00:00:00 Speaker 1: The West, and his stories have been rendered in many ways, some of which I've made an effort to address in this podcast. 00:00:07 Speaker 2: In the deep past, there's. 00:00:08 Speaker 1: Archaeology and paleontology, which is how we know about the Clovist people or the collapse of the Chaco and Empire. Are woolly mammos and dire wolves as part of the West disappeared be sharing. There's ethnology and anthropology and folklore, which you have preserved our oldest Western literature in the form of the Coyote stories, and have told us a great deal about Western cultures, native or not. The visual arts, which I've addressed several times, gave the world our first visual impressions of the West and interpreted the frontier photography followed to capture a West that intrigues us because it looks less like our West than we'd expect. But as for history, literary fiction and poetry, literary art is the form of books about the West, and there are so many, and that allows us to experience the past, present, and future of this region. 00:01:01 Speaker 2: In ways no other way of knowing can do. 00:01:04 Speaker 1: Except the course for Western movies, which we'll take up in the next episode of The American West. 00:01:11 Speaker 2: The truth is that, even among a group. 00:01:13 Speaker 1: Of PhD Western historians know our long discussion is going to probe some ultimate resolved truth about which are the best books on a subject as vast as the American West. All we can do here is offer up to listeners and viewers a tiny sample of our personal favorites and explain why we're advancing these above all the other possibilities. Our street cred for this exercise probably rests. 00:01:39 Speaker 2: Primarily on this reality. 00:01:42 Speaker 1: We have all been voracious readers of books about the West for a long time, and have also taught university courses that were steeped in information from books. I'm going to go last with my own choices, but I'll start this out with a quick exercise that will give you some idea of the literary possible stabilities when you take on a subject like the American West and literature. The last time I taught a graduate class in the history of the West at the University of Montana was in the fall of twenty thirteen. I had organized the bibliography of books on the West I handed out to the PhD and MA students in that class into fourteen sub fields. 00:02:20 Speaker 2: I looked at them again the other day. 00:02:22 Speaker 1: Here's how they broke down and how many books I listed in each subheading. 00:02:29 Speaker 2: First was Overviews of the West. 00:02:31 Speaker 1: There were forty six titles in that one. The Native West through the early twentieth century one hundred and twenty three titles, Western Expiration and Imperialism, seventy seven titles, The first Extractive Economy, the fur trade got forty titles. Understanding the West through Science and Art in the nineteenth century forty three titles Frontier Extraction, Mining and Logging, sixty titles, Societies, farming and Ranching the West, seventy six titles, Class, Ethnicity and Gender in the West. One hundred and twelve titles, Western Infrastructure and the West of the City sixty eight titles. History of the Western Environment one hundred and four different titles. Contemporary West, Tourism, Politics and Modern Indians. One hundred and fifteen titles Modern Western issues like water power, the Economies of the New West forty six titles. A Western sense of Place is Expressed in Art and Film ninety seven titles, and a Western Sense of Place Expressed in History and Literature eighty one titles. The calculator on my phone tells me that's one thousand and eighty eight books. I haven't kept list this complete in the past decade, but the number of high quality books like these on the West released by top New York publishing houses, our university presses putting manuscripts through peer review has probably doubled by now. Choosing, in other words, is not going to be easy. 00:04:25 Speaker 3: Dan, welcome back. It's great to be with you, as. 00:04:28 Speaker 2: Always, great to be here again, Randall. 00:04:30 Speaker 3: We're talking favorite books about the American West, and we are joined today by a very special guest. If you'd like to introduce her to it. We are. 00:04:38 Speaker 1: So we have done these primarily with Randal and me over a lot of the episodes. Steve joined us in the beginning, but for the first time we've got another guest. And this is a special guest because this is my wife, Sarah, Sarah Dant. 00:04:55 Speaker 2: But she's not here. 00:04:56 Speaker 1: Because she's necessarily married to me. She's here because she is a top notch historian and arthur about the West, and she's a former professor at Weaber State University. In fact, she was a distinguished professor there and also the chair of the history department for too many years, I think, but most of the last part. 00:05:24 Speaker 3: Of her career. 00:05:25 Speaker 1: She was the chair of the history department at Weaver and she's also the author of one of the really outstanding recent books on the American West. It's called Losing Eden and Environmental History of the American West, and it's a stunner. Also available as an audiobook too, So it's the kind of thing you can put put on your bluetooth as you're driving across the West and sort of absorb information while you're looking at scenery. 00:05:51 Speaker 3: Which I would have selected had you not been here. I thought it would be awkward to choose yours. 00:05:57 Speaker 4: Oh no, I'm way into flattery. So yeah, if you want to just sort of supplement, that'd be cool. 00:06:03 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:06:03 Speaker 1: No, it's a great it's a great book. Yeah, it's a terrific book. So Losing Eden is the title of it. What we're tasked with today is coming up with favorite books out of an enormous body of material that's out there about the West. And we're going to just kind of go straight to the topic, and we're going to begin with Sarah. 00:06:25 Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I love to start. Well, thanks for having me on the pod, especially since I know that this is coming to an end here pretty soon, and this seems like a very fitting way to conclude. And so I will say that one of the things I tried to do in choosing the books that I wanted to talk about today was to think about how you have structured the podcast, which is not your typical gunfight at the OK Corral, wild West, stereotypical West, but instead a much more thoughtful nuance than even sometimes controversial West. So I decided to talk about three books today that I felt like had a couple of or three actually really kind of important themes to them, one being that they're all really well written. And I feel like anytime that you can read good writing, it makes your own writing better. It just is. It's an inspirational form of communication that I can't get enough of. So all three books that I chose are I think, really well written. The second thing about them is that they do they get at this myth of the West. What's your term for that tribal history of white people? Yeah, and go about undermining that in important and powerful ways. My favorite question to ask about the West is the at what cost question, not so much as a finger pointing blame kind of thing, but instead to get at what are the consequences of the choices that we've made. How does that affect change over time? And one of the things that all three of these books I think speak to is this idea, and I know that you've talked about this in your podcast, that the past doesn't stay in the past. It's very much a part of who we are today in the West. So if people care about what they know, and I think they do, if you want to know more about the geography of the West, people of the West, the animals, the plants, then I think you could you can start with these three books and do pretty well. 00:08:44 Speaker 3: So the first book. 00:08:45 Speaker 4: I chose was Wallace Stegner's Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, Living and Writing in the West. And you know, I feel in some ways bound to start with Stegner because there's really no one who has written better about the West than him. He's often called the Dean of Western history, and with good reason. And so you know, he's written a lot of books. He's won the Pulitzer Prize, he won the National Book Award. We only got eighty four years of Stegner. He died really tragically in a car accident in San Fe of all places. So I picked Where the Bluebird Sings to Lemonade Springs because it's like sixteen essay greatest Hits of Stegner collection, and I feel like it's a way to get at many of the ideas that he brought to us that are really seminal. He talks about the importance, for example, of aridity in the West. He's the one who says that we have to get over the colored green, which is that's a great way of phrasing it. And he talks about how it's aridity that polishes the stars and gives them their brightness. It takes chlorophyll out of the environment. It shapes the mountains and craggy hills into bad lands instead of soft hills like you would get back east. But then he also talks about there's a whole capsule history of conservation in there, which is a nice primer on all things the West. He is good at talking about sort of what are the consequences of the choices that we've made. As I said, that was one of my criteria for picking a book, and he had a quote and I just wanted to hit it as sort of before I open it up to you, guys, he says, we may love a place and still be dangerous to it. 00:10:52 Speaker 1: Just for. 00:10:54 Speaker 3: Listeners who might not be familiar with Stagner, could you give a quick sketch of his life and the sort of imprint he made on Western literature. 00:11:07 Speaker 4: Absolutely, and you're the podcast host. Do you want to tackle that, because I know you're going to talk about Stagner too. 00:11:13 Speaker 2: I think yes. 00:11:14 Speaker 1: Stagner is the author of one of the books I chose as well, which is I think an indication he's probably in our choice is the only person who appears more than once, and there's an obvious reason for it, because he's he stands kind of head and shoulders above most other Western writers in the elegance of his pros, for one thing, but also because he trained so many writers. I mean, he had a Stegner to kind of give a really quick biography of him. He was one of those people who lived, as he said, in twenty two different places and eight different states when he was growing up, almost all of them in the West, some of them in Canada, some of the places were outside Calgary. 00:12:00 Speaker 2: But he also spent a lot. 00:12:02 Speaker 1: Of his youth in Utah and he lived for most of his adult life in California because after getting a PhD from the University of Iowa in English literature and sort of having Bernard de Voto, another famous Western historian and Western writer become his mentor, Stagner ended up at Stanford where he started a creative writing program, and he trained people like Edward Abbey and Thomas mcgwaine, and I mean a whole host of Wendell Berry, a whole host of kind of famous writers about nature and about America and the West. So he was this kind of remarkable giant in Western letters. And that's why he tends to turn up, and he's going to turn up again, as I said in my conversation. 00:12:56 Speaker 4: Well, and he's also the author of some of the books that were an attempt to discuss that at what cost of say, damning our national parks, Glenn Canyon, the place no one knew. He wrote the literature that went with the photographs to help people begin to realize this is dinosaur. He wrote these books that helped people create a value for the Western landscape that wasn't extracted, that we could love this place without doing damage to it if we protected it as a park. 00:13:37 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:13:37 Speaker 1: He's also got a famous line that I think probably all of us have used. I mean, I had forgotten, for one thing, that it was Stagnert who said we have to get over the Colored Green, because I used that as the title of one of the episodes. But he had a very famous line about the American West as. 00:13:57 Speaker 3: The geography of Hope. 00:14:00 Speaker 1: And I think everyone in this room has used that line at one time or another. 00:14:05 Speaker 4: Yeah, And he also talks about the West, as I think I used this at the end of Losing Eden. He said, it's hard to be pessimistic about the West, even though you may be able to chronicle all of these problems and challenges, it's hard to be pessimistic about the West because this is also, as he says, the native home of Hope. And so yeah, in many ways, it's lyrical writing, it's compelling writing, and it's good history at the same time. 00:14:36 Speaker 3: Sarah, what's your second book here? 00:14:38 Speaker 4: So my second book I chose actually a former graduate student of Viewers and I think maybe a contemporary of yours, Rosalind Lapierre. She wrote a book, a really astonishing book called Invisible Reality, Storytellers, story Takers and the supernatural world of the Blackfeet. And she is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet tribe and Mayti, and she wrote this as a really in many ways astonishing hybrid book because she's classically trained as an academic historian, so she knows how to do good archival research and all of that, but she's also trained by Blackfeet elders with traditional economic or excuse me, ecological knowledge ethnobotany, and so this book powerfully weaves together these threads of kind of traditional history with a lot of the stories that she heard growing up from elders in the Blackfeet community, and it becomes this revelation on the Blackfeet movement from when they were called Buffalo Indians or what she calls Buffalo Indians prior to to removal and relocation, the stories that those elders told about that time in their lives. The story Takers is about the ethnographers who came and took many of the stories of the Blackfeet in the late eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties. And then how has that kind of translated for her even as a twentieth century Blackfeet academic woman. And one of the things that she does, which I know you've done to great Successan is used the first person narrative, and you know, of course our English teachers in college always said, no bad, you absolutely are not supposed. 00:16:43 Speaker 2: To do that. 00:16:43 Speaker 4: But in the right hands you her, that works really, really well. And so she also, I think brings in this book an important perspective that again ties in with a lot of what you've tried to do in the podcasts, which is this assumption that a lot of people carry that Indians are somehow nineteenth century people and then they disappeared and we don't have them anymore. They just sort of exist in displays at the Smithsonian or something like that. And she is able to very much contemporize Native peoples and where they are fitting into the current America, not just as some relicant icon of the past. 00:17:32 Speaker 1: Yeah, Roz was with us and doing the Ken Burns film, the recent film on the American Buffalo, and she was one of several, but one of the really great Native voices in that particular film. And she's had quite a career in quite a success since those days in Missoula back twenty or so years ago. And so, yeah, she's she's an outstanding writer, and this book is it's a hell of a choice, because that's really a powerful book. 00:18:11 Speaker 2: Well. 00:18:11 Speaker 4: And one of the things that you know, this invisible reality idea is that she is able to talk about how the Blackfeet have a relationship with the supernatural and that they don't feel the need to fear nature because through their supernatural guides, they can control nature. And it was this source of tremendous security and stability if you didn't have to worry about thunder or rain or snow because you could if you really needed to, you could borrow the beaver bundle or utilize the super the supernatural as she calls it, to help you live a better life. And for students especially, it was it was always fascinating for them to see someone who could put those two ideas together so well. And Ros would talk to my classes and I mean it was just NonStop. We'd go way over time every time. 00:19:25 Speaker 3: Yeah, and it actually I mean, I'll in a little bit here, I'll talk about Fools Grow, which I think would also pair nicely with that one. What's your third So. 00:19:38 Speaker 4: My third book is one that has just come out. It's called The Westerners, And I'm going to make sure that I get the title right here, myth making and belonging on the American Frontier. And so this is by Megan Kate Nelson. She is She was a Pulitzer finalist for her book The Three Cornered War, which looked at the Civil War in New Mexico, which is not the usual setting for the Civil War. And she does a similar strategy with this book that she did in Three Cornered War, which is that she chooses seven protagonists and follows them across and through the West to explore and sort of bust once again this Western ideology and myth making that has become so pervasive. And so it's one thread of it is tracing these seven individuals, and I'll talk about a couple of them for just a minute. But then the other thread is is the erasing that has been happening to many of these communities because they don't fit some you know, whitewashed iconography of here we come white people on the Overlin trail or on horseback pushing cows. And it really it pushes aside a lot of the good, bad and ugly history of the West that makes it much more rich and compelling. So I mean, of the seven, it would be hard to pick one individual. She talks about Saka Juweah, for example, in a very different way than we're used to, not just the night at the museum stereotype that we all have seen in the movies, but instead as this full fledged member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. And I know you're going to talk about Lewis and Clark too, So it's like you and I called each other and planned it. And so she talks about her not as just there she is a guide out in front of the men, but instead she's an ethnobotanist. She's a translator, and she gets to vote equally with the men, and so that's really compelling. She talks about Jim Beckworth, the fur trader, mixed race fur trader, who, as she calls him, sort of is the Forest Gump of the nineteenth century because his narrative weaves in and out of all these other people. 00:22:18 Speaker 3: Hard to box put Jim Beckworth in one box, No. 00:22:22 Speaker 4: And Jim Beckworth doesn't want to be put in a box. And he'll tell you fantastic stories, maybe thirty percent of which is based on truth. 00:22:30 Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, that's when you read his memoir it just doesn't add up. 00:22:38 Speaker 4: Well, there's just no way. 00:22:39 Speaker 2: Yeah, there's just no way. Yeah. 00:22:43 Speaker 4: And she talks about Polybemus, who was a Chinese woman trafficked from China to Idaho, of all places, and found her way there. I asked her who is your favorite character? And it was Getrudus Barcello from Santa Fe, who was who she became the most wealthy woman in Santa Fe by dealing Spanish Spanish Monty, which is a card game of chance. And Meghan said, I, sim well, so why did you pick her? And she said, Sarah, she's a badass and I really like her. And it gave Megan the chance to learn how to deal Spanish Monty, and so I will just this is a note to any of you who meet Meghan, do not let her con you in to plan a game of Spanish Monty, because she will take all your money, she'll take your house, she'll be she'll be devastating to you. But she's very much someone who's going after again this myth making of the West and the erasure that has happened to a lot of the mini voices that create who we are in the modern West. To end by recovering them. I think she's creating helping us to understand how the West that we're living in today is what it is. 00:24:11 Speaker 1: All right, So those are your three, those are my three, those are her three. 00:24:15 Speaker 2: So Randall, what about you? Sure? 00:24:19 Speaker 3: So as you just alluded to, the first book I chose is Steven Ambrose Undaunted Courage, and it's not I was selecting. So I didn't have a single through line through all my three selections. I sort of picked from three different nodes of how I think about books and where they fit into my life. But this, this is a book that's very accessible to the general reader. I was thinking of, you know, some of Michael Punk's books are also fall into this category, or Timothy Egan's The Big Burn, Like that's an another one. Yeah, But Undawned Courage is sort of the the foundational modern work on Lewis and Clark for a general readership. I tried to find how many copies it sold. But it's a book that you'll find in every airport, every Barnes and Noble, and probably on the on the bookshelf of every somebody has an uncle. Every person probably has an uncle who has this book on their bookshelf, and I can say my relationship to it was in my first year as an undergrad. I was just reading a lot late at night, just reading a lot of personal books, sort of my extracurricular reading. I was just churning through books and this was one that I picked up. I'd seen it around, you know, for years, and I thought this is something that I should read, just to kind of put it under my belt, and it it kind of did something to me where I started thinking about the West. You know. I'd come out with my family on some high adventure type trips. We did Yellowstone, we did Glacier, we did the classic family road trips. But this is a book that kind of lit a fire and I think shaped what I was interested in academically and then also what I gravitated towards in terms of my own personal path in life. And as far as Lewis and Clark goes, I don't think that there's a single story in the history of the West that is so far reaching in terms of in terms of all the different It just touches on everything that you think about wherever your interests lie. In the West. There's there's tribal history in Native America. You know, there's sort of the first encounter, there's the suite of animals that they encounter along the way, and you're of imagining this wild West before it's colonized. There's the element of sort of national ambition and state building in the West, the Jefferson vision for the West. There's also the aspect of it just being a survival epic, a journey of sort of incomprehensible distance with very rudimentary equipment and supplies. And so I think like if you were if you were in a position where you wanted someone to become interested in Western history and someone who maybe hadn't given the thought to the West previously, I think this one is a good one to light the fire. But I think you could say the same thing for The Big Burn or any of Michael Punk's books. They're just they read very easily. They have a tremendous amount of information, but they also tell a story that's very compelling just from a an entertainment value for lack of a better term. 00:28:00 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that book in particular, I mean it tells a through story. I mean that's part of the appeal of the Lewis and Clark expedition. I think is that there is a beginning, there is a very long middle, and there is a conclusion to it, and so it answers to what story is supposed to be. 00:28:19 Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think we had a guy on the podcast a few months ago, this Vast Enterprise is a new book on Lewis and Clark, and I said to him, I said, I think that that book could be the new Undaunted Courage because it tackles this subject that's so compelling in a way that's accessible, but also asks bigger questions. And so I think those two also pair together nicely. Yeah. 00:28:50 Speaker 4: Well he had to have been flattered by that. There's the great and I think it's Ambrose who first comes up with the report that it's Clark who's dead reckoning the measurement of how they're moving across the landscape to make them app and you know, dead reckoning is not exactly a precision science, and yet over several thousand miles he's off by just a couple dozen. 00:29:14 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:29:15 Speaker 4: I mean, there's just astonishing. 00:29:16 Speaker 3: It's a book you could flip to. You could flip a few pages, flip a few pages on everyone, you'll find some nugget like that. That just adds to the richness of the story. So that's one that's a good one. That's my sort of point of entry to Western history. The other book which I mentioned earlier is James Welch's Fools Crow, which is a novel written in nineteen eighty six, and it is a novel that is the story of a young Blackfeet man and it's sort of the story of his life or his transition into manhood, and it's it's mapped onto the story of the Blackfeet people, which culminates in the Marias Massacre, which is like this epic moment of tragedy. It's sort of an un I mean, I think a lot of our listeners probably haven't heard of the Marias massacre, but it's one of these real tragic moments in the history of the US Army and Native peoples on the planes. But what's really special about this book is it is sort of fully immersed in the Blackfeet worldview. It's not you know, if I were to try to write a book about with a Native protagonist, it would never get away from the fact that there's a white guy dressed up in Indian garb, you know. But welch is. I believe he was a tribal member in the Yeah, he was an old tribal member. And it is told it's it's told through the eyes of as you said, the you know, it has the cosmology is woven into the story. It's inextricable, and it's it's just a really well written sort of music like musical, colorful narrative and there's just not a lot out there that I can compare it to because you you step into a different world, you see the world through different eyes. There's there's like vocabulary and just the way that things are talked about in reference to one another on the landscape, just in a way that I would never get there. And so I think that's one, you know, one of the many things that books can do, or that a good writer can do, is is remove you from your place in the world and PLoP you down in an other and it kind of tips the world upside down. So that's I don't know the last I doing this, I realized I should reread it because it's been a little while. But I don't know when the last time you read this book was, or what your what your history with it is. 00:32:17 Speaker 2: Well, I had. 00:32:18 Speaker 1: I had the great good fortune of knowing Jim and spending some time with him, and in fact, I went to a very private There were only about six or seven people at his fifty six birthday party out at Onyx Smith's house at Bill Kittridge hosted out there for Jim, and I got to attend that. So I got some good insight into Jim Welsh. And one of the things that one should know about him as a writer is that he was not only authentic in writing books like the Death of Jim Loney and Fool's Crow and a whole hosts of other things. He was a really funny guy, I mean, and so he kept us in stitches that night of his birthday party telling us, you know, and the stories were usually told on him, I mean, he claimed, and everybody laughed. I think it actually was not true, but he's claimed that when he first got to Missoula, he went over to Bill Kittridge's house and said, so, I'm your new graduate student. I'm gonna learn how to write under your tutelision that Kittridge. The first thing he said to him was, the Indians here, why don't you go get a pizza for us? And so. So Jim would tell stories like that on himself. I mean, after he published The Death of Jim Loney, which brought him critical acclaim, he got a posting at the University of Washington in the English department there, and he said he spent the first two or three weeks in his office listening to people out in the hallway saying what he thought was fuck you, fuck you. And finally he mentioned that one of the other professors and the guy said, now, Jim, they're saying fou co fu co. 00:34:12 Speaker 3: It's great. 00:34:14 Speaker 1: So, I mean, and Jim, you know, so he endlessly told stories about himself like that, where he was sort of the butt of the joke, and that, of course was pretty endearing. 00:34:24 Speaker 3: Well, and I think fools crow, it's it's not it's not like a funny book, but you can get a sense it's a lively book. It's very there's a lot of humanity in there. It's and and and the. 00:34:41 Speaker 1: Death of Jim Maloney, of course, which is his twentieth century version of the Blackfeet story, is not a it's. 00:34:47 Speaker 3: A tragic book. 00:34:48 Speaker 1: It's not funny, which is I think one of the reasons I wanted to say that about him is as a. 00:34:54 Speaker 3: Adds depth to But yeah, that's so, that's that's my second choice. And then my third choice here is Elliott West's The Last Indian War, The nez Pers Story. And this is one book I picked out of a mental bucket that included anything Elliott West has written, Contested Planes, Continental Reckoning, and also Donald Worcester, specifically his biography of John Wesley Powell, River Running West. And what I when I think of these books, I think of big books that cover an important subject or tell an important story, but sort of masterfully weave in bigger picture American history Wesley Powell. I think that the Powell Book, in particular Worcester does this job of just pulling all the little threads of John Wesley Powell apart, and you understand how the world around him sort of shaped his the course of his life right And in the Last Indian War, I could have picked any of those. I'm not sure that The Last Indian War in my mind is head and Shoulders among them, but it tells the story of the nez Pers War in eighteen seventy seven. And in this book, one of the things that Elliott West does that shaped my thinking or kind of rearranged my mental furniture is he he makes you think about the relationship between Indian Wars and the Civil War, and he talks about eighteen seventy seven obviously is the end of If you're going to periodize Western history, you'd think of eighteen seventy seven as the end of the Indian Wars, But for most in other parts of the country, you think about that as the end of reconstruction, at the end of the Civil War. And so one of the things I want to pull it here. One of the lines that he has in there that that kind of made this book stick is he says that Confederates and Native people are some of the few people who have had United States citizenship forced on them at gunpoint, and he talks about this period as sort of a top down nation building. You can see the parallels in terms of bringing together the modern United States, and it looks very different in the South than the West, but they're certainly some interesting parallels. And then interestingly enough too, he talks about the relationship between efforts of the federal government to assimilate Native people and efforts of like the Freedman Bureau in the South to assimilate former slaves. Yeah, and so he throughout the book, you know, he tells this story that's very compelling, and again it's like this epic sort of chase and towards the Canadian border with these big Like the Battle of the Little Big Hole is kind of probably the most well known episode in that story. But he takes a story that is just sort of part of the canon of Western history. He packs it with all of this broader national context that makes you think about the past in complex ways, intellectually serious ways. And then he also picks apart, you know, the historiography, and he tells you throughout you know, this is what people have said about Chief Joseph, here's what they've disagreed on. He offers his own sort of interpretation based on his reading of the evidence. Similarly, when he tells the story of the Battle of Little Big Hole, he says, here's what the US soldiers said about it, here's what Native people said about it. And so it's really I think this book and the others in that bucket, but Elliott West, in my mind, does it better than anyone else. It's sort of a masterclass on thinking about the past in terms of both storytelling, making these connections that wouldn't be otherwise apparent to you, and then also showing you how you arrive at conclusions about the past based on these different voices and the evidence out there. So that's one that I think I first read it in one of your graduate seminars, but it's always stuck with me as just you can't do it better than Elliott West. 00:39:54 Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's I think what you really hit on. That to me is always astonished me about Elliott is he's got such a comprehensive view of the histories that he writes that he's able to kind of give you this feeling of standing apart and watching the world operate. And that's a rare kind of gift. And of course it comes from having taught Western history for many, many many years and written a lot of really great books. But he's always had that vision, that really big vision where he's able to put things together in in a large way, and that's really really helpful. 00:40:39 Speaker 3: Yeah, this just occurred to me. But it's sort of like going through a museum with a very experienced docent who cannot only tell you about the exhibits and how they or the displays and how they relate to one another and kind of walk you through what the curator wanted to tell. But he can also tell you about how the building was built, and he can tell you about how this stuff got into the building. And so you walk away from that with not just a to B two C, but the big pig, like the forty thousand foot view of how you arrived in this place. 00:41:17 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's Elliott's talent. 00:41:19 Speaker 3: Well. 00:41:19 Speaker 4: And one of the things I appreciated very much about that book is that you know how it's going to end. So it's not like it's some miss you know, it's like Apollo thirteen. You know they're going to get home, okay. But nevertheless, he can tell such a story and it's it's like one of the few quotes that a lot of people know, I will fight no more forever. Okay, So but let's back up and then figure out how do we get to this? And I mean, if it weren't historically accurate, you would think, man, this is a terrific novel, and because he writes it so well too. But having something that everybody knows how it's going to end, and yet you can hardly you can hardly wait to read the next chapter because I didn't know that. I didn't know that. 00:42:11 Speaker 3: And he's also a funny guy, and that's something that I remember in Continental Reckoning, chuckling, just with these sly asides here and there, where you see the humanity behind what's otherwise just like a the most informative chunk of writing you've ever encountered. 00:42:33 Speaker 1: Yeah, indeed, well those are great choices. 00:42:40 Speaker 2: So it's time for me. 00:42:43 Speaker 1: I suppose to come up with mine, and I will say that, like you, Sarah and Randall, what compels me by certain books is often the grace of the lineanguage and the command of the information, and the ability to tell a good story. And so what that has meant is that out of the three books that I chose, two of them are actually novels, and one of them is going to require a little bit of an explanation because it won't at first glance, appear to be something that one would think of as a classic book about the American West. But the three books that really speak to me, and again this is like both of you, this is one of the most difficult decisions one can come to trying to come up with Okay, three favorite books, but one of my favorite ones has always been Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. I mean, this is a book that was published in nineteen fifty three, and the author, Wallace Stegner, has been gone now for almost forty years, so more than forty years, so this is a book that has withstood, I think the test of time. I love Don Worcester's biography of John Wesley Powell. I mean, donn is a great friend in one of the he is probably the modern dean of environmental history in the American West. But I've always really loved the Stagnant book. And I'll tell you a couple of reasons why. One of the things I like about Stegner's work, and I like this about most writers who I admire, is that they not only go into the archives and not only read a variety of secondary works to inform this kind of broader vision, but when it's necessary, they put on the hiking boots and the backpack and go out into the world to see the the settings of what they're attempting to describe in the book. And that's one of the things Stegner always did. Because this book requires it in that about a third of it is about John Wesley Powell's descents down the Colorado River in the eighteen seventies, and so you have to get out on the landscape and see the river, see the Grand Canyon, understand what he's talking about. 00:45:27 Speaker 2: I mean. 00:45:28 Speaker 1: And Powell was all over the West in the years when he was such a major figure and major bureaucrat and government figure in the West in the late nineteenth century, and so Stagner had to go practically everywhere that Powell went, and he uses that to describe the landscape in a way that you can't unless you go. And the other thing I really love about this kind of writing is I am entranced by the notion of those first visions of a kind of, at least for white Americans, an undiscovered country. And Powell gave us a remarkably vivid description of what the West was like at a time when none of us now can really go back. This is our time machine for seeing what it was like in the eighteen seventies through the early twentieth century. And finally, this is a biography of Powell and all the things that Powell attempted to do in the West, I mean signor sort of posits William Gilpin, who was the first territorial governor of Colorado, as the foil of the book. Guilpin saw, the West is no different from the east. We can apply all the standard settlement techniques that we used in the East to the west, and rain is going to follow the plow, and it's actually going to eventually be green in the west. And John Wesley Powell, of course understood what the west really was, and so he attempted to come up with settlement plans and ultimately, I think, too probably to Stagner's horror, a certain amount of horror, Howell came up with a mapping strategy for almost all the dams and reservoirs that we have today because he realized you had to manipulate water in order for people to settle the West. But it did produce a kind of what we've come to believe was an overreach on the part of a hydraulic empire in the West. So that's one of my books, and we've talked about Stegner already. The second book is a novel, and I will start this one out by telling you that it took me three attempts to read this book. I would get to page sixty or page ninety on the first two attempts and put it down, telling myself, I simply can't read about this much violence and bloodshed. The book is Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. It is widely regarded as probably the best American novel since Moby Dick, since Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick. It's in that category of novels about America, which means that it's probably the best novel. Many people think of it as the best novel anyone has written about the American West. I'm trying to remember if it was The New York Times. I believe it was in a canvassing of literary figures, critics professors of literature in two thousand and six asking them for the best novels written about America over the past fifty years. Blood Meridian came in number two in that list. Having said all that, and also having about to say, the language is incredible. It's lyrical, it's descriptive. The guy writes probably some of the best sentences anyone has penned in the English language for a very long time. This is an eminently disturbing book. It is a book that is based on the real life events of a gang called the Glatten Gang. Right after the Mexican War. This group of Southerners and Texans, primarily with a sprinkling of people from other parts of the country, formed in the new Southwest that had just been added to the United States as a result of the Mexican War and began to contract with the Mexican government that was at the time at war with various bands of the Apaches down on the southwestern border, particularly in the area around Big Ben today's Big Ban National Park. They contracted with the Mexican government to sell them the scalps of Apaches that they killed on behalf of this war that Mexico was having with this particular these particular bands of a very large tribe. What the Glanton Gang also did because they realized this is a part of the world where the Mexican settlers themselves are part native, in some cases significantly native, that you could also kill Mexicans in small little towns that nobody knew much about and scalped them and turn their scalps in and the Mexican government wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Apache scalps and those of the Mexican townspeople. 00:50:43 Speaker 2: These guys carry this on. 00:50:45 Speaker 1: This is a real event that Cormac McCarthy, who was a Tennessee writer originally who had moved to El Paso ended up living his life just died a few years ago in Santa Fe. But Cormac McCarthy, of course wrote a host of things that have become films. All the Pretty Horses is one, No Country for Old Men is another, which became one of his films, The Role, Yeah the counselor all of those have become films. And although this particular book has been attempted to be made into a film, there has not ever been a successful version of Blood Meridian, And I mean there is. It's optioned to a film company right now as of twenty twenty three, but everybody is convinced it's too violent for anyone to ever be able to make into a film. I mean, it is non stop Quentin Tarantino kind of violence. And so let me just say one other thing or a couple other things about it. It has a protagonist who is known throughout the book until the last chapter. He's known as the kid. In the last chapter, he becomes the man because this is thirty years after the episodes of the eighteen fifty period. And the other character, the most memorable character there is, by the way, an imbecile, a kid who is mentally challenged who they around their camp. They keep him chained up like a dog or an animal and lead him around by a leash. But the most memorable character in Blood Meridian is a character called the Judge. And it's difficult to determine exactly who he is, I mean, who he reminds me of. I once read Doustoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and there is a grand inquisitor character in Doustoyevsky that the Judge really reminds me most of. He is six foot seven, He has no hair on his body, including his head. He is pale. He is also the best edge in the book, the best educated person in the entire Southwest, who is endlessly spouting philosophy and history and art and literature. And he is also the most vicious, sadistic sociopath you can possibly imagine. He kills people, children and animals and takes tremendous pleasure in it. And he is himself unkillable. He survives to the end of the book, at which point he manages to pull the kid into an outdoor bathroom and close the door, and McCarthy never tells you what happens. He has someone later come along and open the door and be absolutely horrified, but you don't know exactly what has happened inside this. 00:53:56 Speaker 3: Bathroom. 00:53:57 Speaker 1: The book ends with an epilogue, and the epilogue consists of two figures, one walking into the distance digging post holes in the ground for what you assume are going to be fences across the west Barbara fences, and the other person in the far distance is picking up the bones of all the slaughtered animals from America's push westward. So this is a hell of a book. In other words, Okay, I'm going to end this with one other choice, and it's also a novel, and this is going to be one that, as I said, I'm going to have to make a kind of a offer an explanation for this is the only book that I have read seven times. It's a book by a man named Kim Stanley Robinson. He's a science fiction writer. He has a PhD in English literature from University of California, San Diego wrote a dissertation on the novels of phil K. Dick, And if you know who Philip K. Dick is, you know that he is one of the great science fiction writers. We have at least four or five movies of Philip K. Dick's stories that are out there, Total Recall being one of them, Blade Blade Runner being another one. Kim Sandy Robinson wrote a trilogy back in the nineteen nineties and early two thousands that is usually known as the Mars Trilogy. It is considered the most literary, scientifically accurate, and compelling novel anyone or set of novels anyone has yet written about the settlement of Mars. The one that really compels me is Red Mars, the first one in this trilogy, and the reason I'm so drawn to it is because what he does very purposefully is to use the settlement of Mars as a recasting of the American West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He does it very purposefully. It's visible on all kinds of levels, and just to make sure you don't miss it. His primary character in Red Mars is named John Boone, and John Boone is he's the first person who first human who has ever set foot on Mars, and then goes back fifteen years later with one hundred people who comprise the so called First one hundred, who are all scientists, literary figures, artists, philosophers. And what Kim Sanley Robinson does with this trilogy, because the three books Red Mars, Blue Mars, and Green Mars cover about seventy five years of time and when these people arrive most of them are in their fifties, is he has in Red Mars science invent what is called the treatment, and it is a way to go into your body and reset your genetics, so all the mistakes that your body has made as it has aged are eliminated. And these people end up living one hundred and seventy one hundred and eighty one hundred and ninety years now. They become extremely old physically, but they are completely healthy for all those years. And what he does with this book that really I think delights me is he has John Boone, Lewis and Clark like go out in a rover and explore the Martian landscape and sort of take notes like a naturalist would like Meriwether Lewis did on the Lewis and Clark expedition about what the landscape looks like and what Mars could be if we decide to terraform it and turn it into, in effect, what we have done to the American West. So that's my final choice, and I'm sticking with it. 00:58:04 Speaker 3: All right. Well, I can't argue with you, but I know you've always had a fascination with the interplay between science fiction and Western history, so I think it's only fitting that that's where we end up. It's kind of got your own personal stamp on this collection here, indeed. 00:58:25 Speaker 4: Well, and I think it's nice that this is a collection of you know, novels and more academic things and less academic things. So it really, I think, is that's a good collection of fabes. 00:58:38 Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, it's always fun to talk books with you guys. 00:58:42 Speaker 2: It's been great fun. 00:58:43 Speaker 3: Thanks very much, Thanks for having me.