00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast, you can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for ELK, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com. F I R S T L I T E dot com. All right, joined today by esteemed historian American historian Elliott West. Welcome on the show. 00:00:46 Speaker 2: Thank you, it's good to be here. 00:00:47 Speaker 1: I've had two I've had two, well, a lot of run ins with you work, but I've had two main run ins I want to tell you about. I'll tell you about. We got to cover some stuff that I'm gonna tell you about the runnings. Sure, and then I'm gonna tell you that doctor Randall here. Do you guys know each other? Just be just He has a genuine PhD in history. I heard he told me about he told how did he bring it up? Okay, so he didn't be like a little thing he might not know about me. 00:01:15 Speaker 3: No, No, he. 00:01:18 Speaker 2: Was quite modest. 00:01:20 Speaker 1: I heard there are I was reading today that there's this article in the Free Pressay now that brought up I'll tell the article. The article was a guy, a climatologist that just got there's a climatologist to row to op ed in Free Press about publishing in the journal Nature, m okay, and was saying that it was talking about how biased Nature is toward what they want to publish, and they were publishing about wildfires in California and how you need to de emphasize issues not fitting with climate change to get published in Nature, like they know what they want, right, So like this climatellogy is like absolutely, climate change is a big issue with wildfires in California, but there's all these other underlying things. Eighty percent of California wildfires are human caused. Okay, where is that. You're not going to write an article about changing human behaviors leading to wildfires, or electrical transmission leading to wildfires, or the need to bury electrical lines and not have overhead electrical lines due to wildfires and that's not gonna be of interest, right, climate change boom you're in. So they wrote this article in Free Press about what they had to leave out, like what you need to leave out to catch the eye of nature to fit what they want. You know, what they've decided is scientific. And if it's it's scientific, is you know, like of whale, a whale takes a wrong turn and goes up a river and dies in a river, you better say the climate change led to that whale going up that river, and then it'll be in the paper. Right. But anyways, they're saying, they're talking about there are like sixty times more PhDs. The hell is here? Pull this up CRN sixty times more PhDs now than in nineteen sixty No kidding, that's not right. 00:03:35 Speaker 4: May I wouldn't be surprised if it is. 00:03:38 Speaker 1: Meaning they just hand those things out like candy, and that was my experience. 00:03:43 Speaker 5: And there's no there's a lot more people and there's a lot more people going to higher education than like here hold back in the World War two. 00:03:51 Speaker 3: And a lot of fewer tenure track jobs. 00:03:53 Speaker 1: Well you know how they were Here's what they were blaming. So the point being, where is this dance? I can't can you find it? 00:04:01 Speaker 6: I mean, I don't I don't know if this is reputable. This is Historynewsnetwork dot org. I have no idea who's behind this organization? Are you familiar? 00:04:11 Speaker 2: Sure? 00:04:11 Speaker 1: Okay, so this is it about how many PhDs are running around? 00:04:16 Speaker 6: Yeah? History? Oh well, you know what, Actually this is specifically about history. History. Bachelor's degrees are falling sharply while doctoral degrees in the discipline continue to rise. 00:04:30 Speaker 1: We don't really think about a guy like Randall. 00:04:33 Speaker 5: He's not as he's not as unique as he as he thought he was. 00:04:38 Speaker 1: He's got to see his new bumper stick or asked me about my pH d, and then he's got that, he's got that plate mt pH D. Yeah, it's a joke. It's a joke. 00:04:51 Speaker 3: I made a terrible mistakes. 00:04:56 Speaker 2: It's a tough gig. 00:04:58 Speaker 3: It's like a big target on your back. 00:05:03 Speaker 1: A couple of things. So, oh, you know, darn thing about the Darth thing. I've been thinking about the news. I got a couple of notes I made in my little note thing about that. Someday historians should write an article about how much people love to talk about if you get, if something bad happens, you're in Yellstone National Park, how much people love talking about how dumb you are. It doesn't like I was on the plane ther day and so you know whatever, Like someone gets someone gets run over by a buffalo in the park, What is the story going to be? How how dumb they were? Do you know what I mean? People on the plane behind me are like those people. You know. It's like like I don't know, you know, I can see know Wait a minute, animal, dude. 00:06:06 Speaker 5: How many times of all people, I'm surprised you're walking into like a thin layer of like hot spring crust and falling through. 00:06:15 Speaker 7: I just especially to walk through like three dozen signs saying stop, don't you idiot? 00:06:21 Speaker 1: Don't I like my instinct is to my instinct is to be like, yeah, I can see that happening. The guy that cooked the chicken in the hot spring, you were supposed to get him on the show. Yeah, some guys tie a chicken on a rope and lower it in there and boil it, and everybody talks about all those they should know better. I'm like, that's it. It's like a totally interesting idea. Because Osborne Russell Journal of a Trapper, don't they talk about doing that? They do. I'm gonna put this, but I want to ask you thing. Because I endorse Born, I always endorsed Journal of Trapper and the thing I'll say about it is that historians like it, right, Oh yes, yeah, it's regarded he was regarded as spot on. 00:07:11 Speaker 2: Sure, yeah yeah. 00:07:13 Speaker 1: And you know what surprised me. You know another book I read, uh that I heard that historians are a little incredulous. Is Tough Trip through Paradise? 00:07:22 Speaker 2: Really? 00:07:24 Speaker 1: Yeah? Have you heard that he played a little fast and loose with. 00:07:27 Speaker 2: The I've never heard that. It's been years since I read it, but I loved doing I read it. In fact, I was overthrown through a Paradise valley the other day, just again, is that right? Beautiful country? 00:07:36 Speaker 1: So you can cite uh, Tough Trip through Paradise and it's like like historians will cite Tough Trip through Paradise and it's regarded as okay, sure, yeah, yeah. But historians love Journal of a Trapper. 00:07:48 Speaker 2: They do it really readings true a lot of a lot of the things that he says in there, and you know, jobs with the other material that we have on fur Trader and trappers and so forth. So I think it's sure good. 00:07:59 Speaker 1: I'm gonna keep endorse that was I getting that. Oh A lot of PhDs running around, uh, A lot. 00:08:08 Speaker 5: Of smart people and that's somehow Buffalo brilliant. 00:08:12 Speaker 1: A lot of brilliant people get goured by Buffalo and get blamed for being stupid when I think that they might have just been kind of. 00:08:17 Speaker 6: Like backing up into the like. 00:08:20 Speaker 1: You know, I don't know, I'm gonna go over there and get close. 00:08:22 Speaker 6: To it, backing up into Buffalo with like selfie sticks. 00:08:26 Speaker 1: Okay, Brody, hear me out, Brody. We just worked on Okay, catch crayfish, count stars, and we encourage And what do we tell kids? What do we give tips kids? Tips on hot what to do getting close to critters, how to sneak up on stuff, but you don't got to sneak up on them. 00:08:45 Speaker 5: It's like you get out of the car and there's one stand in the park. 00:08:48 Speaker 8: I think the I think the problem that that's underlying all those stories is just that you somehow expect that people go into Yellowstone and not be stupid. 00:08:57 Speaker 3: You know. 00:08:58 Speaker 8: It's like it's like that's the one place where people aren't supposed to break rules and just behave in all you know, and all types of I feel like you go anywhere in the world, people are doing stupid stuff. It's just that the stakes are higher when you have large animals around. 00:09:11 Speaker 1: But if here's the deal, if someone can to you, like like someone came to be someone here at work comes and that wouldn't be surprised if this happened. I come into work and someone's like, oh, you here, Chili got Gord by a mule deer, right, he got God by a meal deer. I wouldn't be like that, idiot. I'd just be like what, Yeah. I would automatically impulsively blame the person who got mauled by something for stupidity, the way they do if it's in the park. 00:09:41 Speaker 7: M hm. 00:09:42 Speaker 2: Well. The story I remember, though, was the woman who went up to buy some gup right in front of it with a flash camera, you know, took a close up of the of hiss head from the front. Sure, and she got Gord. What do you expect that she. 00:09:58 Speaker 4: Expected? 00:10:00 Speaker 1: I can't go. 00:10:01 Speaker 2: I think pictures blurred. 00:10:06 Speaker 9: Uh. 00:10:07 Speaker 1: The third thing I wanted to talk about, but I can't give too many details. I got a friend who's a prosecutor in this state. He's a county prosecutor, and he was telling me the other day about he had a thing he's working on where these guys in a trailer park, gotten to fight like this want being like a prosecuted issue. They got to fight over a last piece of fried chicken that someone then impregnated the chicken with glass shards of glass, and a fight broke out so bad the fight broke out, went over the fence and into I ninety and shut the highway down. No, no another for common. Here's the everything, this super important that I keep wanting to get to my body. One of my main best friends from growing up and we're still friends today. He comes up to our fishsheck every year. He has a new he's a teacher. Okay, he has a business, a summertime business of he's got a roving bar. I'm gonna explain this, damn it. Okay, if you live around Traverse City, Michigan, here's what you need to who you need to hire for your events. This is the this is so. This is a good, very good buddy, My Matt DROs from growing up, we still hang out. Was just with him and because he's a teacher, he has a summertime business he created called roaming Roaming Northern Michigan dot com. But it's not it's roaming. No. My so roaming Andi dot com. I'll revisit this in a minute. He has a camp or trailer that he rigged up as a bar. But when you have an event, you get married whatever, twenty fifth wedding anniversary bar mitzvah, I don't know. Uh. You call him, you place your liquor order, he picks it up. Okay, so he's not selling booze. You buy your booze for your event like you normally would. He then shows up with his motor home with all the mixers and specialty drinks that he crafts for your thing, pulls his camper in and then your guests go to the bar window to get cocktails. 00:12:46 Speaker 4: And there's no money change. 00:12:47 Speaker 1: In hands, No money changes hands. Fantastic, no money changes hands. He operates out of Traverse City, Michigan. Packages prices everything at the website Roaming nom Roaming n m I dot com. Matt Drose plan an event just to call him. I like it, Like if you're getting married somewhere else, get married there and call it roaming and go to Roamingnomi dot com and patronize my good friend's business. He likes to hunt and fish. 00:13:27 Speaker 5: He should start a franchise take over the country. 00:13:30 Speaker 1: Another thing I've been wanting to talk about. I invented an old saying. I'm the only guy I know that ever invented an old saying meaning, you know, like stitching time saves nine. 00:13:40 Speaker 6: Like you said you invented it. 00:13:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, I know. I thought of one that you'd think was old. And it has to do with like if you send your kids out to pick pole beans and he'd be like, pick every pole bean, and then you go out and look and there's pol beans they didn't pick because it's hard to find them. Or like you send your wife's friend out to pick pole beans and she's like, I got them all, and you go on looking. They didn't get them all. They didn't look carefully enough. The old saying I invented is is I could see applications and finance and other things. A fresh a fresh set of eyes will always find more beans. 00:14:21 Speaker 2: Hm hm. 00:14:23 Speaker 1: So right. So, like let's say someone's like whatever, I don't know. You know, you can see implications and finance whatever, fresh set eye, Yeah exactly, but your body's like, no, I glass that hillside good and you sit down and you're like, you know what, buddy, fresh set eyes always find more beans. 00:14:45 Speaker 2: It doesn't. 00:14:45 Speaker 1: There's a buck right over there. You don't think so Katie thinks is like useless. He knows my wife doesn't think it's a good saying, good old saying at all. A couple more dress you sounds like a real dor when you say you do, sound like a total dork when you say it. First set eyes always find more beans, Randall, I've. 00:15:07 Speaker 3: Never really thought about finding beans. 00:15:09 Speaker 1: Now I'm gonna work on it. Think about it, Phil. Maybe Phil can workshop that that's different. I got a lot more stuff written out here, but we got to get down to what we're talking about. Oh, so here's the deal. 00:15:27 Speaker 4: This is. 00:15:29 Speaker 1: Our esteem. Guests probably wondering why it is here, but we're gonna have a lot of time. We're gonna get to something from your state. Elliott. Were you born in Arkansas? No? 00:15:38 Speaker 2: I was born in Texas, in Dallas. 00:15:39 Speaker 1: Oh you're born in Dallas, Texas. But you're at University of Arkansas. 00:15:42 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:15:42 Speaker 2: I've been there for well, retired a couple of years ago. At been I've been there for forty three, forty four years. 00:15:47 Speaker 1: Did they give you that? What's that good title you get when you retire? But you remain in good standing Americas? Are you emeretis? 00:15:53 Speaker 2: I'm emeritus? 00:15:54 Speaker 1: That's sweet man? Uh Randall have you heard of doubt? The best thing Randallsville tell me about his PhD is when he checks a book out from the library, he gets as long as he wants. That makes all while those librarians chasing after all the time, and you get that, Yeah, librarians aren't always after him for the seventy. 00:16:20 Speaker 8: Eight small, very very small privileges in life to make it all worth it. 00:16:26 Speaker 1: This is from Springdale, Arkansas. So September twenty third. We've talked about this the whole bunch. We actually for a while talked about that we were going to like start our own, which you never got around to. But this one's back on the World Champion Squirrel Cookoff, Springdale, Arkansas, September twenty third, in partnership with Arizona Fish and Game Free of vatkans Arkansas. What did I say, Arizona? I did, we probably can Arkansas. I feel, yeah, this is a lot of work. One state is not going to have a squirrel cookoff and be Arizona. 00:16:59 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:17:02 Speaker 1: Springdale, Arkansas, September twenty third, in partnership with Oh, that's why I screwed up in partnership with Arkansas Fishing Game free event. It's a creative event and competitive cooking and squirrel dishes must contain eighty percent squirrel and be prepared on site. That's a good TIB because I've judged wild game cookoffs before where it's like the game part becomes an afterthought. 00:17:29 Speaker 5: Yeah, you could put like one squirrel in a pot of chili and be. 00:17:32 Speaker 1: Like that squirrel chili eighty percent squirrel, So you are showcasing squirrel. They have a Facebook deal. So when you're describing where to find something on Facebook, do you include like Facebook dot com? Or what do you write? How do you say? 00:17:47 Speaker 6: I guess, yeah, because I guess If you don't have Facebook, you can still type in this your URL and get there. 00:17:52 Speaker 1: Facebook dot com slash Squirrel Cookoff. We'll take you there. 00:17:57 Speaker 6: And it's organized by Clay's good friend. Clay's going to be there this year. I think he is. Yeah, I think. 00:18:04 Speaker 1: So Here's what I don't like. They're billing it. They're making it like a war on squirrels. 00:18:13 Speaker 4: Yeah, this squirrel has. 00:18:14 Speaker 1: Caused millions of dollars of damage. Listen, don't I still want people to go, But this is not about squirrels being bad. 00:18:23 Speaker 6: Come on, I don't know. 00:18:26 Speaker 8: Typically I think of these things as a celebration of the animal right. 00:18:29 Speaker 5: Yeah, like house fires are caused by squirrels, They got all kinds of screams things. 00:18:34 Speaker 1: Listen, listen. I still want you to go to the squirrel Cookoff, but you need to go from a place of love, not from a place of go from a position of love for squirrels, not from a position of squirrel hatred. No. 00:18:49 Speaker 6: I think it's also that for anyone who needs like extra justification to, you know, push them over the edge if they might not otherwise attend they're being reminded did. 00:19:00 Speaker 1: But the last thing you want to create is like another a squirrel. There's a lot of things to love, like about hunting, but people like, well if I didn't hunt, it's kind of you. 00:19:12 Speaker 5: And they're like going after him the way people go after coyote. 00:19:16 Speaker 4: Yeah, exact things like that. It's strange. 00:19:19 Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know to do about all rearing endorsement. No, listen, I am all four. Do you see me pounding this table. I'm all for the squirrel Cookoff. I just think that it has been. It's from a place. I love that it approach the right. Never in my life seeing a squirrel and been like, dah, damn it a squirrel. Do you know what I mean? 00:19:43 Speaker 5: You need to go down there and enter a pine squirrel recipe with Jimmy. 00:19:46 Speaker 1: That'd be great idea. No one else pine squirrel carried away. I still like, I'm still mad at my mother for cutting some of the oak trees down in her yard because of squirrels, squirrel damage, the squirrel habitat uh. We recently had an episode where we were with the founder, the creator of the Merlin app at Cornell. Someone had a hot tip about the Merlin app. Get a bluetooth speaker and play back bird songs. This is very effective. I wish would have brought it up. I don't know if they do. They frown on it. Maybe they frown on it at Merlin. We'll have to see if they write in meaning it works. It's very effective to call in birds. In fact, we would so the over day. I'll sitting there with my boy in a little pop up blind. I'm gonna pull this up. I got a gripe with the Merlin app too, Just and I know they listened to the show it. This is the only bird I never they It does not pick up a It won't pick up a grade. JA listen to this. So here's from my Merlin app. I'm gonna turn it up. This is a recording I made this weekend. So that's a pine squirrel. Okay, but listen to them again. I hit him again and again and again with Merlin. Listen, care for the that's a great jay. Listen. It doesn't get it. It registers it. You see it show up. Obviously, it will not identify that thing. It's the only failure I've ever seen Merlin. 00:21:23 Speaker 7: I wonder if it's too short of no. 00:21:25 Speaker 1: He was going boom boom boom, and there's probably other vocalizations, but it will not detect that vocalization. 00:21:33 Speaker 7: That squirrel is really really upfront and loud. 00:21:38 Speaker 6: I wonder if it's like yeah that and it's audio. 00:21:41 Speaker 7: Clashing with a lot of the frequencies. 00:21:44 Speaker 1: Is my guest, you think so? 00:21:45 Speaker 7: I think so. 00:21:46 Speaker 6: It comes from an audio engineers. 00:21:48 Speaker 1: Here's my kids. Here's what you want to hear my kid criticizing. 00:21:50 Speaker 7: Me ursus, you're so what. 00:22:01 Speaker 1: You're so slow. He didn't like when we go to pick off a bird. He didn't like how long it'd take me to activate the app. It was frustrating. He thought you would just like let it run for hours on end, and I didn't like that approach. 00:22:13 Speaker 8: I mean, it seems like if you're playing on a bluetooth speaker, if there's someone else in the area using the Merlin app, that it could cause a feedback loop where all of a sudden there's a. 00:22:24 Speaker 1: Merlin's too smart. I've played bird, I've played recordings, and I haven't done it much. I've played recordings and something g's lost interesting. So if you play, we can do I don't know, try it right now, But if you play Merlin a recording of a bird, it won't flag the bird. I don't know if it's just because things are too compressed. If something's like too compressed, Phil probably answer that, what do you think of that is? Phil? 00:22:53 Speaker 7: Honestly, that kind of baffles me. I feel like it should be able to pick it out. 00:22:57 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:22:58 Speaker 1: However, we have a called the Bird Song Bible, and you type in bird calls and it's going through like a little chintzy little there's like a speaker baked into the book and it might be that that speaker just sucks. I don't know, but Merlin won't identify those birds. But I could run around with this. I could go into any area with pine squirrels. And we did it for we were just messing around this weekend. We would just walk into a spot and play that squirrel and just no sooner he shut up alst in the woods just come alive with like squirrels replying to it. Years ago, I was reading a thing where they they're working on his study with vervet monkeys who they have these different warning calls. These researchers realizing that they had that they have a warning call for a threat on the ground, and then they have a warning call for a threat from an avian predator, and they seem to have a different noise they make on the ground in the air. And they would record the calls and play it and monitor what evasive actions they took. If it's a thread on the ground, they would do one thing like bust into the tree. If it's an overhead threat, they would respond differently to it to like reduce their risk from a harpy eagle or the hell praise on them. I don't remember what it was the praise on them. It wouldn't be a harpy because that's South America, but these I think are Africa. Anyways, you could burn out. You could burn them out on a monkey. If you record a monkey doing a warning call and then start playing that monkey to his buddies all the time. After a while his buddies, he loses credibility with his buddies. 00:24:48 Speaker 3: The monkey he had cried eagle. 00:24:49 Speaker 1: Yeah, he's the monkey that cried and he's the monkey that cried wolf, and you could play it where everybody's like, oh, Bob, he always is doing that. An insurance so I was using the term inherent vice, which is one of my favorite movies. I like it. It's one of those rare instances where a movie is so much better than a book. Thomas Pinsion's Inherent Vice was made into a film, which was a wonderful movie. And we were talking about when we had David grant On. I think that's when we had David grant On. We're talking about the concept of inherent vice, which is a nautical term. Someone wrote in. A guy named Thomas wrote in from He's from an insurance. He's a marine insurance specialist got to say his name. Sure, he's the president of Alan Armott Agency, Inc. Marine Insurance Specialists. He says, Steve refers to inherent vice as things you can't control, like getting wet. Inherent vice is the ability of a thing to destroy itself health, fruit can rot, marijuana can actually light itself on fire, metal can rust. Getting wet would not be under inherent vice. Getting wet is an external. 00:26:12 Speaker 6: Factor caused by an external factor. 00:26:16 Speaker 1: Caused by an external factor. So like the idea of inherent vice and shipping, if the load gets wet, it's not like, Ah, that just happens. Someone screwed up when he gets wet. Then he goes on to say, never thought I would be the type to email a correction. 00:26:36 Speaker 9: Uh. 00:26:38 Speaker 1: Someone else rode in with another one. When we had the writer David Grant on about the wager, we talked about sayings that come from naval, the naval world. He says, you guys fell down a rabbit hole on ship terms and sayings on the podcast with David Grant. Here's another. Do you believe this? 00:26:58 Speaker 4: I'm wondering, I'm looking it up. 00:27:02 Speaker 6: I didn't look it up. 00:27:03 Speaker 1: He's saying that the word ship comes from the old days. 00:27:08 Speaker 5: I think he's off. You look it up origin Old English. I don't know how to how to pronounce it. S c I T t E of Germanic origin. 00:27:22 Speaker 1: Maybe bags of manure. Maybe maybe our maybe our steam guests has heard of this, bags of manure. 00:27:30 Speaker 2: I'm dealing it a lot, Okay. 00:27:33 Speaker 1: If you stored bags of manure within the depths of a ship, they could get seawater on makes them unusable. They would write s h I T on bags of nerve store high in transit. 00:27:49 Speaker 7: I don't know that sounds fake. Do you think it sounds fake? 00:27:52 Speaker 8: I've heard that before, but I don't. I mean the the etymology. 00:27:57 Speaker 4: Yeah it doesn't. It doesn't match up with but the google because. 00:28:01 Speaker 3: The German is shi. 00:28:03 Speaker 1: Yeah, the Germans were using that word for us words. 00:28:08 Speaker 5: Ship first originally appeared around one thousand years ago and can be traced back to the old Norse origin skit skeeta skeeters. 00:28:19 Speaker 4: I'm just saying, there's like this gate. 00:28:22 Speaker 6: This guy might be wrong, but I kinda like this should feel. 00:28:26 Speaker 1: Pull it out of the show, leave it. Someone wrote in out that Krin likes this one. I don't know. 00:28:33 Speaker 2: Well, if you. 00:28:34 Speaker 1: Were tasked with the decision of picking four American authors to be etched into the side of a mountain. Who would they be. I'll just leave that one hanging for for listeners. 00:28:46 Speaker 6: Elliott West and rand. 00:28:52 Speaker 2: Oh. 00:28:52 Speaker 1: I was gonna tell you, yeah, uh, did you know that Randall reviewed your work? Hemagined they I. 00:29:00 Speaker 3: Did tell him that. 00:29:03 Speaker 1: Let's start with that. Randal set the scene for us. Well. 00:29:06 Speaker 8: I was in a graduate seminar taught by Dan and each week, each week you had to review a book and from a different period of time or I think some of them were probably thematic. 00:29:22 Speaker 1: Each week, yep, you read. 00:29:24 Speaker 8: So everybody in the seminar reads a book and reviews it, and then you get together on Monday or Tuesday or whenever the classes and you just explain your book and Dan kind of pieces them all together and explains how they're in conversation with one another. And that was kind of the structure of those seminars. But one week I had the pleasure of reviewing The Last Indian War, probably two years after it came out, and stuck with me. 00:29:51 Speaker 1: So, I would you like to share a passage with us? 00:29:54 Speaker 2: Mm? 00:29:56 Speaker 1: I mean, you proposed this to me didn't you that you'd share as. 00:30:00 Speaker 4: The passage. 00:30:01 Speaker 8: There's just there are a lot of things that are attributed to me in the course of a conversation having to do with my educational background that really have never once escaped my mouth. 00:30:11 Speaker 1: So but yeah, Crin, if you'd like to know, I'm gonna deny his Montana PhD license plate. 00:30:18 Speaker 9: Now. 00:30:22 Speaker 8: Yeah, it's a memorable book. I think there are a couple. Uh, I just I appreciated. I always appreciate books that make a story that you think is a story about one thing speak to bigger stories and bigger narratives. And so that was one of those books that kind of opened my eyes to how the past is all and you know, different parts of the past during conversation with one another. 00:30:48 Speaker 2: Well, thank you? 00:30:49 Speaker 1: Yeah, do you have it pulled up? 00:30:50 Speaker 7: No? 00:30:51 Speaker 3: Don't? 00:30:52 Speaker 1: Should should read it? How long is the passage? 00:30:55 Speaker 3: It's I just shared. I don't need to read any of this. 00:31:00 Speaker 1: No, no, you don't. You know what you don't need to Randall? Was it a negative review, No, No, it was quite complimentary. 00:31:06 Speaker 8: I actually I only sent along the the excerpt excerpts from it because I I thought you might find them useful in preparation for our conversations. 00:31:16 Speaker 1: Why you shared them? 00:31:16 Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, No, it wasn't a show and tell. If it was, I would have had a I would have had a photo of the original with the sticker at the top. 00:31:25 Speaker 3: But yeah, I thought you might find it. 00:31:27 Speaker 1: Oh you're trying to help me out as a host. Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that. 00:31:31 Speaker 8: Instead, I just put another great, big target on my back. 00:31:34 Speaker 1: I guess. So, elios, let's start out, how many when you look at your career as a historian and you've been in you've been in the biz, how long fifty years do you do you measure it? Do you measure your career as a historian in terms of how many books you've written? 00:32:04 Speaker 6: Like? 00:32:04 Speaker 1: You know what I mean? Like, how do you how do you sum it up? Right? 00:32:09 Speaker 2: Well, that would be one way I think. I think I think more in terms of teaching. Okay, how many teaching the public University of State university, so you have big classes. I tried to figure out. In fact, I dedicated a book of a few books ago to my students, and I said, I and figured out it's probably had somewhere between ten and twelve thousand students. Really, in terms of I've also worked. 00:32:34 Speaker 1: That's a lot of influence, that's a lot of you have them for a lot of hours. 00:32:38 Speaker 6: I do. 00:32:39 Speaker 2: Indeed, they would confirm that yes, captive, Oh my god, it's like I ever shut up, you know. But he also I try to work. I've tried to work a lot with public school teachers to encourage, you know, better teaching of American history. 00:32:57 Speaker 1: Is that right? 00:32:58 Speaker 2: I've had one hundred of them over the years, and they've had, of course, each one of them has said, hundreds of thousands of students. 00:33:06 Speaker 1: How do you think, how do you interact with public school teachers in what capacity? 00:33:11 Speaker 2: Well, there are different programs. One that I continue to work with the Guilder Laherman Institute in New York. It's a wonderful institute to encourage a good teaching of American history. And they sponsor seminars over the years, and I've done, oh gosh, probably ten or fifteen of those. And you meet with a week for a week with school teachers from all around the country, since some from abroad, and you choose a topic. I taught one I was mentioning a moment ago. Taught one in Missoula for four years on Lewis and Clark. So you have teachers come from all over the country, all over the world, and you try to have the seminars and in the place that you're teaching about, you know. So we would talk about Lewis and Clark and sort of pick that expedition apart, and then on a Wednesday, we'd go up a little low pass to the uh you know, to travelers Rest, and then up to the old Pass and then back and sort of around the country. So it's a it's a great way to encourage students to identify, not just in terms of new material, but you know the place itself, because you really can't, especially Western history, you can't understand the story if you don't don't know the place. You know, if you can't go there. 00:34:19 Speaker 1: What do you what do you think is wrong with how American? You know? If you said to be to do better at teaching American history, where do people fall short in teaching American history in your in your view. 00:34:31 Speaker 2: Well, until fairly recently, of course, you leave out a lot that's pertinent. Uh. I think we need to bring in more areas like environmental history, the kind of thing that your podcast deals with a great deal beyond that, I think you need to the you need to talk about the larger contexts, you know, to take something to Lewis and Clark. It's a fascinating story. It's an American epic, you know, it's like an American creation story. Almost You're caught up in this sort of a mythic pattern where you think this is an absolutely unique event, but in fact, you know, this is part of global exploration, you know, and something that was happening all over all over the planet Earth. And these were just two guys among many who we're doing this. You didn't understand in terms of what what does the expedition teach us about Indian peoples at that time? What does it teach us about science of that time? 00:35:28 Speaker 7: You know. 00:35:28 Speaker 2: So it's a big story. It's a big story. It's a distinctly American story. And the journals, of course are a masterpiece of American literature. So it's our story, but it's also the world's story, and I think it helps to put all of American history in that larger context if you can. 00:35:47 Speaker 1: You know, earlier I mentioned there's two areas where I had kind of the main two areas where I brushed up against your work over the years. Is years ago, I was going to write a book. I wanted to write a book about the nets Person War. Oh really yeah, Well I started working on it, my little what I was doing, and I got going on it. I was just going to walk that whole well, I use my packcraft. I just had a backpack with packraft in and I got started on it. I was going to walk and pack raft that whole route, and I got going on it, but just the the time, commitment and other things prevented me. So I read your book at the time, your book on the nets Pers War the other area, and this is kind of where one of the areas where I want to jump in talking to you. I talked about it on the show. Even you had an essay. It was collecting one of your books. It was one of your books that had like there was a collection of four or five bigger pieces. You had an essay about how old European involvement and influence on the Great Plains, how far back that went right? And in it you make the point and this kid just kind of I guess maybe I was aware of it but hadn't thought about it just blew my mind you're like when Lewis and Clark stepped down into the Great Plains, there were Native Americans on the Great Plains at that time who had been to Europe and met the King of France and came back home again on the Great Plains at the time Lewis and Clark, and in the American imagination, it's like that they it was just that they went into this place, this untouched, unhistoried. Yeah, and then you got into just the I think it was hundreds of years if you go back to people like these kind of like offshoots of the Coronado Expedition, that they were coming into an area that had been deeply influenced. 00:37:54 Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, they what you were talking about, these Indians from the Kansas area. Actually Kansas in Missouri had been to the court, the Court of France course of the fifteenth Now that was a but that was in seventeen twenty, seventeen twenty five, seventeen twenty six. This is a long time before Willison Clark. So the image I love to imagine might have happened was that at the time that we the American you know, the East West Frontier was edging its way into the interior. That's what Lewis and Clark would you'll be part of if you go back to when that when this was seventeen twenties. Yeah, there was a governor, territorial governor of coinial governor of Virginia, you know, who had a group of people he called a the the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, and they would they loved to go explored the far west, right and they and he would come back with this reports of this this magnificent river they had found in this beautiful valley that was the it was a shin of door, you know. And these are people who were you know, they were just south of Washington, d C. And they were talking about, you know, penetrating deep into the American interior. At the very time that they would be doing that and talking about going back home, you know, I'm sitting around drinking, drinking port smoking cigars at the very times that they're talking about going to the far West, there might well have been Indians in central Kansas reminiscing about Paris. The Women's So it's so that's that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about. The larger the larger context Lewis and Clark were not entering this plate of Lewis's famous quote, you know when they set off, and that's from the Mandan villages, you know, the and where the foot of civilized man has never trodden. No, there's been a lot of trotting going on before that. 00:39:58 Speaker 1: What do you think was the biggest at the time Lewis and Clark were encountering on the northern plains, tribes and and you know, in all fairness, they encountered people. They encountered people who hadn't directly interacted with euro Americans or Europeans. 00:40:17 Speaker 2: Person example, and this person listen, Clark with the first white people the this person had. 00:40:23 Speaker 1: Met yet they had horses. So what what do you think was the biggest prior to the actual arrival of what was use Europeans. I guess, prior to the rival of Europeans, this thingy iwa think about we had these there's these three huge impacts that that that preceded the actual presence of Europeans would be horses, metal and disease, right, I mean, would you is that a fair statement? And of those which do you think when when Lewis and Clark was a contact people. Which of those influences was most was probably most impactful in shaping what they experienced as you. 00:41:10 Speaker 2: Know Native America at that time. 00:41:12 Speaker 1: Yeah, at that horses horses, like they were seeing something different than what had been. 00:41:20 Speaker 2: That's right, well, and disease, you know, Lewis and Clark arrived when they when they go up through North Dakota what's today North Dakota, they talked about coming across these abandoned villages, a place called Double Ditch today. Well, those were abandoned because of smallpox that had appeared seventeen eighty, you know, twenty years more than twenty years before they were there devastated. There is, twenty thousand Indians in the Pacific Northwest died of smallpox because of it. That epidemic this started in the east, highly influential with the of the revolution. One of the reasons that we were able to hold off against the English is the English troops are devastated, you know, by malaria and by smallpox. So that was a great influence that preceded that preceded them. But so of course is maybe at least as much. In fact, there's a connection there. Smallpox, of course have been in the western hemisphere for a long form, the very early period, from the period of period of Cortez, and it made its way all the way under the American Southwest quite early. And so the sept peoples of the Southwest, Comanches and Apaches and Navajoes and others, have been devastated by smallpox for decades, decades before Lewis and Clark. But in seventeen eighty it swept up from the south out of Mexico and went from the east coast down to Mexico and then up into up into the Americas, and it hit the southwest again. But then then it goes all the way up the Missouri Valley, it goes all the way in the Pacific northwest, devastating, devastating the Indians there. Why why then, and not before horses courses smallpox. When you catch smallpox, we have about ten days to transmit it to another person. So when it arrived first in the Southwest early on, people's natural response was to panic, run away, run away, right, But it's literally running. They're on foot, and they by the time they reach these you know, virgin soil. By the time they reach people who have never been infected by this they're dead or they can no longer pass it along. So it was the slow movement of these people out of the southwest that that allowed the people farther north to be free of it. Then they came than the horses. Yeah, horses spreading first, that are around sixteen eighty, But by seventeen eighty, seventeen eighty, the horse cultures had flourished all the way had developed and flourished all the way across what's today, you know, the far away with the great planes in the Pacific Northwest. And so people now when they panic and they flee, they're doing it on horseback. And the horses allowed the transmission of smallpox and other diseases in ways that had never been before. So the horse, in that sense, you know, one on the one had a great benefit to these people, allowed them to revolutionize their life, you know, to this huge burst of power and creativity and expansion. But it also killed them. 00:44:42 Speaker 1: You know what I'm thinking about as you talked about that is the COVID exactly, COVID in the airplane. 00:44:49 Speaker 2: That's exactly right, you know, exactly right. 00:44:51 Speaker 1: You could have an epidemic go from isolated to global, and I don't know month. 00:44:55 Speaker 2: Weeks really in thinckt I've I've written a recent article on that, comparing uh the covid epidemic today to the cholera epidemics in the in the nineteenth century and making exactly that exactly that point. So this is really what I was talking about a moment ago about the horses in smallpox. That's really one step in what has of course become increasingly a fact of life. We're talking about the shrinkage, the effective shrinkage of the world through transportation. Horses were an important part of that. But that shrinkage of course continues. So these poor folks in Wuhan, China catch this disease, however they got it, uh three weeks later it's in uh it's in the seattle. Yes, it's just really quite astonishing, and you see it, of course over and over over West Nile virus just you know, name a disease that just hit this country in the last one hundred and fifty years, and that's how it got here. 00:45:56 Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Yeah, it's an interesting point. The way the horses did that. Do you think that we've talked about this in the past, that the way so horses being introduced by the Spanish. Was in your view, was that incident the Pueblo Revolt? Was that really in your mind? Was that really sort of the beginning of the spread of horses to all the nomadic what would become the nomadic bison, you know, the equestrian buffalo hunting tribes of the of the Great Plains. Like do you think if the Pueblo Revolt hadn't happened, would that have been delayed significantly by one hundred years? Or it seems like a. 00:46:43 Speaker 3: Very tidy, Yeah, neat and tidy explanation. 00:46:46 Speaker 2: Yeah, it is. It isn't it isn't It clearly had a very important impact that there had been the spread the horse. Horses had spread before sixteen eighty, but it was very localized command you said, Nava holes had them and used them very effectively, rating on the web levels and in the in the Spanish, So there it had sort of I think it was sort of a leakage. You know, the Spanish worked really hard to try to control those horses because they knew what they were. The horses allowed people kind of mobility and the power to maneuvering that they had never had before, and they could be used very effectively against the Spanish, and so they were you know, it was it was a capital offense, the capital offense to sell a horse to an Indian. 00:47:34 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, i'd read that. But ever i'd read that they had tried that they really wanted to control information about horses and control dissemination of horses. 00:47:43 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's absolutely true. But they you can, of course, by the time possible, But go ahead sixteen eighty. It's very clear. You know, the record shows very clear, very clearly that after sixteen eighty, horses spread very rapidly to the north, and they follow exactly those trading routes that the preseed Columbus. It's just just traditional trading routes that go up to first up through the Rockies incidentally interestingly, then into the Pacific Northwest. Nes Purse, you know, the Shoshotes and nis Purse had horses within thirty years of the Weber revolt. Thirty years, that's incredible. And then they spread from there out onto the plains. So so within one hundred years you go forward from sixteen eighty to seventy and eighty, horse cultures have developed everywhere in the West that they eventually would. It's done. It's a done deal in one hundred. 00:48:37 Speaker 5: Years by the time for that they made the horses made it up here to say Montana, what like, how did the tribes here? What was their understanding of where they came from? Like what was like they had to have some story or history about where these things that had never been there before. 00:48:57 Speaker 6: Yeah. 00:48:58 Speaker 2: Yeah, they're also the traditionals develop of course about where they are and quite often not universal, but quite often it's sort of a gift from God. And they're described as things like uh uh, like elk dogs, elk dogs because like an elk, they're big and powerful, right like a dog. They're domesticated. That's so I say, elk dog. 00:49:27 Speaker 5: Yeah, but there was there is no knowledge of them coming into some other culture, some other place. 00:49:37 Speaker 2: Just eventually there were It's quite clear where they're coming from. You once once it develops Lewis and Clark when they meet the Shoshone, that famous meeting, you know, where Chicagoya meets her brother and they're starving for horses. They have to have horses. They gone with canoes up the Missouri, you know, and to the to the to the what to get down the other side. They've got to have horses, and so the Shoshones were obvious sources and once they met them. But if you read those journals, during their meeting with the Shoshonees, they report seeing Spanish brands on some of the world. These are horses that notre live from the They weren't simply descendants of horses that have been spread northward. They had they had those particular horses had come from New Mexico. Seriously, Yeah, so this is a you know, it's a very vigorous vigorous Uh. 00:50:35 Speaker 1: That's so weird. I've never I feel like that'd be like am that'd be like a real talked about aspect of Lewis and Clark. I never heard that. 00:50:42 Speaker 2: It's true. Just read read the journalis Yeah. 00:50:45 Speaker 1: Spanish brands horses, horses up there. 00:50:48 Speaker 2: Ye huh in this case Montana. 00:50:52 Speaker 1: You know, I want to stay on a little bit of this. I want to talk to you. You've written a lot about mining. I want to talk about gold rushes and mining too, but I want to stay on this theme for a minute here. And you have a new book out which I have where is it sitting right in front of me? Continental Reckoning, huge book. It is yeah, the American West and the age of expansion. I make a habit, unlike most hosts. I make a habit of saying I read it, or I didn't read I haven't read it. However, I read the index and then use that to go in and check little certain things out. And I got to last that I was land never reading some passages you had about the Indian Wars in the West, and you kinda you treat it as victory there for the victory there for America was just a certainty. And not only that, but we talked about what we spent on the Indian Wars relative to other military endeavors. The human cost of the Indian Wars relative to other military endeavors really puts into perspective, meaning we you know, the Union, I can't remember what you had. I should find I should have taken a better note. But I mean the Union in a day in the Civil War, would I think that maybe this is how this support whatever you use. There were certain days during the Civil War the Union lost more soldiers and they were going to use than they were going to lose in the Indian Wars of the West. 00:52:42 Speaker 2: That's right, and Tetam of course which is the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, the bloodiest battle in American history in terms of losses. Now, this is strict, this is just on the Union side. Just didn't We're not talking about the Confederates. The Union lost more men in in this two square mile area over about nine hours. Then they lost over thirty years and two million acres square miles in the far West. 00:53:14 Speaker 1: That it just blows mica the amount of mental energy I have spent on the amount of mental energy I've spent on how Coster managed to get a couple couple hundred guys killed one day, and then you go and look at the Antietam like that'd be like a better place to spend your time. It's like, not how did a guy lose a couple hundred, but how do you lose thousands of people? 00:53:39 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right in a blink of an eye. 00:53:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, but really it does it occupies this like I don't know. I mean, I know they're big Civil War buffs, but just it's see, I guess because it went on so long. But you tell me, you kind of painted like it was sort of a light lift and ere that you get into. No, I mean just because the numbers like I didn't realize you were saying. You had to think that by the time some of the I think it was by the time a little Big Horn or by the time of the Nez Perce War in the Pacific Northwest, whites outnumbered Indians sixty to one. I mean, it was just I guess some of these statistics put in the perspective that it was probably not a thing like will we win. It's just like how quickly will we do this? Like how quickly will we perform this thing where we've set out to do? Yeah, you know, and it wasn't a when you just look at the numbers of people moving into the west, it was just overwhelming. 00:54:38 Speaker 2: That's that's the point of course that I was trying to make there. Indians in the Far West were defeated. The military came in, you know, when things got really nasty and they had to step in. There was any other way to avoid it, to control this particular group of Indians. Most of of course didn't resist, like the Lakotas or commanities, realtives. Most just sort of, you know, saw riding on the walls. Okay, you know, we'll deal with it. But if you look at in those terms. Indian wars are just I like I use a metaphor of an Indian war. Indian wars were like a period at the end of a long paragraph. Wasn't the paragraph? The paragraph was this this juggernaut of settlement that comes. 00:55:27 Speaker 1: In, Yeah, and then like like you mentioned the disease issue, and then I was just like depopulating people and taking and eliminating cultural structure, eliminating cultural memory, and then you have this fragment that just gets overwhelmed by immigration. 00:55:44 Speaker 2: Right, that's right. And I think I mentioned before the need to put this in the larger context of environmental history, because what this was in these years, the period that I cover here, which is about eighteen forty eight or fifty two, about eighteen eighty was the greatest environmental transportation transformation, uh convulsion by far in American history. And I would argue that there are very few times in world history, you know, when an area that large have been so completely transformed, so so massively trans environmentally transformed. And that means of course that the whole, the whole way of living that Indians had had before that, you know, was uh, the legs were cut out from it. 00:56:30 Speaker 3: Root. 00:56:31 Speaker 2: You can't if you're if you're a hooting gathering people in California, just. 00:56:35 Speaker 1: The environmental destruction. 00:56:36 Speaker 2: Sure, sure, we just remake it. And you know we uh, the elimination of the bison and replacement of the replacement by by cattle, by ranching. You know, that's that's an obvious, dramatic example of it. But that could be that story could be told over and over and over and over throughout the throughout the far West. We simply transformed. We we remake the world environmentally when they come in, not just a number of people, it's this you make a new world. And this world is not the world that Indian people's had had been living in for generations, uh and knew how to deal with and how to support themselves. 00:57:14 Speaker 7: It's over. 00:57:14 Speaker 2: You know, what are you going to do? There's there's nothing you can do. 00:57:18 Speaker 1: Yeah, I see your point, even outside of the US military involving themselves in certain issues like what really can be done? 00:57:26 Speaker 2: Nothing? Yeah, we've had to be overwhelmed. 00:57:30 Speaker 6: You. 00:57:30 Speaker 1: We've had Dan Florees on the show a couple of times, and he made a point about wildlife. Wildlife in the West specifically, which he spends a lot of his energy on and career, on and and telling the story about the destruction, He'll say, I've looked for it globally and and globally, I can find nothing that compares to the destruction of wildlife. That's right, and that occurred in the American wise. 00:58:01 Speaker 2: Yeah, this wonderful new book of dance, of course, wild New World. He makes that point over and over and over. 00:58:05 Speaker 1: Yeah, and I've looked. 00:58:07 Speaker 2: It's not there, not there, It's just And that's that's an aspect of what I what I was just talking about. 00:58:12 Speaker 1: Yeah, what, uh is it fair to say that you're that's first book the last? The Last Indian War? Is that the name of the book? 00:58:24 Speaker 2: Yes? 00:58:25 Speaker 1: I remember that, right, I read it years ago. Uh, lay that out for us. Why why do you feel that, you know, why that name? What's the significance of that as the last one? 00:58:38 Speaker 2: I should start by saying that I am terrible coming up with titles, absolute absolute worst. 00:58:47 Speaker 1: You know, so I make titles for things don't even exist. 00:58:54 Speaker 2: I bet they're better than my uh my editor at the Oxford guar To Press came up with that. I thought, oh, yeah, that's a good I called it. First of all, because I think it was. If you think of a war, you know, as a as an ongoing conflict between massed forces, it was, but there was no other Indian war in the far West like that that fits said definition, because. 00:59:22 Speaker 1: The feeding eighteen seventy seven, is that right. 00:59:24 Speaker 2: Eighteen seventy seven. Yeah, it fighting goes on, of course, like in the southwest of the Apaches. You know, they're not defeated until eighteen eighties. But is that a war? You know, it's more like a police action. You know, they're they're like gangs, right, They fight for a while and they come back into the reservation, rest up, You'll get some food, fathen their horses, and they go. 00:59:45 Speaker 1: Back out just small groups. 00:59:47 Speaker 2: And yeah, yeah, the next Perst War, you know, if you if you've forget about it, h you know, it was this ongoing, concerted effort over many months included sort of that also both sides, you know, engaging each other like in. 01:00:02 Speaker 1: Any seasoned civil war generals. That's right. Yeah, getting defeated. 01:00:09 Speaker 2: This purse just given I just kicked his rear. He was he was wounded severely wooted twice in his career. Once was at Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg. He was up there at that angle. You know, he was with the group you know that met the Confederates coming up and pick his charge, shot on the shoulder, and then he was severely wounded at the Battle of the Big Hole against the against the purse. 01:00:34 Speaker 1: Can you lay out how that? Can you lay out what that war was, how it started? I mean, you could do the big version of how it started. But then also it kind of had they had a beginning one day, right. 01:00:46 Speaker 2: Well, I think the first thing to say about it is that, as I mentioned a moment ago, Lewis and Clark were the first white people, the first your your Americans for them ever to meet, and in their own minds, they they formed a treaty with the Americans, and they promised to keep the peace with them. They promised to fight on our side against any any common enemies, and in their own minds they kept that treaty from that on that point will be eighteen o six. 01:01:21 Speaker 1: I mean they they came to an agreement with Lewis and Clark, like there was an exchange of gifts, and they came to be like, Okay, we're good. 01:01:30 Speaker 7: We got a deal. 01:01:31 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, of course, Lewis and Clark had set out there. One of the things they were told to do is to make these sorts of arrangements to them to open up trade and to sort of pacify the pacify the Pacific Northwest, which will allow the flow of trade up there. So they approached it with this and they said, this is what we'd like to do, you know, and the new persaid, great, that's great. Well, they don't have exchange gifts. The news person to this day are will tell you that there was a child produced out of that treaty arrangement from William Clark, a man who grew up named Daytime Smoke, who ended up fleeing with Chief Joseph h and dying in Oklahoma. William Clark's son, did he Yeah, yeah, I didn't know. 01:02:18 Speaker 1: So Clark's son was in Clark's son was present for the Nesberust War. 01:02:25 Speaker 2: They just per se that that that's right, and they argue that, you know it's part. 01:02:30 Speaker 1: Of it, you know, that would put him in that will put him in the seventies. 01:02:33 Speaker 2: That's right, that's right, old man. And as was true of virtually what was that old man's name, Daytime Smoke. 01:02:41 Speaker 1: Mm hmmm, and he had light colored hair. 01:02:44 Speaker 2: Right, yeah, he said he had light light colored hair. 01:02:49 Speaker 6: Uh. 01:02:51 Speaker 2: I'm a little doobie about that because, uh you know, well, you know Clark had red hair, and so the point was that this was and theer make a big point of that, Well, this guy had hair just like well, red hair of course is a recessive gene. So you only get red hair if both of your parents have that in their genes. Right, how in the world did this this woman have red hair? 01:03:17 Speaker 6: God? 01:03:18 Speaker 2: So anyway, it's. 01:03:21 Speaker 1: Okay, you're questioning in questioning the hair color, are you questioning the whole premise? 01:03:26 Speaker 2: No, I think there's something to it. This is a standard arrangement, you know, when you make a deal like that. Uh you it's like it's like royal houses in Europe. You know, the prince prince from this house marries a princess in that house because you're sealing this deal between them. And this is the standard standard procedure among Indian peoples. And we know, you know, in terms of producing children. 01:03:50 Speaker 7: Uh. 01:03:51 Speaker 2: Wellim Clark really got down to business once he got back. I had a bunch of kids, so he was he was right. But anyway, so I think the point to make here is that in the nest perseise, they kept this friendship, this treat all the way, all the way from eighteen o six up until eighteen seventy six and seventy seven. 01:04:17 Speaker 1: Never waged war against the US. 01:04:19 Speaker 2: Never did, never did. There is no record that I could find any of a ness person killing a killing a white person. There are plenty of records of White's murdering nes Purse. Didn't do it, didn't do it. And yet they were the other side of the Last Indian War. The Last Indian War was against those people who had the longest friendly kept their word longer than any other Indian group in the entire or west. That's what makes this to me a very compelling and a very heartbreaking story. The reason they did it, the reason happened, was that they were forced by Oliver Howard Uh to leave there. 01:05:03 Speaker 1: He's a civil war guy, right, He's a civil war he was. 01:05:06 Speaker 2: Was he to doe with one arm, He was the one of one arm metrized. He was well. He was a Uh. He was a dedicated abolitionist. He resigned his position teaching up in Buden College to a fight for the war to end a slavery Oliver Howard was the head of the Freedman's Bureau. 01:05:24 Speaker 7: Uh. 01:05:25 Speaker 2: After the war, he founded what is today Howard University, you know, the leading African American university. 01:05:32 Speaker 1: That's that's that's him, yeah, huh. 01:05:37 Speaker 2: And so after the Civil War Howard went out went out to the west. The next person were divided, of course, into various bands. 01:05:44 Speaker 1: Uh. 01:05:45 Speaker 2: Some of those bands, two of them, I think, in eighteen sixty three, had made a treaty with the US, agreeing to a much smaller reservation using the tribal holdings by ninety percent. But this is only one one or two bands. One band really. The other bands had never agreed to it. They had left the treaty negotiations, and you had the government said everybody, all of these bands were bound by this treaty. They let it go. In fact, Howard at some point said, leave alone. You're not bothered anybody. They're living in this country, the Wallava. You know where the Walala is. Yeah, they were living in the Walla, which is a beautiful, beautiful country, but very isolated. So there was no pressure to open this up to settlement. So Howard says, you know, let it go. And then in eighteen seventy six seventy seven, the government said, no, No, that's it. This treaty holds. You've all got to come in. You've got to give up your home within within six weeks. You've got to get rid of all your cattle. You've got to leave your homeland. You've got to get all your people together, everybody, and you've got to come into this come into this reservation. This Why they did that is an interesting question. 01:07:18 Speaker 1: You another passage I read in your new book, Continental Reckoning, you talk about this, You explore this theme you're getting to right now, which is an inability or a lack of willingness on the part of US negotiators to understand the structures of tribal peoples and trying to impose on them this order of that you have a that you have this sort of like this president like figure that I will talk to and they'll agree, and then that that sort of covers me on all of these peoples that we imagine being under this leadership structure, to the point where I know that in the Ohio River country, the US government once bought a chunk of ground from a tribe that didn't occupy the chunk of ground oh, yeah, I'll sell you. 01:08:25 Speaker 2: That's right. 01:08:26 Speaker 1: And then yeah, and then try to hold them to it and they're like, well, hold it, but we didn't the people that were there right, well we didn't agree to that. Well no, but we bought it from these other people. They said, they knew you. 01:08:39 Speaker 7: Exactly right. 01:08:39 Speaker 1: But again and again like that that failure, you know, I'd say, like a lack of It's probably not that they didn't understand it. It's probably they just didn't care. 01:08:49 Speaker 2: I think it was a bit of both. Uh. You gotta think from the from Washington's point of view, are we really these are treating You know, a treaty with an Indian tribe is like a treaty with France, a treaty with Germany or whatever, and it has to go through the same procedure. You have to get negotiate, it's got to be examined. But the Senate desk to approve it. Of course, are we really going to go through that whole procedure with every band in the Far West? That will work? And so I think in a very practical way, very cynical way, they said, okay, we'll just we'll just say that you have a governmental and a structure of collective authority like ours. We got a president. You got a president. We'll call him the head chief. 01:09:42 Speaker 1: And if you don't, if you don't find one, will find one. 01:09:45 Speaker 2: Will and will appoint one. And that happened over and over and over and over against and that's that is what that's what's going on within this perse Joseph uh used an argument exactly like you were just saying. He uses horse. He says. It's like coming in and you're saying saying to me, we just bought your horse. No we didn't. You didn't give me way. We paid that guy over there. Well it's not his horse. 01:10:13 Speaker 1: Well yeah, the way it goes, right, Yeah, So. 01:10:18 Speaker 2: At any point in eighteen seventy seven, then they forced them to move into this small reservation, to give up their homes, be crowded into this this small space, and then we're going to do it. They did it, and they came across the salmon. There's a rough this is late spring. Salmon was up and running, you know. But they got all the people across, they got what cattle they could across there, and they were camped near the reservation on the edge of the reservation. Literally the day before they were required to come onto the reservation. At that point, it finally snapped and a few young men wore who had grudges against a merchant and a couple of other whites would settle there in the in the valley, took off killed him. And that then was that just sort of like a you know, the match to tinder, But it was. 01:11:17 Speaker 1: I don't want to say what's interesting about it, but it's it's noteworthy that it was people that knew each other. Yep, like you're saying, I went to those sites, you know, but uh, it was, uh, they set out to get It was sort of like riding to this strange land and like invading strangers because they they settled grudges with people they had interacted with, of course, and in one case had some physical disputes with I think. But the fact that that would trigger not a police action, right, not like arrest warrants, Well, I guess they tried to do something like that, didn't they They tried to like arrest the people. 01:11:58 Speaker 2: And well, you know, like I say, when these young guys came back and it was clear what they had done, they were boasting about it, you know. Uh. At that point. Then a lot more men took off and it was nasty. It was a nasty bit of business. They killed a lot of folks, that raped a lot of women. It was an ugly, ugly thing. 01:12:16 Speaker 3: Uh. 01:12:17 Speaker 2: And at that point the leadership the the council, these leaders who had argued for peace, said look, we're not gonna win. 01:12:25 Speaker 7: We got to go in. 01:12:27 Speaker 2: At that point they said, well that's it. It will have to be war. Name of one of my chapters. It was a quote from one of these councils. They will have to be war. 01:12:36 Speaker 1: This is it. 01:12:37 Speaker 2: And then they went all after it. And as you said, they just kicked their ear. And in several places. 01:12:45 Speaker 1: It seems so so when you're looking at the country, it correct me if I'm messing this up. When you're looking at the country, like you imagine settlement starting in the east and sort of going like a wall to the west coast to the Pacific. But it actually did that to a sense. But it also skipped this chunk, you know, skip the great planes to some measure. So when the nets person get in this fight with the US army, they had east. They're going east to escape the army because they feel if they get out on the Great Plains. 01:13:27 Speaker 2: They're home free. 01:13:28 Speaker 1: No one's gonna care about them anymore. Because they used to go out there. They had for quite some time gone out there to hunt buffalo, and so they were sort of going what you'd imagine as going east. You'd imagine them sort of going into the eye of the storm of the US. But in their mind they would move east to get away from the US. 01:13:48 Speaker 2: That's right. And they were long time allies with the crows Absorba people, and they what they thought was, if we can get to the crows, if we can get out of here, they'll leave us alone. We'll get over the crow with our friends, and the crows will take us in and we'll let things settle down, and then we'll go back home. One of the fascinating aspects of his story is how the nest pers, on the one hand, were so beautifully adapted to the white presence there. This is in contradiction to what I said a moment ago. Their their environment was just fine for them, and they adapted to it beautifully. They were They were very prosperous, successful ranchers. Uh they were, you know, when they took off in this cattle cattle ranchers on this long retreat, they cashed a lot of their their their valuables, including silver tea sets. Yeah they were, yeah, they were. They were wealthier than the whites in the area. You know, they had lots of resources, had lots of money, and they have become very savvy in dealing with the whites in terms of economically economically, So the 's you've got that on the one hand, and yet on the other hand, in this larger perspective, they had this astonishingly naive view of larger white society, what of what they were really up against. Mmmm, there's this uh. 01:15:18 Speaker 1: You mean, it's just a naive view that you would somehow get out of this a lot or. 01:15:22 Speaker 2: Even beyond that, you know, uh, what are we dealing with here? One of the one of the counts, their transcripts, of course, of all of these negotiations with Howard and these others, and one of the uh Nesbur's banned leaders nat Ju. At one point you first read it, you think he's he's being facetious, he's being he's being uh, you know, he's being sarcastic. But I don't think so. He said, what is this? Who is who is this? Washington, you keep talking about. You keep saying. Washington says that you have this treaty, you got to do. Washington says, you go to who is that? Is it a person? Is it a house? He said, is it a house? So they, you know, on the one hand, they're so beautifully adapted to their aion environment. In the larger U, they've never the first time they become aware of the telegraph that existed was during the retreat over Lolo Pass. Was it really? Yeah, they had. The first time they ever saw or got onto a train was after the surrendery when they were taken they were taken over to the Fort Leavenworth. 01:16:31 Speaker 1: That was their first contact with the Yeah, experience, they know what they were. And so when they split, they had what about twelve hundred people about that and then five six thousand horses a. 01:16:41 Speaker 2: Bunch of horses. 01:16:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, and they run this rolling gunfight and keep whipping, repeatedly whipping Civil War generals in like battles. And then one of the craziest things about sort of the one of the craziest collisions that you have this this semi nomadic tribe of hunter gatherers moving across the landscape and the lateness is they get to Yellowstone National Park, which is a park, try and get into a shootout at Mammoth Hot Springs with tourists. 01:17:20 Speaker 2: It's just like it blows your mind. It's they're just such a bizarre story. It's like it reminds me. You don't reminds me of Uh did you ever see the movie Blazing Saddles. 01:17:30 Speaker 9: Oh? 01:17:30 Speaker 1: Yeah, kidding the very. 01:17:35 Speaker 2: The very end of it, when there's a big fight uh in the in the town and somebody pumps up against this you know what turns out to be. 01:17:44 Speaker 1: Uh scenery, Yeah, and then falls over. 01:17:48 Speaker 2: Well no, no, and then they break through and it's another movie going on next door, dom Delui know. 01:17:57 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you know something about that fighting over Intohigh ninety. 01:18:05 Speaker 2: And that's what this feels like. You know. It's like it's like these two stories that come together in this strange ways. One of the things there, you know William Sherman, who was head of the army in the West at that time. Uh, and of course the man who arguably was most influentially ending the Civil War, he ends up in charge of Indian policy out in the West. He's general, He's the general of the Army. He is the highest ranking military officer in the United States at that time. He's on a vacation in the Yellowstone Park. So William Sherman was at the time at the time that the nest person came in. So and somebody, you know, said, oh my god, you've got these Indians coming in here who had just been, you know, just been killing our soldiers over there, and all of a sudden, they're going in here. So they rushed to tell him, and he gets out just a day ors before they come right through there. So what if that hadn't happened. No, you know, Billy Sherman, you Winnam Sherman sitting around a you know, sipping whiskey and frowed trout. You know, some chief also shows up. 01:19:14 Speaker 1: You know, soaking his feet some hot. 01:19:19 Speaker 2: So it's you know, it's just a it's such a wonderful story on so many levels, the macro level, you know what I'll tell you about what's going on in the United States at that time, and then the even know, the mini level, you know, the micro level where you get these astonishing little stories and quirks. You know that things come together like that. 01:19:38 Speaker 1: Have you read have you read. Sorry, I was just going to say. 01:19:41 Speaker 8: I think one of the more striking things about it is just how sprawling geographically. 01:19:46 Speaker 3: It is. 01:19:47 Speaker 8: Like I can't think of very many sort of episodic stories that start where they do and and cross over and then they're you know, through the breaks and headed up to Canada. 01:19:59 Speaker 3: It's like there aren't very many. 01:20:01 Speaker 8: I mean, there's Lewis and Clark, sure, but that's like years and years, you know, But like in terms of miles covered, this story. 01:20:11 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I try to figure out a way to illustrate that and think of it this way. At the end of the Civil War, there's this community in Virginia, central Virginia, and they decide, I don't want to live out of Union. Let's get out of here. So the whole town gets together and they head west, leaving the middle of Virginia. Right. Uh, like the s verse, this this was these were just warriors, of course. These are the entire men, women and children, old old folks, you know. Uh, pick up and move, pick up and go. 01:20:52 Speaker 7: Uh. 01:20:52 Speaker 2: And the army says, no, you got to you gotta stay here. So the army's chasing them, this this small southern town, right and they're leaving. They're hidden west from from central Virginia. If those if if that town had had had gone as far as this these as person did before they were caught up near the Canadian border, they would have gone from the middle of Virginia to Denver. 01:21:21 Speaker 1: Are you serious? Because they did? They did thirteen hundred miles or something, didn't they. 01:21:26 Speaker 2: Thirteen to fifteen hundred depending on how you measure it. 01:21:28 Speaker 1: Yeah, I think just engagement after engagement after engagement. 01:21:33 Speaker 3: Yeah, that parallel is almost too good to be true. 01:21:36 Speaker 2: It is true. Unlike many things that I've written, it is in fact true. 01:21:40 Speaker 3: I think. 01:21:41 Speaker 8: I think one of the things that I remember from your from this book is you make the point that ex Confederates and Native people are the only Americans that have had citizenship forced on them at gunpoint. 01:21:57 Speaker 3: Oh right, Like there's so many. 01:22:00 Speaker 8: I mean, one of the main points in the book is just to understand the Indian Wars as part of this bigger project of nation making. And you know, you talk about greater reconstruction as eighteen forty five to eighteen eighty or so. Could you talk a little bit about that, like the the parallels that you see in the Indian Wars in the Civil War, because there are a lot of interrelated questions. 01:22:28 Speaker 2: And yeah, that was the larger theme of the last Indian Wars. It's a great story about it. It's an amazing story itself, the whole nes person stories. It is fascinating. What I tried to argue in this book because in a lot of books written on the war. 01:22:47 Speaker 1: In the person, what I try to one lesson there would. 01:22:50 Speaker 2: Have been it is a long walk. I got tired. 01:22:59 Speaker 7: I just drolled it, you know. 01:23:03 Speaker 2: But the larger point was that this is really a very revealing part of what I call the greater reconstruction. What I what I argue here is that something really important happens in the middle of the nineteenth century. We all agree on that in the middle of the nineteenth century, the national narrative shifts fundamentally onto a new track that will carry us into what we know as modern America. Right, we go up before eighteen fifty and look at America and look at in America in nineteen hundred. It's like it's like a different world. We've become a fundamentally different nation, society, people, culture, whatever. Why does that happen? What explains this traumatic shift. Well, the usual suspect, of course, and it's absolutely true, of course, is the Civil War itself. Civil war typically seen as this event, you know, that moves the United States in this dramatically, in this new direction. That's obviously, of course true. What I argue here is that expansion, the acquisition of one point two million square miles in three years eighteen forty five to eighteen forty eight. 01:24:22 Speaker 1: Oh, you open your book by saying, this spasm of expansion would be like if we right now, within a couple of years, the US annexed Mexico, Central America, portions of Brazil. 01:24:41 Speaker 2: From Columbia, about half of cour Yeah. 01:24:42 Speaker 1: Right, you're like, okay, so let's talk about how much how quickly the US grew. It has to be that if between now and three years from now we bought one basically everything south of US halfway down into South America, halfway halfway through, now we're going to incorporate that. 01:25:03 Speaker 2: Good luck with that, right It's uh and I think it's a pretty good I think it's a revealing parallel because you know, justice, if you if you drive south from mel Paso to the middle of globe, you're going to see a lot of people. You're going to see different culture, different languages, different traditions, different economies and so forth, and somehow we're going to bring all of that together into this this one thing the United States. Furthermore, uh, within two hundred hours of the signing of the Treaty of Wadeloupia Dolgo, which gave us, you know, the Mexico Session, two hundred hours before that goal was discovered in northern California, which turned out to be the by far, the greatest gold strike, most productive goal strike in human history up until that time. 01:25:53 Speaker 1: Is that coincidence? 01:25:56 Speaker 2: I think it is. You know, it's it's it's a kind of fact that that is born to create conspiracy theories, right, Oh really yeah, sure, But I don't see any evidence whatsoever that there was anything anything like. It was just pure, pure affected. The first chapter of the book I call the Great Coincidence. This is the greatest and most influential coincidence in American history by far, hands down. 01:26:23 Speaker 1: And they restate that to so people get this. 01:26:27 Speaker 2: I call the first chapter book the Great Coincidence, because I would I think it's incontestable that this coincidence of nine days within nine days, the United States acquiring California, acquiring the Pacific. 01:26:41 Speaker 6: Uh. 01:26:41 Speaker 2: This is part of the end of this three year expansion. Of course, within nine days we begin to this area begins to be revealed as the richest place on earth. It starts at the Gold Rush, but then from then all of course we discovered time after time after time after time. You know, it's like, you know, gods have said you need something, It's there. Yeah, it's there. The West is the great treasure house of the Western hemisphere. 01:27:13 Speaker 5: So think of it. 01:27:15 Speaker 2: Then think of the consequences it would follow expansion up until let's say eighteen eighty, And you can't tell me that those were not as important, is not as consequential as the changes it came because of the Civil War. So what I'm arguing is that we need to think of this great, this shift of the American narrative as a result of two things. The Civil War absolutely expansion, and what follows from expansion is number two. And those two things are their own stories, but they're also interacting. They're also interacting, and that's the point I think that I try to make. And the Last Newian War, what you can see in this story is this effort by the government Washington, where there's a person or a house or whatever, Washington trying to bring into into coherence, bring into a singularity this extraordinary continental nation. 01:28:20 Speaker 1: There. 01:28:21 Speaker 2: They do it beforece if they have to. They do it by expanding the role of the federal government. Uh and they uh and they do it as well by imposing a kind of order on it. Not just physical order, but an order of who is an American? Right, what do we mean by Americans? Well, in the East, it's emancipation. We free one million, four million persons from bondage, and we say you're going to be citizens now. Out west, it's Indians, right, it's Hispanics, it's it's others out there. We're telling them who they are. Yeah, right now in the East, Uh, the freed people wanted citizenship. Out west not so much. Right. But the government says, Okay, now we're going to uh same thing you did with the reconstruction of the South. We're going to give you land. That is, they're going to make you farmers, right, We're going to make you freeholders, independent family freeholders. We're going to uh teach your children, We're gonna we're gonna bring your children in our schools, and we're going to teach them the basics. Uh, starting with the English language. Everybody's gonna speak English, teaching the basics, including cultural basics. What an American is, right, and this is an important part of it. Uh, Christianity. We're going to make you Christians. America will be this Christian nation, right, Oliver Howard, you know this uh, devoted evangelical Christian. He was doing that in the south of the Freeman's Bureau, and when he went out west, he did it with Indias. Well you say that to the you know, to former slaves, and they say, great, we wanty citizens, We want land. We've been working your land for a long time. Give us a farm, give us forty acres and a mule. 01:30:23 Speaker 6: Right. 01:30:23 Speaker 2: We want you to educate our children. We want to send our children at Hampton, you know, and to others. 01:30:29 Speaker 1: Right. 01:30:30 Speaker 6: Uh. 01:30:30 Speaker 2: And we are we are Christians, of course, you know there's you know, Christianity was a fundamental part of slave culture. So they said, terrific. You go to the miss person, we want to make you farmers. I don't think so. Or you go to uh, you know, La Cotas and comanches. Uh, we get a farm in West Texas could no, we want to educate your children. We're already educating our children, right. We want you to be Christians? No, I don't think so. Yeah, we've got our own religions right. And the government says, you don't understand. This is not an offer, this is an order. You will become farmers, and we will take your children and teach them and you will become Christians. That's then the basis of what happens at West when the war, when when the military does step in, it's it's because the consequences of that, and that's what's going on with the with the Ness Purse. It's that final moment when Oliver Howard steps up and says, Okay, we've been overlooking all of us for a long time, you know, no longer. We got to do it. And that's what that's the trigger. 01:31:51 Speaker 5: It sets it off with the NETS person was there, like we talked about Washington and General Sherman was there, like finally a and of urgency to like this, this is it, We're done with this, like we need to establish control after decades of fighting these wars, it seems like it was like well established some stability here and then here and then like was it do you call it the last war? Because they finally decided like this is it, We're done Washington. 01:32:23 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yes, exactly. And that's to me, that is a really interesting question. Why these people were no trouble to them, They were living in an area that very few whites wanted. Why why would you force it in? 01:32:40 Speaker 1: Why? 01:32:41 Speaker 2: The reason, I think an important reason was the little big worn. 01:32:47 Speaker 1: You know, Brody lost some relatives that a little big one. 01:32:50 Speaker 5: Is that right, there's a yeah, there's a couple like distant, distant, Yeah. 01:32:55 Speaker 1: Brody's brother, my older. 01:33:01 Speaker 2: Yeah, uh yeah. I think that that of course, was this this terrific humiliation for the government. You know, uh, the boy general, you know, this the darling of the uh uh not only gets killed, but it's it's this defeat, this this moment that uh. I think that was the that was the key to the government saying Okay, that's it. Everybody everywhere, it's gotta get under our knee. You know, you've got to You've got to play by the rules. Now, these are the new rules. That's the only only way I can I can think of because you look at the at the record, you know, the government suddenly just pivots. Before that, before this, they were saying, oh, well, you know, what's the problem. It'll it'll happen eventually. We'll just sort of kick the can down the. 01:33:56 Speaker 9: Road and uh. 01:33:58 Speaker 2: But all of a sudden, they all of a sudden they send word to Howard, Nope, you gotta do it. 01:34:05 Speaker 1: You know. 01:34:06 Speaker 9: That was. 01:34:07 Speaker 1: I was sorry about all the mental energy I've spent on my life on the players who convened that fateful you know, June twenty fifth. And I think that a lot of historians have are argue now it's it's inescapable. It's like it's almost the definition of a pirate victory, to the point where after the great victory at Little Bighorn, rather than being emboldened and taking the fight to the next army, they disband like some people say, the probably the greatest gathering of planes tribes it was to ever occur, the numerically the greatest gathering to ever occur. The next day they disbanded, and they're like, man, it's hell to pay now. They disbanded and tried to melt into the landscape. Rather than being like, let's take Washington. You know, it was just oh, this is not gonna go over well, it's not good. 01:35:14 Speaker 2: It's not going to go well. I agree with that absolutely, and I think that again comes back to the larger point that I was making, that odds against them were so overwhelming. If you fight, you're gonna lose. It's gonna happen. We caught him at this point just by luck by This guy's a regrettable decision by and like you say, this, this huge gathering, maybe the Fort Laramie conference, a conference at eighteen fifty might have been, might have been larger than that. But but that was of course peaceful. As far as in the wartime, there's nothing nothing to match this. Okay, that's today, right, what now? Well, you know they're going to come after you. 01:36:06 Speaker 1: I want to I want to hate you. With a couple of details that came out of these is one of my favorite things of the perspective of the Native American fighters at Little Big Horn. A man named I can't remember feels gall one of them said in trying to explain the actions of the army, he said, we just thought they were all drunk. And the. 01:36:34 Speaker 2: Two men. 01:36:36 Speaker 1: Were asked how long it took? How long that battle took that that day, and one of them said, gall unk Papa Sue had said it lasted as long as it takes a hungry man to eat his dinner. 01:36:50 Speaker 2: Wow. 01:36:51 Speaker 1: Another said, I'm paraphrasing. He said, you know when you're laying in your teepee and you're looking out the chimney hole and the sun hits one of the poles at the top, It took about as long as it takes the sun to move past that pole. That was all on that fight was And both uh and the later people both said, oh yeah, they're both saying it was about twenty minutes. Yeah, and probably longer than that, but not just they're talking about the hill. The hill hill were costers like there were his little gang water. Was that that that that portion yellow Wolf the Nez Perse He later met that guy. I can't remember who the hell he was. Yellow Wolf met some guy that then sat like yellow Wolf was one of the participants in the Nez Person War. He actually scaped. He's one of the very few that escaped into Canada. When they caught Chief Joseph near the border. He gave his famous from where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever this dude named yellow Wolf had actually slipped out of there, made it to Canada, later came back down into the US. 01:38:10 Speaker 2: Yeah, there were a few hundred who made it. 01:38:12 Speaker 1: And he later met some guy that not only took down his life history, but they went and visited a bunch of places, and yellow Wolf takes this guy. He might have been German, I can't remember. Anyways, he takes this guy to the Little Big Horn battle site, not the Little Big Horn, the Big Horn, Big Hole, Big Hole, in the sight of the Big Hole battle and tells him and even shows him where it happened that a guy, a US soldier got shot through the forehead and was dead standing on his feet, and they challenged him on it, and he's like, no, he was at the end of the battle. He was standing dead, locked knees, standing dead. And I can never tell if that's true. 01:39:02 Speaker 2: It's it's funny. When I was writing the book, I have several stories like that in there in that book, and I wrestled with that. In the end, I just told it straight on, like what yellow Wolf, yellow Wolf and others there were. There were others like that at the Big Hole another one earlier on. Well, they were maneuvering within their home country. There in Idaho. Uh, they came upon a small patrol army patrol. Uh killed them all, but they said there was one guy in there who they kept shooting, kept shooting, shooting, shooting, but he wouldn't die cleaning the head. Instead, what he did was, uh sit on the ground and clucked like a chicken. 01:39:48 Speaker 1: I remember that. Yeah, Yeah, I don't know, is that true. 01:39:54 Speaker 2: I don't know whom I say. I wasn't there, right, Yeah, it's certainly part of their tradition. 01:39:59 Speaker 1: Yellow Wolf was such an interesting dude. 01:40:01 Speaker 7: He had. 01:40:03 Speaker 1: He explains that he had kind of a personal obligation. If he encountered a grizzly, he had a personal obligation to mix it up with that bear and kill that bear. 01:40:16 Speaker 2: He was a fascinating guy. 01:40:17 Speaker 1: Yeah, and again he'd be like, oh, brother, here we go. He found one he had he had to. 01:40:24 Speaker 2: Go not again. Yeah, he's a fascinating guy. I begin and in the book with yellow Wolf, h end with his deaths. Yeah, when he tells his family, I'm dying tomorrow morning when the sun rises on the horizon, and he did, and the last thing he said is, my friends have come for me. Oh you see them right? 01:40:49 Speaker 1: Oh he did. I don't know. 01:40:50 Speaker 2: Yeah, but the failure you're talking about. The name Laculis Quarter, Yeah, not a journalist Scotland and he was a He was a rancher out there and one day this Indian came up and his horse had been injured or pumping into a fence. I guess a barberar fence cut it badly, and so he asked mc quarter, will you take care of my horse? But you know, an Indian terms of course he will. You know, this is what you do if somebody it's not your enemy, says you got an injured horse, will you watch after him? And he said, uh, he said sure, And he came back the next year to claim his horse, and it's just fine. And they struck up a friendship and those two men spent the rest of their lives reconstructing that story. Oh yellow Wolf telling this to back quarter. Mcquarter's papers are at Washington State Archives, and I spent a long time in that archive going through these papers and it's uh there they're just a a treasure because it's the only case I know of where you have such a concentrated body of native testimony because illowilf of taking these others. Tell him your story, tell him your story. So you got all of these voices. 01:42:22 Speaker 1: And I think, if I remember right, it's people feel like that that there was enough of a friendship in the mcwarder, who I couldn't remember his name, mcward was reliable. 01:42:34 Speaker 2: Yes, yes, absolutely, it became his lifelong passion that he. 01:42:39 Speaker 1: Wasn't distorting, I don't think trying to capture well, obviously obviously it was very sympathetic. 01:42:48 Speaker 2: I suppose you take that. But most of what he has in there is not his words at all. It's the words of the nest perse of his uh uh, the people who's interviewing. In fact, one of the things I ran across, uh stuff is really the collector is really kind of a mess. 01:43:05 Speaker 9: You know. 01:43:05 Speaker 2: They worked a long time trying to organize it. He just sort of threw stuff in boxes. But I did run across this small slip of paper that had a thought about something about the war, you know, something just sort of came to him and he wrote this thought on this little slip of paper, and that was the last thing he ever did in his life. He was in the hospital dying and this came to him, and he wrote this on this slip of paper and then died. 01:43:34 Speaker 1: What was what did he write? 01:43:36 Speaker 2: I don't remember dying thought sorry, but as I remember, it wasn't truly consequent. It was just something popping too his head. It wasn't any great breakthrough or anything. 01:43:52 Speaker 1: You uh, you spent a lot of your career and a lot of your writing about mining, mining town's influence of mining. And I'm really paraphrasing, but in your book, you know, it kind of more or less says, you know, in terms of Native people's if when they find gold it's. 01:44:09 Speaker 2: Old that's right, or silver that's right. Yeah, that's right. 01:44:14 Speaker 1: Yeah, lay that out a little bit like just like we're like that, that thirst for gold. Yeah yeah, why is that? You know, you hear about gold in the Black Hills, California gold Rush, you Alaska gold Rush. Just really transformative, really transformative events. Yeah. 01:44:30 Speaker 2: Uh well, a couple of uh, you know, a couple of reasons are I think are sourve event when you think about it. First of all, there's no greater motivation motivator in American history than in a gold discovery. Nothing like that can can put people to the action. So quickly on such a scale. So for the one thing, what you get is thousands of people, you know, racing to this this particular place over a very very short span of time. Uh. Now, I mentioned before, you know, talk about what really defeated the Indians was the transform environmental transformation of their homelands. Nothing did that more dramatically faster on a greater scale than a gold or a silver strike. Thousands of people come into an area that has had a fairly small these one hundred gathering people, so we're real to be small, uh population up until that time that are always on the move. You know, they're semi nomadic, and they're on the move because they're they've choreographed their their life to be at the right place at the right time. You know, we've got to gather, got to fish the salmon at this particular month. You know, we've got to gather the camas bulbs at this particular this particular point we've got this is when the elkmar grat. We got to be there, and all of a sudden, that world is transformed. Right while the game is hunted out, the streams are polluted, the trees are cut, all the migration patterns are are totally disrupted. It's devastate, its convulsive. 01:46:15 Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to interrupt you make to clarify another point you had said about even these huge areas, the specificity of some things that you would need. Meaning here you you're you're nomadic people with horses, and you live in the northern climates. What do you need in the winter right, access to timber, access to water grazing lands, which is going to be like big riparian bottoms. And you said, if there's a spot like that, everybody knows about it. 01:46:48 Speaker 2: That's right. 01:46:49 Speaker 1: It's a real vulnerability, you know. And that's the places that other people want. 01:46:54 Speaker 2: If you look at the history of Indian wars, when when those conflicts did occur, when the well, those campaigns did happen, and those battles did happen, Look at how many of them. 01:47:06 Speaker 1: Take place in the winter, right, because I know where they'll be. 01:47:12 Speaker 2: And of course turn that around, when when is the worst possible time to go up against the Indians. June twenty fifth, eighteen seventy six, they attack attract They attacked the Indians. 01:47:30 Speaker 1: All these winter massacres that they would the army would conduct. But then in the summertime. It's this different games. 01:47:36 Speaker 2: Summertime, they choose, you know, let's let's attack them within two days of the summer solstice. Brilliant. It doesn't work. So yeah, that's right. It's the environmental angle of that, you know that you have to you have to take into account. But the other thing about mining rushes is most by far. Of course, strikes occur in mountains and in very isolated areas, but it's a long way from any white settlement. What that does, you know, once you let's strike occurs, and if it, if it proves to be worth it, what you do is immediately get this great movement into those places, which in turn is key to opening up the interior west UH to transportation, to access of others. So it creates these it's in other words, it's not a you mentioned before. The frontier is like a moving wall, right, that's the agricultural frontier. It's not the way, not the way the mining frontier works. It's it's the image I have is artillery shells you and then they I think it's a good image because the sort of the concussive is the concussive rings move outward from that you know, that's what kills them. That's what kills them. And what what it starts with with this is this, you know, ancient fascination with gold. It's goes back a long way. You know the Egyptians, you know, Egyptians called the breath of God gold. You know, there's something about gold that that that moves people into action, in the movement into nothing else, nothing else can. And it turns out that we have more of it than anybody. 01:49:43 Speaker 5: Else towards gold. 01:49:46 Speaker 6: You know that. 01:49:47 Speaker 2: What you hear, of course is they didn't care much about it. That's not true. 01:49:50 Speaker 7: Uh. 01:49:51 Speaker 2: In fact, there's a one very good a book that's being worked all the time. I've been madly uh in California. He wrote a book, American Genocide. You know that book. I haven't read it, but yeah, about California. And Ben is writing now on Indians and the gold rush. Once the strikes occur, they jump into it with both feet. Before that, I don't know, you know, I think they're just sort of sort of curiosity. They knew it was there, but they didn't, you know. 01:50:21 Speaker 1: And and Ian Frasier's Great Planes, he tells the story, maybe it's an apocryphal story. 01:50:27 Speaker 2: I don't know. 01:50:27 Speaker 1: He tells a story about I think it was the Blackfeet finding bags of gold on a keel boat or some boat that they catch, they capture it, and they like the bags and leave the gold dust laying on the gravel. 01:50:45 Speaker 2: Bara, I've read heard that story. Well, I've read the book that I don't remember that story anything. 01:50:50 Speaker 1: I'd love to know if that's true. Man, he's pretty careful generally, you know. But that's what he said. But I got I got a practical gold rush question. I mean, I kind of know the answer, but be interested to see if you could explore it for a minute. Is if you tell me right now that oh so and so just found a ton of gold in Nebraska, Okay, I would think, oh, well, that's a guy's land. Good for him. I wouldn't think I'm gonna run over and get a bunch of it. What are the factors that it would be that that you could hear about. 01:51:25 Speaker 2: This in wherever the hell you're at, Philadelphia, wherever. 01:51:30 Speaker 1: And and have some plausible idea, like some rational idea that you would go there and then that you would get to pick some of it up. 01:51:42 Speaker 2: Do you know what I mean? 01:51:42 Speaker 1: Like, how is this in terms of just the land ownership and the claiming it, and that the government, you know, whether or not they occupy it, the US has a sort of claim on it. How is it that you're gonna go and get some for yourself advertising? How do you get like where does that idea enter your head? I would never think if someone said, oh, so and so found a bunch of whatever, I would never be I'm going to go and take some. 01:52:08 Speaker 2: Well, I'll think, first of all, again with a spansion, the idea is, it's not Nebraska, it's not a farm. It's this place that we just got, I mean, half an hour ago, right, brand new, right, and it's could not be farther away from me than and still still be the jay in the United States. So I can imagine anything whatever I want to happen, that's gonna happen. Right. 01:52:36 Speaker 7: Yeah. 01:52:38 Speaker 1: It's just like such a strange understanding of how you'd even get a sense of the spatial characteristics of where the stuff is. But to like bet your. 01:52:48 Speaker 2: Life on it, A lot of them did, and some of them lost the. 01:52:53 Speaker 5: Was there any government guidance like if you're going this is how you. 01:52:58 Speaker 2: Want to do it? Or was it us word of mouth, and well you you got to remember it now, Uh, the gold rush of eighteen forty eight forty nine. There have been over a migration before that at the Oregon and to California after the Oregon country out to the you know, central Valley, Sutter and so they knew the way, uh, and the way it was was well marked. By this time they were starting to have the stores along along the overland route. So how to get there was not it was not really much of a mystery. The mystery was once you get there, how do you deal with that? How do you how do you mind? Yeah, it's ever ever occurred to you? I think is part of the question. Oh, yes, you're asking. You know, you're a you know, you're a you're a clerk in in Cleveland, Ohio, and you're gonna go to California. You're gonna mind gold? Really? 01:53:55 Speaker 1: Yeah, you're gonna be You're gonna be a placid miner. 01:53:57 Speaker 3: Or yeah, you're a tender. 01:54:01 Speaker 2: Reminds me of a Jethro Bodine in the Beverly hillbillage, I mean an atomic brain surgeon. He said, you know. 01:54:11 Speaker 7: What you know? 01:54:13 Speaker 2: Well, the people who taught them, of course, were the Mexicans in the South Americans. There have been gold gold mining in Peru and in Chile, in Mexico. So one of the things that I right about in the book, I think that most people don't think about are the forty eight Know, the discovery was made in late January eighteen forty eight. That discovery was not confirmed in the East until the following December. 01:54:45 Speaker 1: Got it forty eight. 01:54:47 Speaker 2: So consequently the Great Russias in forty nine. But by that time, of course, there were people mining gold out there from Mexico, from Chile, from Peru. Yeah, sure, from Australia. There were Australians there. There were Tasmanians before the fort and so these guys forty nine ers come out there and they say, one of the people, you know minding our gold, right, you're good. But they learned from him and from all the all the evidence of the South Americans who were there were very generous showing him how to do it, you know. So they learned from the forty eight ers, and then they kicked him out. Of course they're expelled. 01:55:32 Speaker 1: You know, we had you and I both have some lines and safd for interviews and ken Burns's uh, his his forthcoming The American Buffalo documentary, and uh, following that we had, I had occasion to interview him on this podcast along with his colleague Dayton Duncan, who your personal friends with. Yeah, And in talking to Dayton Duncan, it occurred to me that even though I thought I had, I had not watched The dust Bowl. I thought I did, but I was like, you know what, I actually didn't. So I just recently went and watched The dust Bowl. And speaking of human migrations the as much as we you know, earlier I kind of talked about there's these things in American history that absorble out of mental energy, and sometimes our fascination with them makes them seem overplayed in terms of actual impact. Perhaps far more people fled the dust Bowl, okay, which they in that documentary that described as the greatest human cause environmental tragedy in US history. Far more people fled the dust Bowl and went to California than ever went over the Oregon Trail. But we just don't when looking at how the country took shape, right, you don't go and look at that. No, No, like for that episode of people leaving Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, southern Colorado. 01:57:14 Speaker 2: That's true. 01:57:15 Speaker 1: Who got all got billed as Oaki's right, all got lomped into? 01:57:22 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a real canard. 01:57:24 Speaker 1: And and it was it dwarfed the Oregon Trail traffic. 01:57:30 Speaker 2: I hadn't heard that. I did watch that. I don't I don't remember that quote, that statistic, but it makes sense. 01:57:35 Speaker 7: Of course. 01:57:35 Speaker 2: The population is a lot of parts about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was. They're all you know, American history has all kinds of stories like that that we don't. We don't pay enough attention to the great migration out to California in World War two. 01:57:51 Speaker 1: Oh, I've paid zero attention to that. 01:57:54 Speaker 2: Yeah, including among blacks. You know, when you say the great migration among afric In Americans, you're. 01:58:01 Speaker 1: You're usually crucially to the industrial north. 01:58:04 Speaker 2: That's right leaving you know, as as cotton cultivation was was mechanized, this flight up to the Chicago into the area there. But then there was a second one that was in the twenties World War two, you know, with the uh boom of a defense industries and so forth on the on the Pacific coast. You know, jobs are waiting and a lot of poor black folks in the South you know, and they came out there. So the you know, the origins of the black presence presence on the Pacific coast. You know, it goes back to World War Two. Well, we don't, we don't think about. 01:58:36 Speaker 1: It because I brought that up. Let's close on if you don't mind, give me some of your thoughts on uh, give me some of your thoughts on on bison and the broader story of of you know, the near extermination of the bison just like whatever. You know, I know it's a huge question. But but areas of that saga, meaning the destruction, the recovery, what areas within that long story have caught your attention or you know, yeah, where have you spent your time in thinking about that animal? 01:59:11 Speaker 2: Well, I think I've written a fair amount on that. What really interested me was, once again, the larger context of it and the complexity complexity of it. I think we are mesmerized by this image of the buffalo hunters, of the white you know, high hunters, the buffalo runners. Of What we tend to forget was that the bison population was to had probably declined something like half from the eighteen twenties until eighteen seventy two. Or so when that starts and the decline comes partly from an environmental change, as I said before, the overland trails which destroyed these habitats that the bison had to have in the winter, just as just as the Indians did. Part of it from Indian people's who eagerly jump into this this global market economy selling robes and tongues. 02:00:07 Speaker 1: Me and Randall had an hour long fight about this day. 02:00:09 Speaker 2: Oh yeah, who won. But but the lesson there is once again, how the globe is shrinking. These Indian people suddenly find, you know, great a lot of money and things and stuff because they were able to use this skill that they along had in a new way to sell these robes to people in uh in the East, in London, you know, in Paris there there we're seeing there really is this the shrinkage of the globe. The shrinkage of the globe and the expansion of modern capitalist market economy. You know, that is what that is what kills a buffalo, It starts to kill them. With the Indians, with. 02:01:05 Speaker 5: The white hide hunters, was there like a comparable rush like you like with the mining towns, like a burst of people had a west to. 02:01:15 Speaker 2: Go do this, sure, Uh, not on the numbers or the same scale. Yeah, sure, exactly. You know, I think Steve was saying before we talk about this, Uh, these were not were not you know, uh fly bonn uh fly blown Uh monsters. These are just young men on the move trying to make a buck, right, and this is a great way to do it. 02:01:43 Speaker 1: So sure, sure, yeah. Just like we had talked about with the impacts of the Civil War, like a good many of the people that got involved in that trade were I don't want to call them, maybe not literal refugees of the Civil War, but definitely people spun off, people spun off by the Civil War. 02:02:06 Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean this country, this country was chaos at the end of that war. And if you're a young man, you know, living in the South especially or or the north and subwly, this opportunity showed itself. Sure he did it, and they went on to become one of my early m A students wrote a book called thesis called Reconsidered. And what he did, Dave Dawson, what he did was follow these guys' lives to the extens that you can. These buffalo hunters, Oh really, what did they become? Bank presidents, the Kansas Historical Society, uh, sheriffs, candy salesman. 02:02:51 Speaker 6: Just. 02:02:53 Speaker 1: Winding up on the end of a rope. 02:02:55 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, no, that these are perfectly perfectly responsible. It which makes. 02:03:05 Speaker 1: Candy businessman. No, it's it's well enough. 02:03:12 Speaker 2: Yeah, but it makes it makes perfect sense. What do you think about it? You know they were just they're just jumping into something, makes some money and they turn around and use the money to do something. 02:03:20 Speaker 3: Else and chasing opportunity. 02:03:23 Speaker 7: Yeah. 02:03:23 Speaker 2: One of the man who claims to have killed more bias than anybody else went on to become a cheap of police in Oklahoma City. 02:03:32 Speaker 7: Uh. 02:03:32 Speaker 2: And then to an early filmmaker. 02:03:35 Speaker 1: That Jay Wright Moore who was who knows. 02:03:37 Speaker 2: There's another fellow and he and he also raised race horses and his favorite name Chance won the Kentucky Derby eighteen ninety two. 02:03:48 Speaker 5: Seriously, that's sorry, project, it is I feel like you're disappointed. 02:03:56 Speaker 1: With this, Steve, like you just like. 02:04:02 Speaker 6: It was. 02:04:02 Speaker 1: It was just and I brought it up and I do not mean this as well. I think I I don't want to put any shade on the Dayton and ken Burns, the guys that worked on the Vice documentary. But when I was given my chance to comment on it, I had a couple factual minor, very minor minor factual thoughts, and I hadn't a thing I presented to him as I thought that totally respectfully, I expressed that I thought that they were really that they dehumanized the hide hunters, and that person who was not watching carefully might get the sense that they were motivated out, that they were sadists. 02:04:54 Speaker 5: Yeah, that they were doing it purely for the joy of killing. 02:04:58 Speaker 1: Yeah, they were like I know, I'm going to dedicate my life to is making sure there's no buffalo in the future. When it was a job again and again you see that that you know, like the the you know, you know how you know, like that saying freshet eyes always heard that was quite There was another say there's another saying. There's another saying that goes, uh, I hate the game, not the player. 02:05:30 Speaker 4: That's right, they happen to be I came. 02:05:32 Speaker 1: I came up that too, and and I feel that there's in in looking at what we just spent a lot of time on the hide, the deer hide, the deer skin, you know, the earlier version of the hide hunners was the white tailed deer runners of a century earlier. That you can look and say, like, man, what those guys did was rapacious and wanting. Yeah, But on an end, when you get down to the individual level, you know, a lot of them have demonstrated a yeah I knew, I knew, I knew, but if I didn't But to say that, there's this one guy, maybe it was more one of these guys that said I woke up in the morning now and then and thought, am I really going to go do this again today? And he says, but I would hear the shooting, right, and if I didn't do it, it was getting done. 02:06:27 Speaker 7: Yeah. 02:06:27 Speaker 5: And it's easy to point a finger at them as a group because they were the last one standing when the bus buffalo disappeared, right, Yeah, So it's like those guys they put a real puctuation mark. 02:06:39 Speaker 1: But I do think that that that, yeah, hating the game and not the player, because I think a lot of these people were just they were just poor, desperate people who had no thing. They had no thing, And if you look at. 02:06:55 Speaker 8: If you look at miners, yes, you know, miners don't get the same judgment, right, And they're also yeah, you know, it's more indirect, it's not quite as dramatic. I think that's part of it is that like the near extermination of. 02:07:10 Speaker 3: The bison is just such a. 02:07:13 Speaker 8: It's such it's such right material for like a moral story, whereas like we don't say, you know, these coal miners were just doing it because they loved air pollution. 02:07:25 Speaker 1: You know, Yeah, this is this is a great and there's evil people that hated clean air. 02:07:35 Speaker 3: They could have done they could why didn't they stop? 02:07:43 Speaker 2: That's that's absolutely all. That's absolutely true. Your quote that you often here and there was used in the documentary of Frank Meyer. 02:07:52 Speaker 1: Meyer. 02:07:52 Speaker 2: Yeah, I said, I can figure that. 02:07:54 Speaker 7: I figured. 02:07:57 Speaker 2: A bullllet you know, one shell. It costs me twenty five cents. But there's one shell I could I could kill this animal and I can get back, you know, three to five dollars, he said. So I figured it out. I don't figured it out and says I figured that I could make more money in a year than the president of the United States. That's what did it. It was the market that did it, both for the Indians and then then for these guys. That's what killed the bison. 02:08:24 Speaker 1: So what are you are you writing right now. This is a huge But dude, this is not big, This is not generous font I will say this is probably well, I mean, what a massive amount of work. 02:08:40 Speaker 3: This is probably. 02:08:42 Speaker 2: Oh gosh, I don't I'll write quite slowly. I mean, this took me. That took me twenty twenty five years to research and. 02:08:49 Speaker 1: Ow and I feel better. Well, you've done a lot of books. 02:08:53 Speaker 2: I've done a lot of books. 02:08:54 Speaker 8: Yeah, this is probably the only podcast in the world that has an inside source at the ms u R Hives. 02:09:01 Speaker 7: And so I have word. 02:09:03 Speaker 8: I have a word on good authority that you're still I was there, still digging, you're stiffing. 02:09:08 Speaker 1: Around the archives. 02:09:09 Speaker 7: I was there. I was there the other day. 02:09:12 Speaker 1: What are you working on now? 02:09:14 Speaker 2: You know, I'm not sure I'm gonna I know, I don't have another book me, at least not right now. But I like I like to write short articlests. Right now, I'm fascinating with Arctic exploration. 02:09:29 Speaker 1: I mean, I was hoping it's gonna be more ic. 02:09:33 Speaker 7: Anyway. 02:09:33 Speaker 2: This is just a I've just started reading up on it a lot. And uh, there was a fellow you probably know that was Dome. You know that name he was at Fort Ellis UH. He was early with the first expedition of Yellowstone, and he was in the Person War and Yellowstone, but he also signed on to UH as a as a part of a scheme to develop a colony up in the Arctic, up into the far northern UH near northern Greenland. And so this is his handwritten account of this expedition. 02:10:11 Speaker 4: Man, that sounds like a. 02:10:14 Speaker 8: Well, it's all it always seems like it's a coincidence that these guys are doing. You know, they have a foot in each one of these. But as you're pointing out, it's all part of the same project. 02:10:24 Speaker 2: It's all part of the same thing. Yeah. Anyway, I was, I was looking at the looking at that very funny, really interesting detailed description of that voyage. But the real gem of it is is introduction when he says this is a total disaster of failure, complete failure. It says, uh, we did not convert or kill any Indians in any any natives. Uh we We did not challenge the authenticity of any findings of anybody else. It's this literable sort of tongue in cheek jam the other guys who are going up. It's very funny. 02:11:05 Speaker 1: Well, stay tuned for that. And in the meantime, Continental Reckon if you want to be the guy in your social circle who knows the most about the American West, Continental Reckoning, the American West and the age of expansion, lifetime work, yep, yeah, yeah, it's it's it's fast moving. 02:11:30 Speaker 2: Well, thank you. Yeah, I try to cover a lot of ground. Yeah, well, you know, it was a journalism undergraduate. I came out of a journalist newspaper family, and I was drilled into My father was a very good editor, and he was you try to teach us as well as he could my brother's and me. You know, right, right, like a talk, right, it's a if you can't, if people can't, if you're not drawn to it, if I'm willing to read it, then what's the point. Yeah, So I try. I try to do that. 02:12:03 Speaker 1: I'd like to see you sit down and do the audiobook on that thing. 02:12:11 Speaker 2: It's a been contractor for that, and I thought, god, poor guys. 02:12:17 Speaker 1: Yeah, that would be man, that would be a it's a it's it's a healthy book. Like I said, as I you know, I can't I do it. I'm seriously gonna read the book and I'm just in preparation for today. Like I skimmed around and by doing that approach of looking in the index and finding things and you know, bouncing back and forth, uh, and went to a couple of areas in Western history that that I know well and like to read about. And your ability to what I thought was great about is your ability to not get bogged down into you know, at eight am at nine am, but just to sort of be like, at a large scale, where did like, where did this lead? What was this coming from? What does this really mean? 02:13:13 Speaker 9: You know? 02:13:13 Speaker 1: And then someone reading it could very easily use it as a jump off point to go find a lot of areas that they might want to explore, but just to get in the idea of how the country acquired and acquired and homogenized, maybe like how the country gobbled up so much stuff and sort of made it into this recognizable idea of America so fast. 02:13:45 Speaker 2: Yeah, yep, that's that is really kind of breathtaking when you when you think of it in that larger perspective, how much happened so fast and with so many consequences. And that's what I'm You can say the same thing, of course about the Civil War. I'm saying you can say that about both of them together. Together, those events remade this country. 02:14:06 Speaker 1: So Elliott West again in the latest book, and he has many continental reckoning the American West and the age of expansion. Thank you very much for joining us. 02:14:15 Speaker 2: Thank you. It's great, great pleasure. Thank you. 02:14:17 Speaker 9: Oh right on a seal, great shine like silver in the sun. Right right on alone, sweetheart. We're done beat this damn course today, taking a new one. Ride. We're done beat this day, am coarse today, So take a new one and ride on. 02:15:14 Speaker 8: Mm hmm.