Ep. 478: The American West

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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(00:32):
first light dot com. F I R S T L
I T E dot com. All right, joined today by
esteemed historian American historian Elliott West. Welcome on the show.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Thank you, it's good to be here.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
I've had two I've had two, well, a lot of
run ins with you work, but I've had two main
run ins I want to tell you about. I'll tell
you about. We got to cover some stuff that I'm
gonna tell you about the runnings. Sure, and then I'm
gonna tell you that doctor Randall here. Do you guys
know each other? Just be just He has a genuine
PhD in history. I heard he told me about he

(01:07):
told how did he bring it up? Okay, so he
didn't be like a little thing he might not know
about me.

Speaker 3 (01:15):
No, No, he.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Was quite modest.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
I heard there are I was reading today that there's
this article in the Free Pressay now that brought up
I'll tell the article. The article was a guy, a
climatologist that just got there's a climatologist to row to
op ed in Free Press about publishing in the journal Nature,

(01:43):
m okay, and was saying that it was talking about
how biased Nature is toward what they want to publish,
and they were publishing about wildfires in California and how
you need to de emphasize issues not fitting with climate

(02:08):
change to get published in Nature, like they know what
they want, right, So like this climatellogy is like absolutely,
climate change is a big issue with wildfires in California,
but there's all these other underlying things. Eighty percent of
California wildfires are human caused. Okay, where is that. You're
not going to write an article about changing human behaviors

(02:34):
leading to wildfires, or electrical transmission leading to wildfires, or
the need to bury electrical lines and not have overhead
electrical lines due to wildfires and that's not gonna be
of interest, right, climate change boom you're in. So they
wrote this article in Free Press about what they had
to leave out, like what you need to leave out

(02:55):
to catch the eye of nature to fit what they want.
You know, what they've decided is scientific. And if it's
it's scientific, is you know, like of whale, a whale
takes a wrong turn and goes up a river and
dies in a river, you better say the climate change

(03:16):
led to that whale going up that river, and then
it'll be in the paper. Right. But anyways, they're saying,
they're talking about there are like sixty times more PhDs.
The hell is here? Pull this up CRN sixty times
more PhDs now than in nineteen sixty No kidding, that's
not right.

Speaker 4 (03:35):
May I wouldn't be surprised if it is.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
Meaning they just hand those things out like candy, and
that was my experience.

Speaker 5 (03:43):
And there's no there's a lot more people and there's
a lot more people going to higher education than like
here hold back in the World War two.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
And a lot of fewer tenure track jobs.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Well you know how they were Here's what they were blaming.
So the point being, where is this dance? I can't
can you find it?

Speaker 6 (04:01):
I mean, I don't I don't know if this is reputable.
This is Historynewsnetwork dot org. I have no idea who's
behind this organization? Are you familiar?

Speaker 2 (04:11):
Sure?

Speaker 1 (04:11):
Okay, so this is it about how many PhDs are
running around?

Speaker 6 (04:16):
Yeah? History? Oh well, you know what, Actually this is
specifically about history. History. Bachelor's degrees are falling sharply while
doctoral degrees in the discipline continue to rise.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
We don't really think about a guy like Randall.

Speaker 5 (04:33):
He's not as he's not as unique as he as
he thought he was.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
He's got to see his new bumper stick or asked
me about my pH d, and then he's got that,
he's got that plate mt pH D. Yeah, it's a joke.
It's a joke.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
I made a terrible mistakes.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
It's a tough gig.

Speaker 3 (04:58):
It's like a big target on your back.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
A couple of things. So, oh, you know, darn thing
about the Darth thing. I've been thinking about the news.
I got a couple of notes I made in my
little note thing about that. Someday historians should write an
article about how much people love to talk about if
you get, if something bad happens, you're in Yellstone National Park,

(05:26):
how much people love talking about how dumb you are.
It doesn't like I was on the plane ther day
and so you know whatever, Like someone gets someone gets
run over by a buffalo in the park, What is
the story going to be? How how dumb they were?

(05:49):
Do you know what I mean? People on the plane
behind me are like those people. You know. It's like
like I don't know, you know, I can see know
Wait a minute, animal, dude.

Speaker 5 (06:06):
How many times of all people, I'm surprised you're walking
into like a thin layer of like hot spring crust
and falling through.

Speaker 7 (06:15):
I just especially to walk through like three dozen signs
saying stop, don't you idiot?

Speaker 1 (06:21):
Don't I like my instinct is to my instinct is
to be like, yeah, I can see that happening. The
guy that cooked the chicken in the hot spring, you
were supposed to get him on the show. Yeah, some
guys tie a chicken on a rope and lower it
in there and boil it, and everybody talks about all
those they should know better. I'm like, that's it. It's

(06:42):
like a totally interesting idea. Because Osborne Russell Journal of
a Trapper, don't they talk about doing that? They do.
I'm gonna put this, but I want to ask you thing.
Because I endorse Born, I always endorsed Journal of Trapper

(07:04):
and the thing I'll say about it is that historians
like it, right, Oh yes, yeah, it's regarded he was
regarded as spot on.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
Sure, yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:13):
And you know what surprised me. You know another book
I read, uh that I heard that historians are a
little incredulous. Is Tough Trip through Paradise?

Speaker 2 (07:22):
Really?

Speaker 1 (07:24):
Yeah? Have you heard that he played a little fast
and loose with.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
The I've never heard that. It's been years since I
read it, but I loved doing I read it. In fact,
I was overthrown through a Paradise valley the other day,
just again, is that right? Beautiful country?

Speaker 1 (07:36):
So you can cite uh, Tough Trip through Paradise and
it's like like historians will cite Tough Trip through Paradise
and it's regarded as okay, sure, yeah, yeah. But historians
love Journal of a Trapper.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
They do it really readings true a lot of a
lot of the things that he says in there, and
you know, jobs with the other material that we have
on fur Trader and trappers and so forth. So I
think it's sure good.

Speaker 1 (07:59):
I'm gonna keep endorse that was I getting that. Oh
A lot of PhDs running around, uh, A lot.

Speaker 5 (08:08):
Of smart people and that's somehow Buffalo brilliant.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
A lot of brilliant people get goured by Buffalo and
get blamed for being stupid when I think that they
might have just been kind of.

Speaker 6 (08:17):
Like backing up into the like.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
You know, I don't know, I'm gonna go over there
and get close.

Speaker 6 (08:22):
To it, backing up into Buffalo with like selfie sticks.

Speaker 1 (08:26):
Okay, Brody, hear me out, Brody. We just worked on Okay,
catch crayfish, count stars, and we encourage And what do
we tell kids? What do we give tips kids? Tips
on hot what to do getting close to critters, how
to sneak up on stuff, but you don't got to
sneak up on them.

Speaker 5 (08:45):
It's like you get out of the car and there's
one stand in the park.

Speaker 8 (08:48):
I think the I think the problem that that's underlying
all those stories is just that you somehow expect that
people go into Yellowstone and not be stupid.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
You know.

Speaker 8 (08:58):
It's like it's like that's the one place where people
aren't supposed to break rules and just behave in all
you know, and all types of I feel like you
go anywhere in the world, people are doing stupid stuff.
It's just that the stakes are higher when you have
large animals around.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
But if here's the deal, if someone can to you,
like like someone came to be someone here at work
comes and that wouldn't be surprised if this happened. I
come into work and someone's like, oh, you here, Chili
got Gord by a mule deer, right, he got God
by a meal deer. I wouldn't be like that, idiot.
I'd just be like what, Yeah. I would automatically impulsively

(09:35):
blame the person who got mauled by something for stupidity,
the way they do if it's in the park.

Speaker 7 (09:41):
M hm.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
Well. The story I remember, though, was the woman who
went up to buy some gup right in front of
it with a flash camera, you know, took a close
up of the of hiss head from the front. Sure,
and she got Gord. What do you expect that she.

Speaker 4 (09:58):
Expected?

Speaker 1 (10:00):
I can't go.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
I think pictures blurred.

Speaker 9 (10:06):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (10:07):
The third thing I wanted to talk about, but I
can't give too many details. I got a friend who's
a prosecutor in this state. He's a county prosecutor, and
he was telling me the other day about he had
a thing he's working on where these guys in a
trailer park, gotten to fight like this want being like
a prosecuted issue. They got to fight over a last

(10:29):
piece of fried chicken that someone then impregnated the chicken
with glass shards of glass, and a fight broke out
so bad the fight broke out, went over the fence
and into I ninety and shut the highway down. No,

(11:00):
no another for common. Here's the everything, this super important
that I keep wanting to get to my body. One
of my main best friends from growing up and we're
still friends today. He comes up to our fishsheck every year.
He has a new he's a teacher. Okay, he has
a business, a summertime business of he's got a roving bar.

(11:24):
I'm gonna explain this, damn it. Okay, if you live
around Traverse City, Michigan, here's what you need to who
you need to hire for your events. This is the
this is so. This is a good, very good buddy,
My Matt DROs from growing up, we still hang out.

(11:46):
Was just with him and because he's a teacher, he
has a summertime business he created called roaming Roaming Northern
Michigan dot com. But it's not it's roaming. No. My
so roaming Andi dot com. I'll revisit this in a minute.
He has a camp or trailer that he rigged up
as a bar. But when you have an event, you

(12:10):
get married whatever, twenty fifth wedding anniversary bar mitzvah, I
don't know. Uh. You call him, you place your liquor order,
he picks it up. Okay, so he's not selling booze.
You buy your booze for your event like you normally would.
He then shows up with his motor home with all

(12:32):
the mixers and specialty drinks that he crafts for your thing,
pulls his camper in and then your guests go to
the bar window to get cocktails.

Speaker 4 (12:46):
And there's no money change.

Speaker 1 (12:47):
In hands, No money changes hands. Fantastic, no money changes hands.
He operates out of Traverse City, Michigan. Packages prices everything
at the website Roaming nom Roaming n m I dot com.
Matt Drose plan an event just to call him. I

(13:10):
like it, Like if you're getting married somewhere else, get
married there and call it roaming and go to Roamingnomi
dot com and patronize my good friend's business. He likes
to hunt and fish.

Speaker 5 (13:27):
He should start a franchise take over the country.

Speaker 1 (13:30):
Another thing I've been wanting to talk about. I invented
an old saying. I'm the only guy I know that
ever invented an old saying meaning, you know, like stitching
time saves nine.

Speaker 6 (13:40):
Like you said you invented it.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
Yeah, I know. I thought of one that you'd think
was old. And it has to do with like if
you send your kids out to pick pole beans and
he'd be like, pick every pole bean, and then you
go out and look and there's pol beans they didn't
pick because it's hard to find them. Or like you
send your wife's friend out to pick pole beans and

(14:04):
she's like, I got them all, and you go on looking.
They didn't get them all. They didn't look carefully enough.
The old saying I invented is is I could see
applications and finance and other things. A fresh a fresh
set of eyes will always find more beans.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
Hm hm.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
So right. So, like let's say someone's like whatever, I
don't know. You know, you can see implications and finance whatever,
fresh set eye, Yeah exactly, but your body's like, no,
I glass that hillside good and you sit down and
you're like, you know what, buddy, fresh set eyes always
find more beans.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
It doesn't.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
There's a buck right over there. You don't think so
Katie thinks is like useless. He knows my wife doesn't
think it's a good saying, good old saying at all.
A couple more dress you sounds like a real dor
when you say you do, sound like a total dork
when you say it. First set eyes always find more beans, Randall, I've.

Speaker 3 (15:07):
Never really thought about finding beans.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
Now I'm gonna work on it. Think about it, Phil.
Maybe Phil can workshop that that's different. I got a
lot more stuff written out here, but we got to
get down to what we're talking about. Oh, so here's
the deal.

Speaker 4 (15:27):
This is.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
Our esteem. Guests probably wondering why it is here, but
we're gonna have a lot of time. We're gonna get
to something from your state. Elliott. Were you born in Arkansas? No?

Speaker 2 (15:38):
I was born in Texas, in Dallas.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
Oh you're born in Dallas, Texas. But you're at University
of Arkansas.

Speaker 3 (15:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:42):
I've been there for well, retired a couple of years ago.
At been I've been there for forty three, forty four years.

Speaker 1 (15:47):
Did they give you that? What's that good title you
get when you retire? But you remain in good standing Americas?
Are you emeretis?

Speaker 2 (15:53):
I'm emeritus?

Speaker 1 (15:54):
That's sweet man? Uh Randall have you heard of doubt?
The best thing Randallsville tell me about his PhD is
when he checks a book out from the library, he
gets as long as he wants. That makes all while
those librarians chasing after all the time, and you get that, Yeah,

(16:18):
librarians aren't always after him for the seventy.

Speaker 8 (16:20):
Eight small, very very small privileges in life to make
it all worth it.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
This is from Springdale, Arkansas. So September twenty third. We've
talked about this the whole bunch. We actually for a
while talked about that we were going to like start
our own, which you never got around to. But this
one's back on the World Champion Squirrel Cookoff, Springdale, Arkansas,
September twenty third, in partnership with Arizona Fish and Game

(16:46):
Free of vatkans Arkansas. What did I say, Arizona? I did,
we probably can Arkansas. I feel, yeah, this is a
lot of work. One state is not going to have
a squirrel cookoff and be Arizona.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
Springdale, Arkansas, September twenty third, in partnership with Oh, that's
why I screwed up in partnership with Arkansas Fishing Game
free event. It's a creative event and competitive cooking and
squirrel dishes must contain eighty percent squirrel and be prepared
on site. That's a good TIB because I've judged wild

(17:23):
game cookoffs before where it's like the game part becomes
an afterthought.

Speaker 5 (17:29):
Yeah, you could put like one squirrel in a pot
of chili and be.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
Like that squirrel chili eighty percent squirrel, So you are
showcasing squirrel. They have a Facebook deal. So when you're
describing where to find something on Facebook, do you include
like Facebook dot com? Or what do you write? How
do you say?

Speaker 6 (17:47):
I guess, yeah, because I guess If you don't have Facebook,
you can still type in this your URL and get there.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
Facebook dot com slash Squirrel Cookoff. We'll take you there.

Speaker 6 (17:57):
And it's organized by Clay's good friend. Clay's going to
be there this year. I think he is. Yeah, I think.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
So Here's what I don't like. They're billing it. They're
making it like a war on squirrels.

Speaker 4 (18:13):
Yeah, this squirrel has.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
Caused millions of dollars of damage. Listen, don't I still
want people to go, But this is not about squirrels
being bad.

Speaker 6 (18:23):
Come on, I don't know.

Speaker 8 (18:26):
Typically I think of these things as a celebration of
the animal right.

Speaker 5 (18:29):
Yeah, like house fires are caused by squirrels, They got
all kinds of screams things.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
Listen, listen. I still want you to go to the
squirrel Cookoff, but you need to go from a place
of love, not from a place of go from a
position of love for squirrels, not from a position of
squirrel hatred. No.

Speaker 6 (18:49):
I think it's also that for anyone who needs like
extra justification to, you know, push them over the edge
if they might not otherwise attend they're being reminded did.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
But the last thing you want to create is like
another a squirrel. There's a lot of things to love,
like about hunting, but people like, well if I didn't hunt,
it's kind of you.

Speaker 5 (19:12):
And they're like going after him the way people go
after coyote.

Speaker 4 (19:16):
Yeah, exact things like that. It's strange.

Speaker 1 (19:19):
Yeah, I don't know to do about all rearing endorsement. No, listen,
I am all four. Do you see me pounding this table.
I'm all for the squirrel Cookoff. I just think that
it has been. It's from a place. I love that
it approach the right. Never in my life seeing a
squirrel and been like, dah, damn it a squirrel. Do

(19:42):
you know what I mean?

Speaker 5 (19:43):
You need to go down there and enter a pine
squirrel recipe with Jimmy.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
That'd be great idea. No one else pine squirrel carried away.
I still like, I'm still mad at my mother for
cutting some of the oak trees down in her yard
because of squirrels, squirrel damage, the squirrel habitat uh. We
recently had an episode where we were with the founder,
the creator of the Merlin app at Cornell. Someone had
a hot tip about the Merlin app. Get a bluetooth

(20:11):
speaker and play back bird songs. This is very effective.
I wish would have brought it up. I don't know
if they do. They frown on it. Maybe they frown
on it at Merlin. We'll have to see if they
write in meaning it works. It's very effective to call
in birds. In fact, we would so the over day.

(20:32):
I'll sitting there with my boy in a little pop
up blind. I'm gonna pull this up. I got a
gripe with the Merlin app too, Just and I know
they listened to the show it. This is the only
bird I never they It does not pick up a
It won't pick up a grade. JA listen to this.
So here's from my Merlin app. I'm gonna turn it up.

(20:53):
This is a recording I made this weekend. So that's
a pine squirrel. Okay, but listen to them again. I
hit him again and again and again with Merlin. Listen,
care for the that's a great jay. Listen. It doesn't

(21:14):
get it. It registers it. You see it show up. Obviously,
it will not identify that thing. It's the only failure
I've ever seen Merlin.

Speaker 7 (21:23):
I wonder if it's too short of no.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
He was going boom boom boom, and there's probably other vocalizations,
but it will not detect that vocalization.

Speaker 7 (21:33):
That squirrel is really really upfront and loud.

Speaker 6 (21:38):
I wonder if it's like yeah that and it's audio.

Speaker 7 (21:41):
Clashing with a lot of the frequencies.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
Is my guest, you think so?

Speaker 7 (21:45):
I think so.

Speaker 6 (21:46):
It comes from an audio engineers.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
Here's my kids. Here's what you want to hear my
kid criticizing.

Speaker 7 (21:50):
Me ursus, you're so what.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
You're so slow. He didn't like when we go to
pick off a bird. He didn't like how long it'd
take me to activate the app. It was frustrating. He
thought you would just like let it run for hours
on end, and I didn't like that approach.

Speaker 8 (22:13):
I mean, it seems like if you're playing on a
bluetooth speaker, if there's someone else in the area using
the Merlin app, that it could cause a feedback loop
where all of a sudden there's a.

Speaker 1 (22:24):
Merlin's too smart. I've played bird, I've played recordings, and
I haven't done it much. I've played recordings and something
g's lost interesting. So if you play, we can do
I don't know, try it right now, But if you
play Merlin a recording of a bird, it won't flag
the bird. I don't know if it's just because things

(22:46):
are too compressed. If something's like too compressed, Phil probably
answer that, what do you think of that is? Phil?

Speaker 7 (22:53):
Honestly, that kind of baffles me. I feel like it
should be able to pick it out.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:58):
However, we have a called the Bird Song Bible, and
you type in bird calls and it's going through like
a little chintzy little there's like a speaker baked into
the book and it might be that that speaker just sucks.
I don't know, but Merlin won't identify those birds. But
I could run around with this. I could go into

(23:20):
any area with pine squirrels. And we did it for
we were just messing around this weekend. We would just
walk into a spot and play that squirrel and just
no sooner he shut up alst in the woods just
come alive with like squirrels replying to it. Years ago,
I was reading a thing where they they're working on

(23:42):
his study with vervet monkeys who they have these different
warning calls. These researchers realizing that they had that they
have a warning call for a threat on the ground,
and then they have a warning call for a threat
from an avian predator, and they seem to have a
different noise they make on the ground in the air.

(24:05):
And they would record the calls and play it and
monitor what evasive actions they took. If it's a thread
on the ground, they would do one thing like bust
into the tree. If it's an overhead threat, they would
respond differently to it to like reduce their risk from
a harpy eagle or the hell praise on them. I

(24:25):
don't remember what it was the praise on them. It
wouldn't be a harpy because that's South America, but these
I think are Africa. Anyways, you could burn out. You
could burn them out on a monkey. If you record
a monkey doing a warning call and then start playing
that monkey to his buddies all the time. After a
while his buddies, he loses credibility with his buddies.

Speaker 3 (24:48):
The monkey he had cried eagle.

Speaker 1 (24:49):
Yeah, he's the monkey that cried and he's the monkey
that cried wolf, and you could play it where everybody's like, oh, Bob,
he always is doing that. An insurance so I was
using the term inherent vice, which is one of my
favorite movies. I like it. It's one of those rare

(25:10):
instances where a movie is so much better than a book.
Thomas Pinsion's Inherent Vice was made into a film, which
was a wonderful movie. And we were talking about when
we had David grant On. I think that's when we
had David grant On. We're talking about the concept of
inherent vice, which is a nautical term. Someone wrote in.
A guy named Thomas wrote in from He's from an insurance.

(25:33):
He's a marine insurance specialist got to say his name. Sure,
he's the president of Alan Armott Agency, Inc. Marine Insurance Specialists.
He says, Steve refers to inherent vice as things you
can't control, like getting wet. Inherent vice is the ability

(25:58):
of a thing to destroy itself health, fruit can rot,
marijuana can actually light itself on fire, metal can rust.
Getting wet would not be under inherent vice. Getting wet
is an external.

Speaker 6 (26:12):
Factor caused by an external factor.

Speaker 1 (26:16):
Caused by an external factor. So like the idea of
inherent vice and shipping, if the load gets wet, it's
not like, Ah, that just happens. Someone screwed up when
he gets wet. Then he goes on to say, never
thought I would be the type to email a correction.

Speaker 9 (26:36):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Someone else rode in with another one. When we had
the writer David Grant on about the wager, we talked
about sayings that come from naval, the naval world. He says,
you guys fell down a rabbit hole on ship terms
and sayings on the podcast with David Grant. Here's another.
Do you believe this?

Speaker 4 (26:58):
I'm wondering, I'm looking it up.

Speaker 6 (27:02):
I didn't look it up.

Speaker 1 (27:03):
He's saying that the word ship comes from the old days.

Speaker 5 (27:08):
I think he's off. You look it up origin Old English.
I don't know how to how to pronounce it. S
c I T t E of Germanic origin.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
Maybe bags of manure. Maybe maybe our maybe our steam
guests has heard of this, bags of manure.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
I'm dealing it a lot, Okay.

Speaker 1 (27:33):
If you stored bags of manure within the depths of
a ship, they could get seawater on makes them unusable.
They would write s h I T on bags of
nerve store high in transit.

Speaker 7 (27:49):
I don't know that sounds fake. Do you think it
sounds fake?

Speaker 8 (27:52):
I've heard that before, but I don't. I mean the
the etymology.

Speaker 4 (27:57):
Yeah it doesn't. It doesn't match up with but the
google because.

Speaker 3 (28:01):
The German is shi.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
Yeah, the Germans were using that word for us words.

Speaker 5 (28:08):
Ship first originally appeared around one thousand years ago and
can be traced back to the old Norse origin skit
skeeta skeeters.

Speaker 4 (28:19):
I'm just saying, there's like this gate.

Speaker 6 (28:22):
This guy might be wrong, but I kinda like this
should feel.

Speaker 1 (28:26):
Pull it out of the show, leave it. Someone wrote
in out that Krin likes this one. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
Well, if you.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
Were tasked with the decision of picking four American authors
to be etched into the side of a mountain. Who
would they be. I'll just leave that one hanging for
for listeners.

Speaker 6 (28:46):
Elliott West and rand.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (28:52):
I was gonna tell you, yeah, uh, did you know
that Randall reviewed your work? Hemagined they I.

Speaker 3 (29:00):
Did tell him that.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
Let's start with that. Randal set the scene for us. Well.

Speaker 8 (29:06):
I was in a graduate seminar taught by Dan and
each week, each week you had to review a book
and from a different period of time or I think
some of them were probably thematic.

Speaker 1 (29:22):
Each week, yep, you read.

Speaker 8 (29:24):
So everybody in the seminar reads a book and reviews it,
and then you get together on Monday or Tuesday or
whenever the classes and you just explain your book and
Dan kind of pieces them all together and explains how
they're in conversation with one another. And that was kind
of the structure of those seminars. But one week I
had the pleasure of reviewing The Last Indian War, probably

(29:48):
two years after it came out, and stuck with me.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
So, I would you like to share a passage with us?

Speaker 2 (29:54):
Mm?

Speaker 1 (29:56):
I mean, you proposed this to me didn't you that
you'd share as.

Speaker 4 (30:00):
The passage.

Speaker 8 (30:01):
There's just there are a lot of things that are
attributed to me in the course of a conversation having
to do with my educational background that really have never
once escaped my mouth.

Speaker 1 (30:11):
So but yeah, Crin, if you'd like to know, I'm
gonna deny his Montana PhD license plate.

Speaker 9 (30:18):
Now.

Speaker 8 (30:22):
Yeah, it's a memorable book. I think there are a couple. Uh,
I just I appreciated. I always appreciate books that make
a story that you think is a story about one
thing speak to bigger stories and bigger narratives. And so
that was one of those books that kind of opened
my eyes to how the past is all and you know,

(30:44):
different parts of the past during conversation with one another.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
Well, thank you?

Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yeah, do you have it pulled up?

Speaker 7 (30:50):
No?

Speaker 3 (30:51):
Don't?

Speaker 1 (30:52):
Should should read it? How long is the passage?

Speaker 3 (30:55):
It's I just shared. I don't need to read any
of this.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
No, no, you don't. You know what you don't need
to Randall? Was it a negative review, No, No, it
was quite complimentary.

Speaker 8 (31:06):
I actually I only sent along the the excerpt excerpts
from it because I I thought you might find them
useful in preparation for our conversations.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
Why you shared them?

Speaker 8 (31:16):
Yeah, yeah, No, it wasn't a show and tell. If
it was, I would have had a I would have
had a photo of the original with the sticker at
the top.

Speaker 3 (31:25):
But yeah, I thought you might find it.

Speaker 1 (31:27):
Oh you're trying to help me out as a host. Yeah, yeah,
I appreciate that.

Speaker 8 (31:31):
Instead, I just put another great, big target on my back.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
I guess. So, elios, let's start out, how many when
you look at your career as a historian and you've
been in you've been in the biz, how long fifty

(31:54):
years do you do you measure it? Do you measure
your career as a historian in terms of how many
books you've written?

Speaker 6 (32:04):
Like?

Speaker 1 (32:04):
You know what I mean? Like, how do you how
do you sum it up? Right?

Speaker 2 (32:09):
Well, that would be one way I think. I think
I think more in terms of teaching. Okay, how many
teaching the public University of State university, so you have
big classes. I tried to figure out. In fact, I
dedicated a book of a few books ago to my students,
and I said, I and figured out it's probably had
somewhere between ten and twelve thousand students. Really, in terms

(32:33):
of I've also worked.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
That's a lot of influence, that's a lot of you
have them for a lot of hours.

Speaker 6 (32:38):
I do.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
Indeed, they would confirm that yes, captive, Oh my god,
it's like I ever shut up, you know. But he
also I try to work. I've tried to work a
lot with public school teachers to encourage, you know, better
teaching of American history.

Speaker 1 (32:57):
Is that right?

Speaker 2 (32:58):
I've had one hundred of them over the years, and
they've had, of course, each one of them has said,
hundreds of thousands of students.

Speaker 1 (33:06):
How do you think, how do you interact with public
school teachers in what capacity?

Speaker 2 (33:11):
Well, there are different programs. One that I continue to
work with the Guilder Laherman Institute in New York. It's
a wonderful institute to encourage a good teaching of American history.
And they sponsor seminars over the years, and I've done,
oh gosh, probably ten or fifteen of those. And you
meet with a week for a week with school teachers

(33:32):
from all around the country, since some from abroad, and
you choose a topic. I taught one I was mentioning
a moment ago. Taught one in Missoula for four years
on Lewis and Clark. So you have teachers come from
all over the country, all over the world, and you
try to have the seminars and in the place that
you're teaching about, you know. So we would talk about

(33:54):
Lewis and Clark and sort of pick that expedition apart,
and then on a Wednesday, we'd go up a little
low pass to the uh you know, to travelers Rest,
and then up to the old Pass and then back
and sort of around the country. So it's a it's
a great way to encourage students to identify, not just
in terms of new material, but you know the place itself,
because you really can't, especially Western history, you can't understand

(34:14):
the story if you don't don't know the place. You know,
if you can't go there.

Speaker 1 (34:19):
What do you what do you think is wrong with
how American? You know? If you said to be to
do better at teaching American history, where do people fall
short in teaching American history in your in your view.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
Well, until fairly recently, of course, you leave out a
lot that's pertinent. Uh. I think we need to bring
in more areas like environmental history, the kind of thing
that your podcast deals with a great deal beyond that,
I think you need to the you need to talk
about the larger contexts, you know, to take something to

(34:52):
Lewis and Clark. It's a fascinating story. It's an American epic,
you know, it's like an American creation story. Almost You're
caught up in this sort of a mythic pattern where
you think this is an absolutely unique event, but in fact,
you know, this is part of global exploration, you know,
and something that was happening all over all over the

(35:12):
planet Earth. And these were just two guys among many
who we're doing this. You didn't understand in terms of
what what does the expedition teach us about Indian peoples
at that time? What does it teach us about science
of that time?

Speaker 7 (35:28):
You know.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
So it's a big story. It's a big story. It's
a distinctly American story. And the journals, of course are
a masterpiece of American literature. So it's our story, but
it's also the world's story, and I think it helps
to put all of American history in that larger context
if you can.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
You know, earlier I mentioned there's two areas where I
had kind of the main two areas where I brushed
up against your work over the years. Is years ago,
I was going to write a book. I wanted to
write a book about the nets Person War. Oh really yeah,
Well I started working on it, my little what I
was doing, and I got going on it. I was

(36:10):
just going to walk that whole well, I use my packcraft.
I just had a backpack with packraft in and I
got started on it. I was going to walk and
pack raft that whole route, and I got going on it,
but just the the time, commitment and other things prevented me.
So I read your book at the time, your book
on the nets Pers War the other area, and this

(36:31):
is kind of where one of the areas where I
want to jump in talking to you. I talked about
it on the show. Even you had an essay. It
was collecting one of your books. It was one of
your books that had like there was a collection of
four or five bigger pieces. You had an essay about

(36:52):
how old European involvement and influence on the Great Plains,
how far back that went right? And in it you
make the point and this kid just kind of I
guess maybe I was aware of it but hadn't thought
about it just blew my mind you're like when Lewis

(37:13):
and Clark stepped down into the Great Plains, there were
Native Americans on the Great Plains at that time who
had been to Europe and met the King of France
and came back home again on the Great Plains at
the time Lewis and Clark, and in the American imagination,

(37:33):
it's like that they it was just that they went
into this place, this untouched, unhistoried. Yeah, and then you
got into just the I think it was hundreds of
years if you go back to people like these kind
of like offshoots of the Coronado Expedition, that they were
coming into an area that had been deeply influenced.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
Right, Yeah, they what you were talking about, these Indians
from the Kansas area. Actually Kansas in Missouri had been
to the court, the Court of France course of the
fifteenth Now that was a but that was in seventeen twenty,
seventeen twenty five, seventeen twenty six. This is a long
time before Willison Clark. So the image I love to

(38:17):
imagine might have happened was that at the time that
we the American you know, the East West Frontier was
edging its way into the interior. That's what Lewis and
Clark would you'll be part of if you go back
to when that when this was seventeen twenties. Yeah, there
was a governor, territorial governor of coinial governor of Virginia,

(38:42):
you know, who had a group of people he called
a the the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, and they
would they loved to go explored the far west, right
and they and he would come back with this reports
of this this magnificent river they had found in this
beautiful valley that was the it was a shin of door,

(39:02):
you know. And these are people who were you know,
they were just south of Washington, d C. And they
were talking about, you know, penetrating deep into the American interior.
At the very time that they would be doing that
and talking about going back home, you know, I'm sitting
around drinking, drinking port smoking cigars at the very times
that they're talking about going to the far West, there

(39:23):
might well have been Indians in central Kansas reminiscing about Paris.
The Women's So it's so that's that's the kind of
thing that I'm talking about. The larger the larger context
Lewis and Clark were not entering this plate of Lewis's

(39:46):
famous quote, you know when they set off, and that's
from the Mandan villages, you know, the and where the
foot of civilized man has never trodden. No, there's been
a lot of trotting going on before that.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
What do you think was the biggest at the time
Lewis and Clark were encountering on the northern plains, tribes
and and you know, in all fairness, they encountered people.
They encountered people who hadn't directly interacted with euro Americans
or Europeans.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
Person example, and this person listen, Clark with the first
white people the this person had.

Speaker 1 (40:23):
Met yet they had horses. So what what do you
think was the biggest prior to the actual arrival of
what was use Europeans. I guess, prior to the rival
of Europeans, this thingy iwa think about we had these
there's these three huge impacts that that that preceded the

(40:45):
actual presence of Europeans would be horses, metal and disease, right,
I mean, would you is that a fair statement? And
of those which do you think when when Lewis and
Clark was a contact people. Which of those influences was
most was probably most impactful in shaping what they experienced

(41:09):
as you.

Speaker 2 (41:10):
Know Native America at that time.

Speaker 1 (41:12):
Yeah, at that horses horses, like they were seeing something
different than what had been.

Speaker 2 (41:20):
That's right, well, and disease, you know, Lewis and Clark
arrived when they when they go up through North Dakota
what's today North Dakota, they talked about coming across these
abandoned villages, a place called Double Ditch today. Well, those
were abandoned because of smallpox that had appeared seventeen eighty,

(41:43):
you know, twenty years more than twenty years before they
were there devastated. There is, twenty thousand Indians in the
Pacific Northwest died of smallpox because of it. That epidemic
this started in the east, highly influential with the of
the revolution. One of the reasons that we were able
to hold off against the English is the English troops

(42:04):
are devastated, you know, by malaria and by smallpox. So
that was a great influence that preceded that preceded them.
But so of course is maybe at least as much.
In fact, there's a connection there. Smallpox, of course have
been in the western hemisphere for a long form, the
very early period, from the period of period of Cortez,

(42:27):
and it made its way all the way under the
American Southwest quite early. And so the sept peoples of
the Southwest, Comanches and Apaches and Navajoes and others, have
been devastated by smallpox for decades, decades before Lewis and Clark.
But in seventeen eighty it swept up from the south

(42:48):
out of Mexico and went from the east coast down
to Mexico and then up into up into the Americas,
and it hit the southwest again. But then then it
goes all the way up the Missouri Valley, it goes
all the way in the Pacific northwest, devastating, devastating the
Indians there. Why why then, and not before horses courses smallpox.

(43:15):
When you catch smallpox, we have about ten days to
transmit it to another person. So when it arrived first
in the Southwest early on, people's natural response was to panic,
run away, run away, right, But it's literally running. They're
on foot, and they by the time they reach these

(43:37):
you know, virgin soil. By the time they reach people
who have never been infected by this they're dead or
they can no longer pass it along. So it was
the slow movement of these people out of the southwest
that that allowed the people farther north to be free

(43:58):
of it. Then they came than the horses. Yeah, horses
spreading first, that are around sixteen eighty, But by seventeen eighty,
seventeen eighty, the horse cultures had flourished all the way
had developed and flourished all the way across what's today,
you know, the far away with the great planes in
the Pacific Northwest. And so people now when they panic
and they flee, they're doing it on horseback. And the

(44:19):
horses allowed the transmission of smallpox and other diseases in
ways that had never been before. So the horse, in
that sense, you know, one on the one had a
great benefit to these people, allowed them to revolutionize their life,
you know, to this huge burst of power and creativity
and expansion. But it also killed them.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
You know what I'm thinking about as you talked about
that is the COVID exactly, COVID in the airplane.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
That's exactly right, you know, exactly right.

Speaker 1 (44:51):
You could have an epidemic go from isolated to global,
and I don't know month.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
Weeks really in thinckt I've I've written a recent article
on that, comparing uh the covid epidemic today to the
cholera epidemics in the in the nineteenth century and making
exactly that exactly that point. So this is really what
I was talking about a moment ago about the horses
in smallpox. That's really one step in what has of
course become increasingly a fact of life. We're talking about

(45:20):
the shrinkage, the effective shrinkage of the world through transportation.
Horses were an important part of that. But that shrinkage
of course continues. So these poor folks in Wuhan, China
catch this disease, however they got it, uh three weeks
later it's in uh it's in the seattle. Yes, it's

(45:41):
just really quite astonishing, and you see it, of course
over and over over West Nile virus just you know,
name a disease that just hit this country in the
last one hundred and fifty years, and that's how it
got here.

Speaker 1 (45:56):
Mm hmm. Yeah, it's an interesting point. The way the
horses did that. Do you think that we've talked about
this in the past, that the way so horses being
introduced by the Spanish. Was in your view, was that

(46:16):
incident the Pueblo Revolt? Was that really in your mind?
Was that really sort of the beginning of the spread
of horses to all the nomadic what would become the
nomadic bison, you know, the equestrian buffalo hunting tribes of
the of the Great Plains. Like do you think if

(46:38):
the Pueblo Revolt hadn't happened, would that have been delayed
significantly by one hundred years? Or it seems like a.

Speaker 3 (46:43):
Very tidy, Yeah, neat and tidy explanation.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
Yeah, it is. It isn't it isn't It clearly had
a very important impact that there had been the spread
the horse. Horses had spread before sixteen eighty, but it
was very localized command you said, Nava holes had them
and used them very effectively, rating on the web levels
and in the in the Spanish, So there it had

(47:09):
sort of I think it was sort of a leakage.
You know, the Spanish worked really hard to try to
control those horses because they knew what they were. The
horses allowed people kind of mobility and the power to
maneuvering that they had never had before, and they could
be used very effectively against the Spanish, and so they
were you know, it was it was a capital offense,

(47:30):
the capital offense to sell a horse to an Indian.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
Yeah, yeah, i'd read that. But ever i'd read that
they had tried that they really wanted to control information
about horses and control dissemination of horses.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
Yeah, that's absolutely true. But they you can, of course,
by the time possible, But go ahead sixteen eighty. It's
very clear. You know, the record shows very clear, very
clearly that after sixteen eighty, horses spread very rapidly to
the north, and they follow exactly those trading routes that
the preseed Columbus. It's just just traditional trading routes that

(48:07):
go up to first up through the Rockies incidentally interestingly,
then into the Pacific Northwest. Nes Purse, you know, the
Shoshotes and nis Purse had horses within thirty years of
the Weber revolt. Thirty years, that's incredible. And then they
spread from there out onto the plains. So so within
one hundred years you go forward from sixteen eighty to

(48:29):
seventy and eighty, horse cultures have developed everywhere in the
West that they eventually would. It's done. It's a done
deal in one hundred.

Speaker 5 (48:37):
Years by the time for that they made the horses
made it up here to say Montana, what like, how
did the tribes here? What was their understanding of where
they came from? Like what was like they had to
have some story or history about where these things that
had never been there before.

Speaker 6 (48:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:58):
Yeah, they're also the traditionals develop of course about where
they are and quite often not universal, but quite often
it's sort of a gift from God. And they're described
as things like uh uh, like elk dogs, elk dogs
because like an elk, they're big and powerful, right like

(49:24):
a dog. They're domesticated. That's so I say, elk dog.

Speaker 5 (49:27):
Yeah, but there was there is no knowledge of them
coming into some other culture, some other place.

Speaker 2 (49:37):
Just eventually there were It's quite clear where they're coming from.
You once once it develops Lewis and Clark when they
meet the Shoshone, that famous meeting, you know, where Chicagoya
meets her brother and they're starving for horses. They have
to have horses. They gone with canoes up the Missouri,
you know, and to the to the to the what

(49:59):
to get down the other side. They've got to have horses,
and so the Shoshones were obvious sources and once they
met them. But if you read those journals, during their
meeting with the Shoshonees, they report seeing Spanish brands on
some of the world. These are horses that notre live
from the They weren't simply descendants of horses that have

(50:23):
been spread northward. They had they had those particular horses
had come from New Mexico. Seriously, Yeah, so this is
a you know, it's a very vigorous vigorous Uh.

Speaker 1 (50:35):
That's so weird. I've never I feel like that'd be
like am that'd be like a real talked about aspect
of Lewis and Clark. I never heard that.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
It's true. Just read read the journalis Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:45):
Spanish brands horses, horses up there.

Speaker 2 (50:48):
Ye huh in this case Montana.

Speaker 1 (50:52):
You know, I want to stay on a little bit
of this. I want to talk to you. You've written
a lot about mining. I want to talk about gold
rushes and mining too, but I want to stay on
this theme for a minute here. And you have a
new book out which I have where is it sitting
right in front of me? Continental Reckoning, huge book. It

(51:13):
is yeah, the American West and the age of expansion.
I make a habit, unlike most hosts. I make a
habit of saying I read it, or I didn't read
I haven't read it. However, I read the index and
then use that to go in and check little certain

(51:34):
things out. And I got to last that I was
land never reading some passages you had about the Indian
Wars in the West, and you kinda you treat it
as victory there for the victory there for America was

(52:00):
just a certainty. And not only that, but we talked
about what we spent on the Indian Wars relative to
other military endeavors. The human cost of the Indian Wars
relative to other military endeavors really puts into perspective, meaning
we you know, the Union, I can't remember what you had.

(52:22):
I should find I should have taken a better note.
But I mean the Union in a day in the
Civil War, would I think that maybe this is how
this support whatever you use. There were certain days during
the Civil War the Union lost more soldiers and they
were going to use than they were going to lose
in the Indian Wars of the West.

Speaker 2 (52:42):
That's right, and Tetam of course which is the bloodiest
battle of the Civil War, the bloodiest battle in American
history in terms of losses. Now, this is strict, this
is just on the Union side. Just didn't We're not
talking about the Confederates. The Union lost more men in
in this two square mile area over about nine hours.

(53:04):
Then they lost over thirty years and two million acres
square miles in the far West.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
That it just blows mica the amount of mental energy
I have spent on the amount of mental energy I've
spent on how Coster managed to get a couple couple
hundred guys killed one day, and then you go and
look at the Antietam like that'd be like a better
place to spend your time. It's like, not how did

(53:34):
a guy lose a couple hundred, but how do you
lose thousands of people?

Speaker 2 (53:39):
Yeah, that's right in a blink of an eye.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
Yeah, but really it does it occupies this like I
don't know. I mean, I know they're big Civil War buffs,
but just it's see, I guess because it went on
so long. But you tell me, you kind of painted
like it was sort of a light lift and ere
that you get into. No, I mean just because the

(54:03):
numbers like I didn't realize you were saying. You had
to think that by the time some of the I
think it was by the time a little Big Horn
or by the time of the Nez Perce War in
the Pacific Northwest, whites outnumbered Indians sixty to one. I mean,
it was just I guess some of these statistics put
in the perspective that it was probably not a thing

(54:24):
like will we win. It's just like how quickly will
we do this? Like how quickly will we perform this
thing where we've set out to do? Yeah, you know,
and it wasn't a when you just look at the
numbers of people moving into the west, it was just overwhelming.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
That's that's the point of course that I was trying
to make there. Indians in the Far West were defeated.
The military came in, you know, when things got really
nasty and they had to step in. There was any
other way to avoid it, to control this particular group
of Indians. Most of of course didn't resist, like the
Lakotas or commanities, realtives. Most just sort of, you know,

(54:59):
saw riding on the walls. Okay, you know, we'll deal
with it. But if you look at in those terms.
Indian wars are just I like I use a metaphor
of an Indian war. Indian wars were like a period
at the end of a long paragraph. Wasn't the paragraph?

(55:22):
The paragraph was this this juggernaut of settlement that comes.

Speaker 1 (55:27):
In, Yeah, and then like like you mentioned the disease issue,
and then I was just like depopulating people and taking
and eliminating cultural structure, eliminating cultural memory, and then you
have this fragment that just gets overwhelmed by immigration.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
Right, that's right. And I think I mentioned before the
need to put this in the larger context of environmental history,
because what this was in these years, the period that
I cover here, which is about eighteen forty eight or
fifty two, about eighteen eighty was the greatest environmental transportation transformation,
uh convulsion by far in American history. And I would

(56:08):
argue that there are very few times in world history,
you know, when an area that large have been so
completely transformed, so so massively trans environmentally transformed. And that
means of course that the whole, the whole way of
living that Indians had had before that, you know, was uh,
the legs were cut out from it.

Speaker 3 (56:30):
Root.

Speaker 2 (56:31):
You can't if you're if you're a hooting gathering people
in California, just.

Speaker 1 (56:35):
The environmental destruction.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
Sure, sure, we just remake it. And you know we uh,
the elimination of the bison and replacement of the replacement
by by cattle, by ranching. You know, that's that's an obvious,
dramatic example of it. But that could be that story
could be told over and over and over and over
throughout the throughout the far West. We simply transformed. We
we remake the world environmentally when they come in, not

(57:00):
just a number of people, it's this you make a
new world. And this world is not the world that
Indian people's had had been living in for generations, uh
and knew how to deal with and how to support themselves.

Speaker 7 (57:14):
It's over.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
You know, what are you going to do? There's there's
nothing you can do.

Speaker 1 (57:18):
Yeah, I see your point, even outside of the US
military involving themselves in certain issues like what really can
be done?

Speaker 2 (57:26):
Nothing? Yeah, we've had to be overwhelmed.

Speaker 6 (57:30):
You.

Speaker 1 (57:30):
We've had Dan Florees on the show a couple of times,
and he made a point about wildlife. Wildlife in the
West specifically, which he spends a lot of his energy
on and career, on and and telling the story about
the destruction, He'll say, I've looked for it globally and

(57:53):
and globally, I can find nothing that compares to the
destruction of wildlife. That's right, and that occurred in the
American wise.

Speaker 2 (58:01):
Yeah, this wonderful new book of dance, of course, wild
New World. He makes that point over and over and over.

Speaker 1 (58:05):
Yeah, and I've looked.

Speaker 2 (58:07):
It's not there, not there, It's just And that's that's
an aspect of what I what I was just talking about.

Speaker 1 (58:12):
Yeah, what, uh is it fair to say that you're
that's first book the last? The Last Indian War? Is
that the name of the book?

Speaker 2 (58:24):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (58:25):
I remember that, right, I read it years ago. Uh,
lay that out for us. Why why do you feel that,
you know, why that name? What's the significance of that
as the last one?

Speaker 2 (58:38):
I should start by saying that I am terrible coming
up with titles, absolute absolute worst.

Speaker 1 (58:47):
You know, so I make titles for things don't even exist.

Speaker 2 (58:54):
I bet they're better than my uh my editor at
the Oxford guar To Press came up with that. I thought, oh, yeah,
that's a good I called it. First of all, because
I think it was. If you think of a war,
you know, as a as an ongoing conflict between massed forces,

(59:16):
it was, but there was no other Indian war in
the far West like that that fits said definition, because.

Speaker 1 (59:22):
The feeding eighteen seventy seven, is that right.

Speaker 2 (59:24):
Eighteen seventy seven. Yeah, it fighting goes on, of course,
like in the southwest of the Apaches. You know, they're
not defeated until eighteen eighties. But is that a war?
You know, it's more like a police action. You know,
they're they're like gangs, right, They fight for a while
and they come back into the reservation, rest up, You'll
get some food, fathen their horses, and they go.

Speaker 1 (59:45):
Back out just small groups.

Speaker 2 (59:47):
And yeah, yeah, the next Perst War, you know, if
you if you've forget about it, h you know, it
was this ongoing, concerted effort over many months included sort
of that also both sides, you know, engaging each other
like in.

Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
Any seasoned civil war generals. That's right. Yeah, getting defeated.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
This purse just given I just kicked his rear. He
was he was wounded severely wooted twice in his career.
Once was at Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg. He was up
there at that angle. You know, he was with the
group you know that met the Confederates coming up and
pick his charge, shot on the shoulder, and then he
was severely wounded at the Battle of the Big Hole

(01:00:32):
against the against the purse.

Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
Can you lay out how that? Can you lay out
what that war was, how it started? I mean, you
could do the big version of how it started. But
then also it kind of had they had a beginning
one day, right.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
Well, I think the first thing to say about it
is that, as I mentioned a moment ago, Lewis and
Clark were the first white people, the first your your
Americans for them ever to meet, and in their own minds,
they they formed a treaty with the Americans, and they

(01:01:07):
promised to keep the peace with them. They promised to
fight on our side against any any common enemies, and
in their own minds they kept that treaty from that
on that point will be eighteen o six.

Speaker 1 (01:01:21):
I mean they they came to an agreement with Lewis
and Clark, like there was an exchange of gifts, and
they came to be like, Okay, we're good.

Speaker 7 (01:01:30):
We got a deal.

Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
Yeah, that's right, of course, Lewis and Clark had set
out there. One of the things they were told to
do is to make these sorts of arrangements to them
to open up trade and to sort of pacify the
pacify the Pacific Northwest, which will allow the flow of
trade up there. So they approached it with this and
they said, this is what we'd like to do, you know,
and the new persaid, great, that's great. Well, they don't

(01:01:51):
have exchange gifts. The news person to this day are
will tell you that there was a child produced out
of that treaty arrangement from William Clark, a man who
grew up named Daytime Smoke, who ended up fleeing with
Chief Joseph h and dying in Oklahoma. William Clark's son,

(01:02:16):
did he Yeah, yeah, I didn't know.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
So Clark's son was in Clark's son was present for
the Nesberust War.

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
They just per se that that that's right, and they
argue that, you know it's part.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
Of it, you know, that would put him in that
will put him in the seventies.

Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
That's right, that's right, old man. And as was true
of virtually what was that old man's name, Daytime Smoke.

Speaker 1 (01:02:41):
Mm hmmm, and he had light colored hair.

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Right, yeah, he said he had light light colored hair.

Speaker 6 (01:02:49):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:02:51):
I'm a little doobie about that because, uh you know, well,
you know Clark had red hair, and so the point
was that this was and theer make a big point
of that, Well, this guy had hair just like well,
red hair of course is a recessive gene. So you
only get red hair if both of your parents have

(01:03:11):
that in their genes. Right, how in the world did
this this woman have red hair?

Speaker 6 (01:03:17):
God?

Speaker 2 (01:03:18):
So anyway, it's.

Speaker 1 (01:03:21):
Okay, you're questioning in questioning the hair color, are you
questioning the whole premise?

Speaker 2 (01:03:26):
No, I think there's something to it. This is a
standard arrangement, you know, when you make a deal like that.
Uh you it's like it's like royal houses in Europe.
You know, the prince prince from this house marries a
princess in that house because you're sealing this deal between them.
And this is the standard standard procedure among Indian peoples.

(01:03:47):
And we know, you know, in terms of producing children.

Speaker 7 (01:03:50):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:03:51):
Wellim Clark really got down to business once he got back.
I had a bunch of kids, so he was he
was right. But anyway, so I think the point to
make here is that in the nest perseise, they kept
this friendship, this treat all the way, all the way

(01:04:12):
from eighteen o six up until eighteen seventy six and
seventy seven.

Speaker 1 (01:04:17):
Never waged war against the US.

Speaker 2 (01:04:19):
Never did, never did. There is no record that I
could find any of a ness person killing a killing
a white person. There are plenty of records of White's
murdering nes Purse. Didn't do it, didn't do it. And
yet they were the other side of the Last Indian War.

(01:04:39):
The Last Indian War was against those people who had
the longest friendly kept their word longer than any other
Indian group in the entire or west. That's what makes
this to me a very compelling and a very heartbreaking story.
The reason they did it, the reason happened, was that
they were forced by Oliver Howard Uh to leave there.

Speaker 1 (01:05:03):
He's a civil war guy, right, He's a civil war
he was.

Speaker 2 (01:05:06):
Was he to doe with one arm, He was the
one of one arm metrized. He was well. He was
a Uh. He was a dedicated abolitionist. He resigned his
position teaching up in Buden College to a fight for
the war to end a slavery Oliver Howard was the
head of the Freedman's Bureau.

Speaker 7 (01:05:24):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:05:25):
After the war, he founded what is today Howard University,
you know, the leading African American university.

Speaker 1 (01:05:32):
That's that's that's him, yeah, huh.

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):
And so after the Civil War Howard went out went
out to the west. The next person were divided, of course,
into various bands.

Speaker 1 (01:05:44):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:05:45):
Some of those bands, two of them, I think, in
eighteen sixty three, had made a treaty with the US,
agreeing to a much smaller reservation using the tribal holdings
by ninety percent. But this is only one one or
two bands. One band really. The other bands had never

(01:06:08):
agreed to it. They had left the treaty negotiations, and
you had the government said everybody, all of these bands
were bound by this treaty. They let it go. In fact,
Howard at some point said, leave alone. You're not bothered anybody.
They're living in this country, the Wallava. You know where
the Walala is. Yeah, they were living in the Walla,
which is a beautiful, beautiful country, but very isolated. So

(01:06:32):
there was no pressure to open this up to settlement.
So Howard says, you know, let it go. And then
in eighteen seventy six seventy seven, the government said, no, No,
that's it. This treaty holds. You've all got to come in.
You've got to give up your home within within six weeks.

(01:06:53):
You've got to get rid of all your cattle. You've
got to leave your homeland. You've got to get all
your people together, everybody, and you've got to come into
this come into this reservation. This Why they did that
is an interesting question.

Speaker 1 (01:07:18):
You another passage I read in your new book, Continental Reckoning,
you talk about this, You explore this theme you're getting
to right now, which is an inability or a lack
of willingness on the part of US negotiators to understand

(01:07:38):
the structures of tribal peoples and trying to impose on
them this order of that you have a that you
have this sort of like this president like figure that
I will talk to and they'll agree, and then that

(01:07:58):
that sort of covers me on all of these peoples
that we imagine being under this leadership structure, to the
point where I know that in the Ohio River country,
the US government once bought a chunk of ground from
a tribe that didn't occupy the chunk of ground oh, yeah,

(01:08:21):
I'll sell you.

Speaker 2 (01:08:25):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (01:08:26):
And then yeah, and then try to hold them to
it and they're like, well, hold it, but we didn't
the people that were there right, well we didn't agree
to that. Well no, but we bought it from these
other people. They said, they knew you.

Speaker 7 (01:08:39):
Exactly right.

Speaker 1 (01:08:39):
But again and again like that that failure, you know,
I'd say, like a lack of It's probably not that
they didn't understand it. It's probably they just didn't care.

Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
I think it was a bit of both. Uh. You
gotta think from the from Washington's point of view, are
we really these are treating You know, a treaty with
an Indian tribe is like a treaty with France, a
treaty with Germany or whatever, and it has to go
through the same procedure. You have to get negotiate, it's
got to be examined. But the Senate desk to approve it.

(01:09:11):
Of course, are we really going to go through that
whole procedure with every band in the Far West? That
will work? And so I think in a very practical way,
very cynical way, they said, okay, we'll just we'll just
say that you have a governmental and a structure of

(01:09:34):
collective authority like ours. We got a president. You got
a president. We'll call him the head chief.

Speaker 1 (01:09:42):
And if you don't, if you don't find one, will
find one.

Speaker 2 (01:09:45):
Will and will appoint one. And that happened over and
over and over and over against and that's that is
what that's what's going on within this perse Joseph uh
used an argument exactly like you were just saying. He
uses horse. He says. It's like coming in and you're
saying saying to me, we just bought your horse. No

(01:10:07):
we didn't. You didn't give me way. We paid that
guy over there. Well it's not his horse.

Speaker 1 (01:10:13):
Well yeah, the way it goes, right, Yeah, So.

Speaker 2 (01:10:18):
At any point in eighteen seventy seven, then they forced
them to move into this small reservation, to give up
their homes, be crowded into this this small space, and
then we're going to do it. They did it, and
they came across the salmon. There's a rough this is
late spring. Salmon was up and running, you know. But

(01:10:39):
they got all the people across, they got what cattle
they could across there, and they were camped near the
reservation on the edge of the reservation. Literally the day
before they were required to come onto the reservation. At
that point, it finally snapped and a few young men
wore who had grudges against a merchant and a couple

(01:11:05):
of other whites would settle there in the in the valley,
took off killed him. And that then was that just
sort of like a you know, the match to tinder,
But it was.

Speaker 1 (01:11:17):
I don't want to say what's interesting about it, but
it's it's noteworthy that it was people that knew each other. Yep,
like you're saying, I went to those sites, you know,
but uh, it was, uh, they set out to get
It was sort of like riding to this strange land
and like invading strangers because they they settled grudges with

(01:11:42):
people they had interacted with, of course, and in one
case had some physical disputes with I think. But the
fact that that would trigger not a police action, right,
not like arrest warrants, Well, I guess they tried to
do something like that, didn't they They tried to like
arrest the people.

Speaker 2 (01:11:58):
And well, you know, like I say, when these young
guys came back and it was clear what they had done,
they were boasting about it, you know. Uh. At that point.
Then a lot more men took off and it was nasty.
It was a nasty bit of business. They killed a
lot of folks, that raped a lot of women. It
was an ugly, ugly thing.

Speaker 3 (01:12:16):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):
And at that point the leadership the the council, these
leaders who had argued for peace, said look, we're not
gonna win.

Speaker 7 (01:12:25):
We got to go in.

Speaker 2 (01:12:27):
At that point they said, well that's it. It will
have to be war. Name of one of my chapters.
It was a quote from one of these councils. They
will have to be war.

Speaker 1 (01:12:36):
This is it.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):
And then they went all after it. And as you said,
they just kicked their ear. And in several places.

Speaker 1 (01:12:45):
It seems so so when you're looking at the country,
it correct me if I'm messing this up. When you're
looking at the country, like you imagine settlement starting in
the east and sort of going like a wall to
the west coast to the Pacific. But it actually did

(01:13:06):
that to a sense. But it also skipped this chunk,
you know, skip the great planes to some measure. So
when the nets person get in this fight with the
US army, they had east. They're going east to escape
the army because they feel if they get out on

(01:13:26):
the Great Plains.

Speaker 2 (01:13:27):
They're home free.

Speaker 1 (01:13:28):
No one's gonna care about them anymore. Because they used
to go out there. They had for quite some time
gone out there to hunt buffalo, and so they were
sort of going what you'd imagine as going east. You'd
imagine them sort of going into the eye of the
storm of the US. But in their mind they would
move east to get away from the US.

Speaker 2 (01:13:48):
That's right. And they were long time allies with the
crows Absorba people, and they what they thought was, if
we can get to the crows, if we can get
out of here, they'll leave us alone. We'll get over
the crow with our friends, and the crows will take
us in and we'll let things settle down, and then
we'll go back home. One of the fascinating aspects of
his story is how the nest pers, on the one hand,

(01:14:11):
were so beautifully adapted to the white presence there. This
is in contradiction to what I said a moment ago.
Their their environment was just fine for them, and they
adapted to it beautifully. They were They were very prosperous,
successful ranchers. Uh they were, you know, when they took
off in this cattle cattle ranchers on this long retreat,

(01:14:34):
they cashed a lot of their their their valuables, including
silver tea sets. Yeah they were, yeah, they were. They
were wealthier than the whites in the area. You know,
they had lots of resources, had lots of money, and
they have become very savvy in dealing with the whites

(01:14:55):
in terms of economically economically, So the 's you've got
that on the one hand, and yet on the other hand,
in this larger perspective, they had this astonishingly naive view
of larger white society, what of what they were really
up against. Mmmm, there's this uh.

Speaker 1 (01:15:18):
You mean, it's just a naive view that you would
somehow get out of this a lot or.

Speaker 2 (01:15:22):
Even beyond that, you know, uh, what are we dealing
with here? One of the one of the counts, their transcripts,
of course, of all of these negotiations with Howard and
these others, and one of the uh Nesbur's banned leaders
nat Ju. At one point you first read it, you
think he's he's being facetious, he's being he's being uh,

(01:15:44):
you know, he's being sarcastic. But I don't think so.
He said, what is this? Who is who is this? Washington,
you keep talking about. You keep saying. Washington says that
you have this treaty, you got to do. Washington says,
you go to who is that? Is it a person?
Is it a house? He said, is it a house?
So they, you know, on the one hand, they're so

(01:16:06):
beautifully adapted to their aion environment. In the larger U,
they've never the first time they become aware of the
telegraph that existed was during the retreat over Lolo Pass.
Was it really? Yeah, they had. The first time they
ever saw or got onto a train was after the
surrendery when they were taken they were taken over to

(01:16:29):
the Fort Leavenworth.

Speaker 1 (01:16:31):
That was their first contact with the Yeah, experience, they
know what they were. And so when they split, they
had what about twelve hundred people about that and then
five six thousand horses a.

Speaker 2 (01:16:41):
Bunch of horses.

Speaker 1 (01:16:42):
Yeah, and they run this rolling gunfight and keep whipping,
repeatedly whipping Civil War generals in like battles. And then
one of the craziest things about sort of the one
of the craziest collisions that you have this this semi

(01:17:03):
nomadic tribe of hunter gatherers moving across the landscape and
the lateness is they get to Yellowstone National Park, which
is a park, try and get into a shootout at
Mammoth Hot Springs with tourists.

Speaker 2 (01:17:20):
It's just like it blows your mind. It's they're just
such a bizarre story. It's like it reminds me. You
don't reminds me of Uh did you ever see the
movie Blazing Saddles.

Speaker 9 (01:17:30):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:17:30):
Yeah, kidding the very.

Speaker 2 (01:17:35):
The very end of it, when there's a big fight
uh in the in the town and somebody pumps up
against this you know what turns out to be.

Speaker 1 (01:17:44):
Uh scenery, Yeah, and then falls over.

Speaker 2 (01:17:48):
Well no, no, and then they break through and it's
another movie going on next door, dom Delui know.

Speaker 1 (01:17:57):
Yeah, yeah, you know something about that fighting over Intohigh ninety.

Speaker 2 (01:18:05):
And that's what this feels like. You know. It's like
it's like these two stories that come together in this
strange ways. One of the things there, you know William Sherman,
who was head of the army in the West at
that time. Uh, and of course the man who arguably
was most influentially ending the Civil War, he ends up
in charge of Indian policy out in the West. He's general,

(01:18:28):
He's the general of the Army. He is the highest
ranking military officer in the United States at that time.
He's on a vacation in the Yellowstone Park. So William
Sherman was at the time at the time that the
nest person came in. So and somebody, you know, said,

(01:18:48):
oh my god, you've got these Indians coming in here
who had just been, you know, just been killing our
soldiers over there, and all of a sudden, they're going
in here. So they rushed to tell him, and he
gets out just a day ors before they come right
through there. So what if that hadn't happened. No, you know,
Billy Sherman, you Winnam Sherman sitting around a you know,

(01:19:10):
sipping whiskey and frowed trout. You know, some chief also
shows up.

Speaker 1 (01:19:14):
You know, soaking his feet some hot.

Speaker 2 (01:19:19):
So it's you know, it's just a it's such a
wonderful story on so many levels, the macro level, you
know what I'll tell you about what's going on in
the United States at that time, and then the even know,
the mini level, you know, the micro level where you
get these astonishing little stories and quirks. You know that
things come together like that.

Speaker 1 (01:19:38):
Have you read have you read. Sorry, I was just
going to say.

Speaker 8 (01:19:41):
I think one of the more striking things about it
is just how sprawling geographically.

Speaker 3 (01:19:46):
It is.

Speaker 8 (01:19:47):
Like I can't think of very many sort of episodic
stories that start where they do and and cross over
and then they're you know, through the breaks and headed
up to Canada.

Speaker 3 (01:19:59):
It's like there aren't very many.

Speaker 8 (01:20:01):
I mean, there's Lewis and Clark, sure, but that's like
years and years, you know, But like in terms of
miles covered, this story.

Speaker 2 (01:20:11):
Yeah, I think I try to figure out a way
to illustrate that and think of it this way. At
the end of the Civil War, there's this community in Virginia,
central Virginia, and they decide, I don't want to live
out of Union. Let's get out of here. So the
whole town gets together and they head west, leaving the

(01:20:37):
middle of Virginia. Right. Uh, like the s verse, this
this was these were just warriors, of course. These are
the entire men, women and children, old old folks, you know. Uh,
pick up and move, pick up and go.

Speaker 7 (01:20:52):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:20:52):
And the army says, no, you got to you gotta
stay here. So the army's chasing them, this this small
southern town, right and they're leaving. They're hidden west from
from central Virginia. If those if if that town had
had had gone as far as this these as person

(01:21:12):
did before they were caught up near the Canadian border,
they would have gone from the middle of Virginia to Denver.

Speaker 1 (01:21:21):
Are you serious? Because they did? They did thirteen hundred
miles or something, didn't they.

Speaker 2 (01:21:26):
Thirteen to fifteen hundred depending on how you measure it.

Speaker 1 (01:21:28):
Yeah, I think just engagement after engagement after engagement.

Speaker 3 (01:21:33):
Yeah, that parallel is almost too good to be true.

Speaker 2 (01:21:36):
It is true. Unlike many things that I've written, it
is in fact true.

Speaker 3 (01:21:40):
I think.

Speaker 8 (01:21:41):
I think one of the things that I remember from
your from this book is you make the point that
ex Confederates and Native people are the only Americans that
have had citizenship forced on them at gunpoint.

Speaker 3 (01:21:57):
Oh right, Like there's so many.

Speaker 8 (01:22:00):
I mean, one of the main points in the book
is just to understand the Indian Wars as part of
this bigger project of nation making. And you know, you
talk about greater reconstruction as eighteen forty five to eighteen
eighty or so. Could you talk a little bit about that,

(01:22:20):
like the the parallels that you see in the Indian
Wars in the Civil War, because there are a lot
of interrelated questions.

Speaker 2 (01:22:28):
And yeah, that was the larger theme of the last
Indian Wars. It's a great story about it. It's an
amazing story itself, the whole nes person stories. It is fascinating.
What I tried to argue in this book because in
a lot of books written on the war.

Speaker 1 (01:22:47):
In the person, what I try to one lesson there would.

Speaker 2 (01:22:50):
Have been it is a long walk. I got tired.

Speaker 7 (01:22:59):
I just drolled it, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:23:03):
But the larger point was that this is really a
very revealing part of what I call the greater reconstruction.
What I what I argue here is that something really
important happens in the middle of the nineteenth century. We
all agree on that in the middle of the nineteenth century,
the national narrative shifts fundamentally onto a new track that

(01:23:31):
will carry us into what we know as modern America. Right,
we go up before eighteen fifty and look at America
and look at in America in nineteen hundred. It's like
it's like a different world. We've become a fundamentally different nation, society, people, culture, whatever.
Why does that happen? What explains this traumatic shift. Well,

(01:23:55):
the usual suspect, of course, and it's absolutely true, of course,
is the Civil War itself. Civil war typically seen as
this event, you know, that moves the United States in
this dramatically, in this new direction. That's obviously, of course true.
What I argue here is that expansion, the acquisition of

(01:24:16):
one point two million square miles in three years eighteen
forty five to eighteen forty eight.

Speaker 1 (01:24:22):
Oh, you open your book by saying, this spasm of
expansion would be like if we right now, within a
couple of years, the US annexed Mexico, Central America, portions
of Brazil.

Speaker 2 (01:24:41):
From Columbia, about half of cour Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:24:42):
Right, you're like, okay, so let's talk about how much
how quickly the US grew. It has to be that
if between now and three years from now we bought
one basically everything south of US halfway down into South America,
halfway halfway through, now we're going to incorporate that.

Speaker 2 (01:25:03):
Good luck with that, right It's uh and I think
it's a pretty good I think it's a revealing parallel
because you know, justice, if you if you drive south
from mel Paso to the middle of globe, you're going
to see a lot of people. You're going to see
different culture, different languages, different traditions, different economies and so forth,
and somehow we're going to bring all of that together
into this this one thing the United States. Furthermore, uh,

(01:25:28):
within two hundred hours of the signing of the Treaty
of Wadeloupia Dolgo, which gave us, you know, the Mexico Session,
two hundred hours before that goal was discovered in northern California,
which turned out to be the by far, the greatest

(01:25:49):
gold strike, most productive goal strike in human history up
until that time.

Speaker 1 (01:25:53):
Is that coincidence?

Speaker 2 (01:25:56):
I think it is. You know, it's it's it's a
kind of fact that that is born to create conspiracy theories, right,
Oh really yeah, sure, But I don't see any evidence
whatsoever that there was anything anything like. It was just pure,
pure affected. The first chapter of the book I call
the Great Coincidence. This is the greatest and most influential

(01:26:19):
coincidence in American history by far, hands down.

Speaker 1 (01:26:23):
And they restate that to so people get this.

Speaker 2 (01:26:27):
I call the first chapter book the Great Coincidence, because
I would I think it's incontestable that this coincidence of
nine days within nine days, the United States acquiring California,
acquiring the Pacific.

Speaker 6 (01:26:41):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:26:41):
This is part of the end of this three year expansion.
Of course, within nine days we begin to this area
begins to be revealed as the richest place on earth.
It starts at the Gold Rush, but then from then
all of course we discovered time after time after time
after time. You know, it's like, you know, gods have

(01:27:02):
said you need something, It's there. Yeah, it's there. The
West is the great treasure house of the Western hemisphere.

Speaker 5 (01:27:13):
So think of it.

Speaker 2 (01:27:15):
Then think of the consequences it would follow expansion up
until let's say eighteen eighty, And you can't tell me
that those were not as important, is not as consequential
as the changes it came because of the Civil War.
So what I'm arguing is that we need to think
of this great, this shift of the American narrative as

(01:27:38):
a result of two things. The Civil War absolutely expansion,
and what follows from expansion is number two. And those
two things are their own stories, but they're also interacting.
They're also interacting, and that's the point I think that
I try to make. And the Last Newian War, what

(01:28:01):
you can see in this story is this effort by
the government Washington, where there's a person or a house
or whatever, Washington trying to bring into into coherence, bring
into a singularity this extraordinary continental nation.

Speaker 1 (01:28:20):
There.

Speaker 2 (01:28:21):
They do it beforece if they have to. They do
it by expanding the role of the federal government. Uh
and they uh and they do it as well by
imposing a kind of order on it. Not just physical order,
but an order of who is an American? Right, what
do we mean by Americans? Well, in the East, it's emancipation.

(01:28:48):
We free one million, four million persons from bondage, and
we say you're going to be citizens now. Out west,
it's Indians, right, it's Hispanics, it's it's others out there.
We're telling them who they are. Yeah, right now in
the East, Uh, the freed people wanted citizenship. Out west

(01:29:12):
not so much. Right. But the government says, Okay, now
we're going to uh same thing you did with the
reconstruction of the South. We're going to give you land.
That is, they're going to make you farmers, right, We're
going to make you freeholders, independent family freeholders. We're going
to uh teach your children, We're gonna we're gonna bring

(01:29:37):
your children in our schools, and we're going to teach
them the basics. Uh, starting with the English language. Everybody's
gonna speak English, teaching the basics, including cultural basics. What
an American is, right, and this is an important part
of it. Uh, Christianity. We're going to make you Christians.

(01:29:57):
America will be this Christian nation, right, Oliver Howard, you
know this uh, devoted evangelical Christian. He was doing that
in the south of the Freeman's Bureau, and when he
went out west, he did it with Indias. Well you
say that to the you know, to former slaves, and
they say, great, we wanty citizens, We want land. We've

(01:30:18):
been working your land for a long time. Give us
a farm, give us forty acres and a mule.

Speaker 6 (01:30:23):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:30:23):
We want you to educate our children. We want to
send our children at Hampton, you know, and to others.

Speaker 1 (01:30:29):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:30:30):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:30:30):
And we are we are Christians, of course, you know
there's you know, Christianity was a fundamental part of slave culture.
So they said, terrific. You go to the miss person,
we want to make you farmers. I don't think so.
Or you go to uh, you know, La Cotas and comanches. Uh,
we get a farm in West Texas could no, we

(01:30:54):
want to educate your children. We're already educating our children, right.
We want you to be Christians? No, I don't think so. Yeah,
we've got our own religions right. And the government says,
you don't understand. This is not an offer, this is
an order. You will become farmers, and we will take

(01:31:18):
your children and teach them and you will become Christians.
That's then the basis of what happens at West when
the war, when when the military does step in, it's
it's because the consequences of that, and that's what's going
on with the with the Ness Purse. It's that final
moment when Oliver Howard steps up and says, Okay, we've

(01:31:42):
been overlooking all of us for a long time, you know,
no longer. We got to do it. And that's what
that's the trigger.

Speaker 5 (01:31:51):
It sets it off with the NETS person was there,
like we talked about Washington and General Sherman was there,
like finally a and of urgency to like this, this
is it, We're done with this, like we need to
establish control after decades of fighting these wars, it seems
like it was like well established some stability here and

(01:32:14):
then here and then like was it do you call
it the last war? Because they finally decided like this
is it, We're done Washington.

Speaker 2 (01:32:23):
Yeah, yeah, yes, exactly. And that's to me, that is
a really interesting question. Why these people were no trouble
to them, They were living in an area that very
few whites wanted. Why why would you force it in?

Speaker 1 (01:32:40):
Why?

Speaker 2 (01:32:41):
The reason, I think an important reason was the little
big worn.

Speaker 1 (01:32:47):
You know, Brody lost some relatives that a little big one.

Speaker 5 (01:32:50):
Is that right, there's a yeah, there's a couple like distant, distant, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:32:55):
Brody's brother, my older.

Speaker 2 (01:33:01):
Yeah, uh yeah. I think that that of course, was
this this terrific humiliation for the government. You know, uh,
the boy general, you know, this the darling of the
uh uh not only gets killed, but it's it's this defeat,

(01:33:23):
this this moment that uh. I think that was the
that was the key to the government saying Okay, that's it.
Everybody everywhere, it's gotta get under our knee. You know,
you've got to You've got to play by the rules. Now,
these are the new rules. That's the only only way
I can I can think of because you look at

(01:33:44):
the at the record, you know, the government suddenly just pivots.
Before that, before this, they were saying, oh, well, you know,
what's the problem. It'll it'll happen eventually. We'll just sort
of kick the can down the.

Speaker 9 (01:33:56):
Road and uh.

Speaker 2 (01:33:58):
But all of a sudden, they all of a sudden
they send word to Howard, Nope, you gotta do it.

Speaker 1 (01:34:05):
You know.

Speaker 9 (01:34:06):
That was.

Speaker 1 (01:34:07):
I was sorry about all the mental energy I've spent
on my life on the players who convened that fateful
you know, June twenty fifth. And I think that a
lot of historians have are argue now it's it's inescapable.
It's like it's almost the definition of a pirate victory,

(01:34:27):
to the point where after the great victory at Little Bighorn,
rather than being emboldened and taking the fight to the
next army, they disband like some people say, the probably

(01:34:47):
the greatest gathering of planes tribes it was to ever occur,
the numerically the greatest gathering to ever occur. The next
day they disbanded, and they're like, man, it's hell to
pay now. They disbanded and tried to melt into the landscape.
Rather than being like, let's take Washington. You know, it

(01:35:09):
was just oh, this is not gonna go over well,
it's not good.

Speaker 2 (01:35:14):
It's not going to go well. I agree with that absolutely,
and I think that again comes back to the larger
point that I was making, that odds against them were
so overwhelming. If you fight, you're gonna lose. It's gonna happen.
We caught him at this point just by luck by

(01:35:35):
This guy's a regrettable decision by and like you say, this,
this huge gathering, maybe the Fort Laramie conference, a conference
at eighteen fifty might have been, might have been larger
than that. But but that was of course peaceful. As
far as in the wartime, there's nothing nothing to match this. Okay,

(01:35:59):
that's today, right, what now? Well, you know they're going
to come after you.

Speaker 1 (01:36:06):
I want to I want to hate you. With a
couple of details that came out of these is one
of my favorite things of the perspective of the Native
American fighters at Little Big Horn. A man named I
can't remember feels gall one of them said in trying
to explain the actions of the army, he said, we

(01:36:28):
just thought they were all drunk. And the.

Speaker 2 (01:36:34):
Two men.

Speaker 1 (01:36:36):
Were asked how long it took? How long that battle
took that that day, and one of them said, gall
unk Papa Sue had said it lasted as long as
it takes a hungry man to eat his dinner.

Speaker 2 (01:36:50):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:36:51):
Another said, I'm paraphrasing. He said, you know when you're
laying in your teepee and you're looking out the chimney
hole and the sun hits one of the poles at
the top, It took about as long as it takes
the sun to move past that pole. That was all

(01:37:12):
on that fight was And both uh and the later
people both said, oh yeah, they're both saying it was
about twenty minutes. Yeah, and probably longer than that, but
not just they're talking about the hill. The hill hill
were costers like there were his little gang water. Was
that that that that portion yellow Wolf the Nez Perse

(01:37:45):
He later met that guy. I can't remember who the
hell he was. Yellow Wolf met some guy that then
sat like yellow Wolf was one of the participants in
the Nez Person War. He actually scaped. He's one of
the very few that escaped into Canada. When they caught
Chief Joseph near the border. He gave his famous from
where the sun now stands, I will fight no more
forever this dude named yellow Wolf had actually slipped out

(01:38:06):
of there, made it to Canada, later came back down
into the US.

Speaker 2 (01:38:10):
Yeah, there were a few hundred who made it.

Speaker 1 (01:38:12):
And he later met some guy that not only took
down his life history, but they went and visited a
bunch of places, and yellow Wolf takes this guy. He
might have been German, I can't remember. Anyways, he takes
this guy to the Little Big Horn battle site, not
the Little Big Horn, the Big Horn, Big Hole, Big Hole,
in the sight of the Big Hole battle and tells

(01:38:34):
him and even shows him where it happened that a guy,
a US soldier got shot through the forehead and was
dead standing on his feet, and they challenged him on it,
and he's like, no, he was at the end of
the battle. He was standing dead, locked knees, standing dead.

(01:38:58):
And I can never tell if that's true.

Speaker 2 (01:39:02):
It's it's funny. When I was writing the book, I
have several stories like that in there in that book,
and I wrestled with that. In the end, I just
told it straight on, like what yellow Wolf, yellow Wolf
and others there were. There were others like that at
the Big Hole another one earlier on. Well, they were

(01:39:23):
maneuvering within their home country. There in Idaho. Uh, they
came upon a small patrol army patrol. Uh killed them all,
but they said there was one guy in there who
they kept shooting, kept shooting, shooting, shooting, but he wouldn't
die cleaning the head. Instead, what he did was, uh

(01:39:46):
sit on the ground and clucked like a chicken.

Speaker 1 (01:39:48):
I remember that. Yeah, Yeah, I don't know, is that true.

Speaker 2 (01:39:54):
I don't know whom I say. I wasn't there, right, Yeah,
it's certainly part of their tradition.

Speaker 1 (01:39:59):
Yellow Wolf was such an interesting dude.

Speaker 7 (01:40:01):
He had.

Speaker 1 (01:40:03):
He explains that he had kind of a personal obligation.
If he encountered a grizzly, he had a personal obligation
to mix it up with that bear and kill that bear.

Speaker 2 (01:40:16):
He was a fascinating guy.

Speaker 1 (01:40:17):
Yeah, and again he'd be like, oh, brother, here we go.
He found one he had he had to.

Speaker 2 (01:40:24):
Go not again. Yeah, he's a fascinating guy. I begin
and in the book with yellow Wolf, h end with
his deaths. Yeah, when he tells his family, I'm dying
tomorrow morning when the sun rises on the horizon, and
he did, and the last thing he said is, my

(01:40:46):
friends have come for me. Oh you see them right?

Speaker 1 (01:40:49):
Oh he did. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:40:50):
Yeah, but the failure you're talking about. The name Laculis Quarter, Yeah,
not a journalist Scotland and he was a He was
a rancher out there and one day this Indian came
up and his horse had been injured or pumping into
a fence. I guess a barberar fence cut it badly,

(01:41:12):
and so he asked mc quarter, will you take care
of my horse? But you know, an Indian terms of
course he will. You know, this is what you do
if somebody it's not your enemy, says you got an
injured horse, will you watch after him? And he said, uh,

(01:41:33):
he said sure, And he came back the next year
to claim his horse, and it's just fine. And they
struck up a friendship and those two men spent the
rest of their lives reconstructing that story. Oh yellow Wolf
telling this to back quarter. Mcquarter's papers are at Washington

(01:41:53):
State Archives, and I spent a long time in that
archive going through these papers and it's uh there they're
just a a treasure because it's the only case I
know of where you have such a concentrated body of
native testimony because illowilf of taking these others. Tell him

(01:42:19):
your story, tell him your story. So you got all
of these voices.

Speaker 1 (01:42:22):
And I think, if I remember right, it's people feel
like that that there was enough of a friendship in
the mcwarder, who I couldn't remember his name, mcward was reliable.

Speaker 2 (01:42:34):
Yes, yes, absolutely, it became his lifelong passion that he.

Speaker 1 (01:42:39):
Wasn't distorting, I don't think trying to capture well, obviously
obviously it was very sympathetic.

Speaker 2 (01:42:48):
I suppose you take that. But most of what he
has in there is not his words at all. It's
the words of the nest perse of his uh uh,
the people who's interviewing. In fact, one of the things
I ran across, uh stuff is really the collector is
really kind of a mess.

Speaker 9 (01:43:05):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:43:05):
They worked a long time trying to organize it. He
just sort of threw stuff in boxes. But I did
run across this small slip of paper that had a
thought about something about the war, you know, something just
sort of came to him and he wrote this thought
on this little slip of paper, and that was the

(01:43:25):
last thing he ever did in his life. He was
in the hospital dying and this came to him, and
he wrote this on this slip of paper and then died.

Speaker 1 (01:43:34):
What was what did he write?

Speaker 2 (01:43:36):
I don't remember dying thought sorry, but as I remember,
it wasn't truly consequent. It was just something popping too
his head. It wasn't any great breakthrough or anything.

Speaker 1 (01:43:52):
You uh, you spent a lot of your career and
a lot of your writing about mining, mining town's influence
of mining. And I'm really paraphrasing, but in your book,
you know, it kind of more or less says, you know,
in terms of Native people's if when they find gold it's.

Speaker 2 (01:44:09):
Old that's right, or silver that's right. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:44:14):
Yeah, lay that out a little bit like just like
we're like that, that thirst for gold. Yeah yeah, why
is that? You know, you hear about gold in the
Black Hills, California gold Rush, you Alaska gold Rush. Just
really transformative, really transformative events. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:44:30):
Uh well, a couple of uh, you know, a couple
of reasons are I think are sourve event when you
think about it. First of all, there's no greater motivation
motivator in American history than in a gold discovery. Nothing
like that can can put people to the action. So

(01:44:53):
quickly on such a scale. So for the one thing,
what you get is thousands of people, you know, racing
to this this particular place over a very very short
span of time. Uh. Now, I mentioned before, you know,
talk about what really defeated the Indians was the transform

(01:45:15):
environmental transformation of their homelands. Nothing did that more dramatically
faster on a greater scale than a gold or a
silver strike. Thousands of people come into an area that
has had a fairly small these one hundred gathering people,
so we're real to be small, uh population up until

(01:45:35):
that time that are always on the move. You know,
they're semi nomadic, and they're on the move because they're
they've choreographed their their life to be at the right
place at the right time. You know, we've got to gather,
got to fish the salmon at this particular month. You know,
we've got to gather the camas bulbs at this particular
this particular point we've got this is when the elkmar grat.
We got to be there, and all of a sudden,

(01:45:59):
that world is transformed. Right while the game is hunted out,
the streams are polluted, the trees are cut, all the
migration patterns are are totally disrupted. It's devastate, its convulsive.

Speaker 1 (01:46:15):
Yeah, I want to interrupt you make to clarify another
point you had said about even these huge areas, the
specificity of some things that you would need. Meaning here
you you're you're nomadic people with horses, and you live
in the northern climates. What do you need in the
winter right, access to timber, access to water grazing lands,

(01:46:42):
which is going to be like big riparian bottoms. And
you said, if there's a spot like that, everybody knows
about it.

Speaker 2 (01:46:48):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (01:46:49):
It's a real vulnerability, you know. And that's the places
that other people want.

Speaker 2 (01:46:54):
If you look at the history of Indian wars, when
when those conflicts did occur, when the well, those campaigns
did happen, and those battles did happen, Look at how
many of them.

Speaker 1 (01:47:06):
Take place in the winter, right, because I know where
they'll be.

Speaker 2 (01:47:12):
And of course turn that around, when when is the
worst possible time to go up against the Indians. June
twenty fifth, eighteen seventy six, they attack attract They attacked
the Indians.

Speaker 1 (01:47:30):
All these winter massacres that they would the army would conduct.
But then in the summertime. It's this different games.

Speaker 2 (01:47:36):
Summertime, they choose, you know, let's let's attack them within
two days of the summer solstice. Brilliant. It doesn't work.
So yeah, that's right. It's the environmental angle of that,
you know that you have to you have to take
into account. But the other thing about mining rushes is

(01:47:58):
most by far. Of course, strikes occur in mountains and
in very isolated areas, but it's a long way from
any white settlement. What that does, you know, once you
let's strike occurs, and if it, if it proves to

(01:48:18):
be worth it, what you do is immediately get this
great movement into those places, which in turn is key
to opening up the interior west UH to transportation, to
access of others. So it creates these it's in other words,
it's not a you mentioned before. The frontier is like

(01:48:40):
a moving wall, right, that's the agricultural frontier. It's not
the way, not the way the mining frontier works. It's
it's the image I have is artillery shells you and

(01:49:01):
then they I think it's a good image because the
sort of the concussive is the concussive rings move outward
from that you know, that's what kills them. That's what
kills them. And what what it starts with with this
is this, you know, ancient fascination with gold. It's goes

(01:49:24):
back a long way. You know the Egyptians, you know,
Egyptians called the breath of God gold. You know, there's
something about gold that that that moves people into action,
in the movement into nothing else, nothing else can. And
it turns out that we have more of it than anybody.

Speaker 5 (01:49:43):
Else towards gold.

Speaker 6 (01:49:46):
You know that.

Speaker 2 (01:49:47):
What you hear, of course is they didn't care much
about it. That's not true.

Speaker 7 (01:49:50):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:49:51):
In fact, there's a one very good a book that's
being worked all the time. I've been madly uh in California.
He wrote a book, American Genocide. You know that book.
I haven't read it, but yeah, about California. And Ben
is writing now on Indians and the gold rush. Once
the strikes occur, they jump into it with both feet.

(01:50:14):
Before that, I don't know, you know, I think they're
just sort of sort of curiosity. They knew it was there,
but they didn't, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:50:21):
And and Ian Frasier's Great Planes, he tells the story,
maybe it's an apocryphal story.

Speaker 2 (01:50:27):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:50:27):
He tells a story about I think it was the
Blackfeet finding bags of gold on a keel boat or
some boat that they catch, they capture it, and they
like the bags and leave the gold dust laying on
the gravel.

Speaker 2 (01:50:45):
Bara, I've read heard that story. Well, I've read the
book that I don't remember that story anything.

Speaker 1 (01:50:50):
I'd love to know if that's true. Man, he's pretty
careful generally, you know. But that's what he said. But
I got I got a practical gold rush question. I mean,
I kind of know the answer, but be interested to
see if you could explore it for a minute. Is
if you tell me right now that oh so and
so just found a ton of gold in Nebraska, Okay,

(01:51:12):
I would think, oh, well, that's a guy's land. Good
for him. I wouldn't think I'm gonna run over and
get a bunch of it. What are the factors that
it would be that that you could hear about.

Speaker 2 (01:51:25):
This in wherever the hell you're at, Philadelphia, wherever.

Speaker 1 (01:51:30):
And and have some plausible idea, like some rational idea
that you would go there and then that you would
get to pick some of it up.

Speaker 2 (01:51:42):
Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (01:51:42):
Like, how is this in terms of just the land
ownership and the claiming it, and that the government, you know,
whether or not they occupy it, the US has a
sort of claim on it. How is it that you're
gonna go and get some for yourself advertising? How do
you get like where does that idea enter your head?
I would never think if someone said, oh, so and

(01:52:05):
so found a bunch of whatever, I would never be
I'm going to go and take some.

Speaker 2 (01:52:08):
Well, I'll think, first of all, again with a spansion,
the idea is, it's not Nebraska, it's not a farm.
It's this place that we just got, I mean, half
an hour ago, right, brand new, right, and it's could
not be farther away from me than and still still
be the jay in the United States. So I can

(01:52:30):
imagine anything whatever I want to happen, that's gonna happen. Right.

Speaker 7 (01:52:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:52:38):
It's just like such a strange understanding of how you'd
even get a sense of the spatial characteristics of where
the stuff is. But to like bet your.

Speaker 2 (01:52:48):
Life on it, A lot of them did, and some
of them lost the.

Speaker 5 (01:52:53):
Was there any government guidance like if you're going this
is how you.

Speaker 2 (01:52:58):
Want to do it? Or was it us word of mouth,
and well you you got to remember it now, Uh,
the gold rush of eighteen forty eight forty nine. There
have been over a migration before that at the Oregon
and to California after the Oregon country out to the
you know, central Valley, Sutter and so they knew the way, uh,

(01:53:22):
and the way it was was well marked. By this
time they were starting to have the stores along along
the overland route. So how to get there was not
it was not really much of a mystery. The mystery
was once you get there, how do you deal with that?
How do you how do you mind? Yeah, it's ever
ever occurred to you? I think is part of the question. Oh, yes,

(01:53:45):
you're asking. You know, you're a you know, you're a
you're a clerk in in Cleveland, Ohio, and you're gonna
go to California. You're gonna mind gold? Really?

Speaker 1 (01:53:55):
Yeah, you're gonna be You're gonna be a placid miner.

Speaker 3 (01:53:57):
Or yeah, you're a tender.

Speaker 2 (01:54:01):
Reminds me of a Jethro Bodine in the Beverly hillbillage,
I mean an atomic brain surgeon. He said, you know.

Speaker 7 (01:54:11):
What you know?

Speaker 2 (01:54:13):
Well, the people who taught them, of course, were the
Mexicans in the South Americans. There have been gold gold
mining in Peru and in Chile, in Mexico. So one
of the things that I right about in the book,
I think that most people don't think about are the
forty eight Know, the discovery was made in late January

(01:54:37):
eighteen forty eight. That discovery was not confirmed in the
East until the following December.

Speaker 1 (01:54:45):
Got it forty eight.

Speaker 2 (01:54:47):
So consequently the Great Russias in forty nine. But by
that time, of course, there were people mining gold out
there from Mexico, from Chile, from Peru. Yeah, sure, from Australia.
There were Australians there. There were Tasmanians before the fort

(01:55:08):
and so these guys forty nine ers come out there
and they say, one of the people, you know minding
our gold, right, you're good. But they learned from him
and from all the all the evidence of the South
Americans who were there were very generous showing him how
to do it, you know. So they learned from the

(01:55:28):
forty eight ers, and then they kicked him out. Of
course they're expelled.

Speaker 1 (01:55:32):
You know, we had you and I both have some
lines and safd for interviews and ken Burns's uh, his
his forthcoming The American Buffalo documentary, and uh, following that
we had, I had occasion to interview him on this
podcast along with his colleague Dayton Duncan, who your personal

(01:55:55):
friends with. Yeah, And in talking to Dayton Duncan, it
occurred to me that even though I thought I had,
I had not watched The dust Bowl. I thought I did,
but I was like, you know what, I actually didn't.
So I just recently went and watched The dust Bowl.
And speaking of human migrations the as much as we

(01:56:18):
you know, earlier I kind of talked about there's these
things in American history that absorble out of mental energy,
and sometimes our fascination with them makes them seem overplayed
in terms of actual impact. Perhaps far more people fled
the dust Bowl, okay, which they in that documentary that

(01:56:41):
described as the greatest human cause environmental tragedy in US history.
Far more people fled the dust Bowl and went to
California than ever went over the Oregon Trail. But we
just don't when looking at how the country took shape, right,

(01:57:03):
you don't go and look at that. No, No, like
for that episode of people leaving Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico,
southern Colorado.

Speaker 2 (01:57:14):
That's true.

Speaker 1 (01:57:15):
Who got all got billed as Oaki's right, all got
lomped into?

Speaker 2 (01:57:22):
Yeah, that's a real canard.

Speaker 1 (01:57:24):
And and it was it dwarfed the Oregon Trail traffic.

Speaker 2 (01:57:30):
I hadn't heard that. I did watch that. I don't
I don't remember that quote, that statistic, but it makes sense.

Speaker 7 (01:57:35):
Of course.

Speaker 2 (01:57:35):
The population is a lot of parts about. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it was. They're all you know, American history has all
kinds of stories like that that we don't. We don't
pay enough attention to the great migration out to California
in World War two.

Speaker 1 (01:57:51):
Oh, I've paid zero attention to that.

Speaker 2 (01:57:54):
Yeah, including among blacks. You know, when you say the
great migration among afric In Americans, you're.

Speaker 1 (01:58:01):
You're usually crucially to the industrial north.

Speaker 2 (01:58:04):
That's right leaving you know, as as cotton cultivation was
was mechanized, this flight up to the Chicago into the
area there. But then there was a second one that
was in the twenties World War two, you know, with
the uh boom of a defense industries and so forth
on the on the Pacific coast. You know, jobs are

(01:58:24):
waiting and a lot of poor black folks in the
South you know, and they came out there. So the
you know, the origins of the black presence presence on
the Pacific coast. You know, it goes back to World
War Two. Well, we don't, we don't think about.

Speaker 1 (01:58:36):
It because I brought that up. Let's close on if
you don't mind, give me some of your thoughts on uh,
give me some of your thoughts on on bison and
the broader story of of you know, the near extermination
of the bison just like whatever. You know, I know
it's a huge question. But but areas of that saga,

(01:59:00):
meaning the destruction, the recovery, what areas within that long
story have caught your attention or you know, yeah, where
have you spent your time in thinking about that animal?

Speaker 2 (01:59:11):
Well, I think I've written a fair amount on that.
What really interested me was, once again, the larger context
of it and the complexity complexity of it. I think
we are mesmerized by this image of the buffalo hunters,
of the white you know, high hunters, the buffalo runners.

(01:59:33):
Of What we tend to forget was that the bison
population was to had probably declined something like half from
the eighteen twenties until eighteen seventy two. Or so when
that starts and the decline comes partly from an environmental change,
as I said before, the overland trails which destroyed these
habitats that the bison had to have in the winter,

(01:59:55):
just as just as the Indians did. Part of it
from Indian people's who eagerly jump into this this global
market economy selling robes and tongues.

Speaker 1 (02:00:07):
Me and Randall had an hour long fight about this day.

Speaker 2 (02:00:09):
Oh yeah, who won. But but the lesson there is
once again, how the globe is shrinking. These Indian people
suddenly find, you know, great a lot of money and

(02:00:30):
things and stuff because they were able to use this
skill that they along had in a new way to
sell these robes to people in uh in the East,
in London, you know, in Paris there there we're seeing
there really is this the shrinkage of the globe. The

(02:00:52):
shrinkage of the globe and the expansion of modern capitalist
market economy. You know, that is what that is what
kills a buffalo, It starts to kill them. With the Indians, with.

Speaker 5 (02:01:05):
The white hide hunters, was there like a comparable rush
like you like with the mining towns, like a burst
of people had a west to.

Speaker 2 (02:01:15):
Go do this, sure, Uh, not on the numbers or
the same scale. Yeah, sure, exactly. You know, I think
Steve was saying before we talk about this, Uh, these
were not were not you know, uh fly bonn uh
fly blown Uh monsters. These are just young men on

(02:01:38):
the move trying to make a buck, right, and this
is a great way to do it.

Speaker 1 (02:01:43):
So sure, sure, yeah. Just like we had talked about
with the impacts of the Civil War, like a good
many of the people that got involved in that trade
were I don't want to call them, maybe not literal
refugees of the Civil War, but definitely people spun off,

(02:02:04):
people spun off by the Civil War.

Speaker 2 (02:02:06):
Yeah. I mean this country, this country was chaos at
the end of that war. And if you're a young man,
you know, living in the South especially or or the
north and subwly, this opportunity showed itself. Sure he did it,
and they went on to become one of my early
m A students wrote a book called thesis called Reconsidered.

(02:02:31):
And what he did, Dave Dawson, what he did was
follow these guys' lives to the extens that you can.
These buffalo hunters, Oh really, what did they become? Bank presidents,
the Kansas Historical Society, uh, sheriffs, candy salesman.

Speaker 6 (02:02:51):
Just.

Speaker 1 (02:02:53):
Winding up on the end of a rope.

Speaker 2 (02:02:55):
Yeah, yeah, no, no, that these are perfectly perfectly responsible.
It which makes.

Speaker 1 (02:03:05):
Candy businessman. No, it's it's well enough.

Speaker 2 (02:03:12):
Yeah, but it makes it makes perfect sense. What do
you think about it? You know they were just they're
just jumping into something, makes some money and they turn
around and use the money to do something.

Speaker 3 (02:03:20):
Else and chasing opportunity.

Speaker 7 (02:03:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:03:23):
One of the man who claims to have killed more
bias than anybody else went on to become a cheap
of police in Oklahoma City.

Speaker 7 (02:03:32):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (02:03:32):
And then to an early filmmaker.

Speaker 1 (02:03:35):
That Jay Wright Moore who was who knows.

Speaker 2 (02:03:37):
There's another fellow and he and he also raised race
horses and his favorite name Chance won the Kentucky Derby
eighteen ninety two.

Speaker 5 (02:03:48):
Seriously, that's sorry, project, it is I feel like you're disappointed.

Speaker 1 (02:03:56):
With this, Steve, like you just like.

Speaker 6 (02:04:02):
It was.

Speaker 1 (02:04:02):
It was just and I brought it up and I
do not mean this as well. I think I I
don't want to put any shade on the Dayton and
ken Burns, the guys that worked on the Vice documentary.
But when I was given my chance to comment on it,
I had a couple factual minor, very minor minor factual thoughts,

(02:04:28):
and I hadn't a thing I presented to him as
I thought that totally respectfully, I expressed that I thought
that they were really that they dehumanized the hide hunters,
and that person who was not watching carefully might get

(02:04:50):
the sense that they were motivated out, that they were sadists.

Speaker 5 (02:04:54):
Yeah, that they were doing it purely for the joy
of killing.

Speaker 1 (02:04:58):
Yeah, they were like I know, I'm going to dedicate
my life to is making sure there's no buffalo in
the future. When it was a job again and again
you see that that you know, like the the you know,
you know how you know, like that saying freshet eyes
always heard that was quite There was another say there's

(02:05:22):
another saying. There's another saying that goes, uh, I hate
the game, not the player.

Speaker 4 (02:05:30):
That's right, they happen to be I came.

Speaker 1 (02:05:32):
I came up that too, and and I feel that
there's in in looking at what we just spent a
lot of time on the hide, the deer hide, the
deer skin, you know, the earlier version of the hide
hunners was the white tailed deer runners of a century earlier.
That you can look and say, like, man, what those

(02:05:55):
guys did was rapacious and wanting. Yeah, But on an end,
when you get down to the individual level, you know,
a lot of them have demonstrated a yeah I knew,
I knew, I knew, but if I didn't But to
say that, there's this one guy, maybe it was more

(02:06:16):
one of these guys that said I woke up in
the morning now and then and thought, am I really
going to go do this again today? And he says,
but I would hear the shooting, right, and if I
didn't do it, it was getting done.

Speaker 7 (02:06:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:06:27):
And it's easy to point a finger at them as
a group because they were the last one standing when
the bus buffalo disappeared, right, Yeah, So it's like those
guys they put a real puctuation mark.

Speaker 1 (02:06:39):
But I do think that that that, yeah, hating the
game and not the player, because I think a lot
of these people were just they were just poor, desperate
people who had no thing. They had no thing, And
if you look at.

Speaker 8 (02:06:55):
If you look at miners, yes, you know, miners don't
get the same judgment, right, And they're also yeah, you know,
it's more indirect, it's not quite as dramatic. I think
that's part of it is that like the near extermination of.

Speaker 3 (02:07:10):
The bison is just such a.

Speaker 8 (02:07:13):
It's such it's such right material for like a moral story,
whereas like we don't say, you know, these coal miners
were just doing it because they loved air pollution.

Speaker 1 (02:07:25):
You know, Yeah, this is this is a great and
there's evil people that hated clean air.

Speaker 3 (02:07:35):
They could have done they could why didn't they stop?

Speaker 2 (02:07:43):
That's that's absolutely all. That's absolutely true. Your quote that
you often here and there was used in the documentary
of Frank Meyer.

Speaker 1 (02:07:52):
Meyer.

Speaker 2 (02:07:52):
Yeah, I said, I can figure that.

Speaker 7 (02:07:54):
I figured.

Speaker 2 (02:07:57):
A bullllet you know, one shell. It costs me twenty
five cents. But there's one shell I could I could
kill this animal and I can get back, you know,
three to five dollars, he said. So I figured it out.
I don't figured it out and says I figured that
I could make more money in a year than the
president of the United States. That's what did it. It

(02:08:18):
was the market that did it, both for the Indians
and then then for these guys. That's what killed the bison.

Speaker 1 (02:08:24):
So what are you are you writing right now. This
is a huge But dude, this is not big, This
is not generous font I will say this is probably well,
I mean, what a massive amount of work.

Speaker 3 (02:08:40):
This is probably.

Speaker 2 (02:08:42):
Oh gosh, I don't I'll write quite slowly. I mean,
this took me. That took me twenty twenty five years
to research and.

Speaker 1 (02:08:49):
Ow and I feel better. Well, you've done a lot
of books.

Speaker 2 (02:08:53):
I've done a lot of books.

Speaker 8 (02:08:54):
Yeah, this is probably the only podcast in the world
that has an inside source at the ms u R Hives.

Speaker 7 (02:09:01):
And so I have word.

Speaker 8 (02:09:03):
I have a word on good authority that you're still
I was there, still digging, you're stiffing.

Speaker 1 (02:09:08):
Around the archives.

Speaker 7 (02:09:09):
I was there. I was there the other day.

Speaker 1 (02:09:12):
What are you working on now?

Speaker 2 (02:09:14):
You know, I'm not sure I'm gonna I know, I
don't have another book me, at least not right now.
But I like I like to write short articlests. Right now,
I'm fascinating with Arctic exploration.

Speaker 1 (02:09:29):
I mean, I was hoping it's gonna be more ic.

Speaker 7 (02:09:33):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (02:09:33):
This is just a I've just started reading up on
it a lot. And uh, there was a fellow you
probably know that was Dome. You know that name he
was at Fort Ellis UH. He was early with the
first expedition of Yellowstone, and he was in the Person
War and Yellowstone, but he also signed on to UH

(02:09:56):
as a as a part of a scheme to develop
a colony up in the Arctic, up into the far
northern UH near northern Greenland. And so this is his
handwritten account of this expedition.

Speaker 4 (02:10:11):
Man, that sounds like a.

Speaker 8 (02:10:14):
Well, it's all it always seems like it's a coincidence
that these guys are doing. You know, they have a
foot in each one of these. But as you're pointing out,
it's all part of the same project.

Speaker 2 (02:10:24):
It's all part of the same thing. Yeah. Anyway, I was,
I was looking at the looking at that very funny,
really interesting detailed description of that voyage. But the real
gem of it is is introduction when he says this
is a total disaster of failure, complete failure. It says, uh,

(02:10:46):
we did not convert or kill any Indians in any
any natives. Uh we We did not challenge the authenticity
of any findings of anybody else. It's this literable sort
of tongue in cheek jam the other guys who are
going up. It's very funny.

Speaker 1 (02:11:05):
Well, stay tuned for that. And in the meantime, Continental
Reckon if you want to be the guy in your
social circle who knows the most about the American West,
Continental Reckoning, the American West and the age of expansion,
lifetime work, yep, yeah, yeah, it's it's it's fast moving.

Speaker 2 (02:11:30):
Well, thank you. Yeah, I try to cover a lot
of ground. Yeah, well, you know, it was a journalism undergraduate.
I came out of a journalist newspaper family, and I
was drilled into My father was a very good editor,
and he was you try to teach us as well
as he could my brother's and me. You know, right, right,

(02:11:51):
like a talk, right, it's a if you can't, if
people can't, if you're not drawn to it, if I'm
willing to read it, then what's the point. Yeah, So
I try. I try to do that.

Speaker 1 (02:12:03):
I'd like to see you sit down and do the
audiobook on that thing.

Speaker 2 (02:12:11):
It's a been contractor for that, and I thought, god,
poor guys.

Speaker 1 (02:12:17):
Yeah, that would be man, that would be a it's
a it's it's a healthy book. Like I said, as
I you know, I can't I do it. I'm seriously
gonna read the book and I'm just in preparation for today.
Like I skimmed around and by doing that approach of
looking in the index and finding things and you know,

(02:12:38):
bouncing back and forth, uh, and went to a couple
of areas in Western history that that I know well
and like to read about. And your ability to what
I thought was great about is your ability to not

(02:12:58):
get bogged down into you know, at eight am at
nine am, but just to sort of be like, at
a large scale, where did like, where did this lead?
What was this coming from? What does this really mean?

Speaker 9 (02:13:13):
You know?

Speaker 1 (02:13:13):
And then someone reading it could very easily use it
as a jump off point to go find a lot
of areas that they might want to explore, but just
to get in the idea of how the country acquired
and acquired and homogenized, maybe like how the country gobbled

(02:13:38):
up so much stuff and sort of made it into
this recognizable idea of America so fast.

Speaker 2 (02:13:45):
Yeah, yep, that's that is really kind of breathtaking when
you when you think of it in that larger perspective,
how much happened so fast and with so many consequences.
And that's what I'm You can say the same thing,
of course about the Civil War. I'm saying you can
say that about both of them together. Together, those events
remade this country.

Speaker 1 (02:14:06):
So Elliott West again in the latest book, and he
has many continental reckoning the American West and the age
of expansion. Thank you very much for joining us.

Speaker 2 (02:14:15):
Thank you. It's great, great pleasure. Thank you.

Speaker 9 (02:14:17):
Oh right on a seal, great shine like silver in
the sun. Right right on alone, sweetheart. We're done beat

(02:14:49):
this damn course today, taking a new one. Ride. We're
done beat this day, am coarse today, So take a
new one and ride on.

Speaker 8 (02:15:14):
Mm hmm.

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