The Joe Rogan Experience - #2058 - Elliott West

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

Elliott West is a historian, author, and professor specializing in the history of the American West. Look for his book "Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion" available now.https://history.uark.edu/directory/faculty.php?uid=ewest

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Hello, sir. Hello. Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it. You're quite welcome. I really enjoyed you on the Meat Eater podcast, and that's why I reached out. And I started reading the book on the Nez Perce, and then I picked this up as well, Continental Reckoning.

That is – that's a hell of a book. It's a big book. That's a big book. How long did it take you to write this? The writing, probably eight to ten years. The research and so forth, more than 20 years, yeah. Wow. Yeah, a long time.

So this is a lifetime of work continental reckoning the american west in the age of expansion one of the most fascinating subjects i think in the history of the human race i mean it is just such it's such an amazing story and such a tragic story and such a crazy story of the amount of change that took place over a relatively short period of time. Yeah, 30 years. Yeah. And how little most people really understand about the actual history of the Native Americans and that. One of the things that was most fascinating about the Mediator podcast was that at the time that Lewis and Clark had come to America,

a hundred years before that, there had been Native Americans that had traveled to France. That's right. And met with the king. That's right. Yep, yep, yep. That's right. In the 1720s, there was a group of Native people from Kansas, Missouri area, and they had been accorded by the French

because the French wanted to expand their fur trade into that area up the Missouri River. So they, and the Spanish had recently suffered a terrible military defeat there in sort of what's today eastern Nebraska. So the French sent this guy named Étienne Bourguement to make contact. He already had contact there.

In fact, he had a son by one of the women in the Missouri tribe. Made contact, made some friends, made some allies, courted them. And then to sort of seal the deal, he took back a delegation of about six Indians. Now, this is from eastern Nebraska. Which tribe was this? There were several tribes. The Missouri tribe, the Illinois tribe, I think some Osage. And they were – he then took them back from there down to Mississippi,

down to New Orleans, and then over across the Atlantic to Le Havre. And then they went by coach from there to Paris. across the Atlantic to Le Havre, and then they went by coach from there to Paris. And they spent several months there in Paris, being fitted by King Louis XV, visiting the Paris Opera, which they said was a great place full of sorcerers.

Sorcerers. Sorcerers. Why did they describe it as sorcerers? I think they figured these people were just sort of transformed for their eyes. They just became somebody else. They're great actors, ofers? I think they figured these people were just sort of transformed for their eyes. They just became somebody else. They're great actors, of course. I think that was it. They saw this famous puppet show on a Pont Neuf bridge, and they said this place was inhabited by small dwarfs.

Wow. They loved it. They were taken to the Corte Fontainebleau. They loved it. They were taken to the Corte Fontainebleau. They showed their expertise at hunting by riding bareback in the water below, you know, the royal woods, naked and bareback, shooting pheasants. Had a great time. A woman who was, in fact, the woman who had born Bergman's child, She married a sergeant in Notre Dame. They had a wonderful time, and the men liked just about everything except the men, the other men,

the French men. They said they were sort of effeminate and sissy, and they said they smelled like alligators. Alligators? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. But this was, you know, this was 1720s. So that's, what, 80 years or something before Lewis and Clark even made it out to that area.

That is so fascinating. Now, what was the language barrier? How did they communicate? Well, there were – Borgbunt himself had lived for years among the Indians and was an expert on the Missouri River. So he was a Frenchman who came over, enlisted in the army, deserted, sort of went native, became a courier de bois, a French mountain man, took up with the Indians, had this child by this woman. So he knew the languages quite well. And there were other – remember these Indians, as you can tell in this story, were very cosmopolitan, very sophisticated.

They knew English, or some of them did. So I think the point to remember is that this – long before our image of Americans coming into this area, there was all sorts of contact between Native peoples and Europeans, all sorts of exchanges. It was really a mixed world, a world that was far more complex, far more interesting, in my opinion, than the usual way that we remember it. To put it into perspective, it's hard for us in 2023 to look back at this time period and really have a context for it. But to put it into perspective, so first Europeans arrive here essentially in the 1400s, right? Peter Robinson Yes. Trevor Burrus The very first. Peter Robinson The very first, very late 1400s. Trevor Burrus So this is 200 plus years after that.

Peter Robinson That's right. Trevor Burrus So we're essentially talking about us thinking about the 1820s. Peter Robinson Yeah. Trevor Burrus Right? Peter Robinson That's right. Trevor Burrus So there was hundreds of years of Europeans slowly making their way across the continental United States. That's right.

Spanish coming up from the south, of course. Cabeza de Vaca. Cabeza de Vaca, 1520s. French coming in quite early up to what's today the northeast, eastern Canada. of the Northeast, Eastern Canada. That had been going on, of course, a long time before the English began their very slow and timid expansion beyond the Appalachians. It's interesting because if you ask the general public about the expansion, they seem to put it into the time period of the 1800s. That's right. But there was so much more going on, hundreds of years of that, which is hard for us to imagine.

Again, it's like us thinking that the 1800s, like 1823 was just yesterday. It wasn't. Trevor Burrus Right. John Pletka Long time ago. So there's hundreds of years. Trevor Burrus Before that. John Pletka Yeah. Trevor Burrus That's right.

And that had been going on slowly. It was sort of a slow simmer of these cultures coming together. And so there are many ways in which the Indians were far more sophisticated and well-traveled, far-traveled, than the Americans who were coming in there. We think, you know, our national myth has it that when Lewis and Clark – this is in, you know, 184, 186 – Lewis and Clark make their way up the Missouri River into the West, that that's sort of the start of the history of the West. Before that, Lewis's famous quote as they left the Mandan villages in 185 says, we're heading up – he compared himself to Columbus. He said, we're heading into this place where the foot of civilized man has never trodden.

Not true. Not true. No. Well, to the best of their knowledge, which is interesting also, right? The amount of information that was available back then. It was so difficult to find out what was going on. Well, sure. Just like today, information is power.

Right. And you don't want to let your imperial rivals know what's out there. You don't want them to know what you know. Right. And you don't want to let your imperial rivals know what's out there. You don't want them to know what you know. Right. So it's these sort of state secrets. So have you read the Cabeza de Baca book, A Strange New Land? Yes, I have. A Land So Strange?

A Land So Strange by Andres Resendiz. Which is a fascinating book because they essentially document the spread of disease without meaning to do it because that is really where it all started from. A lot of it did, yeah. It's a wonderful book, yeah. It's an amazing book. And, you know, they talk about culture. They talk about the Mayas. And there's always been this confusion as to what happened to the Mayas.

But it's probably the same exact thing that happened to 90-plus percent of the Native Americans that contacted smallpox. Maybe. The Mayas declined a good bit before that. But who knows? It's very hard to say. But certainly disease was a very important factor in the conquest of Native peoples and the conquest by Europeans of North America and South America. Is it clearly established that Cabeza de Baco was one of the first Europeans to make it to the continental United States? Or was it possible that others had made it before that but we don't have record of it? He was the first movement to encounter what we know today as the Southwest. He was part of a shipwrecked expedition on the Texas coast. And he and a few others, including a black African slave, Esteban, Stephen, they were the ones who made their way, first enslaved by the Indians.

And then they gradually made their way across the Southwest up to, you know, what is today Arizona, like the Zunis, and then made their way southward into Mexico. Fabulous journey. What a story. It's an insane story. And if you look at the history of the human race across the planet, it's one of the most transformative stories in such a short amount of time where everything changed so rapidly because it coincides with the industrial revolution and all these things happen. And then you have massive cities appearing in these places where there was nothing before. Yeah. That's a bit later. Yeah. But it's all over this period

of a few hundred years, which is such a transformative time period. That's right. If you think of it as sort of a, I think of it as kind of a curve of change or a graph, right? Now, we got to remember all kinds of changes up and down, up and down, before – long before the Europeans came. You know, the rise and fall of civilizations, fantastic stories about that. So there's that. But then the Europeans come into this area, and that line just goes straight up.

And it keeps accelerating. It keeps accelerating. So it's important to remember that change has been going on for 15,000 years in what's today the United States. Interesting changes that I think people don't recognize nearly enough. And they ought to. They ought to. But the pace of that change accelerates at this really astonishing degree. Well, they keep pushing back the date of modern humans in North America as well.

Yeah. You know, it used to be Clovis first and then the discovery of these 22,000-year-old footprints. And now they don't even know. I mean, maybe there's some stuff that we haven't found that predates that considerably. I suspect there is. That's one of these questions that we thought we had answered. But as usual, we hadn't. And that question has been very vigorously argued recently. All sorts of new discoveries in places that we didn't know there were people before until fairly recently, like the Amazon. So all of a sudden we are finding these sites in the Amazon. We have no idea who these people were.

They don't seem to be culturally related to others in South America. Where'd they come from? When did they get there? Yeah, I've discussed this many times with Graham Hancock. And one of the things that he has brought up recently is the use of LIDAR. And through this use of LIDAR, they found these grids and what appears to be irrigation systems and streets and structures and foundations and all of it unexplained. Yeah. And all of it was essentially covered by vast rainforest. Right. Yep.

Until fairly recently. It's really only the last two or three generations that we've begun to even poke our way into that place. Right. To begin to feel this out. begun to even poke our way into that place to begin to feel this out. Theodore Roosevelt's granddaughter, incidentally, was one of the key figures in investigating this. Really? An anthropologist, yeah.

She was? Really? Interesting. Do you think that with the Amazon that we're looking at disease there as well, that it's probably European settlers came or explorers? You mean to explain the – I doubt that. You doubt it? These go way – those ruins seem to go way, way, way back.

I mean thousands of years before the Europeans show up. So there's no explanation for the decline? Like maybe some other diseases or something like that? We don't know. We don't know a whole lot about what diseases were here before the Europeans. But I don't know a whole lot about what diseases were here before the Europeans. But I don't know. I suspect if you look at any civilization, it rises, peaks, collapses. One of the more interesting things that we found was that when you look at the rise of syphilis in Europe,

that some are connecting at least some forms of syphilis to European settlers who had come to America and then gone back to Europe and brought syphilis with them. Yep. That, too, is being argued about right now. But right now, the evidence is quite clear. And we're talking about venereal syphilis now. Syphilis can also be kind of a skin infection. That was there before.

It could also be kind of a skin infection. That was there before. But the first documented cases of syphilis the last time I checked, a very suspicious time, a very suspicious place. It was in Spain in 1493. You know, that's pretty close. It seems circumstantially pretty clear that Columbus's folks brought that back. Another thing, it was also absolutely devastating, which suggests that this is a new disease. It was not one that we had begun to – we'd been around for any length of time. Terrible effects, fatal insanity, fatalities.

So that seems pretty clear. There's also evidence of syphilitic bone damage among native peoples going way back in North America. So I think it's pretty safe to say that. Well, we've talked about it before on this show, but it's really interesting that that's the origin of the term bigwig. Really? Did you know about that? No. Okay, great. I'm going to tell you something. Okay, great. So there was, see if you could find out who these French royals were, but there was these French royals who contacted syphilis. They started losing their hair. And so they started wearing these, they put these beautiful wigs on. And the more money you had, the bigger your wig was.

And it became, because the syphilis had just run rampant through this population. So many people were losing their hair and they would get these holes in their face, sores. It was really horrific. So these are the gentlemen. Samuel, how do you say his name? Papais? How would you say that? Peeps. Pe these are the gentlemen. Samuel, how do you say his name? Papais? How would you say that? Peeps.

Peeps. Peeps. Yeah. So at the time, hair loss was a one-way ticket to public embarrassment. Long hair was a trendy status symbol, and a bald dome could stain any reputation. Well, Samuel Peeps' brother acquired syphilis. The diarist wrote, if my brother lives, he will not be able to show his head, which would be a very great shame to me. Hair was that big of a deal. And so the syphilis outbreak sparked a surge in wig making

Victims hid their baldness as well as their bloody sores that scored Scoured their faces with wigs made of horse goat or human hair Perukes were also coated with powder Scented with lavender or orange to hide any funky aromas. Although common wigs were not exactly stylish, they were a shameful necessity. That changed in 1655 when the king of France started losing his hair. And so these guys started wearing wigs, and everybody started wearing wigs, and the bigger your wig was, the more famous and rich and established you were. So the term big wigs.

So you're a big wig. Yeah. Isn't that wild? you're a bigwig. Yeah. Isn't that wild? That's a wonderful story. Because, I mean, I heard about that when I was a kid. Oh, he's a bigwig. Like, that had made it to the 1980s. Yeah, absolutely.

I think you and I should look into this. No, I'm good. I like being bald. Me too. It's comfortable. It's so easy. You don't have to talk to barbers. Shave your head yourself.

I enjoy it. And I have a good shaped head, so I'm lucky. Some too. It's comfortable. It's so easy. You don't have to talk to barbers. Shave your head yourself. I enjoy it. That's me. And I have a good shaped head, so I'm lucky. Some people have some funky heads. So you got a good head too. Thank you so much. So that is part of the story is this exchange of disease and the lack of immunity and how much of a devastating effect this had on the North Americans who did encounter the Europeans.

That's right. That's right. And that's very well established now. Now we're coming to understand that in a more sophisticated way now. For instance, it's not quite true that Indians had no immunity to it or that our immunity protected us when we went there. It's more typically a case of these diseases like smallpox, for example. If you got it as a child, it's like measles today or mumps or chickenpox. You want your kids to get those because then they're immune.

You know, you want your kids to get those because then they're immune. And later on, it's a much more devastating disease if you get it as an adult, as a grown-up. Do we know why? You know, I'm not at all sure. I think it's because when you're young like that, you can deal with it more effectively. I'm not sure. But it is a case, especially viruses like smallpox. You then gain lifetime immunity.

So what probably was going on was that smallpox was so common in Europe that the Europeans who came over here had likely had it when they were kids. And so it wasn't that they had genetic immunity to it. Right. They had previous exposure. Right. Also the fact that, especially later on, when time passes, the greater mortality rate among Indians was because of the general degeneration of their condition. Just like when we see in COVID, you know, people who are the poorest,

people who have the least medical care, people who are – they're the ones who are most vulnerable. The oldest. Yeah. Right. Ones with mortality or comorbidities. Yeah. But what's absolutely incontestable is that the effect of diseases on Indian peoples was absolutely catastrophic. And it goes a long way toward explaining how the Europeans were able to take control of the continent as quickly as they did.

Yeah, there's some estimations that 90 percent of the Native Americans died from disease. That's right. Well, the population declined by as much as 90 or even 94 percent. Disease is an important factor. But think of it now. If smallpox hits an Indian village, let's say, in the Dakotas, it kills, unlike other diseases, smallpox is sort of democratic in the sense that it kills all ages. It kills the most productive. It kills the hunters. It kills all ages. It kills the most productive.

It kills the hunters. It kills the mothers who are nursing their children. So these secondary effects of that kind of loss, what would happen if Austin, Texas lost 40% of its people? And the other 60% may survive, but not for long. The whole system, everything collapses. So it's an absolutely devastating effect when you have those kinds of epidemics. So you have this kind of epidemic, and then you have this rush of human beings that have come over from Europe. And have they come over? What was the primary motivation for them coming over here? Was it to seek a better life? Was it gold mining, silver mining? What was the first initial wave? Richard Wagner There are various answers, various answers

to that. Keep in mind, these were all initially at least imperial enterprises. It wasn't just Frenchmen coming over. It was the French government trying to establish an empire there that they could profit from. The Spanish, same thing. Now, when the English came over, theirs was a combination of governmental ambition and a business enterprise. But in any case, this was all being directed by others in Europe for their own ends, not the ones who were coming over. But they were there. They were trying to do it for their own purposes. Then that raises the question, so the ones who came over, why were they there?

And I think the most common answer is the one you suggested, better lives. I think the most common answer is the one you suggested, better lives. You've got to remember, in Europe, especially places like England, land was very scarce. So the possibility of somebody being born into the peasantry or being born on the lower ranks, the possibility of them acquiring land was beyond remote. And then somebody says, okay, if you'll just go across the Atlantic, we'll give you land. We'll give you a new start. And that's very seductive. It's fascinating because that pessimism seems to still be prevalent in a lot of English people. English people, this pessimism as far as like your ability to improve your lifestyle.

Yeah. You know, I have many English friends that have come over here and say the attitude in America is that like you can go out and you can forge your own path, you could do things. But in England, there's this like, they're very dismissive of that. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's something to that, yeah. There is that sort of American spirit. But the kind of people that would take that kind of chance to get on a boat and go across the ocean with no photographs to look at?

I mean, what did they have? A sketch that someone, a story, a tale, a pile of gold that someone had brought back? Well, they had accounts. They had lies being told to them. A lot of lies. A lot of lies. What were the big lies? The big lies? Oh, that you would prosper instantly.

There was a very healthy place. A great place to raise a family. The usual ones. But again, they were promoters. They were imperial promoters. They were private promoters. The first English colonies, Jamestown and then Plymouth and then Massachusetts Bay. Those were all businesses.

They were corporations. It was like Walmart establishing a colony on the moon or something. So they're promoting it. They're trying to persuade people to go over there to develop it, to raise tobacco, to give them their profits. So a huge promotional scheme. profits. So huge promotional scheme. Yeah, just the kind of human that did that really sort of establishes the ethic of what it means to be an American, because these are wild, risk-taking people. And these are the people that essentially first established America, or as far as Europeans. You have to be a wild person to take that kind of a

chance. It's a big chance. But of course, it's always balanced between what appears to be a dead-end life from where they were. All immigration is sort of a push and a pull. Right. That's the motivation. America had a great pull, but they're also being pushed. It's also extraordinary that there was this enormous continent, far bigger than Europe, that was available, that you could go there and establish a new life to. I mean, what a marketing promotion. Oh, yeah. Imagine it now.

I'm retired now, but what I used to tell tell my classes, imagine that suddenly the news hits that there is another universe that we didn't know was there. And number two, you could go there. You could actually go there. Yeah. What an idea. Yeah, what a crazy there. Yeah. What an idea. Yeah, what a crazy idea. Yeah, my family came over here in the 1920s from both sides. And they came over from Europe with this idea that, you know, America was better than what was available in Italy and Ireland.

And, you know, that was something that had already been really pretty well established. Go 100 years earlier than that, 200 years earlier than that. These are incredible risks that these people took. Yeah. Yeah. They were. And you have to sort of marvel at it at the same time. Ask yourself, would you do that?

You know, I don't think so. Yeah. We can look at it from that perspective, marvel at it. But man, from the perspective of the natives that lived here, what a horrific invasion and what a devastating effect it had on their way of life, their culture, and how much is missing from their cultural memory because of this devastation of 90% of their population. Yeah. Except for the Black Death, this was the most horrific thing that has ever happened in recorded human history to Indian peoples in the New World. Nothing remotely approaches it except the Black Death, except the bubonic plague. And even then, when you consider it, when you track it over time, bubonic plague, of course, came in waves, occasional waves. If you look at this as one story over 400 years, it's by itself, nothing like it.

Well, it's not only by itself for human beings, but it's also by itself for native wildlife, which is another incredible aspect of this story of American expansion. I watched the Ken Burns documentary on the American buffalo, and you were in that as well. And in that, as well as Steve Rinella. And that is, that is a crazy story that no wildlife in this country can it can survive being a commodity and it might survive but it's gonna have a real tough time that's right barely yeah I mean we had to put the brakes on it in order for it to survive and we're able to put the brakes on it because it was no longer profitable. As long as it's a profitable commodity.

Yeah. It's in real trouble. But that also contributed to the demise of Native Americans. Of course. Particularly the ones who hunted the buffalo. That's right. Not just the buffalo. the most dramatic example of dozens, scores of species of animals in the New World, in North America,

that were driven either to extinction completely or really close to it. Dan Flores, I think he's been on your show. Yes, a couple times. Dan has this marvelous new book, A Wild New World, that goes into that in some detail and describes it. As I remember from the book, Dan says that at no point in modern history have so many different species been eradicated so quickly. So quickly. Yeah. And, of course, you made the essential point. So quickly.

Yeah. And, of course, you made the essential point. What that is, it's not just that they're being hunted and exploited for the profit of people who are coming into. That's really part of an even larger process that is the complete transformation of a world. That's one of the things that I try to emphasize in this book. Between 1850 and 1880, the western third of North America was literally remade. Ecologically, not just culturally, socially. Ecologically. Ecologically, it was made over into a new world.

And that world, of course, was not one that native peoples knew how to work. Their existence relied on them being able, relied on centuries of knowledge gained from this intricate understanding and use, sort of choreographed life of this place, relying upon its resources. Animals, also plants, of course, crops and so forth. And the Europeans come in and they just transform it. Quickly. Very quickly, very quickly. So what are you going to do? That is what defeated the Indians.

It wasn't the military. It was this transformation of their world into another, one world into another, in which they didn't fit. So they simply had no choice but to do what they were told, if they're going to live. aspect of it, that they were hunting them for their tongues, they were hunting them for their hides. But there was also, it seems like there was a motivation to remove the Native Americans' ability to sustain themselves. Or was that a, just a peripheral, was that like? It's a little complicated, as usual. You're talking about two things here. Yes. When you're talking about the – I think it's fair to say that Indian peoples had their own hand in this.

What's buffalo robes? That is you take usually a cow hide and you process, you scrape it out and you work it into a robe. and you process, you scrape it out, and you work it into a robe. Those became quite popular in the East, in England, and in Europe. Sort of this exotic thing to have in your house. You put it on the wall, or you make it into a rug, or you use it as a—you're out in a carriage in the winter. You would have these things. It was something that was interesting, something that was all of a sudden, it was a fashion, kind of a fad.

And suddenly there was this great market for these things for Indian hunters, native hunters. They've been killing bison, of course, for their own uses. But now they would do both that and for their hides, which they could turn into robes, which would give them this unprecedented affluence. It was this business boom among them. And also warmth and the ability to sustain during winter. Sure. Well, I mean, they had always used it for that.

Now, it was a commodity. When did that shift? And what caused that shift? That was in the 1820s is when it really booms. Suddenly, there's this exotic thing that you can get from the American West that's kind of cool to have. So that's in the 1820s. And it's a huge trade. Hundreds of thousands of robes are sent down the Missouri and the Mississippi, down to be marketed out of New Orleans and to be sent east.

That had an early effect on the decline of the bison population. In my own research and work on this, I think that something close to a half of the bison population at its peak is explained by that sort of hunting and other kinds of ecological and environmental changes that were going on in the West. So long before the hide hunters, those white hide hunters went out there and started killing them, Indians were killing them, And essentially for the same reason. In other words, Indians themselves became caught up in this commodification, caught up in this international trade.

And they began to feel the effects of it. By the 1850s, there was this noticeable shortage, decline of bison populations. So they're already under pressure. there's this noticeable shortage, decline of bison population. So they're already under pressure. And then, and then, somebody figures out, 1872, we know exactly the year, 1872, somebody figures out that you can take a bison hide and you can turn it into industrial leather. In the 1870s, there was a worldwide leather shortage. The reason was industry.

Factories needed leather for gaskets for these machines, belts and these things. A huge demand for it, both here and in England and in Europe. Most of that leather had been coming from Argentina, the huge herds in Argentina. But they were about tapped out. So there's this huge demand. There's this big, pressing economic question. How? Where is the leather going to come from?

There's hundreds of new factories being built all the time, right? Suddenly somebody figures out, buffaloes. Wow. They can give it. So the buffalo got it from both sides. That's right. Have you read Dan Flores' work on the reason why there was these immense buffalo herds in the first place? Sure. He believes that with the decline of the Native American population

because of disease, that led to an unprecedented rise in the buffalo. And that when the Europeans came and saw these millions of buffalo on the plain, that this was not normal. That this was something akin to, like, if you go to populations like in my neighborhood. My neighborhood is overrun with white-tailed deer. It's crazy how many of them there are. And white-tailed deer at one point in time were on the verge of extinction in the United States. That's right.

Because of market hunting. That's right. But that he says that he believes that this insane number of bison that people at first witnessed, that this was because the Native Americans had declined so much there was no pressure on them. Yeah. That's a good argument. I think it's very hard to prove. But Dan and I have had that conversation before. And I think there might well be something to it.

You know, the classic thing. Like Yellowstone, you know, you get rid of the wolves, the elk population booms. Right. Right. Yeah. You get rid of predators, the beaver population booms. And all of a sudden, all the creeks are dammed and every man's foot is a horse. Yes.

Yeah. So it's, yeah, it's this extraordinarily intricate relationship and connection that we have with the world around us. And you mess with any one part of it and the rest of it's going to change. And human beings love to mess with things. We do, especially. Yeah, we do, especially when we came to a place that we didn't really have an understanding of that horses originated from North America, but were wiped out, but had already been transferred to Europe and to other parts of the world, and then were reintroduced when Europeans came here. What year was that when that started happening?

Well, you're right, of course. They evolved in the southern plains over 50 million years from a critter called a hyracotherium, which is about the size of a collie, into the modern horse. That took millions of years. And fairly late in that story, that is to say only two or three million years ago, they migrated along with all kinds of other animals. Camels, for example, evolved alongside horses. That's crazy. In the southwest. And they made that trip, you know, over Beringia, over the land bridge there. Bering Strait.

Yeah. Into what was the largest pasture on earth, you know, Central Asia. And their population exploded. And there they continued to evolve. They became zebras headed south into Africa. That is crazy. They became, you know, asses. So all the equids evolved from those horses coming out of New Mexico. That is so crazy that zebras came out of New Mexico.

Pushing far back enough. That's right. Pushing far back enough. That's right. Wow. So they boomed over there. But, you know, at the end of the last ice age, during the Wisconsin, at the end of the Wisconsin glaciation, the world changes.

We're going through kind of a climate change, as we have today, warming. And that changes the ecology completely. And all kinds of animals, especially in North America, became extinct. Dozens of species became extinct. It's like 65% of all North American large megafauna. Yeah, yep, yep. We had an American lion.

We had, of course, the saber-toothed tiger, the simuladon. American cheetah. The American cheetah. Yeah. We had armadillos the size of Volkswagen Bugs. Really? Up until when? With this extinction.

Wow. So 12,000, 13,000 years ago, there was giant armadillos. That's right. That's right. Wow. So, you know, they would run over cars. The cars didn't run over them. Wow.

And, you know, the list just goes on and on. All of these animals suddenly disappeared because of this – partly because of this ecological change. Now, there's an argument that it wasn't just that. The question is, okay, the lion goes extinct in America. It didn't go extinct in Africa. Horses go extinct in America. They didn't go extinct over there. But it was a global change.

So what's the difference? The argument is people. People by that point had just been able to make their way over in the other direction. You know, Beringia was a two-way street, a two-way highway. And there were animals coming over from Asia at the same time that American animals were going over in the other directions. Buffaloes, bison evolved in the old world, and then they came over here. Where did they originate from? Central Asia.

Wow. Yeah. And also parts of Europe. There was an animal called a orac that was a descendant also of them. Were they just as furry? Did they look similar? Who knows? Who knows?

Maybe they changed and evolved. And they were quite different from the ones today. Were they just as furry? Did they look similar? Who knows? Who knows? Maybe they changed and evolved. They were quite different from the ones today. The ones that came over that dominated were called bison antiquus or bison latifrons. They were much larger, much larger. Bison antiquus, if you can imagine one now, the you know, the horn spread just like ours do. The horn spread of a bison antiquus was great enough that LeBron James could lie down between the tips of the horns and not touch either one. So there were these gigantic bison. They became extinct and they were then succeeded. They were then

replaced by or followed by our bison, bison bison, Americanus. Have you ever read into the Younger Dryas Impact Theory? Into the what now? Younger Dryas Impact Theory. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Randall Carlson has been on my podcast multiple times. He's a proponent of that. And there's a lot of scientific evidence in terms of core samples and micro diamonds that seem to indicate that around 11,800 years ago, North America and a good 30% of the world was hit when we passed through a comet shower.

And that that was the end of the ice age and that it happened not just then, but it happened another time, somewhere in the 10,000 range. And that that was what melted almost instantaneously most of the North American ice cap that covered half the continent and miles of ice and all that. And that he thinks that that was the origin of the mass extinction along with human beings. Yeah. There was a combination of those two things. Yeah.

I've heard that idea, but I don't, frankly, don't know enough about it. I'm trying to bring Randall together with someone who is an expert, like Dan Flores. Yeah. I'd love to bring Randall and Dan Flores together so they can sort of compare notes. Sure. Because both of them are working on the same problem from different angles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's a fascinating one.

And it has to do, of course, with what we were talking about a little earlier. Human groups, right, people who are here, what effect did that have on them? Yeah. Does that explain some of these sudden declines of populations? Don't know. Don't know. Well, it's so interesting that we still have some animals left over, like the pronghorn antelope that moves at speeds that don't make any sense considering the predators that are available for it. They're so much faster than everything else because they had to evade

the North American cheetah. That's right. Yep. Yeah, there's a wonderful book called Ghosts of Extinction. And that's exactly, exactly along those lines. Also, you know, pronghorns can't jump fences. Right. They go under them. Or they go under them or try to go through them, but they can't go over them. And that's because no fences back then.

Right. Yeah, pretty wild. They're faster than hell. You know, they can outrun a lion, but they can't jump a fence. You would think that something that could run that fast could also jump. You'd think. Do you think if you gave them another million years, they'd figure out how to jump fences? I feel pretty confident they would. Because white-tailed deer do it like they're born to do it.

Right. Like a fence to them is just like stepping over a branch. Oh, I know. We have a place out in the hills in Arkansas, and we've got, like you said, they're overrun with deer. Yeah. There's a place called Catalina Island in California where what they're trying to do now is use snipers and helicopters to wipe out the deer population. No kidding. Yeah, because, well, they're on an island, and there's no predators, which is a shame. It's a horrible shame. They starve.

Yeah. They starve, diseases, CWD. There's a lot of different diseases that they can get hit with because of this overpopulation. Yeah. And of course, that's the kind of context that you could put in the decline of native peoples here. What we're doing is messing with the ecological arrangement in ways that make it impossible for certain animals that have adapted to that to survive. The difference, of course, is that Indians are human beings and human beings have the imagination to imagine a different way and to respond to it in ways that others can't. One of the more fascinating and horrific aspects of the story of the decline of the native population in America is that they had this incredibly unique lifestyle that really wasn't – it wasn't available anywhere else in the world at that time. Most of the rest of Europe and Asia had sort of changed and moved to agriculture and moved to cities. And these people had these immense tribes, super sophisticated hunter-gatherer civilizations that lived in symbiosis with the land. And to us, people that sort of understand how horrible it is that that's happened,

we have this incredible romantic attachment to Native Americans. Yeah. Yes, a lot of ways we do. Now, there was, of course, agriculture here. Yes. And what's today the United States in the East, highly sophisticated forms of agriculture growing a variety of States in the East, highly sophisticated forms of agriculture, growing a variety of crops in the Southwest, relying especially on corn. But you're right, a good part of what's today the United States, especially the West, were hunter-gatherer

peoples and fishers. They had figured out these ways to, these sort of incredibly complicated and complex practiced ways of moving through their year, month by month, week by week, in ways that they had practiced and learned about over many generations that allowed them really a remarkably high standard of living. Now there were not large tribes. One of the limitations of a hunter-gatherer society is you cannot expand in numbers beyond a certain limit, about 125. You know, that's a...get bigger than that you really can't support it. So what you had was this extraordinary splay, this extraordinary variety of peoples, you know, hundreds, hundreds of different Native groups. Today, there are 530 federally recognized tribes in the United States. And that's just, those are the ones who have survived, And that's just – those are the ones who have survived physically and culturally. So there's this remarkable array of peoples, many of them speaking different languages or different dialects, all of them in contact with the others in these very intricate trade relationships. It was quite a place. And you're right. It was quite a place, you know. And you're right, it flies dramatically in the face of what we think was going on back then, this romanticized, simplistic view

of the Indian, right? They're just like this one group of people. right? They're just like this one group of people. It's also so interesting that that number of 125 people aligns with what we know as Dunbar's number. That's exactly right. That's where it comes from. So you're aware of that. Yeah. Wonderful book. Yeah. Yeah. Dunbar's number, meaning that we have in our mind the ability to hold a relationship with a certain number of people intimately. And then as it spreads out further, we can know some people sort of. We kind of know of them. But there's just a small group that would be your family, a larger group that would be your tribe, and then there's neighboring tribes.

That's right. That's right. It's a fascinating idea. It is fascinating because it shows a hard drive. We have a mental hard drive that's sort of designed. Yeah, we do, yeah. He uses – it's a great book. He uses the idea of gossip, the maximum number in which gossip really affects you, right? You can't get above about 125 for – what the hell? I don't care.

Well, it is interesting because it seems like there's a biological, maybe an evolutionary reason for gossip. Of course. Yeah. Yeah, sure. And in those societies, it played a very important role because these groups typically had nothing remotely like our system of authority. Essentially, nobody was in charge. Along many Western groups, no person in a particular band

could tell another person to do anything. No one had that kind of authority. So how do they stop people from going nuts, doing horrible things. It's the group's or the band's opinion of you. You're shamed.

They have they would often have these characters sort of like town criers. You know, somebody would do something awful and he'd walk through the camp yelling about this guy. Oh, wow. So with that, of course, it's just sort of gossip on a grand scale. Right.

Someone's hiding food. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Someone's being greedy. And what's interesting also about Dunbar, I'm sure you remember this from his book, when you get down below 125, smaller groups, there's also groups in which there's a certain intimacy where you can absolutely trust these people, right?

Right. What's that number? Twelve. Twelve. Think of it, twelve jurors. Right. Twelve disciples. Right.

Yeah. Eleven in a football team. Yeah. Close to it. Right. Twelve disciples. Right. Yeah. Eleven in a football team. Yeah. Close to it. Right. You know, that's a smaller group that works because everybody knows everybody else. Everybody is, you can rely on each other, you know. So, yeah.

And like you say, it's hard work. Yeah. It's how we work. Well, that's one of the things that's fascinating about things like the Battle at Little Bighorn because the Native American groups had figured out, listen, we got to get together. The only way we're going to stop these invaders is if we band together and form a much larger group. Dr. Yeah. Now, those are the tribes. Most importantly, they're the Lakota of the Western Sioux and the Northern Cheyenne. They were all, again, composed of bands. There was no tribe in the sense that we're thinking of. All of them broke down into these smaller units. And they recognized a kinship.

They spoke the same or common or highly related languages and so forth. They intermarried a lot, sort of binding them together. But about that time, as you say, about the time of 1876, 1870s, there was this realization, you know, we got a real problem here. We got a real problem here. And the best shot we have is for us to overcome these, to forge a sense of common identity and a common purpose. and a common purpose. It's a kind of rise of what you might call nationalism,

a kind of a Sioux, Cheyenne nationalism. And that's new. That's new. That wasn't there before. So they're evolving. They're evolving in their understanding. They're evolving in how they think about it themselves. It's this world in constant motion and change and what I what fascinated me about this and this in this book was how complex it was and how fast it was and how completely

far-reaching it was everything changes quickly Yeah. One of the fascinating stories about Little Bighorn was that this band, this banding together of all these natives didn't last. They were very effective, this one battle, very quickly. They said that the battle, what did they say the battle lasted somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes? Well, sort of the height of it, you know, where Custer's part. That's probably about that or maybe a little longer. Which is crazy. Now, the battle itself, of course, a larger battle lasted much longer or more than a day, about two days. Part of the command under Reno retreated to this hill and was besieged and held under siege for a day and a half.

But you're right. And then, you know, that's a great victory. The problem is you know what's going to happen, right? You know what's going to happen. They? You know what's going to happen. They knew the retaliation was coming. Yep, yep, big time. You've got to remember now, when did this happen? It was 1876. The battle itself was on June 25th, 1876.

Like I say, they were under siege there for two or three days. Like I say, they were under siege there for two or three days. It was another few days before the first other group of the army, of the cavalry, arrived. Then they had to spend a few days taking care of the wounded, doing what they can. Then they took the survivors to the Missouri River to get on a steamboat to head down to Bismarck. And it was at that point that the news began to travel about this unprecedented defeat by American forces. So the battles on June 25th put all those days together. When do you think the first news arrived of this catastrophe? July 4th.

July 4th, 1876, the 100th anniversary of the approval of the Declaration of Independence, our 100th birthday. News arrives of this crushing of Custer. The nation, the military was not going to let that stand. So this was part of the reasons there was this extraordinary effort to destroy these people. So they very quickly broke up into these constituent bands and tried to get away as best they could. And less than a year, they were defeated. And you talk about what happened after that in your other book on the Nez Perce, The Last Indian War. Yeah, right. That was the next year, 1877. The Nez Perce were this extraordinary people in the Pacific Northwest.

They were from Idaho, from eastern Oregon. They, too, composed of these different bands gathered together in this one common identity, the Nimiipuu, which means the real people. And they were completely at peace with the whites. In fact, Lewis and Clark had been the first Americans, the first white people that they had ever seen. Lewis and Clark came over Lolo Pass down in there. They were starving. And the Nez Perce took them in, saved them, helped them get some horses and canoes to keep on their way. And on the way back, Lewis and Clark stayed with them more

than a month. And they formed, in the eyes of the Nez Perce, they formed this alliance with the Americans. And they swore. From this time on, we're friends. We're allies. You help us when we fight. We'll help you when you fight. And that was in 1806. They kept that promise from 1806 until 1877.

Wow. As their land was being overrun, as these appalling treaties were being forced upon them, they kept their word. And then finally in 1877, the government said, okay, that's enough. You've got to come into this reservation. The government said, okay, that's enough. You've got to come into this reservation. And the ones who were living off of it had to then, within one month, within a month, they had to pack up everything. They had to leave their homeland that they had known for generations. They had to cross the Snake River at its highest point,

somehow get their families, you know, women, children, kids, old folks, across this river to gather, to go into this reservation. End of a way of life. Even though the treaty that required them to do that was a fraud. And on the eve, literally the day before they were to go on to the reservation, to be forced on to the reservation, these young men sort of snapped. And these young men took off and killed a bunch of white folks that they had grudges against.

men took off and killed a bunch of white folks that they had grudges against. That then triggered this war, triggered this larger outbreak against whites. That then, of course, brought the army in, and the army tried to put this down. But as I researched that book, the question that kept coming back to me was, why? Why did they do that? Because at the time of the war, they were completely at peace with the Americans around them. They had adapted beautifully. They were prosperous cattlemen. They were raising cattle, you know? They had silver tea sets, for Pete's sake. They were more prosperous than the whites who were living in the area. They threatened no one. They were living on

lands that the whites didn't want. Why then? Why force them in? What's the reason? And the only reason I can think of was the Little Bighorn. This year before this humiliating defeat at the hands of the Lakotas and the Cheyennes, with that, the government said, okay, that's it. Everybody, even our best friends, have to give up. And they have to come in into reservations where we will control them. They'll control them and they'll force Christianity on them as well. Have you seen Taylor Sheridan's series 1923? It's a prequel to Yellowstone. Have you ever watched any of those shows?

No. Really good shows? No. Really good show. But one of the things that 1923 documents, it stars Harrison Ford, and so it's very interesting, but it documents these women that are forced from their tribe to go into these schools

where Christianity is forced upon them, they're beaten and treated horrifically. It's very hard to watch because you know that that is what happened. Of course, yeah. The boarding schools. That goes way back before 1923. By 23, it's sort of winding down. But yeah, all sorts of, of course, scandalous news recently in the past year or two about the kinds of treatment that came out of those schools. Here in Canada, the same sort of thing is being revealed in Canada about the abuses under those schools.

It's not just Christianity that's being forced on. They are required to speak only English. They're punished if they speak their own languages. They give up their appearance, cut their hair, dress in a certain way. Now there's a wonderful irony in that show.

I said a moment ago most people, most of the public think of the Indian as if there's one group of people. Right. The Indian. Native peoples, of course, didn't think at all like that.

They identified with tribal groups. They identified with the band within the tribal groups. Often at odds with each other. They've been fighting each other like everybody fights everybody else in history. So their identity was, you know, when you say, what are you? They would say, well, I'm a Cheyenne. I'm a Comanche. You know, I'm a Tlingit.

You know, I'm a whatever. I belong to this guy's band. So the idea of the Indian was completely foreign to them until boarding schools. And all of a sudden in boarding schools, all the kids, all the young people are taken, required to go to these schools. All of these different groups, they're all living together. They're all forced to surrender much of their own individual cultures, those dozens of different cultures that they had come from. And suddenly it begins to dawn on them. They're now all speaking the same language, right? They're all – you know, we've got much more in common than we have differences among us. So there's a way in which – the supposed

purpose of a boarding school was to destroy Indian-ness. The famous phrase coming from Colonel Pratt, who was the one who founded Carlisle, was kill the Indian to save the man. Destroy Indian identity in order to allow these people to survive in the modern world. Wow. But what the Rodeo schools did was did was in fact create the Indian. They didn't kill the Indian. The Indian didn't exist before that. It created this sense of common identity. This sense of, okay,

we may be Comanche, we may be Cheyenne, we may be Lakota, we may be Tlingit or whatever, but we all have this common problem that we're facing, these common difficulties. So we need to think in terms of the Indian to bond together, just like on a smaller scale when these bands decide to join and unite in order to fight the military. Now on this much larger continental scale,

Indians from all over, native peoples from all over the nation, now begin to see that they are related, related in their circumstances, not by blood. So the Indian was created, not killed, in the boarding schools. That's fascinating. When they initially tried to move the natives to reservations, how did they – were they doing it because where the natives were, there was valuable resources? Were they doing it because geographically they could control them better in these regions? Like what was the motivation initially? It was all of that, yeah.

Certainly they were – especially when they're in particular places that are very rich in resources. Great examples, of course, were mining rushes. These people who were, again, hunter-gatherers living in some place, this remote mountain area in California or Arizona or wherever. or Arizona or wherever, suddenly they're overrun by these people coming in, overrun because they are living on some of the richest places in the nation. So you got to get rid of them, right? But there's also the reason this is a way to control them and to – in the eyes of the government to transform them. Put them on these reservations and you can turn them into the kind of people that you want them to be.

Make them American. That's what – so it was both of those things together. Trevor Burrus Which is historically – when we look back at it now, it's like one of the most horrific aspects of it that we just try to eliminate them and just integrate them into our culture. Right. That was always the formal government goal. It wasn't simply give them a place to live the way they live. It was not.

No. Virtually no one was saying that. Jeez. No one was saying that. Even the people who were called – it's sort of a formal term, Friends of the Indians. They were an organization called the Friends of the Indians. And they were honestly in their own hearts. They thought that they were doing what was necessary for the best for these people. But this was – they said the only way we can do that, the only way that these people can be saved is to transform them into people like us, to make them into our – to integrate them into our culture. And that depended on really basically three things.

It depended on really basically three things. It was they had to become farmers because, you know, from the beginning in this country, you know, that's sort of the ideal life. That's how you begin your integration into the American economy, farming, you know, the Jeffersonian vision, you know, of the ideal farmer. They got to be Christian. They got to have this common religion and education. We've got to take their young people, and we've got to put them in schools where they will be not only learn the basics of the three R's and so forth, but they'll be culturally educated. They will be culturally transformed. So these boarding schools were

meant to transform these people into Americans. So yeah. So you often hear the term genocide thrown around. And there are times in American history when that was absolutely true, when there was an effort to simply eradicate Indian peoples. But the whole reservation system was not meant for that. Sometimes it turned out that way. But the purpose of it was this control and transformation. That's what was supposed to happen. And then when that happened, once that was done, then the reservations would be done away with. Everybody would live in harmony. Wow. It didn't happen, of course.

Of course. It had to be so confusing to them what the resources were that the white man wanted, too. Because they're like, why do you want gold you can't eat it you can't use it as a weapon yeah so strange it is in a lot of ways it is you know gold as you said it's virtually useless it's it's very soft right yeah so you can't make it into a what a strange thing to be the most valuable of all commodities. It's really shiny. How bizarre that so many parts of the world had agreed upon that. That's right.

It's just cross-culturally across hundreds of years. The Egyptians, you know. Egyptians called gold the breath of God. The Aztec consider it God's scant. This is the excrement of the gods. So strange. So strange, yeah. Now, it's not true, I think, that once – there's some really interesting works going on right

now by a historian named Benjamin Badley who is studying in California. Who is studying in California. In the gold rush, there were Indians who said, oh, they're going to give me much stuff for this stuff. Of course. And so they went to work and there were hundreds of Indians who were in the gold fields before the 49ers came. Really? Yeah. That was another interesting thing about your discussion with Steve Rinell, that we think of the 49ers as the miners, but there was 48ers.

That's right. And they were from a variety of different countries. That's right. Tasmania. Australia. Australia. Yeah. Wild.

All parts of Asia. Yeah. Remember, the gold was discovered in the American River on January 24th, 1848. So, you know, three weeks into 1848. The word then began to leak out, made it to San Francisco, and slowly, Greg, this is now 1848, so it takes a long time for news to get from California to the east. How did it primarily get there? Well, there was traffic back and forth, but it's very slow, overland trails, overland states, so forth. Months and months. Months and months. And when it came

to the East, a lot of people said, oh, come on. One more rumor about the riches in the West and so forth. So it wasn't until December 4th, 1848, when the President, James Polk, in his annual message to Congress said, yep, it's true. It's true. They found gold out there, and there's a lot of it. A lot of it. And people are making thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars out there. But the point here is that from January 1848, when gold was discovered,

to the end of 1848, nobody in the East really either knew about this, there were rumors, or believed it. So that's why we call the gold rushers 49ers, because it's the next year that they go out there in these extraordinary numbers. But the question then is what was happening out there at the time, right? What was happening is we had the 48ers, people from Oregon, people from Australia, people from Tasmania, people from the first Chinese ever coming over, especially people from the south. Sonorans, people coming from Mexico, Peruvians, Chileans. So when the 49ers get out there, the Americans get out there, and they look around, They say, who are these people digging our gold?

So it's what I call in the book the second conquest of California, the first, of course, in the War with Mexico. But then suddenly, you know, this is the richest place on earth, quite literally, at that time. is the richest place on earth, quite literally, at that time. And it's being, the gold there is being mined by these people that we considered non-Americans, right? So we gotta get rid of them. Indians, right? The rest of them, there's this, what's called the Chile War, in which Chileans are driven out of the islands.

So these people are either driven out completely or they're confined to the edges while the 49ers take over, including, of course, the Indians. This is what triggered the greatest, one of the few cases in which this is clearly genocide, in which there was a concerted, formal effort to eradicate Indian peoples who were on these gold fields. The California legislature funded bond issues to pay for militias to go kill Indians. Congress reimbursed California, the legislature, to pay for those expeditions. It was Ben Madley who wrote the book on this. It's called The Killing Machine.

One of the few times in American history when we could say absolutely, yes, this was attempted genocide. And it was specifically because of the commodity of gold? Sure, of course. Wow. Of course, yeah. You've got to remember this was by far the richest gold discovery in human history up until that time. up until that time. More gold was mined in California in one year, 1852,

than had been mined across the world in the entire 18th century. One year. Wow. There's a story from the fellow who was the head of the San Francisco Mint. It was established in the mid-1850s. He said that at one time they were processing so much gold in that mint that the furnaces couldn't handle it.

And they discovered, to their horror, that gold dust was being blown out of the smokestacks. Wow. And settling on the area around there. So they had to send out people for like a quarter mile around the mint to sweep up the gold. And sift through it. On the roofs. Wow. The gilded rooftops, you know.

Wow. So this is a lot of gold. That's insane. And one result of that was that California, of course, gets this instant population. It never goes through a territorial period. It just goes straight to statehood because there's so many people, right? Well, historically, if the Indians were getting much of a protection, it came from the federal government. Well, the federal government has – it's not a territory.

So it's a state government that's in charge there. And the state government's attitude was get rid of them. Wow. Get rid of them. And the population dropped from estimated 150,000 in 1848 to 1,916,000. Wow. So about 90%. Wow.

Yeah, it was one of the... You can picture it this way. I think we mentioned to most folks, where were the great Indian wars? Where are the great Indian defeats? They think typically of the Great Plains, Little Bighorn, you know, Montana, the Dakotas, and the Southwest, New Mexico, Arizona. That's where the movies all are. Those are the ones that we're most aware of publicly.

Those are the ones that we're most aware of publicly. If the population in California, native population in California, dropped as much Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona vanished. Wow. As if they were all gone, all dead. Wow. And that was happening in just one state. One state because of one commodity. Yeah, yeah.

Wow. It was an absolute nightmare. And yet who knows about it? Very few people. Who's aware of that? Yeah, that's not really discussed that much. There's a fantastic book about Texas and about the Comanches called Empire of the Summer Moon.

Sure. Have you read it? Yeah. Incredible book. It details the difficulty that they had in trying to establish colonies both in New Mexico and in Texas because of the Comanche. And that is an absolutely amazing documentation of what took place in this area. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Part of that story has to do with what we were talking about earlier, and that is horses. Yes. This was one of the great revolutions. I call it the other American revolution. In the book, I call it the grass revolution. Because remember, horses now had, of course, started here, went to Asia, became extinct here, and the Europeans brought them back. Coronado was the first to bring them into where they had been born, onto the South Plains.

What year was this? Coronado? Yeah. In the 1540s. In the 1540s. And then the Spanish came for good at the end of the 1500s, up and establishing Santa Fe along the Rio Grande River. They brought horses. up in establishing Santa Fe along the Rio Grande River.

They brought horses. And then it wasn't until around 1680 with this rebellion of Pueblo Indians in the Santa Fe area that drove the Spanish out for 12 years that these horses began to spread across the West. Now, they had begun to spread before, and we're coming to understand now that there were probably more of them out there than we realized, earlier than we realized. But the explosive growth of horses out of New Mexico comes after 1680. 1780, 100 years later, Indian peoples across the plains in the southwest and in the Rocky Mountains have all developed, adapted the horse, adopted and adapted to that horse into what we call horse cultures, that is, these ways of life that depend upon the horse. Without the horse, you can't do what you want to do.

It's like we have a car culture, right? And this gave them, among other things, great military power, economic power, but also military power. The key to that, Joe, was the fact that horses are herbivores, right? And they're adapted to the second largest grassland on earth, the Great Plains. And when you put a human on a horse, then it becomes something else. It becomes what I call a horse man. It is horse hyphen man, right? Not a horseman.

It becomes, it's like you take these two animals and you fuse them into one thing. And this animal, like a centaur, this animal has the power and the speed and the grace and the beauty of a running horse. And it has the brain of a human being. It has the imagination and the innovation and the arrogance of a human being. So that's a new animal. It's bad news for the bison. Really bad news for the bison. Because the first time, you have a grass-eating predator. bad news to the bison because the first time you have a grass-eating predator, you have a killer, you have a killer that can draw upon the same energy in the grasses that the bison do. And it's ultimately fatal for them, right?

But at the same time, it becomes this – these horse cultures become extraordinary military machines. And that's what the Comanches were. That's what the book is about. And that was this other American revolution. is going on. There's this revolution in life and power in the middle of what's today the United States with the rise of these native empires, the Comanches and the Lakotas and others. These become these sort of superpowers. They dominate. They dominate the middle of America. And they just kick the bejabbers out of the Spanish and of others. It's not until the Americans show up with their numbers, overwhelming numbers, and with their new technologies.

The pistol. The pistol and the rifles and railroads and the others that they're able to find that these empires are broken. And of course, Little Bighorn, that's the end of that particular cycle of it. When the Lakotas, they were the superpower of the middle of America. They and the Comanches formed in effect one great empire

stretched from southern Canada all the way into Mexico, a native empire, right? That's what we broke when we came in with the Little Bighorn in 1876 against the Comanches, what that book writes about, 1874. 74. It was also the last time that a horse culture arose on earth. The first were about 5,000 years ago in Ukraine. And then, of course, that way of life spreads across Central Asia, the Mongols. It spreads into northern China. It spreads down into the Mideast. It leads to the great horseback empires of the Arabs in northern Europe. And then into Europe to the great Iberian powers like Spain. All of these are military horse cultures. It's a story that goes 5,000

years back. And it ends where the story began 50 million years ago with the beginning, with the first horses, right? It ends at the same place. What we see when you look at the Little Bighorn, when you look at the defeat of the Comanches, when you look at the Little Bighorn, when you look at the defeat of the Comanches, when you look at the defeat of those other Indian tribes, what you're seeing is the end of a 5,000-year epic in world history, an epic that began at the same place. That's incredible. So the horse empire began in Ukraine? The first time that we know, we think now, the first time that people domesticated horses was in Ukraine, yeah. That's so fascinating.

Yeah. How did they figure it out? And how did the Comanche figure out how to do it so much better than the other tribes? That's a great question. better than the other tribes? That's a great question. There have been some very good books written recently on the Comanches. The best, in my opinion, is by – it's called The Comanche Empire that Follows a Story of the Rise of Comanche Power. It's by a good friend of mine. His name is a Pekka Homolianan.

He's a native Fin who has written the great book on this. I don't know. They just – well, first place is – I think Dan Flores would stress this. They were in absolutely the right place. Southern Plains. Dan has a book called Horizontal Yellow, which is the Comanche word for this area. This is where horses evolved. This is where they were born.

This is where they were best adapted. And that was Comancheria. That was a Comanche hymn. So they were in just the right place for this proliferation of horses. And they took advantage of it. Something about them was able to fashion, to take advantage of this to a degree that few others did. They were very, very good at it. And what Pekka's book does also is show that this was genuinely an empire.

They had their own foreign policy. They had their own economic system. They had this intricate trade system. They would sort of outsource the growing of horses. When the Americans came, they would wait until the Americans were developing horse herds as well as cattle and other things, let them do the work, let them use their grass to develop these horse herds, and then we steal them. So they're outsourcing, right?

Wow. They develop these trade networks of trading horses up to the northern plains where the winters are so severe that they had terrible losses every year. So they would sell horses, trade horses up to the north. It's a very sophisticated arrangement. But they were the masters of it. And it served them well until the Americans show up in numbers. They figured out how to geld stallions. They figured out how to raise them.

And the amount of status and wealth that you had was dependent upon the amount of horses that you had. Sure. Yeah, yeah. Which is very different. From what you had before. That was quite common among other groups. These horse cultures, you know, horses became sort of the coin of the realm, as you said. Who you were, it was like big wigs, right? Yes. Bigger the wig you had, the bigger – more horses you have. That's a measure of your wealth, of your status, of your prestige. This area that we're in right now was populated by the Comanche.

And these arrowheads, this is one of them, they're everywhere here. I mean they're everywhere here. I mean, they're everywhere. There's a friend of mine who has a ranch out here and he finds hundreds, if not thousands of them a year. And he actively sifts through them and he puts them up on his website, on his Instagram page. And he sent me one of them. And this is just one of who knows how many, if not hundreds of thousands of these that have been found in this area where these people live for a long time, just surviving off the buffalo and wild game and primarily eating only meat, which gave them a big advantage over the Americans who came here,

who needed carbohydrates and who they couldn't go a day or two without eating, without being completely diminished. Whereas they were, just because their body had adapted to eating meat, they were essentially in ketosis and they were eating meat and it didn't bother them to go a day without food. They had all these advantages. Yep. Beautifully adapted, partly by their own planning, partly just good chance. Yeah. And also their strategies, their ability. You know, we think of Native Americans, we think of archers as having a quiver on their back, and they pull an arrow from the quiver and put it in.

But they carried multiple arrows in each finger. So in the four fingers of the hand, they would have four arrows sitting in their hands ready to go. And they had the ability to cycle them through the bow very quickly. Whereas the Europeans had a musket. And they had to put the ball in there and the gunpowder and tap it down. And the whole thing took like 30 seconds to get one shot off under extreme pressure of these Native Americans who are extremely adept on horseback and who actually would ride sideways so they would hide behind the body of the horse, which is incredible.

Now, by the time the real hammer came down, the whites had repeating rifles and they had pistols. But still, in terms of fighting on those terms, Comanche on horseback was far more effective. They were called shortbows and they were very powerful. We think of longbows or crossbows as ones with a great power. But these things were, you know, they could, hunting bison, they could shoot an arrow, one of these shortbow arrows under these shortbows, and it would go through a bison all the way through this animal. And they're incredibly accurate.

Yeah, and very accurate. Even on horseback. Riding horseback. They trained accurate. Even on horseback. Riding horseback. They trained to shoot off of horseback. Like the Mongols famously would release their arrow while the horse was in the air because of the less disturbance. So they had this thing that they would do where they would release the arrow as the horse was in the air. And they were insanely accurate doing it that way. Apparently not very accurate doing it just standing still.

That was alien to them. Like, why would you shoot on the ground like that? What's the point? That's so stupid. Get on a horse, dummy. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what was documented in Empire of the Summer Moon was the use of the revolver and

that the military didn't really have a desire to acquire the revolver. But the Texas Rangers did. And the reason why they did is they recognized that there's a need to have multiple bullets in some sort of a cylinder that you could replace. And so when they started doing that, that's when they started to gain ground over the Comanche. And then, of course, the Henry rifle, the repeating rifle, all these different things that happened after that. Yeah.

Revolvers are not terribly accurate, but they could fire bullets as fast as a Comanche could fire an arrow. So that's an advantage. Yeah. And Jack Hayes, who's the original Texas Ranger, there's a photo of him out there in our lobby, as well as a photo of Cynthia Ann Parker. I saw those in Kwanzaa.

In Kwanzaa Parker, yeah. It's just such an amazing aspect of the history of this area. I mean, in this region, when you drive around, you'll see like Kwanzaa Parker Lane. You'll see like all these Comanche names that have been put on streets. Yeah. Well, Cynthia was taken not far from here. Right. 11 years old, yeah. Yeah. Well, Cynthia was taken not far from here. Right. 11 years old.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a crazy story, right? It's an amazing story. Yeah. This whole place transformed so rapidly. And it's interesting that this sort of independent philosophy of Texans probably had a lot to do with how difficult it was to take over this place. Yeah, I think you can push that a little too far.

But there's certainly something to that. It would be awfully, awfully tough people. How could you push it too far, and what do you mean by that? Well, I think that so many of the people in Texas and elsewhere, they were just sort of ordinary folks. And you wouldn't really – they really didn't have to go through the kind of transformation, the kind of adaptive transformation that would produce those kinds of abilities. But the ones on the cutting edge, you know, the ones out there, you know, that was true of them.

Yes. Tough guys. Charlie Goodnight, you know that name? Yes. Charles Goodnight, yeah. Good example of that. Yeah. He's a tough guy.

But his partner, Oliver Loving, was killed by Comanches out in West Texas. And he had to go through some serious stuff. Good night to others at that time to make it. Did the Comanches have a reservation? Not as such. There were, at the very end of this, right before it all fell apart, Do the Sanchez have a reservation? Dr. Not as such. There were – at the very end of this, right before it all fell apart, they were on sort of government land had been set aside, far north Texas, up at the border of Oklahoma,

stayed on that. that, but didn't last. The animosity, the unalloyed hatred, mutual hatred between Comanches and Texas, it's hard to exaggerate it. It was just, you know, it was like Palestinians and Israelis, you know, Hamas and Israelis. It just, you could not reconcile it. And so the government, you know, was trying to give these folks a chance to become farmers and the rest of it. So they put them on this piece of land. But the Texans kept at them, kept at them, kept at them. And finally they said, enough of that. You're going back to the panhandle.

So besides that, no. Texas has only a couple of reservations by the end of the story, one in East Texas. The reason is, of course, that this hostilities, these hostilities between Texans and Indians is so extreme that they're either all Indians or they're all killed or driven out. Which is so extraordinary when you think about the expanse of their empire. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. It's just sort of a purging of them, you know, ethnic cleansing.

When you set out to write a book this vast, I mean, this is an enormous book, it seems like there's so much information that it's got to be a daunting task to try to figure out how to pull it all together. Yeah. That was by far the biggest problem. I think I was very naive when I started to look back and you're going to do what? You know, as I've already said a couple of times, it's this 30-year period when so much happens all over the place, so fast, in so many ways, so many changes, all of them bouncing off each other, all of them influencing each other.

It's just this bewildering series of things, of events. The hardest part, the hardest part of any book, one of my friends told me, he said, the hardest thing about writing a book is making it a book. You know, making it one thing as opposed to just a whole series of note cards put together. But that was

what went beyond hard for this. You had to come up with some way to fit it together with a narrative, an arc over time, with themes to try to hold it together. I did my best to do that, but that was by far the hardest part of it. Yeah. Did you do this independently? Did you have a contract to do a book? Oh, it's part of a series, the History of the West series, University of Nebraska series.

And we're about finished with it now. But beyond that, it was independent. It would have to be. It would have to be. Otherwise, the pressure on you to get this done, the deadlines. They're like, what are you doing, Elliot? What kind of book is this? Well, I've told them before.

It's done when it's done, right? Well, it's just, it must be so hard to put together something that if we put it into perspective today, imagine that kind of change happening from 1993 to 2023. Put that in your head and imagine.

The world changes. The world is made over. It's made over, yeah. The theme that I came up with here, the closest thing I had to tie it together was something really big happens in this country in the second half of the 19th century. And we all recognize that. Any American historian will agree with that. And what happens is the narrative of this country, the basic story of the United States, shifts onto a new track. We're changing all the time, of course,

but sometimes things really change. And this was one of them. When this American story moves in a new direction, it would carry it into what we think of as modern America, carry it into the America where we know the 20th and the 21st centuries. If you go back, if you're able to get a time machine, you don't twirl a dial. Go back to, say, 1850. And before that, you know, we're industrialized, right? We're tied to the world in new ways.

We're technologically far more sophisticated. We're a people, much more of a polyglot nation. The whole idea of citizenship, of who is an American, all that has changed. And it happens during that period. Well, all American historians agree with that. If you were to ask them, how do you explain that? What accounts for this shift?

The most common answer to that by far up until now has been the Civil War. It was a civil war that establishes the primacy of the federal government. It's a civil war that expands citizenship through emancipation. It's a civil war that helps – it's a go to us to industrialize, to turn into this modern economic superpower. It's all true, undeniable. What I argue in this book is that expansion in the 1840s, the discovery of gold, which comes exactly at the same point, and what happens in the West during these 30 years, from 1850 to 1880, happens in the West during these 30 years, from 1850 to 1880, those things are as important as the Civil War in helping us understand how we became modern in the making of modern

America. Expansion, those 30 years of incredible changes were as important as the Civil War in turning us into a modern industrial power and expanding citizenship, in this case, not just free people, but Indians, Hispanics, Chinese, and the strength of the power of the federal government, which takes on all kinds of new responsibilities because of the West. You know, from national parks to the Department of Interior to outward looking into the world. It's because of this happening that we, what I call the orientation, the reorientation of America, we turn into the Pacific.

We become a Pacific-facing nation as well as an Atlantic-facing nation. We began to move into what we know today as a people who are looking continuously across the Pacific to China to the other nations over there. All of those things that we associate with being modern have as much to do with expansion as they do with the Civil War. have as much to do with expansion as they do with the Civil War. So the basic idea is you cannot possibly understand America as the America that we know from the 20th and 21st centuries without looking at this story, without taking into account what follows

from the acquisition of 1,200,000 square miles over three years and what happened following that. But just without books like this, I think people have sort of this abstract notion of what took place here. They know horrible things happened. They know the Native American population was wiped out. They know horrible things happened. They know the Native American population was wiped out. They know they were forced into reservations. But I don't think it's being taught enough to most Americans the actual history of this land and how extraordinary this change was. That's a grave responsibility that you had to put down this one massive book.

Yeah. Well, of course, I could not agree more. We can't know who we are as Americans unless you take this into account and unless you get beyond the sort of the mythic romanticized view that we have of that and recognize it as this is the birth of modern America. that we have of that and recognize it as this is the birth of modern America, just as it's going on east and west, of course. But the point of the title is it's a continental story. Yes. It's a story that has to be told and understood from coast to coast. There's also a very bizarre aspect of our understanding of the West that has to do with the narratives that are shaped in film.

Sure. Eddie Westerns are actually made in Italy with Trin Eastwood and, you know, all these films that detail these heroic Americans who fight off the Indians. And, you know, our narrative is the people that are on the wagon train, they're just trying to have a good life and they're getting attacked by the Indians. We have to fight off the Indians. We have this very sort of myopic view. It's weird, right? It is weird. Yeah, our view of what happened in terms of what's been depicted in film and in books, it's very simplistic. No kidding.

Yeah, right? It is. And it's a great question about why that is. Yeah, right? It is. And it's a great question about why that is. For 40 plus years, I taught a course called The West of the Imagination, which wrestles with exactly that question. What is it about Western history that is so... What is it sort of compels us, you know, to take this story of the west and to turn it into this simplistic, romanticized story? It's a great question.

It's a revisionist history question, right? Well, it is. And I think there are various ways to approach it. The most basic way is simply in a way sort of to restate the question by saying that there is something about the West. And this goes way back to European history, even before Columbus. There's something about the direction West that invites us to imagine new worlds. Yeah. Right. People living in Europe, the one direction in which they knew absolutely nothing

was west. You look into the Atlantic and so they were able to imagine all of these wonderful myths. There's something about that. There's something that sort of carries through on that. But in particular, in this country, people need the West to be something. It's their need that produces a story. It's not what's happening out there. We need to make the West into what we need. We need the West to be what we require in this particular time. So, for instance, after

the Civil War, this country is trying to remake itself into one nation. We're trying to heal these wounds, to stitch the nation back together. We need stories about what we have in common, whether you live in South Carolina or whether you live in Pennsylvania. What do we have in common? Well, one thing we have in common is we're conquering the West. We're doing this together. All Americans.

It's a heroic, very positive American view, story. story. In that story, among other things, we've got to earn our way into this country. That means we got to suffer. Okay. So all of these tales of suffering pioneers and so forth, but also, of course, Indians, the threat of Indians, overcoming the threat of Indians. That's a heroic American story, right? In other words, sort of we got to bleed our way into full possession, full possession of the West. Don't bother me with complications like this is Indian's country. This is their country. Don't bother me with the fact that they're just trying to defend their land, right? They're not

trying to kill people to kill people. That doesn't matter. We need this to be a very virile story to reflect the image of this American nation that's really coming into its own. Yes. The heroic, rugged individualist who makes his way across the country. That's right. Not wholesale genocide for resources. That's right.

So it becomes a very male story. All of these stories of railroaders trying to protect themselves against the Indians, the idea of a violent West, these shootouts every day. That reflects a kind of virility to the whole story. So in other words, I think of it as a metaphor like this. A Western movie, right? Any movie. You sit there in the theater and you're watching this thing up on the screen and you're tricking yourself to thinking it's on the screen. But it's not, of course course it's behind you yeah it's the projector so there's a way in which we turn the west into this thing that

that that in fact is outsiders are projecting onto it what they want it to be. That's what Westerns are. Do you think it's a part of a guilt of a real understanding of what really took place? I don't know. I don't know people. Because it's so romanticized. It seems like there should have been one genocidal film made about the American West. The knowledge was there. Yeah.

You said a moment ago, everybody, if you stop folks on the street, everybody agrees Indians are poorly treated. Yes. But, hey, you know, eggs broken for a national omelet, right? Right. And it's also it wasn't me. I wasn't there. That's right. You know, I'm a child of immigrants, came here in the 20s.

I have no responsibility. And you are. Well, and you are. You know, it's not a matter of guilt so much as it's a matter of recognizing this is our story. This is the actual events. Yeah. Nobody's going to

pressure you to feel guilty about it. And we're never going to learn unless we actually know what happened. Sure. I mean, there's no... It's too easy to... A good term is whitewash because it really is whitewashing, right? Sure. In this case, literally.

Literally whitewashing. Yeah. It's too easy to whitewash the actual events that took place. Yeah. Yeah. And it could be an awfully ugly story. But it's also – I think we can also make the mistake of painting it in these sort of starkly tragic, occasionally genocidal terms. There is absolutely something to the point of view that these are just ordinary people going out there to try to make better lives.

Right. My early passion was what we call social history, which is the history of everyday life. And so I was fascinated by these people who went out there, took off Solar Farm or whatever, picked up and went out to Oregon or someplace. Why were they doing that, you know? And what was it like? What was it like for them? And I read hundreds of letters and diaries and journals and memoirs of this.

And I have yet to find one example, to read one example of somebody saying, well, tell you what, it's going to be tough out there, but we've got to go out there and get rid of the Indians. Right. They had these images of who the Indians were and what sort of a danger they had. But they weren't out there to dispossess the Indians. They were out there to get a better farm. Out there to make a better life. That's the American story. But in

doing that, as I said earlier, in doing that, they took part in this effort. They took part in this complete transformation of this world that destroyed the Indian life, that made it impossible for Indians to live where they had.

When you're writing something like this, it must be an overwhelming responsibility to accurately relay this message to people. Sure. Yeah. I mean, that's what historians do. That's probably why it took 20 years, right? I looked at a lot of stuff, right? And it took me a long time to research it, to write it, put together. And I also try to make it as much as I can a human story. I try to give it what I say in there, give it a story with a somebody-ness, you know, a sense of what it was like for individuals out there. And that means you make it very complicated. You know, there are no simple moral messages as much as we'd

like for them to be. It's not. That's part of the accuracy of it, right? That's part of the accuracy of it. I also try to respect, as we've talked about, Americans have this romanticized view out there. In particular, things like cowboys, cattle drives, Homesteaders. Well, the fact is, those are the stories that fascinate us. And I try to honor that fascination. Those were great stories.

You know, the stories, Overland Trails, you know, these wagon trains, these families picking up, you know, walking 1,500 miles out there. Those are great stories. The story of the lives of cowboys, cattle drives, and all the rest of that, those fascinate us for good reason, because they're fascinating, right? What I try to do is to respect that fascination at the same time of trying to tell those stories as fully as I can,

with as much nuance as I can, and to bring in new understandings. To point out, for example, in ranching, I mean, who knew that the great ranching empires, the Great Plains, were run mostly by corporations? Really? Yeah. There were hundreds of corporate ranches out there. It was stock being sold in New York and Boston and Edinburgh. There was a very tight connection between Edinburgh investors and Ranches,

Ranches out of the Great Plains. Would they ship the livestock back? No. No, the livestock was raised in the plains, and then it was typically fattened up in a place like Iowa and then slaughtered in Chicago, Kansas City, where it's like that. Now, over time, by the end of the century, close to the end of the century, they developed refrigeration.

So they were able to send slaughtered beef back, but they wouldn't send the animals themselves. But the point is, it was ranching, for all of our images of lonesome cowboys out there and cattle drivers, ranching was an international corporatized business. One more way in which we see the West as modernizing America. It was as much a corporatized enterprise as iron and steel or petroleum in the East. Modern business. Which is bizarre to imagine what it was like before ranching. Because, well, that probably led rise to the market hunting, right? Because where else are you going to get your meat from?

That was before. Right. Market hunting was before ranching. Before ranching. Right. But you're right. It's the same thing. Because, like, before ranching, where did they get their meat?

Like, if people came over here en masse from Europe, what were they eating? Well, they were eating a lot of beef, a lot of pigs. They were eating a lot of bear, too, which is wild. Early on, early settlement. But there was, you know, Americans are traditional carnivores. They're also, of course, eating a lot of wild game as well, like bear. They're also, of course, eating a lot of wild game as well, like bear. But that beef and that pork, those are raised on farms.

That is, individuals, you would raise your own cattle, cow. To feed your own family. That's right. And you slaughter it at that particular time of the year to do it. What happens after the – it starts in California actually. The first time you see modern ranching develop is before the Civil War out in California to feed the gold miners. But then it becomes a national phenomenon after the Civil War when they began to raise cattle on a mass scale on public land out of the Great Plains. Now you have a modern transportation system. Railroads make their way out onto the plains.

So you can take cattle in Texas, southern Texas. You can drive them north on public domain. That's the grass is free. The fuel for the whole thing is government, coming out of the government free. You load them up on cattle cars in Abilene or Dodge City, becomes funded in the same way that other new national businesses are, corporations. It's all coordinated by the revolution of communication through the telegraph. So we're using these new revolutionary technologies like the telegraph and the railroad and new revolutionary economic systems like that of corporate America,

sort of these concentrations of capital, to create this new national, international business. It's all part of the national story. But it's a national story in the West that we've turned into this kind of exotic, romantic story. We miss the fact that it's really critical to what's going on across the country. But it's such a fascinating transformation and so many moving pieces. Yeah. And so little understanding by the general public of all these factors that are at play. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, that's why you're so important, Elliot. I appreciate you very much for coming on here and talking about this in your book. This book is not available right now as an audiobook. Do you have plans? Do they have plans to release it? I think they, last I heard they did. Given the length of it, I have a large stack of packages of lozenges I'm going to send to whoever has to read this. Try to help him out, yeah. Well, I know The Last Indian War is available. It's available.

And I'm listening to that right now. And so this book right now is only available. You've got to read, folks. Continental Reckoning, The American West, and the Age of Expansion, Elliot West. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you. I really appreciate you being here. Thank you, Joe.

It's been an awesome, awesome conversation. A lot of fun. A lot of fun. Thank you very much. All right. Bye, everybody. Bye.