#2058 - Elliott West

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32:07See terms at DraftKings .com slash promotions. It's in real trouble. But that also contributed to the demise of Native Americans. Of course. Particularly the ones who hunted the buffalo. That's right. Not just the buffalo. Buffalo was just the most dramatic example of dozens, scores of species of animals. In the New World, in North America. That were driven to either to extension completely or really close to it. Dan Flores. I think he's been on your show. Yes. A couple times. Dan has this marvelous new book, a while new world that goes to that. Goes into some detail. And the sky. And sorry, remember from the book.

32:54Dan says that at no point in modern history. Have so many different species been eradicated so quickly. So quickly. And of course, you made the essential point. What that is. It's not just that they're being hunted and exploited for the profit of people who are coming into. That's really part of an even larger process that is the complete transformation of a world. That's one of the things that I try to emphasize in this book. Between 1850 and 1880. The Western third of North America was literally remade. Ecologic, not just culturally, socially. Ecologically. Ecologic was made over into a new world.

33:46And that world, of course, was not one that native people's knew how to work. Their existence relied on them being able to rely on. And the real centuries of knowledge gained from this intricate understanding and use sort of choreographed life of this place, of this place. We're lying upon its resources. And it was also plants, of course, crops and so forth. And the Europeans come in and they just transform it. Quickly, very quickly, very quickly. So what are you going to do? That is what defeated the Indians. It wasn't the military. It was this transformation of their world into another, one world into another in which they didn't fit.

34:33So they simply had no choice but to do what they were told if we're going to live. Now, when it comes to the American bison, there certainly was a market hunting aspect of it that they were hunting them for their tongues. They were hunting them for their hides. But there was also, it seems like there was a motivation to remove the Native Americans' ability to sustain themselves. Or was that a, just a peripheral, was that like... It's a little complicated, as usual. You're talking about two things here, for instance. Yes. When you're talking about the... I think it's fair to say that Indian peoples had their own hand in this.

35:17What's buffalo robes that usually take a cow hide and you process, you scrape it out and you work it, you work it into a robe. Those became quite popular in the east, in England, and in Europe. It was sort of this exotic thing to have in your house. You put it on the wall or you put it making it into a rug or you use it as a... You're out at a carriage in the winter. You would have these things. It was something that was interesting, something that was... All of a sudden it was a fashion, kind of a fan. And suddenly there is this great market for these things for Indian hunters, Native hunters.

35:59They have been killing bison, of course, for their own uses. But now they would do both that and for their hides, which they could turn into robes, which would give them this unprecedented influence. It was this business boom among them. And also warmth in the build of the sustain during winter. Sure. Well, they had always used it for that. Now it was a commodity. When did that shift and what caused that shift? That was in the 1820s when it really, when it really booms. Suddenly there's this exotic thing that you can get from the American West. That's kind of cool to have. So that's in the 1820s.

36:41And it's a huge trade. Hundreds of thousands of robes are sent down the Missouri and the Mississippi down to be marketed out of new organs. And to be in to be cities. That had an early effect on the decline of the bison population. And my own research and work on this, I think that something close to a half of the bison population at its peak is explaining by that sort of hunting and other kinds of ecological environmental changes that were going out of the West. So long before the hide hunters, the white, those white hide hunters went out there and started killing them. It is killing them. And essentially for the same reason.

37:30In other words, in these themselves became caught up in this commodification, caught up in this international trade. And they began to feel the effects of it. By the 1850s, there is this noticeable shortage decline of bison population. So they're already under pressure. And then, and then somebody figures out 1872, we know exactly the year, 1872, somebody figures out that you can take a bison hide and you can turn it into industrial leather. In the 1870s, there was an oral wide leather shortage. The reason was industry factories needed leather for gaskets, for these machines, belts and these things.

38:25A huge demand for it, both here and in England and in Europe. Most of that leather had been coming from Argentina. The huge herds in Argentina. But they were about tapped out. So there's this huge demand. There's this big pressing economic question. Where is the leather going to come from? There's hundreds of new factories even built all the time. Suddenly, somebody figures out buffalos. Wow. They can give it. So the buffalo got it from both sides. That's right. Had read Dan Flores' work on the reason why there was these immense buffalo herds in the first place. He believes that with the decline of the Native American population because of disease, that led to an unprecedented rise in the buffalo.

39:16And then when the Europeans came and saw these millions of buffalo in the plane, that this was not normal. But this was something akin to, like if you go to populations like my neighborhood, my neighborhood has overrun with white tail deer. It's crazy how many of them there are. And white tail deer at one point in time were in the verge of extinction in the United States. That's right. Because of market hunting. That's right. But that he says that he believes that this insane number of bison that people at first witnessed. That this was because the Native Americans had declined so much, there was no pressure on them.

39:52Yeah. That's a good argument. I think it's very hard to prove. But Dan and I have had that conversation before. And I think there might well be something to it. It's classic thing. Like Yellowstone. You know, you get rid of the wolves. The elk population, but it's right. Right. Yeah. You get rid of the predators, the beaver population, but it's all of a sudden all the creeks are damned and their man's footed. So it's a horse. Yeah. So it's a, yeah, it's just extraordinary intricate relationship and connection that we have in the world around us. And you mess with any one part of it. And the rest of it's going to change.

40:29And human beings love to mess with those things. We do especially. Yeah, we do. Especially when we came to a place that we didn't really have an understanding of the ecosystem. Right. Which, right. Like North America. Yeah. And the other thing that Dan talks about that's really fascinating was that horses originated from North America, but were wiped out, but had already been transferred to Europe and to other parts of the world. And then we're reintroduced when Europeans came here. What year was that when that started happening? Well, erotic horse. They evolved in the Southern Plains over 50 million years from a critter called a hyracatherium, which is about the size of a collie into the modern, into the modern horse.

41:18That took millions of years. And fairly late in that story, that is to say only two or three million years ago, they migrated along with all kinds of other animals. Camels, for example, evolved in long side horses in the southwest. And they made that trip over Berencia over the land bridge there. Berenstray? Yeah. Into what was the largest pasture on earth, Central Asia, and their population exploded. And they continued to evolve. They became zebras, headed south into Africa. That is crazy. They became, you know, asses. All the equids evolved from those horses coming out of New Mexico. That is so crazy that zebras came out in Mexico.

42:09Pushing far back enough, that's right. Wow. So they boomed over there. But, you know, at the end of the last ice age, into the plight, during the Wisconsin, at the end of the Wisconsin glaciation, the world changes. We're going through kind of a climate change as we have today warming. And that changes the ecology completely. And all kinds of animals, especially in North America, became extinct. Does is the species of became extinct. 65 % of all North American, large megafauna. Yep. You know, we had an American lion. We had, of course, a saber -tugatiger, the Somai -Ladon. American Cheetah. The American Cheetah.

42:54Yeah. We had armadillas, the size of Volkswagen bugs. Really. Up until when? With this extension. Wow. And so, 12 ,000, 13 ,000 years ago, there was giant armadillas. That's right. That's right. Wow. So, you know, they would run over cars. The cars didn't run over there. Wow. So, and, you know, the list just goes on and on. They, all of these animals suddenly disappeared because of this, partly because of this ecological change. Now, there's an argument that it wasn't just that the question is, okay, the lion goes extinct in America. It didn't go extinct in Africa. Horses go extinct in America.

43:42They didn't go extinct over there. But it was a global change. So, what's the difference? The argument is people. People by that point had just been able to make their way over in the other direction. You know, you know, you know, Barringi was a two -way street, two -way highway. And the animals coming over from Asia at the same time that American animals are going over in the other directions. Buffaloes. Bison. Evolved in the Old World. And then they came over here. Where did they originate from? Central Asia. Wow. And also parts of Europe. There was an animal called Orok that was a descendant also of them.

44:24Were they just as furry? Do they look similar? Who knows? Who knows? Maybe they changed. And they were quite different from the ones today. The ones that came over to dominate them were called Bison Antiquis, or Bison Latifrons. They were much larger. Much larger. Bison Antiquis, if you can imagine one now, the bulls had these horns bred just like ours do. The horns bred of a Bison Antiquis was great enough that LeBron James could lie down between the tips of the horns. And not touchy, not touchy to one. Wow. So there were these gigantic Bison. They became extinct. And they were then succeeded.

45:09They were then replaced by or followed by our Bison. Bison Bison, Americana. Have you ever read into the Younger Dryas Impact Theory? Into the what now? Younger Dryas Impact Theory. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. A Randall Carlson has been on my podcast multiple times. He's a proponent of that. And there's a lot of scientific evidence in terms of our core samples and microdiamonds that seem to indicate that alone 11 ,800 years ago, North America and a good 30 % of the world was hit when we passed through a comet shower. And that was the end of the ice age and that it happened not just then, but it happened another time, somewhere in the 10 ,000 range.

45:53And that was what melted almost instantaneously, most of the North American ice cap that covered half the continent and miles of ice and all that. And that he thinks that that was the origin of the mass extinction along with human beings. There was a combination of those two things. I've heard that idea, but I don't know about it, too. I'm trying to bring Randall together with someone who is an expert like Dan Flores. We'd love to bring Randall and Dan Flores together so they can compare notes because both of them are working on the same problem from different angles. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a fast -ending one.

46:35And it has to do, of course, is what we were talking about a little earlier. Human groups. Right? People who are here, what effect did that have on them? Does that explain some of these sudden declines of populations? Don't know. What's so interesting that we still have some animals left over like the pronghorn antelope that moves its speeds that don't make any sense considering the predators are available for it. There's so much faster than everything else because they had to evade the North American Cheetah. That's right. Yeah, there's a wonderful book called Ghosts of Extinction. And that's exactly, exactly, long time.

47:13Also, pronghorn can't jump fences. Right, they go under them. They go under them or try to go through them, but they can't go over them. And that's because no fences back there. Right. Yeah, pretty wide. Faster than hell. They can outrun a lion, but they can't jump a fence. You would think that something that could run that fast could also jump. You'd think. Do you think if you gave them another million years, they'd figure out how to jump fences? I feel pretty confident they would. Because white tail deer do it like they're born to do it. Like a fence to them is just like stepping over a branch.

47:44Oh, I know. We have a place out in the hills in Arkansas. And we've got a fence like you said overrun overrun with deer. There's a place called Catalina Island in California where they're, what they're trying to do now is use snipers and helicopters to wipe out the deer population. No kidding. Yeah, because well, they're on an island and there's no predators. Right. It's which is a shame. It's a horrible shame. They starve. Yeah. They starve diseases. You know, CWD, there's a lot of different diseases that they can get hit with because of this overpopulation. Yeah. And of course, that's the kind of context that you could put in the decline of native peoples here.

48:24What we're doing, what we're doing is messing with the ecological arrangement in ways that make it impossible for certain thing for animals that have adapted to that to survive. The difference was, of course, that Indians are human beings and human beings have the imagination to imagine a different way and to respond to it in ways that others can't. What's one of the more fascinating and horrific aspects of the story of the decline of the native population in America is that they had this incredibly unique lifestyle that really wasn't, it wasn't available anywhere else in the world at that time.

49:09Most of the rest of Europe and Asia had sort of changed and moved to agriculture and moved to cities. And these people had these immense tribes, super sophisticated hunter -gatherer civilizations that lived in symbiosis with the land. And to us, people that sort of understand how horrible it is that that's happened, we have this incredible romantic attachment to Native Americans. Yes, a lot of ways we do. Now there was, of course, agriculture here. Yes. In what's today the United States and the East, highly sophisticated forms of agriculture growing a variety of crops in the Southwest, reminding especially on corn.

49:53But you're right, a good part of what's today the United States, especially the West, were hunter -gatherer peoples and fishers. They had figured out these ways to these sort of incredibly complicated and complex practice ways of moving through their year, months by month, week by week, in ways that they had practiced and learned about over many generations. That allowed them a really remarkably high standard of living. Now there were not large traps that one of the limitations of a hunter -gatherer society is that you cannot expand in numbers beyond a certain limit, about 125. You know, that's a bigger than that you really can't support.

50:43So what you had was this extraordinary display, this extraordinary variety of peoples, hundreds of different Native groups. Today there are 530 federally recognized crops in the United States. And that's just those are the ones who have survived physically and culturally. So there's this remarkable array of peoples, many of them seeking different languages, or different dialects, all of them in contact with the others, in these very intricate trade relationships. It was quite a place, you know, and you're right, it flies dramatically in the face of what we think was going on back then. This romanticized simplistic view of the Indian, right, they're just like this one group of people.

51:46It's also so interesting that that number of 125 people aligns with what we know as Dunbar's number. That's exactly right, that's where it comes from. So you're aware of that? Yeah, wonderful book. Yeah, Dunbar's number, meaning that we have in our mind the ability to hold a relationship with a certain number of people intimately. And then as it spreads out further, we can know some people sort of, we kind of know of them. But there's just a small group that would be your family, a larger group that would be your tribe, and then there's neighboring tribes. That's right, that's right. That's fascinating idea.

52:23It is fascinating because it shows a hard drive. We have a mental hard drive, it's sort of designed. Yeah, we do, yeah. He uses a great book. He uses the idea of gossip.

52:39The maximum number in which gossip really affects you, right? You can't get above about 125 or what the hell I don't care. Well, it is interesting because it seems like there's a biological maybe an evolutionary reason for gossip. Of course, yeah, sure. And in those societies, it played a very important role because these groups typically had nothing remotely like our system of authority. Essentially nobody was in charge, along many Western groups. No person in a particular band could tell another person to do anything. No one had that kind of authority. So how do they stop people from being going nuts?

53:28Doing horrible things. It's the groups, the bands, opinion of you. We're ashamed. They would often have these characters sort of like town cries. So they would do something awful and they'd walk through the camp yelling about this guy. Wow. So with that of course, it's just sort of gossip on a grand scale. Right. Someone's hiding food. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Someone's being greedy. And what's interesting also about Dunbar, I'm sure you remember this one from his book. When you get down below 125 smaller groups, there's also groups in which there's a certain intimacy where you can absolutely trust these people.

54:16Right. Right. What's that number? 12. 12. Think of it, 12 jurors. 12 disciples. Yeah. 11 at a football team. Close to it. Yeah. Right. You know, that's a smaller group that works because everybody knows everybody else. Everybody is. You can rely on each other. So yeah. And like I can say, it's hard work. Yeah. So we work. Well, that's one of the things that's fascinating about things like the battle at Little Big Horn. Because the Native American groups had figured out, listen, we got to get together. The only way we're going to stop these invaders is if we band together in former much larger group.

55:10Yeah. Now, those are the tribes that they're the most importantly there, the Lakota, the western zoo, and the northern Shiam. They were all, again, composed of bands. There was no tribe in the sense that we're thinking about. All of them broke down into, into these smaller units. And they recognized a kinship. They spoke the same or common or highly related languages so forth. They intermarried a lot, sort of bonding them together. But about that time, as you say, about the time of 1876, 1870s, there was this realization, you know, we got a real problem here. We got a real problem here. And the best chance, the best shot we have is for us to overcome these, to forge a sense of common identity and a common purpose.

56:05It's a kind of, rather what you might call nationalism, a kind of a, you know, a zoo, Shion nationalism. And it's new. That's new, that wasn't there, wasn't there before. So they're evolving, you know, they're evolving in their understanding. They're evolving in how they think about it themselves, right? It's this world of constant motion and change. And what fascinated me about this in this book was how complex it was and how fast it was, and how completely far reaching it was. Everything changes, you know. Quickly. Yeah. One of the fascinating stories about Little Big Horn was that this band, this banding together of all these natives, didn't last.

56:58They were very effective. This one battle. Very quickly. Like they said that the battle, would they say the battle lasted somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes? Well, sort of the height of it, you know, we're a, a customs part. That's probably about that or maybe a little longer. It's crazy. Now the battle itself, of course, a larger battle, asked him which long, or more than a day, about two days, as he's part of the, part of the command under Reno, retreated to this hill. You know, and was besieged and held under siege for a day and a half. Looks alright. And then, you know, they, that's a great victory.

57:43Yeah. The problem is, you know what's going to happen. Right? You know what's going to happen. The new retaliation was coming. Yep. Yep. Big time. You got to remember now when, when did this happen? It was 1876. The battle itself was on June 25th, 1876. Like I say, they were under siege there for two or three days. It was another few days before the first other group of the army of the cavalry arrived. Then they had to spend a few days taking care of the wounded, doing what they can. Then they took the survivors to the Missouri River to get on a steamboat to head down to Bismarck. And it was at that point that the news began to travel about this unprecedented defeat by American forces.

58:38So the battle on June 25th, put all those days together. When do you think the first news arrived that of this catastrophe? July 4th. July 4th, 1876. The 100th anniversary of the approval of the Declaration of Independence, our 100th birthday. News arrives of this crushing of custard. The military was not going to let that stand. So this was part of the reasons there was this extraordinary effort to destroy these people. So they very quickly broke up into these constituent bands and tried to get away as best they could. Less than a year, they were defeated. And you talk about what happened after that in your other book on the Nez Perce, the last Indian war?

59:38Yeah, right. That was the next year, 1877. The Nez Perce were this extraordinary people in the Pacific Northwest. They were from Idaho, from Eastern Oregon. They too composed of these different bands gathered together in this one common identity, the Nimi Poo, which means the real people. And they were completely at peace with the whites. In fact, Lewis and Clark had been the first Americans, the first white people that they had ever seen. Lewis and Clark came over a little pass down there, they were starving. And the Nez Perce took them in, saved them, gave them help them get some horses and canoes to keep on their way.

1:00:37And on the way back, Lewis and Clark stayed with them more than a month. And they formed the, in the eyes of the Nez Perce, they formed this alliance with the Americans. And they swore. From this time on, we're friends, we're allies. You help us when we fight, we'll help you when you fight. And that was in 1866. They kept that promise from 1866 until 1877. Wow. As they were, their land was being overrun as these appalling treaties were being forced upon them. They kept their word. And then finally in 1877, the government said, okay, that's enough. You got to come into this reservation. And the ones who were living off of it had to then, within one month, then a month.

1:01:38They had to pack up everything. They had to leave their home land that they had known for generations. They had to cross the Snake River at its highest point. Somehow get their families, you know, women, children, kids, old folks, across this river to gather, to go into this reservation, into the way of life. Even though the treaty that required them to do that was a fraud. And on the eve, literally the day before they were to go on to the reservation, to be forced over the reservation, these young men sort of snapped. And these young men took off and killed a bunch of white folks. You know, that they had grudges against.

1:02:29That then triggered this war, triggered this larger outbreak against whites. That then of course brought the army in. And the army tried to put this down. But as our research set book, the question that kept coming back to me was, why did they do that? Because at the time of the war, they were completely at peace with the Americans around them. They had adapted beautifully. They were prosperous cattlemen. They were raising cattle, you know. They had silver t -sets for pizza. They were more prosperous than the whites who were living in the area. They threatened no one. They were living on lands that the whites didn't want.

1:03:21Why then? Why forced them in? What's the reason? And the only reason I can think of was the little bit more. This year before, this humiliating defeat at the hands of the Lakotas and the Shaians. With that, the government said, okay, that's it. Everybody, even our best friends, have to give up. And they have to come in into reservations where we will control them. This episode is brought to you by Zip Recruiter. The hiring process is stressful. There are so many different things to consider. And on top of it all, you need to get it done quickly. It's like when you're trying to find a decent contractor for a home renovation project or even a new primary care doctor.

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1:06:26Robin Hood Financial LLC member SIPC Gold membership is offered by Robin Hood Gold LLC. Control them and then force Christianity on them as well. Have you seen Taylor Sheridan's series 1923? It's a prequel to Yellowstone. Have you ever watched any of those shows? No. Really good show. One thing that 1923 documents it stars Harrison Ford and it's very interesting, but it documents these women that are forced from their tribe to go into these schools, where Christianity is forced upon them, beaten and treated horrifically. It's a very hard watch because you know that that is what happened. Of course, yeah, that's a little boring school.

1:07:13Yeah, that goes way back before 1923, about 23 and sort of winding down. But yeah, all sorts of course, scandalous news recently in the past year or two about the kinds of treatment that came out of those schools. Here in Canada, the same sort of thing is being revealed in Canada about the abuses under those schools. Yeah, just Christian. He's being forced on there required to speak only in English. They're punished if they speak their own languages. Yeah, they give up their appearance or cut their hair, dress in a certain way. Now, there's a wonderful irony in that show. Set a moment ago, most people, most public think of the Indian as if there's one group of people.

1:08:11Right. The Indian Native people's course didn't take it all like that. They identified with tribal groups. They identified with a band within the tribal groups. Often it odds with each other. They've been fighting each other like everybody fights everybody else in history. So their identity was, you know, when you say, what are you? They would say, well, I'm a Cheyenne. I'm a Kamehchi. I'm a clinkin'. Whatever. I belong to this guy's band. So the idea of the Indian was completely foreign to them until boarding schools. All of a sudden, boarding schools, all the kids, all the young people are taken, required to go to these schools.

1:09:03All of these different groups, they're all living together. They're all forced to surrender much of their own individual culture. So those dozens of different cultures that they were, you know, they'd come from. And suddenly, it begins to dawn on them. They're now all speaking the same language, right? You know, we've got much more in common than we have differences among us. So there's a way in which the supposed purpose of a boarding school was to destroy Indianness. The famous phrase coming from a Colonel Pratt, who was the one who founded Carlisle, was kill the Indian to save the man, destroy Indian identity in order to allow these people to survive in the modern world.

1:10:04But what the boarding schools did was, in fact, create the Indian. They didn't kill the Indian. They didn't exist before that. It created this sense of common identity. This sense of, okay, we may be Kamehchi, we may be Shiam, we may be Lakota, maybe Jolingar, whatever. But we all have this common problem that we're facing, these common difficulties. So we need to think in terms of the Indian to bind together, just like in a smaller scale when these bands decided to join in the United in order to fight the military. Now on this much larger continental scale, Indians from all over, Native people from all over the nation, now begin to see that they are related in their circumstances, not by the law.

1:10:56So the Indian was created, not killed in the boarding schools. That's fascinating. When they initially tried to move the natives to reservations, how did they, were they doing it because where the natives were, there was valuable resources, were they doing it because geographically they could control them better in these regions? Like what was the motivation initially? It was all of that. Certainly they were, especially when they were in particular places that are very rich in resources. Great examples, of course, were mining rushes. These people who were, again, hunter -gatherers living in this someplace, this remote mountain area in California or Arizona, are where suddenly they're overrun by these people coming in.

1:11:49Overrun because they are living on some of the richest places in the nation. So you got into rid of them, right? But there's also the reason this is way to control them and to, in the eyes of the government, to transform them. Put them on these reservations and you can turn them into the kind of people that you want them to be, make them American. So it was both of those things, those things together. Which is historically, when we look back at it now, it's one of the most horrific aspects of it, that we just try to eliminate them and just integrate them into our culture. Right, that was always the formal government goal.

1:12:38It wasn't simply give them a place to live the way they live. No, virtually no one was saying that. Even the people who were called, there's the formal term, friends of the Indians, they were an organization called the Friends of the Indians. And they were, honestly, in their own hearts. They thought that they were doing what was necessary for the best for these people. But they said the only way we can do that, the only way that these people can be saved, is to transform them into people like us, to make them into our, to integrate them into our culture. And that, it depended on really basically three things.

1:13:26It was, they had to become farmers. Because, you know, from the beginning in this country, you know, that's sort of the ideal life. That's how you, that's how you begin your integration into the American economy, farming of the Jeffersonian vision, you know, of the ideal farmer. They got to be Christian. They got to have this common, common religion. And education. We've got to take their young people, and we've got to put them in schools where they will be not only learn the basics of the three hours and so forth, but they'll be culturally educated. They will be culturally transformed. So these boarding schools were meant to transform these people into Americans, you know.

1:14:17So yeah. So we, you often hear the term genocide thrown around. And there are times in American history when that was absolutely true, when there was an effort to simply eradicate Indian peoples. But the whole reservation system was not meant for that. Sometimes it turned out that way. But the purpose of it was this control and transformation. That's what was supposed to happen. And then when that happened, once that was done, then the reservations would be done away with. Everybody would live in harmony. Wow. It didn't happen, of course, but of course. It had to be so confusing to them what the resources were that the white man wanted to.

1:15:06Because they're like, why do you want gold? You can't eat it. You can't use it as a weapon. It's so strange. It is. A lot of ways it is. You know, gold, as you said, it's, it's virtually useless. It's, it's very soft, right? Yeah. So you can't make it into a strange thing to be the most valuable of all commodities. It's really shiny. How bizarre. That's so many parts of the world that agreed upon that. That's right. It just crossed culturally, across hundreds of years. You know, the Egyptians, you know. The Egyptian's called gold, the Breath of God. The Aztec, considerate God's scat. This is the extramarine of the gods.

1:15:50You know, it came so strange. So strange. Yeah. Now it's not true, I think, that once there's some really interesting works going on right now by historian and Benjamin Madley, who is studying in the California in the gold rush. There were Indians who said, oh, they're going to give me much stuff for this stuff. Of course. And so they adapted. They went to work and there were hundreds of Indians who were in the gold fields before the 40 -notters came. Really? Yeah. That was another interesting thing about your discussion with Steve Renella. That we think of the 49ers as the miners, but there was 48ers.

1:16:29That's right. And they were from a variety of different countries. That's right. Tasmania. Australia. Australia. Yeah. Yeah. Why? Well, parts of Asia. Remember the gold was discovered in the American River on January 24th, 1848. So, you know, three weeks into 1848. The work then began to leak out, made it to San Francisco, and slowly, Greg, this is now 1840. It takes a long time for news to get from California to the east. How did it primarily get there? Well, there was traffic back and forth, but it's very slow over the trails, over the months and months. And months and months. And when it came to the east, a lot of people said, oh, come on.

1:17:19One more rumor about the riches in the west and so forth. So it wasn't until December 4th, 1848, when the president, James Pope, and his annual message to Congress said, yep, it's true. It's true. They found gold out there, and there's a lot of it. A lot of it. And people are making thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars out there. But the point here is that from January 1848, when gold was discovered, to the end of 1848, nobody in the east really knew about this. There were rumors, or believed it. So that's why we call it the gold rushers 49ers, because it's the next year that they go out there on these extraordinary numbers.

1:18:13But the question is, what was happening out there at the time? Right? What was happening is we had the 48ers, people from Oregon, people from Australia, people from Tasmania, the first Chinese ever coming over, especially people from the south, Sonoran's people coming from Mexico, Peruvians, Chileans. So when the 49ers get out there, the Americans get out there, and they look around, they say, who are these people? They're taking our gold. Right. So it's what I call the book, the second conquest of California, the first and of course, in the war with Mexico. But then suddenly, this is the richest place on earth, quite literally at that time, and it's being the gold there as being mine, by these people that we considered not Americans.

1:19:14So we've got to get rid of them. Indians, right? The rest of them, there's what's called the Chile War, in which Chileans are driven out of the mines. So these people are either driven out completely or they're confined to the edges while the 49ers take out, including of course the Indians. This is what triggered the greater, one of the few cases, and with this is clearly genocide, in which there was a concerted formal effort to eradicate Indian peoples who were on these gold fields. The California legislature funded bond issues to pay for malicious to go kill Indians. Congress reimbursed California the legislature to pay for those expeditions.

1:20:12It was what Ben Madley wrote the book on this, it called the Killing Machine. One of the few times in American history, when we just say absolutely, yes, this was attempted genocide. And it was specifically because of the commodity, of course. Sure, of course. Wow, of course. Yeah, you got to remember this was, yeah, this was the, by far, the richest gold discovery in human history up until, up until that time. More gold, more gold was mined in California in one year, 1852, then it had been mined across the world in the entire 18th century. One year, you know, wow. There's a story from the fellow who was ahead of the San Francisco Mint.

1:21:09It was established in the mid 1850s. He said that at one time they were processing so much gold in that mint that the furnaces couldn't handle it. And they discovered to their horror that gold dust was being blown out of the smoke stacks. And settling on the area around there. So they had to send out people, you know, for like a quarter mile around the mint to sweep up the gold on the other. And sift through it. On the roots. Wow. The gilded rooftops, you know. Wow. So this is a lot of gold. That's insane. And one result of that was, as a California course, gets this instant population. It never goes through a territorial period.

1:22:05It just goes straight to statehood because there's so many people, right? Well, historically, if the Indians were getting much of a protection, it came from the federal government. Well, the federal government has, it's not a territory, you know. So it's a state government, it's in charge there. And state government, state government's attitude was get rid of them. Wow. Get rid of them. And a population drop from estimated 150 ,000 and 1848 to 1916 ,000. Wow. A hundred, so about 90, about 90%. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it was one of the, you could picture it this way. I think we mentioned the most folks, you know, wherever the Great Indian War is.

1:23:09Where are the Great Indian defeats? I think typically of the Great Plains. Little big horn, you know, Montana, the Dakotas, and the Southwest, New Mexico, Arizona. That's where the movies all are. Those are the ones that we're most aware of publicly. If the population in California, Native population in California, dropped as much as we think it did, that would be as if every Native person in Montana, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, vanished. Wow. It was if they were all gone, all dead. Wow. And that was happening on this one state. One state because of one commodity.

1:24:07Yeah. Yeah. Wow. It was an absolute nightmare. And you had who knows about it, you know? Very few people. Who's aware of that? Yeah. That's not really discussed that much.

1:24:24There's a fantastic book about Texas and about the command cheese called Empire the Summer Moon. It was read it. Yeah. Incredible book. It details the difficulty that they had in trying to establish colonies, both in New Mexico and in Texas, because of the command cheese. And that's sure. That is an absolutely amazing documentation of what took place in this area. Yeah.

1:24:55Part of that story. It has to do with what you, what we were talking about earlier. And that is horses. Yes. Right? This was one of the great revolutions. I call it the other American revolution. In the book I call it the grass revolution. Because remember, your horses now had, of course, started here. Went to Asia. It became extinct here. And the Europeans brought them back. Cornetto was the first to bring them into where they had been born out of the South Plains. What year was this? Cornetto, 1540s in the 1540s. And then this banished came for good at the end of the 1500s, establishing Santa Fe along the Rio Grande River.

1:25:47They brought horses. And then wasn't until around 1680 with the rebellion of Pueblo Indians in the Santa Fe area in the Drove the Spanish out for 12 years. These horses began to spread across the West. They had begun to spread before. And we're coming to understand now that they're reporting more than out there than we realized earlier than we realized. But the explosive growth of horses out of New Mexico is, comes after 1680. 1780, 100 years later, Indian peoples across the plains in the Southwest and in the Rocky Mountains have all developed, adapted the horse, adopted and adapted to that horse into what we call horse cultures.

1:26:48That is these ways of life that depend upon the horse. Without the horse, you can't do what you want to do. It's like we have a car culture. And this gave them, among other things, great military power, economic power, but also military power. The key to that was the fact that horses are herbivores. And they're adapted to this, the second largest grassland on earth, the Great Plains. And when you put a human on a horse, then it becomes something else. It becomes what I call a horse man, and it is horse hyphen man. Not a horseman. It's like you take these two animals and you fuse them into one thing.

1:27:51And this animal like a centaur. This animal has the power and the speed and the grace and the beauty of a running horse. And it has the brain of a human being. It has the imagination and the innovation and the arrogance of a human being. So that's a new animal. It's bad news for the bison. Really bad news for the bison. Because the first time you have a grass eating predator. You have a killer. You have a killer that can draw upon the same energy and the grasses that the bison do. And it's ultimately fatal for them. But at the same time, it becomes these horse cultures become extraordinary military machines.

1:28:52And that's what the Camages were. That's what the book is about. And that was this other American revolution. At the same time that our revolution in the east is going on, there is this revolution in life and power in the middle of what's today the United States. With the rise of these Native empires. The Camages and the Lakotas and others become these superpowers. They dominate the middle of America. And they just kick the bjabbers out of the Spanish. It's not until the American show up with their numbers, overwhelming numbers. And with their new technologies. The pistol and the rifles and the railroads.

1:29:41And the others that they're able to find that these empires are broken. And of course, little big horn. That's the end of that particular cycle of it. When they're Lakotas who they were the superpower of the middle of America. They and the Camages were these formed in effect. One great empire. It's stretched from southern Canada all the way in the Mexico. A native empire. That's what we broke when we came in with a little big horn in 1876 against the Camages. With that book, right, it's about 1874. It was also the last time that a horse culture arose on Earth. The first were about 5 ,000 years ago in Ukraine.

1:30:40And then of course that way of life spreads. Spreads across Central Asia, the Mongols. It spreads into northern China. It spreads down into the Middle East. It leads to the great horseback empires of the Arabs in northern Europe. And then into Europe to the Iberian powers like Spain. All of these are horse military horse cultures. It's a story that goes 5 ,000 years back. And it ends where the story began 50 million years ago with the beginning with the first horses. It ends at the same place. What we see when you look at the little big horn, when you look at the defeat of the Camages, when you look at the defeat of the Indian trials, what you're seeing is the end of a 5 ,000 year epic in world history.

1:31:39An epic that began at the same place. That's incredible. So the horse empire began in Ukraine. The first time that we think now, the first time the people domesticated horses was in Ukraine. That's so fascinating. How did they figure it out? How did the Camagci figure out how to do it so much better than the other tribes? That's a great question. There have been some very good books written recently on the Camages. The best, in my opinion, is by the Camagci Empire, the fallous history of the rise of Camagci power. It's by a good friend of mine. His name was Peca Hummelian and he's a native fin who has written the great book on this.

1:32:36I don't know. The first place, I think Dan Flores would stress this. They were in absolutely the right place. Southern Plains. Dan is a book called horizontal yellow, which is the Camagci word for this area. This is where horses evolved. This is where they were born. This is where they were best adapted. That was the Camagci, that was Camagciaria. That was the Camagciaria. They were in just the right place for this proliferation of horses. They took advantage of it. Something about them was able to fashion, to take advantage of this, to a degree that a few others did. They were very, very good at it.

1:33:30What Peca's book does also show that this was genuinely an empire. They had their own foreign policy. They had their own economic system. They had this intricate trade system. They were sort of outsource the growing of horses. When the Americans came. They would wait until the Americans were developing horse -hards, as well as cattle and other things, let them do the work. They would use their grass to develop these horse -hards, and then we steal them. They're outsourcing, right? They develop these trade networks of trading horses up to the northern plains, where the winters are so severe that they had terrible losses every year.

1:34:23So they would sell horses, trade horses, up to the north. This was a very sophisticated arrangement, but they were the masters of it. It served them well until the Americans show up in numbers. They figured out how to gild stallions. They figured out how to raise them. The amount of status and wealth that you had was dependent upon the amount of horses that you had. Sure. Which is very different. From what you had before. That was quite common among other groups. These horse -coulders. Horses became the coin of the realm, as you said. Who you were, it was like big waves. Bigger the wig you had, the bigger the...

1:35:06That's the right. More horses you have. That's the measure of wealth, of your status, of your prestige. This area that we're in right now was populated by the Comanche. And these arrowheads, this is one of them, they're everywhere here. They're everywhere. There's a friend of mine who has a ranch out here, and he finds hundreds, if not thousands of them a year. And he actively sifts through them, and he puts them up on his website on his Instagram page. And he sent me one of them. And this is just one of, who knows how many, if not hundreds of thousands of these that have been found in this area.

1:35:50Where these people live for a long time. Long time. Surviving off the Buffalo and wild game. And primarily eating only meat. Which gave them a big advantage over the Americans who came here who needed carbohydrates. And who, they couldn't go a day or two without eating without being completely diminished. Whereas they were, just because their body had adapted to eating meat, they were essentially in ketosis. And they were eating meat and they didn't bother them to go a day without food. They had all these advantages. Beautiful adapted partly by their own planning. Partly just good chance. Yeah.

1:36:34And also their strategies. Their ability, you know, we think of Native Americans. We think of archers as having a quiver on their back, and they pull an arrow from the quiver and put it in. But they carried multiple arrows in each finger. So in the four fingers of the hand, they would have four arrows sitting in their hands ready to go. And they had the ability to cycle them through the bow very quickly. Whereas the Europeans had a musket. They had to put the ball in there and the gunpowder and tap it down. The whole thing took like 30 seconds to get one shot off. Under extreme pressure of these Native Americans who were extremely adept on horseback.

1:37:12And who actually would ride sideways so they would hide behind the body of the horse. Now the time those, the real hammer came down. The whites had repeating rifles and they had pistols. But still, but still. In terms of fighting on those terms, the Comanche on horseback is far more effective. They were called short bows. And they were very powerful. We think of long bows or crossbows as once were the great power. But these things were... You know, they could hunt in Bison. They could shoot an arrow on these short bows. The arrows under these short bows and they would go through a bison. Through this animal.

1:38:02And they're incredibly accurate. Very accurate horseback. Riding horseback, they trained to shoot off a horseback. Like the Mongols famously would release their arrow while the horse was in the air. Because they had the less disturbance. So they had this thing that they would do where they would release the arrow as the horse was in the air. And they were insanely accurate doing it that way. Apparently not very accurate doing it just standing still. That was alien to them. Like why would you shoot on the ground like that? That's a stupid. Get off a horse, dummy. What was documented in Empire of the Summer Moon was the use of the revolver.

1:38:44And that the military didn't really have a desire to acquire the revolver. But the Texas Rangers did. And the reason why they did it is they would recognize that there's a need to have multiple bullets in some sort of a cylinder that you could replace. And so when they started doing that, that's when they started to gain ground over the Comanche. And then of course the Henry Rifle, the repeating rifle, all these different things that happened after that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the revolvers are not terribly accurate. But they could fire bullets as fast as the Comanche could fire an arrow. So that's an advantage.

1:39:19And Jack Hayes who is the original Texas Ranger. There's a photo of him out there in our lobby as well as the photo of Cynthia Ann Parker. I saw those in Quantaparker. It's such an amazing aspect of the history of this area. I mean, in this region when you drive around you'll see like Quantaparker Lane, you'll see like all these Comanche names that have been put on streets. Yeah, well Cynthia was taken not far from here. Right. 11 years old. Yeah, it's a crazy story, right? It's an amazing story. Yeah, this whole place transformed so rapidly. And it's just, it's so interesting that the sort of independent philosophy of Texans probably had a lot to do with how difficult it was to take over this place.

1:40:17Yeah, I think you can push that a little too far. But there's certainly something to that. It would be awfully, awfully tough people. How could you push it too far and what would he mean by that? Well, I think that so many people in Texas and elsewhere, they were just sort of ordinary folks. And they really didn't have to go through the kind of transformation of adaptive transformations. They would produce those kinds of abilities. But the ones on the cutting edge, you know, the ones out there, you know, that was true to them. Yes. Tough guys. Charlie Goodnight, you know that name? Yes. Charles Goodnight.

1:41:00Good example of that. Yeah. It's a tough guy. His partner, Oliver Loving, was killed by Comanche, he's had in West Texas. And he had to go through some serious stuff. Goodnight to others at that time to make it. Did the Comanches have a reservation? Not as such. There were the very end of this, right before it all fell apart. They were on sort of government land have been set aside, far north Texas, up at the border of Oklahoma, stayed on that. But did last the animosity, the unalloyed hatred, mutual hatred between Comanches and Texas. It's hard to exaggerate it. It was just, it was like Palestinians in Australia's.

1:42:05You know, homosin in Australia's. It just could not reconcile it. And so the government, you know, was trying to give these folks a chance to become farmers and the rest of it. So they put him on this piece of land. But the Texans kept dead on him, kept dead on him, kept dead on him, and finally they were said. Enough of that. You're going back to the panhandle.

1:42:33So besides that, no. Texas has only a couple of reservations by the end of the story, one in East Texas. The reason is, of course, that this hostilities, these hostilities between Texans and Indians is so extreme. That they read their all Indians, or they're all killed or driven out. Which is so extraordinary when you think about the expanse of their empire. Yeah. Yeah. It's just sort of a purging, you know, ethnic cleansing. When you set out to write a book this vast, I mean this is an enormous book. It seems like there's so much information that it's got to be a daunting task to try to figure out how to pull it all together.

1:43:25Yeah. That was by far the biggest problem. I think it was very naive when I started to think that, look back, you're going to do what? Because you know, as I've already said a couple of times, it's this 30 -year period when so much happens. All over the place, so fast, in so many ways, so many changes. All of them, all of them bouncing off each other. All of them influencing each other. It's just this bewildering series of things, you know, of events. The hardest part, the hardest part of any book, you know, one of my friends told me, the hardest thing about writing a book is making it a book.

1:44:16Making it one thing, as opposed to just a whole series of note cards put together. But that was, it went beyond hard for this. It had to come up with some way to fit it together with a narrative, an arc over time, with themes that try to hold it together. I did my best to do that, but that was by far the hardest part of it. Yeah, did you do this independently? Did you have a contract to do a book? Oh, it's part of a series, the History of the West, the University of Nebraska series. And we're about to finish with it now. But beyond that, it wasn't dependent. You know, it would have to be. It would have to be.

1:45:02Otherwise, the pressure on you to get this done and the deadlines, like, what are you doing, Elliot? What kind of book is this? Well, I've told him before, it's done when it's done. Right, I'm like, well, it's just, it must be so hard to put together something that if we put it into perspective today, imagine that kind of change happening from 1993 to 2023. Yeah. Put that in your head and imagine the world changes. The world is made over. It's made over. Yeah. And if I, does anybody came up with it here, the closest thing I had to tie it together was something really big happens in this country in the second half of the 19th century.

1:45:48And we all recognize that. Any, any American historian will agree with that. And what happens is the narrative of this country, the basic story of the United States shifts onto a new track. We're changing all the time, of course, but sometimes things really change. And this is one of them. When this American story moves in a new direction that would carry it into, we'll be thinking of this modern America, carry it into the America where we know the 20th and the 21st centuries. If you go back, if you ever get a time machine, you don't twirl a dial, go back to the 1850 before that. You're in another world.

1:46:42It's one's very difficult for us to identify with. 1900. We're industrialized. We're tied to the world in new ways. We have technologically far more sophisticated. We're people, much more of a polyglot nation, a whole idea of citizenship of who is an American. All that has changed. It happens during that period. Well, if you, all Americans, all American historians agree with that. If you were to ask them, how do you explain that? What accounts for this shift? The most common answer to that by far up in John L. has been the Civil War. It was the Civil War. The establishes the primacy of the federal government, the Civil War that expands citizenship through emancipation.

1:47:38It's a Civil War that helps us to go to industrialize and turn into this modern economic superpower. It's all true, undeniable. What I argue in this book is that expansion in the 1840s, the discovery of gold, which comes exactly at the same point, and what happens in the West during these 30 years, from 1850 to 1880, those things are as important as the Civil War in helping us understand how we became modern, in the making of the making of modern America. Expansion, those 30 years of incredible changes, were as important as the Civil War in turning us into a modern industrial power, and expanding citizenship, in this case not just freed people, but Indians, you know, Hispanics, Chinese, and the strength of the power of the federal government, which takes out all kinds of new responsibilities, because of the West, you know, from national parks to the Department of Interior to outwardly looking into the West, and the world.

1:48:55It's because of this happening that we, what I call the orientation, the reorientation of America, we turn into the Pacific, we become a Pacific facing nation, as well as an Atlantic -Fation nation. We began to move into what we know today, as a people who are looking continuously across the Pacific, to China, to the other nations over there, all of those things that we associate with being modern, have as much to do with expansion as they do with the Civil War. So the basic idea is you cannot possibly understand America, as if the America that we know from the 20th and 21st centuries, without looking at this story, without taking into account what follows from the acquisition of 1 ,200 ,000 square miles over three years, and what happened following that.

1:49:56But just without books like this, I think people have sort of this abstract notion of what took place here. They know horrible things happened, they know the Native American population was wiped out, they know they were forced into reservations, but I don't think it's being taught enough to most Americans, the actual history of this land, and how extraordinary this change was. Well, that's a great responsibility that you had to put down to this one massive book. Well, of course I could not agree more. We can't know who we are as Americans unless you take this into account, unless you get beyond the sort of the mythic romanticized view that we have of that.

1:50:44And recognize this is the birth of modern America, just as going on east and west, of course. But the point of the title, it's a continental story. Yes. It's a story that has to be told and understood from coast to coast. There's also a very bizarre aspect of our understanding of the West that has to do with the narratives that are shaped in film. Sure. I mean, we have this whole genre of film in America called Westerns, which is really interesting. Because we have spaghetti Westerns that are actually made in Italy with Chinese Twitter. All these films that detail these heroic Americans who fight off the Indians.

1:51:35And our narrative is the people that are on the wagon train, they're just trying to have a good life and they're getting attacked by the Indians, we have to fight off the Indians. We have this very sort of myopic view. It's weird, right? It is weird. Yeah, our view of what happened in terms of what's been depicted in film and in books, it's very simplistic. No kidding. Yeah, right? It is. And it's a great question about why, why that is. Yeah. For 40 plus years, I taught a course called The West of the Imagination, which wrestles with exactly that question. What is it about Western history that is so, seem to, what is it sort of compels us to take this story of the West and to turn it into this simplistic, romanticized story?

1:52:39It's a great question. It's a revisionist history question, right? Well, it is. Yeah. And I think there are various ways to approach it. The most basic way is simply in a way, sort of the restates the question by saying that there is something about the West. And this goes way back to European history even before Columbus. There's something about the direction West that invites us to imagine new worlds. Yeah. People living in Europe, the one direction in which they knew absolutely nothing was West. You look into the Atlantic and so they were able to imagine all of these wonderful myths. There's something about that, there's something that sort of carries through on that.

1:53:28But in particular, in this country, people need the West to be something. It's their need that produces a story. It's not what's happening out there. Yeah. We need to make the West into what we need. We need the West to be what we require in this particular time. So, for instance, after the Civil War, this country is trying to remake itself into one nation. We're trying to heal these wounds to stitch the nation back together. We need stories about what we have in common with you live in South Carolina or the you live in Pennsylvania. What do we have in common? Well, one thing we have in common is we're carcoring the West.

1:54:32We're doing this together. All Americans, you know, it's a heroic, very positive American view. A story. In that story, among other things, we've got to earn our way into this country. That means we've got to suffer. We've got to, okay. So, all of these tales of suffering, pioneers and so forth, but also, of course, Indians. The threat of Indians. Overcoming the threat of Indians, that's a heroic American story. In other words, we've got to bleed our way into full possession of the West. Don't bother me with the complications like this is Indians' country. This is their country. Don't bother me with the fact that they're just trying to defend their land.

1:55:34Not trying to kill people, to kill people. Right, right. That doesn't matter. We need this to be a very virile story to reflect the image of this American nation is really coming into its dome. The heroic rugged individualist makes his way across the country. That's right. Not wholesale genocide for resources. So, it becomes a very male story. All of these stories of railroads trying to protect themselves against Indians. The idea of a violent West, these shootouts every day. That reflects the kind of virility to the whole story. So, in other words, I think of it as a metaphor like this. A Western movie, right?

1:56:38Any movie. You sit there in the theater and you're watching this thing up on the screen. And you're tricking yourself to thinking it's on the screen. But it's not, of course. It's behind you. Yeah. It's the projector. So, there's a way in which we turn the West into this thing that in fact, as outsiders are projecting onto it, what they want it to be. Yeah. That's what Westerns are. Do you think it's a part of a guilt of a real understanding of what really took place? I don't know. I don't know, people. Because it's so romanticized. It seems like there should have been one genocidal film made about the American West.

1:57:23The knowledge was there. Yeah. Yeah. You're set a moment ago. Everybody, if you stop folks on the screen, everybody agrees Indians are poorly treated. Yes. But, hey, you know, it's eggs broken for an Asian law, right? Right. And it's also, it wasn't me. I wasn't there. That's right. You know, I'm a child of immigrants who came here in the 20s. I have no response. And you are. Well, and you are. You know, it's not a matter of guilt. So much is it a matter of recognizing this is our story. Does the actual events. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody's going to, you know, pressure to feel guilty about it. And we're never going to learn unless we actually know what happened.

1:58:03Sure. I mean, there's no, it's too easy to, the good term is whitewash. Because it really is whitewashing, right? Sure. In this case, literally. Literally whitewashing. Yeah. It's too easy to whitewash the actual events took place. Yeah. Yeah. And it could be an awfully ugly story. But it's also, I think we can also make the mistake of painting it in these, these sort of starkly tragic occasional genocidal terms. There is absolutely something to the point of view that these are just ordinary people going out there to try to make better lives. Right. I have a, my early passion, what we call social history, which is the history of everyday life.

1:58:56And so I was fascinated by these people who went out there, took off solar farm or whatever, picked up and went out to Oregon or someplace. Why were they doing that? You know, and what was it like? What was it like for them? And I looked at red hundreds of letters and diaries and journals and memoirs of this. And I have yet to find one example of saying, by saying, well, tell you what, it's going to be tough out there. But we got to go out there and get rid of the Indians. Right. They had these images of who the Indians were and what sort of a danger they had. When they were not there to dispossess the Indians, they were not there to get rid of better farm.

1:59:49Right. Out there to make a better life. That's the American story. But in doing that, I said earlier, in doing that, they took part in this effort, this part in this complete transformation of this world. That destroyed the Indian life. It's a bit of an impossible for Indians to deliver what they had. When you're writing something like this, what could it must be an overwhelming responsibility to accurately relay this message to people? Sure. Yeah. I mean, that's what stories do. That's part why I took 20 years to write. I looked at a lot of stuff. Yeah. And it took me a long time to research it, write it, put together.

2:00:41And I also try to make it as much as I can, a human story. I try to give what I say in their story with a, a, a, a, some body -ness, you know, a, a sense of what it was like for individuals, for individuals out there. And that means you make it very complicated. You know, there are no simple moral messages as much as we'd like, like for them to be. It's not, that's part of the, that's part of the accuracy of it. Right? Yeah. I also try to respect, you know, as, as we've talked about, Americans have this romanticized view out there. In particular, things like cowboys, title drives, right? Home stethers.

2:01:28Well, the fact is, those are the stories that fascinate us. Right? And I try to honor that fascination. Those were great stories. You know, the stories, over the trails, you know, these wagon trains, these families picking up, you know, walking 1500 miles in there. Those are great stories. The story of the lives of cowboys, cattle drives, all the rest of that. Those fascinators for good reason, because they're fascinating. Right? What I try to do is to respect that fascination at the same time of trying to tell those stories as fully as I can, with as much nuance as I can, and to bring in new understandings, to point out, for example, that in ranching, I mean, who knew that the great ranching empires, the great planes, were run mostly by corporations?

2:02:34Real? Yeah. There were hundreds of corporate ranches. Right there. It was stock being sold in New York and Boston and Edinburgh. There was a very tight connection between Edinburgh investors and ranches. I don't know how to tell the great things. Would they ship the livestock back? No. No, the livestock was, you know, grown, was raised in the planes. And then it was typically fattened up in a place like Iowa, and then slaughtered in Chicago, Kansas City, west of the cap. Now over time, by the end of the century, closely in the century, they developed a refrigerator, refrigeration. So they were able to send slaughtered beef, but they wouldn't send the animals themselves.

2:03:25But the point is, it was a ranching for all of our images of Lonesome Cowboys out there in cattle drives. Ranching was an international, corporatized business. One more way in which we see the West as modernizing America. Yeah. It was as much a corporatized enterprise as iron and steel, or petroleum in the east. Modern business. Which is bizarre to imagine what it was like before ranching. Well, that probably led rise to the market hunting, right? Because where else are you going to get your meat from? I was before. Right. Market hunting was before ranching. Before ranching. Right. But it's your right is the same thing.

2:04:18Because before ranching, where did they get their meat? Like if people came over here and mass from Europe, what were they eating? Well, they were eating a lot of beef, a lot of pigs. They were eating a lot of bear too, which is wild. Early on. Yeah. Early a settlement. But there was. Americans are traditional carnivores. There also be, of course, eating a little wild game. It was well like bear. But that beef and that pork, those are raised on farms that is individuals. You would raise your own cattle. The feeder on a family. That's right. And you slaughter it at that particular time of the year to do it.

2:05:04What happens after the, it starts in California actually. The first time you see modern ranching develop. It's before the Civil War. Out in California to feed the goldmires. But then it becomes a national phenomenon after the Civil War. When it began to raise cattle on a mass scale on public land. Out of the great plains. Now you have a modern transportation system. Railroads. You know, make their way out on the plains. So you can take cattle in Texas. So they're Texas. You can drive them north on public domain. That's the grass is free. You know, the fuel for the whole thing is government coming out of the government free.

2:05:51You load them up on cattle cars and Abelay or Dodge City. Ship them to the east to, to fatten them up and then to slaughter. In other words, it's a, it becomes a nationalized business. And then international business. And it becomes funded in the same the way that other new national businesses are. Corporations. It's all coordinated by the revolution of communication through the telegraph. So we're using these, these new revolutionary technologies like the telegraph in the railroad. And new revolutionary economic systems like that of corporate America, you know, sort of these concentrations of capital to create this new national international business.

2:06:50It's all part of the national story. But it's one, it's a national story in the, in the west that we've turned into this kind of exotic, romantic story. Yeah. You miss the fact that it's really critical to what's going on across the country. But it's such a fascinating transformation and so many moving pieces. Yeah. And so little understanding by the general public of all these factors that are play. Yeah. Well, that's why you're so important now, it appreciate you very much for coming on here. Thank you. And talking about this in your book. This book is not available right now as an audiobook.

2:07:29Do you have plans? Do they have plans to really say? I think they, uh, last I heard they did. Given the length of it, I have a large stack of packages of lozenges, somebody to send to whoever has to read the system. Try the healthy man. Yeah. Well, I know the last, uh, last Indian war is available. It's available. And I'm listening to that right now. Yeah. So this, uh, this book right now is only available. You got to read, folks. Continental reckoning, the American west, the age of expansion, Elliott West. Thank you very much. Thank you. Really appreciate you being here. Thank you, Jill. It's a awesome, awesome conversation.

2:08:02A lot of fun. A lot of fun. Thank you very much. All right. Bye everybody.

2:08:15Thank you.