The Joe Rogan Experience - #1397 - S.C. Gwynne

Episode Date: December 10, 2019

S. C. Gwynne is an American nonfiction writer. He is the author of the prize-winning "Empire of the Summer Moon" and his latest book "Hymns of the Republic" is now available.

Three, two, okay. So, very nice to meet you. And your book is fantastic. I really, really loved it. And it's kind of hilarious how this conversation came about. You said you got a call from your publicist because your audio book spiked. It spiked like crazy. It was like, what cosmic dust in the outer bands of Jupiter just did that?

Because we didn't figure out what it was. It just spiked like crazy, went nuts. I think it went to number one briefly. So he thought, what did that? And it was from an Instagram post. It was. And you were, see, my friend Steve Rinella wrote a book called American Buffalo. And I had put on Instagram how great the book was.

And he did the audio version of it. And a friend of mine on Instagram, he goes by the name of The Jackalope. He's a fellow Hunter S. Thompson enthusiast. He said, you got to read this book. And so he tells me to read your book, and Empire of the Summer Moon. And it was amazing. it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was amazing. I mean, he was absolutely right, and it was so good, and I made an Instagram post about that. There it is. Oh, we got a copy of it.

Look at that, ladies and gentlemen. It's a fantastic book. There's so much good stuff in there. And I just, it was so sad and so gripping and so riveting. And we all know that a lot of horrific things happened in the time where the settlers started making their way across the plains and headed west. But, God, you just did such a fantastic job of sort of bringing it to life. It's all those things. It's brutal. It's life. It's all those things. It's brutal. It's sad.

It's incredibly dramatic. I mean, I just think people forget about what the frontier was. It's kind of a nice idea that you get on TV or something, but it was a savage place. Anyway, I was trying to convey it with this. With the minimum possible of people being stanked out on anthills with their eyelids cut off and things like that there's a lot of that though yeah i mean the the

horrors of it all it's like you know um and i'd never seen i had no i knew that that kind of stuff had taken place but i'd really never read it so graphically depicted before this book. What motivated you to write about all this? So this is a book about me. I'm a Connecticut Yankee, Massachusetts, Connecticut guy. I moved to Texas 25 years ago, and I've been there ever since. And I didn't know anything about Texas history, nothing beyond whatever you might know about the Alamo or something or Sam Houston or somebody like that. And I got there and I just started to, you know, I started to hear about, one, the Great Plains and what they were, which was an alien concept to me.

I wasn't sure what the plains were or why they were different than some other part of the country, the high plains. And I came into this idea, I came upon this idea that the last frontier was there, that this is where it all went down. This is where like the end of freedom and limitlessness, it was, it didn't happen. The frontier didn't push forward until it got to California and then hit the ocean. California settled, the East settled, and then there was this one last place that did not. And it went on for, and there were reasons for that, one of which was the most hostile Indian tribes in the country. Another was that it was – there was no water, wood or – there was basically only land, no water or timber.

But so I got into this and then lo and behold, there's this – I find out because I live in Texas that there's this principle that lives on this, that lived on this land, the Comanches, that determined everything that happened in the American West around them. And that's not an exaggeration. They were, because until, you know, the West wasn't won until they lost it. And that was for sure. And so there were two things. One, this arc of the rise and fall of the most powerful tribe, most influential tribe in American history, the Comanches, which was very cool from the Spanish and the horse and all sorts of big stuff that goes on. And then in the middle of that story was this little story of this little nine-year-old girl with blonde hair and cornflower blue eyes who gets taken in a Comanche raid in

1836, who ends up becoming the mother of the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. who ends up becoming the mother of the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. And in fact, her kidnapping and his surrender at the very end of the Comanches, sort of bookend a 40-year war. We never fought a 40-year war against anybody except them. So I ran into this story, and I'm just a kid from Connecticut. And it just seemed like the most obvious book in the world. It was just the coolest history. It's a crazy story, and I'd never heard of Cynthia Ann Parker before.

Now she's, we have her on the wall. We have a giant metal picture of her on the wall. Because it was so powerful, your depiction of it too, I wanted to find out what she looks like. And what is his name again? So, Quanah. Quanah was his – This is on the cover of the book.

Right. Because his mother was Cynthia Ann Parker, which was not – that didn't come out and no one found out that until he was much older. So, he was born Quanah as a Comanche. Later, in the reservation period, when people found out who he was, he identified as part of the Parker family also. Oh, wow. Yeah. So as a famous Comanche war chief, and he was one of the most famous and feared, he was Quanah. That's such a crazy story that they killed so many people, but occasionally they would keep people and bring them into the tribe.

Right. So there were rules of the frontier at the time, and we're talking about how savage it was, and the rules of the, at least of the Plains Indians, of which the Comanches were one, that if you were captured as an adult male, you were killed, tortured to death, either quickly or slowly, depending on how much time they had.

If you were a baby, you were killed. They couldn't deal with a baby. They were nomads, and they were on their horse, and they were probably escaping from whatever raid they had just done. They couldn't deal with babies. A teenage girl or a young woman would possibly be killed, but likely turned into sort of a slave. The ones who had a chance of being adopted into the tribe were the, you know,

eight, nine, 10, 11, 12-year-olds. Because Comanches had trouble keeping their numbers up, and so they instinctively kind of, they would take these captives. And not just from, you know, white people, but from the Apaches and the Utes and the Navajos and whoever they might take them from. And so what was interesting about the frontier, though, is that those rules applied. So forget about white people arriving in the early 18th century for the moment. Those rules had applied to Indian tribes since forever.

You know, that was the assumption of a raid. It was almost like the golden rule in reverse, or the golden rule, do unto others. They all expected that kind of treatment. None of them were shocked when a baby was killed or a pregnant woman was killed. It took the kind of, you know, the Anglo-European civilization of, you know, Newton and Leibniz and the biblical tradition to arrive on the Texas frontier in 1830 and be shocked at what they saw. Very interesting. Very savage, very brutal. It was a culture of raiding, essentially.

This is the Comanche culture in particular or Native Americans in general? Well, Native Americans in general, Plains Indians in general. So Plains Indians, we could kind of start. You would know the names of a lot of them. Arapaho and Cheyenne and Sioux. And these were people who operated out in the great wide open. They were all masters of the horse. What made the Comanche special was that they became the preeminent horse tribe. Now, people forget that there weren't any horses in the continent until the Spanish brought them in the 16th century. And so the tribes that got the horse and mastered the

horse basically altered the entire balance of power in the plains. And the tribe that got the horse better than anybody else in terms of breaking and breeding and saddling and riding and stealing and hunting on the back of and fighting with were the Comanches and nobody was their peer. And so this was not just a plains tribe. It was the preeminent power on the southern plains. Did you know that horses originally evolved here in North America? No. And then they went extinct here, but then they reintroduced them. Really? The Europeans did, yeah. There's a guy named Dan Flores. He's got a bunch of great books, and one of them is called Coyote America. He's got another one.

What is his other book about the various large land animals that went extinct here in North America? But the wolf and a lot of the other ones. What is it? Serengetity that's it the natural west also yeah um yeah he he's fantastic and essentially they all went extinct all the horses went extinct here and then they were reintroduced by europeans but they had originally evolved here in north america i didn't know so there no, but there's no evidence that any of the native people here really used them until Europeans came, whether it was Cortez or whoever, you know, Cortez with the Aztecs or whoever else came across. Horses, a horse is so much a part of the story.

Yeah. The, you know, so they come up with the Spanish. The Spanish are acutely aware of what is going to happen if the horse technology gets out, and they take great pains to not let it get out. They don't want to teach the Indians in Mexico or the Indians in North America how to use them. But inevitably, the technology does get out. And then there's a few moments. There's a great moment in time in 1680 in Santa Fe when there's a great Pueblo revolt,

and they kick the Spanish out, and like tens of thousands of horses get fe when there's a great pueblo revolt and they kick the spanish out and like tens of thousands of horses get out it's the great horse dispersal and and and these are the horses that come into the hands of the these plains tribes um so in the 1600s that their power and their dominance started to assert itself begins so how did the comanches figure out how to have all these horses and how valuable that was, where some of the other tribes just hadn't kind of caught on? No one knows, and it's interesting, no one knows that because it was only seen in flashes by the Spanish through their kind of northern outposts.

No one exactly knows what it was in the heart and soul of a Comanche that could do that better than anybody else. But in fact, Comanches, by all descriptions of the time, were not, you know, a pre-horse anyway, graceful people. They were kind of short and kind of, you know, bow-legged, and they weren't especially graceful. And they didn't look like perhaps you would think of the Northern Sioux Indians on the nickel. I mean, that kind of tall and, you know, with the bone structure. That wasn't the Comanches. And then they got on a horse, and then everything changed.

And even though the Apaches were the first ones to actually get that technology from the Spanish, and they raised havoc with it. from the Spanish, and they raised havoc with it. But the tribe that got it the best and the most were the Comanches. They were the tribe that actually ended up supplying horses to a lot of the Northern Plains tribes that we just talked about. And what they did, once they had this incredible mastery of the horse and this ability to hunt like they never had and fight like they never had, they did what you would, I guess, expect the great new power in the plains. The plains are a big place, by the way. The great new power in the plains is going to challenge for the greatest food source

out in mid-America, and that was the buffalo herds. And they were in the southern plains. So the Comanches, over a period of 150 years of sustained combat, moved south from the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, essentially into this 250,000 square mile empire. Think of kind of headquartered in the Texas Panhandle, which is where the buffalo were. And this tribe, they were known for being buffalo hunters, and they were also known, they weren't really like making artwork or doing a lot of the things that we sort of associate with other Native American tribes. They were mostly just hunting and raiding.

Right, and the things that we all would associate with Native Americans, you know, this wonderful abilities in dance and music, complex religion and complex religious social structures to go along with it, and all these different things, music and dance and all these things. The Comanches, by the time that the kind of Anglo-Europeans run into them, they are a stripped down culture that looks more like Sparta. And one of the reasons they are is because they've been fighting this long war, primarily against the Apaches, but against other tribes over decades. And during that time, as they became ascendant militarily, they became less interested in those things. They became interested in war-conveyed status, right?

War-conveyed numbers of ponies and status and the thing. And so, yes, they were a stripped-down war culture. I guess to whatever extent we know or something about Sparta would remind you of Sparta. That's what's so interesting about it is it's such a unique tribe, just a very unique branch of Native Americans that was specifically like this. They made war, and they conquered. And when you think about what they got themselves finally, it's about, I said, 250,000 square miles. This probably doesn't mean anything. But think of West Texas, Western Oklahoma, Western Kansas, Eastern Colorado, and Eastern New Mexico. Gigantic chunks of that.

That was theirs. You think also of the numbers of them that were there when, say, the Anglo-Europeans and the Americans came through in the 1830s. There was probably 25,000 or 30,000 of them out there, of which 5,000 or 6,000 warriors. Now, I don't know what 5,000 or 6,000 suggests to you, but it suggests to me like the third baseline at Yankee Stadium or something. You know, occupying this gigantic area that became, as I was saying earlier, determinant of everything that happened around it. Well, your depictions of how the raid happened, where Cynthia Ann Parker got kidnapped, and how all these other various raids happened was so terrifying, because these people, the initial ones, really kind of had no idea what they were in for these are the parkers yeah yes so so the the core so as i say that my

book's about the um you know the rise and fall the comanches is a tribe which we've been talking about but then there's this little family the parkers and the parkers did what so many other texans did and and this was the crazy amer crazy Americans who moved across their frontiers in ways that just were, presidio, and then the priests would come in, and the mission would be set up, and then the protections would be in place and the institutions, and then the people would come. In Texas, it was just these rednecks from Tennessee and Alabama coming through with no protection of any kind. There were no institutions. They were out beyond any form of security or protection or institutions. And so this is what the Parkers were in the 1830s. They were about 90 miles south of Dallas.

And you had Spanish in New Mexico, but nothing but Comanches and Apaches between where these people were and that. So, you know, 800 miles of nothing. that. So, you know, 800 miles of nothing. And so what they had done is they had taken these head rights or grants from Mexico, which owned Texas at that point. They'd been given about, you know, 20,000 acres worth, which is a kingdom from their point of view. And the Mexicans were giving them this so that they could provide a buffer against the Comanches, basically providing fresh meat for the Comanches. And so they built this little fort out there, out right at the, and it was so cool. It was not only out in the middle of nowhere, the absolute edge of the frontier, of the Indian frontier, where it was in great danger.

It was also right at a part where the rainfall drops below 30 inches, where we go from around the 98th Meridian, where we go from what we think of as the east to the west, where there's no trees. It happens right there, too. It also happens right that this raid in 1830 that started this out where the little blonde girl is taken. out where the little blonde girl is taken. This also happens at a time when this gigantic Comanche empire with 20 vassal states and diplomatic relations touches this westward booming American empire. All these guys in Washington wearing suits and running around, that empire is,

and they're touching right at this point, and neither has any idea what the other one is. The Comanches have no idea that these Parker family is sitting there attached in some way to cities in the East and the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. They would not know what that was. By the same token, the Americans coming west had absolutely no clue that they just hit. They just did what they shouldn't have done, which was to push into Comanche territory. It's so crazy that they set them up like that. Oh, it's so dark. I mean, but it's just such a wild time, too.

I mean, but also so recent. I mean, I'm 52, so we're talking about three of my lifetimes. Three of my lifetimes ago it was on like donkey kong down there just crazy i mean it's it's hard to believe that that recently some unbelievably horrific barbaric hand-to-hand combat killing people and slaughtering entire villages and all the stuff that went back and forth between the Native Americans and between the white settlers. I mean, it was just – it's unbelievable. It's one of the most – what you just said is one of the most striking things about this to me and was when I –

the Connecticut kid came to Texas was that where I grew up, Indians had been, well, when I say subdued, usually killed off by white man's diseases, but if not by, you know, bullets or treaties or something, I mean, couple of hundred years before my forebears ever got off the boat. There wasn't a frontier, in memory anyway. I mean, there were Indian tribes around and I played baseball with some of them in the summers and so forth. I knew of them, but this was a really distant memory. Okay. Get to Texas. 1875 was when the last of the Comanches came in and there was a whole bunch of jostling on and off the res after that into the 20th century. Yeah. 140 plus years ago. Not that long. Yeah. So we're talking within a really close generational memory. And that's what's really stunning. And if you talk to, I don't know, where are you from originally, Joe? Boston. So joe boston so boss okay you and i okay boston i was born in jersey but did most of my

most of my family came from boston and so the the difference between that and and what if you go to texas uh there's a there's an area west of fort worth kind of weatherford palo pinto county parker county now where you can talk to people and they're still talking about Comanches. Really? It's their great-grandfather was killed by them. Wow. So that's Texas. And that's why I found it so striking.

So really striking. It's also striking because you realize over the course of the book and then more books that I've gotten into subsequently that this was something that was going on before the white settlers even got there, that this way of life and the raiding and the killing, and that's not what we associate Native Americans with. We associate us with taking the Native Americans' land and then them fighting back, and that's when things get ugly. But it turns out,

this was just a wild way of life that they had had for who knows how many years. One of the things that surprised people when I wrote this book, and I didn't know that I was going to be surprising people because I was just reporting what I found, was that very thing. I think people are often used to the bury my heart and it wounded me narrative of Native Americans, which is as victims. Yeah. And there's no question that they were victims of a westward rolling empire and 378 broken treaties and we can just go on and we know what that narrative is like. But the narrative that I told was a narrative of power, of dominance, of power, which came with brutality, too. And I think it surprised – it was a fact.

It was a fact that if you go back in time, these Native American tribes, that eventually got crushed, as the Comanches did, and put on a reservation somewhere and had their livelihood taken away from them. But, you know, it really –'s a it's a it's a huge deal um and and a narrative that i i think to me that doesn't take into account the enormous power and dominance and behavior of of command she's just missing you know half the half the narrative well it's so fascinating because it's essentially they were living like stone age people and they were doing it very recently they were they were doing it like in in terms of the way europe is you could go and see buildings in italy that were built long before any of this stuff happened long before the settlers started encountering them and they were living like this and this sort of i mean it's very romantic the the way they live just chasing the buffalo

and extremely and killing them and then eating only buffalo meat and then doing very little farming picking some berries and nuts and that's about it i mean it was just eating meat and raiding and killing if they were hunter-gatherers. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers, which is what they were. And what the horse allowed them to do, which is what they had been before, the horse allowed them to do that only just really, really, really well. In other words, they weren't in a position of becoming agricultural Indians. The horse gave them this ability to, and as you said,

of becoming agricultural Indians, the horse gave them this ability to, and as you said, they got everything from the buffalo, clothing and lodging and tools and saddles and bridles and food. I mean, everything came from the buffalo. So the horse just enabled them to do this on an incredibly sophisticated level.

It's the most sad part of the story is the extirpating of the buffalo. I mean, that's not the most sad but one of the that their way of life it's almost like you know what happened but i'm rooting for them in some weird way you know i mean i know that they're not going to win but there's something about the way they lived it seems so exciting and the other thing is the way you described cynthia ann parker post being air quote rescued like how badly she wanted to go back to the comanche and how she missed the way they looked at the world that the world was in in many ways there was so much magic involved in the way the comanche viewed the sky

and the ground and that there was gods that were looking out for them and that they could literally have magic going into battle like all this the the romance of this nomadic lifestyle was that's what she wanted and like when you talked about that one guy that spoke comanche and then she she meets him and she's like please take me take me with you yeah it's crazy it it was um so she was she was taken about the age of i guess it was nine and then she was with the command she's for 24 years she completely assimilated she married a war chief she had three children she they tried you know at two different times they knew where she was indian agents figured out where she was and they they made a push to get her back because the idea generally was to get captives back she wouldn't go um and then suddenly in a raid uh purely by accident

she's captured in 1860 and is dragged back and she has to show that she's white so that they don't kill her right she has to show that she's a woman and and white so that they don't kill her she she she barely escapes from that. But she ends up being, you know, forcibly re-assimilated. So here's someone who completely assimilated once with great success. And then in her 30s now, she's taken back into this white culture. And in fact, they put her up on a, they were so astounded to see her because she was, Indians weren't the cleanest people in the world. I mean, her job was to kind of, you know, tan buffalo hides.

So she – her kind of greasy looking and, you know, didn't look like a white farm – you know, white God-fearing farm woman from Dallas. But they put her up on a, you know, on a pedestal with her daughter and they kind of looked at her and stared at her as this kind of this strange object, the white squaw who wouldn't return, this kind of object of curiosity. And then she gets kind of shuffled ever deeper into the East Texas piney woods and ever farther away from her people. And she never assimilated. It was interesting. Having assimilated once brilliantly, she was asked in effect to do it again, and she couldn't, and she never did. But going back for just one moment to something you said was this idea of this kind of freedom and magic. There was in Comanche, and it was, it was all there. It was this world that was

suffused with magic everywhere you looked. There was magic in everything. But one of the things that also was, and this was relayed by actually male captives of the Comanches. It was like maybe a war chief and a civil chief, but there was really no – there were no priest clans and hierarchies. It was just flat. And if you were a Tawana Parker, a young warrior, and you wanted to get together a raid on the Utes, you could just do it. It was just – you could do what you wanted to do. And so you look at these – this one particular captive was talking about this, and he was talking about being 15 years old. This was before the Comanche men had to fight and really hunt. They could do some hunting, but they weren't yet in the full responsibility of men.

There they are sitting there. They've got no responsibilities except to go hunt and have fun and go swimming and learn how to become the greatest riders in the world they've got no institution around them of any kind they've got and you start to think of why do people go west you know away from institutions away from things that were going to make them less free and so you i i looked at and i describe it this way a a 15 year old comanche boy may have been like the freest thing that ever existed in in america and i i can feel the pull you know yeah i think we all can i mean when we were kids growing up you know you didn't we played cowboys and indians you know exactly and a lot of people wanted to be indians you know you wanted to wear those kind of native american jackets with the frill and there was so so much of that that was attractive to us and that was a big part of it was that they were free you know dances with

wolves obviously you know when kevin costner gets assimilated into that tribe there's something exciting about it like it's more noble it's sought to be like a more powerful alternative to this western grind and and and again you're just you're out there and and and you are beyond the reach of any of the normal institutions that we think about school and work and job and government and religion and church and all the things that bind people in and most people are happy to be bound by them, but many people aren't. And I thought that there was an idea of the West of kind of limitless freedom, this West that predates barbed wire and private property. And that just seemed, I don't know, I still find it just one of the most appealing things to think about.

And just the fact that it's so recent.'s what's really crazy really talking about the urban sprawl and barb meyer and things along those lines i mean and it's particularly texas where everything's almost private property i mean just giant ranches everywhere and this was all run by the comanche 98 of texas is unlike if you go one one state to the west and you're in the big land, public land, government land states, Texas is 98% private now. That's a weird thing, isn't it? It is. It's very strange. How'd that happen?

And the public land states just – there was – for one thing, there was a lot more of apparently sort of useless land in the western states. But anyway, it happened. And in Texas, you're lucky to get yourself a state park here and there. When you were doing research for this, did you meet with any current Comanches? I met with some of them, and I know some of them. Some of them are on my website. But as far as interviewing them for things that happened 200 or 300 years ago, that's not really a, that's sort of a non-starter as a historian.

Although the book itself is based on lots and lots of interviews with Comanches, but of the era. People who, this was the great, there were some great projects done in the 20s and 30s with Comanches who talked about, who had memories of the 19th century. And so a lot of what we know that's in my book that we know about the Comanches and who they are

come from all of these interviews. And there's a lot in my book that comes from Comanches, but again, of the era. So I just figured that interviewing people today about things that happened a long time ago was probably not that efficient. No, for sure not that efficient. But still, to me, it would be kind of fascinating to see where they are now. I mean, the Native American reservations in this country have traditionally been pretty

horrific. And it's very depressing and sad. And for the people that live there, just so little hope and so little opportunity. And it's, as you were talking about before, the broken treaties and just to see them having gone from being this incredible war-like tribe to being resigned to these very small patches of land that are usually not very fruitful and not very resource-filled. And that happened to a lot of tribes.

I mean, if you look at the Comanches, the Comanches are a pretty small tribe. They're located in their center, although there's no reservations. There's no – excuse me. You all right? Yeah. They don't have a – hell, end of the flu. They don't have a reservation there, but they're – I'd say the last number I heard was 14,000 or something like that. One of the big, I guess ironically in some ways, determinant factors in how wealthy a tribe is now is proximity to a major urban area.

For example, Chickasaws and Choctaws are in range of DFWs, so their casinos there make a lot of money. The Seminoles in Florida. There's some tribes in California who are making a lot of money. If you go up to, say, some of the Sioux reservations, you know, well up north on the plains, they're not near, they just, their lands, their traditional lands just don't happen to be close to urban centers. Yeah, urban centers. And so there's a little bit of that going on there. But, yeah, this is just, you know, where we, the U.S. government, put the Indians.

And in terms of Plains Indians and Comanches and Arapahos and Cheyennes and Sioux and everybody else, they never wanted to be farmers. Farming was exactly what they never wanted to do. And even if you gave them 160 acres, they would sublet it. They would rent it out to usually a white farmer who would farm it and they would take a sharecropping percentage or something. But, yes, so they didn't want anything to do with that. And above all, they didn't want to be forced into a type of life that they had never done before and considered it just kind of unseemly. So, do Comanches have a reservation today? No.

No reservation at all? No. Well, the problem is the way – this is going to get into a lot of detail, but I mean Oklahoma, they they basically, in place of reservations, they gave out individual portionments of land. And had them assimilated. Yeah. So, for example, where I came from in the East Coast, there are reservations. If you go to, say, Colorado, you'll see the Ute Reservation or some of the Sioux Reservations. There's reservations all over the place, not in Oklahoma. Wow.

So they're in danger of having their culture probably get erased. They're pretty, I mean, I think they would tell you, I mean, I don't want to speak for Comanches or anybody else, but that they're pretty strongly organized where they are. They have a nation. They do have a nation. It's just they don't have a body of a reservation, are. They have a nation. They do have a nation. It's just they don't have a body of a reservation, but they do have a nation. But if they have a nation, they don't have the same sort of laws that ones have a reservation. No, they actually do.

So if you go, for example, I spent some time with the Chickasaws a few years ago. It's incredible. Now, they don't have a, quote, reservation either, but they have little pieces of land that is theirs. But they also have a completely parallel police system, completely parallel legislature. They have parallel healthcare systems. And you can drive through these parts of Oklahoma where, I don't know, say Choctaws or Cherokees or whoever they may be are. And there are these whole parallel worlds that are existing right in front of you and you don't see them. Wow.

Yes. So, no, actually, I think they're, in a lot of ways, a lot of the tribes in Oklahoma are doing well. But you literally can drive through it and you wouldn't be able to tell. It's just such a stunning amount of change that happened to this continent over a short relatively short period of time yeah i mean really astounding and and if you look at what from from the moment that the last comanche is surrendered with quan when koana and the

the last of the starving have all the buffalo have been killed now and so And so they're coming in and it's 1875. You know, that very year, their old kind of main, I guess, camping ground would be Palo Duro Canyon, one of the biggest canyons in the American West up in the Texas Panhandle. And that's kind of where their sanctuary was, or one of their big sanctuaries were. Within that very year, white men already owned Palo Duro Canyon. There was already a ranch on it. It was that happens is now we have the cattle drives just before barbed wire, and then there's only a few years of cattle drives, and then the barbed wire goes up, and this happens with just breathtaking speed. And, I mean, from really the moment that they started killing the buffalo off in the, what, 1870 or something, 1871 to, I mean, full barbed wire, it's just, it's less than a couple decades.

It's such a great story. And the fact that this young girl, Cynthia Ann Parker, gets kidnapped and gives birth to this man who eventually becomes the last great Comanche chief and literally watches the entire empire change and shift into this, what we now call Western world. Yep. He rides inosevelt's inaugural parade that's what we're talking about that was also what's crazy about the book like that he meets teddy and he has a speech with him on stage yeah and this is all i mean he had killed a lot of white people too right a lot of settlers he didn't talk about it but yes he had this is because that's what comanches did yeah well so wise of settlers he didn't talk about it but yes he had this is because that's

what comanches did yeah well so wise of him also to not talk about right and not only comanches he would he was he fought indians he fought anybody who was out there but yes he he didn't he didn't spend a lot of time bragging about that yeah i mean i guess it's just the way they felt about war what is this jamie uh the parade oh here's the parade there's i don't know which one he is but there's six of them in the parade wow and what year is this 1908 or somewhere oh eight i think oh wait so what a insane relationship that must have been for those people to be experiencing first of, these enormous cities and going through Washington, D.C. on horseback and knowing what you had come from

and what a catastrophic, titanic change had taken place inside of your lifetime, and now you're experiencing something that you didn't even think was possible, and it's the new law of the land. Is that Quanta there? It does look like Quanta, doesn't it, in the middle? But, I mean, and he was not just ceremonial Indian. I mean, he was a brilliant man. And

one of the things he did is he went to New York. I mean, went to Washington and he testified and there were all these hearings trying to figure out how much land Indians were going to get. And Quan of Tours testified this and actually is quite brilliant. I put his testimony in my book. He's just flat brilliant. He sort of runs circles around the senator who's questioning him. So he played an active role too, but there he is, as you say, sitting in a committee room in Congress.

I mean, this guy who was this great free warrior on the plains. Now, how long did it take you to research this? I, you know, I did this partly while I was at a day gig, so I'm not really sure, probably three or four years, something like that. There isn't as much as you would think, because, and the reason is, I mean, there's a fair amount, and it's all in Texas, which is good. in Texas, which is good. But there's one curious thing about writing about Native Americans is that they didn't write anything down. So if you're writing about, say, Winston Churchill, I mean, you can track him from like his bath in the morning to his seventh note to ask with to his notes to his wife, to all of his proceedings in Parliament and everything he ever did. It's like moment by moment. You take someone like Juana out on the plains and you've got pretty much nothing.

And so what you have, what you do have are, you know, flashes that are seen by, say, the Spanish originally or the French or Mexicans or Texans and Americans as they come through. You're seeing them in flashes as they're presented to you because there are no parish records. There's no legal records. There's no interviews. There's no things like that. That's so stunning.

It's so stunning. But that's one of the weirdest things about where they are today in 2019, this idea that they don't have really a reservation or a specific giant chunk of land that's theirs. They can sort of preserve at least some of this history. Yeah. No, it was a peculiarity of Oklahoma that it went that way because there are other states, as we talked about earlier, who do have large reservations to this day. But yeah, so it's so, and when you get,

if you're writing about them, when you get to sort of the post-reservation period, so let's say into the 1880s, 1890s, the world does change in terms of, you know, things are being written down. Quanta, you know, Quanta becomes a big part of his society.

He's setting up cattle leasing deals. He's founding a school board. I mean, he does all these things that you wouldn't necessarily think a glorious chief of the Comanches would do. But he does those things. And those are very trackable. I mean, you know exactly what he's doing. And you can research them in conventional ways. I was fascinated by the peyote rituals, too.

Now, was that a natural, normal part of Comanche life, or is this something that he adopted from other tribes? this for. And so there was this great, a place I would really like to go back to in American history would be to Quanah's house. Quanah got his cattleman buddies to build him. First of all, he wanted the US government to build him a house because Quanah was a hustler and he said, could I please have a house? They said, no, you can't have a house. So he went to his cattleman buddies and they built him this house, magnificent house. It was like 4,500 square feet, double porch with these giant white stars in the roof. It became known as— Is that his house right there?

That's Star House. It's fallen down now, but yes, in its heyday, it looked really pretty spiffy. So that still exists to this day? It does, and it's about to fall down, and they've now— Who owns it? It does, and it's about to fall down. Who owns it? Well, this guy who lives in cash or lot in Oklahoma and who has been unwilling to accept help or money

from everybody from the Comanche Nation. That's it right there. It always had the stars on the roof like that? Yeah, it did, because he saw that U.S. generals had these stars on their collars, and he wanted more than they had. Wow. But that sits there in Cache, Oklahoma.

Now, I've been in it, but it's gotten so beat up now that they don't let you go in it anymore, but it sits there. So as long as we have that there, in 1895, if you went there in the early 1890s, it would have been one of the most amazing scenes. We had people like Geronimo coming to dinner. Roosevelt came to dinner. Nelson Miles, the great general, came to dinner. He had a, I think it was a Swiss-Mexican cook.

He had six wives. He had 21 children, 19 who grew to adulthood. The house was full of kids. It would have been surrounded by lodges. And the reason it would have been that is because people, his own tribe, had come in for help, money or pay for a funeral or going back to the peyote ritual, which is a healing ritual. And so you would have seen one of the great scenes in the American West. And people, when he died in 1911, people found out that he'd given most of his money away to all these people who had come in asking for his help. He had, in fact, helped them and given most of his cattle ranching money away that he had made. Now, this house is owned

by one individual? Yes. But it's a historical landmark and no one's preserving it? They're not doing anything to it? You know, I don't know all the details of it, but it's owned by Wayne Gibson and his sister, as far as I know, still. And they've owned it for a while. They don't want any help. That house was put into an amusement park years ago to preserve it. It was owned by Wayne's uncle, as far as I know. So it was taken apart? It was.

Was it taken apart? I don't know. They did move it, though. They moved it. so this is not the original location where it's at right now the original location was out on what turned out to be later to be a fort sill gunnery artillery range and so they they moved it and so quana's um a daughter i guess it was moved it down into cash and then it was moved one more time into this amusement park literally uh that when i went into this amusement park, literally. When I went into

this amusement park, it was like something out of a, I don't know, a Spielberg movie. I mean, you go, I was told the house was back there and I couldn't really believe it. But so we go in and you're going by these defunct old roller coasters that are all overgrown with vines like Sleeping Beauty's Castle, you know, and there's cows everywhere and rides and carousels, all overgrown. And then you go through a series of houses that were also moved there, like Frank James's house or something, and keep going, keep going. In the back, there that thing was. The house was sitting there.

Now, it is his. He owns it. He's been approached, as I said, by all sorts of different people, consortiums of people with money who want to buy it or just save it. You know, from literally the Comanche Nation I know has wanted to and Texas Tech has and some Dallas people and a number of people. And so, to my knowledge, thus far, he refuses to sell or to take their help. Is that him right there? I think that is. That's him.

Wayne. Wayne Gibson, yeah. Come on, Wayne. Hey, so he's a perfectly nice guy. He feels the house is very special in his family, and it is indeed very special. But he won't. The last tour I got with him, as you're going up the main stairwell, there was a four foot by six inch hole in the roof above the main stairwell. I mean, you can't really have a four foot by six inch hole. No.

There it is. And the rain would just come through. What can you do to preserve a house like this while still leaving it the way it is so it's you know i'm saying like you would have to replace the wood now if you replace the wood is it still the same house like there's arguments about boats yeah they've found some ancient boats and they've done some rebuilding of these boats now all of a sudden you're looking at new wood in the shape of this old boat. Like, what is it now? Is it?

What is it? Yeah. So, I tell you, the first time I walked in there, which was 15 years ago, you wouldn't have needed to do that much work to it. 15 years ago? Yeah. You would not have needed to. You would have needed some bolstering for sure, and the foundation would have needed some work. But it has gone way downhill because nothing's been done to it.

So, now, I don't know. It has gone way downhill because nothing's been done to it. So now, I don't know. But when I walked in there, you really could have, a good carpenter and carpenter team in a month, you could have shored that thing up. Jesus Christ. Yeah. That's so sad. Yeah, and I don't know how much of it. I mean, a lot of it was the problem was with all those holes in it, stuff that started to rot.

Right, of course. And rot is different than, you know. And then you would have to actually really replace that wood. So at the end of the day, it was going to be a certain percentage of it was going to be new. But at least you could sort of get a semblance of what it was and do your best to sort of, I mean, if you had like a real good architect on hand and a real good engineer and someone from some sort of historical society where they could look at it and say, okay, we want to maintain as much of this old stuff as possible while making sure this thing can last for more people to see it. I think they could still do that, but I'm no expert. But there's plenty of it that you can save.

And there's things like, you know, there's that famous, it's in my book, it's a picture of the table, Quanah's table there. And you've got the tin ceiling, that's table there. And you've got the tin ceiling. That's still there. And the floorboards are still there. And those are all the same stuff. So I don't know. I'm no expert on it.

But until the owner, because it's his, until the owner decides to do something to it. Come on, bro. What's his name? I think it's Wayne Gibson. Wayne. Gibson. Come on, Wayne. It's ridiculous, Wayne. He's a lovely lovely guy i'm sure he's a lovely guy he just doesn't want to do that

giant part of history i mean and particularly after you read this story um read your book it's just so much more interesting you know that mean that was the end that was when this guy had become a cattleman that's when this guy had sort of assimilated into not not just assimilated eastern what settler culture like what what would you say when they assimilate into the white man's world uh would you just say that the white man's world i suppose i guess the white man's world is probably the best way anglo-european culture that had come west um but yeah very much the white man's world the fact that he become a cattleman and become incredibly successful i I thought it was hilarious, too, that they wanted him to not have so many wives. They didn't want him to have the wives.

They didn't want to have the braids, the long, long braids. They didn't like that, didn't like the wives. Quan did things his own way. He also played politics brilliantly. I mean, he understood from the early going that, quote, the chief of the Comanches was going to be appointed by the commander at Fort Sill. You know, it wasn't just going to happen. And there were all sorts of candidates jostling for this, and he made sure that it was him. That didn't make him any less the leader of his tribe. It didn't make him any less of an independent person who the white men had to deal with but he

made sure he had that one um buttoned up and he was challenged continuously i mean there was there were continuous challenge to him it's interesting historically that you don't hear about him and the comanches when it played such a significant part in taking over the west and settling the west when you hear about crazy horse you hear about sitting bull you hear about the the West and settling the West, when you hear about Crazy Horse, you hear about Sitting Bull, you hear about the Sioux and the Apaches, you don't hear that much about the Comanches. And you don't hear much about Quanah Parker. No, it was one of the great pleasures of writing this book

is that these were largely unknown things. I mean, Quanah was one of them. Another discovery was, you know, we all know about certain people running around San Antonio in the 1830s. Davy Crockett would come to mind. But we don't know about Jack Hayes, the world's greatest, you know, the ranger, the guy who sort of invented this anti-Comanche warfare, invented the repeating, you know, he first, he didn't invent, but he first used the repeating five-shot pistol. And then, of course, had a hand in the invention of the six-shooter. But everybody should know who Jack Hayes is.

Everybody should know. I mean, Guana was – I mean, Geronimo is Geronimo, and he's famous largely for one particular breakout in the late 19th century. But, you know, Guana was arguably the greater man in the reservation period. was arguably the greater man in the reservation period. And, I mean, Geronimo in some ways was kind of a curmudgeon. Yeah, that was another part that I wanted to get to, was Jack Hayes and the creation of the Texas Rangers. We think of the Texas Rangers today, we think of like Chuck Norris. You really don't realize that they were essentially a group

that was created to effectively combat the Comanche. Exactly. That's where they came from. It's amazing. The story, when you talk about how it took sort of several iterations of these guys before they figured out how to do it right, and the guys that came out, they're essentially a lot like a lot of depictions of Navy SEALs, like renegades, like wild, rugged rebels. And there they are. There's the original Texas Rangers. Is that Jack Hayes in there?

I don't see him. This is a group of San Antonio's military. There he is. There's Jack Hayes' – well, the lightest picture. That's him. That's him right there, huh? Yeah, so Hayes – so the thing was – okay, San Antonio in the 1830s, late 1830s, you have about 2,000 residents. It's kind of the final outpost on the frontier.

And what's happening is Texas, which now owns Texas, having won its independence, is giving out what they call head rights. So if you want to get a head right, meaning free land, so all you had to do to get your free land outside of San Antonio was go survey the land. That's all you had to do, and you had it. And so the surveyors would go out and survey it, and the Comanches would kill them in ever more imaginative ways because the Comanches understood exactly that the instruments did steal the land. The instruments were the mechanism of the theft of the land from them. And so part of the deal was to keep – how can you keep the surveyors alive? And Hayes was originally a surveyor, but he eventually just got good at keeping other surveyors alive. And these guys who could do that eventually became known as rangers.

And they evolved as Comanche fighters, fighting like Comanches did. I mean, they learned bird signs to track people. They would make cold camps. I mean, you never made a campfire if you were around Comanches. I mean, they learned these techniques and techniques of warfare. And they got really good at it. They just had this one problem. And the problem was that they had three shots.

They had Kentucky long rifle, bang, and two single-shot pistols. And that's all they had against Comanches, who I would encourage all of your listeners to go and look up this guy Lars Anderson on the Internet. He's the bow guy. Yeah. Okay. I've seen him before. What he proved, among other things,

he went back and he just researched it. And a lot of the things that I frankly found hard to believe about Comanches, once I saw the Anderson videos, you believe them. Anderson can, I think it's 10 arrows in 5 seconds. There's no such thing as a quiver. You're holding it as a bunch in your arm. But all these things that we heard that Comanches could do, underneath the horse's neck and rapidity of fire, and no one's ever – Comanches never stood in one place and closed one eye and shot. They never once did that. They were moving both eyes open.

Anyway, look at the Anderson video. It's really cool. But what that meant was that Jack Hayes and the Rangers were at an enormous disadvantage. an enormous disadvantage. You know? And then, lo and behold, he, well, cut to the East Coast. This inventor named Samuel Colt had come up in the early 1830s

with a prototype of a, it was a really ingenious little pistol. It was a five-shot pistol made in, well, eventually made in Patterson, New Jersey. There it is right there. Yeah, is that the Patterson Colt? I hope so. It's just a five-shot chamber that was popping up with the same guy.

So, Jack Case. Yeah, it doesn't look like the Patterson Colt. But anyway, it's a five-shot thing with revolving cylinders. And it was a great idea, right? Absolutely nobody wanted it. I mean, it was like a sidearm for cavalry, but the U.S. didn't have a cavalry, so it didn't really work out. For some reason, Mirabel Lamar, the president of Texas, ordered 180 of these things, and they found their way to Texas, the five-shot Patterson Colts. And somehow Jack Hayes and his guys found out about them. And they got a hold of them, they trained with them, and they immediately

understood what it meant. It meant equalizing the warfare against the Comanches. It meant, because now they had five shots, one interchangeable cylinder, now 10, 10 shots in each pistol now. So in close hand combat, the world changed. And not only did that world change, but eventually everybody was so stunned by this development that the U.S. government ordered a lot of what ended up being Walker Colt's six shooters for the Mexican War. Colt becomes one of the richest men in America. And basically Jack Hayes and the Rangers redefine warfare, which is, and people said this about Jack Hayes, and it's broadly speaking true. Before Jack Hayes, you know, people came into the West on foot carrying a Kentucky long rifle, and after Jack Hayes, they came mounted and carrying a six-shooter. Yeah, that was the other thing that was really

shocking, was that the U.Ss soldiers would try to get off their horse to to engage right right because they didn't think you fought mount the only people who fought mounted were the plains indians i mean you know nobody thought you fighting mounted was not something anybody did if you if you used a horse you used it in the dragoon way which is you would ride to where you were going to fight get get off the horse, and then fight. But Comanches were fully mounted, and Rangers were fully mounted. And what they used the Texas Rangers for in the Mexican War, which is there were these terrible guerrilla problems, and these Rangers just went and cleared out these whole areas. And nobody had seen this type of warfare before.

Nobody had seen this kind of ability before nobody had seen this kind of ability to fight and move and move mounted and move with these well and nobody had ever seen these these walker colts these five pound hand cannon six shooters that they had nobody had seen those either and so these crazy these these rangers that dressed any way they wanted to you know sometimes with no shirts on and serapes and crazy hats i mean they were just the rangers they're everybody was scared to death do we know the history of the bow and arrow amongst the native americans do we know when it was first implemented i'm not an expert on it um i mean i i don't know because i don't know if other if the way the lars anderson style of shooting of keeping all the the arrows in the

fingers that he researched did he research that from Native Americans or was that ever utilized in Europe or anywhere else his research is I think he started and I don't I'm not an expert on him either but I think he started with other I mean he started reading about you know anybody who were you know who were archers and famous for it and descriptions of them and i believe i'm sure that that did include native americans but it was no it was a whole he looked at the whole world and so do you think native america well we don't know but i'm just speculating did native americans develop this ability independently or did they did they learn it from anyone else like it seems interesting that they were living particularly the comanches

this incredible nomadic life and didn't really have a lot of interaction with other people from other places so for the first interaction from from anywhere else is 16th century spain and there's there's no that that's the that's the first interaction with europeans so um the question is did the bow come over in the land bridge? Did it – I mean, I don't know. Really, not my field. No, of course. It's just – it's so interesting because I don't know if that style of multiple shooting,

of being able to shoot so many arrows in a row, had been – I don't think it was implemented by the Europeans. Maybe the Mongols? Did they have – I don't think it was implemented by the Europeans. Maybe the Mongols, did they have? I don't know. The question, though, the question you're getting at is how did the Comanches in particular, because when these Dodge and Catlin and these various people saw Comanches in Texas in 1830s, they just flat couldn't believe what they were looking at.

They couldn't believe their abilities with horses breaking them yeah i've never seen anything like it before i've never seen anything like it no saddle either right down the ad the ad they did have a saddle yeah that was part of the spanish technology very very very minimal you'll see it uh museums but uh do you think you can find one of those a spanish saddle or anyway but uh uh yeah, they had – but particularly the shooting. There it is right there. Wow. Yeah, very, very minimal.

See how – right, minimal, yes. And one of the ways they could shoot underneath the neck of the horse was to hang a thong off the side of one of the saddles. A thong? Well, a loop, a leather loop. A leather loop that would allow them, because otherwise they would need to be supported as they came down underneath. And they were fairly small people, right? They were fairly small people.

So they would kind of climb off the saddle and hang on the side? Hang on the side. Full gallop. Full gallop shooting. Under the neck. Accurately. Arrows that would kill a man at 30 Hang on the side. Full gallop. Full gallop shooting. Under the neck. Accurately. Arrows that would kill a man at 30 yards underneath the neck. Wow.

But people, so the question there, I don't know the answer to that. And I don't know that anyone does. What the white men saw just absolutely floored them with abilities with arrows. And among other things, they would ask the Indian boys, they'd set up a dime and a tree or a coin, and they'd go, okay, now here, you stand here and close your eyes and aim and hit that. And the Comanche boy would miss it by a foot.

Look at that picture right there of them doing the interaction. That's incredible. Underneath the... So they're basically using the horse as a shield. Yeah, that's the whole idea. Wow. And if you see them from the other side, I've seen trick riders do this, you can't even see them from the other side of the horse. Wow.

And again, this was something that trick riders after in the Wild West shows and beyond would do these sorts of things. I'm sorry, so go back to what you're saying. So when they were standing still. Oh, so with the Comanche Boy, they were asking him to shoot that dime. Comanche boy wouldn't hit... I mean, he was playing by their rules. They wanted him to stand and aim and whatever. And again, if you see the Lars Anderson videos, there was no such thing as closing one eye.

There was no such thing almost as standing still and shooting. It was constant movement. It was shooting from movement wherever they were going. So they were really accurate that way. So it was sort of like the member in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where they say, here, Sundance, try to hit that. And Sundance Kid shoots at it and misses it. And then on his way out, he moves.

He says, you mind if I move or something, or I'm better if I move? It's the same deal. It was all about movement, and it was never about anything stationary. Anyway, so yeah, all that. That, to answer your, I have no idea how they got good at that. That's a real shame that they don't have a written history. Yeah. I mean, that's one of many, many things.

That's a real shame that they don't have a written history. And I would have loved to have seen someone be able to do that. I mean, God, how incredible would it be to see what it looked like to see them? I mean, we just missed the motion picture by 60, 70 years. You've got to think they were doing it for hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds of years. It's almost like just too magical to capture. Sorry, gone gone right before you'd invent a camera no i mean at least we have some photos some still photos we do and we have um and i put in pretty big chunks of text

into my book of people of the time who saw them and who described it yeah that's all you can do is yeah just this just what they saw and how astounded they were at what they were looking at. So you must have been pretty excited when you saw that Lars Anderson guy. Oh, yeah. Because, you know, I... Pull that guy up.

Show up. Pull up a video of that guy so we can watch it because it is pretty amazing. And because I, I mean, it's not that I didn't believe what I was reading, but on some level,

it's hard to believe that they can do what people said they could do. It's interesting because this guy gets hated on a lot in the archery community it's very funny because uh you know they they say that a lot of what he's doing is tricks and a lot of what he's doing is nonsense and you know it's not really true that people actually did that but watch him do it yes i say okay i mean i'm the i mean unless that's a trick's not a trick. He's clearly doing what he's saying he's doing.

There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Are they tricks in terms of like, is it something that maybe wouldn't be as effective, but it's really cool to see? Yeah, for sure. But so what? So what? He's still showing you.

Yeah, he's showing you that you can do things. I mean, what is he throws a ball and then shoots, look at it, he shoot it with his, look at that, he shoot it in the head with his foot. He's also the rate of discharge, which is one of the things I had trouble believing. When you see him shoot, he's just, it's one every half second. Throws it, catches it, and he can shoot an arrow, like, right after he catches it. Look at that, how he throws something in the air and then shoots two shots.

Two. He throws it in the air and then by the time it hits the ground, he hits it twice. I mean, it's incredible. And he's really accurate with this thing. He also, one of his cases is that, you know, he is always moving.

It's continuous movement. He never, he doesn't close one eye. He doesn't stand still. He is moving all the time. Yeah. Everywhere he goes, which is what he said was a trademark of the great, the Magyars and the great, you know, archer cultures. Look at this.

Jumps in the air, gets off an arrow before he hits the ground. I mean, amazing. And he's even catching arrows and then shooting them back. Like, anybody that says that what he's doing is nonsense is a fool. Like, look, I'm an archer. He's plainly doing it. He's plainly doing it. Oh, you are an archer?

Yeah, that's why I have that archery range back there. Oh, okay, so you get it. I'm a bow hunter. Yeah. Well, okay, that's. This is really impressive stuff. I mean, I don't shoot traditional archery. I shoot a compound bow with a sight, and I can line it up to the exact yardage and all that stuff.

But I know enough to know that what this guy's doing is pretty special. So he's showing arrows in the quiver versus arrows in his hand, how he can just grab them and pull them. Right. So his case is that we all think that it's a quiver, right? Yeah. He says nobody who was any good ever used a quiver. You can transport them in a quiver, but in battle, you're holding them in a bunch, a

clustered bunch in your hand. Right. And he's showing it. Just the way we're seeing these people here in these ancient depictions the actual drawings from you know hundreds of years ago the way he did it holding the arrows in his draw hand and so he can do it very quickly really interesting it is really interesting this is probably i mean because of this one gentleman is probably the only way we're really going to know that this was possible. Because no one else is doing anything like this guy.

Look at this. He's doing drive-bys on the back of a bike. And he hits. Back that up again so you can see that. Because that is insane. Watch how he's doing this right there. Look at this. I mean, three times he hits in a second.

He hits three targets on a bike as he's riding by, which would emulate a horse other than the difference between the elevation change. You go up and down on a horse. But the other thing about the stories of the Mongols, that they had developed an ability to shoot as the horse was in the air because the stomping of the horse's hooves would- During that pause. Yes. So as the horse was up, that because it wouldn't like the the stomping oh i see hooves would during that pause so as the horse was up that's when they would release so it would have the least amount of impact on their uh their accuracy it's pretty incredible stuff but it's one of the things that made comanches comanches the mastery of the horse plus that would now combine with

this ability to shoot from from a moving horse now did they have a particular prowess with archery that was was known amongst native americans was it extraordinary amongst other tribes i don't know that for a fact but i do know the reaction of people who saw them who had seen plenty of other indians nobody had ever seen anything like it at the time. Now, was there a group of Northern Plains Indians that could do it? I don't know. But the reaction was almost universal by people who had seen a lot of Indian tribes. And, you know, they'd never seen that before. Someone needs to make a movie.

Yeah. You know? I mean, someone really needs to make a movie about Cynthia Ann Parker parker about kwana about the comanche just about what it must have been like for these poor hapless settlers that didn't know they're being used as a meat buffer you know the whole story i mean well so you know warner brothers has been working on this for nine years so have they yeah i would maybe one day we can't they came very as i understand it very close this book came out nine years ago. Right. So that's when Warner Brothers was. Right.

And the first screenwriter was Larry McMurtry. It was very famous. If you had to pick a screenwriter, it would be Larry McMurtry. Hollywood, you're in the belly of the beast here. You know what it's like. Hollywood just does what it does. I mean, there are two modes here, I think, hair on fire and glacier. And I've been through both of them over these years.

Maybe we can get your hair on fire again. But no, we've got a great screenplay now that I didn't write, but you know, Derek Cianfrances, the director, has been attached to it. Are you happy with it, though? I am extremely. I didn't think it was possible

to do a two-hour movie about that. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So what they did is they basically made it about Mackenzie and Quanah. It's just flat brilliant. And I think, as I'm told, even though I wasn't part of it, they came pretty close last summer to doing this, but the budget was too high.

The budget was so high, I think, that they thought that the only way they could make their money back is if they had Batman or Wonder Woman in it. But that might wreck the atmosphere. But yeah, I'd love to see it get done, and it's a wonderful screenplay, and we'll see. No, listen, it's more than that. It's an amazing book, and I can't recommend it enough.

It's just, it changed the way I felt and thought about this whole thing of these settlers traveling across the country and encountering these Native American tribes. It completely changed my whole perspective of that era in time. Well, the needle sort of swings both ways on this on the question of um on native americans and there as i said there was a there was sort of a school that was dominant um well if you if you actually go back you you have kind of a mid-century impression that you know sort of the indians are all bad and the army is good right the cavalry is riding out right that kind of idea of indians and then

you have the bury my heart at wounded knee which is the needle swinging the other way then these people are victims the army is all evil yeah which wasn't true either um and it kind of swings it swings between one untruth to another untruth but the actual truth is some is somewhere in the middle well you and you do a great job of depicting that. Like you talk about the horrific crimes that particular army people did do. Yeah. Yeah, so there's no, in my book,

objectively speaking, both sides are responsible for atrocities. And one of the things the rangers learned was no quarter. No quarter isn't, if you can imagine all the way into an attack on an indian village as men women and children in it and imagine what no quarter looks like it's not very pretty and that was certainly comanche way of doing things and that was the texas rangers way of doing things when fighting comanche so

yeah you have you have and and any number of great massacres perpetrated against, well, Comanches and other Indian tribes. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. I can't recommend it enough. Well, thank you. Have you thought about writing any other books on Native Americans, or is there any other subjects like this that you'd like to tackle? You know, I would have probably. This book became very successful, and then there was a wave of other books.

There were really not very many books at all before it about this particular Native culture. But then there was a big wave of them right afterward, which inspired by the success of this book. Any good ones? Oh, yeah, yeah. What was Any good ones? Oh, yeah. Yeah. What was a good one?

Let's see. The Center of Everything That Is, The Heart of Everything That Is, which was a version, well, not a version, but it was a kind of doing for the Sioux what this book did. That might have been a choice of mine, for example, would be to go, hey, I'll do the Sioux

and Northern Plains Indians. Won't that be great? But there were some books like that. But The Heart of Everything That Is is a very, I would recommend that one. There was another book actually that came out just before mine called Blood and Thunder that's quite good.

But anyway, it preempted me on some of the choices I might have made. But I'd like to return to it. I've been in the Civil War now for a few years and writing about the Civil War. I have a new book out called Hymns of the Republic about the final year of the war. I wrote a biography of Stonewall Jackson. And so I've been kind of, I took a right turn. Actually, because this book was very successful, I mean, sometimes when you're successful, a window opens and maybe it's never going to open again. And that window, in this case, was that I could maybe do what I wanted to do. And so I picked Stonewall Jackson just because I wanted to do Stonewall Jackson. And so that made me a right angle turn into the Civil War, where I've been for a while.

But I'd love love the answer is i'd love to return to native america well it's a whole genre of film in this country which is so interesting right the west the wild west movies i mean it's a gigantic genre of course clint eastwood and so many other great movies and even the civil war it's like there's so many story what we're trying to tell this insane story of what this country was and what it became and how quickly it all happened yeah it's so hard for us when you you're born me me i was born on the east coast you know you live around cities seems normal and then you start hearing about the west and then you start like as you're growing up you start learning about cowboys and

indians and what happened but you get this sort of weird version of it where i mean in high school they barely taught you anything nothing comprehensive nothing anything remotely touching on your book and then as i got older and i started getting in it more and more, it became this really weird puzzle to me until I read your book. And your book was, I actually listened to it on audio tape, and it was one of the most sort of paradigm shifting. It just completely shifted my perspective on how it happened. Well, I'm glad. I'm glad you experienced it that way i think people

need to hear it was it is it is a bit of i mean i think from my point of view it's a bit of me being too dumb or naive to know any better i mean i just went in as a reporter and reported without any particular agenda not because i'm a noble person but just because i just didn't have any agenda i just reported the book and i thought this is interesting and this is interesting. And just laying that out actually means you're avoiding these sort of ideological extremes of whatever it may be that is painting a picture that isn't quite accurate for some other reason. So, anyway. Has anybody written a good book on Crazy Horse? Not that I can.

Larry McMurtry wrote a pretty good book about Crazy Horse? Not that I can. Larry McMurtry wrote a pretty good book about Crazy Horse, a small volume. I'm trying to remember. There was a book a few years about Crazy Horse. But anyway, the McMurtry book is pretty good. Yeah. So you may go back to this sort of subject. I may, if I could find the if I could find, you know, the right subject.

So, Jack Hayes was something, I could still go back, Jack Hayes was a really interesting guy. Yeah, that seemed like when you were talking about in the book, like this could be a whole other avenue that you could take. I could see going back to Jack Hayes

because he continues to intersect with Native America all through his life. Anyway, so we'll see. Well, just the whole idea of going from a surveyor to protecting surveyors to becoming the original Texas Ranger,

which is one of the, I mean, Texas Rangers, one of the most iconic groups of humans in the history of this country. He was the Uber Ranger. He was the man. He was like 5'8",

5'9", slender, the high voice high voice you know just a bad motherfucker man was he bad and he had all these you know these giant rangers really mean people i mean these were people you did not want to pick the fight with in the western bar you know complete deference yeah well that was what was fascinating about is like they had put together these sort of outcasts and those are the ones that were able to do the job. And not only able, but nobody else would do it. I mean, these were 23-year-old guys who didn't have families

and who just didn't give a shit about anything. They were happy to be out in the field for six months without pay, which was often true. I mean, they often just didn't get paid. They weren't armed. They weren't armed. They weren't paid. They weren't anything. There's just, and they wanted to fight Indians.

I mean, how many 41-year-olds you know want to do that? Not a lot. It's just such a wild group of humans, you know? Yeah, I really do hope you write a book about that. Well, that would be a, I've often thought of of pursuing that one and that gets into other native american areas so well listen man i mean just what just being able to talk about it uh on here i'm hoping that it gives it a boost again well thank you for whatever i'm so glad you like it it uh it it's it's a great subject in it and it it in some ways i think the think the reason I was mainly attracted to it

is it told you what happened in the American West on some level through this one lens, which is pretty cool. You knocked it out of the park, man. Thank you. And thanks for coming here. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Bye, everybody.

Well, that was painless. Thank you. well that was painless thank you