin to sort of comprehend the larger picture. I
don't know if that makes sense, but you know, there's
some very familiar aspects to the story of wildlife depletion,
(53:17):
but there's also these outliers that are pretty horrific and
yet again in keeping with the ones that were maybe
more comfortable with as a culture talking about.
Speaker 1 (53:28):
Yeah, that one is definitely an outlier because of the
conscription of the alliots and others. I mean, sometimes they
would kidnap a guy's family and hold his family ransom
so that he would go and do the otter hunt
for them. And the reason I think that one, really,
you know, strikes us as egregious as it is is
(53:51):
because what we're more used to is something like what happened,
you know, with the fur companies and the native people.
Speaker 2 (53:58):
As clients of the fur companies.
Speaker 1 (54:00):
And of course that one is a that one you
have to know about history some to wrap your mind
around to realize that native people, who we accord a
kind of a special consideration for the natural world, and
they almost always have it, there's no question. But they
were also confronted with people who had brought in a
(54:22):
brand new technology, a metal technology that if you didn't
participate in it, and your neighbors, your native neighbors down
the river did, then you were suddenly massively disadvantaged, because
if they got metal, if they got guns, if they
got knives made of steel, and they got arrow points
(54:46):
made of iron, then and you remained with your traditional
flint culture, you were massively disadvantaged in the world that
was happening around them. And so most people, all the
there were religious leaders who tried to stop this and said,
don't do it, don't join into this this hunt. Nonetheless,
(55:08):
most people did because they realized that the world had
changed so dramatically if they did not participate. And the
unfortunate result was that the market hunt usually usually pointed
out very specific things that it wanted. It didn't want
native people to, you know, offer them up there the
crops from their fields. It wanted the furs of beavers
(55:32):
and muskrats and otters, and so if you want to
play the game with the global market, that's what you
have to offer us in trade and will then set
you up with metalware. And so it's a it's a
part of a kind of a voluntary participation in the
market economy. Over most of the West, that is not
(55:55):
true of the otter thing we were just talking about,
where people were conscripted into it.
Speaker 5 (56:02):
There's another question about the odd country or you're doing
sea otters. But to set it up, I'll point out that,
like if you look at a lot of the areas
as they marched across the country, you kind of come
for the fur and stay for the whatever. Right, So
these like guys that go across the Appalachian Mountains the
(56:26):
hunt deer, oftentimes those same individuals stay to get into agriculture,
stay to get into timber extraction whatever.
Speaker 4 (56:38):
Yeah, so you go like or you know, you.
Speaker 5 (56:42):
Hide hunters go out and out of that comes these
like cattle enterprises or whatever. Right, Like there's there's no
there's no gap. People show up oftentimes to extract fur,
and then they quickly they don't leave. You follow me,
like more people come in their footsteps. Are there exceptions
in that where there's a big gap, and like, what
(57:05):
what was it like when you came to the Pacific
coast for odds, like the Russians are down there? Like
after the odters, was there a retraction or was there
like a thing you stayed for you?
Speaker 1 (57:18):
No, No, that probably was an exception because almost everybody
was coming by ship, and so they were when the
otter hunt was over, when they couldn't find anymore, when
the first seals were too depleted to continue, it was
you know, law of diminishing returns, there's no point in continuing.
They usually went back to wherever they were from, because
(57:40):
a ton of them were from Boston and New York.
Speaker 4 (57:43):
And I mean then there was like a quiet there's
like an otterless quiet period.
Speaker 1 (57:48):
There was, indeed, Yeah, and the twenties and and thirties
and forty I mean, otters don't start recovering until about
the eighteen eighties or eighteen nineties. The first seals, because
there had been more of them, they recover a little
bit more quickly. But there is also a kind of
a subsidence period after the demise of beavers in the
(58:12):
interior West, when that Husses Bay group of guys, I
was talking about go in and try to ruin the
country and trap all the beavers out of all the streams.
On the west side of the Continental Divide, there's a
period of about fifteen years or so where a lot
(58:33):
of the mountain men kind of are I mean, some
of them go west with the Oregon Trail folks who
settle in the Willamet River valley and become sheriffs and things.
And I'm going to talk in one of the upcoming
episodes about a next step that several of the mountain
men do. When their beavers are gone, a lot of
(58:55):
them turn to the horse trade, and they become traders
and horses. And one of the things that some of
the classic mountain men do Bill Sublett, for example, they
go to California and either trade for horses or catch
wild horses in the rolling golden hills of California, or
(59:16):
they sometimes they just steal them off Spanish ranches and
they drive them east from California and outfit Stephen Carney's
Army of the West, which needs mounts and remounts. Or
they take them to places like Fort Bridger and they
supply the wagon trains the Overlin trail folks with horses
(59:40):
with fresh stock to get all the way to the
west coast. So there's a there's a little bit of
a lag, but they usually find something like the buffalo hunters.
When the buffalo are gone, shit, you got prong horns,
you got elk, you got big horn sheep, they just
go after whatever is left and so and wolves because
(01:00:03):
they've learned now that you know, you can use strychnine
and you can poison wolves.
Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
You can get a dollar a pelt for a wolf pelt,
and so.
Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
Yeah, so they managed to segue into just a whatever
animals are left. Yeah, but the mountain Man, quite a
number of them become horse traders.
Speaker 4 (01:00:19):
Are you familiar with a vicaro of the brush country?
Speaker 1 (01:00:22):
No?
Speaker 4 (01:00:22):
I am, Yeah, Yeah, that dude.
Speaker 5 (01:00:25):
He hated the buffalo hunters because he was he felt
that they all became criminals, not all became sheriffs. Right.
Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
And there's a line, and there's a line that we
cited in the Mountain En Project where like at the
eighteen thirty seven or eighteen thirty eight rendezvous, someone writes
a number of them have gone west to become horse thieves.
Such a thing has never been heard of until now. Yeah,
like it was just this invention of desperation.
Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
Yeah, well that was the Bill Sublette thing.
Speaker 1 (01:00:57):
I mean, he actually did that, and he regarded that
as one of his great coups. He went to California
and stole a bunch of Spanish horses and drove them
back to the planes to outfit the overland and to
Bent's Fort. Bent's Fort was one of the big sort
of receiving areas for Western horses. But that episode is
coming up. I'm going to tell the horse story. I
(01:01:18):
think it may be the next to one, in fact,
after this, where we'll turn to the horse trade in
the West, which is another one of those that's kind
of little known and unlike the sort of thing we've
been talking about. I mean, with the horse trade, the
idea was to get live animals back to the seventies,
and yeah, getting live animals back. And what made horses
(01:01:42):
really great is that they.
Speaker 2 (01:01:44):
Got back there on their own.
Speaker 1 (01:01:45):
You didn't have to load them on a steamboat or
you know, pack them up on the.
Speaker 2 (01:01:49):
Back of a pack horse.
Speaker 1 (01:01:51):
You could just drive them along and they got to market,
you know, on their own.
Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
Accord. Good Randal, I'm good.
Speaker 5 (01:02:01):
One last observation for you about my favorite part of that.
I can't remember the guy's name, Vacaro the Brush Country.
Speaker 3 (01:02:07):
Is it j Frank Adobie.
Speaker 5 (01:02:09):
Yeah, well no no, but it's like it's as told
you from a Vicaro of the Brush Country. But he's
talking about the King Ranch. Okay, he's talking about one
of the guys that would become a King Ranch. Guy
having experimenting with taking a like like injecting cattle with
(01:02:36):
brine into their vascular system to that you would somehow
preserve because it's like hot, it's humid down the Gold Country,
South Texas, like everything rots to dam fast. So he's
toying with the idea, how would you inject like a
brine into its as it's dying, into its askular system
(01:03:01):
and sort of pickle it.
Speaker 1 (01:03:02):
This is basically salting the meats.
Speaker 4 (01:03:10):
Tickles me endlessly. Man, it's like that. But he acknowledges
that they never got that perfected.
Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
It's one of those things that appears on those redneck solutions.
Speaker 4 (01:03:21):
Well, thank thanks for all the wisdom, Dan Man.
Speaker 2 (01:03:24):
It's fun. Thanks guys.
Speaker 5 (01:03:25):
Things
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