The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 699: The American West with Dan Flores

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with Dan Flores, Randall Williams, Cory Calkins, Corinne Schneider, and Phil Taylor.  Topics discussed: Dan's brand new podcast on The MeatEater Network, "The American West With Dan Flores"; an unconventional telling of the West by an environmental historian; a pigeon catching controversy in New York; the International Order of St. Hubertus; invasive aoudad as detrimental to native desert bighorn sheep populations; hunting the University of Texas, El Paso's Indio Mountain Research Station and donating to fund research for bighorn sheep conservation; reintroducing species; deep history and long time with Dan; and more. Subscribe to The American West with Dan Flores now wherever you listen to podcasts! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050 iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/ Pandora: https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272 Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Before we start today's show, we'd like to touch on Dr. Randall's hair a little bit. Yes. You got screwed at the barber. I don't want to say screwed, but there's a miscommunication. I was going for a more minimalist touch-up and we ended up... You wanted to keep your length in the back. Yeah, I wanted to keep my length in the back. Then I was, I was, I'd sort of made peace with it and then Seth showed me the other day, a photo from when we were out doing the SIG

shoot and I saw that flow and I just. Just blown in the wind. Yeah. I missed it so badly. Um, the reason I wanted you to talk about that is Corey just had an interesting observation that there's a river you like to fish and you say that the river never

fishes good two days in a row. Yeah. So if you have a great day, you know, not to go back. Yeah. You better pick another stream for sure. Cause it can't fish two days in a row. Yeah. And he's proposing that if you get a great haircut somewhere, don't go back

cause it's going to not be good. Yeah. Cause what are the odds lightning's not gonna strike twice. Never in the same spot. How about fishing? It goes in weeks, week on, week off. So if you're like, if people are up fishing at our fish shack and you call up,

the last thing you wanna hear, cause if you're going up, like let's say they're up there last week of July, you're going first week of August. What you want, you think you want hot reports, you don't. No, you want you think you want hot because it's gonna be the little die it'll be the dead I'll be there for the dead week you want it to be that no one's catching nothing then you're gonna go up and have a phenomenal time. Yeah.

No, that's the same with this little riffle that I'm speaking of just East of here. You just winked at me. Does that mean it's not East of here? No. We're joined today by the esteemed professor, former professor of American history, current author of all kinds of books,

New York Times bestselling author, Dan Flores has been on the show a handful of times in the past. Um, I'll just come flat out and say it. He's my most, he's my favorite historian and one of America's most celebrated historians, uh, 11 books. If you listen to Rogan's podcast, Dan's been

on Rogan's podcast a couple of times talking about his book as well. Um, started his career as, uh, not started. You were a writer, but also a teacher. Yeah. I basically started as a freelance magazine writer before I went off and, you know, did the strange thing of getting a PhD. Yeah. me and Randall can relate. Yeah and becoming an academic. Yeah you guys can relate. Randall can relate, I know.

Not only that but I took when I was in graduate school I took a class with Professor Flores and Randall took presumably many classes. A handful. A handful of classes. And now Dan is doing a, Dan is doing a podcast on our podcast network called the American West with Dan Flores and we're going to talk about some of the themes that will emerge in that podcast

as he tells a, I would say an unconventional telling of the American West. Don't get into enormous detail, but how would you describe your approach? Because you were an environmental historian. Yeah, that's right. I trained to be an environmental historian and for people who don't know what that is. It's basically somebody who studies and writes about and And taught classes to about the relationship between people and nature so that's pretty big topic, you know allows for a lot of things and What it doesn't do much because I also taught the American West, it doesn't do much

of the standard American West stuff. I mean, I never did really talk much about mining strikes and the Overland Trail migrations and Indian Wars and gunfights and all that. I was interested in stuff that pertained to the kind of environmental relationship between people and the natural world in the West and in the country. And so that's really what this podcast boils down to. Yeah, fewer okay corrals and more wildlife. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah. Speaking of wildlife, pigeon catching controversy

in New York, and this makes sense to me. My boy sells pigeons to dog trainers. Oh, now he's onto selling them. Oh, he makes good money selling pigeons. Oh yeah, no, I didn't know that. Well, this year he just did a, if you go from seven dollars to eight dollars What percent increase is that? That's a tough one to figure out. I told him say tariffs

Wait how twelve and a percent how much is that? I think that's right Wait, is that how much he sells them for he just what, he just, he just, uh, he had a new client and, um, and he was saying what, cause last year he was getting seven, a piece and he had a new client and he just threw out eight and not a blank. Take as many as I can get. So point being, it doesn't surprise me. Now, what he, so he gets pigeons out of grain silos. Right. Because guys are storing grain, the last thing you

want is pigeons in the grain. You know, you don't want them shitting in the grain. So he gets them out of grain silos and whatnot, out of barns, and people use them for dog training. Oh, I didn't, I thought he got paid to capture them I didn't realize that he was turning them around no he would pay to get them but I'm saying picture now that a pigeon is worth that amount of money okay some guy has thought to himself apparently well now where are there a lot of pigeons and he has noted that in Brooklyn there's a lot of pigeons and some guys are taking some industrial pigeon catching strategies

to these parks in Brooklyn, which is really causing a lot of distress for local pigeon lovers. It's a little bit weird because I think that, I don't know if New York does, but there's a thing called Avatrol. There's a poison called avatrol there's a there's a poison

That municipalities will use on pigeons. It's kind of like an you know So I think that for them to see a guy jump out and net a bunch Is probably like definitely disturbing but I mean if you looked at the darker side There's like a darker side to pigeon removal that they're probably not aware of. Pigeons being a non-native bird, but pigeons have been there. I mean, the French introduced pigeons along the St. Lawrence, I think the late 1500s. I mean, there's been pigeons on the ground,

street pigeons. It's Linnaean name. If you see a pigeon flying around town, it's Linnaean name is Columba livia, I believe is what it is, and people are worked up because guys are catching these things and they're probably, like the guests are selling them into the pigeon market. Some guy cleared 150 out of a park. Bushwick. I thought this was going the direction of roller pigeons which is why I paid attention. Jordan Siller sent me this. This is a a dude selling this is a dude selling pigeons for some purpose. I used to on occasion

when I I lived in Brooklyn and I would go down and I would just nab them and Put them in my pockets and we Can you we would grab them and we would make pate's with them, me and my chef buddy, and I just put them right in my pockets. We got all kinds of videos of it. We, oh my gosh, we need to put this together, this is a new episode. Well, what's the hand grabbing pigeons? You just put a little bit of food down, that's gonna go viral Steve. And you just put them, I'd always want to leave the scene With them alive, so we just put them in our pockets and make little pate's with them. Your pockets all bouncing around Yeah, what garment is best for just any kind of coat like a down puffy type coat and put them in your pockets

But uh kangaroo pouch yeah the thing that came to mind here if any person like if you went to any The thing that came to mind here, if any person, like if you went to any, I shouldn't say any, if you went to most wildlife managers and you asked them if you could wave a magic wand and it would make street pigeons disappear, they would wave the wand, you know? But then you get into like different things. Like I used to go to even farmers and ranchers

that like would hate wild pigs. But you'd say if I could wave a magic wand and a wild pig would never ever ever again walk on your property, would you want me to wave it? And they'd think go, no, I just don't want as many, you know. So that's going on there. You can get stung though. If you're the guy doing this, if you're listening, if you're listening, they are fixing to, they're fixing to get you under animal cruelty. So they haven't caught this person yet, huh?

Wonder how deep they're diving. But if he's getting, let's say he's getting New York prices. I feel like New York prices, wouldn't that be, oh okay. Let's say he's getting ten bucks per. Does that mean Jimmy gets to? No I'm just saying he's like the last of the old New York market There's a thing I found out about buddy mine told me about it have you ever heard on it Randall I asked you about this We like started talking about it the other day. Yeah go into it into it. The international order of St. Hubertus. That's how I pronounce it. Not a expert though.

Yeah, I don't know how this was never on my radar. You know why you don't know about it. Same reason I don't know about it. I'm not a member. You have to be asked to join. The International Order of St. Hubertus is a true nightly order. I mean, you can look at their website. They even do that thing where like you'll have the first letter of a paragraph and you put it in a red box. Like once upon a time. Oh yeah. Like the old. That's when you know it's legit.

Yeah. You know what I'm saying? There's gotta be a technical term for that. No doubt. The international order of St. Hubertus is a true knightly order in the historical tradition. The order is under the royal protection of his majesty, King Juan Carlos of Spain, the Grand Master Emeritus in his Imperial

and Royal Highness Archduke Andreas Salvatore von Hadsburg Lavingren of Austria. That's a lot of syllables. And our current Grand Master is his Imperial and Royal Highness Istivan von Habsburg Lothringen, Royal Highness Istivan von Habsburg-Lothringen, Archduke of Austria, Prince of Hungary. The International Order of St. Hubertus is comprised of an international group of individuals, Ordens brothers, who are passionate about the sports of hunting and fishing, and who are vitally interested

and actively involved in the preservation of wildlife, its habitat, and the tradition of ethical hunting and fishing. They got members who are dedicated to upland bird hunting, duck hunting, and hunters of quote, larger and big game. Never been asked. If Randall gets asked to be in this and I don't, I'm gonna be pissed. No, I was just thinking we should start our own

secret order. Here's what they stand for. That's okay. Instead of skull and bones, we'll just go with skulls and skulls. Here's what they stand for. That's okay. Instead of skull and bones, we'll just go with skulls and skulls. Here's what they stand for. To promote sportsman-like conduct in hunting and fishing. To foster good fellowship among sportsmen

from all over the world. To teach and preserve sound traditional hunting and fishing customs. To encourage wildlife conservation and to help protect endangered species from extinction, to promote the concept of hunting and fishing as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity, to endeavor to ensure that the economic benefits derived from sports hunting and fishing support the regions where these activities are carried out, and to strive to enhance respect for responsible hunters and fishermen if I

get into that um you know I don't have any tattoos I'm getting that crap it's got a crest where's that Chris is it going on your lower back right here oh that's where you put the first one now not like Spencer who ran out of places to put them He said with he said with no small amount of judgment Before you get in a day, can you guys tell us about your audit, huh? But can I start by telling about how controversial it is? Yeah. Yeah Are you familiar with the controversy? Well, is it similar to asking folks if they want to get rid of pigs?

And if most of them would say no because they're, you know, they turn quite a profit. Yeah, so people like you guys, people like you guys getting all excited flying all around the country to That's true. No, no, no, I'm joking. Wanna start? Yeah. I'm paraphrasing a heffal finger. Yeah.

Oh yeah, we're definitely gonna address that because that's part of the conservation story. I'll just cut right, I'm being too, I'm being not too cute. No, no, that's, thank you. By promoting awdad hunting. Yeah, meaning that awdad, they're a sheep species from?

North Africa. North Africa. Yeah, Sahara. They run wild in, they run wild in Texas. Not a sheep. What are they? I just learned. They're awed at.

They're closely. They're own, more closer to their own thing. They're their own thing. They're closer to goats. The sheep. But people call them Barberry sheep. I just learned yesterday. Oh, I guess that's where I got that idea.

Right. So not a true sheep. Correct. Obviously, okay. Related, but not a true sheep. They've Obviously, okay. Related, but not a true sheep. They've gone feral, they do quite well in Texas, and people point out that it's been pointed out. Not just pointed out, I think it's,

according to Heffelfinger, it's like an objective reality that ought to add a detrimental to bighorn sheep recovery. So, in all fairness, I don't mean to overblow it, Heffelfinger has pointed out he feels that there is like an increasing popularity in audat hunting because you can hunt them year-round, poor man sheep hunting. You don't have any kind of bag limits like it's kind of the you know it's like the you know it's like the Wild West of Audat hunting right now. Yep you're not gonna get a

sheep probably ever in your life, so if you wanna try for something adjacent to it. Go down in the desert and run around in the rim rocks, they're down there, and he feels that as this gains popularity, land managers, land owners will become incentivized to host Audad on their properties and he feels this could lead to a net loss in suitable bighorn habitat. But I was

hunting Audad when you guys, when your mommies was wiping your noses. How old are you? 51. So Steve made it cool before it was cool? No, I went one time. No, I went two times. I'm just trying to be cute, Steve. I went two times and I guess I wasn't really aware of the issue, but anyways, tell about your guys' trip.

Yeah, well, a couple of weeks ago, Corinne and I and Corinne's significant other, Matt, were hosted by Dr. Phil Lavretsky. Oh, the duck doctor, the duck doctor, DNA doc, now, now, odd-ed DNA doc. Also turkey DNA doc. Yep, he's got all the names He hosted us down in West, Texas on UTEPs the Indio Research Station. Yep. He's that Yeah, so so we weren't at you know a Ranch where you you run a research for yeah University of Texas at El Paso has a research facility. That's about 35 or 40

Thousand I think it's 40,000. So that's where we were. Right on the Rio Grande. I somehow missed all these details. You're looking at Mexico, the mountains in Mexico the whole time. Glorious, stunning country. He wanted us to come down in February or January when it was cooler and the best time we could pull it off was in early April. And so odds were that it was gonna be hot while we were down there. But we got really lucky with a cold front that rolled in just days before we landed. And they were still trying to squeak out of that cold front.

And I don't think it ever got above 70 degrees. We hunted two days. And we did our best to help the conservation aspect and tried to just shoot and use. At first was our main objective. So this facility is hostile to the oddads. I mean, they've just made themselves at home. Yeah, they're a desert bighorn that roam in and out, but this is just south of the elephant mountains, I believe, which has a herd of big horn sheep and they'll bleed over into this ranch.

But the odd out of made themselves at home. There weren't a lot of odd out around or at least. They weren't easy to find. We made it look easy in two days, but it was because the weather was so nice. We were able to hunt all day. the weather was so nice we were able to hunt all day glass them up in the morning and take hours to get in within rifle range and you know slowly pack them out without worrying about wasting any of the meat. But the university does want to get rid of them or reduce the numbers. Well that's kind of the general vibe in west Texas is to keep the numbers reduced for desert bighorn sheep You're never gonna be able to get rid of odd ad just because they've made themselves at home and they do so well in that landscape, but Yeah, desert bighorn certainly sit higher on the pedestal down there, but odd ad are very close because of the

Outfitting opportunity the trophy hunting big air quotes you pass that thing down here so I can look at yeah, I can't 50 pounds Cory shot it really bar really huge sand gram So Steve like I guess your hand doesn't even fit around the the whole horn there But yeah just just more on that, you know, Phil's lab, he's trying to figure out certain new techniques to test aspects of the odd ad so like they Everyone that we shot we collectively got four They all got nasal swabbed and

they all got a piece of meat cut out of them for testing for various diseases and such but to my understanding that research facility is Potential grounds for desert bighorn reintroduction. Oh really? So there are, it would be possible to put together some kind of study or test to see how many females would need to be taken out of the population in order to accommodate, I don't really know the right language, but you know to accommodate some number of big exactly exactly Are you counting up that he's like 11 or 12 years old that's what we guesstimated somewhere between 10 and 13

It's so hard to tell I mean Yeah, the the annual I or rubbed off on the outer mm-hmm very smooth now I also brought in the you that I shot which, which was an older ewe as well. And just as beautiful of a trophy. And the meat is. Ten times better. Is it because these have a real bad eating reputation? Yeah, which I don't understand.

Well, it's just like people who say antelope aren't good to eat or a sagey mule deer. You know, they just don't know how to cook more than cereal. Yeah, I felt like the meat flavor is so incredibly mild. I mean, I shot the littlest of them of the four. I thought that I was aiming at a U and then it ended up being a small ram that was termed as a sub-adult. You could kind of like lift it with one hand. And I haven't eaten off of, I ate a little bit of his heart, but the meat is much like

lighter pink and seems tender as heck because it because he's really young but we threw ribs on the grill one of the days and our first night of dinner at Dr. Phil's house he just put I forget what cut but he just grilled it up and it you know he he he says it's like sirloin to him. I thought it was absolutely delicious So kind of riffing off at Jesse Griffith's, you know eat a hog save the world Phil's new tagline is save a sheep eat an odd ad. So yeah, he whipped up a again I don't know what cut it was but an odd ad steak and an elk steak. I couldn't tell the difference It was really tenderness. Yeah, it was really good It just, you can smell the meat and it doesn't. It's, it's yeah. It's just really, it's really clean. Yeah. Man, they got a bad reputation. Yeah, they do. I don't,

I don't like you said that reputations aren't really based on that much. Yeah. But sometimes it's based on what some dude said about it. Yeah. And then some dude else parrots, what he said. Yeah. And then it just, you know, as a total echoes out. Hey guys, it's Steve Rinella here. When I was a little kid, my number one piece of hunting equipment was my mom who would always drive us around to go hunting. She would take me out to check my traps, never asked anything in return. Very, very supportive. When I knew that I wanted to find out to get a life in the outdoor

industry or become a writer, she had my back, never made any other suggestions otherwise, and just helped me push and pursue for what I wanted and helped me maximize the amount of time I got to spend out hunting, fishing, trapping. Now this Mother's Day, if you love your mom like I love mine, you can show her that you see the hard work and dedication that she put in in raising you. From now until Mother's Day, First Light is offering free shipping on all women's products. Whether she's chasing down adventure just out in the field, First Light's gear is built

to keep up. Give her gear that works as hard as she does. Head to firstlight.com today and take advantage of free shipping. That's First Light, F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com for Mother's Day savings. So how many did you guys see altogether? Oh.

Well, the group that Corinne and I both got our Adult and sub-adult Rams there were 23 in that group And then I guess we saw two other solo Rams and another small group So we probably saw close to 50 in two days two full days of hunting though, and then sun up till sundown when you were Sun up till sundown. When you were gutting yours in the field, Matt and I went off on a little nearby knob and there were probably like 10 in that group.

So they're around. Their behavior is interesting. Like if you, you know, like Cory shot first and then I shot second into that same group. That was Shivarasavya, Cory? Well, it was 400 yards. Yeah, no, no, no, I didn't, you know, we had hiked in. I'll take the first shot later.

Cory wanted to check the dope for Corinne. No, Cory was so awesome the entire time. What his kids go, stand back kids. What we haven't covered is that I was like tremendous dead weight on that hunt. This is the hardest. It was so hard for me. Not just physically and it was hot and it was, but just the terrain is punishing. Like I think it was you who said at some point Steve, like even the thorns have thorns down there. I mean, you're not gonna grab on to anything.

have thorns down there. I mean, you're not gonna grab onto anything. It's so like shaly and every step, like the rocks, that everything is just, you know, shifting under your feet so you can't get on stable ground. And I knew I'd always had like a little bit of a fear of heights and incline, but oh goodness. I mean, this, I was, I like shut down at points. So can't not Cory or Phil or mean, this, I was, I like shut down at points.

So can't, can't not Cory or Phil or Matt. Like I, I had my handheld quite a bit through this experience. Literally your handheld. Well, yes, at one point, literally my hand was held. We were on the highest point of the ranch. Which I think was about 6,000 feet. And to get the two sheep out, it took us eight and a half hours to pack out.

By far the most brutal pack out I've ever been a part of. Let's shave a third of the time off because they stopped and waited for my ass a lot. Well, yeah, it was so hot though. We had to stop. Again, it probably wasn't 70 degrees, but there's zero shade. And we were, I'll admit, we were out of water by two o'clock.

I mean, we were sipping the last little bits of our water On our way out of there. It got a little touch and go Mm-hmm. Yeah, I was the end there definitely got in my head about that but You know, they they don't like, you know, maybe The year elk like they'd be gone. But I took a long time between or after his shot, and I didn't get mine with the first shot. And there were still other odd-ad hanging out. So their behavior is weird.

I mean, yeah, you were saying they didn't know where the shot came from, but it's not like one shot and they're all gone. So they hung around, presented other opportunities to you know. I find it interesting how the different states look at their attitude about the animal. In New Mexico it's a draw it's a draw tag and you don't draw it. Yeah. Like I put it in every year. For New Mexico audit? Yeah I put it in every year. For New Mexico audit? Yeah, I put it in every year. My buddy, my buddy's got a spot, he says they go there and sometimes you see like you'll be looking at a hillside and at first you

don't think there's anything there but once you start looking he's like there'd be like 30, 40 of them on the hillside and every time they draw a permit, every time one of his buddies draws a permit, they just get an audit. I've been applying now for I think 10 years in New Mexico, you know, New Mexico doesn't do the points. I've been applying in 10 years, 10 years to draw an audit tag in New Mexico. Um, I've never drawn it. So it's like, they kind of became like an honorary, they're sort of, uh, they're managed, you know,

like you look at with Texas Wild Hogs, Texas is so serious about Wild Hogs. They dropped any license requirement. You need, there is no license requirement for hogs. Obviously no season, no bag limit, no license requirement. You go to California to hunt hogs, you gotta tag. Full big game license, and you need to California to hogs. Yeah, you got a tag Full big game license you needed to tag the hog Just like different states have really different attitudes about

How to how to treat and handle right not native wild, but and then I think that also maybe goes back to what Heffelfinger is saying like there's obviously probably a delicate balance between the state wildlife agency and then the the you know the ranches that that sell odd at hunts yeah just having to be careful about you know well yeah the ranch control the ranch controls the access another way that like another interesting way that New Mexico handles this issue is with the you know they have the Ibex in the Florida mountains. The Florida mountain, well you can stand on one end of the Florida mountains and see the other end. It's like a containable little mountain range. It

maybe I don't know maybe, am I wrong? Could you walk around the Florida mountains in two days? Maybe yeah if you were a good in shape hiker. Yeah. Are you like picture you like standing and be like, there they are. Like you see them in their entirety. There's Ibex in the Florida mountains or non-native. So another non-native species. It's very hard to draw a Ibex tag in the Florida mountains. There's actually a thing where it's like a once in a lifetime if you draw for a billy or a ram, whatever they call them.

Meanwhile, their management strategy is, it's always IBEX season, not in the Florida mountains. Oh yeah, if they exit the mountains then it's full on. So like, it's like, they's, it's, they're like, this is the Ibex place. You have to apply and probably will never get a chance to hunt it as soon as one of them suckers steps out of those hills.

It's fair, it just, you just gotta go get a tag and go for it. So you just come up, they have these little, I don't know, man. I think they're kind of weighing like interest. People are very interested in it. So you just come up, they have these little, I don't know, man, I think they're kind of weighing like interest. People are very interested in it. They're kind of weighing interest against other ecological considerations when they figure out how to do it. Like in Florida they have that island with the sandbar on it. And you have to draw a tag to hunt a sandbar on the island. I'm

guessing if those sandbar were cut loose on the island. I'm Heffelfinger is like for every ram anyone takes, you need to shoot like 10. That was Heffelfinger's, yeah. I like to miss- 10 ladies. Heffelfinger every day though. I misrepresent something Heffelfinger told me every day. He doesn't call you out on it, which is a nice thing. But I'll just plug Phil's lab again. It's the Population Evolutionary Genetics Lab at UTEP,

University of Texas at El Paso. And if anyone feels like, you know, donating some tax-deductible monies to their research lab, and I think they'll probably end up doing more on Audad and looking at Desert Bighorn, the potential for reintroduction. That's giving2.utep.edu forward slash conservation. You probably did not retain that information. I will put a link in the show notes. And what was the episode he came on? Oh, he's been on a couple.

What do we call it? Yeah, the one. Our wild ducks really wild. That was the first episode a year or two ago. So if you remember back. He's been on ago. Yeah. So if you remember back, he's been on radio live. Yeah. If you remember back, we did an episode where in some places it's so weird this even allowed in some places you can like pen raise mallards,

like pretend mallards and caught them loose to kind of like, they have like a pretend duck hunt, but then those pen raiseraised ducks are breeding into our wild duck populations and affecting their behavior, screwing up migration patterns, life cycles, fitness. And he came on to talk about how, through their genetic survey work, they're able to see from these reintrodu to see from these pen-raised operations,

they're able to see a genetic spread as the genetics of those ducks expand outward. And how far west they're finding traces of these ducks. Michael Chamberlain is beginning a new thing on wild turkeys. The impact of, you know, people get all excited when they shoot a white turkey, real excited. Usually what's happened is you've shot a turkey. Butterball.

People love it. But what's probably happened is you shot someone's turkey. Right? You shot someone's turkey, right? You shot someone's feral turkey. And so there's a new project coming out where they're gonna start looking at the impacts of domestic turkeys finding their way into wild turkeys and interbreeding into wild turkey populations. Well, as Corinne mentioned, while we were out there,

Phil took meat samples and he was, they're trying to figure out, there was two different strains of Audad that were introduced to Texas originally, back in the 50s, I believe. And now we're trying to figure out which strain were we hunting and harvesting, and could they be hybrid strains? Could the two different groups have, you know, blended together and made a hybrid odd-ad. Who cut them loose in the first place? Yeah and why? Texas Parks and Wildlife. I was yeah because yeah it was. And now there you know people very much

don't like Texas Parks and Wildlife because they're you know aerial gunning odd-ad to help with desert bighorn sheep just because they have to. If you want to protect the sheep, you've got to minimize the odd-ad population. It's funny that we, I think, like, generally, you could say that wildlife management has this dark period, and then there's a turning point, and then there's sort of the good old days of post-Pittman Robertson, and we figured it out, you know?

But so many of these non-native introductions carried on until fairly late in the 20th century. And not all of them necessarily have the same ecological implications, but like Himalayan snowcock are like in the 70s. And you think about now non-natives are such an issue for us, but it's really not all that long ago.

No, I mean, Hungarian, like Hungarian part, it ain't American partridge. Right, right. But some, well, so you can hunt turkeys in 49 states. Turkeys are native to 38 states. Yeah. I mean, like some stuff is, there's no, some stuff, there's no like demonstrated deleterious effect. Yeah, no, and that's, I mean, I recognize that, but yeah, it's funny how quickly

we've shifted with some of these species in recognizing the impacts, you know? Yeah. Even in the fishing world. There is one last introduction I want to do. Whenever I'm in Hawaii, I always think on those hot lava rocks, I always think how much a rattlesnake would love it in there. That's all right. Do you know what I mean? It's the last introduction. 10,000 pet dogs in Hawaii just grown. I just want to tune to a male and a female rattlesnake on the Kona coast. I just feel like they'd be so happy. There'd be so much to eat. They'd be on those hot rocks.

I have zero interest in a rattlesnake being happy. Yeah, no kidding. When I'm standing on one of those hot lava rocks, I can just picture the sound. We really need some TSA agents now to follow you. Make sure I'm not showing up on my rattlesnakes. So you know Hawaii is the only state in the Union where coyotes have not colonized. Is that right?

It is. It's the only one. Maybe I'll do that too. Well, I mean, think about it. Those nenes, those endangered nenes would not be around for very long if coyotes ever got to Hawaii. What is that? I never heard that. It's a goose. It looks like a species of goose. Oh, yeah. It's got another name though, right? Oh, I've ever heard it's Nene, which is probably the Hawaiian name. I'm guessing.

I mean, probably, you know, Anglo missionaries maybe called them geese. Who knows? But yeah, I think they're generally known by nae nae these days. Okay. Yeah, I believe it's a dance too, the whip and nae nae, right Bill? Yeah, that's right. But one conversation we had on a rock when we were with this genetic scientists out there, we were talking about like at what point in evolution is an animal native versus invasive? You know, Dan's got some,

Dan's got some great segue. Trying to roll out a segue. Yeah. See he's taking after you. Dan's been on the show making his case for wild horses. Do you feel like remake it? Cause you know what I was going to ask you about first? We're going to give you a pick. Okay.

I was going to ask you to tell everyone the story of the other Lewis and Clark, the other Lewis and Clark. The other Lewis and Clark. Or you can, you can try to sell, you can try to, you can, you can sell everybody on the horse as a, as a native American animal. Well, the horse is, is taking, he's taking me. I'll say the horse is quick because the horse and its ancestors have been here for 56 million years Okay, they have only been absent for about eight thousand years and so you know, and I've talked to paleontologists in Canada who say from the fossils they have of the last horses in America that are ten eleven thousand years old that they they had

last horses in America that are 10, 11,000 years old that they had, they can't tell the difference readily between those and the horses that Europeans brought from the old world over here. And so, I mean, that's, I think what you can say about the horse is the horse is either an exotic with an asterisk or it's a native with an asterisk. And I prefer the native with an asterisk because I tend to think in terms of deep history and long time. And so an animal that's been here for 56 million years

and only gone for a wink of an eye time, to me is a native animal. I mean, that's why they went while so readily and so quickly when they were reintroduced in the West. The primary problem, of course, is that they were reintroduced without their Pleistocene predators accompanying them. And so that's why we're having such difficulty in controlling them is we don't have, you know, big hunting hyenas and American cheetahs and all these cats, particularly, that preyed on horse foals.

But yeah, this is an animal that, although it's created a huge kind of outcry by a lot of people as a non-native, I mean, it's actually an animal that's been here for a long time. So yeah, that one's pretty quick story. It's compelling. It's compelling. Uh, now talk about the, tell folks about the other Lewis and Clark. Yeah, this is a, this is a story that, uh, I know most Americans do not know and it has to do with something called historical memory because there are some things, you know, and you know this when

you study history, Randall knows it very well, some things we remember and make a part of the ongoing story of the country and some things that are swept under the rug. And so at a time when the United States was a brand new country, that's the period when Lewis and Clark, Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark into the West, 184 and 186, we were a country with a little bit of a self-esteem problem because we were brand new. The Brits were still sort of acting like at any moment they were going to reinvade and take the colonies back. And so Jefferson, after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, I mean if you think about the Lewis

and Clark Expedition and the map in your mind that you remember from school of the Louisiana Purchase, one of the things that will quickly occur to you is that why was Jefferson interested in only exploring the northern piece of it? Why didn't he have some interest in all the rest, which was a much larger chunk of ground? To be sure, the southern boundary was less set than the northern boundary because Jefferson tried to claim that the southern boundary was less set than the northern boundary, because Jefferson tried to claim that the southern boundary of the Louisiana Pursuits was the Rio Grande River.

And of course here is Spain with colonies in Texas and New Mexico on the north side of the Rio Grande who contested that. It's weird because he wanted being kind of right. Oh yeah, well. I mean, like over time. Yeah ultimately that's how it played out. But so after and to get to the story here, after the Lewis and Clark expedition was underway, Jefferson set about preparing an expedition to

go into the southern parts of the Louisiana Purchase. And the river that he decided was the very best river to explore, in the north it was the Missouri and the Columbia, obviously those two. In the south, what he decided to do was to explore the Red River, that's the river that is the boundary today between Texas and Oklahoma. And he picked that river because he thought it came out of the southern Rockies near Santa Fe. And so what he was organizing as a second expedition was to send a party up the Red River to its source in the southern Rockies near Santa Fe.

And then the party would cross over to the Arkansas, also believed to be, to have its headwaters in the southern mountains, and to come back to civilization down the Arkansas River. So this was not going to be an expedition that went all the way to the coast the way Lewis and Clark's was planned, because there was no idea of a northwest passage in the southern reaches of the west. And of course that's what Lewis and Clark were looking for. They were trying to find the fabled Northwest passage for commerce. So anyway, the second expedition was essentially based on a flawed premise.

Jefferson and just about everybody else who made maps of the West at the time followed Alexander von Humboldt's map of the West, which he had put together. He's probably in that order of Hubertus with that name. Alexander von Humboldt? Yeah, he's a major, he's a Prussian naturalist who explored South America, had a ton of students who followed in his wake, like Prince Maximilian on the Missouri. He was one of von Humboldt's students. who followed in his wake like Prince Maximilian on the Missouri.

He was one of Von Humboldt's students. And he's the guy who comes up with all kinds of sort of early notions about ecology. So Von Humboldt had put together a map of the West from sources in the archives in Mexico, and he saw that there was a river coming out of the Southern Rockies near Santa Fe that flowed eastward. And the French in Louisiana knew there was this river, the Red River, in their part of the world that flowed from the west. And so von Humboldt put those two together and told Jefferson that the Red River headed in the Southern Rockies

and you could send a party up it and it would take them all the way into what is now New Mexico and Colorado. The problem with that was that Von Humboldt did not have any sources that actually tied those two rivers together and so the river that he saw in New Mexico heading near Santa Fe was actually the Pecos, which is a tributary of the Rio Grande and the red river that Jefferson sent his party up heads in what we now call the Llano Westicato Plateau. It comes out of Palo Duro Canyon, which most people have heard of this big giant canyon that's on the eastern side of this plateau

in West Texas and New Mexico. So it was a river that actually didn't head in mountains. It would have led the explorers, the American explorers, out into the middle of the southern high plains and left them still like 10 days travel from New Mexico, from Santa Fe. Anyway, Jefferson didn't know that and he insisted that the Red was the river that he wanted to explore because there

were all sorts of wonderful stories about what was up at the headwaters of the Red River. So he put together this expedition in 1806, two years after Lewis and Clark set out. As Lewis and Clark were returning from the Pacific, Jefferson put together this party of more than 50 people, including a military escort led by a guy named Captain John Sparks, who was a close friend of Meriwether Lewis's and William Clark's. They had all grown up in Virginia. And Jefferson selected an Irish, basically he was a geographer named Thomas Freeman to lead the expedition, and he picked as the

first American-trained naturalist to explore in the West a young man he knew from Virginia. His name was Peter Custis, and he was just about to get a doctorate in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. So the expedition is known to the people who know about it as the Freeman and Custis expedition up the Red River in 1806, and these guys start out... They had 50 dudes? They had 50 dudes they had 50 dudes were Lewis and Clark well 40 40 so yeah about 40 42 I think is the top figure because they one guy died and they sent one guy back for bad behavior but Congress also

interestingly about this second expedition appropriated twice the money for it that they appropriated for Lewis and Clark. Now you know people who know about the expeditions know that Meriwether Lewis actually spent a whole lot more money than Congress had appropriated for him, but this second expedition had twice the funds appropriated. Jefferson referred to it as the Grand Expedition. And it set out up the Red River in April of 1806, reached the last point of civilization on the Red, the town of Natchitoches, which was an old French town on the Red River in central Louisiana.

And then, and we've talked about this, Steve, I know because you've been interested in it, one of the things they had to do to get on the Red River above Natchez was to detour around what we think is probably the biggest log jam anywhere in North America. It was called the Great Raft. And this thing extended for about 140 miles up the Red River. And so it was impossible to travel on the river, and they had to go through all these bayous and swamps around to the east of it to get around the raft and

back to the river. So they did that, and they were above the Great Raft in the early summer of 1806, and getting ready to head west. I gotta have you pause. Yeah, sure. Can you remind me, how did they end up getting rid of that raft? It took the invention of nitroglycerin. When nitro was invented in the 1860s, early 1870s actually, it was possible for a guy

named Captain Henry Shreve, for whom Shreveport is named, to go out with what he calls snag boats and pull the raft apart enough to place charges of nitro under it. And they basically blew it apart. Just sent all that wood out. Took it took them 10 years to do it. Yeah. But yeah, it was a gigantic lot of chance. Wow, man.

Yeah. It took the invention of a new explosive device, essentially nitro to do it. So anyway, this expedition is on the Red River and they're headed west and they're bound for Santa Fe and they have all these, you know, wonderful objectives that they're going to do. And Peter Custis is doing natural history. I mean, he, you know, Mary Weather Lewis is kind of self-trained as a naturalist. Peter Custis was trained in a university. And they get about 650 miles up the Red River and round a bend and discover a Spanish force, four times their size, arrayed across the river.

four times their size arrayed across the river. And they hear word that another, this Spanish forest is from Texas, and they hear that another Spanish forest, the largest one ever sent out from Santa Fe, is coming down the upper Red River. And so Spain determines that it is not going to allow the Americans to explore into country where the boundary has not going to allow the Americans to explore into country where the boundary has not been resolved between the United States and Spain and Jefferson had included in his letter of instructions to both Mary with a Lewis and to Thomas Freeman a line that said if you are if Your further progress is opposed by a force authorized or not not authorized by a nation, in other words, either an Indian group or some force authorized by a nation, I would,

I want you to turn back with the information you've already gathered rather than attempt to go forward because I don't want to risk the lives of American citizens in a confrontation with an overwhelming force. Meriwether Lewis never confronted anything like that because even the Spaniards tried to stop Lewis and Clark, but they were so far to the north, the Spanish forces could never find them on the Missouri. And they sent several expeditions out to stop Lewis and Clark. Yeah, hold on that for a minute. Yeah. Like, why does no one talk about where these Spanish guys, how can you not hear the stories about the Spanish guys trying to find Lewis and Clark? Like, where were they

looking? They were launched primarily from Texas. I mean, San Antonio had the the biggest presidios of any of the Spanish colonies and what were known as the provincias internas, the internal provinces of the North. And so they were launched from there, but they never got the one that got farther, it's never got out of what is now present day Kansas, never even got really to the, to the Missouri river. What obstacles were preventing them from getting up there? Usually poor planning, poor execution, uh, leaders who were not up to the task and on at least one of the groups encountered, uh, uh,

an opposing force of native people that turned them back. So they were those forces that were trying to intercept Lewis and Clark were, you know, they didn't really get close. But the Red River was a lot closer to these Spanish Presidios in Texas and they successfully got a 200-man force led and Freeman and his party, round a bend, they see the Spanish force, they stop for three days and have a diplomatic conference with... Parlay. Parlay with the leader of the Spanish force. And this Spanish leader, Viana, was basically, he was polite, but he was firm, my orders are, you are not to be allowed to progress any farther on the river.

And so Freeman consulted his orders from Jefferson, which said, if you're confronted by an overwhelming force, I want you to turn back with the information you have. And the Americans turned around and went back. And so what I would say about this is that the reason you've never heard of it, and nobody else really very much in America has ever heard of this expedition, is because at a time when the United States had a little bit of a self-esteem problem as a young country, we were perfectly willing to celebrate the success of Lewis and Clark getting to the Pacific. But the second presidential expedition being turned around by a

foreign power and told to retrograde to American territory, that was one that I mean even Jefferson was willing to just sort of sweep under the rug. Effectively. Effectively so, yeah. I did a talk one time at the 200th anniversary of Lewis and Clark in St. Louis, under the arts, hosted by the National Park Service. And they asked me to talk about this expedition. And immediately before me, there was this Hispanic historian from I think he was from Arizona who got up and did a talk and his whole talk was about

man I really wish some Spanish force had managed to stop Lewis and Clark that would have really changed and I got up after this guy said you know I'm gonna make all your dreams come true. It happened exactly that way, but with another party with the second expedition. Yeah. Yeah. So it's one of those kind of unknown stories. And, you know, the podcast I'm doing for you guys is a lot of it is like that. It's the the Western stories that you've not really ever heard or been exposed to, with a lot of emphasis, as we were saying a few minutes ago, on wildlife, on native people, on the landscapes, the great landforms of the West and all that. But that's what I've tried to do with

most of my career is to sort of work on things that other people hadn't done already. If you had to say, what are some of the things that people miss the most? What are some of the most common misses that people have about the American West? Is it like the antiquity or? I think that's very definitely one. I mean, the West and if you, and the Southwest in particular, you can't miss this because of all the ruins all over the, you know, the Southwest. When you and I were at Chaco a few months ago and the

time we went to the Clovis side. I mean, there are these unmistakably ancient, still visible, there's still visible evidence of people having lived in the West for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And in a lot of the rest of the country, because of higher humidity and dense forests and rainfall, I mean, evidence of long-term occupation is often really much more difficult to see. But in the arid part of North America, it's still there and it's still visible. And so that antiquity is a part of it. I mean, our sense about American history is, wow, I mean, it's know 400 years old. We've only been here since the 1600s and wow this is a brand new place. Well the truth is of course the story of America is that

right now we think at least 23,000 years old. That's when we have evidence for the first people getting over here. So one of the things I try to do in this podcast is at least spend some of it, the first two or three episodes, talking about these really ancient occupations and how people lived and their interactions with the natural world and wildlife and all that, because it's a story that I think really shapes the future. If you believe, and I always make this argument about history, is that the past

doesn't stay in the past. We're occupying a world that was shaped by our ancestors, by other humans. And the world that we're in right now is what it is in large part because of what they did. And that's kind of one of my themes, I think, in this podcast. At the end of Dan's podcast episodes, what we've been doing is we've been doing a little Q&A where Dan does his material. It's kind of a, in the best way possible, lecture format. You take a subject, talk about it, but then the subjects bleed into each other. Yeah. And at the end, me and Randall get to ask questions.

In the spirit of that, Randall, I'd like to point the next question. Oh, I didn't. Whatever you think is the most interesting thing. Oh, if not, I'll do it. Um, I mean, Dan, I think this is not necessarily specific to the podcast, but I think people would probably be interested to just hear your story about how you grew up and you've got some, you've got sort of an interesting past that some might not maybe expect from a professor of history and published Yeah, well, so at least on my dad's side, my mom's side of the family was, you know, pretty much sort of standard Anglo-Scots, American through the upper southern states

and into the Midwest and all. And so that's part of my lineage, but probably the more interesting one, in part because that's where I grew up and I still have family there, is from Louisiana because that town, Natchitoches I mentioned a few minutes ago, which is the, you know, I always have fun telling people this,

that's the oldest European town in Louisiana, not New Orleans. Is it really? Yeah, Natchitoolis is four years older than New Orleans. Oh gosh. It was founded in 1714. And my ancestors got there in 1716. So. Wow.

Yeah. So we've been in Louisiana for a very, very long time, but I had. What brought them there, do you know? Well, I had two different sides of the story in Louisiana, and I don't know why my French ancestors showed up, and that's the predominant line in that side of my family. But there, I mean, my last name is Flores, which is a Spanish name. And the reason I have that name is because when the French founded Natchitoches in 1714, the Spaniards farther west were so alarmed

at this French incursion because they were afraid the French were going to go up the Red River into the west. And they were absolutely right about that. That they plunked down 10 miles away from Natchitoches a little Presidio manned by about 25 or 30 young soldiers and these guys, one of whom was my ancestor, the Flores ancestor, here they were in the Louisiana wilderness with no available potential marriage partners. And so my... Except the enemies.

Except the enemies, 10 miles away. So my ancestor married into a French family in Natchitoches. And he's like, you guys ain't all bad. Yeah, they absolutely, they were Catholics at least anyway. Yeah, so we got absorbed into the French story in Louisiana. And I think the reason I probably grew up being fascinated with the West is because one of the stories that we always talked about in the family was there were some groups four or five generations back who were traders to the Indians in the West and so I grew up hearing stories about Pierre Lafitte Pierre Bois Lafitte who was my great grandfather four times back and

he had been a sort of a major player in the Indian trade to the West out of Nakadish and Had gone I don't know if he ever got all the way up to the Wichita villages far up the Red River, but he certainly was a pretty major player in Indian trade in Louisiana. And I knew that they had gone west, so I kind of grew up with the idea of, you know, the west was always this part of the country that beckoned. And when I was four years old, my family went on a national park tour and one of the places they went was into New Mexico. So by the time I was about 10 or 11, I was having these dreams of these beautiful blue

skies, cotton ball clouds, sand dunes, red cliffs. Had no idea where that had come from until I was about 37 or 38 years old and I was back in Louisiana for for family reunion. And I mentioned to an ad of mine, you know, I've always had these strange dreams. That's why, about the West, that's why I ended up going West. And she said, well, I wonder if that had anything to do

with that national park tour. We took you on to New Mexico when you were four. Oh, I guess maybe it did. And you know, so it's the kind of thing that you sort of forget, but clearly colors your subconscious for a long time. So that was part of it. And as soon as I was able to drive a car and my parents would let me go out overnight, first thing I did was drive 500 miles to the west just to see what the country was like.

And I've never forgotten how exciting it was when night fell the first time on that drive and I could see the lights of towns 30 and 40 miles away. Because growing up in Louisiana, you can't see 40 feet away. The vegetation is so dense and it was very exciting to be able to see. Yeah. Yeah. Sea country.

And you spent a fair bit of time running around outside in your, in your youth, right? Oh, I did. Yeah. I grew up in a little small town where the woods were, you know, a hundred yards away. And so, and we didn't have enough guys in the town to field one baseball team, let alone two baseball

teams to play one another. So what I got to do for recreation was essentially read books and roam around in the woods. And you know, and I certainly grew up hunting. I wasn't too interested in fishing, but I was certainly interested in hunting. And I did that through a lot of my teen years into my early 20s. And as Randall knows, when I was living in Montana, I mean, I can't say that I ever actually hunted, but three times because I wanted venison in my freezer, I bought a deer tag and shot a little, you know, yearling or four-corn mule deer buck out the window of my living room, out in the horse pasture.

I remember when I first met you, I remember you telling me that and you were very careful not to overplay the circumstances. And so I couldn't say that was a hunt that was more harvesting a deer for the freezer. That was a, you know, but I, I still, I mean, it was in my forties and fifties and I still remembered how to do it at least. Yeah. Well, you, you also wrote for Field and Stream and, you know. Field and Stream, Sports of Field, and Outdoor Life.

Yeah, those were, when I started as a writer, that's who I wrote for. That was the magazine world that I knew. And so I was an English major as an undergraduate and had an English professor in a creative writing course when I was a junior who had us write things that we thought you know you might approach a magazine for, query a magazine about. And I had the fun of writing a piece and before the semester was over going into his office and saying sports of field just bought that piece I wrote for you back in February. And so that was very fun. And I had a, you know, just like you did, Steve, at Outdoor,

what's the magazine? Outside. Yeah, outside. I had an editor at Sports of Feel in particular who I guess saw some potential in me and he gave me a few pointers and took the first three or four things I wrote and introduced me to editors at Field and Stream and Outdoor Life. And I ended up finally for Outdoor Life before I went to graduate school and got a PhD in history, I wrote a conservation column for Outdoor Life for their regional pages. They had these pages in Outdoor Life that were designated for particular regions, and I wrote a conservation column for the one on what was known as the Mid-South. And I wrote a conservation column for Louisiana woods and waters. So this was all before I ever went to graduate school and did the

professor thing. I got a lot of friends who wind up being that they're in occupation, professionally they wind up in occupation, they would have had no idea existed when they were a kid. Yeah. I mean you asked your kid what they wanted to be like, detective, fireman, veterinarian, right? And then people have jobs that they don't even, they don't find out. A lot of times you don't even know what you're doing was a thing until you're in your twenties, in your thirties. You probably had, you probably didn't use the word growing up. I want to be an environmental historian. the word growing up, I want to be an environmental historian. You are absolutely right. I never once said that. So I was not the first person in my

family to go to college. My dad had gone to college. So I knew something about university life, a little bit about it, but I actually went to college on an athletic scholarship. And with the idea, because my dad had played semi-pro baseball and he wanted me to be a baseball player, and with the idea of actually doing that, and it didn't last, I didn't play baseball in college for more than two years. We got a new coach, he and I didn't like one another and so that was sort of the end of that. But what I had sort of discovered, you know, a baseball player who's an English major is a little bit of an unusual character. And I began to meet professors who started pointing me in the direction of where I went. And one of them was this guy, this creative writing guy I mentioned, who when I talked to him about my future,

I said, I want to be a writer. This is my idea. I've always thought, you know, as a kid growing up reading books, that's what I wanted to do. He said, well, most people who write usually do something else as a day job. And I said, well, like what? And he said well I mean like me this guy wrote Western novels. He said like me I mean you're a professor and they actually reward you for writing books when you're a professor and that put the idea into my head for the very first time that well okay so I think maybe what I'll do is I'll go ultimately to graduate school and become a professor of some kind. And then that will enable me or give me enough time to be able to write too. So that's kind of what I did, but you're exactly right. As a kid, I never said,

I'm going to grow up and, you know, be an environmental historian at the University of Montana. Yeah. Yeah, that never happened. One of the things I've picked up through my relationship with you and talking to you about American history and it also, I also kind of absorbed it a little bit from reading and kind of conversations with the historian Elliot West is a, this thing about the West where I think that if you fall into the trap, maybe that's not the best word for it, but if you fall into the mindset

that the West was just sitting there untouched, right? Or as Elliot West put it, that like Native Americans were just in the static, they were just basically waiting for Europeans to show up in this static state. And then you get this idea that then, and then Lewis and Clark go out there, no one had been there before them. They go out there and then it's just like this tidal wave is unleashed. And it all happens like that. It all happens through the 1800s. That sense of how Western history went, for me, really started to fall apart when I learned

that from the time the first European descended the Mississippi, okay, so from the time the first European descended the Mississippi, it was 100 years until the next European descended the Mississippi. Or as Elliot West pointed out in one of his essays, when Lewis and Clark hit the Great Plains. There were people, there were Native Americans on the Great Plains whose parents had been to Paris and come home. And then you start realizing that this, the job of understanding contact, right, of understanding like European contact isn't like this little like blip through the 1800s. It's centuries long. Yeah, well, Elliot steered you correctly. I mean, that's been one of the things that even in my own career, you know, I

mean, I started out being trained to do a more classic kind of Western history, where really it does kind of begin with Lewis and Clark. Or maybe if you start being imaginative about it, okay, it starts with Spanish settlements in New Mexico. So the place where I live, Santa Fe, is about 10 years ago, well 15 years ago now, it celebrated its 400th anniversary as a town. Santa Fe was founded in 1610. That's almost 200 years before Lewis and Clark

started up the Missouri River. That's incredible, man. Yeah. There's already a town there. If you go from today, like to understand this, okay, it's 2025. Okay. If you go that distance of time, think about where that puts you. Oh yeah. You know? Yeah.

So the distance between Lewis and Clark in the northern plains and the founding of Santa Fe, the founding of a European like kind of cosmopolitan city in New Mexico was the distance that separates us from 1825 from 1825. Yeah. At a time when we were just now starting to try steamboats on the Western Rivers. Yeah, so it's that kind of distance. And so you have to, you know, as a historian, you start learning to incorporate that into your thinking and and once I started having the fun of doing that, I started pushing it back farther and farther because it became evident.

pushing it back farther and farther because it became evident. So historians primarily rely on written documents, right? But if you decide, okay, and as environmental historian, I was trained to do this, you don't just rely on the written documents. You also rely on archaeology and paleontology and ecology and all these other fields. And if you start using those, then suddenly the past starts getting deeper and deeper and deeper for you. I mean, you can't come up with a great quote from anybody from 10,000 years ago.

You don't know exactly what we call people Clovis and Folsom. We don't really know what their names actually were for themselves because we named them after the towns where their archaeologists first found remains of them. So it's a kind of a deep time past that's not perfect, but it allows you to think in terms of a really deep and ancient history. When you start doing that, that's kind of how I translated the human past in America, going back 23,000 years, to start thinking about the past of the animals here. Because many of the animals in North America, I mean like horses and their ancestors, 56 million years back.

Camels are another family of animals that had their origins in America and died out here while surviving in the rest of the world. They go back 46 million years. Passenger pigeons went back 15 million years Bison actually which we of course is now our national mammal in America. We have concluded that probably the oldest Arrival of bison in North America was only about four hundred thousand years ago. So they're actually quite recent arrivals compared to something like passenger pigeons. Mammoths got here 17 million years ago. So doing that deep time for humans, I think, was the, it was a ready step from that to start looking at all these animals around us.

And as we were talking yesterday, talking to you and Randall both about this, I mean, one of the things I've decided to do, because I couldn't see that anybody else was really doing it in writing Western history, was to start taking the animals seriously. To stop thinking about them as, okay, beavers are just, you know, there's just this lumpen animal that everybody that produced the beaver trade, them is okay beavers are just you know there's just this lumpen animal that

everybody that produced the beaver trade and start actually looking at so what did the presence of beavers over five million to seven million years that's how we think they've been here what did that do in North America and you begin to realize well hell man beaver ecology totally transformed the continent. They made it a much more humid and wetter place and when we started extracting them from the world it suddenly dried out a lot of America because it undermined an ecology that they had built up over a really long period of time. So taking the animals seriously I think has probably been a step towards just revising

the whole story of the West and America. You know, one of the biggest gaps that puzzles me, and I think it'd be like a, it'd be a cool book, and there would not be any quotes in it, like you said. But like, personally, I focus a lot of attention on, and I love reading about talking with experts on the ice age, the first Americans, right?

Yeah. The Clovis culture, Folsom culture, different migration theories. Um, that's of great interest to me. And then you have where we talked about some of these, the first Europeans to make the way in the Southwest and they encounter probably to their surprise cities. I mean cities. Yeah. Yeah. Absolute cities where, where there were cities. If you go back a thousand years, there were cities in the American Southwest

that were bigger than London. Like more people living in them. You know what I mean? Architecture, religious facilities, irrigated crop lands. Like, how did we get from, how did you get from these bands? Do you mean these like bands of 30 or 40 or 50 hunters running around with stone tip tools?

Like, how do you get to the cities? And I don't think that that's understood. I mean, it's probably it's understood, but I don't think that's like, that people, like that narrative hasn't been told. No, I think it hasn't, certainly not for, for kind of public consumption. I mean, among the, the archeologists, you know, David Stewart with his book, Anasazi America.

I mean, I think he probably told that story. I mean, I certainly rely on his treatment quite a bit in trying to analyze that. And to get from, I mean, we start with paleolithic big game hunters like the Clovis and Folsom people. And once those animals are gone, and they're gone by about 10,000, 9,000 years ago, essentially what you get is a long period of hunter-gatherers where the focus is on smaller animals. I mean, there's still deer and elk and things out there. And so the big game is smaller. And there's an enhanced focus on vegetable products, on plant foods. And so the hunter-gatherer, the very name implies that you've got a new

focus on plants. You're beginning to realize some. And once the focus on plants is there, then you're set up for some human genius at some point to say, well, you know, this particular plant that produces this thing we now call Teosinte, which produces this little tiny corn cob, but sometimes there's a slightly bigger one. Is there some way that we can take the plants that make the slightly bigger ones?

And if the next generation, the corn cob is even a little bit bigger than that, plant those. And of course what they're doing is that they're domesticating plants. And I think the reason we reached that stage, because we reached it in the old world many thousands of years before this happened in the Americas. The reason being, of course, is the Americas are settled by humans a lot later than, say, Europe and Asia get settled by humans. And so the whole process over time

is an accelerated rate in the old world compared to the Americas. But what happened in both places, I think, to push us in the direction ultimately of crops and domesticated animals is that as the human population grew, relying on hunting got harder and harder to do because animals became more and more difficult to find. And you finally reach a point, I think, where everybody knew during hunting and gathering stages

that you had to keep the human population low. And one of the ways they did that was basically they engaged in not only abortions, but infanticide. Whenever a band of 120 people, they had too many children one year, I mean the leaders knew if we let this go on, we are screwing ourselves to the hilt. And so we've got to control our population. And that became obviously a psychological burden for people, especially for women who

were carrying kids, babies. So everybody is looking for a way to escape it, and the domestication of crops and animals became a way. It's hard to grow the population now just by relying on hunting because we've thinned the animals to the point where we can't really grow the human population. But what if we start domesticating things? What if we start domesticating plants and growing them ourselves? What if we take these wild goats, these gazelles in the old world in North America, wild turkeys

become the primary domesticated animal, what if we take these and raise them and that allows us then to avoid this the speed bump of having to so assiduously keep the population down and that then produces of course the great agricultural revolution, the so-called Neolithic Revolution in the old world and 5,000 years later in the Americas. And so those cities that you and I have walked around in Chaco Canyon Historic Park, of course, is the primary and most dramatic one in North America. Those cities resulted from the evolution,

basically, of hunting and gathering culture into an agricultural sort of, in Chaco's case, an empire really, of hundreds of small farmers growing corn, beans, and squash that they had imported up from Mexico because Mexico and North America was where the first domestication of plants took place. And that domestication then enabled larger populations that were capable of producing a city like Chaco. Which, you know, Chaco was such a dramatic and large place, huge buildings. There were not buildings the size of those built in Chaco in North America until the 1880s. Well, we don't have any buildings the size

of something like Pueblo Benito until, you know, only basically 150 years ago in the United States. But this is a story, it's sort of like that, you know that other Lewis and Clark expedition story. I was telling it's not one that plays to Historical memory in America I mean I've talked to a lot of people who go to Chaco who are utterly shocked to find the ruins of that place Because you grow up on the East Coast nobody ever talks about the fact that there was a giant city. No people lived in tents

Yeah, people lived in tents and stick hogans Yeah I was gonna I think I told you about this before. Do you remember that? The fizzy, I think he's a physiologist Jared Diamond. Oh, yeah wrote that He wrote a book guns germs and steel germs and steel. Yeah, did he pass away Jared Diamond. Oh yeah. He wrote a book, Guns, Germs and Steel. Did he pass away Jared Diamond? I don't think he has passed away. No, I think he's still around. He kind of

begins with this question, I think I told you about this foreword, who was it that took on the Incans? Was it Pizarro? Yeah, one of Pizarro. He begins with this question, like why was it that Pizarro. He begins with this question, like, um, why was it that Pizarro came from Spain to attack the Incans? Why didn't, um, I don't know who the leader of the Incans was, why didn't the Incan Empire go and attack Spain? And I think that there's a point, if you'd have gone, if you'd have been like, if you'd have visited Earth, right, at that time of the ascendancy of Chaco, you might have been like, I think someday

these people are gonna go and find Europe. Do you know what I mean? It would have seemed like it was heading that direction, but then there's certain things like that Misses like the wheel Yeah, they don't they do not there's no and so one of the strange things about the wheel is that they're actually figurines little small figurines in Aztec Mexico that show wheels. But there's not an application of the wheel in any kind of utility form because they have

not proceeded to the domestication of a beast of burden that would pull a wheeled vehicle. And so, yeah, the wheel is a very strange one, but I mean, your question is really on the mark, because at the same time that Chaco was at its height, just roughly a thousand years ago, I mean, all those great cities in the Mayan Empire on the Yucatan Peninsula were also at their height and Tenochtitlan which is what Mexico City is that how you supposed to pronounce that I think so I was like a Tenochtitlan yeah Tenochtitlan well I mean you may be yeah you may be more accurate than I am but the people

that could answer that question or that's what I call that's what I call a reading word. Yeah, it is a reading word. But that city was also, I mean, it was absolutely at its height and in many respects, these big cities of Mesoamerica, you know, I mean, you guys have probably been to Chichen Itza and seen the pyramid there, which I mean, the first time I went there, you could still climb it. They won't let you climb it anymore. No, they won't let you go up the steps of the top anymore. You know, and it is precipitously steep. There's no question.

But you know, I had the fun 15 or so years ago of climbing to the top of, you know, this temple of Kukulkan, the temple of Venus. And I mean, holy cow, man, that's just, it's impressive as hell when you're there. But we come out of a, you know, a Western European kind of sensibility that we were on top of the world. We were the leaders of civilization. I mean, Western Europe is, I mean, that's what Guns, Germs and Steel is about. His argument, Jared Diamond's argument in that book is that the reason Western Europe

managed to prevail over all those other places is that it happened to sit at the far end of the largest landmass on Earth, Eurasia, also connected to Africa, and so Europeans got to benefit from all the human inventions that took place all over Eurasia and Africa. Yep, the flow was smooth. The flow was smooth, and everything that was invented in China, gunpowder, managed to get to Western Europe, whereas the Americas are completely isolated from the rest of the world, not only from the ideas of the rest of the world, but, you know, as

we all know, from the diseases that evolved through the domestication of animals and living with domesticated animals. Europeans, old-worlders ended up developing all sorts of really pretty horrific diseases. And when they brought them over to the Americas, I mean what really conquered the Americas, this is the germs part of guns, germs and steel, is these exotic diseases that native people had absolutely no immunity to. Yeah.

You know another one about Tenochtitlan? Yeah. When you think about sort of your, if you don't have the luxury of spending a lot of time studying history and you get this idea of, um, you know, people living in tents and small scale habitations, that that's what Europeans found. intense and small-scale habitations, that that's what Europeans found. It always struck me that when the Spanish got there, they had zoos. They had zoos with, I mean, not foreign animals from other continents, but they had zoos holding animals, like bison, from places that they wouldn't even, the residents of those cities could have gone and seen animals on the streets that they would

have no prayer of encountering in normal life. Things collected from far away, from far to the south, from far to the north, brought and you could go like, where's that from? You know, it'd be like as weird as when you take your kids, they see a giraffe. That people would have that experience and see like, yeah, like they would have, you know, a Jaguar, they would have a Buffalo, they would have birds from South America? Well, it's pretty clear that, you know, aggregates of charismatic and intriguing animals from the far edges of human knowledge assembled together for public viewing.

In effect, the word, of course, our word is zoo. That is a very old human impulse. I mean and you know we have no idea it's possible that the Clovis people had something like that but as you pointed out we certainly do know that the Aztecs which had an empire that stretched for hundreds thousands of miles in every direction. They were doing that very thing. They were collecting animals out at the far reaches

of their empire and bringing them to the citadel city of the empire and assembling them into zoos for the public entertainment of their citizenry. That's so, I mean, I've argued in my books, especially in Wild New World, the most recent one, which is a book about the long-term story of humans and animals in North America, that this is something, and I know I derived this from Paul Shepard, from reading Paul Shepard many years ago, that this fascination with the natural history of the living world around us is something that is impossibly ancient in the human story.

Every time we look back into the past, we find examples of it. And it survives today. And one of the ways it survives, I mean, I don't have children myself. I know you do though, and I'll bet this happened with you because it happens with every time I visit somebody's home and they have young kids and they show me the nursery there are always little elephants and buffaloes and monkeys and so what that is getting at is that it's knowledge about natural history and about other living creatures that is the very first step in kind of the organization of the brain in creating a

taxonomy of the world around you, you know, and then when For little boys in particular when you get to be 8 or 10 years old, you start collecting hot wheeled cars and things like that. And that provides you with the next step of taxonomy. But that human desire to kind of organize everything into an understandable world really starts with animals. And that's why we do this with toddlers. The first thing you teach them really is the difference between well this is a picture of an elephant.

It has this long trunk and it has and this is a picture of a horse. It has this tail and that probably you know is something we humans have been doing for two million years Have you ever thought about why American why American people when they put a mobile above the crib Why is it African fauna? generally Why is it African fauna generally? No, that's, that's a good question. You know, and, uh, why is it elephants, elephants and giraffes? I mean, cause they're so distinguishable.

I don't know. They're distinguishable. You know, interestingly, of course they're, it's the living Pleistocene that we're, we're showing them. And so there may be, you know, I mean, Randall, take it away, man, you should maybe do a piece on the evolution of something like that. The mobile. I was just thinking when you were talking about animals, I was like, yeah, why don't we just hang, you know, desks and chairs around the,

this is your world, this is what you'll have, and the keyboards. A keyboard, yeah, and Keyboards. Yeah. It must be some deep, like the African fauna must be some like deep thing about the cradle of, you know, like you're speaking to some deep genetic memory of cradle of Africa or something. Or it's just easy to tell apart. Yeah. And I also think it's like, those are real animals, you know? Like they're big, they're toothy, they got wild horns.

There's something about, I don't know, there's something about the exoticism of those creatures compared to what we see around us today. So I still look at something like an Ibex, and I'm just like, that's an animal. When I was writing Wild New World, I kept encountering over and over again the stories, especially when you get to the 20th century, when most of the charismatic animals in North America

are gone by that time, are reduced to such small numbers that you hardly ever have a chance to see them. I kept encountering over and over again these people who become really prominent conservationists in the United States, you know, and found all sorts of organizations from the Sierra Club on, who acquired their fascination for nature and for the wild by going to Africa. And they came back from Africa and decided, okay, we're gonna try to do something like that.

And it's a kind of an indication. Like the size and variety. Size and variety and an indication, you know, and of course Africa as a result of the big game parks there preserve these animals so that people could go and see them. But it speaks in a way to the fact, you know, to Thoreau's lament back in the 1850s that he lived in this impoverished world because his ancestors in New England had already taken out all these animals that he wanted to watch because he kept, you know,

these meticulous notes about when the birds, particular species of birds, arrive in the spring and when they nest and when the beavers are hatching there or having their kits. And so he goes through all this process and realizes, oh my God, I'm missing the lynx, I'm missing the moose, I'm missing black bears. Those have all been taken out. He could read the accounts of the first colonists in New England who were describing pigeon

flights and huge numbers of wolves. And here he sits in the 1850s and all of that is gone. And he feels like, as he says, I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth, except demigods have come along before me and plucked from the heavens the best of the stars. And so I think in some ways what I kept running into with all these American conservationists who had to go to Africa first before they were realizing how important it was to, you know, campaign on behalf of nature in America has something to do with the fact that we lost so much of the magic in North America and it's like in order to get it

you had to go somewhere else. To glimpse it, yeah. Yeah, in order to glimpse it and understand. You know, we've touched on this in the past. It's kind of a, like a, like a conundrum of history, uh, and talking about native peoples. We talked about this when we were talking about like Chaco society and things is there, there is a sort of a custody battle, a cultural custody battle about, you know, like whose story is what, right? Yeah. Like do, if you're not Native American, do you have a right to a right R-I-G-H-T to write W R I T E about native culture.

Yeah. And is your telling like when you're talking about it, is there a cult like a, like a European bias, a colonial bias, you won't get it right. And when we've talked about this, I don't think you don't, you don't punt on it, but you have a great point. As you said, there's human history, right? As a human being, you're interested in human history, And human history travels all around the world. And it's weird to put, this is my words, not yours. I'd like you to speak on it, but it's weird that you would then start

drawing sort of like borders of where your interest in human history can't go. Like how have you, because you've had to been challenged about that, being a history like in teaching and writing about the American West and teaching about Native peoples, you had to have encountered the sentiment of like, well, who are you to go telling people about that? You know? Yeah, I would, I would say, so one of the, the probably important steps in my career was I, I published an article in a really fancy academic journal, the Journal of American History, in 1992 about what happened to the Buffalo. And it was a complete recasting of the story. And for the first time, and this was a period of time, the 1980s, 1990s, probably back to the 1970s, when a lot of people in the environmental movement

were sort of using native people as, you know, here were our stand-ins for conservation, living, and environmental living. I mean, you all remember the famous ad where the Indian steps out of his canoe onto the shore of Manhattan Island, and he steps out and there's trash all underfoot, and a tear rolls down his face. Well, that particular piece that I did about what happened to Buffalo was it was not only a complete

recasting of the story and kind of an environmental telling of the story. I pulled in things that nobody had ever pulled in before like when horses were reintroduced into the Americas and went wild. I mean they obviously were drinking the water and grazing the grass that bison had also been subsisting on and so they had an effect and there were a whole numbers of things that I plugged into that story that I told a changing climate in the middle of the 19th century there was a drought that lasted for like 15 years on the Great Plains and reduced the numbers of Buffalo and there so I went through this whole sequence of five or six sort of new and compelling, obviously they were compelling because a lot of other historians like Elliot West sort of immediately

picked up on this, these compelling reasons for what happened. And one of the things I also did was I pointed out, which people were kind of shy about doing at the time, that native people had been seduced into the market economy. And just as we were talking about this yesterday, it was a situation where Europeans were offering a transformative technology, metalware, guns, and if you didn't do it in exchange for bison robes, and if you didn't participate in it, and everybody else, all the other native groups around you did, you ended up disadvantaging yourself to the point where you might not survive, whereas the southern Cheyennes, just

down the way, were going to do very well because they in fact were participating in the market trade. And they're now armed with guns. And they're armed with guns and they're armed with all sorts of metal tools. And so I talked about that. And so what that meant, of course, was that in 1992, an article comes out that re-cast the whole story about what happened to Buffalo in the 19th century and it also talks about the Indian role in it.

Well, I immediately, as you might suspect, had various native people get in touch with me and say exactly what you were referring to a few minutes ago. What gives you the right to say this, to write about this? One of the people who did so was Vine Deloria. And Vine Deloria, who was a very famous Indian author in those days, he was at the University of Colorado. He was famous for books like God is Red, Custer Died your sins. And Vindaloria called me up and said, I read your piece and I think it's really good. And what I want you to do, if you would, is come down to the

University of Colorado and spend three days with me. We're having a conference. I'm bringing in the wildlife managers from a bunch of the Western reservations, and I want you to come down, but I don't want you to speak. I don't need you to tell them the story that you just wrote about Buffalo. I just want you to come down here and sit beside me and listen to them." And I said, okay, I will do it. And that's exactly what I did. And so I never, Vynd lawyer, never asked me to speak.

And for three days, I sat right beside him, sort of in the protection of this guy who was this looming figure, and listened to all these wildlife managers talk about the native approach to managing wildlife. And of course, what he was interested in having me do was to understand the native approach to managing wildlife. But what I brought away from that particular experience,

and I have said this in every book that I have written that includes a section on native people since, and on all kinds of other people, is that just as you inferred a few minutes ago, I'm interested in the human story. And I think as a human, I have a perfect right to write about humans, an R I G H T to be able to W R I T E about humans, regardless of their culture. And I think in a way, the whole impulse was, you know, I'm an Italian

American, only I can write about Italian Americans, only I can write about Christopher Columbus or something. I think that's a stage in our development that probably is kind of dropping away some, because I think to me the argument that we're all human beings and that we should be interested in the human story everywhere among every group of people we all come from the same source. We're all part of the evolutionary river, the Darwinian River, that's the stronger argument here and so I stand by that Mm-hmm It'd be I think it'd be in many ways

You know an impoverished world if you weren't able to bring all those different perspectives to things You know yeah, I think like that big picture of like the human story is pretty compelling when you imagine that when when compelling when you imagine that when, when all, when humans spread all around the world and they started to meet back up, they were meeting back up. Do you know what I mean? You kind of lose sight, you sort of lose sight of that, that like that people, these groups moved around and it was so long they kind of forgot about each other. They lost track of each other but then all of a sudden they come

back and they're like, wow. Yeah. Look what you did with your time. Yeah. You guys got so tan. And everybody is fascinated. Everybody is fascinated by everybody else. I mean, that's part of the whole first contact notion

is that we get to see these people who maybe 30,000 years ago, we actually knew some of their ancestors, or our ancestors knew their ancestors. And now once again, we're meeting up and seeing them and wow, look, look what you guys did with your time and your place. And it's absolutely fascinating. I mean, that's sort of the whole premise of cultural anthropology is that, oh, my God, you know, humans have sort of fractured into tens of thousands of cultural groups with all these different deities and all these different ideas of creation.

And wow, isn't it incredible to sort of listen to what you guys have to say about what you think is going on with human life. So yeah, I mean, that's because like you, and I think like all of us sitting around the table and probably most of the people listening to this, I'm fascinated with all those differences. Yeah, I would say the stronger argument is it's the

human story that compels us and nobody has any kind of lock on a particular one. I mean, I'm certainly willing to concede that some people might not want to share the details of their religious practices and ceremonies and all that. That's everybody's perfect right, but the bigger story I think is ours for understanding, because that's how we we manage to figure out who we are. I took this class one time called the structure of modern English, and in it the guy had said, the professor, I can't remember who taught that class, but

he said if at the end of the Civil War, if you had built an impenetrable barrier along the Mason-Dixon line, that at this point those two populations wouldn't be able to communicate. They wouldn't understand one another. You wouldn't communicate anymore. So imagine that little gap and that kind of like, so when you imagine these peoples getting separated, he's talking about not being able to communicate in a hundred years, a couple hundred years. Imagine these groups of people separated and you get to watch what, like, 10,000 years of being subject to different climates and then different founder

effects just it could be as small as personality differences that's a very good point absolutely and the wildly different directions yeah people go in terms of religion you see these crazy themes animism you know all these cultures holding out the ideas that the land landscape features have a sort of spirit or personality You see these continuities That they'll that folks will eventually figure out agriculture if they can They'll get better and better at launching Projectiles right they'll like a lot of them will figure out vertical walls, right?

But other things are just so different, man. Yeah, other things are so different. Now that's a really great argument. And that's why it's fascinating to explore it and to approach all of it with a curious and open mind and to allow yourself to be completely intrigued without falling back on the kind of where, okay, so our ideas are better than their ideas. I mean, it's not a case of better, it's a case of different and how did you guys arrive at this particular notion? But there are some obviously some commonalities that

are all over the planet and you know the old animistic religion ideas that you just mentioned where there are deities in wild animals and there are deities in landforms and all of that. That is so widespread as part of the European tradition too. The Druids, for example, of only 1,200, 1,500 years ago in Western Europe are certainly practitioners of that kind of animistic approach to religion. So it's something that is so widespread that it's clear it probably dates back a very, very long time. I argue in Wild New World, in fact, that the idea that native people have of being kin

to other animals, to the European line about that went in a different direction where humans are, we're the only ones created in the image of God and the only ones with an everlasting soul and everything else is different. And that actually is an anomaly compared to the idea that, which is kind of a proto-Darwinian idea, that we're all related to one another. We're all part of the same kind of kinship order. And it requires somebody like Darwin using science

in the 19th century to finally bring the European world back to that recognition because it had gone in a sort of an unusual direction with the notion, well, humans are completely different from everything else out there. I mean, we're special, we're exceptional and everything else is something else. While rather than being entangled in this kind of elaborate give and take relationship where you had to show, you had to show honor to other species or

else other species would deprive you of the benefits of their use. That's it. Yeah, that's it. And that I think is very old in the human experience. Well, I'm gonna close with a couple details here. The American West with Dan Flores will premiere May 6th. You can find it anywhere you find your podcasts. It'll pop up every other Tuesday? Mm-hmm, yep. On its own feed. And it'll be in the history category, if you're shopping around. I have here short show description,

and then show description. But the short show description is only two lines shorter. Yeah. I'm gonna do the big dog. Dan Flores celebrates the American West by chronicling the heroes, scoundrels, and events that shaped its history from the Battle of Adobe Walls to the Mountain Meadows Mastacher. What goes back more than that? Where's the other one? Yeah, it's got to be the other one. That sounds like an early... Longtime Western author, Dan Flores, presents a big picture history of an

American West you've never encountered, covering a vast span in a Western America whose landscapes and wild animals drew people from around the world. This podcast tells a new story of our most fascinating region. To give people a sense, the series opens up with kind of a overview, it's called West of Everything, opens up with some of the deep antiquity and introduces some of the broader themes. Episode two is Clovisia, is that how you like pronounce that? Yeah, Clovisia the beautiful About the the early human cultures Clovis cultures Ravens and coyotes America is episode three and that gets into that That long period we talked about

Between early arriving humans what happened between then and European contact, and how did people seem to have developed a very, I'll call it harmonious or static environment, static relationship with the natural world. All of a sudden we go 10,000 years and there's like one extinction. Yeah. And 10,000 years of human history in the new world, there's one extinction. That's right. And then man, we get busy. Yeah.

On extinctions. It changes pretty rapidly. After that. Old Man America is a story of kind of, why does the coyote come in as such a complex religious figure in Native American culture. The Wild New World of the American Serengeti is episode five about everybody's idea of the Serengeti in Africa, about that that was

the perception that people who arrived on the grain plains had at first. It was, it was, it was, it was a Serengeti of its time. Survivors from a Lost World, episode six, talks about the American pronghorn. There's an episode on something we touched on today, Jefferson's other Lewis and Clark, and that's the first seven episodes. That's the first seven, yeah. So a lot of stuff, if you're a fan of American history, if you're a fan of the West, it's just a lot of stuff that you probably don't know about, but that will really shape your understanding of these other big moments, and puts those other big moments into context. My favorite phrase for something like this is that it will rearrange the furniture in your head.

So when you get to be like I do reading about the battle little bighorn, you'll have a much more expansive view of how that you'll have a instead of a those few days that led up to that you'll have a what are the thousands of years that led to this moment? Yeah All yeah. All right, thank you, Dan, for coming on. Can't wait for the show. Oh, thanks for all of this, Steve.

I appreciate it, man. Everyone subscribe to the new feed. Very important. Thank you. I've been running FHF vinyl harnesses for over a decade and for the last couple years it has been the FOB because it's quiet, it's tough, and it just plain works and it's easy to work. I've worn it and damn near every environment you can think of, desert, mountains, snow, heat, and it has never let me down.

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