00:00:01 Speaker 1: Following the collapse of the Grand Chaco and Empire, refugees founded eight thriving new towns along the Galisteo River of New Mexico, but ultimately found it difficult to sustain an arid climate civilization across the next five hundred years. I'm Dan Flores and this is the American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck, Crafted for those who live off the beaten path, where the hunt meets the harvest, and every glass tells a story. Enjoy responsibly, West of Everything. Thinking of a podcast about the American West and my own take on its history has had me trying to understand recently why the West resonates with us the way it does. Apologies to New England, New York, the South, the Midwest, but the West seems to fascinate the world in a way no other American region can. Why are their television channels devoted twenty four to seven to playing seventy five year old Western movies, so a John Wayne fix is available at just about any sleepless three am. Why does a contemporary soap opera Western like Yellowstone succeed with so many people? Why do Germans dress up and play act being residents of the West on their vacation weekends in European forest. How does back at the Ranch Bootstore in Santa Fe sell five thousand dollars cowboy boots that will never see a stirrup? Why is there a cowboy poets gathering in Nevada every winter? Why a gene Autrey Museum in la a Buffalo Bill Historical Museum in Cody, a National Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City? 00:02:03 Speaker 2: And why? 00:02:04 Speaker 1: Maybe this is the most serious question here, does the phrase just like the Wild West cause all of us to imagine entire freedom of action, a whole lack of restraint, a free for all. Nobody is regulating all that reverence and fascination for the West happens for good reason, because of its sunshine and the public lands that provide remarkable access to the surrounding landscape. The West is a great place to live in the present, but as we all know, it's the past of the West that's the key to its magic. Those of us who live in the West may love various aspects of the modern world out the door, but we all absolutely adore the old West, the frontier. We've absorbed it by watching films by john Ford and Quentin Tarantino, reading novels by Louis Lamore and Cormac McCarthy, and histories by Steven Ambrose and Hampton Sides. Of course, there are many versions of the West, and all of us have a personal preference for our favorite version. Clearly, for john Ford or Quentin Tarantino, it's the Cowboy West of so many hundreds of Western movies. 00:03:16 Speaker 2: For others, it's the West. 00:03:18 Speaker 1: Of town building and Wyatt Earp's or Marshall Dillon's imposition of law and order, or of settlers versus railroads are the gunfighter stories that Tarantino obviously also loves and loves to invert. And of course there's the Indian Wars West of a few hundred movies and a few thousand paintings. But as a modern Westerner, a writer and historian who is interested most in the West, remarkable landscapes and animals, the West that does it for me is one most people may not think of as iconic. I'm most drawn to what Western artist Charlie Russell, in one of his magnificent paintings, called when the Land belonged to God? For me, the West that speaks to my deepest soul is the West either side of Lewis and Clark. How the kind of natural West they saw came to be and lasted for so long? Plus what has happened to that version of the West in the centuries since Lewis and Clark saw it. That's the West I try to understand. To me, that's the true West, a natural West, one that's west of everything else. In part, my West is a kind of a first contact West, a theme of much science fiction and fascination with exploring places like Mars in the next few decades. It's about travel to strange places, new country and new animals, the meeting place of an exotic, ancient world and modernity. Come to think of it, the natural West is not only our future on Mars, it's also our deep past. When modern humans left Africa more than fi fifty thousand years ago and began to explore the rest of the Earth, America's West, in many ways, was a last earthly experience of that first contact moment in human history when new people's first meet. Everybody experiences first contact, but usually only one side sees the natural world as new and exotic, a new world. The resident people tend to think invasion, and so it is. Yet all of us have ancestors who bequeathed us more than twenty thousand years of first contact experiences in North America. So I think I come by a fascination for stories like this naturally, and of. 00:05:41 Speaker 2: Course so do you. 00:05:43 Speaker 1: Those of us who are in love with the natural West are usually attracted to the world of native people, to natural landscapes, and to wild animals. Being intrigued by the native West is self evidently at the core of Western fascination, judging by the volume and quality of Western landscape art and the way the Western landscape becomes a character in so many films. Judging by the number of Crown Jewel national parks in the West, the same can be said of the Western landscape. But let's say at the outset. The West I'm talking about is not synonymous with the frontier. 00:06:19 Speaker 2: When the Old World came to North America. 00:06:22 Speaker 1: Every place on the continent had a frontier, a meeting point between what existed and what was coming. But the natural West of which I speak is not defined by a moment in time a frontier. It's a place, a region of plains, mountains, and deserts, on the sunset side of the Mississippi River. The timeframe of the natural West is not just its frontier stage. The story of this West is much more ancient, and it also takes place more recently than the frontier. Because the past does not remain in the past, but affects us in our own time. The story of the West continues beyond the frontier and into the twenty first century. Many of the Western stories I've written about and will tell in this podcast are the stories of the West's wildlife, very much an ignored topic in the West and elsewhere. The cow and the sheep, and to a certain extent, even the saddled horse, are the animals we associate with the West of trail driving, ranching, town building, But I have to observe that not one of them appears in Charlie Russell's When the Land Belonged to God. Russell's timeless scene of a bison herd flanked by gray wolves pouring over a divide in a landscape we old worlders would one day call Montana implied that the divine world in the West was a Native America. So let's start there, but not necessarily at its beginning. At least not yet. Let's commence our exploration of the natural West slightly later in time. We'll return to beginnings in the next episodes with a story that makes the point that the West is not new, but a very old place. This story stretches our imaginations, suggests how central and fragile Western ecologies have always been to human life here, and illustrates the longevity of the human experience in a country where reflexively still thinking of as the newest part of America. On a sun drenched November afternoon, I sit in t shirt and shorts a few feet from the edge of a canyon rimrock, looking through four hundred feet of transparent desert air on a thousand year old city. My wife Sarah is pulling a bottle of water from her pack. A few feet away. Various friends are scattered along rock cairn marked trails through the uplands behind us, where the faint indentation of ancient highways four hundred miles of them, extend to horizons miles distant. The whole country sagebrush uplands, the canyon floor, the enclosing rimrocks, and the ruins with odd names that lie in every direction below is a uniform tannish brown, the color of dust or perhaps the color of abandonment. During the time of the Crusades in Europe, this spot and another on the east bank of the Mississippi River just across from today Saint Louis, held the two largest cities in North America, both religious centers, with a ceremonial effigy mound of lizards and serpents, and a stone hinge like circle of upright timbers planted to mark out soices and equinoxes. 00:09:52 Speaker 2: The city in the Eastern Woods today we call it Kahokia. 00:09:56 Speaker 1: Probably held a fairly permanent population of thirty thousand people, larger than London at that time. I first saw Kahokia in the early nineteen nineties with a girlfriend who had Missouri roots and insisted we visit the place. I'd seen mounds, but never anything on the scale of Monks Mound towering up out of the American bottoms like an earth and Chichenitsan pyramid. After three hundred years of urban life, an earthquake mostly destroyed Kahokia City, but not before its population had gone through twenty thousand trees and almost all the wildlife for scores of miles around. As for the city whose ruins lay below us now either side of ten centuries ago. From eight hundred AD to eleven forty AD, it was the Vatican of the American Desert. We call it Chaco, and it's another of our UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Chaco was the closest Native America ever got to an empire like those of the Aztecs, Mayans, or Incas. But this was not an empire of warrior armies and conquered provinces. It was an empire of priests who organized many thousands of scattered farming hamlets across fifty thousand square miles of today's four corners into an economic and religious network. No European principality of the age matched it. What the priest's promised was direct intervention with the deities who controlled rain, crops and animals, those grand imponderables whose presence made life good and whose absence ruined it. The city of Chaco housed the priests, their families, and a resident population of thousands. It stored and distributed surplus crops. Then at solstices and other special times of year, it hosted grand ceremonies, to which the outlying residents made holy pilgrimages. At those times, Choco gathered a population of some forty thousand. Looking down now on its buildings and avenues, one suspects both the ceremonies and the nightlife must have been epic. Choco America almost seems foreign in the modern United States, as if lifted from the Middle East. The agricultural revolution arrived in this region thirteen hundred years before the city existed, and pollen studies indicate this development produced two immediate environmental effects. Human populations skyrocketed, and crops that needed to be boiled before you could eat them meant that daily cooking fires soon reduced a robust pinions juniper woodland to desert. This became a world in need of priests who could intervene with the gods. Sitting and admiring the sprawling, hemispheric architecture of Chaco's largest structure, Pueblo Benito, as its lines and shadows shimmer in the afternoon sun, I know this is a place that reveals much about humanity. Sarah passes the water bottle over to me, and reading my mind, sums it up. 00:12:54 Speaker 2: It wasn't until the eighteen eighties that anyone built a larger building than that in America. In its time, the city lasted longer than Washington, d C. Has so far. 00:13:07 Speaker 1: Chaco and its satellite hamlets survive, in fact, for three hundred and forty years. The shorthand version of its collapse is that it all ended with a series of droughts across the Southwest, and that's true, but the many archaeologists who have interpreted Chaco know that much more happened here. When the rain stopped coming, the farmers seemed to act abruptly, dropping their digging sticks in the fields, turning their backs on the grand religious gatherings at Chaco, and relocating. 00:13:37 Speaker 2: Across the southwest. 00:13:39 Speaker 1: Some went north to what we now call Mesa Verdi's Cliff Palace in present Colorado. Most of the people who abandoned the Chaco and world congregated along the Upper Rio Grand, eventually founding towns still home to their descendants, the Pueblo peoples, famous for their apartment like villages, geometrically painted pottery, and turquoise jewelry. Why did Choco collapse in what sounds. 00:14:03 Speaker 2: Like a fit of peak. 00:14:05 Speaker 1: The evidence and ultimately the response of the pueblos afterwards points to a crisis we should recognize. Down there in Pueblo Bonito, a single room out of six hundred and fifty rooms yielded the remains of fourteen people whose funerary items indicated they represented Chaco's religious and political elites. In the room were flutes, ceremonial staffs, thousands of pieces of turquoise jewelry, cont shell trumpets from America's west coast, the remains of macaw parrots from the tropics, The oldest burial dated to eight hundred a d. And the last from Choco's abandonment. So those fourteen span the entire life of the city, and. 00:14:50 Speaker 2: Not just that. 00:14:52 Speaker 1: The genetics of nine of the fourteen showed them to be descended from the same matrilineal line from a woman who evidently had been there at Chaco's founding. Disparities in wealth and quality of life, along with the resentments they produce, are familiar to modern Americans. Isotope comparisons of the bones of the priestly class in Choco's great houses with those of farmers from the villages indicates that the elites consumed far more protein from the meat of deer and prong horns. They were better fed, grew almost two inches taller, suffered less from disease, had three times the survival rate for children under five, and lived longer. They were also conspicuous consumers of high status goods, from beautiful pots to copper bells, from turquoise jewelry to parrots. In the late eighteen hundreds, an early archaeologist working in Chaco shipped more than seventy thousand high status items just from Pueblo Benito to the American Museum of Natural History. The farming class suffered this gap between rich and poor as long as the elites delivered on their promise to make it rain. But when drought came and the priests were powerless to stop it, the lower classes attacked and killed many in the upper class. They also embraced a new belief, the Kachina religion. By the year eleven sixty, massive three story public buildings like Chetro Kettle, a four hundred room great house in Chako that was built with fifty million sandstone blocks, twenty six thousand timbers and extended for four hundred and fifty feet beneath a canyon wall, stood completely abandoned as for animal life in the Chacoan region. Diet studies in the collapses aftermath implied that rabbits and rodents were almost the only huntable animals left. Their need for protein perhaps explains why some of the new villages were founded close to the bison planes. One March afternoon in the early two thousands, I opened the passenger door of a pickup, stretched out a hiking boot to the ground, and had one of those small steps for man moments until I exited that pickup and began to walk on a surface that spoke, it crunched, it crinkled. I'd never had the kind of visceral understanding of America's ancient past I was now experiencing. I was walking into a place known to Southwestern archaeologists as the San Lazaro Ruins. With every step, my boots were landing on broken shards of Indian pottery half a foot deep. That brought a profound realization. I was walking on ground that humans long before me had lived on for some three hundred years. In every direction, the ground underfoot was a thick, continuous surface of curving, angled, shattered pottery. The pieces set at all angles and drawing the eye with painted zigzags and designs in blacks and reds. This is how the people who lived here seven hundred years ago must have experienced a stroll around their town. I thought, it's how the pioneers of archaeology in the West, the Adolf Bandeliers, the Alfred Kidters and Edgar Hewletts, no doubt felt the first time they walked across the ruins of Chaco or Mesa Verdi, or the country I was in now, the Galistaloe River country south of Santa Fe. 00:18:40 Speaker 2: I was having this experience. 00:18:42 Speaker 1: Because I've become friends with a remarkable Santa Fe character named Forrest Finn. Among many aspects of Finn's world that seemed more than improbable was that he actually owned the ground where the ruins of San Lazaro stood. That's why we were here. He was proudly showing off his possession of the largest ancestral pueblo village site in the Santa Fe area. A native Texan and a former Vietnam fighter pilot who survived being shot down to become a successful art gallery owner in Santa Fe. Fenn was in his late seventies. Then his body leaned his silvery hair still in a military buzz cut. 00:19:23 Speaker 2: When we struck up a friendship, I. 00:19:25 Speaker 1: Found him garrulous, hugely energetic, and, despite a slender education, fiercely opinionated. 00:19:32 Speaker 2: True to his Texas roots. 00:19:34 Speaker 1: Those opinions included a hatred for the federal government and a distrust of educated elites. Although he could occasionally be impressed by experts, Fenn was as dedicated to Old West history as fundamentalists are in Old Time religion. His home came across as a combination museum, archive, and archaeology lab. He outdid anyone in my experience with his boyish, hucked finn like romance about Western adventure, which led him to invest prodigious energy in several seriously crazy projects that made many people WinCE. One was acquiring and doing amateur excavations at a major site like San Lazaro. The last of Forrest's grand ideas, when he was in his eighties, got him national exposure that wasn't always admiring. He buried a treasure chest containing more than two million dollars of precious artifacts from around the world in a secret location in the West, then self published a book featuring a page of verse offering clues to its hiding spot. More than one person died, and untold thousands trecked the West's vast public lands in search of a treasure that to forest offered ordinary folks a chance to reprise a classic Old West opportunity, finding loot and. 00:20:55 Speaker 2: Making a mint off nature. 00:21:00 Speaker 1: San Lazaro had once been one of eight major Indian towns that post Choco spread across the Galiso River near where Spain would found Santa Fe in the year sixteen ten. The entire four corners is lousy with the surviving ruins of advanced farming civilizations that made the Southwest into one of the most densely lived in parts of North America a thousand years ago, long before Europeans came here, other humans hoped and dreamed, lived, loved, and died, and left their mark on this oldest place in America. In fact, eight hundred years ago there was a far larger population of people living in the Galisseo River country than actually live here. Now that's a claim few other American regions can make. A great drought in the Southwest, the most severe one in the past thousand years, was the apparent approximate cause that brought them here. In a sense, they were religious refugees fleeing that hereditary religious class that had insisted they could intervene with the gods to send life saving rain. So the search for a new center place led some of the former Choco Puebloans to the beautiful, wind swept Galisteo Country. Here's what they found. A high desert with three hundred and twenty days of annual sunshine, prompting their name for it, placed near the sun, rainfall that rarely reached to double figures but still made for green mountains and dwarf forests. A river, albeit small, with spring fed tributaries sometimes flowing water, sowable ground, sandstone for bricks, and suitable soil to make adobes. A small mountain range long known and famous far and wide for its sky blue stones, ample firewood to boil their crops in the grassland basin. Bands of striped prong orn antelope, mule deer in the hills, and elk, sheep and bears in the mountains. Eagles soaring overhead, packs of gray wolves howling in the night, Lions slinking through the rocks, and sacred coyotes trotting by with a quick, sharp eyed look. Crystalline air for watching the sun's progress along the horizons, nights brilliant with jittering stars, the steady glow of traveler planets, and the occasional light that flies. The colonizers spoke two different pueblo and languages, Tanno and Caresson, so living near one another were bilingual. They wore garments made from the cotton they grew, and ornamented themselves with turquoise jewelry. The women wore their dark hair long, while men affected a bowl cut. They painted colorful designs on pottery known as Rio Grand glazeware that frequently included images of parrots or macaus, brilliantly mark birds, traded up from Mexico and not native to anywhere in the Southwest. Farm implements they fashioned from fire hardened juniper arrow points largely from local black obcitian glass, and their axe blades from an aluminum silica called fiber light. They mined in the high rockies nearby. Their domestic animals were dogs and turkeys. Their ancestors had domesticated turkeys around the year one thousand, when huntable wildlife near their villages declined and left them protein poor water manipulation and desert agriculture required cooperative effort, so these were town dwellers. They lived in apartment like rectangular buildings with flat roofs resting on massive support beams, with plastered walls, occasionally built of stacked stone, but more commonly in the Galileo country of puddled dried adobes. The buildings often were three to five stories, with entrances, cooking and daily life carried out on the top roof level. The lower levels accessed by descending ladders into rooms that featured gleaming, polished floors and walls, often painted with murals. The buildings commonly grouped around central plazas. The plazas highlighted circular underground ceremonial rooms known as kivas, with fireplaces, perimeter benches, and a central hold a sipapu. It was called representing humanity's point of emergence from a world below into. 00:25:37 Speaker 2: The present world. 00:25:41 Speaker 1: San Lazarro left the largest ruins of all the Galistale villages. Its ruins cover fifty seven acres and feature the outlines of twenty seven separate buildings, with one nine hundred and forty one ground floor rooms and a remarkable total of five thousand rooms. It was settled around twelve ninety, and, despite a pair of debilitating droughts in the fourteen hundreds, continued to grow for two hundred years, when its peak population was nearly two thousand people. That's six times the size of any twenty first century Galisteo valley town. By then, many local resources were likely depleted, and the town was abandoned in the early fifteen hundreds. The immediate catalyst to that exodus may have been something dramatic, for in fifteen eighty one, a Spanish party found the town half destroyed. Finn's most remarkable San Lazaro discovery, for which he had the good sense to call in professional archaeologists and native descendants, came in nineteen ninety two, when he unearthed two plastered Kachina masks and other stored sacred objects. The magnificent mask appeared to represent black bears and were likely associated with a bear clan or Medison society. Various dating techniques placed the masks a few years on either side of fifteen hundred. Kachina mask would be one of the most unlikely objects any Puebloan would ever abandon, whatever happened at San Lazarro around fifteen hundred must have come on remarkably suddenly when European colonizers arrived in the early sixteen hundreds and introduced fulsome news sources of protein. Four thousand sheep and one thousand goats arrived with those first Spanish settlers. Pueblo people fully reoccupied San Lazarro before long, though swelling resentment over having to provide crops and labor, and as Spanish suppression of the Kachina religion led San Lazaro's warriors to become leaders in the Great Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty, which drove the Europeans out of New Mexico for a dozen years. But the Pueblo citizens were alarmed at the possible consequences of this that everyone ended up fleeing San Lazaro, leaving a four hundred year old city to dissolve into silence and adobe. There were at least seven other similar, long lived towns in the Galileo country, harboring at various times several thousand more of these former Chocowans. Several were farther east and close to the high plains, where they had to survive a patchy rage after those Athabaskan speakers migrated in from the far north, but like the townspeople of San Lazaro, their inhabitants fled soon following the Pueblo Revolt, when the Spanish absence allowed for even more plains Indian raids, this time by Comanches thundering their horses through a rim rock break that still known today as Comanche Gap. The Spaniards called the westernmost Pueblo town they found than the Galileo country, San Marcos. It was near a little mountain range the newcomers named Los Surreals, the little hills that had been mined since the time of Chaco for lead use to glaze pottery, and for the ultimate trade item from the southwest, sky blue turquoise. One thousand years ago, Indian miners pulled turquoise or out of shafts in a minor cereals peak called Chalchi Wheedle, the name from the Aztec language, and a little mountain with an outsized reputation. An image of this little mountain graces the Temple of the Sun Pyramid in the Aztec capital of tenoch Teetlin. I've explored its ancient shafts sum but always with hair raising alarm and shock at the fearlessness of Indian miners. The fortunes of these towns flourished and ebbed as the centuries passed, when they were all occupied with unexploited resources available. In the thirteen hundreds and fourteen hundreds, the combined population of these Galileo River towns may have been more than six thousand, because rainfall was essential for their economy, yet droughts also strike the Galiseo. They made a science of cloud and wind study, no doubt hopeful as modern residents still are when grand anvil headed clouds full of moisture towered up from the mountain ranges in summertime. Their religion was less theocratic and more decentralized than at Chaco, and featured clan leaders dressed in the elaborate costuming representing Kachina emissaries. 00:30:39 Speaker 2: To the deities of nature. 00:30:41 Speaker 1: The Kachina religion lives on among their descendants today, although none of these towns survives today. Half of these Galiselo pueblos lasted longer than the United States has existed, but as is evident from a place like San Lazara, for all their successes, the Galistale Pueblins struggled with long term sustainability. The year round fires to boil their crops meant that firewood cutting and gathering pushed farther out year after year. One of the first scientists to investigate the ruins of their towns, Nels Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History, took a revelatory photograph of the San Lazaro site in nineteen twelve, one hundred and thirty two years after its abandonment. That photo showed a still barren landscape, almost entirely stripped of trees and shrubs, for two miles around. With the diaspora that followed Chaco's collapse, the new pueblo town of Pecos, northeast of the Galistaloe country, developed a mutualistic arrangement with planes hunters to trade Pueblo crop products for dried bison meat. There's no evidence these Galistdale villages ever managed something similar, so with eight towns and several thousand residents, huntable wildlife likely took a significant hit. One bit of evidence comes from Sand Lazaro's archaeology's astonishing number of bones and skulls, many of them cracked open to get at marrow or brains from the goats and sheep Spanish settlers introduced now the sixteen hundreds. Protein was obviously a dietary addition. The Galisteo Pueblo residents were avid for. Their several hundred year inhabitation did leave the incoming Europeans a beautifully grass basin and valley and a healthy Galisto river that flowed over the surface of this landscape. The ecological changes that left exotic weeds and spreading junipers and produced a river that slashed arroyos and stream beds twenty five feet deep all came later with pasturage for new spains, horse herds, and flocks of sheep and goats, and when the Americans came with millions of cattle and renewed mining in the local mountains. Beyond walking across the broken pots at San Lazaro, my own most vivid experience of the lingering presence of this former Galistal world has come from hiking the remnant lava dykes that rise like black dragon backbones from the yellow grasslands here. Centuries ago, my Galistal neighbors lavishly adorned these lava boulders with petroglyphs, not a handful, not a few dozen, but with thousands of white outlined images carefully pecked into the black rock surfaces for capturing some of the essentials of their world and their presence. Nothing else brings them to life like these Today we call petroglyphs and pictrographs rock art, but of course they express a more specific cosmic meaning than any decorative or narrative art. Picking my way from boulder to boulder atop these dykes and keening morning winds, the images have sometimes given me a Sistine chapel feeling, at other times the open mouth reaction one has to the Las Vegas Strip. There are elaborately costumed Kachina figures on these rocks, and having once stood in freezing December weather in Zuni Pueblo and watched a towering Shaalako kachina clacking its two foot wooden beak while dancing a Solstice blessing inside a brand new home, it's hard for me to separate the sacred from the entertaining in these images. I also can't help imagining date nights and holding hands under a full moon, gobsmacked at white visions leaping out at you from the silvery black. The imagery is mind bending in variety and detail. There are mythical creatures like giant horn water serpents, but also real rattlesnakes, often too in tandem, underbird eagles, badgers, coyotes, bears, all revered animals the Pueblos preserved. There are gleaming four pointed planets, an endless variety of different cloud terraces, which is the home of the Kachina gods, and those appear in conjunction with water serpents, mountain lions, a woman's nether parts. There are faces with or without masks. Handprints link these zigzag lines, spirals, fields of dots, warrior figures protected by circular shields. While history and their struggles at sustainability mean the Pueblo people no longer live along the Galisal River, which is my home today, their descendants. 00:35:42 Speaker 2: Remain along the Rio Grande. 00:35:44 Speaker 1: Nearby, and I like to go to the annual ceremonies they open to the public. But like so much of the human story, the past here and even in Chaco somehow still seems just out of my grasp. We humans focus on the moments we exist in touching the past is the forever problem of history. 00:36:09 Speaker 3: I'm Steve Vanella. I'm joined here by Randall Williams. Hello, and we're gonna do a little thing where after we listen to Dan Florey's American West podcast, we get to come in. We have the privilege we get to come in and ask questions and hopefully for you listeners, some of the questions we asked might reflect some of the questions that you have and maybe we'll do a little thing or if you have questions, yeah, we will do this. Send your questions in and at some point we'll send your questions and at some point we'll be able to round up with Dan and get your questions answered. But in the meantime, here's our questions. 00:37:00 Speaker 4: And this is very familiar to us as former students of dance, so exactly. 00:37:05 Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks to you guys for doing this, by the way, really appreciate it. 00:37:09 Speaker 3: Oh, it's great. You got you want to start. 00:37:15 Speaker 4: Yeah, I think in the start of this episode you're talking about many wests, and there's certain wests that have you know, lived on and on and pop culture, especially for Americans living in the twenty first century. But you kind of challenge people to understand the West as a much larger place than the West of cowboys and Indians and of overland trails and everything like that. So I wonder, what is it about the West that seems to have grabbed a hold of our imaginations, and what has particular about cowboy culture that's grabbed our imaginations? And then what do we gain by opening our eyes to through the deep time West. 00:38:10 Speaker 1: Yeah, So I'm putting together a podcast here, twenty six episodes on it that will be about different kinds of things than most people think of when they think of Western history. They're no gunfights, they are no mining strikes, there's no Marshall Dylon. What I'm interested in is a different kind of West. And I think this is maybe the value of something like this, a part of the Western story that's not really been known or written about very much, and certainly not in pop culture portrayed so that people get to understand it. And what that West is is something I call the natural West, which is it's a West of the native people. It's a West of wildlife, abundance beyond imagining for wildlife and many, many different species, and it's a story of the West. That really hinges a lot of around kind of an initial reaction to a place that's different, new, and very unfamiliar to people coming out of the East in particular. I mean, I think people coming up, say from Mexico into New Mexico or California, don't see the West as being that different. Their usual reaction to the country farther north is that it's cold. 00:39:48 Speaker 2: But it's similar. 00:39:50 Speaker 3: That's an interesting point, man. 00:39:51 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's how they that's how they characterize it. Man, it's really cold. 00:39:55 Speaker 3: There kind of got similar thing going on as cold. 00:39:58 Speaker 1: Yeah, the country looks the same, but man, it's cold. But what I'm kind of interested in is the deep time story all the way back to the Pleistocene and the earliest people who were here and how they interacted with Western animals, because we have some pretty epic alterations that take place in this story. I mean, we lose a lot of animals ten thousand years ago. Then we have a period where we go for ten thousand years in the West and it looks as if native people in particular are pretty benevolent. I mean, there's only one extinction during that time period, and I try to try to figure out why that is how it happened that way, and then a lot of the rest of the episodes have to do with a kind of an exploratory first contact experience from people like Lewis and Clark, for example, and a whole host of people later in the nineteenth century, and also with what transpires in a West in the nineteenth century with all this abundant wildlife where there are really no rules, no regulations. It's just kind of a free for all, and pretty much what you would predict for a free for all, things don't turn out all that great for a lot of the animals, and of course a lot of. 00:41:23 Speaker 2: The native people either. 00:41:25 Speaker 1: But it's those stories in contrast to Marshall Dillon and town building and the California gold Rush, the Mormon settlement of Utah, these are the things that I've been writing about. 00:41:43 Speaker 2: For thirty five years. 00:41:45 Speaker 1: Basically, I never was interested much because other people had already done it to write about the mining rushes or the Indian Wars. I was always looking for something different and new to write about that I thought would sort of tell us story that nobody quite knew yet. And that's really what this podcast does. 00:42:08 Speaker 3: This there's the thing I've wondered about there's an impression I have unsourced material about source material east versus West source material, and you might not share the same impression. But if you have this impression, maybe you can speak to it would be this is a very roundabout way of arriving at the point. But when Rand and I were reading about the long hunters, so this this group of Euro American deer skin hunters that were first pushing over the apple Achian Mountains and going into Kentucky, basically the country south of the Ohio River, west of the apple Aachian Range, south of the Ohio pushing into that area, and we kind of marvel at the paucity of materials and the and the the lack of sort of like the lack of natural observation, the lack of nature observation. What is there was collected like very deliberately by a historian who went and talked to some of the key players, children, spouses, grandchildren and try to put together a little history of these first euro Americans to push into this area. But there's just not a ton there. And that is at say, seventeen seventy six. Yeah, what happens that when you get what happens in the next thirty forty years where all of a sudden it seems like everyone is so literate. Yeah, and everyone is just observing and writing about trying to you know, writing about the sites they see, counting things right, like really putting a record down. Then now you can look at the West, and part of what's so inviting about it is there something, there's something there to read about. Yeah, and it's really hard to get Like you just when looking at people coming into Kentucky again for instance, coming into Kentucky, it's like there's hints of things where you're like, you gather it must have been really different, but there's no just vivid pictures of what they're seeing. Did people also learn to read and write? Like, like, how do you how do you explain that? 00:44:25 Speaker 2: Well? 00:44:25 Speaker 1: I explained it in three ways, I guess. One is that starting in eighteen hundred, a lot of the expeditions into the West, or government expeditions, and those people are giving given specific instructions to keep a record, keep a really close record. I mean, Jefferson tells Lewis and Clark, for example, you know, any animals that you see that aren't found in the maritime states, collect them, write a description, learn them as much about their natural history as you can. And I think that's one of the things. I think another thing is that there are a lot of Europeans coming over in the early nineteenth century. The Thomas Nuttalls, the John Bradberry's and those guys tend to look at darkest North America sort of the way the Brits were looking at Africa. Then where Wow, man, this is some amazing part of the world that none of us has ever seen. And so we got to keep a record of all of it. We've got to, you know, we've got to preserve what it looks like. And I think really there was an actual market. 00:45:43 Speaker 2: For literary work about the West. 00:45:47 Speaker 1: Starting around probably as early as eighteen ten. And I think the you know, the Nicholas Biddle Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which came out in eighteen fourteen. 00:45:56 Speaker 2: I mean, those things sold like hotcakes in the East, and I. 00:46:00 Speaker 1: Think that made people understand that, wow, okay, all I gotta do is go out to the West, you know, and write some account. And it even led to I mean, and I have found two or three of these what were basically made up accounts by people who never actually went to the West, but they talked to people and read other people's stuff and sat down and wrote an account of their own journey. 00:46:27 Speaker 3: Like it was enough of a thing that there's value in faking one. 00:46:31 Speaker 1: Yes, there was, and you could sell a faked book. There's one particular guy, a guy named John Mayley, who wrote a faked book about an expedition he took up the Red River, and he sold it for like five thousand dollars or something, which, of course at the time was a huge sum of money. But the publisher he sold it to broke in the panic, the Depression of eighteen nineteen, and they never did publish it. So it kind of exists just as a manuscript which I have actually examined and examined closely enough to realize bullshit. 00:47:07 Speaker 2: This guy did not do any of this. 00:47:10 Speaker 3: But man, like, it's off your subject matter. But can you just imagine that if a century prior to Lewis and Clark you to have taken people with that mandate and that skill set, and you had said, I want you to cross over the range divide, I want you to descend the Ohio decend the Mississippi, come back overland, yeah, trace or whatever, and like do your thing, like right down about all this stuff, right down about all of it. 00:47:41 Speaker 2: Yeah, you have to. 00:47:42 Speaker 4: I mean in that era, you really have to sort through what material there is to get glimpses of the natural world. And obviously there's a literature from the earlier colonial period. 00:47:55 Speaker 2: Of you know, English gentlemen. 00:48:00 Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it doesn't William Bartram kind of very it reads is very sort of pre modern, not in the technical sense, but pre modern. I mean it's very It's like. 00:48:11 Speaker 3: Yeah, you read that's true. You read like the account of Kabe's a Devaka. It feels like it's like an extended acid trip. You know, like you're kind of like, what, really, there's no way, I mean, that's you kind of like it doesn't paint a vivid picture. And I think that something you're right, Like, something happened linguistically where we got over this hump and all of a sudden you can understand what people are talking about. 00:48:35 Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's that a market emerged for it. There was a market, you know, America where we're interested in possibilities for making money, and here was this wild new country that everybody around the world, including all the Europeans, were really intrigued by, And so people began to realize, well, hell, I just you know, I try to I try to keep notes. 00:49:01 Speaker 2: Maybe I embellish a little bit. 00:49:03 Speaker 1: Even, And so I think that's kind of one of the explanations for what happens starting about eighteen hundred and eighteen ten, that suddenly you start getting a lot more primary source accounts. You have to use them, you know, with a grain of salt. 00:49:20 Speaker 2: Sometimes. 00:49:21 Speaker 3: I wasn't really aware of that, man, and you turned me on to that to be suspicious. In studying writing, we'd always in studying fiction writing, we always learned about the the unreliable narrator as a fictional device, right like you're reading a novel and the reader sort of becomes aware like that part of the thing is not to trust the narrator, which is common in movies and other stuff, right like it's built, it's built intension. I never thought of it in historical journals. I never thought of it. And I had read Tough Trip through Paradise, and I'd emailed you or ran in to you whatever it was, and asked you about tough trip through Paradise. I remember you said basically, you know, be careful. He plays a little I think he said something. He gets a little fast and loose, and some of the things don't quite add up, and I just read it like gospel. 00:50:14 Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, well, I think one is inclined to do that until you began to realize that. You know, the classic one in the West is the account of James Ohio Patty, who you know. I mean that book was probably published ten different times in the nineteenth century, and so there are a bunch of different versions. 00:50:32 Speaker 2: He changed him up. 00:50:33 Speaker 3: Wait, we quote him, and had been warned about him, now, but we quote him. 00:50:37 Speaker 2: Yeah, he's got some good some good details. Yeah, he does have some good details. 00:50:43 Speaker 1: And I mean, who knows what I think, for example, with people like that, like Patty and maybe like John Maylee, is they actually did I think Melee knew enough to convince me that he had talked to people, he had talked. 00:50:55 Speaker 2: To people who knew about it. 00:50:57 Speaker 1: But when he started going up the Red River and started describing the landmarks, I mean I could tell by the time you got to about the third or fourth day, this guy ain't nowhere on any red rivers that. 00:51:09 Speaker 2: Existed then or now. I mean, so it was. 00:51:14 Speaker 1: You know, it's a market for stuff and it produces a huge abundance of material to use, but somehow you have to be careful. 00:51:21 Speaker 3: I'm reading one right now. It's like sixty years. It's a guy that wound up in Montana, wound up having he had a trading for it. He had a trading post in Missoula for a while. Can't member's name. Sixty years, a fighter and trader or something. And a lot of the stuff in there. There's a lot of stuff in there where you read it and you're like you accept as legit. Like some of the observations are ways they use things right, like little tricks of the trade. You're like, that has to come from a level of knowledge. But other parts of it, you know, he's talking about I sent Randall passage about Sharp's Buffalo rifles, and Randall's like they didn't exist, So he's a mystery later he's misremembering whatever, you know. I mean, he's like he feels like he had one at a time when he didn't actually have before Christian made a rifle. Yeah, but here's the thing, like my man fought in World War Two. Okay, my dad's long. Dad, my dad fought in World War Two. I could tell you he told me about getting and carrying around with him a Thompson submachine gun. Right now, I could go and put down like my dad was in World War two and had a Thompson sub machine gun. And he might be like, well, no, no, no, I didn't have it there. I had it later. But you know what I mean, Like like I just remember war Thompson submachine gun, and you can see someone later just out of expediency bleeding it together, just putting it all in there, and then someone later saying that that couldn't have been true. Yea, he wouldn't have had it. 00:52:48 Speaker 2: He don't know. 00:52:49 Speaker 3: He couldn't have had it at Anzio. He could have had it later in France, but he wouldn't have had it at Anzio. 00:52:54 Speaker 1: Well, it becomes these kinds of things become even more difficult when you're dealing like with in this particular or podcast with the people in Shako, where we have no written accounts. All we have to go on is archaeology and material culture objects and so and now genetics. Obviously, that story about the the fourteen people who are all related to one another buried in a single room in Puebloo. That makes the whole story of telling the deep time history of the West even more difficult, because now you don't really have you may have, I mean, and I have used them this way. There are great coyote stories going back thousands of years, and I have occasionally used a coyote story associated with a particular group that I think would make a point about them. But that's literally the only kind of storytelling you get. It's oral history, and so you have to you have to approach things that way, as you know, really carefully. 00:54:04 Speaker 3: But that's where my that's where my observation, I guess, falls apart because I was talking about the vivid descriptions, but when it comes to the Pueblo site, some of the ancient Pueblo sites, here's these really these guys doing really vivid descriptions, and they're stumped. 00:54:19 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:54:20 Speaker 3: The vivid description is of someone being like, what in the hell happened here? 00:54:24 Speaker 2: Yeah? 00:54:24 Speaker 3: You know what I mean, it's not even like a vivid they're just describing being awestruck by what they see as a ruin. 00:54:31 Speaker 1: Yeah, So what we're grappling with then is you know, so people got into Chaco in the eighteen fifties for the first time, eighteen fifties, eighteen sixties, and so we've essentially got one hundred and seventy years of archaeological speculation. And so the way you try to figure it out as you sort of track that story through to hopefully the most recent versions of well, here's what it kind of looks like what happened. But that kind of evidence is never quite as fool proof as Lewis and Clark saying today, for the first time we saw and shot a buffalo. 00:55:09 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So the. 00:55:13 Speaker 1: Story of the West when you go back in time is based on a kind of an evidentiary base that you have to even be more careful with, but it's the only way we have to figure out what happens. 00:55:29 Speaker 3: Have you ever read Black Range Tales? 00:55:31 Speaker 2: I don't think so. 00:55:32 Speaker 3: It's a gold miner. He's knocking around New Mexico mostly eighteen sixties. But one of the things really stuck with me is here's this guy in the eighteen sixties and he's talking about basically trying to loot pueblo sites, and in the eighteen sixties. He's lamenting that all the good stuff's been hauled away. In the eighteen sixties. He describes like amazing things that other guys have carried off. 00:56:00 Speaker 2: Yeah right, yeah, well that's that. 00:56:03 Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, that's been going on forever. As soon as those villages, like in the Galiseo Valley were abandoned, there's no question there were people out there poking around seeing what they could find. 00:56:14 Speaker 2: Instantly, yeah, just instantly. 00:56:16 Speaker 1: Yeah, And so who knows what all disappeared, but sometimes really great finds or you know, they remain. And I mean those Kachina masks that Forest Finn found there in San Lazarro Pueblo in nineteen ninety two. Man, that's a you just don't find that stuff in part because nobody ever leaves it. And something that we don't understand happened at San Lazaro around fifteen hundred that caused that population of that town to flee. So suddenly that either some you know, some magician, some healer, some shaman maybe got killed and couldn't go for his his goods, or some attack came so suddenly that everybody just fled. I mean, so sometimes you get lucky like that, and Forrest got pretty lucky on that one. 00:57:17 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it's. 00:57:19 Speaker 3: Like founding finding a modern day house where they didn't even take their passports. 00:57:23 Speaker 2: Yeah that's right, that's exactly right. 00:57:25 Speaker 3: Well damn man, I'm super excited for the series. I can't wait to learn all this stuff that's coming. 00:57:29 Speaker 2: So thanks, well thanks to you guys for joining me with this