Ep. 699: The American West with Dan Flores

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
If this is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast, you
can't predict anything.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
for ELK. First Light has performance apparel to support every
hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light
dot com, f I R S T L I T
E dot com. Before we start today's show, we'd like

(00:42):
to touch on, uh, doctor Randall's hair a little bit. Yes,
you got screwed at the barber.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
I don't want to say screwed, but there's a miscommunication.
I was going for a more minimalist touch up and
we ended up.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
You wanted to keep your length in the back.

Speaker 4 (01:03):
Yeah, I wanted to keep my length in the back,
and I was.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
I was.

Speaker 4 (01:06):
I'd sort of made peace with it.

Speaker 3 (01:07):
And then Seth showed me the other day a photo
from when we were out doing the SIG shoot and
I saw that.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Flow and I just just blown in the wind.

Speaker 4 (01:15):
Yeah, I missed it so badly.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
The reason I winded you talk about that is Corey
just had interesting observation that there's a river you like
to fish, and you say that the river never fishes
good two days in a row. Yeah, So if you
have a great day, you know not to go back.

Speaker 5 (01:31):
Yeah, you better pick another stream for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Because it can't fish two days in a row.

Speaker 6 (01:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
And he's proposing that if you get a great haircut somewhere,
don't go back because it's gonna not be good. Yeah,
because one of the odds, lightning's not gonna strike twice,
never in the same spot. Hell about fishing, it goes
in weeks, week on, week off. So if you're like,
if people are up fishing at our fish shack and
you call up, the last thing you want to hear

(01:57):
because if you're going up, like let's say they're up
there last week of July, you're going first week August.
What you want? You think you want hot reports, You
don't want horrible report.

Speaker 4 (02:12):
You make that phone call wanting some bitching and moaning.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
Yeah, because they're like, oh my god, it's on fire.
You're like, I'm not even gonna go now. Yeah, because
this is gonna be the it'll die, it'll be the dead.
I'll be there for the dead week. You want it
to be that no one's catching nothing, then you're gonna
go up and have a phenomenal time. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:29):
No, that's the same with this little riffle that I'm
speaking of. Just easty here. M.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
You just winked at me. Does that mean it's not
easty here? No? Uh. Joined today by the esteemed professor,
former professor of American history, current author of all kinds
of books, New York Times best selling author Dan Floores.
It's been on the show a handful of times in

(02:57):
the past. I'll just come flat out and say, he's
my most He's my favorite historian, one of America's most
celebrated historians. Uh. Eleven books if you listen to a
Rogan's podcast. Dan's been on Rogan's podcast a couple of
times talking about his book as well. Started his career
as not started you were a writer but also a teacher. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:21):
I basically started as a freelance magazine writer before I
went off. And you know, I did the strange thing
of getting a PhD. Relate yeah, and becoming Yeah, you
guys can relate Randall can relate that know.

Speaker 7 (03:38):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Not only that, but I took when I was in
graduate school, I took a class with Professor Floories, and
Randall took presumably many classes, a handful of a handful
of classes. And now Dan is doing a were Dan
is doing a podcast our podcast network called The American

(04:02):
West with Dan floy'es. We're going to talk about some
of the themes that will emerge in that podcast. As
he tells a I would say an unconventional telling of
the American West. Don't get into enormous detail. But how
would you describe your approach because you were an environmental historian?

Speaker 6 (04:26):
Yeah, that's right. I trained to be an environmental historian.
And for people who don't know what that is, it's
basically somebody who studies and writes about and taught classes
too about the relationship between people and nature. So that's
a pretty big topic. You know, allows for a lot
of things, and what it doesn't do much because I

(04:48):
also taught the American West, it doesn't do much of
the standard American West stuff, you know. I mean I
never did really talk much about mining strikes and the
overall and trail migrations and Indian wars and gunfights and
all that. I was interested in in stuff that pertained

(05:10):
to the kind of environmental relationship between people and the
natural world in the West and in the country. And
so that's that's really what this podcast boils down to.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
Yeah, fewer okay corrals and more more wildlife.

Speaker 6 (05:23):
Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, yeah, it's.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
Being a wildlife. Uh pigeon catching controversy in New York
And this makes sense to me. The price, Like my
boy sells pigeons to dog trainers.

Speaker 7 (05:40):
Oh now he's now he's onto selling them.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
Oh he's made he makes good money selling pigeons.

Speaker 7 (05:44):
Oh yeah, No, I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
I thought, well, this year he just did a if
you go from seven dollars to eight dollars, what percent
increases that.

Speaker 4 (05:51):
That's a tough one to figure out.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
One I told him, say tariffs did it?

Speaker 7 (05:55):
And wait, how twelve? How much does he is that?

Speaker 6 (05:59):
How much?

Speaker 2 (06:00):
Your head?

Speaker 6 (06:00):
Dan, I think that's right.

Speaker 7 (06:05):
Wait does he is that? How much he sells them for?

Speaker 2 (06:08):
He just he just he just uh he had a
new client mm hmm. And and he was saying what
because last year he was getting seven a piece and
he had a new client. He just threw out eight
and out of blank, take as many as I can get.
So point being, it doesn't surprise me. Now what what?

(06:30):
So he gets pigeons out of grain silos because guys
are storing grain. Last thing, you want his pigeons in
the grain. You know, you don't want I'm shitting in
the grain. So he gets them out of grain silos
and whatnot, out of barns and people use them for
dog training.

Speaker 6 (06:47):
Oh I didn't.

Speaker 7 (06:47):
I thought he got paid to capture them. I didn't
realize that he was turning them around.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
He would pay to get him. Okay, but I'm saying,
picture now that a pigeons worth that amount of money. Okay.
Some guy has thought to himself apparently, well, not where
are there a lot of pigeons? And he has noted
that in Brooklyn there's a lot of pigeons, and some
guys are taking some industrial pigeon catching strategies to these

(07:14):
parks in Brooklyn, which is really causing a lot of
distress for logo pigeon lovers. It's a little bit weird
because I think that I don't know if New York does.
But there's a thing called a vatroll. There's a there's
a poison that municipalities will use on pigeons. It's kind

(07:34):
of like an un you know. So I think that
for them to see a guy jump out and net
a bunch, it's probably like doubt be disturbing by I mean,
if you looked at the darker side, there's like a
darker side the pigeon removal that they're probably not aware
of pigeons being a non native bird. But pitches have
been there. I mean the French delivered introduced pigeons along

(07:57):
the Saint Lawrence, I think the late fifteen hundred. I
mean there's been pigeons on the ground. Street pigeons. It's
Lenaian name. If you see a pigeon flying around town,
it's Lenaian name. Is Columba, Olivia, I believe is what
it is. And people are worked up because guys are
catching these things and they're probably like the guests are
selling them into the pigeon market. Some guy cleared one

(08:20):
hundred and fifty out of a park.

Speaker 7 (08:23):
Bushwick. I thought this was going the direction of roller pigeons,
which is why I paid attention. Jordan Siller sent me this.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
This is a dude selling. This is a dude selling
pigeons for some purpose. I used to on occasion when
I lived in Brooklyn and I would go down and
I would just nab them and put them in my pockets.
And I'm not kidding you. We would grab them and
we would make patas with them, me and my chef
buddy and I just put them right in my pockets.

(08:53):
We got all kinds of videos of it.

Speaker 7 (08:56):
Oh my gosh, we need to put this together. This
is a new episode. Well, what what's the hand grabbing pigeons?

Speaker 2 (09:04):
You just put a little bit of and you just
put them and I'd always want to leave the scene
with them alive. So we just put them in our
pockets and make little pat tays with them. Your pockets
all bounce garment is best for any kind of coat,
like a down puffy type, and put them in your pockets.

Speaker 5 (09:21):
But uh, kangaroo.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah, the thing that came mind, they came on here
if any person, like if you went to any I
shouldn't say any If you went to most wildlife managers
and you ask them if you could wave a magic
wand and it would make street pigeons disappear, they would
wave the wand. You know, but then you get into
like different things like I used to go to even

(09:45):
farmers and ranchers that like would hate wild pigs. But
you'd say, if I could wave a magic wand and
a wild pig would never ever ever again walk on
your property? Would you want me to wave it? And
they think and go, no, I just don't want as many,
you know. Uh, so that's going on there. You can

(10:09):
get stung though, if you're the guy doing this. Mm hmm,
if you're listening to you, if you're listening, they are
fixing to they're fixing to get you under animal cruelty.

Speaker 5 (10:22):
So they haven't caught this person yet, huh. I wonder
how their diving.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
But if he's getting let's say he's getting New York prices,
mm hmm.

Speaker 7 (10:32):
I feel like he's getting.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Oh okay, let's say he's getting ten bucks per Does
that mean Jimmy gets to I'm just saying he's making like,
you know, making money. Yeah, he's like the last of
the old New York market. Huns. Uh. There's the thing
I found out about Buddy Mine told me about it.

(10:59):
Have you ever heard old man Randall to ask you
about this?

Speaker 7 (11:03):
We like started talking about it the other day.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
The International Order of Saint Hubertus.

Speaker 3 (11:11):
That's how I pronounce it not a expert though.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, I don't know how. This was never on my radarm.
You know why you don't know about it, same reason
I don't know about it.

Speaker 4 (11:24):
I'm not a member.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
You have to be asked.

Speaker 6 (11:28):
To join.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
The International Order of Saint Hubertus is a true nightly order.
I mean you can look at their website. They even
do that thing where like you'll have the first letter
of a paragraph and you put it in a red
box like once upon a time. Oh yeah, like the
old m I mean that's when you know it's legit.

Speaker 3 (11:49):
Yeah, you know, there's got to be a technical term
for that, no doubt.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
The International Order of Saint Hubertus is a true nightly order.
In the historical tradition. The Order is under the royal
protection of His Majesty, King Juan Carlos of Spain, the
grand Master Emeritus in his Imperial and Royal Highness, Archduke
Andreas Salvatore von Habsburg, Lovingren of Austria, and our current

(12:20):
grand Master is His Imperial and Royal Highness Istevon von
Habsburg Lothringen, Archduke of Austria, Prince of Hungary. The International
Order of Saint Hubertus is comprised of an international group

(12:43):
of individuals Ordun's Brothers, who are passionate about the sports
of hunting and fishing, and who are vitally interested and
actively involved in the preservation of wildlife its habitat in
the tradition of ethical hunting and fish. They got members
who are dedicated to upland bird hunting, duck hunting, and

(13:06):
hunters of quote larger and big game. Never been asked
if Brandley was asked to be in this and I don't,
I'm gonna be pised.

Speaker 7 (13:19):
No.

Speaker 4 (13:19):
I was just thinking we should start our own secret order.

Speaker 2 (13:24):
Here's what they stand for.

Speaker 3 (13:25):
That's okay, instead of skull and bones, we'll just go
with skulls and skulls.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
Here's what they stand for. To promote sportsmanlike conduct and
hunting and fishing. To foster good fellowship among sportsmen from
all over the world. To teach and preserve sound traditional
hunting and fishing customs. To encourage wildlife conservation, and to
help protect in dangered species from extinction. To promote the
concept of hunting and fishing as an intangible cultural heritage

(13:54):
of humanity. To endeavor to ensure that the economic benefits
derived from sports, hunting and fishing, support the regions where
these activities are carried out, and to strive to enhance
respect the responsible hunters and fishermen. If I get into that,
I'm you know, I don't have any tattoos. I'm getting

(14:14):
that it's got a crest.

Speaker 5 (14:18):
Where's that is going on your lower back?

Speaker 6 (14:20):
Right?

Speaker 2 (14:22):
Oh?

Speaker 5 (14:22):
That's where it has to go.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
Put the first one?

Speaker 7 (14:25):
Then?

Speaker 2 (14:26):
Yeah, now expenser, who ran out of place to put them?
He said?

Speaker 4 (14:32):
He said, with no small amount of judgment.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
Before you get in a dank, Can you, guys tell
us about your added hunt? But can I start by
telling about how controversial it is? Yeah? Are you familiar
with the controversy? Mm hmm.

Speaker 5 (14:47):
Well is it similar to asking folks if they want
to get rid of pigs?

Speaker 2 (14:51):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 5 (14:52):
And if you most of them would say no because
they're you know, they turned quite a profit.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah. So people like you guys, the people you guys
getting all excited flying all around the country to hunt
a dad are killing big horns.

Speaker 7 (15:10):
Not exactly, I think.

Speaker 2 (15:16):
You hate big horn sheep.

Speaker 7 (15:20):
Thanks for putting us in a box.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
Tell us about your trip.

Speaker 5 (15:23):
I don't think that's true.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
No, no, No, I'm joking. I want to want to start
paraphrasing half a Finger.

Speaker 7 (15:30):
Yeah, oh yeah, we're definitely gonna address that. That's part
of the that's part of the conservation.

Speaker 2 (15:36):
I'm being too, I'm being I'm being.

Speaker 5 (15:38):
By promoting hunting.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
Yeah, meaning that a dad are there. They're there are
sheep species from North Africa, North Africa, and they run wild,
and they run wild in Texas.

Speaker 5 (15:52):
Not a sheep, they're odd.

Speaker 6 (15:56):
They're closer, more closer, they're closer to oats.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Oh, I guess that's where I got that. So not
a true sheep.

Speaker 5 (16:06):
Correct, obviously related, but not not a true sheep.

Speaker 2 (16:09):
They've gone feral. They do quite well in Texas, and
people point out that it's been pointed out, not not
just pointed out. I think it's According to half a Finger,
it's like an objective reality that awed ad are detrimental
to big horn sheep recovery. So, in all fairness, do
not mean to overblow it. Halfle Finger has pointed out

(16:30):
he feels that there is like an increasing popularity in
awed hunting because you can hunt around, you don't have
any kind of bag limits, Like it's kind of the
you know, it's like the the you know, it's like
the wild West of Awdad hunting.

Speaker 7 (16:44):
Right now, You're not going to get a sheep probably
ever in your life. So if you want to try
for something adjacent to it.

Speaker 2 (16:52):
Go down in the desert and you know, run around
in the rim rocks. They're down there. And he feels
that as this gains popular larity land managers, landowners will
become incentivized to host awed AD on their properties, and
he feels that this could lead to a net loss

(17:16):
in suitable big horn habitat. But I was hunting, oh Dad,
when you guess when your mommy's was wiping your noses?
How old fifty one?

Speaker 7 (17:32):
So Steve made it cool before it was cool.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
No, I went one time, I went two times.

Speaker 7 (17:39):
I'm just trying to be cute.

Speaker 2 (17:40):
I went two times and I was not. I guess
I was. I wasn't really aware of the issue. But anyways,
tell about you guys trip. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (17:46):
Well, a couple of weeks ago, Karin and I and
Karin's significant other Matt, were hosted by doctor Phil of Retzki, the.

Speaker 7 (17:57):
Duck Doctor DNA doc now now odd AD DNA doc
also Turkey DNA doc Yep, he's got all the names.

Speaker 5 (18:07):
He hosted us down in West Texas on UTEPS, the
Indio Research Station.

Speaker 7 (18:14):
Yep, he's at the Yeah. So so we weren't at
you know, uh RAN for research for it. Yeah, University
of Texas at El Paso has a research facility that's
about thirty five or forty it's forty thousand.

Speaker 5 (18:30):
That's where we were, right on the Rio Grande.

Speaker 2 (18:34):
All these details.

Speaker 5 (18:34):
We're looking at Mexico, the mountains in Mexico the whole time, glorious,
stunning country. He wanted us to come down in February
or January when it was cooler, and the best time
we could pull it off was in early April, and
so odds were that it was going to be hot
while we were down there, but we got really lucky
with a cold front that rolled in just days before

(18:55):
we landed. And if they were still trying to squeak
out of that cold front, and I don't think it
ever got above seventy degrees. We hunted two days and
we did our best to help the conservation aspect and
tried to just shoot and use at first was our
main objective.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
So this facility is hostile to the odd ads.

Speaker 5 (19:16):
I mean, they've just made themselves at home.

Speaker 6 (19:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (19:21):
Yeah, they're a desert big horn that roam in and out.
But this is just south of the Elephant Mountains, I believe,
which has a herd of bighorn sheep and they'll bleed
over into this ranch. But the odd ad have made
themselves at home. There weren't a lot of odd ad around,
or at least they weren't easy to find. We made

(19:42):
it look easy in two days, but it was because
the weather was so nice. We were able to hunt
all day, glass them up in the morning and take
hours to get in within rifle range, and you know,
slowly pack them out without worrying about wasting any of
the meat.

Speaker 3 (19:55):
But the university does want to get rid of them
or reduce the numbers.

Speaker 5 (20:01):
Well, that's kind of the general vibe in West Texas
is to keep the numbers reduced for desert big horn.
Sheet You're never going to be able to get rid
of odd ad just because they've made themselves at home
and they do so well in that landscape. But yeah,
desert big horns certainly sit higher on the pedestal down there,
but odd ad are very close because of the outfitting

(20:25):
opportunity the trophy hunting big air quotes.

Speaker 2 (20:27):
Can you pass that that thing down here so I
can look at it?

Speaker 7 (20:30):
Yeah, I can't have fifty pounds. Corey shot it really
really huge sand Graham, So Steve, like, I guess your
hand doesn't even fit around the the whole horn there.

(20:50):
But yeah, just more on that. You know, the phil
Phil's lab, he's he's trying to figure out certain new
techniques to test aspects of the odd ads. So like
they everyone that we shot, we collectively got four. They

(21:12):
all got nasal swabbed. Uh and uh, they all got
a piece of meat cut out of them for testing
for various diseases and such. But to my understanding, that
research facility is potential grounds for desert big horn reintroductions.
Oh really, so there are it would be possible to

(21:35):
put together some kind of study or tests to see
how many females would need to be taken out of
the population in order to accommodate I don't really know
the right language, but you know, to accommodate number exactly exactly?

Speaker 2 (21:54):
Are you counting up that he's like eleven or twelve
years old?

Speaker 5 (21:57):
That's what we guesstimated somewhere between ten and thirteen. It's
so hard to tell.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
I mean, well, the yeah, the annually ier rubbed off
on the outer very smooth. Now.

Speaker 5 (22:08):
I also brought in that you that I shot, which
was an older at you as well and just as
beautiful of a trophy. And the meat is ten times better.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
Because he has a real bad eating reputation.

Speaker 5 (22:21):
Yeah, which I don't understand. Well, it's just like people
who say antelope aren't good to eat, or sagey mule deer.
You know, they just don't know how to cook more
than cereal.

Speaker 7 (22:31):
Yeah, I felt like the meat flavor is so incredibly mild.
I mean I shot the little list of them. Of
the four, I thought that I was aiming at a you,
and then it ended up being a small ram that
was termed us a subadult. You can kind of like

(22:53):
lift it with one hand. And I haven't eaten off of.
I ate a little bit of his heart, but the
meat is much like lighter pink and seems tender as
heck because it because he's really young. But we threw
ribs on the grill one of the days and our
first night at dinner at doctor Phil's house, he'd just

(23:17):
forget what cut, but he just grilled it up and
it you know, he he he says it's like sirloin
to him, and I thought it was absolutely delicious. So
kind of riffing off of Jesse Griffiths, you know, Eat
a hog, Save the world.

Speaker 6 (23:34):
Uh.

Speaker 7 (23:35):
Phil's new tagline is save a sheep, Eat an odd ad.

Speaker 5 (23:38):
So yeah, he whipped up a again. I don't know
what cut it was, but an odd ad steak and
an elk steak. I couldn't tell the difference.

Speaker 7 (23:46):
It was real. It was really good. It just you
even smell the meat and it doesn't it's it's yeah,
it's just really it's really clean.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
They got a bad reputation, Yeah they do.

Speaker 6 (23:59):
I don't.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
I don't know. It's like reputations aren't really based on
that much. Yeahs based on what some dude said about it. Yeah,
and then some dud parrots what he said.

Speaker 7 (24:07):
Yeah, and then that just you know, it's a total
that goes out.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
So how did you guys see all together?

Speaker 1 (24:16):
Oh?

Speaker 5 (24:17):
Well, the group that Karin and I both got uh
are adult and sub adult rams.

Speaker 7 (24:23):
Uh.

Speaker 5 (24:23):
There were twenty three in that group, and then I
guess we saw two other solo Rams and another small group,
so we probably saw close to fifty in two days.
Two full days of hunting though, and then sun up
till sundown.

Speaker 7 (24:35):
When you were goutting yours in the field, Matt and
I went off on a on a little nearby knob
and there were probably like ten in that group. So
they're around, they're they're there. Their behavior is interesting, like
if you you know, like Corey, Corey shot first and

(24:56):
then I shot.

Speaker 5 (24:57):
Second into those chivalrous of you those four hundred yards.

Speaker 7 (25:01):
Yeah, no, no, I didn't. You know, we we we
had hiked in. Corey was so awesome the entire time.
But we what we haven't covered is that I was
like tremendous dead weight on that hunt. This is the hardest.
It was so hard for me, not not just physically

(25:25):
and it was hot and it was but just the
terrain is punishing. Like I think it was you who
said at some point, Steve, like even the thorns have
thorns down there. I mean, you're not going to grab
onto anything. It's so like Shaley and every step, like
the rocks, that everything is just you know, shifting under
your feet, so you can't get on stable ground. And

(25:48):
I knew I'd always had like a little bit of
a fear of heights and incline, but oh goodness, I
mean this I was, I like shut down at point,
so I can't, can't not courier Phil or Matt like.
I had my handheld quite a bit through this experience.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
Literally your handheld.

Speaker 7 (26:07):
Well, yes, at one point literally my hand was out.

Speaker 5 (26:10):
We were on the highest point of the ranch.

Speaker 7 (26:12):
So literally my hand was out.

Speaker 5 (26:15):
Which I think was about six thousand feet And to
get the two sheep out, it took us eight and
a half hours to pack out, by far, the most
brutal packout I've ever been.

Speaker 7 (26:23):
Probably let's let's shave a third of the time off
because they stopped and waited for my ass a lot.

Speaker 5 (26:28):
But yeah, it was so hot though we had to
stop again. It probably wasn't seventy degrees, but there's zero
shade and we were I'll admit, we were out of
water by two o'clock. I mean we were sipping the
last little bits of our water on our way out
of there. It got a little touch and.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
Go towards the end there.

Speaker 7 (26:47):
Definitely got in my head about that. But you know,
they they don't like, you know, maybe deer elk like
they'd be gone, but I took a long time between
or after his shot, and I didn't get mine with
the first shot, and there were still other odd ad

(27:08):
hanging out. So their behavior is weird. I mean, yeah,
you were saying they didn't know where the shot came from.
But it's not like one shot and they were all gone,
so they hung around, presented other opportunities to you know.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
I find it interesting how the different states look at
their attitude about the animal. In New Mexico, it's a
draw it's a draw tag and you don't draw it. Yeah,
like I put it in.

Speaker 7 (27:35):
I put it in every year for New Mexico audit.

Speaker 2 (27:38):
Yeah, I put it every year.

Speaker 7 (27:39):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
My buddy, My buddy's got a spot. He says, they
go there and sometimes you see like you'll be looking
at a hillside yep, and at first you don't think
there's anything there, but once you start looking, he's like
there'd be like thirty forty of them on the hillside.
And every time they draw a permit, every time one
of his bodies draws a permit, they just get an
odd ad. I've been applying now for I think ten
years in New Mexican, you know, next doesn't do the

(28:01):
points right. I've been applying in ten years, ten years
to drawn aud ad tag in New Mexico. I've never
drawn it. So it's like they've kind of became like
an honorary. They're sort of the thing they're managed, you know,
like you look at with Texas wild hogs. Texas is

(28:21):
so serious about wild hogs they dropped any license requirement
you need. There is no license requirement for hogs obviously,
no season, no bag limit, no license requirement. You go
to California to hunt hogs, you gotta tag full big
game license and you need to tag the hog. Just

(28:42):
like different states have really different attitudes about how to
treat and handle right not native.

Speaker 7 (28:48):
Wild And then I think that also maybe goes back
to what Heffelfinger is saying, like there's obviously probably a
delicate balance between the state Wildlife agency and then the
the you know, the ranches that that sell odd ad
hunts and just having to be careful about.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
You know, well, yeah, the ranch control, the ranch controls
the access. Another way that like another interesting way that
New Mexico handles this issues with the you know, the
IBEX in the Florida Mountains, the Florida where you can
stand on one end of the Florida Mountains and see
the other end. It's like a containable little mountain range.
Maybe I don't know, Maybe am I wrong? Could you

(29:31):
walk around the Florida Mountains in two days?

Speaker 6 (29:34):
Maybe? Yeah, if you were a good in shape hiker.

Speaker 2 (29:38):
Yeah, are you like picture you like like standing and
be like there they.

Speaker 4 (29:41):
Are, like you see the island in the entirety.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
There's ibecks in the Florida Mountains or non native so
another non native species. Uh, it's very hard to draw
an ibex tag in the Florida Mountains. There's actually a
thing where that's like a once in a wh lifetime
if you draw for a billy or a ram whatever
they call them. Meanwhile, their management strategy is it's always

(30:09):
ibex season, not in the Florida Mountains.

Speaker 5 (30:14):
If they exit the mountains then it's full.

Speaker 2 (30:16):
So like it's like it's they're like, this is the
ibec's place. You have to apply and probably will never
get a chance to hunt it. As soon as one
of them soccer steps out of those hills. It's just
you just got to go get a tag and go
for it, so you just come up. They have these
little I don't know, man, they're kind of weighing like interest.

(30:40):
People are very interested in it. They're kind of weighing
interest against other ecological considerations when they figure out how
to do it. Like in Florida they have that island
with the sandbar on it and you have to draw
tagged on a sandbar on the island. I'm guessing if
those sandbar were cut loose on the main Florida peninsula,
they'd have a very different attitude about the sandbars, you know.

Speaker 5 (31:04):
Yeah, super cool animal. If anybody's thinking about hunting, one
shoot an you or two before you shoot a ram.

Speaker 7 (31:12):
Yeah. I think heavy Finger is like for every ram
anyone takes, you need to shoot like that.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
I like to miss I misrepresented something Hefflefinger told me
every day.

Speaker 4 (31:26):
And then he doesn't call you out on it, which
is a nice thing.

Speaker 7 (31:29):
But I'll just plug Phil's lab again. It's the Population
Evolutionary Genetics Lab at UTEP University of Texas at El Paso.
And if anyone feels like, you know, donating some tax
deductible UH monies to their research lab, and I think
they'll probably end up doing more on odd AD and

(31:50):
looking at desert big Horn, the potential for reintroduction that's
giving to dot utep dot edu forward slash conservation. You
probably did not retain that information. I will put a
link in the show notes.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
And what was the episode he came on, what do
we call their wild ducks?

Speaker 7 (32:13):
Really wild? That was the first episode a year or
two ago.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
So if you remember back, he's yeah, if you remember back,
we did an episode where in some places it's so
weird this even allowed in some places you can like
pen raise mallards, like pretend mallards and cut them loose
to kind of have like a pretend duck hunt. But
then those pen raise ducks are breeding into our wild

(32:41):
duck populations and affecting their behavior, screwing up migration patterns,
life cycles, fitness.

Speaker 6 (32:50):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
And he came on to talk about how through the
through their genetic survey work, they're able to see from
these reintroductions from not these from the pen raised operations,
they're able to see a genetics spread as the genetics
of those ducks expand outward. And how far into how

(33:11):
far I guess it would be, how far west they're
finding traces of these ducks. Michael Chamberlain is beginning a
new thing on wild turkeys, the impact of you know,
people get all excited when they shoot a white turkey,
real excited. Usually what's happened is you've shot a turkey.

(33:32):
People love it. But what's probably happened is you shot
someone's turkey, right, you shot someone's fair old turkey. And
so there's a new project coming out what we're going
to start looking at the impacts of domestic turkeys finding
their way into wild turkeys and interbreeding into wild turkey populations.

Speaker 5 (33:53):
Well, as Karin mentioned, while we were out there, Phil
took meat samples and he was trying to figure out
because there was two different strains of odd ad that
were introduced to Texas originally back in the fifties, I believe,
And now we're trying to figure out which strain were
we hunting and harvesting and could they be hybrid strains?

(34:13):
Could the two different groups have you know, blended together
and made a hybrid odd ad?

Speaker 2 (34:19):
Who caught him loose in the first place?

Speaker 5 (34:22):
Yea, And Texas Parks and Wildlife was yeah, because yeah
it was. And now they're you know, people very much
don't like Texas Parks and Wildlife because they're you know,
aerial gunning odd ad to help with desert big horn
sheep just because they have to. If you want to
protect the sheep, you gotta minimize the odd ad population.

Speaker 3 (34:42):
It's funny that we I think, like generally you could
say that wildlife management has this dark period and then
there's a turning point and then there's sort of the
good old days of post Pittman Robertson and we figured
it out, you know. But so many of these non
native introductions carried on until fairly late in the twentieth century,

(35:03):
like and not all of them are necessarily have the
same ecological implications, but like Himalayan snowcocker, like in the seventies,
you know, and you think about now non natives are
such an issue for us, but it's it's really not
all that long ago.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
Now, I mean Hungary like Hungarian party and American partridge, right, right,
But some well, so you can hunt turkeys in forty
United States. Turkeys are native to thirty eight states. Yeah,
I mean, like some stuff is right, there's no some
stuff there's no like demonstrated deleterious effects.

Speaker 4 (35:39):
Yeah, no, And that's that. I mean, I recognize that.

Speaker 3 (35:42):
But yeah, it's funny how quickly we've we've shifted with
some of these species in recognizing the impacts.

Speaker 4 (35:49):
You know, even in the fishing world.

Speaker 2 (35:52):
There is one last introduction I want to do. Whenever
I'm in Hawaii, I always think on those hot lava rocks.
Just think how much rattlesnake could love it there. That's
all right, you know what I mean. It's the last introduction.

Speaker 4 (36:08):
Ten thousand pet dogs and Hawaiian thrown.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
A male and a female rattlesnake on the ConA coast.
I just feel like they'd be so happy. It'd be
so much to eat hot rocks.

Speaker 4 (36:21):
I have zero interest in rattlesnake being happy.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
Yeah, yeah, no kidding. When I'm standing on one of
those hot live rocks, I can just picture to the sound.

Speaker 7 (36:29):
We really need some TS agents to follow.

Speaker 2 (36:33):
You and make sure I'm not.

Speaker 7 (36:36):
So.

Speaker 6 (36:36):
You know, Hawaii is the only state in the Union
where coyotes have not colonized. Is that right?

Speaker 2 (36:41):
It is?

Speaker 6 (36:42):
It's the only one.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Maybe I'll do that too, well, very popular.

Speaker 6 (36:48):
Those endangered anaise would would not be around for very
long if coyotes ever got there. What is that underheard
that it's a goose. It looks like it's a species
of goose. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's got It's got another
name though, right I've ever heard is Nane, which is
probably the Hawaiian name. Yeah, I mean probably you know,

(37:11):
Anglo missionaries maybe called them geese, but yeah, I think uh,
I think they're generally known by nine.

Speaker 5 (37:18):
The Yeah, I believe it's a dance to the whip
and Nane.

Speaker 4 (37:23):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 5 (37:26):
But one conversation we had on a rock when we
were with this genetics scientists out there. We were talking
about like, at what point in evolution is an animal
native versus invasive?

Speaker 2 (37:39):
You know, Dan's got some Yeah, Dan's been on the
show making his case for wild horses. Do you feel
like remaking because you know what I was gonna ask
you about. First, We're gonna give you a pick, Okay,
I was gonna ask you to tell everyone the story
of the other Lewis and.

Speaker 6 (37:58):
Clark their listen clock experts, or.

Speaker 2 (38:01):
You can you can try to sell you can try
to you can sell everybody on the horse as as
a native American animal. Well, the horse is good, he's
taken that he's taken b I'll say the.

Speaker 6 (38:14):
Horse is quick because the horse and its ancestors have
been here for fifty six million years. Okay, they have
only been absent for about eight thousand years, and so,
you know, and I've talked to paleontologists in Canada who
say from the fossils they have of the last horses

(38:34):
in America that are ten eleven thousand years old that
they had, they can't tell the difference readily between those
and the horses that Europeans brought from the Old World
over there. And so I mean that's I think what
you can say about the horse is the horse is
either an exotic with an asterisk, or it's a native

(38:54):
with an asterisk. And I prefer the native with an asterisk,
because I tend to think in terms of deep history
and long time, and so an animal that's been here
for fifty six million years and only gone for a
wink of an eye time, to me is a native animal.
I mean, that's why they went while so readily and

(39:17):
so quickly when they were reintroduced in the West. The
primary problem, of course, is that they were reintroduced without
their plaistosine predators accompanying them. And so that's why we're
having such difficulty in controlling them, is we don't have
you know, big hunting hyenas and American cheetahs and all

(39:42):
these cats, particularly that preyed on horse folds. But yeah,
this is an animal that you know, although it's created
a huge kind of outcry and by a lot of
people as a non native, I mean, it's actually an
animal that's been here for a long time. So yeah,
that one's pretty quick, pretty quick story.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
It's compelling. It's compelling. Now talk about the tell folks
about the other Lewis and Clark.

Speaker 6 (40:15):
Yeah, this is a story that I know most Americans
do not know. And it has to do with something
called historical memory. Because there are some things you know,
and you know this when you study history. Randall I
knows it very well. Some things we remember and make
a part of the ongoing story of the country, and

(40:36):
some things that are swept under the rug. And so
at a time when the United States was a brand
new country, that's the period when Lewis and Clark, Jefferson
Lewis and Clark into the West eighteen four and eighteen
to eighteen six, we were a country with you know,
a little bit of a self esteem problem because we

(40:57):
were brand new. The Brits were still sort of acting
like at any moment they were going to reinvade and
take the colonies back. And so Jefferson after the Louisiana
Purchase of eighteen oh three. I mean, if you think
about the Lewis and Clark expedition and the map in
your mind that you remember from school of the Louisiana Purchase,

(41:18):
one of the things that will quickly occur to you
is that why was Jefferson interested in only exploring the
northern piece of it? Why didn't he have some interest
in all the rest, which was a much larger chunk
of ground. To be sure, the southern boundary was less
set than the northern boundary because Jefferson tried to claim

(41:40):
that the southern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase with the
real Grand River, and of course here is Spain with
colonies in Texas and New Mexico on the north side
of the Rio Grand who contested.

Speaker 2 (41:53):
That it's weird because he wanted being kind of right.
Oh yeah, well, I mean like over time, yeah.

Speaker 6 (42:00):
Ultimately that's how it played out. But so after to
get to the story, here. After the Lewis and Clark
expedition was underway, Jefferson set about preparing an expedition to
go into the southern parts of the Louisiana Purchase. And
the river that he decided was the very best river

(42:22):
to explore in the north, it was the Missouri and
the Columbia, obviously those two. In the south, what he
decided to do was to explore the Red River. That's
the river that is the boundary today between Texas and Oklahoma.
And he picked that river because he thought it came
out of the Southern Rockies near Santa Fe. And so

(42:42):
what he was organizing as a second expedition was to
send a party up the Red River to its source
in the Southern Rockies near Santa Fe, and then the
party would cross over to the Arkansas, also believed to
be to have its headwaters in the southern mountains, and
to come back to civilization down the Arkansas River. So

(43:03):
this was not going to be an expedition that went
all the way to the coasts the way Lewis and
Clark's was planned. Because there was no idea of a
northwest passage in the southern reaches of the West and
of course, that's what Lewis and Clark were looking for.
They were trying to find the fable Northwest passage for commerce.

(43:23):
So anyway, the second expedition was essentially based on a
flawed premise. Jefferson and just about everybody else who made
maps of the West at the time followed Alexander von
Humboldt's map of the West, which he had put together.

Speaker 2 (43:40):
Probably in that order of hubert Us with that name.
Oh yeah, Alexander von Humboldt's.

Speaker 6 (43:46):
Yeah, he's a major. He's a Prussian naturalist who explored
South America. Had a ton of students who followed in
his wake, like Prince Maximilian on the Rose area was
one of humboldt students, and he's the guy who comes
up with all kinds of sort of early notions about ecology.

(44:08):
So von Humboldt had put together a map of the
West from sources in the archives in Mexico, and he
saw that there was a river coming out of the
southern Rockies near Santa Fe that flowed eastward. And the
French in Louisiana knew there was this river, the Red
River in their part of the world, that flowed from

(44:30):
the west, and so von Humboldt put those two together
and told Jefferson that the Red River headed in the
southern Rockies and you could send a party up it
and it would take them all the way into what
is now New Mexico and Colorado. The problem with that
was that von Humboldt did not have any sources that

(44:52):
actually tied those two rivers together, and so the river
that he saw in New Mexico heading near Santa Fe
was actually the Pacer which is a tributary of the
Rio Grande, and the Red River that Jefferson sent his
party up heads in what we now call the Yano
Westacado Plateau. It comes out of Palo Duro Canyon, which

(45:13):
most people have heard of, this big giant canyon that's
on the eastern side of this plateau in West Texas
and New Mexico. So it was a river that actually
didn't head in mountains. It would have led the explorers,
the American explorers, out into the middle of the southern
high plains and left them still like ten days travel

(45:35):
from New Mexico from Santa Fe. Anyway, Jefferson didn't know that,
and he insisted that the Red was the River that
he wanted to explore because there were all sorts of
wonderful stories about what was up at the headwaters of
the Red River. So he put together this expedition in
eighteen oh six, two years after Lewis and Clark set out.

(45:55):
As Lewis and Clark were returning from the Pacific, Jefferson
put together the party of more than fifty fifty people,
including a military escort led by a guy named Captain
John Sparks, who was a close friend of Meriwether Lewis's
and William Clark's. They had all grown up in Virginia,

(46:16):
and Jefferson selected an Irish basically he was a geographer
named Thomas Freeman to lead the expedition, and he picked
as the first American trained naturalists to explore in the West,
a young man he knew from Virginia. His name was

(46:37):
Peter Custis, and he was just about to get a
doctorate in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. So the
expedition is known to the people who know about it
as the Freeman and Custis Expedition up the Red River
in eighteen oh six, and these guys starting, they.

Speaker 2 (46:56):
Had fifty dudes. They had fifty dudes Lewis and Clark,
well forty forty.

Speaker 6 (47:02):
Yeah, about forty forty two, I think is the top
figure because the one guy died and they sent one
guy back for bad behavior. But Congress also, interestingly about
this second expedition, appropriated twice the money for it that
they appropriated for Lewis and Clark. Now, you know, people
who know about the expeditions know that Meriwether Lewis actually

(47:24):
spent a whole lot more money than Congress had appropriated
for him. But this second expedition had twice the funds appropriated.
Jefferson referred to it as the Grand Expedition, and it
set out up the Red River in April of eighteen
oh six, reached the last point of civilization on the

(47:46):
Red the town of Nakotash, which was an old French
town on the Red River in central Louisiana. And then,
and we've talked about this, Steve, I know, because you've
been interested in it. One of the things they had
to do to get on the Red River above Necklish
was to detour around what we think is probably the
biggest logjam anywhere in North America. It was called the

(48:07):
great Raft, and this thing extended for about one hundred
and forty miles up the Red River, and so it
was impossible to travel on the river, and they had
to go through all these balues and swamps around to
the east of it to get around the raft and
back to the river. So they did that, and they
were above the Great Raft in the early summer of

(48:30):
eighteen oh six and getting ready to head west.

Speaker 2 (48:32):
I got addy pause, Yeah, sure, can you remind me
how did they end up getting rid of that raft?

Speaker 6 (48:39):
It took the invention of nitro glycerin now when nitro
was invented in the eighteen sixties, eighteen early eighteen seventies.
Actually it was possible for a guy named Captain Henry
Shreve for whom Shreveport is named to go out with
what he called snag boats and the raft apart enough

(49:01):
to place charges of nitro under it, and they basically
blew it apart.

Speaker 2 (49:07):
Just sent all that out.

Speaker 6 (49:08):
Took it took them ten years to do it. Yeah,
but yeah, it was a gigantic chance. Wow man. Yeah,
it took the invention of a new explosive device, essentially
nitro to do it. So anyway, this expedition is on
the Red River, and they're headed west and they're bound

(49:28):
for Santa Fe. And they have all these, you know,
wonderful objectives that they're going to do. And Peter Custis
is doing natural history. I mean he you know, Marriwether
Lewis is kind of self trained as a nationalist. Peter
Custis was trained in a university. And they get about
six hundred and fifty miles up the Red River and
round a bend and discover a Spanish force four times

(49:54):
their size a arrayed across the river. And they hear
that another this Spanish force is from Texas, and they
hear that another Spanish force, the largest one ever sent
out from Santa Fe, is coming down the upper Red River.
And so Spain determines that it is not going to

(50:15):
allow the Americans to explore into country where the boundary
has not been resolved between the United States and Spain.
And Jefferson had included in his letter of instructions to
both Meriwether Lewis and to Thomas Freeman a line that said,
if you are if your further progress is opposed by

(50:36):
a force authorized or not authorized by a nation. In
other words, either an Indian group or some force force
authorized by a nation. I would I want you to
turn back with the information you've already gathered rather than
attempt to go forward, because I don't want to risk
the lives of American citizens in a confrontation with an

(50:57):
overwhelming force. Whether Lewis never confronted anything like that, because
even the Spaniards tried to stop Lewis and Clark, but
they were so far to the north the Spanish forces
could never find them on the Missouri and they sent
several expeditions out to stop Lewis and Clark.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
Yeah, hold on that for a minute. Yeah, Like why
does no one talk about where these Spanish guys? How
can you hear the stories about the Spanish guys trying
to find Lewis and Clark, Like where were they looking?
They were?

Speaker 6 (51:29):
They were launched primarily from Texas. I mean San Antonio
had the biggest presidios of any of the Spanish colonies
and what were known as the Provincia's internals than the
internal provinces of the north, and so they were launched
from there, but they never got The one that got
fartherest never got out of what is now present day,

(51:52):
Kansas never even got really to the to the Missouri Rial.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
What obstacles were preventing them from getting up there.

Speaker 6 (51:58):
Usually poor planning, poor execution, leaders who were not up
to the task, and on at least one of the
groups encountered an opposing force of Native people that turned
them back. So they were those forces that were trying
to intercept Lewis and Clark were, you know, they didn't

(52:19):
really get close, but the Red River was a lot
closer to these Spanish presidios in Texas, and they successfully
got a two hundred man force led by a guy
named Captain Francisco Vianna, and they put up a perimeter
across the Red River and Freeman and his party round

(52:43):
of Ben they see this Spanish force. They stopped for
three days and have a diplomatic conference with parlay with
the leader of the Spanish force. And this Spanish leader,
h Vianna, was basically he was polite, but he was firm.
My orders are you are not to be allowed to
progress any farther on the river. And so Freeman consulted

(53:07):
his orders from Jefferson, which said, if you're confronted by
an overwhelming force, I want you to turn back with
the information you have, and the Americans turned around and
went back. And so what I would say about this
is that the reason you've never heard of it, and
nobody else, really very much in America has ever heard

(53:29):
of this expedition is because at a time when the
United States had a little bit of a self esteem
problem as a young country, we were perfectly willing to
celebrate the success of Lewis and Clark getting to the Pacific.
But the second Presidential expedition being turned around by a
foreign power and told to retrograde to American territory, that

(53:52):
was one that I mean, even Jefferson was willing to
just sort of sweep under the rug effectively effectively. So yeah,
I did a talk one time at the two hundredth
anniversary of Lewis and Clark and Saint Louis under the Arts,
hosted by the National Park Service, and they asked me

(54:12):
to talk about this expedition, and immediately before me there
was this Hispanic historian from I think he was from
Arizona who got up and did a talk and his
whole talk was about, man, I really wish some Spanish
force had managed to stop Lewis and Clark that would
have really changed. And I got up after this guy said,

(54:34):
you know, I'm going to make all your dreams come
true because it happened exactly that way, but with another party,
with the second expedition.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (54:46):
Yeah, So it's one of those kind of unknown stories.
And you know, the podcast I'm doing for you guys
is a lot of it is like that. It's the
Western stories that you've not really ever heard or been
exposed to with a lot of emphasis as we were
saying a few minutes ago, on wildlife, on native people,

(55:08):
on the landscapes, the great landforms of the West, and
all that. But that's what I've tried to do with
most of my career is sort of work on things
that other people hadn't done already.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
If if you had to say, like, what are some
of the things that people miss the most? What are
some of the most common misses that people have about
the American West? Is it like the antiquity or.

Speaker 6 (55:32):
I think that's very definitely one. I mean the West,
And if you in the Southwest in particular, you can't
miss this because of all the ruins all over the
the Southwest. As you know, when you and I were
at Chaco a few months ago and the time we
went to the Clovis side. I mean, there are these

(55:57):
unmistakably ancient still visible. There's still visible evidence of people
having lived in the West for thousands and thousands and
thousands of years. And in a lot of the rest
of the country because of higher humidity and dense forests
and rainfall, I mean, evidence of long term occupation is

(56:21):
often really much more difficult to see. But in the
arid part of North America, it's still there and it's
still visible, and so that antiquity is a part of it.
I mean our sense about American history as well. I
mean it's only you know, four hundred years old. We've
only been here since the sixteen hundreds, and wow, this
is a brand new place. Well, the truth is, of course,

(56:44):
the story of America. Is it right now? We think
at least twenty three thousand years old, that's when we
have evidence for the first people getting over here. So
one of the things I tried to do in this
podcast is at least spend some of it the first
two or three episodes talking about these really ancient occupations
and how people lived and their interactions with the natural

(57:07):
world and wildlife and all that, because it's a story
that I think really shapes the future if you believe.
And I always make this argument about history is that
the past doesn't stay in the past. We're occupying a
world that was shaped by our ancestors, by other humans,
and the world that we're in right now is what

(57:30):
it is in large part because of what they did.
And that's kind of one of my themes. I think
in this podcast.

Speaker 2 (57:39):
At the end of Dan's podcast episodes, what we've been
doing is we've been doing a little Q and A
where Dan does his material. It's kind of a in
the best way possible lecture format. You take a subject,
talk about it, but then the subjects bleed into each other. Yeah,
and at the end me and Randall to ask questions.

(58:02):
In the spirit of that, Randall, I'd like to point
the next question, Oh I didn't whatever you think is
the most interesting thing? Oh not, I'll do it.

Speaker 3 (58:12):
I mean, Dan, I think this is not necessarily specific
to the podcast, but I think people would probably be
interested to just hear your story about how you grew.

Speaker 4 (58:23):
Up and.

Speaker 3 (58:25):
You've got some You've got some sort of an interesting
past that some might not maybe expect from a professor
of history and published author.

Speaker 6 (58:35):
Yeah, well uh so, uh, at least on my dad's side.
My mom's side of the family was you know, pretty
much sort of standard Anglo Scott's American through the Upper
Southern States and into the Midwest and all. And so

(58:56):
that's part of my lenn Is but probably the more
interesting one in part because that's where I grew up
and I still have family there is from Louisiana because
that town Nacotish I mentioned a few minutes ago, which
is the you know, I always have fun telling people this,
that's the oldest European town in Louisiana, not New Orleans. Yeah,

(59:18):
Nacotash is four years older than New Orleans. I was
found in seventeen fourteen and my ancestors got there in
seventeen sixteen. So yeah, so we've been in Louisiana for
a very very long time.

Speaker 2 (59:31):
But I had what brought them there, do you know?

Speaker 6 (59:34):
Well, I had two different sides of the of the
story in Louisiana, and I don't know why my French
ancestors showed up. And that's the predominant line in that
side of my family. But there, I mean, my last
name is Flores, which is a Spanish name. And the

(59:57):
reason I have that name is because when the French
founded Nacotash in seventeen fourteen, the Spaniards farther west were
so alarmed at this French incursion because they were afraid
the French were going to go up the Red River
into the West, and they were absolutely right about that.
That they plunked down ten miles away from Nakotish a

(01:00:19):
little presidio manned by about twenty five or thirty young soldiers.
And these guys, one of whom was my ancestor, the
Flores's ancestor. Here they were in the Louisiana wilderness with
no available potential marriage partners, and so my sees except

(01:00:43):
the enemies ten miles away. So my ancestor married it
to a French family in Nacotish. And so you guys
ain't all bad, Yeah, they absolutely they were Catholics at least. Yeah.
So yeah, So we got absorbed into the French story
in Louisiana. And I think the reason I probably grew

(01:01:05):
up being fascinated with the West is because one of
the stories that we always talked about in the family
was there were some groups four or five generations back
who were traders to the Indians in the west, and
so I grew up hearing stories about Pierre Lafitte, Pierre
Bouie Lafitte, who was my great grandfather four times back,

(01:01:25):
and he had been a sort of a major player
in the Indian trade to the west out of Nakotash
and had gone I don't know if he ever got
all the way up to the Wichita villages far up
the Red River, but he certainly was a pretty major
player in Indian trade in Louisiana, and I knew that
they had gone west. So I kind of grew up

(01:01:47):
with the idea of, you know, the west was always
this part of the country that beckoned. And when I
was four years old, my family went on a National
park tour and one of the places they went was
into New Mexico. And so by the time I was
about ten or eleven, I was having these dreams of
these beautiful blue skies, cottonball clouds, sand dunes, red cliffs.

(01:02:11):
Had no idea where that had come from until I
was about thirty seven and thirty eight years old, and
I was back in Louisiana for a family reunion and
I mentioned to an ad of mine, you know, I've
always had these strange dreams. That's why about the West.
That's why I ended up going west. And she said, well,
I wonder if that had anything to do with that
National Park tour we took you on to New Mexico

(01:02:32):
when you were four. Oh, I guess maybe it did.
And you know, so it's the kind of thing that
you sort of forget but clearly colors your subconscious for
a long time. So that was part of it. And
as soon as I know, I was able to drive

(01:02:54):
a car and my parents would let me go out overnight,
first thing I did was drive five hundred mise to
the west, just to see what the country was like. Yeah,
And I've never forgotten how exciting it was when night
fell on the first time on that drive, and I
could see the lights of towns thirty and forty miles away,

(01:03:14):
because growing up in Louisiana, you can't see forty feet away.
The vegetation is so dense, And it was very exciting
to be able to see, ye see country.

Speaker 3 (01:03:25):
And you spent a fair bit of time running around
outside in your in your youth, right.

Speaker 6 (01:03:31):
Oh, I did, Yeah, I grew up in a little
small town where the woods were, you know, one hundred
yards away and so, and we didn't have enough guys
in the town to field one baseball team, let alone
two baseball teams to play one another. So what I
got to do for recreation was essentially read books and

(01:03:51):
roam around in the woods. And you know, and I
certainly grew up hunting. I didn't wasn't too interested in fishing,
but I was certainly interested in hunting. And I did
that through a lot of my teen years into my
early twenties. And you know, as Randall knows, when I
was living in Montana. I mean, I can't say that

(01:04:14):
I ever actually hunted, but three times, because I wanted
venison in my freezer, I bought a deer tag and
shot a little you know, yearling or four corn mule
deer buck out the window of my living room out
in the horse.

Speaker 2 (01:04:34):
I remember when when I first met you, I remember
you telling me that, and you're very careful not overplay
the circumstances.

Speaker 6 (01:04:41):
And so I couldn't say that was a hunt. That
was more harvesting a deer for the freezer. That was uh,
you know, but I I still I mean I was
in my forties and fifties and I still remember how
to do it at least.

Speaker 4 (01:04:54):
Well, you also wrote for Field and Stream and you know.

Speaker 6 (01:04:58):
Field and Stream, Sports of Feel an Outdoor Life. Yeah,
those are when I started as a writer. That's who
I wrote for. That was the magazine world that I knew.
And so I was an English major as an undergraduate
and had an English professor and a creative writing course
when I was a junior who had us write things

(01:05:21):
that we thought, you know, you might approach a magazine
for query, a magazine about And I had the fun
of writing a piece and before the semester was over,
going into his office and saying Sports a Field just
bought that. That's that piece I wrote for you back
in February. And so that was very fun. And I

(01:05:43):
had a you know, just like you did Steve at
Outdoor what's the magazine outside. I had an editor at
Sports of Feel in particular, who I guess saw some
potential and me, and he gave me a few pointers

(01:06:03):
and took the first three or four things I wrote,
and introduced me to editors at Field and Stream and
Outdoor Life, and I ended up finally for outdoor Life.
Before I went to graduate school and got a PhD
in history, I wrote a conservation column for outdoor Life
for their regional pages. They had these pages in Outdoor

(01:06:26):
Life that were designated for particular regions. And I wrote
a conservation column for the one on what was known
as the Mid South. And I wrote a conservation column
for Louisiana Woods and waters. So this was all before
I ever went to went to graduate school. And you
know what, the professor thing, I.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
Got a lot of friends who wind up being that
there into occupation professionally. They wind up into occupation they
would have had no idea existed when they were a kid. Yeah,
I mean you asked your kid what they wanted to
do and be like detective fireman, veterinarian. Right, And then
people have jobs that they don't even they don't find
out a lot of times, you don't even know what
you're doing was a thing until you're in your twenties.

(01:07:09):
In your thirties, you probably had You probably didn't use
the word growing up. I want to be an environmental historian.

Speaker 6 (01:07:19):
You you were absolutely right. I never once said that.
I So I was not the first person in my
family to go to college. My dad had had gone
to college, but so I knew something about university life,
a little bit about it. But I actually went to
college on an athletic scholarship and with the idea because

(01:07:43):
my dad had played semi pro baseball and he wanted
me to be a baseball player, and with the idea
of actually doing that. And it didn't last. I didn't
play baseball in college for more than two years. We
got a new coach and I didn't like one another,
and so that was start of the end of that.
But what I had sort of discovered, and I'm a

(01:08:04):
baseball player who's an English major is a little bit
of an unusual character. And I began to meet professors
who started pointing me in the direction of where I went.
And one of them was this guy, this creative writing
guy I mentioned who when I talked to him about
my future, I said, I want to be a writer.
This is my idea. I've always thought, you know, as

(01:08:24):
a kid growing up reading books, that's what I wanted
to do. He said, well, most people who write usually
do something else as a day job. And I said, well,
like what he said, Well, I mean, like me. This
guy wrote Western novels. He said like me, I mean,
you're a professor, and they actually reward you for writing

(01:08:45):
books when you're a professor, And that put the idea
into my head for the very first time that well, okay,
so I think maybe what I'll do is I'll go
ultimately to graduate school and become a professor of some kind,
and then that will enable me or give me enough
time to be able to write too. So that's kind
of what I did. But you're exactly right. As a kid,

(01:09:07):
I never said I'm going to grow up and you know,
be an environmental historian at the University of Montana.

Speaker 2 (01:09:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:09:13):
Yeah, that never happened.

Speaker 2 (01:09:17):
One of the things I've picked up through my relationship
with you and talking to you about American history and
it also I also kind of absorbed it a little
bit from reading and conversations with the historian Elliott West.
Is this thing about the West, right, I think that

(01:09:37):
if you fall into the into the trap, maybe that's
not the best word for it, but if you fall
into the mindset that the West was just sitting there untouched, right,
whereas Elliott West put it, like Native Americans were just
in the static they were just basically waiting for Europeans
to show up in this static state, and then you

(01:10:01):
get this idea that then and then Lewis and Clark
go out there. No one had been there before them.
They go out there, and then it's just like this
tidal wave is unleashed, and it all happens like that.
It all happens through the eighteen hundreds. That sense of
how Western history went for me really started to fall

(01:10:26):
apart when I learned that from the time the first
European descended the Mississippi. Okay, so from the time the
first European descended the Mississippi, it was one hundred years
until the next European descended the Mississippi, or, as Elliott

(01:10:49):
West pointed out one of his essays, when Lewis and
Clark hit the Great Planes, there were people there were
name of Americans on the Great Plains whose parents had
been to Paris and come home. And then you start

(01:11:10):
realizing that this the job of understanding contact, right of
understanding European contact, isn't like this little like blip through
the eighteen hundreds. It's centuries long.

Speaker 6 (01:11:23):
Yeah, well, Elliott steers you correctly. I mean that's been
one of the things that even in my own career,
you know, I mean I started out being trained to
do a more classic kind of Western history, where really

(01:11:44):
it does kind of begin with, you know, with Lewis
and Clark, or maybe if you start being imaginative about it, Okay,
it starts with, you know, Spanish settlements in New Mexico.
I mean, so the place where I live, you know,
Santa Fe Is it's about ten years ago, fifteen years

(01:12:04):
ago now it celebrated its four hundredth anniversary as a town.
Santa Fe was founded in sixteen ten. That's almost two
hundred years before Lewis and Clark.

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):
That's incredible, man, Yeah, there's already you go from today
like to under I always like to understand this. Okay,
it's twenty twenty five. Okay, if you go that distance
of time, think about where that puts you. Oh yeah,
you know, the distance between the distance between Lewis and

(01:12:38):
Clark and the northern plains and the founding of Santa Fe,
the founding of a European like kind of cosmopolitan city
in New Mexico, was the distance that separates us from
eighteen twenty five from eighteen twenty five. Yeah, at a
time when we were just now starting to try steamboats

(01:12:58):
on the Western River. Yeah, so it's that kind of distance,
and so you have to, you know, as a historian,
you start learning to incorporate that into your thinking. And
once I started having the fun of doing that, I
started pushing it back farther and farther because it became evident.
So historians primarily rely on written documents, right, but if

(01:13:23):
you decide, okay, in this environmental history, and I was
trained to do this, you don't just rely on the
written documents. You also rely on archaeology and palaeontology and
ecology and all these other fields. And if you start
using those, then suddenly the past starts getting deeper and

(01:13:44):
deeper and deeper for you. I mean, you can't come
up with a great quote from anybody from you know,
ten thousand years ago. You don't know exactly what we
call people Clovis and Folsome. We don't really know what
their names actually were for themselves, because we named them
after the towns where their archaeologists first found remains of them.

(01:14:09):
So it's a kind.

Speaker 6 (01:14:10):
Of a deep time past that's not perfect, but it
allows you to think in terms of a really deep
and ancient history. And when you start doing that, that's
kind of how I translated the human past in America,
going back twenty three thousand years to start thinking about

(01:14:31):
the past of the animals here, because many of the
animals in North America, I mean, like horses and their
ancestors fifty six million years back, Camels or another family
of animals that had their origins in America and died
out here while surviving in the rest of the world,
they go back forty six million years. Passenger pigeons went

(01:14:55):
back fifteen million years. Bison actually, which we of course
is now our national mammal in America. We have concluded
that probably the oldest arrival of bison in North America
was only about four hundred thousand years ago, so they're
actually quite recent arrivals compared to something like passenger pigeons.

(01:15:20):
Mammoths got here seventeen million years ago. So doing that
deep time for humans, I think it was a ready
step from that to start looking at all these animals
around us. And as we were talking yesterday, talking to
you and Randall both about this, I mean, one of

(01:15:40):
the things I've decided to do because I couldn't see
that anybody else was really doing it in writing Western
history was to start taking the animals seriously, to stop
thinking about them as Okay, beavers are just you know,
there's just this lumping animal that everybody that produced the
beaver trade and start actually looking at So what did

(01:16:04):
the presence of beaver's over five million to seven million
years that's how we think they've been here? What did
that do in North America? And you began to realize, well,
hell man beaver ecology totally transformed the continent. They made
it a much more humid and wetter place. And when
we started extracting them from the world, it suddenly dried

(01:16:25):
out a lot of America because it undermined an ecology
that they had built up over a really long period
of time. So taking the animals seriously, I think has
probably been a step towards, you know, just revising the
whole story of the West in America.

Speaker 2 (01:16:45):
You know, one of the biggest gaps that puzzles me.
And I think it'd be like a it'd be a
cool book and there would not be any quotes in it,
like you said, But like personally, I folk a lot
of tension on and I love reading about and talking
with experts on the Ice Age, the first Americans, the

(01:17:08):
Clovis culture, fullsome culture, different migration theories. That's of great
interest to me. And then you have where we talked
about some of these the first Europeans to make the
way in the Southwest and they encounter, probably to their surprise, cities.
I mean cities.

Speaker 6 (01:17:29):
Yeah, absolute cities where where there were cities if you
go back a thousand years, there were cities in the
American Southwest that.

Speaker 2 (01:17:41):
Were that were bigger than London, like more people living
in them, you know what I mean, architecture, religious facilities,
irrigated crop lands, like how did we get from how
did you get from? These bands?

Speaker 7 (01:18:03):
Do?

Speaker 2 (01:18:03):
I mean these like bands of thirty or forty or
fifty hunters running around with stone tip tools, like how
do you get to the cities? Now? I don't think
that that's understood. I mean it's probably it's understood, but
I don't think that's like that people like that narrative hasn't.

Speaker 6 (01:18:21):
Been told now. I think it hasn't, certainly not for
kind of public consumption. I mean among the the archaeologists,
you know, David Stewart with his book Anassauzi America. I mean,
I think he probably told that story. I mean I
certainly rely on his treatment quite a bit in trying

(01:18:43):
to analyze that and to get from I mean, we
start with Paleolithic big game hunters like the Clovis and
fulsome people. And once those animals are gone, and they're
gone by about ten thousand, nine thousand years ago, essentially
what you get is a long period of hunter gatherers

(01:19:07):
where the focus is on smaller animals. I mean, there's
still deer and elk and things out there, and so
the big game is smaller, and there's an enhanced focus
on vegetable products, on plant foods, and so the hunter
gatherer the very name implies that you've got a new

(01:19:28):
focus on plants. You're beginning to rely some and once
the focus on plants is there, then you're set up
for some human genius at some point to say, well,
you know this particular plant that produces this thing we
now call teocente, which produces this little tiny corn cob,

(01:19:50):
But sometimes there's a slightly bigger one. Is there some
way that we can take the plants that make the
slightly bigger ones, and if the next generation the corn
cob is even a little bit bigger than that plant
those and of course what they're doing is that they're
domesticating plants. And I think the reason we reached that

(01:20:10):
stage because we reached it in the Old World many
thousands of years before this happened in the Americas. The
reason being, of course, is the Americas are settled by
humans a lot later than say, Europe and Asia get
settled by humans, and so the whole process over time
is an accelerated rate in the Old World compared to

(01:20:33):
the Americas. But what happened in both places, I think
to push us in the direction ultimately of crops and
domesticated animals, is that as the human population grew, relying
on hunting got harder and harder to do because animals

(01:20:53):
became more and more difficult to find. And you finally
reach a point I think where everybody knew when during
hunting and gathering stages, that you had to keep the
human population low. And one of the ways they did
that was basically they engaged in not only abortions, but infanticide.
Whenever a band of one hundred and twenty people they

(01:21:17):
had too many children one year. I mean, the leaders
knew if we let this go on, we are screwing
ourselves to the hilt, and so we've got to control
our population. And that became obviously a psychological burden for people,
especially for women who were carrying kids, babies. So everybody

(01:21:40):
is looking for a way to escape it. And the
domestication of crops and animals became away. It's hard to
grow the population now just by relying on hunting, because
we've thinned the animals to the point where we can't
really grow the human population. But what if we start
domesticating things. What if we start domesticating plants and growing

(01:22:02):
them ourselves. What if we take these wild goats, these
gazelles in the Old World, in North America, wild turkeys
become the primary domesticated animal. What if we take these
and raise them? And that allows us then to avoid
this the speed bump of having to sew assiduously keep

(01:22:26):
the population down, and that then produces, of course, the
Great agricultural Revolution, the so called Neolithic Revolution in the
Old World and five thousand years later in the Americas.
And so those cities that you and I have walked
around in Chaco Canyon Historic Park, of course is the

(01:22:47):
primary and most dramatic one in North America. Those cities
resulted from the evolution basically of hunting and gathering culture
into an agricultural sort of in Choco's case, an empire
really of hundreds of small farmers growing corn, beans and

(01:23:10):
squash that they had imported up from Mexico, because Mexico
in North America was where the first domestication of plants
took place, and that domestication then enabled larger populations that
were capable of producing a city like Chaco, which you know,

(01:23:32):
Chaco was such a dramatic and large place, huge buildings.
There were not buildings the size of those built in
Chaco in North America until the eighteen eighties. I mean,
we don't have any buildings the size of something like
Pueblo Benito until, you know, only basically one hundred and

(01:23:53):
fifty years ago in the United States. But this is
a story. It's sort of like that, you know, that
other Lewis and Clark expedition and story I was telling.
It's not one that plays to historical memory in America.
I mean, I've talked to a lot of people who
go to Chaco who are utterly shocked to find the

(01:24:14):
ruins of that place. Because grew up on the East coast,
nobody ever talks about the fact that there was giant city.

Speaker 2 (01:24:21):
People lived in tents.

Speaker 6 (01:24:22):
Yeah, people lived in tents and guns and yeah, yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (01:24:28):
Was gonna I think I told you about this for
do you remember that the I think he's a physiologist.
Jared Diamond wrote that he wrote a book Guns, Germs
and Steel Steel. Did he pass away?

Speaker 6 (01:24:42):
Jared Diamond, I don't think he has passed away. No,
I think he's he's still around.

Speaker 2 (01:24:47):
He kind of begins with this question, I think I
told you about this forward. Was it Who was it
that took on the Incins? Was it Bizarro? Yeah?

Speaker 6 (01:24:54):
Zaro.

Speaker 2 (01:24:55):
He begins with this question like, why was it that
Pizarro came from Spain to attack the Incans? Why didn't
I don't know who the leader the Incans was. Why
didn't the Incan Empire go and attack Spain? And I

(01:25:19):
think that there's a point if you'd have gone, if
you'd have been, like, if you'd have visited Earth right
at that time of the ascendancy of Chaco, you might
have been like, I think someday these people are gonna
go and find Europe do you know. I mean, it
would have seemed like it was head in that direction.
But then there's certain things like that misses, like the wheel.

Speaker 6 (01:25:46):
Yeah, they don't know, they do not, there's no And
so one of the strange things about the wheel is
that they're actually figurines, little small figurines in Aztec Mexico
that show wheels, but there's not an application of the
wheel in any kind of of utility form because they

(01:26:10):
have not proceeded to the domestication of a beast of
burden that would pull a wheeled vehicle. And so, yeah,
the wheel is a very strange one. But I mean
your question is is really on the mark because at
the same time that Chako was at its height, it's
about just roughly a thousand years ago. I mean, all

(01:26:33):
those great cities in the Mayan Empire on the Yucatan
Peninsula were also at their height, and uh ten oach
teat line, which is what Mexico city. I think. Well,
I mean, you may be, it may be more accurate

(01:26:54):
than I am.

Speaker 2 (01:26:54):
But the people that could answer that question, that's what
I call a reading word.

Speaker 6 (01:27:00):
It it's a reading word. But that city was also
I mean, it was absolutely at its height and in
many respects these big cities of meso America. You know,
I mean you guys have probably been to Chichenizza and
seen the pyramid there, which I mean the first time
I went there, you could steal climate. They won't let

(01:27:20):
you climb it any won't. No, they won't let you
go up the steps to the top anymore, you know.
And it is precipitously steep, there's no question. But you know,
I had the fun fifteen or so years ago climbing
to the top of you know, this Temple of cuckl Khan,
the Temple of Venus, and I mean, holy cow, man,

(01:27:41):
that's just it's impressive as hell when you're there. But
we come out of a you know, a Western European
kind of sensibility that we were on top of the world.
We were the leaders of civilization. I mean Western Europe
is I mean, that's what guns, germs and steel about

(01:28:02):
is about his argument, Jared Diamond's argument in that book
is that the reason Western Europe managed to prevail over
all those other places is that it happened to sit
at the far end of the largest land mass on Earth, Eurasia,
also connected to Africa, and so Europeans got to benefit

(01:28:23):
from all the human inventions that took place all over
Eurasia and Africa. The flow was smooth, The flow was smooth,
and everything that was invented in China gunpowder managed to
get to Western Europe, whereas the Americas are completely isolated
from the rest of the world, not only from the
ideas of the rest of the world, but you know,

(01:28:46):
as we all know, from the diseases that evolved through
the domestication of animals and living with domesticated animals, Europeans
old worlders ended up developing all sorts of really pretty
horrific diseases and when they brought them over to the
America's I mean, what really conquered the Americas. This is

(01:29:07):
the germs part of guns, germs and steel, is these
these exotic diseases that native people had absolutely no immunity to.

Speaker 2 (01:29:16):
Yeah, you know another one about to not Tillon. Yeah,
when you think about sort of your if you don't
have the luxury of spending a lot of time studying
history and you get this idea of you know, people
living in tents and small scale habitations, that that's what
Europeans found. It always struck me that when they when

(01:29:40):
they when the Spanish got there, they had zoos. Yeah,
they had zoos with I mean not foreign animals from
other continents, but they had zoos holding animals like bison
from places that they wouldn't even the residents of those

(01:30:04):
cities could have gone and seen animals on the streets
that they would have no prayer of encountering in normal life.
Things collected from far away, from far to the south,
from far to the north, broad and you could go like,
where's that from you? It'd be like as weird as
when you take your kids they see a giraffe. That

(01:30:25):
people would have that experience and see it like yeah,
like they would have, you know, a jaguar, they would
have a buffalo, they would have birds from South America.

Speaker 6 (01:30:36):
Well, it's pretty clear that, you know, aggregates of charismatic
and intriguing animals from the far edges of human knowledge
a symbol together for public viewing. In effect, the word,

(01:30:56):
of course, our word is zoo. That is a very
human impulse. I mean, and you know, we have no
idea it's possible that the Clovis people had something like that,
but as you pointed out, we certainly do know that
the Aztecs, which had an empire that stretched for hundreds
thousands of miles in every direction, they were doing that

(01:31:19):
very thing. They were collecting animals out at the far
reaches of their empire and bringing them to the citadel
city of the empire and assembling them into zoos for
you know, for the public entertainment of their citizenry. I mean,
that's that's so, you know. I mean, I've I've have
argued in my books, especially in Wild New World, the

(01:31:42):
most recent one that which is a book about, you know,
the long term story of humans and animals in North America,
that this is something and I know I derived this
from Paul Shepherd, from reading Paul Shepard many years ago,
that this fact, with the natural history of the living
world around us, is something that is impossibly ancient in

(01:32:07):
the human story. Every time we look back into the past,
we find examples of it, and it survives today. And
one of the ways it survives, I mean, I don't
have children myself. I know you do, though, and I'll
bet this happened with you, because it happens with it.
Every time I visit somebody's home and they have young kids,
and they show me the nursery, there are always little

(01:32:30):
elephants and buffaloes and monkeys, and so what that is
getting at is that it's knowledge about natural history and
about other living creatures. That is the very first step
in kind of the organization of the brain, in creating
a taxonomy of the world around you, you know. And

(01:32:53):
then when for little boys in particular, when you get
to be eight or ten years old, you know, you
start collecting hot wheeled cars and things like that, and
that provides you with the next step of taxonomy. But
that human desire to kind of organize everything into an
understandable world really starts with animals. And that's why we

(01:33:16):
do this with toddlers. The first thing you teach them
really is the difference between well, this is a picture
of an elephant. It has this long trunk and it
has and this is a picture of a horse, it
has this tail. And that probably you know, is something
we humans have been doing for two million years.

Speaker 2 (01:33:42):
Have you ever thought about why American? Why American people
when they put a mobile above the crib? Why is
it African fauna generally?

Speaker 6 (01:33:57):
Now, that's that's a good question, you know, And why
is it elephants allisons and giraffes. I mean, because they're
so distinguishable. They're distinguishable, you know, interestingly of course there
it's the living Pleistocene that we're showing them, and so
there may be you know, I mean, Randall, take it away, man.

(01:34:18):
You should you should maybe do a piece on on
the evolution of something like that.

Speaker 3 (01:34:25):
I was just thinking when you were talking about animals,
and it's like, yeah, why don't we just hang you know,
desks and chairs around them.

Speaker 2 (01:34:33):
This is your world, this is what you'll have, keyboards,
a keyboard.

Speaker 6 (01:34:37):
On the phone.

Speaker 2 (01:34:40):
It must be some deep like the African fauna must
be some like deep thing about the cradle of you know,
like you're speaking to some deep genetic memory of the
cradle of Africa or something easy to tell apart.

Speaker 3 (01:34:56):
Yeah, And I also think it's like those are real animals,
you know, like they're big, they're toothy, they got wild horns.
There's something about I don't know, there's something about that,
the exoticism of those creatures compared to what we see
around us today.

Speaker 2 (01:35:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:35:13):
So I still look at something like an ibex and
I'm just like, that's an animal.

Speaker 6 (01:35:18):
When I was writing Well New World, I kept encountering
over and over again the stories, especially when you get
to the twentieth century, when most of the charismatic animals
in North America are gone by that time, are reduced
to such small numbers that you hardly ever have a
chance to see them. I kept encountering over and over
again these people who become really prominent conservationists in the

(01:35:40):
United States, you know, and found all sorts of organizations
from the Sierra Club on who acquired their fascination for
nature and for the wild by going to Africa. And
they came back from Africa and decided, Okay, we're going
to try to do something like that. And it's kind

(01:36:01):
of an insides vary size and variety and an indication,
you know. And of course Africa, as a result of
the big game parks there, preserve these animals so that
people could go and see them. But it speaks in
a way to the fact, you know, to Thro's lament
back in the eighteen fifties that he lived in this

(01:36:24):
impoverished world because his ancestors in New England had already
taken out all these animals that he wanted to watch.
Because he kept, you know, these meticulous notes about when
the birds, particular species of birds arrive in the spring,
and when they nest, and when the beavers are hatching
their or having their kits, and when. So he goes

(01:36:46):
through all this process and realizes, oh my god, I'm
missing the lynx, I'm missing the moose, I'm missing black bears.
Those have all been taken out. He could read the
accounts of of the first colonists in New England who
are describing pigeon flights and huge numbers of wolves, and

(01:37:08):
here he sits in the eighteen fifties and all of
that is gone, and he feels like, as he says,
I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth,
except demigods have come along before me and plucked from
the heavens the best of the stars. And so I think,
in some ways, what I kept running into with all

(01:37:29):
these American conservationists who had to go to Africa first
before they were realizing how important it was to you know,
campaign on behalf of nature in America has something to
do with the fact that we lost so much of
the magic in North America. And it's like, in order

(01:37:50):
to get it you had to go somewhere else.

Speaker 2 (01:37:52):
To glimpse it.

Speaker 6 (01:37:53):
Yeah, yeah, in order to glimpse it and understand.

Speaker 2 (01:37:56):
You know, we've touched on this in the past. It's
kind of like a like a conundrum of history and
talking about Native people's We talked about this when we're
talking about like Choco society and things. Is there there
is a sort of a custody battle, a cultural custody

(01:38:18):
battle about you know, like whose story is what right?
Like do if you're not Native American, do you have
a right to a write r I g h T
to write w R I T E about Native culture?

(01:38:41):
And and and as you're telling like when you're talking
about it, is there a cult like a like a
European bias, a colonial bias? You won't get it right.
And when we've talked about this, I don't think you don't.
You don't punt on it, but you have a point,

(01:39:02):
as you said, like there's human history, right, Like as
a human being, you're interested in human history, and human
history travels all around the world. And it's weird to
put this is my word is not yours. I'd like

(01:39:23):
to speak on it, but it's weird that you would
then start drawing sort of like borders of where your
interest in human history can't go, you know, like, how
have you grapped? Because you've had to be challenged about
that being a history, Like in teaching and writing about
the America West and teaching about Native peoples, you had
to have encountered the sentiment of like, well, who are

(01:39:44):
you to go telling people about that?

Speaker 6 (01:39:47):
You know, yeah, I would, I would say so. One
of the the probably important steps in my career was
I I published an article and a really fancy academic journal,
the Journal of American History, in nineteen ninety two about
what Happened to the Buffalo, And it was a complete

(01:40:13):
recasting of the story and for the first time. And
this was a period of time the nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties,
probably back to the nineteen seventies when a lot of
people in the environmental movement were sort of using Native
people as you know, here were our stand ins for
conservation living, environmental living. I mean, you all remember the

(01:40:37):
famous ad where the Indian steps out of his canoe
onto the shore of Manhattan Island and he steps out
and there's trash all underfoot and a tear rolls down
his face. Well, that particular piece that I did about
what happened to Buffalo was it was not only a

(01:40:59):
complete recasting of the story and kind of an environmental
telling of the story. I pulled in things that nobody
had ever pulled in before, like when horses were reintroduced
into the Americas and went wild. I mean, they obviously
were drinking the water and grazing the grass that bison
had also been subsisting on, and so they had an effect.

(01:41:21):
And there were whole numbers of things that I plugged
into that story that I told. A changing climate. In
the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a drought
that lasted for like fifteen years on the Great Plains
and reduced the numbers of Buffalo and there so I
went through this whole sequence of five or six sort

(01:41:41):
of new and compelling. Obviously they were compelling because a
lot of other historians, like Elliott West sort of immediately
picked up on this, these compelling reasons for what happened.
And one of the things I also did was I
pointed out, which you know, people were kind of shy
about doing at the time, that Native people had been
seduced into the market economy. And just as we were

(01:42:03):
talking about this yesterday, it was a situation where Europeans
were offering a transformative technology metalware guns, and if you
didn't do it in exchange for bison robes, and if
you didn't participate in it and everybody else, all the

(01:42:24):
other native groups around you did, you ended up disadvantaging
yourself to the point where you might not survive. Whereas
the southern Cheyennes just down the way, we're going to
do very well because they, in fact were participating in
the market trade.

Speaker 2 (01:42:40):
And they're now armed with guns.

Speaker 6 (01:42:42):
And they're armed with guns, and they're armed with all
sorts of metal tools. And so I talked about that,
and so what that meant, of course, was that in
nineteen ninety two an article comes out that recasts the
whole story about what happened to Buffalo in the nineteenth century,
and it also talks about the Indian role in it. Well, immediately,

(01:43:04):
as you might suspect, had various Native people get in
touch with me and say exactly what you were referring
to a few minutes ago, what gives you the right
to say this, to write about this. One of the
people who did so was Vinedaloria and Vine Deloria, who

(01:43:25):
was a very famous Indian author. In those days he
was at the University of Colorado. He was famous for
books like God Has Read Custarded for Your Sins, and
Vinedaloria called me up and said, I read your piece
and I think it's really good. And what I want

(01:43:45):
you to do, if you would, is come down to
the University of Colorado and spend three days with me.
We're having a conference. I'm bringing in the wildlife managers
from a bunch of the western reservations and I want
you to come down, but I I don't want you
to speak. I don't need you to tell them the
story that you just wrote about Buffalo. I just want

(01:44:07):
you to come down here and sit beside me and
listen to them. And I said, okay, I will do it,
and that's exactly what I did, and so I never
find Laurie never asked me to speak, And for three
days I sat right beside him, sort of in the
protection of this guy who was his illumining figure, and
listened to all these wildlife managers talk about the Native

(01:44:28):
approach to managing wildlife. And of course what he was
interested in having me do is to understand the Native
approach to managing wildlife. But what I brought away from
that particular experience, And I have said this in every
book that I have written that includes a section on
Native people since and on all kinds of other people.

(01:44:50):
Is that, just as you inferred a few minutes ago,
I'm interested in the human story, and I think as
a human I have a perfect right to write about humans,
an right to be able to write about humans, regardless

(01:45:13):
of their culture. And I think in a way, the
whole impulse was, you know, I'm an Italian American. Only
I can write about Italian Americans. Only I can write
about Christopher Columbus or something. I think that's a stage
in our development that probably is kind of dropping away

(01:45:34):
some because I think, to me, the argument that we're
all human beings and that we should be interested in
the human story everywhere among every group of people, we
all come from the same source. We're all part of
the evolutionary river, the Darwinian River. That's the stronger argument here,

(01:45:54):
and so I stand by that.

Speaker 2 (01:45:59):
It'd be a uh. I think it'd be in many ways,
you know, an impoverished world if you weren't able to
bring all those different perspectives to things. You know.

Speaker 6 (01:46:09):
Yeah, I think like.

Speaker 2 (01:46:10):
That big picture of like the human story is pretty
compelling when you imagine that when when Allen, when humans
spread all around the world and they started to meet
back up, they were meeting back up, you know what
I mean, you sort of lose sight of that that
like that people these groups moved around and it was

(01:46:33):
so long they kind of forgot about each other, They
lost track of each other. But then all a sudden
they come back and they're like, wow, yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:46:39):
Look what you did with your time. Yeah, you guys
got so tan, and everybody is fascinated you know, everybody
is fascinated by by everybody else. I mean, that's part
of the whole first contact, you know, notion, is that
we get to see these people who maybe thirty thousand

(01:47:02):
years ago we actually knew some of their ancestors or
our ancestors knew their ancestors, and now once again we're
meeting up and seeing them, and wow, look what you
guys did with your time and your place, and it's
absolutely fascinating. I mean, that's sort of the whole premise
of cultural anthropology is that, oh my god, you know,
humans have sort of fractured into tens of thousands of

(01:47:28):
cultural groups, with all these different deities and all these
different ideas of creation, and wow, isn't it incredible to
sort of listen to what you guys have to say
about what you think is going on with human life?
So yeah, I mean that's because like you, and I think,
like all of us sitting around the table, and probably

(01:47:50):
most of the people listening to this, I'm fascinated with
all those differences. Yeah, I would say the stronger argument
is it's the human story that compels us, and nobody
has any kind of lock on a particular one. I mean,

(01:48:11):
I'm certainly willing to conceive that some people might not
want to share the details of their religious practices and
ceremonies and all that. That's everybody's perfect right. But the
bigger story, I think is ours for understanding, because that's
how we managed to figure out who we are.

Speaker 2 (01:48:29):
I took this class one time, called the Structure of
Modern English, and in it the guy had said the professor,
I can't remember who taught that class. But instead, if
at the end of the Civil War, if you had
built an impenetrable barrier along the Mason Dixon Line, that

(01:48:49):
at this point those two populations wouldn't be able to another,
you wouldn't communicate anymore. So you imagine that little gap
and that kind of like so when you imagine these
these these peoples getting separated. He's talking about not being
able to communicate in one hundred years, a couple hundred years.
Imagine these groups of people separating and you get to

(01:49:11):
watch what like ten thousand years of being subject to
different climates and then different founder effects. Just it could
be as small as personality differences. That's a very good point, absolutely,
And the wildly different directions people go in terms of religion.
You see these crazy themes animism, you know, all these

(01:49:35):
cultures holding out of the ideas that that landscape features
have a sort of spirit or personality. You see these
continuities that they'll that folks will eventually figure out agriculture
if they can, they'll get better and better at launching projectiles, right,

(01:49:56):
They'll like a lot of them will figure out vertical wall, right,
but on the wheel.

Speaker 6 (01:50:02):
Yeah, but other things are just so different, man, Yeah,
other things are so different. Now, that's a that's a
really great argument, and that's why it's fascinating to explore
it and to approach all of it with a curious
and open mind and to allow yourself to be completely

(01:50:24):
intrigued without you know, without falling back on the kind
of where Okay, so our ideas are better than than
their ideas. I mean, it's not a case of better,
it's a case of different. And how did you guys
arrive at this particular notion. But there are some obviously

(01:50:45):
some commonalities that are all over the planet, and you know,
the old animistic religion ideas that you just mentioned, where
there are deities in wild animals, and there are deities
in landforms and all of that that it's so widespread
as part of the European tradition too. The Druids, for example,

(01:51:09):
of only twelve hundred and fifteen hundred years ago in
Western Europe are certainly practitioners of that kind of animistic
approach to religion. So it's something that is so widespread
that it's clear it probably dates back a very very
long time. I argue while a New World in fact,
that the idea that native people have of being kin

(01:51:32):
to other animals, to the European line about that when
in a different direction where humans are we're the only
ones created in the image of God and the only
ones with an everlasting soul, and everything else is different.
And that actually is an anomaly compared to the idea
that which is kind of a proto Darwinian idea that

(01:51:53):
we're all related to one another, we're all part of
the same kind of kinship order. And it requires somebody
like Darwin using science in the nineteenth century to finally
bring the European world back to that recognition because it
had gone in a sort of an unusual direction with
the notion while humans are completely different from everything else

(01:52:15):
out there, I mean, we're we're special, we're exceptional, and
everything else that's something else.

Speaker 2 (01:52:22):
While rather than being entangled in this kind of elaborate
give and take relationship where you had to show you
had to show honor to other species or else all
the species would deprive you of the benefits of their youth.

Speaker 6 (01:52:37):
Since it, yeah, that's it, and that I think is
very old in the human experience.

Speaker 2 (01:52:44):
Well, I'm going to I'm going to close with a
couple of details here. The American westl Dan Floyd's will
premiere May six. You can find it anywhere you find
your podcast. It'll pop up every other Tuesday, m h Yeah,
on its own and it'll be in at in the
history category if you're if you're shopping around, I have

(01:53:07):
here short show description and then show description. But the
short show description is only two lines shorter. I'm gonna
do the big dog the Dog. Dan Floy celebrates the
American West by chronicling the heroes, scoundrels, and events that
shaped its history, from the Battle of Adobe Walls to

(01:53:29):
the Mountain Metals Massacre. What goes back more than that?
Where's the other one?

Speaker 6 (01:53:33):
Yeah, it's got to be the other one. That sounds
like an.

Speaker 2 (01:53:36):
Early longtime Western author Dan Floorries presents a big picture
history of an American West you've never encountered, Covering a
vast span in a Western America whose landscapes and wild
animals drew people from around the world. This podcast tells
a news story of our most fascinating region to give

(01:53:57):
people a sense. The series opens up with kind of
an overview. It's called West of Everything opens up with
some of the deep antiquity and some and introduced to
some of the broader themes. Episode two is Clovisia. Is
that how you like pronounce that?

Speaker 6 (01:54:17):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:54:18):
Clovisia The beautiful about the early human cultures Clovis cultures,
Ravens and Coyotes. America is episode three, and that gets
into that that long period we talked about between early
arriving humans, what happened between then in European contact, and

(01:54:39):
how did people seem to have developed.

Speaker 6 (01:54:43):
A very.

Speaker 2 (01:54:45):
I'll call it harmonious or static environment, static relationship with
the natural world. All of a sudden, we go ten
thousand years and there's like one extinction. Yeah, and ten
thousand years of human history in the New World. There's
one extinction, that's right, and then man, we get busy

(01:55:05):
un extinctions. It changes after that. Uh old Man America
is a story of kind of why does the coyote
or the coyote, why does the coyote come in as
such a complex religious figure in Native American culture? The

(01:55:27):
Wild New World of the American Serengetti is episode five
about you know, everybody's idea of the Serengetti in Africa,
about that that was the perception that people who arrived
on the Grand Plains had at first. It was it
was it was it was a Sarngetti of its time.
Survivors from a Lost World Episode six talks about the

(01:55:50):
American prong horn there's an episode on something we touched
on today, Jefferson's other Lewis and Clark and that, Uh,
that's the seven.

Speaker 6 (01:56:00):
Episodes, it's the first seven.

Speaker 2 (01:56:02):
Yeah, so a lot of stuff if you're a fan
of American history, if you're a fan of the West,
which is a lot of stuff that you probably don't
know about, but that will really shape your understanding of
these other big moments and put those other big moments
into context.

Speaker 6 (01:56:16):
I think my favorite phrase for something like this is
that it will rearrange the furniture in your head.

Speaker 2 (01:56:23):
So when you get to be like I do reading
about the battle a Little Bighorn, you'll have a much
more expansive view of how that. You'll have a instead
of a those few days that led up to that,
you'll have a what are the thousands of years that
led to this moment? Yeah? Yeah, all right, thank you
Dan for coming on. Can't wait for the show.

Speaker 6 (01:56:43):
Thanks for all of this. I appreciate it. Man.

Speaker 7 (01:56:46):
Everyone subscribe to the new feed. Very important. Thank you.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 699: The American West with Dan Flores