The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 478: The American West

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Steven Rinella talks with Elliott West, Randall Williams, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: How there are way more history PhDs now than there were before; talking about the dumb shit people do at Yellowstone National Park; when a fight over the last piece of fried chicken shuts down the interstate; a roaming bar in Northern Michigan for hire; how Steve invented an “old saying,” which goes, “a fresh set of eyes will always find more beans”; the Arkansas World Champion Squirrel Cook Off on September 23rd; how the origin of the word “shit” is old; the time when Dr. Randall reviewed the work of our esteemed guest; falling short on teaching American history; horses and disease; why you might call it the Last Indian War; Antietam; Elliott’s lifetime work, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion; the greatest environmental transformation of the United States and making a new world; when citizenship is forced on you at gunpoint; the greater reconstruction and the great coincidence; humans’ long running obsession with gold; the 48ers; from hide hunter to candy salesman; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-t-l-i-t-e.com all right joined today by esteemed historian american historian elliot west welcome on the show thank you it's good to be here i've had two i've had two well a lot of run-ins with your work but i've had two main run-ins I want to tell you about. I'll tell you about.

We've got to cover some stuff, then I'm going to tell you about the run-ins. Sure. And then I'm going to tell you that Dr. Randall here, do you guys know each other? Just a bit. He has a genuine PhD in history. I heard that. He told you about that, didn't he? How did he bring it up?

I asked him, actually. Oh, okay. So he didn't be like, little thing you might not know about me no no no he was quite modest i heard there are i was reading today that there's this article um in free press it's kind of now that brought up i'll tell you the article the article was a guy a climatologist article was a guy, a climatologist, that just got... There was a climatologist that wrote an op-ed in Free Press about publishing in the journal Nature. And was saying that, was talking about how biased Nature is toward what they want to publish and they were publishing about wildfires in california and how you need to de-emphasize

issues not fitting with climate change to get published in nature like they know what they want right so like he's this climatologist like absolutely climate change is a big issue with wildfires in california but there's all these other underlying things 80 of california wildfires are human caused okay but you're not going to write an article about changing human behaviors leading to wildfires or electrical transmission leading to wildfires or the need to bury electrical lines and not have overhead electrical lines due to wildfires that's not going to be of interest right climate change boom you're in so they wrote this article in free press about what they had to leave out like what you need to leave out to catch the eye of nature to fit what they want you know what they've decided

is scientific and if it's it's scientific is you know like a whale a whale takes a wrong turn and goes up a river and dies in a river you better say that climate change led to that whale going up that river. And it'll be in the paper, right? But anyways, they're saying, they're talking about, there are like 60 times more PhDs. What the hell is, here, pull this up, Corinne. 60 times more PhDs now than in 1960? No kidding. That's not right. I wouldn't be surprised if it is. 60 times more PhDs now than in 1960? No kidding. 60 times?

That's not right. I wouldn't be surprised if it is. Meaning they just hand those things out like candy. That was my experience. No, there's a lot more people, and there's a lot more people going to higher education than back in World War II. A lot fewer tenure track jobs well you

know how they were here's what they were blaming so the point being where is this damn okay can you find it i mean i don't i don't know if this is reputable it's this is history news network.org i have no idea who's behind this organization. Are you familiar? Sure. Okay. So this. Is it about how many PhDs are running around now? Yeah. History. Oh, well, you know what? Actually, this is specifically about history.

History bachelor's degrees are falling sharply while doctoral degrees in the discipline continue to rise. Hmm. Hmm. We're batting Randall. I don't really think about a guy like Randall. He's not as unique as he thought he was. Oh, I know. He's run around.

Did you see his new bumper sticker? Ask me about my PhD. And then he's got that license plate. MT PhD. Yeah. It's a joke. It's a joke. I made a series of terrible mistakes.

It's a tough. It's a joke. I made a series of terrible mistakes. It's a tough gig. It's like a big target on your back. A couple of things. So, oh, you know what the other thing about the news? I got a couple of notes. I made my little note thing about um that someday a historian should write an article about how much people love to talk about if you get if something bad happens you and yell so national park how much people love talking about how dumb you are it doesn't like i was on the plane the other day and so

you know whatever like someone gets someone gets run over by a buffalo in the park yeah what is the story gonna be how look at this more dumb how dumb they were even when people on the plane behind me are like, those people. You know? It's like, I don't know. You know, I can see, you know, Wait a minute. Worrying an animal a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dude, how many times? Of all people, I'm surprised that you're... You don't think walking into a thin layer of hot spring crust and falling through is stupid? Especially after you had to walk through three dozen signs saying, stop, don't, you idiot, don't. My instinct is to be like, yeah, I can see that happening. The guy that cooked the chicken in the hot spring.

I know, you love those guys. You were supposed to get him on the show. Yeah. Some guys tie a chicken on a rope and lower it in there and boil it. And everybody talks about, oh, those, they should know better. I'm like, that's a, it's like a totally interesting idea because Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, don't they talk about doing that? They do. I'm going to put this to LDR gonna put this i'm gonna defer to the historian

i want to ask you think because i i endorse osborne um i always endorse journal of a trapper and the thing i'll say about it is that historians like it right oh yes yeah it's regarded he was regarded as spot on sure yeah yeah and you know what surprised me you know another book i read uh that i heard that historians are a little incredulous is um tough trip through paradise really garcia yeah have you heard that he played a little fast and loose with the i've never heard that it's been years since i read it but i loved it when i read in fact i was over drove through a paradise valley the other day just to see it again. Oh, is that right? Beautiful country.

So you can cite Tough Trip Through Paradise, and it's, like, historians will cite Tough Trip Through Paradise, and it's regarded as okay? Sure, yeah. But historians love Journal of a Trapper. They do. It really rings true, a lot of the things

that he says in there, and it, you know, jives with other material that we have on fur trader and trappers and They do. It really rings true, a lot of the things that he says in there. And it, you know, jives with other material that we have on fur trader and trappers and so forth. So I think, sure. Good. I'm going to keep endorsing that. What was I getting at? Oh, a lot of PhDs running around.

A lot of smart people getting gored by buffaloes. A lot of brilliant people get gored by buffaloes and lot of brilliant people get gored by buffalo and get blamed for being stupid when I think that they might have just been kind of like, backing up into, well, they might have been like, you know, I don't know, I'm going to go over there and get close to it.

Backing up into buffalo with like selfie sticks to see how close they can get. But okay, Brody, hear me out. Brody, we just worked on, okay, catch crayfish, count stars. And we encourage. And what do we tell kids? What do we give tips, kids tips on what to do? Getting close to critters. How to sneak up on stuff.

But you don't got to sneak up on them. That's what I'm saying. It's like you get out of the car and there's one standing in the parking lot. I think the problem that's underlying all those stories is just that you somehow expect that people go into yellowstone and not be stupid you know it's like it's like that's the one place where people aren't supposed to break rules and just behave in all you know and all types of i feel like you go anywhere in the world people are doing stupid stuff it's just that the stakes are higher when you have large animals around but if here's the deal deal, if someone came to you, like, like someone came to me, someone

here at work comes and I wouldn't be surprised if this happened. I come into work and someone's like, oh, did you hear Chili got gored by a mule deer? Right. He got gored by a mule deer. I wouldn't be like that idiot. Do you know what I mean? I just would be like, what happened? Yeah. I would automatically, impulsively blame the person who got mauled by something for stupidity.

The way they do if it's in the park. Well, the story I remember, though, is the woman who went up to the bison, got right in front of it with a flash camera, took a close-up of his head from the front. Sure. And she got gored. I mean, what do you expect? That's stupid. She expected to get a nice picture. That's what she expected.

I can't go into too many. I think the picture was blurred. The other thing I wanted to talk about, but I can't give too many details. I got a friend who's a prosecutor in this state he's a county prosecutor and he was telling me the other day about he had a thing he's working on where these guys in a trailer park got in a fight like this won't be like a prosecuted issue they got in a fight over a last piece of fried chicken. That someone then impregnated the chicken with glass, shards of glass. And a fight broke out so bad, the fight broke out, went over the fence and into I-90 and shut the highway down um no comment no no another comment here's the other thing that's super important that i keep wanting to get to my buddy one of my main best friends from

growing up and we're still friends today he comes up to our fish shack every year he has a new he's a teacher okay he has a business a summertime business of he's got a roving bar and i'm gonna explain this damn it okay if you live around traverse city michigan here's what you need to who you need to hire for your events this is the this so this is a good very good buddy my matt droves from growing up we still hang out i was just with him and because he's a, he has a summertime business he created called RoamingNorthernMichigan.com. But it's not. It's RoamingNomi. So RoamingNomi.com.

I'll revisit this in a minute. He has a camper trailer that he rigged up as a bar. But when you have an event, you get married, whatever, 25th wedding anniversary, bar mitzvah, I don't know. You call him. You place your liquor order. He picks it up. Okay? So he's not selling booze.

You buy your booze for your event like you normally would he then shows up with his motorhome with all the mixers and specialty drinks that he crafts for your thing pulls his camper in and then your guests go to the bar window to get cocktails and there's no money changing hands no money changes hands fantastic no money changes hands he operates out of Traverse City Michigan packages prices everything at the website roaming no my roaming n-o-m-i.com Matt Dross plan an event just to call him I like it like if you're getting married somewhere else, get married there. And call roaming and go to roaming,

know my.com and patronize my good friend's business. He likes to hunt and fish. Got it. He should start a franchise. Take over the country. Another thing I've been wanting to talk about. Yeah. I invented an old saying. I'm the only wanting to talk about I invented an old saying

I'm the only guy I know that ever invented an old saying Meaning? You know like stitching time saves nine But you said you invented it Yeah I know I thought of one that you'd think was old Oh okay And it has to do with like if you send your kids out to pick pole beans And you'd be like

Pick every pole bean And then you go out and look and there's pole beans they didn't pick because it's hard to find them or like you send your wife's friend out to pick pole beans and she's like i got them all and you go on look and they didn't get them all they didn't look carefully enough. The old saying I invented is, I could see applications in finance and other things. A fresh set of eyes will always find more beans. Hmm. Ugh.

So you... Right? So let's say someone's like, whatever. I don't know. You see implications in finance, whatever. Glassing. Fresh set of eyes. Yeah, exactly. But your buddy's like, no,'t know you know you see implications and finance whatever glassing fresh set eye yeah exactly but your body's like no i glass that hillside good and you sit down and you're like you know what buddy fresh set eyes always find more beans it doesn't there's a buck right over there

roll off the tongue very well you don't think so kat Katie thinks it's useless. She knows my wife doesn't think it's a good old saying at all. I just think it needs a couple more drafts. You sound like a real dork when you say it. You do sound like a total dork when you say it. Fresh set of eyes will always find more beans, Randall. I've never really thought about finding beans.

No. I'm going to work on it. Think about it, Phil. Maybe Phil can workshop that sure um that's it for now i got a lot more stuff written on here but we got to get down to what we're talking about oh so here's the deal this is the uh our esteemed guest probably wondering why he's here but we're gonna have a lot of time but we're gonna to have a lot of time to talk about it. But we're going to get to something from your state.

Elliot West, were you born in Arkansas? No, I was born in Texas and Dallas. Oh, you were born in Dallas, Texas. But you're at University of Arkansas.

Yeah, I've been there for, well, retired a couple of years ago. I've been there for 43, 44 years. Did they give you that, what's that good title you get when you retire

but you remain in good standing? Emeritus. Emeritus. Are you emeritus? I'm emeritus that's sweet man uh randall have you heard of the best thing randall's been able to tell me about his phd is when he checks a book out from the library he gets as long as he wants he doesn't have those librarians chasing after him all the time five years of study and you get that right yeah yeah librarians aren't always after him for the 78 cents it's a very very

small privileges in life that make it all worth it this is from springdale arkansas so september 23rd we've talked about this a whole bunch. We actually for a while talked about that we were going to start our own, which we never got around to. But this one's back on. The world champion squirrel cook-off. Springdale, Arkansas, September 23rd, in partnership with Arizona Fish and Game. Free event.

Arkansas. What did I say? Arizona. I did? We could probably cut that out, right, Phil? Yeah. It's a lot of work. One state that's not going to have a squirrel cook-off would be Arizona.

Yeah. Springdale, Arkansas, September 23rd, in partnership with, oh, that's where I screwed up, in partnership with Arkansas Fish and Game, free event. It's a creative event and competitive cooking. And squirrel. Dishes must contain 80% squirrel and be prepared on site. That's a good tidbit

because I've judged wild game cook-offs before where it's like the game part becomes an afterthought. Yeah, you could put like one squirrel in a pot of chili and be like that squirrel chili. 80% squirrel. You could put like one squirrel in a pot of chili and be like that squirrel chili. 80% squirrel. So you are showcasing squirrel.

They have a Facebook deal. So when you're describing where to find something on Facebook, do you include like facebook.com or what do you write? How do you say it? I guess. Yeah. Cause I guess if you don't have Facebook,

you can still type in this URL and get there. Facebook.com slash squirrel cook-off. We'll take you there. And it's organized by Clay's good friend. Clay's going to be there this year, I think. He is? Yeah, I think so. Here's what I don't like.

They're billing it. They're making it like a war on squirrels. Yeah, this is strange. Squirrels cause millions of dollars of damage. they're making it like a war on squirrels. Yeah. This is causing millions of dollars of damage. Listen, don't, I still want people to go, but this is not about squirrels being bad.

Come on. I don't know. Typically I think of these things as a celebration of the animal, right? Yeah. Like house fires are caused by squirrels. They got all kinds of strange things listen listen i still want you to go to the squirrel cook-off but you need to go

from a place of love not from a place of go go from a position of love for squirrels not from a position of squirrel hatred no i think i think it's also that for anyone who needs like a extra justification to you know push them over the edge if they might not otherwise attend they are being reminded but the last thing you want to create is like another a squirrel there's a lot of things to love like about hunting but people like well if i didn't hunt it's kind of your house to be full of deer and they're like going after him the way people go after coyotes yeah exactly things like that it's strange yeah yeah i don't know what to do about all that also i'm not sure endorsement no listen i am all for did you see me pounding this

table i am all for the squirrel cook-off. I just think that it has to be from a place of... I have never in my life seen a squirrel and been like, damn it! A squirrel. Do you know what I mean? You need to go down there and enter a pine squirrel recipe with Jimmy. That would be a great idea.

No one else would have pine squirrels. You'd be carried away. I'm still mad at my mother for cutting some of the oak trees down in her yard. Hmm. Because of squirrels. The squirrel damage to squirrel habitat. We recently had an episode where we were with the founder, the creator of the Merlin app at Cornell. Someone had a hot tip about the Merlin app.

Get a Bluetooth speaker and play back bird songs this is very effective i wish you'd have brought it up i don't know if they do they frown on it maybe they frown on it at merlin we'll have to see if they write yeah i'm not sure i can ask jesse meaning uh it works it's very effective to call in birds in fact we would so the other day i was sitting there with my boy in a little pop-up blind i'm gonna pull this up i i got a gripe with the merlin app too just and i know they listen to the show it the the this is the only bird i never they it does not pick up it won't pick up a gray jay listen to this so here's from my merlin app i'm gonna turn it up this is a recording i made this weekend so that's a pine squirrel okay but listen to him again i hit him again and again and again

with merlin listen carefully that's a gray jay listen it doesn't get it it it registers it you see it show up obviously it will not identify that thing it's the only failure i've ever seen merlin i wonder if it's too short of a no he was going okay boom boom boom and there's probably other vocalizations but it will not detect that vocalization now that squirrel is really really up front and loud i wonder if it's like yeah that and it's it's i think it's audio no clashing with a lot of the frequencies is my guess you think so i think so comes from an audio engineer's uh here's my kid here's my You want to hear my kid criticizing me? Dad, you're so slow. You're so what? What did he say? You're so slow.

He didn't like when we go to pick off a bird, he didn't like how long it'd take me to activate the app. It was frustrating. He thought he should just let it run for hours on end, and I didn't like that approach. It seems like if you're playing on a Bluetooth speaker, if there's someone else in the area using the Merlin app, that it could cause a feedback loop where all of a sudden there's a...

Merlin's too smart. I've played recordings, and I haven't done it much. I've played recordings, and something gets lost. So if you play... I don't know it much. I've played recordings and something is lost. Interesting. So if you play, we can do, I don't know, try it right now, but if you play Merlin, a recording

of a bird, it won't flag the bird. I don't know if it's just because things are too compressed, if something's like too compressed, Phil probably will answer that. What do you think that is, Phil? Honestly, that kind of baffles me. I feel like it should be able to pick it out.

However, we have a book called The Birdsong Bible. And you type in bird calls, and it's going through like a little chintzy little, there's like a speaker baked into the book. And it might be that that speaker just sucks, I don't know know but merlin won't

identify those birds but i could run around with this i could go into any area with pine squirrels and we did it for we're just messing around this weekend we would just walk into a spot and play that squirrel and just no sooner he shut up all of a sudden the wood just come alive with like. Squirrels replying to it. Years ago, I was reading a thing where they were working on a study with vervet monkeys who they have these different warning calls. These researchers realizing that they have a warning call for a threat on the ground and they have a warning call for a threat from an avian predator and they seem to have a different noise they make on the ground in the air and they would record the calls and play it and monitor what evasive actions they took if it's a threat on the ground they would do

one thing like bust into the tree if it's an overhead threat they would respond differently to it to like reduce their risk from a harpy eagle or the hell praise on them i don't remember what it was the praise on them it wouldn't be a heart because that's south america but these i think anyways you could burn out you could burn them out on a monkey. If you record a monkey doing a warning call and then start playing that monkey to his buddies all the time, after a while, his buddies, he loses credibility with his buddies. The monkey who cried eagle.

Yeah, he's the monkey that cried. He's the monkey that cried wolf. And you could play it where everybody's like, oh, Bob, he always is doing that. Yeah. And insurance. So I was using the term inherent vice, which is one of my favorite movies.

I like it. It's one of those rare instances where a movie is so much better than a book. Thomas Pynchon's inherent vice was made into a film which was a wonderful movie anyway we were talking about when we had david grant on i think it was when we had david grant on we're talking about the concept of inherent vice which is a nautical term someone wrote in guy named thomas wrote in he's from he's wrote in. He's from insurance. He's a marine insurance specialist. Can I just say his name?

Sure. He's the president of Allen R. Mott Agency, Inc., Marine Insurance Specialists. He says, Steve refers to inherent vice as things you can't control, like getting wet. Inherent vice is the ability of a thing to destroy itself. Fruit can rot.

Marijuana can actually light itself on fire. Metal can rust. Getting wet would not be under inherent vice. Getting wet is an external factor. Getting wet is an external factor. Caused by an external factor. Caused by an external factor. So like the idea of inherent vice and shipping, if the load gets wet, it's not like, ah, that just happens. Someone screwed up when it gets wet.

Then he goes on to say, never thought I would be the type to email a correction. Someone else wrote in with another one. When we had the writer David Grant on about the wager, we talked about sayings that come from naval, the naval world. He says, you guys fell down a rabbit hole on ship terms and sayings on the podcast with david gran here's another do you believe this i don't know i'm wondering i'm looking it up i didn't look it up he's saying that the word shit comes from ye old days i think he's off. You look it up, origin, Old English, I don't know how to pronounce it,

S-C-I-T-T-E of Germanic origin. Bags of manure. Maybe our esteemed guest has heard of this. Bags of manure. I deal in that a lot. Okay.

If you stored bags of manure within the depths of a ship, they could get seawater on it and make them unusable. They would write S-H-I-T on bags of manure. Store high in transit. I don't know. That sounds fake. Do you think it sounds fake? I've heard that before, but I don't. I mean, fake. Do you think it sounds fake? I've heard that before,

but I don't, I mean the, the etymology. Yeah. It doesn't, it doesn't match up with, with the Google, right?

Cause the German is shite. Yeah. Right. Oh, the Germans were using that word for us. Dung. Word shit first originally appeared around 1000 years ago and can be can be traced back to the Old Norse origin Skeeter. Skeeters?

I'm just saying. This guy might be wrong, but I like the story of it. Should we leave it in or should Phil pull it out of the show? Yeah, let's leave it in. Someone wrote in. Corinne likes this one. I don't know. If you were tasked with the decision

of picking four American authors to be etched into the side of a mountain, who would they be? I'll just leave that one hanging for listeners. Elliot West and Randall. Oh, I was going to tell you. Yeah.

Do you know that Randall reviewed your work? Can you imagine the audacity? I did tell him that. Let's start with that, Randall. Set the scene for us. Well, I was in a graduate seminar taught by Dan. And each week Dan Flores.

Yep. Each week you had to review a book and, uh, from a different period of time, or I think some of them were probably thematic. Each week. Yep. You read, so everybody in the seminar reads a book and reviews it and then you get together

on Monday or Tuesday or whenever the class is and you just explain your book and Dan kind of pieces them all together and explains how they're in conversation with one another. And that was kind of the structure of those seminars. But one week I had the pleasure of reviewing The Last Indian War, probably two years after it came out, and it stuck with me. Would you like to share a passage with us i mean you proposed this to me didn't you that you'd share a passage

i read the passage there's just there are a lot of things that are attributed to me in the course of a conversation having to do with my educational background that really have never once escaped my mouth. But yeah, Corinne, if you'd like to pull that up. He's going to deny his Montana PhD license plate now. But yeah, it was a memorable book. I think there are a couple. I just, I appreciated, I always appreciate books that make a story that you think is a story about one thing speak to bigger stories and bigger narratives. And so that was one of those books that kind of opened my eyes to how the past is all in different parts of the past during conversation with one another.

Well, thank you. Yeah. Do you have it pulled up? No, don't. Should Corinne read it? No, no. How long is the passage? I just shared.

You can choose the best passage. I don't need to read any of this. No, you don't need to, Randall. Was it a negative review? No, no. Was it glowing? It was quite complimentary. Oh.

I actually, I only sent along the excerpts from it because I thought you might find them useful in preparation for our conversation. Oh, that's why you shared them. Yeah, yeah. No, it wasn't a show and tell. If it was, I would have had a photo of the original with the sticker at the top. But yeah, I thought you might find it. Oh, you

were trying to help me out as a host. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I appreciate that. Instead, I just put another great big target on my back i guess hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle orstakes, and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function.

As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer,

you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club club y'all so elliot west let's start out how many when you look at your career as a historian

um and you've been you've been in the biz how long 50 years do you do you measure it do you measure your career as a historian in terms of how many books you've written how like you know i mean like how do you how do you sum it up right well uh that would be one way i think i i think i think more in terms of teaching okay how many teaching the public university a state university so you have big classes you know i've tried to figure out this is in, I dedicated a book a few books ago to my students, and I sat down and figured out it was probably had somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 students. Oh, really? So you think in terms of – I've also worked a lot.

That's a lot of influence. That's a lot of influence. And you have them for a lot of hours. I do indeed. They would confirm that, yes. A captive audience. That's right. Oh, my God, it's like I ever shut up.

Also, I've tried to work a lot with public school teachers to encourage better teaching of American history. Oh, is that right? I've had hundreds of them over the years. And they've had, of course, each one of them has had hundreds of thousands of students. How do you interact with public school teachers? In what capacity? Well, there are different programs.

One that I continue to work with, the Gilder Lehrman Institute in New York. It's a wonderful institute to encourage good teaching of American history. And they sponsor seminars over the years. And I've done, oh gosh,

probably 10 or 15 of those. And you meet with a week, for a week, with school teachers from all around the country, some from abroad.

And you choose a topic. I taught one, I was mentioning a moment ago, taught one in Missoula for four years on Lewis and Clark. So you have teachers come from all over the country, all over the world and

you try to have the seminars in the place that you're teaching about. So we would talk about Lewis and Clark and sort of pick that expedition apart. And then on a Wednesday we would go up Lolo Pass to the Traveler's Rest and then up Lolo Pass to the, you know, to Traveler's Rest and then up Lolo Pass and then back and sort of around the country.

So it's a great way to encourage students to identify not just in terms of new material, but, you know, the place itself. Because you really can't, especially Western history, you can't understand the story if you don't know the place, you know, if you can't go there. What do you think is wrong with how American, you know, if you said to do better at teaching American history, where do people fall short in teaching American history in your view? Well, until fairly recently, of course, you leave out a lot that's pertinent. I think we need to bring in more areas like environmental history, the kind of thing that your podcast deals with a great deal. Beyond that, I think you need to talk about the larger context.

Take something of Lewis and Clark. It's a fascinating story. It's like an American epic. It's like an American creation story almost. You're caught up in this sort of a mythic pattern where you think this is an absolutely unique event. But in fact, this is part of global exploration.

And something that was happening all over the planet Earth, and these were just two guys among many who were doing this. You understand in terms of what does the expedition teach us about Indian peoples at that time?

What does it teach us about science at that time? So it's a big story. It's a big story. It's a distinctly American story. And the journals, of course, are a masterpiece of American literature. So it's our story, but it's also the world's story. And I think it helps to put all of American history in that larger context if you can.

You know, earlier I mentioned there's two areas where I had kind of, the main two areas where I brushed up against your work over the years is, years ago I was going to write a book, I wanted to write a book about the Nez perce war oh really yeah um it's quite a story well i started working on it my little what i was doing and i got going on it i was just going to walk that whole i was well i use my pack raft i just

had a backpack with a pack raft in it i got started on it i was gonna walk and packraft that whole route um and i got going on it but just the the time commitment and other things prevented me so i read your book at the time your book on the nez perce war the other area and this is kind of where one of the areas where i want to jump in talking to you um i talked about it on the show even you had an essay it was collected one of your books um it was one of your books that had like there was a collection of four or five bigger pieces you had an essay about how old european involvement and influence on the great plains how far back that went right and in it you make the point and this kid's got it i guess maybe i was aware of it but hadn't thought about it

just blew my mind you're like when lewis clark stepped down to the great plains there were native americans on the great plains at that time who had been to Europe. That's right. Met the King of France and came back home again on the Great Plains at the time, Lewis and Clark. And in the American imagination, it's like it was just that they went into this place. That's right. This untouched. Unhistored.

Yeah. And then you got into just the, I think it was hundreds of years. If you go back to people, these kind of like offshoots of the Coronado expedition, that they were coming into an area that had been deeply influenced. That's right. Yeah. What you were talking about, these Indians from the Kansas area, actually Kansas and Missouri, who had been to the court of France, of course, Louis XV. But that was in 1720, 1725, 1726. This was a long time before Wilson Clark. I love to imagine might have happened was that at the time that we – the American – the east to west frontier was edging its way into the interior.

That's what Lewis and Clark would be part of. There was a governor, territorial governor, colonial governor of Virginia who had a group of people he called the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe. And they would go explore the far west, right? And he would come back with these reports of this magnificent river they had found and this beautiful valley. It was the Shenandoah. These are people who were just south of Washington, D.C. And they were talking about penetrating deep into the American interior.

At the very time that they would be doing that and talking about going back home and sitting around drinking port, smoking cigars, at the very time that they're talking about going to the far west, there might well have been Indians in central Kansas reminiscing about Paris.

Oh, the women's line. So that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about, the larger context. Lewis and Clark were not entering this place, Lewis's famous quote, you know, when they set off, and that's from the Mandan villages, you know, the land where the foot of civilized man has never trotted. No, no. There'd been a lot of trotting going on before before that right what do you think was the biggest at the time lewis and clark were encountering on the northern plains tribes and and you know in all fairness they encountered people they encountered people who hadn't directly interacted with euro americans or europeans that's right yeah this purse for example the, for example, the Nespers, the Lewis and Clark were the first white people

that the Nespers had met. Yet they had horses. They had horses. So what, what do you think was the biggest, um, prior to the actual arrival of, well, let's use Europeans, I guess, prior to the arrival of Europeans, this thing I always think about, we had these there's

these three huge impacts that pre that preceded the actual presence of europeans would be horses metal and disease right i mean would you is that a fair statement and of those which do you think when lewis and clark was a contacting people which of those influences which do you think, when Lewis and Clark was contacting people, which of those influences was probably most impactful in shaping what they experienced as Native America? At that time. Yeah, at that. Horses. Horses. Like they were seeing something different than what had been.

That's right. Well, and disease. Lewis and Clark arrived. When they go up to North Dakota, what's today North Dakota? They talked about coming across these abandoned villages, a place called Double Ditch today. Those were abandoned because of smallpox that had appeared 1780, 20 years, a bit more than 20 years before they were there. Devastated there. It's estimated that 20,000 Indians in the Pacific Northwest died of smallpox because of that epidemic.

This started in the East, highly influential with the outcome of the revolution. One of the reasons that we were able to hold off against the English was the English troops were devastated by malaria and by smallpox. So that was a great influence that preceded them. But I think horses may at least as much. In fact, there's a connection there. Smallpox, of course, have been in the Western Hemisphere for a long, for the very early period, the period of Cortez. And it made its way all the way into the American Southwest quite

early. And so the peoples of the Southwest, Comanches and Apaches and Navajos and others, have been devastated by smallpox for decades, decades, before Lewis and Clark. But in 1780, it swept up from the south out of Mexico, went from the east coast down to Mexico, and then up into the Americas.

And it hit the southwest again. But then, then, it goes all the way up the Missouri Valley. It goes all the way in the Pacific Northwest, devastating the Indians there. Why? Why then and not before? Horses. Horses. Smallpox, when you catch smallpox, you have about 10 days to transmit it to another person.

So when it arrived first in the southwest early on, people's natural response was to panic. Run away, run away, right? But it's literally running. They're on foot. And by the time they reach these virgin soil, by the time they reach people who have never been infected by this, they're either dead or they can no longer pass it along. So it was the slow movement of these people out of the southwest that allowed the people farther north to be free of it. Then they came, then the horses. Yeah. Horses. Spreading first out around 1680, but by 1780, by 1780, the horse cultures had flourished

all the way, had developed and flourished all the way across what's today, you know, the far west, the Great Plains and the Pacific Northwest. And so people now, when they panic and they flee, they're doing it on horseback. And the horses allowed the transmission of smallpox and other diseases in ways that had never been before. So the horse, in that sense, was the one that had a great benefit to these people. It allowed them to revolutionize their life, this huge burst of power and creativity and expansion.

But it also killed them. You know what I'm thinking about as you talk about that is the COVID in the airplane. That's exactly right. You could have an epidemic go from isolated to global in, I don't know, months? Weeks, really. In fact, I've written a recent article on that,

on comparing the COVID epidemic today to the cholera epidemics in the 19th century and making exactly that point. So this is really what I was talking about a moment ago about the horses and smallpox. That's really one step in what has, of course, become increasingly a fact of life. We're talking about the shrinkage, the effective shrinkage of the world through transportation. Horses were an important part of that. But that shrinkage, of course, continues. So these poor folks in Wuhan, China, catch this disease however they got it. Three weeks later, it's in Seattle. Yeah, this is amazing, man.

It's just really quite astonishing. And you see it, of course, over and over and over, West Nile virus. Just, you know, name a disease that has hit this country in the last 150 years, and that's how it got here. Yeah, it's an interesting point, the way those horses did that do you think that we've talked about this in the past that the the way so horses being introduced by the spanish was in your view was that incident the pueblo revolt was that really in your mind was that really sort of the the beginning of the spread of horses to all the nomadic what would become the nomadic bison you know the equestrian buffalo hunting tribes of the of the great plains yeah like do you think if the pueblo

revolt hadn't happened would that have been delayed significantly by 100 years? It seems like a very tidy, neat and tidy explanation. Yeah. It is and it isn't. It clearly had a very important impact. It did. But there had been – horses had spread before 1680, but it was very localized. Comanches had them.

Navajos had them and used them very effectively, raiding on the Pueblos and the Spanish. So it had sort of, I think it was sort of a leakage. You know, the Spanish worked really hard to try to control those horses because they knew what they were. The horses allowed people kind of mobility and a power to maneuvering that they had never had before. And they could be used very effectively against the Spanish. And so they were, you know, it was a capital offense, a capital offense to sell a horse to an Indian.

But in the Spanish, yeah. Yeah, I'd read that. I'd read that they had tried, that they really wanted to control information about horses and control dissemination of horses. Yeah, that's absolutely true. But you can't, of course. By the time – It's impossible. But 1680, it's very clear.

The record shows very clearly that after 1680, the horses spread very rapidly to the north. And they follow exactly those trading routes that precede Columbus. It's just traditional trading routes that go up through the Rockies, incidentally, interestingly, then into the Pacific Northwest. Nez Perce, you know, the Shoshones and Nez Perce had horses within 30 years of the Webber Revolt. 30 years. That's incredible. And then they spread from there out onto the plains. So within 100 years, if you go forward from 1680 to 1780, horse cultures have developed everywhere in the West that they eventually would.

It's done. It's a done deal in 100 years. By the time they made, the horses made it up here to, say, Montana. Mm-hmm. What, like, how did the tribes here, what was their understanding of where they came from? Like, what was, like, they had to have some story or history about where these things that had never been there before. Yeah. Yeah.

There are also also traditions develop, of course, about where they are. And quite often, not universal, but quite often it's sort of a gift from God.

And they're described as things like elk dogs. Oh, is that right? Elk dogs. Because like an elk, they're big and powerful, right?

Like a dog, they're domesticated. So let's say an elk dog. Yeah. That's what I'm going to start calling them. But there was no knowledge of them coming from some other culture, some other place. Eventually there were. It's quite clear where they're coming from. Once it develops, Lewis and Clark, when they meet the Shoshones,

that famous meeting, you know, where Chicago meets their brother, and they're starving for horses. They have to have horses. They've gone with canoes up to Missouri, you know, and to the Continental Divide. But to get down the other side,

they've got to have horses. And so the Shoshones were the obvious source of them once they met them. But if you read those journals, during their meeting with the Shoshones, they report seeing Spanish brands on some of those horses. Oh, they do?

I didn't know that. These are horses that not... That are alive from the Spanish. Yeah, that's right. They weren't simply descendants of horses that have been from the Spanish. Yeah, that's right. They weren't simply descendants of horses that have been spread northward. They had, those particular horses had come from New Mexico.

Seriously? Yeah. So this was a, you know, it's a very vigorous, very vigorous operation. That's so weird. I've never, I feel like that'd be like a real

talked about aspect of Lewis and Clark, but I've never heard that. It's true. Just go back and read the journals. Spanish brands on the horses up there. Yep. Yep. Huh.

In this case, Montana. You know, I want to stay on a little bit of this. I want to talk to you. You've written a lot about mining. I want to talk to you about gold rushes and mining too but i want to stay on this this theme for a minute here in uh you have a new book out which i have where is it oh they're sitting right in front of me continental reckoning huge book it is yeah the american west in the age of expansion i make a habit unlike most uh hosts i make a habit of saying i read it or i didn't read i haven't read it however i read the index and then use that to

go in and check little certain things out um and i got to last I was laying there reading some passages you had about the Indian Wars in the West. And you kind of, you treat it as victory there for the victory there for america was just a certainty and not only that but you talk about what we spent on the indian wars relative to other military endeavors the human cost of the indian wars relative to other military endeavors really puts into perspective yeah meaning we you know the union i can't remember what you had i should find i should have taken a better note but i mean the union in a day in the civil war would i think that maybe this is what how this is whatever you use the there were certain days during the civil war the union lost more soldiers than they were going to use and then they were

going to lose in the Indian Wars of the West. That's right. Antietam, of course, which is the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, the bloodiest battle in American history in terms of losses. This is just on the Union side. We're not talking about the Confederates. The Union lost more men in this two-square square mile area over about nine hours than they lost over 30 years and two million acres, two square miles in the far west.

It just blows my mind because the amount of mental energy I have spent on, the amount of mental energy I've spent on how custer managed to get a couple couple hundred guys killed one day then you go and look at the antietam like that'd be like a better place to spend your time it's like not how did a guy lose a couple hundred but how did you lose thousands of people yeah that's right in in in a blink of an eye yeah but it really it does it occupies this like i don't know i mean i know they're big civil war buffs but just it's i guess because it went on so long but you talk like you kind of paint it like it was sort of a light lift and other you you get into, no,

I mean, just cause the numbers, like I didn't realize you were saying you had to think that by the time some of the, I think it was by the time a little bighorn or by the time of the Nez Perce war in the Pacific Northwest whites outnumbered Indian 60 to one. That's right. I mean,

it was just, I guess some of these statistics put in the perspective that it was probably not a thing like will we win it's just like how quickly will we do this like how quickly will we perform this thing we've set out to do yeah you know and it wasn't a when you just look at the numbers of people moving into the west it was just overwhelming overwhelming. That's the point, of course, that I was trying to make there. Indians in the far West were defeated. The military came in, you know, when things got really nasty and they just had to step in.

There wasn't any other way to avoid it, to control this particular group of Indians. Most of them, of course, didn't resist like the Lakotas or Comanches or others. Most just sort of saw the writing on the walls and, okay, you okay, we'll deal with it. But if you look at it in those terms, Indian wars were just – like I use a metaphor of – Indian wars were like a period at the end of a long paragraph. It wasn't a paragraph.

A paragraph was this juggernaut of settlement that comes in. Yeah, and then like you mentioned, the disease issue. I was just like depopulating people and eliminating cultural structure, eliminating cultural memory, and then you have this fragment that just gets overwhelmed by immigration. Right. That's right. And I think I mentioned before the need to put this in, was the greatest environmental transformation, convulsion by far in American history.

And I would argue that there are very few times in world history when an area that large had been so completely transformed, so massively environmentally transformed. And that means, of course, that the whole way of living that Indians had had before that, you know, was the legs were cut out from under it. You can't, if you're a hunting, gathering people in California. Just the environmental destruction. Sure, sure. We just remake it and, you know, the elimination of the bison and the replacement by cattle, by ranching. That's an obvious, dramatic example of it. But that story could be told over and over and over and over throughout the Far West. We simply transform. We remake the world environmentally when they come in. It's not just a number of people. It's this, you make a new world. And this world is not the world that Indian peoples had been living in for generations

and knew how to deal with and how to support themselves. It's over. You know, what are you going to do? There's nothing you can do. Yeah, I see your point. Even outside of the u.s military involving themselves in certain issues like what really can be done yeah nothing yeah we've had the overwhelmed yeah we've had dan flores on the show a couple times um

and he made a point about wildlife wildlife in the west, which he spends a lot of his energy on and career on. And in telling the story about the destruction, he'll say, I've looked for it globally. And globally, I can find nothing that compares to the destruction of wildlife. That's right. That occurred in the American West. Yeah, this wonderful new book of Dan's, of course of course wild new world he makes that point over and over and

over yeah and he says and i've looked it's not there not there no it's just and that's that's an aspect of what i what i was just talking about yeah yeah what uh is it fair to say that your Nez Perce book, the last, the last Indian war, is that the name of the book? Yes. I remember that.

Right. I read it years ago. Uh, lay that out for us. Why, why do you feel that, you know, why that name?

What, what's the significance of that as the last one? I should start by saying that I am terrible coming up with titles. Absolute worst. I make titles for things that don't even exist. I bet they're better than mine. My editor at the Oxford University Press came up with that. I thought, yeah, that's a good one.

I call it that first of all because I think it was. If you think of a war as an ongoing conflict between massed forces, it was. But there was no other Indian war in the far west like that. That fits that definition. It was 1877, is that right? 1877, yeah. The fighting goes on, of course, like in the southwest with the Apaches. They're not defeated until the 1880s.

But it's not a war. It's more like a police action. They're like gangs, right? Yeah, I got you. They fight for a while and they come back into the reservation, rest up, get some food, fatten their horses, and they go back out. Just small groups. Yeah, yeah. The Nez Perce War, you know if you've read about it.

It was this ongoing concerted effort over many months, included sort of battles of both sides, engaging know, engaging each other like in any – Like seasoned Civil War generals. That's right. Yeah. Getting defeated. This person just – Gibbon just kicked his rear. He was wounded, severely wounded twice in his career. Once was at Cemetery Ridge in Gettysburg.

He was up there at that angle. He was with a group that met the Confederates coming up and pick his charge. Shot in the shoulder. And then he was

severely wounded at the Battle of the Big Hole against the Nez Perce. Can you lay out how that, can you lay out what that war was, how it started? I mean, you could do

the big version of how it started, but then also it kind of had a beginning one day, right? Well, I think the first thing to say about it is that, as I mentioned a moment ago, Lewis and Clark were the first white people, the first Euro-Americans for them ever to meet. And in their own minds, they formed a treaty with the Americans. And they promised to keep the peace with them. They promised to fight on our side against any common enemies. And in their own minds, they kept that treaty from that point of 1806. You mean they came to an agreement with Lewis and Clark, a bit like there was an exchange of gifts, and they came to be like, okay, we're good.

We got a deal. Yeah. That's right. Of course, Lewis and Clark had been sitting out there. One of the things they were told to do was to make these sorts of arrangements to them, to open up trade and to sort of pacify the Pacific Northwest, which will allow the flow of trade up there.

So they approached them with this and they said, this is what we'd like to do. And the Nez Perce said, great. That's great. Well, they don't exchange gifts. The Nez Perce to this day will tell you that there was a child produced out of that treaty arrangement from William Clark, a man who grew up, he named Daytime Smoke, who ended up fleeing with Chief Joseph and dying in Oklahoma. William Clark's son. Oh, did he?

Yeah. I didn't know. So Clark's son was in, Clark's son was present for the Nez Perce War? The Nez Perce say that. The Nez Perce say that, yeah. That's right. And they argue that, you know, it's just part of it. That'll put him in his 70s.

That's right. That's right. Old man, and as was true of virtually. What was that old man's name? Daytime Smoke. And he had light colored hair, right? Yeah. It is said.

He said he had light colored hair. I'm a little dubious about that because. You don't buy it? Well, you know, Clark had red hair. And so the point was that this was, and the Nespers make a big point of that. Well, this guy had hair just like.cs make a big point of that well this guy had hair just like well red hair of course is a recessive gene so you only get red hair if both of your parents have uh that in their genes right how in the world did this this woman have

red hair got it anyway so anyway it's it is debatable. But do you, okay, you're questioning, in questioning the hair color, are you questioning the whole premise? No. So you do think there's something to it?

I think there's something to it. This is a standard arrangement, you know, when you make a deal like that. It's like royal houses in Europe, you know, a prince from this house

marries a princess from that house because you're sealing this deal between them. And this is a standard procedure among Indian peoples. And we know, you know, in terms of producing children, William Clark really got down to business once he got back home. Is that right? Yeah, he had a bunch of kids. He was fecund.

He was fecund. That's right. He was fecund. That's right. He was. Anyway, so I think the point to make here is that in the Nez Perce eyes, they kept this friendship, this treaty, all the way, all the way from 1806 up until 1876, 1777. Never waged war against the U.S. Never did. Never did. There is no record that I could find of an S-Purse killing a white person. There are plenty of records of whites murdering S-Purse.

Didn't do it. Didn't do it. And yet, they were the other side of the last Indian War. The last Indian War was against those people who had the longest friendly – kept their word longer than any other Indian group in the entire far west. That's what makes this to me a very compelling and a very heartbreaking story. The reason they did it, the reason it happened was that they were forced by Oliver Howard to leave their— He's a Civil War guy, right?

He's a Civil War guy. Was he due with one arm? He was the one with one arm. That's right. He was a dedicated abolitionist. He resigned his position teaching up in Bowdoin College to fight for the war to end slavery. Oliver Howard was the head of the Freedmen's Bureau after the war. He founded what is today Howard University, the leading African-American university.

Oh, that's the same guy? That's him, yeah. And so after the Civil War, Howard went out to the West. The Nez Perce were divided, of course, into various bands. Some of those bands, two of them I think, in 1863 had made a treaty with the U.S. agreeing to a much smaller reservation, reducing the tribal holdings by 90%. But this was only one or two bands, one band really. The other bands had never agreed to it. They had left the treaty negotiations, and yet the government said everybody,

all of these bands were bound by this treaty. They let it go. In fact, Howard at some point said, leave it alone. You're not bothering anybody. They're living in this country, the Wallowa. You know where the Wallowa is? Yeah. Yeah. They were living in the Wallowa, which is a beautiful, beautiful country, but very isolated. So there was no pressure to open this up to settlement. So Howard says, you know, let it go. And then in 1876, 77, the government said, no, no.

That's it. This treaty holds. You've all got to come in. You've got to give up your home within six weeks. You've got to get rid of all your cattle. You've got to leave your homeland. You've got to get all your people together, everybody, and you've got to come into this reservation.

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As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Another passage I read in your new book, Continental Reckoning, you talk about this, you explore this theme you're getting to right now, which is an inability or a lack of willingness on the part of U.S. negotiators to understand the structures of tribal peoples. this order of that you have a that you have this sort of like this president-like figure that i will talk to and they'll agree and then that that sort of covers me on all of these peoples that we imagine being under this leadership structure to the point where i know that in the ohio river country

um the u.s government once bought a chunk of ground from a tribe that didn't occupy the chunk of ground where they're like oh yeah i'll sell you bob's spot no problem that's right and then yeah and then try to hold them to it they're they're like, well, hold on, but we didn't, the people that were there, like, well, we didn't agree to that. Right. Well, no, but we bought it from these other people. They said they knew you. That's exactly right. But again and again.

Yeah, we have. Like that failure, or, you know, I'd say like a lack of, it's probably not that they didn't understand it. It's probably they just didn't care. I think it was a bit of both. You've got to think from Washington's point of view. Are we really? These are treaties. A treaty with an Indian tribe is like a treaty with France

or a treaty with Germany or whatever, and it has to go through the same procedure. You have to negotiate. This has got to be examined, but the Senate has to go through the same procedure. You have to negotiate. It's got to be examined. The Senate has to approve it, of course. Are we really going to go through that whole procedure with every band in the Far West? That won't work.

And so I think in a very practical way, a very cynical way, they said, okay, we'll just say that you have a governmental and a structure of collective authority like ours. Yeah. Right? We got a president. We got a president. We'll call him the head chief. Yeah. And if you don't find one, we'll find one.

And we'll appoint one. Yeah. And that happened over and over and over again. And that's what's going on with the Nez Perce. Joseph used an argument exactly like you were just saying. He uses horses. He says, it's like coming in and you're saying to me, we just bought your horse. No, you didn't.

You didn't give me. Well, yeah, we paid that guy over there. Well, it's not your horse. No, you didn't. You didn't give me. Well, yeah, we paid that guy over there. Well, it's not his horse. Well, that's the way it goes. Yeah. So at any point in 1977, then, they forced them to move into this small reservation, to give up their homes,

be crowded into this small space, and they were going to do it. They did it. And they came across the salmon. This was late spring. Salmon was up and running, but they got all the people across. They got what cattle they could across there. And they were camped near the reservation, on the edge of the reservation, literally the day before they were required to come onto the reservation, on the edge of the reservation, literally the day before they were required

to come onto the reservation. At that point, it finally snapped. And a few young men, warriors, who had grudges against a merchant and a couple of other whites who had settled there in the valley, took off and killed them. And that then, with that, just sort of like the match to tender. But it was, I don't want to say what's interesting about it, but it's noteworthy that it was people that knew each other. Yep. Like you're saying. I went to those sites, you know but uh it was uh they set out to

get it wasn't sort of like riding to this strange land and like invading strangers it was they they settled grudges with people they had interacted with of course and in one case had some physical disputes with, I think. But the fact that that would trigger not a police action, right? Not like arrest warrants. Well, I guess they tried to do something like that, didn't they? They tried to like arrest the people.

Well, you know, like I say, when these young guys came back and it was clear what they had done, they were boasting about it, you know. At that point, then a lot more men took off and it was nasty. It was a nasty bit of business. They killed a lot of folks. They raped a lot of women. It was an ugly, ugly thing.

And at that point, the leadership, the council, these leaders who had argued for peace said, look, we're not going to win. We got to go in. At that point, they said, well, that's it. It will have to be war the name of one of my chapters you know was a quote from one of these councils it will have to be war this is it you know and then they went all after it and as you said they just kicked their rear and in several places they yeah it was this idea it seems so so when you're looking at the country correct me if i mess any of this up when you're looking at the country, and correct me if I mess any of this up, when you're looking at the country, like you imagine settlement starting in the east and sort of going like a wall to the west coast, the Pacific. But it actually did that to a sense, but it also skipped this chunk you know skip the great plains to some measure

so when the nez perce get in this fight with the u.s army they had east they're going east to escape the army because they feel if they get out on the great plains they're home free no one's going to care about them anymore because they used to go out there that they had for quite some time gone out there to hunt buffalo and so they were sort of going what you'd imagine as going east you'd imagine sort of going into the eye of the storm of the u.s but in their mind they would move east to get away from the u.s that's's right. And they were longtime allies with the Crows, Absaroka people. And what they thought was, if we can get to the Crows, if we can get out of here, they'll leave us alone. We'll get over to the Crows with our friends, and the Crows will take us in, and we'll let things settle down, and then we'll go back home. One of the fascinating aspects of this story is how the Nez Perce, on the one hand,

were so beautifully adapted to the white presence there. This is in contradiction to what I said a moment ago. Their environment was just fine for them, and they adapted to it beautifully. They were very prosperous, successful ranchers. When they took off on this- Cattle ranchers. They were, you know, when they took off on this- Cattle ranchers. Cattle ranchers on this long retreat, they cashed a lot of their valuables, including silver tea sets. Yeah.

It's incredible to think about, right? Yeah. They were wealthier than the whites in the area. You know, they had lots of resources, had lots of money, and had lots of money. And they had become very savvy in dealing with the whites in terms of economically. So you've got that on the one hand. And yet, on the other hand, in this larger perspective, they had this astonishingly naive view of larger white society, of what they were really up against.

There's this – You mean the naive view that you would somehow get out of this alive? Yeah, or even beyond that. What are we dealing with here? One of the – there are transcripts, of course course of all of these negotiations with Howard and these others. And one of the Nesper's band leaders, named Matuhu Hulzote, at one point – you first read it, you think he's being facetious. He's being sarcastic. But I don't think so.

He said, what is this – Who is this Washington you keep talking about? You keep saying Washington says that you have this treaty. You go to the Washington says, you go to this. Who is that? Is it a person? Is it a house, he said? Is it a house? So, you know, on the one hand, they're so beautifully adapted to their immediate environment. The first time they become aware of the telegraph that existed was during the retreat over Lolo Pass. Was it really? Yeah. The first time they ever saw or got onto a train was after the surrender when they were taken over to Fort Leavenworth. That was their first contact with the train, or experience of the train.

Yeah, before they, they didn't know what they were. And so. When they split, they had what, about 1,200 people? About that, yeah. And then 5,000, 6,000 horses? A bunch of horses, yeah. And they run this rolling gunfight and keep whipping, repeatedly whipping civil war generals in like battles and then one of the craziest things about sort of the one of the craziest collisions of that you have this this

semi-nomadic tribe of hunter-gatherers moving across the landscape and the lateness is they get to yellowstone national park which is a park that's right kept it for five and get into a shootout at mammoth hot springs with tourists it's just like it blows your mind it's just such a bizarre story you know it's like it reminds me you don't remind me uh uh you ever see the movie Blazing Saddles? Oh, yeah. Are you kidding me? The very end of it when there's a big fight in the town and somebody bumps up against this, you know, what turns out to be, you know, scenery. Yeah, and all the town falls over.

Well, no, no. And they break through and it's another movie going on next door. Dom DeLuise, you know, and he's I forgot about that detail, yeah. Yeah, we were talking about that fight rolling over into I-90. Yeah, their fight rolls into a new movie set.

And that's what this feels like. You know, it's like these two stories come together in this strange way. One of the things, William Sherman, who was head of the army in the West at that time, and of course the man who arguably was most influential in ending the Civil War, he ends up in charge of Indian policy out in the West. He's the general of the army. He is the highest-ranking military officer in the United States at that time.

He's on a vacation in Yellowstone Park. So William Sherman was – Was he? He was Indian at the time that Nez Perce came in. So somebody said, oh, you know. So, and somebody, you know, said, oh my God, you've got these Indians coming in here who have just been, you know, just been killing our soldiers over there. And all of a sudden they're going in here. So they rushed to tell him and he gets out just a day or so before they come right through

there. So what if that hadn't happened? Yeah. You know, Billy Sherman, you know, William Sherman sitting around, you know, sipping whiskey and eating fried trout, you know. Yeah. All you know winnie sherman sitting around you know sipping whiskey and eating fried trout you know yeah sudden chief joseph shows up you know soaking his feet in some hot spring boiling the chicken so it's a you know it's just a it's such a wonderful story on so many levels the macro level you know what it tells you about what's going on in the united states at that time and then the the the mini level you know the micro level, you know, what it tells you about what's going on in the United States at that time. And then the mini level, you know, the micro level where you get these astonishing little stories and quirks, you know, that things come together like that.

Have you read, have you read, oh, sorry. Did you just go to say? I was just going to say, I think one of the more striking things about it is just how sprawling geographically it is like i can't think of very many sort of episodic stories that start where they do and and cross over and then they're you know through the breaks and headed up to canada it's like there aren't very i mean there's lewis and clark sure but that's like years and years you know but like in terms of miles covered in telling this story. Yeah. I try to figure out a way to illustrate that.

Think of it this way. At the end of the Civil War, there's this community in Virginia, central Virginia, and they decide, I don't want to live on the Union. Let's get out of here. So the whole town gets together and they head west, leaving the middle of Virginia. Like the Nez Perce, these were just warriors, of course. These are men, women, children, old folks, you know, pick up and move, pick up and go. And the army says, no, you got to stay here. So the army is chasing them, this small southern town.

And they're leaving. They're heading west from central Virginia. If that town had gone as far as these Nez Perce did before they were caught up near the Canadian border, they would have gone from the middle of Virginia to Denver. Are you serious? They did 1,300 miles or something, didn't they? 1,300 to 1,500, depending on how you measure it, yeah. Just engagement after engagement after engagement. Yeah, yeah. That parallel is almost too good to be true.

Well, it is true. Unlike many things that I've written, it is in fact true. from this book is you make the point that ex-confederates and native people are the only americans that have had citizenship forced on them at gunpoint oh right and like there's so many i mean the one of the main points in the book is just to understand the indian wars as part of this bigger right project of nation making and know, you talk about greater reconstruction as 1845 to 1880 or so. Could you talk a little bit about that, like the parallels that you see in the Indian Wars and the Civil War? Because there are a lot of interrelated questions.

Yeah. That was the larger theme of the last Indian Wars and the Civil War, because there are a lot of interrelated questions. Yeah. That was the larger theme of the last Indian Wars. It's a great story about it. It's an amazing story itself. The whole Nez Perce story is fascinating. What I try to argue in this book, because there's been a lot of books written on the war, on the Nez Perce. What I try to— One less than there would have been a lot of books written on the war and the espers. What I try to – One less than there would have been.

It is a long walk. I got tired and I just drove it. But the larger point was that this is really a very revealing part of what I call the greater reconstruction. What I argue here is that something really important happens in the middle of the 19th century. We all agree on that. In the middle of the 19th century, the national narrative shifts fundamentally onto a new track that will carry us into what we know as modern America. If you go back before 1850 and look at America and look at then America in 1900, it's like

a different world. We've become a fundamentally different nation, society, people, culture, whatever. Why does that happen? What explains this dramatic shift? fundamentally different nations, society, people, culture, whatever. Why does that happen? What explains this dramatic shift? Well, the usual suspect, of course, and it's absolutely true, of course, is the Civil War itself. Civil War is typically seen as this event that moves the United States in this – dramatically in this new direction. That's obviously, of course, true.

What I argue here is that expansion, the acquisition of 1.2 million square miles in three years, 1845 to 1848. Oh, you open your book by saying this spasm of expansion would be like if we right now, um, within a couple of years, the U S annexed Mexico, Central America, portions of Brazil,

Columbia, about half of Columbia. You're like, okay, so let's talk about how much, how quickly the U S grew is to be that, that if, if between now and three years from now we bought one

basically everything south of us halfway down into south america halfway halfway and then we're going to now we're going to incorporate that right good luck with that right and i think it's a pretty good i think it's a revealing parallel because just as if you drive south from El Paso to the middle of Colombia, you're going to see a lot of people. You're going to see different cultures, different languages, different traditions, different economies and so forth. And somehow we're going to bring all of that be the, by far, the greatest gold strike, most productive gold strike in human history up until that time. Is that coincidence? I think it is. That's the kind of fact that is born to create conspiracy theories.

Oh, really? Yeah, for sure. But I don't see any evidence whatsoever that there was anything like it. It was just pure coincidence. In fact, the first chapter of the book I call The Great Coincidence. This is the greatest, most influential coincidence in American history by far, hands down. And restate that just so people get this. I call the first chapter of the book The Great Coincidence because I think it's incontestable

that this coincidence of nine days, within nine days, the United States acquiring California, acquiring the Pacific, and this is part of the end of this three-year expansion, of course. Within nine days, we begin to,

this area begins to be revealed as the richest place on earth. It starts at the gold rush, but then from then on, of course, we discover time after time after time after time. It's like the gods have said, you need something? It's there. It's there. The West is the great treasure house of the Western Hemisphere. So think of it then.

Think of the consequences that would follow expansion up until, let's say, 1880. And you can't tell me that those were not as important, as not as consequential as the changes that came because of the Civil War. So what I'm arguing is that we need to think of this shift to the American narrative as a result of two things. The Civil War, absolutely. Expansion and what follows from expansion is number two. And those two things are their own stories, but they're also interacting. They're also interacting.

And that's the point, I think, that I try to make in The Last Indian War. And what you can see in this story is this effort by the government, Washington, whether it's a person or a house or whatever. Whoever that guy is. That's right. Washington trying to bring into coherence, bring into a singularity this extraordinary continental nation. They do it by force if they have to.

They do it by expanding the role of the federal government. And they do it as well by imposing a kind of order on it, not just physical order, but an order of who is an American, right? What do we mean by Americans? Well, in the East, it's emancipation. We free one million, four million persons from bondage. And we say, you're going to be citizens now. Out West, it's Indians, right? It's Hispanics.

It's others out there. We're telling them who they are. Yeah. Right? Now, in the East, the freed people wanted citizenship. Out West, not so much. Right? Now, in the East, the freed people wanted citizenship. Out West, not so much. Right? But the government says, okay, now we're going to – same thing they did with the Reconstruction of the South.

We're going to give you land. That is, we're going to make you farmers, right? We're going to make you freeholders, independent family freeholders. We're going to teach your children. We're going to bring your children to our schools, and we're going to teach them the basics, starting with the English language. Everybody's going to speak English. We're going to teach them the basics, including cultural basics, what an American is, right?

And this is an important part of it, Christianity. We're going to make you Christians. America will be this Christian nation, right? Oliver Howard, you know, this devoted evangelical Christian. He was doing that in the south of the Freedmen's Bureau, and when he went out west, he did it with Indians. Well, you say that to former slaves, and they say, great. We want these citizens. We want land. We've been working your land for a long time. Give us a farm. Give us 40 acres and a mule. We want you to educate our children. We want to send our children to Hampton, to others.

We are Christians. Christianity was a fundamental part of slave culture. So they said, terrific. You go out to the Nez Perce. We want to make you farmers. I don't think so. Or you go to Lakotas and Comanches.

Are you going to farm in West Texas? No. We want to educate your children. We're already educating our children, right? We want you to be Christians. No, I don't think so. We've got our own religion, right? And the government says, you don't understand.

This is not an offer. This is an order. You will become farmers. And we will take your children and teach them. And you will become Christians. That's then the basis of what happens out west when the war – when the military does step in. It's because of the consequences of that. And that's what's going on with the Nez Perce.

It's that final moment when Oliver Howard steps up and says, OK, we've been overlooking all of this for a long time. No longer. We've got to do it. And that's what – that's the trigger that sets it off. With the next person was there, like we talked about Washington and General Sherman, was there like finally a sense of urgency to like, this is it, we're done with this, like we need to establish control, like after decades of fighting these wars, it seems like it was like, we'll establish some stability here and then here.

And then like, was it, do you call it the last war? Cause they finally decided like, this is it. We're done. Washington, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Exactly.

And that's, uh, to me, that is a really interesting question. Why? These people were no trouble to them. They were living in an area that very few whites wanted. Why? Why would you force a 10? Why? The reason – I think an important reason was the Little Bighorn.

You know, Brody lost some relatives at Little Bighorn? Is that right? There's – yeah, there's a couple. Golly. Distant, distant. Yeah. Brody's brother. My older brother.

He's older than he looks. Yeah. Yeah, I think that that of course was this terrific humiliation. Right. For the government. The boy general, the darling of the—not only gets killed, but it's this defeat, this moment that I think that was the key to the government saying, okay, that's it. Everybody, everywhere. that I think that was the key to the government saying, okay, that's it. Everybody everywhere has got to get under our knee. You've got to play by the rules now. These are the new rules.

That's the only way I can think of because you look at the record, the government suddenly just pivots. Before this, they were saying, oh, well, what's the problem? record, you know, the government suddenly just pivots. Oh, yeah. Before that, before this, they were saying, oh, well, you know, what's the problem? It'll, it'll happen eventually and we'll just sort of kick the can down the road. And, uh, um, but all of a sudden they, all of a

sudden they send word to Howard, uh, nope, you got to do it. You know, that was, I was talking about all the mental energy I've spent on my life, um, the players who convened that fateful, you know that was i was talking about all the mental energy i've spent on my life on the players who convened that fateful you know june 25th uh and i think that a lot of historians have are argue now and it's it's inescapable it's like it's almost the definition of a pirate victory to the point where after the great victory at Little Bighorn rather than being emboldened and taking the fight to the next army they disband like some people say the probably the greatest gathering of plains tribes it was to ever occur

yep the numerically the greatest gathering to ever occur the next day they disbanded and they're like man it's hell to pay now they disbanded and tried to melt into the landscape rather than being like let's take washington you know it was just, uh-oh. This is not going to go over well. This is not good. This is not going to go over well. I agree with that.

Absolutely. And I think that, again, comes back to the larger point that I was making, that odds against them were so overwhelming. If you fight, you're going to lose. It's going to happen. We caught him at this point just by luck, by this guy's regrettable decision. And like you say, this huge gathering.

Maybe the Fort Laramie Conference, a conference in 1850 might have been larger than that. Oh, is that right? Yeah. But that was, of course, peaceful as far as in the wartime. There's nothing to match this. Okay, that's today, right? What now? What now? You know they're going to come after you.

I want to hit you with a couple couple details that came out of these is one of two one of my favorite things of the perspective of the native american fighters at little bighorn a man named i can't remember if it was gall one of them said in trying to explain the actions of the army he said we just thought they were all drunk it might have been and then two two men were asked how long it took how long that battle took that that day and one of them said gall uh uncle papa sue had said it lasted as long as it takes a hungry man to eat his dinner wow another said i'm paraphrasing he said you know when you're laying in your teepee and you're looking out the chimney hole and the sun hits one of the poles at the top it took about as long as it takes the sun to move past that pole and both it and then later people both said oh yeah they're both saying it was about 20

minutes yeah I think probably longer than that but not just about the land the hill the hill yeah oh sure hill were cost hill where Custer, where his little gang was, that portion. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians

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out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Yellow Wolf, the Nez Perce, he later met that guy. I can't remember who the hell he was.

Yellow Wolf met some guy that then sat. Yellow Wolf was one of the participants in the Nez Perce war. He's one of the very few that escaped into Canada. They caught Chief Joseph near the border, he gave his famous, from where the sun now stands, I'll fight no more forever.

Right. This dude named Yellow Wolf had actually slipped out of there, made it to Canada, later came back down into the US. Yeah, there were a few hundred who made it. And he later met some guy that not only took down his life history,

but they went and visited a bunch of places. And Yellow Wolf takes this guy. He might have been German. I can't remember. Anyways, he takes this guy to the Little Bighorn battle site. Not the Little Bighorn. The Bighorn. Big Hole.

Big Hole. The site of the Big Hole battle. And tells him, and even shows him where it happened, that a guy, a U a u.s soldier got shot through the forehead and was dead standing on his feet and they challenged him on it and he's like no he was at the end of the battle he was standing dead locked knees standing dead and i can never tell if that's true dead, locked knees, standing dead. And I can never tell if that's true.

It's funny. When I was writing the book, I have several stories like that in there, in that book. And I wrestled with that. In the end, I just told it straight on. Like what, Yellow Wolf? Yellow Wolf and others. There were others like that at the Big Hole. Another one, earlier on, while they were maneuvering within their home country there in Idaho, they came upon a small patrol, army patrol, killed them all.

But they said there was one guy on there who, like, kept shooting, kept shooting, shooting, shooting. And he wouldn't die. Cleaning the head.

Instead, what he did was sit on the ground and cluck like a chicken. Oh, I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. Is that true? I don't know. I'd say I wasn't there, right? But it's certainly, it's certainly part of their tradition yellow wolf was such an interesting dude he had he explains that he had kind of a personal

obligation if he encountered a grizzly he had a personal obligation to mix it up with that bear and kill that bear he was a fascinating guy yeah Yeah, and again and again, he'd be like, oh, brother, here we go. Like if he found one, he had to go after it. Oh, not again. Yeah, he's a fascinating guy. I begin and end the book with Yellow Wolf. I end with his death. When he tells his family, I'm dying tomorrow morning when the sun rises on the horizon.

And he did. And the last thing he said, he said, my friends have come for me. Oh, really? Do you see them? Right. Oh, he did? I didn't know that. Yeah.

But the fellow you're talking about is named Lachullis McWhorter. Oh, McWhorter. Yeah. Yeah, not a German. He was a Scotman. And he was a, he was a rancher out there. And,

um, one day this Indian came up and his horse had, uh, been injured, uh, pumping into a fence, I guess a barbed wire fence that cut it badly. And so he asked McWhorter,

will you take care of my horse? Which, you know, in Which in Indian terms, of course he will. This is what you do if somebody who's not your enemy says you've got an injured horse, will you watch after him? And he said, sure. And he came back the next year to claim his horse, and it was just fine. And they struck up a friendship. And those two men spent the rest of their lives reconstructing that story. Oh, okay.

Yellow Wolf telling this to McWhorter. McWhorter's papers are in Washington State Archives, and I spent a long time in that archive going through these papers. And they're just a treasure because it's the only case I know of where you have such a concentrated body of Native testimony because Yellow Wolf was taking these others you know tell him your story tell him your story so you got all of his voices and i think if i remember right it's um people feel like that that there was a enough of a friendship in the mick warder who i couldn't remember his name mick warder was reliable yes Yes. Yes. Absolutely. It became his lifelong passion. That he wasn't distorting these narratives.

I don't think so. He was trying to capture these stories. Well, he obviously was very sympathetic to the Nez Perce. I suppose you take that. But most of what he has in there is not his words at all. It's the words of the Nez Perce, of the people he's interviewing. In fact, one of the things I ran across – stuff is really – the collector is really kind of a mess. You know, they worked a long time trying to organize it.

They just sort of threw stuff in boxes. But I did run across this small slip of paper that had a thought about something about the war. You know, something just sort of came to him. And he wrote this thought on this little slip of paper. And it was the last thing he ever did in his life. He was in the hospital dying. And this came to him. And he wrote this on this slip of paper and then died.

What did he write? I don't remember. But that was just his dying thought sorry but uh you know as i remember it wasn't truly consequent it was just something popped into his head it wasn't any great breakthrough or anything but you uh you spent a lot of your career and a lot of your writing about mining, mining towns, influence of mining. And I'm really paraphrasing, but in your book, I don't know, it kind of more or less says, you know, in terms of native peoples, when they find gold, it's over. It's over. That's right.

That's right. Or silver. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Lay that out a little bit. Like just like that thirst for gold. Yeah. Yeah. Why is that bit. Like, just like, that thirst for gold. Yeah, yeah.

Why is that? You know, you hear about gold in the Black Hills, the California gold rush, the Alaska gold rush. Just really transformative. They are. Really transformative events. Yeah. Well, a couple of, you know, a couple of reasons I think are self-evident when you think about it. First of all, there's no greater motivator in American history than a goal discovery. Nothing like that can put

people into action so quickly and on such a scale. So for the one thing, what you get is thousands of people, you know, racing to this particular place over a very, very short span of time. Now, what I mentioned before, you know, talk about what really defeated the Indians was the environmental transformation of their homelands. Nothing did that more dramatically, faster, on a greater scale than a gold or a silver strike. Thousands of people come into an area that is at a fairly small, these are hunter-gatherer people, so a relatively small population up until that time, that are always on the move.

They're semi-nomadic and they're on the move because they've choreographed their life to be at the right place at the right time. We've got to gather, got to fish the salmon at this particular month. We've got to gather the canvas bulbs at this particular point. This is when the elk migrate. We've got to be there. And all of a sudden, that world is transformed.

The game is hunted out. The streams are polluted. The trees are cut. The migration patterns are totally disrupted. It's devastating. It's convulsive. Yeah, I want to interrupt you

to clarify another point you had said about even these huge areas the specificity of some things that you would need meaning here you you're you're a nomadic people with horses and you live in the northern climates what do you need in the winter right access to timber access to water grazing lands which is going to be like big riparian bottoms and you said if there's a spot like that everybody knows about it that's right it's a real vulnerability that's right you know that's and and that's the places that other people want that's right if you look at the history of indian wars when those conflicts did occur,

when those campaigns did happen and those battles did happen, look at how many of them take place in the winter. Right? Because I know where they'll be. That's right. And of course,

turn that around. When is the worst possible time to go up against the Indians? June 25th, 1876. That's a good point. They attack the Indians. All these winter massacres that the army would conduct, but then in the summertime, it's just a different game. So summertime, they choose, you know, let's attack them within two days of the summer solstice.

Brilliant. It doesn't work. So, yeah, that's right. It's the environmental angle of that, you know, that you have to take into account. The other thing about mining rushes is

most by far, of course, strikes occur in mountains and in very isolated areas. It's a long way from any white settlement. What that does, once you – a strike occurs and if it proves to be worth it, what you do is immediately get this great movement into those places, which in turn is key to opening up the interior west to transportation, to access of others. So it creates these – in other words, it's not a, you mentioned before, the frontier is like a moving wall, right? That's the agricultural frontier. It's not the way, not the way the mining frontier works. No, I got it. It's a leapfrog. It's a leap, the image I have is artillery shells. Yeah. Probably better than a leapfrog. Yeah, that's good.

And then the, I think it's a good image because the sort of the concussive rings move outward from that. That's what kills them. That's what kills them. And what it starts with

is this, you know, ancient fascination with gold. It goes back a long way. Egyptians, you know, the Egyptians called it the breath of God, gold. There's something about gold that moves people into action, into movement, into nothing else can. And it turns out that we have more of it than anybody else. What was the native attitude towards gold? You know, what you hear, of course, is they didn't care much about it. Right.

That's not true. In fact, there's a very good book that's being worked on at the time by Ben Madley in California. He wrote a book on American genocide. You know that book? I haven't read it, but yeah. Yeah, I know. About California. And Ben is writing now on Indians and the gold rush.

Once the strikes occur, they jump into it with both feet. Before that, I don't know. I think they just sort of, it's a curiosity, they knew it was there, but they didn't, uh. You know, in, in Ian Frazier's Great Plains, he tells a story. I don't know. Maybe it's an apocryphal story. I don't know. He tells a story about, I think it was the Blackfeet finding bags of gold on a keel boat or some boat that they catch.

They capture it and they like the bags and leave the gold dust laying on the gravel bar yeah i've heard you heard that story well i've read the book but i don't remember that story yeah i'd love to know if that's true man he's pretty careful generally you know but that's what he said but i got i got a practical gold rush question i mean i got a practical gold rush question i mean i kind of know the answer but just be interested to see if you could explore it for a minute is if you tell me right now um that oh so-and-so just found a ton of gold in nebraska okay i would think oh well that's a guy's land good for him i wouldn't think i'm gonna run over and get a bunch

of it what are the factors that it'd be that that you could hear about this in wherever the hell you're at philadelphia wherever okay and and have some plausible idea like some rational idea that you would go there and then that you would get to pick some of it up do you know i mean like how like how is this in terms of just the the land ownership and the claiming it and that the government you know whether or not they occupy it the u.s has a sort of claim on it how is it that you're gonna go and get some for yourself yeah were they advertising how do you get like where does that idea enter your head i would never think if someone said oh so-and-so found a bunch of whatever i would never be i'm gonna go and take some

well i think it ties in first of all with again with expansion the idea that it's not nebraska it's not a farm you know it's this place that we just got i mean half an hour ago right yeah brand new right and it's could not be farther away from me than uh and still be still be the united states so i can imagine anything whatever i want to happen that's gonna happen right yeah i mean they right, but it's just like such a strange understanding of how you'd even get a sense of the spatial characteristics of where the stuff is. Right, right.

But to like bet your life on it. Yep. A lot of them did and some of them lost the bet. Yeah. Was there any government guidance? Like if you're going, this is how you want to do it. Or was it just word of mouth? Well, you've got to remember, the gold rush of 1848-49, there had been overland migration before that.

Out to Oregon and to California. Out to the Oregon country, out to the Central Valley, Sutter. So they knew the way, and the way was well marked. By this time, they were starting to have stores along the Overland Route. So how to get there was not really much of a mystery. The mystery was once you get there, how do you deal with that? How do you mine? Has it ever occurred to you?

I think it's part of the question that you're asking. You know, you're a clerk in Cleveland, Ohio, and you're going to go to California, you're going to mine gold? Yeah, you're going to be a placer miner or whatever. You're a tenderfoot. It reminds me of Jethro Bodine in the Beverly Hillbillies. I'm going to be an atomic brain surgeon, he said.

What? The people who taught him, of course, were the Mexicans and the South Americans. There had been gold mining in Peru and in Chile and in Mexico. So one of the things that I write about in the book I think that most people don't think about are the 48ers. The discovery was made in late January 1848. That discovery was not confirmed in the East until the following December.

Got it. 48. So consequently, the Great Rush was in 49. But by that time, of course, there were people mining gold out there from Mexico, from Chile, from Peru. Oh, is that right? Sure. From Australia. There were Australians there. There were Tas mining gold out there from Mexico, from Chile, from Peru. Oh, is that right? Sure. From Australia. There were Australians there.

There were Tasmanians. Before the 49ers got there. 48ers. Early bird. And so these guys, 49ers, come out there and they say, well, these people are mining our gold, right? Your gold. But they learned from them and from all the all the evidence uh the south americans who were there um were very generous showing them how to do it you know

so they learned from the 48ers and then they kicked them out of course they were expelled you know we had you and i both uh have some lines and staff for interviews and ken burns is uh his his forthcoming the american buffalo documentary and uh following that we i had occasion to interview him on this podcast along with his colleague dayton duncan who you're personal friends with yeah um and then in talking to dayton duncan it occurred to me that even though i thought i had i had not watched the dust bowl i thought i did but i was like you know what i actually didn't so i just recently went and watched the dust bowl and speaking of human migrations

the as much as we you know earlier i kind of talked about there's these things in american history that absorb a lot of mental energy and sometimes our fascination with them makes them seem overplayed in terms of actual impact perhaps um far more people fled the dust bowl okay which which they in that documentary they describe as the greatest human cause environmental tragedy in u.s history far more people fled the dust bowl went to california than ever went over the oregon trail is that right that makes sense but we just don't when looking at how the country took shape right you don't go and look at that no no like that episode of people leaving oklahoma texas new mexico southern colorado that's Who got, all got billed as Okies. Right.

Right. All got lumped into like Oklahoma. Yeah, that's a real canard. And it dwarfed the Oregon Trail traffic. I hadn't heard that. I did watch that. I don't remember that statistic, but it makes sense because the population is a lot harder to find.

Oh, yeah. So, yeah, yeah. They're all, you know, American history has all kinds of stories like that, that we don't pay enough attention to. The great migration out to California in World War II. Oh, I've paid zero attention to that. Yeah. Including among blacks.

You know, when you say the great migration among African Americans, you're usually— Usually to the industrial north, right? That's right. Yeah, yeah. Leaving, you know, as cotton cultivation was mechanized, this flight up to the Chicago into the area there. But then there was a second one that was in the twenties, uh, World War II, you know, with the, uh, boom of a defense industries and so forth out on the, out on the Pacific coast, you know, jobs are waiting and a lot of poor black folks in the South, you know, and they came out there. So the, you know, the origins of the black presence, presence on the Pacific coast, you know, it goes back to World War II.

Well, we don't, we don't think about it because i brought that up let's close on um if you don't mind give me some of your thoughts on uh give me some of your thoughts on on bison and the the broader story of of you know the near extermination of the bison just like whatever you know i know it's a huge question but but areas of that saga meaning the destruction the recovery what areas within that long story have caught your attention or you know yeah where have you spent your time and thinking about that animal well i like i've written a fair amount on on that um what really interested me was once again the larger context of it and the complexity of it. I think we are mesmerized by this image of the buffalo hunters,

or the white, you know, the hide hunters, the buffalo runners. What we tend to forget was that the bison population had probably declined something like half from the 1820s until 1872 or so when that starts. And the decline comes partly from environmental change, as I said before, the overland trails, which destroy these habitats that the bison had to have in the winter, just as the Indians did. Part of it from Indian peoples who eagerly jump into this global market economy, selling robes and tongues. Me and Randall had an hour-long fight about this the other day. Oh, yeah? Who won? Mm-hmm. Randall.

He won. It was about word choice. But the lesson there is, once again, how the globe is shrinking. These Indian people suddenly find a lot of money and things and stuff. Because they were able to use this skill that they long had in a new way to sell these robes to people in the east, in London, in Paris. What we're seeing there really is the shrinkage of the globe and the expansion of modern capitalist market economy. That is what kills a buffalo. It starts to kill them with the Indians.

With the white hide hunters, was there like a comparable rush like with the mining towns, like a burst of people headed west to go do this? Sure. Not on the same number or the same scale. Sure, exactly. You know, I think as Steve was saying before, when we talk about this, these were not, you know, fly-blown monsters. These are just young men on the move trying to make a buck, right?

And this is a great way to do it. So, sure, sure. Yeah, just like we had talked about with the impacts of the Civil War, like a good many of the people that got involved in that trade were, I don't know, I don't want to call them, maybe not literal refugees of the Civil War, but definitely people spun off. People spun off by the Civil War. Yeah, I mean, this country was chaos at the end of that war.

And if you're a young man living in the South, especially, or the North, and suddenly this opportunity shows itself. Sure, you do it. And they went on to become one of my early MA students, wrote a book called, or a thesis called Reconsidered. And what he did, Dave Dawson, what he did was follow these guys' lives to the extent that you can. These buffalo hunters. Oh, really? What did they become? Bank presidents?

Head of the Kansas Historical Society? Sheriffs? Candy salesmen? You think of both of them winding up on the end of a rope. No, no. These are perfectly responsible, which makes sense. You always been in the candy business? Well, no. Not always.

Funny enough. Yeah, but it makes perfect sense when you think about it. You know, they were just jumping into something, make some money, and they turn around and use the money to do something else. Chasing opportunity. Yeah. The man who claims to have killed more Bison than anybody else went on to become chief of police in Oklahoma City and then to an early filmmaker. Is that Jay Wright Moore? Who was it?

No. No. It was another fellow. And he also raised racehorses. And his favorite named Chance won the Kentucky Derby, 1892. Seriously? A high runner.

A high runner. That's a great project. It is. I feel like you're disappointed with this, Steve. Like you have this image of these like, just like gritty, kind of tough guys. No, no, it was, it was this, it was this,

and I brought it up and I do not mean this as, well, I think I, I don't want to put any shade on the Dayton and Ken Burns, the guys that worked on the Bison documentary, but when I was given my chance to comment on it i had a couple factual minor very minor minor factual thoughts and i had a thing i presented to him as i thought that and totally respectfully i expressed that i thought that they were really, that they dehumanized the hide hunters. And the person who was not watching carefully might get the sense that they were motivated, that they were sadists. Yeah, that they were doing it purely for the joy of killing yeah they were like i know

what i'm going to dedicate my life to is making sure there's no buffalo in the future when it was um a job again and again you see that that you know like the the old you know you know how you know like that saying um fresh set eyes always i've heard that one finds more beans that was quite a setup there's another saying there's another saying two plus hours there's another saying that goes uh hate the game not the player that's right yeah okay they happen to be i came i came up with that too and and i feel that there's in in looking at what we just spent a lot of time on the hide the deer hide the deer skin you know the earlier version of the hide hunters was the white tail

deer hunters right of a century earlier um that you can look and say like man what those guys did was rapacious and wanton yeah but on an end when you get down to the individual level you know a lot of them have demonstrated a yeah i knew i knew i knew but if i didn't but to say that there's this one guy maybe it was more one of these guys that said i woke up in the morning now and then and thought am I really going to go do this again today? And he says, but I would hear the shooting. Right. And if I didn't do it, it was getting done. Yeah.

And it's easy to point a finger at them as a group because they were the last ones standing when the Buffalo disappeared. Right. So it's like those guys. They put a real punctuation mark on it. Yeah, yeah. But I do think that, yeah, hating the game and not the player. Because I think a lot of these people were just,

they were just poor, desperate people who had no thing. They had no thing. And if you look at minors. Yes. You know, miners don't get the same judgment, right? And they're also,

you know, it's more indirect. It's not quite as dramatic. I think that's part of it is that like the near extermination of the bison is just such a, it's such, it's such ripe material for like a moral story. Right.

Whereas like, we don't say, you know, these coal miners were just doing it because they loved air pollution. You know, like. Like what they hate. No, why do coal miners, yeah, this is a great point. A hundred years from now, maybe they'll be saying that. And then there's these evil people that hated clean air.

Yeah, they could have done anything in the world. They decided to dig coal out and burn it. Why didn't they stop? That's absolutely – all of it's absolutely true. And for any of us that quote that you often hear and it was used in the documentary of Frank Meyer. Meyer, yeah. Yeah, he said, I can figure it. He says, I figured a bullet, one shell, cost me 25 cents.

With this one shell, I could kill this animal and I can get back $3 to $5. He said, I figured it out. I said, I figured it out. He says, I figured that I could make more money in a year than the president of the United States. That's what did it. It was the market that did it, both for the Indians and then for these guys. That's what killed the bison.

So what are you, are you writing right now? This is a huge book, dude. It took him a long time. This is not big, this is not generous font. I will say this is probably. I mean, what a massive amount of work. How many pages do you write today? Oh gosh,

I write quite slowly. I mean, that took me 20, 25 years to research and write. Oh, now I feel better. Well, you've done a lot of books. I've done a lot of books, yeah. This is probably the only podcast in the world that has an inside source at the MSU archives.

And so I have word on good authority that you're still digging. You're still sniffing around the archives. I was there the other day. What are you working on now? You know, I'm not sure I'm going to – I know I don't have another book in me, at least not right now. But I like to write short articles. So right now I'm fascinated with Arctic exploration. Oh, really?

Now you're talking, Steve. Well, I know you are, but I mean, I was hoping it was going to be more esoteric. Anyway, this is just a – I've just started reading up on it a lot. And there was a fellow, you probably know him, Gustavus Doane. Do you know that name? He was at Fort Ellis. He was early – that first expedition at Yellowstone. And he was in the Arctic, up into far northern, near northern Greenland.

And so this is his handwritten account of this expedition. Man, that sounds like a book. Well, it's all, it always seems like it's a coincidence that these guys are doing, you know, they have a foot in each one of these, but as you're pointing out, it's all part of the same project. It's all part of the same thing. Yeah. Anyway, I was, I was looking at that, looking at that. Very funny, really interesting detailed description of that voyage. But the real gem of it is his introduction when he says, this is a total disaster, a

failure, complete failure. He says, we did not convert or kill any Indians, any natives. We did not challenge the authenticity of any findings by anybody else. It's this wonderful sort of tongue-in-cheek jab at other guys who are going up there. Sure, yeah. It's very funny. Yeah. Well, stay tuned for that.

You're right. And in the meantime, Continental Reckoning, if you want to be the guy in your social circle who knows the most about the American West, Continental Reckoning, the American West and the Age of Expansion. Lifetime work. Yep. Yeah. It is.

Yeah. It's fast moving. Well, thank you. Yeah, I try to. It covers a lot of ground. Yeah. Well, you know, I was a journalism undergraduate. I came out of a newspaper family

and was drilled into this. My father was a very good editor, and he was, he tried to teach us as well as he could. My brothers and me, you know, write like you talk, right? If you can't, if people can't, if you're not drawn to it, if you're not willing to read it, then what's the point? Right. Yeah. So I try to do that. I'd like to see you sit down and do the audio book on that thing. Very clear up a couple months of studio space.

It's a big contractor for that. And I thought, God, poor guy. Yeah, that would be, man, that would be a, it's a healthy book. Like I said, as I, you know, I can't, I do it, I'm seriously going to read the book. And just in preparation for today, like I skimmed around and by doing that approach of looking in the index and finding things and then you know bouncing back and forth um uh and went to a couple areas in western history that that i i know well and like to read about and um your ability to what i thought was great about is your ability to not get bogged down into the you know at 8 a.m at 9 a.m but just to sort of be like in a large scale where did like where did this lead what was

this coming from what does this really mean you know and then someone reading it could very easily use it as a jump off point to go find a lot of areas that they might want to explore. homogenized maybe like like how the country gobbled up so much stuff and sort of made it into this recognizable idea of america so fast yeah yep that's that is really kind of breathtaking when you when you think of it in that larger perspective yeah how much happened so fast and with so many consequences yeah and that's what i'm you'm saying the same thing of course with the Civil War I'm saying you can say that about both of them together together those events remade this country no so Elliott West again and latest book and he has many Continental Reckoning the American West in the age of expansion thank you very much for joining us thank you it's great great pleasure thank you expansion. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. It was a great, great pleasure. Thank you. Like silver in the sun Ride on

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