In this episode of the podcast, we talk with the author of Empire of the Summer Moon, John Grisham, about his new book, "The Last Frontier: The Story of the Comanches and the Last of the Wild West." John talks about how he came up with the idea for the book, why he chose the last frontier, and why he decided to write a book about it. He also talks about the most powerful tribe in the American West, The Comanches, and how they changed the landscape of the American west. And, of course, there's a lot more! We hope you enjoy this episode, and don't forget to subscribe on your favorite streaming platform so you don't miss the next episode! Subscribe to the podcast and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms! Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! Timestamps: 4:00 - What's the Last Frontier? 5:30 - The story of the last of the wild west? 6:20 - Why the Comanche tribe? 7:15 - Who were the most influential tribe in American history? 8:20 9:00 What was the Last frontier? 11:00 The Comanche? 12:00 How did they change the landscape? 13:40 - What is the Last Wild West? 14:00 What was it like? 15:00 Who was the last place? 16: What is it like in the most important tribe in America? 17:00 Is there? 18:00 Where did they really live? 19:00 Why did they have the last chance? 21:00 Can they rule? 22:00 Do they have a place in the middle of the story? 27:30 26:00 Will they really have the most influence? 29:00 Are they really? 30:00 Did they really matter? 31: What do they have it all? 32:30 What are they really stand up to it? 33:30 Can they really be the greatest? 35:00 And so much more? 36:30 Is there a place for them in the next generation? 37:00 They are the last? 39: Is there any such thing? 40:30 Who are they the greatest of the Great Plains?
00:01:21.000It was so sad and so gripping and so riveting.
00:01:26.000And we all know that a lot of horrific things happened in the time where the settlers started making their way across the plains and headed west.
00:01:38.000But God, you just did such a fantastic job of sort of bringing it to life.
00:01:47.000I mean, I just think people forget about what the frontier was.
00:01:51.000It's kind of a nice idea that you get on TV or something, but it was a savage place.
00:01:58.000Anyway, I was trying to convey it with the minimum possible of people being stanked out on anthills with their eyelids cut off and things like that.
00:02:07.000There was a lot of that, though, right?
00:02:41.000Beyond whatever you might know about the Alamo or something or Sam Houston or somebody like that.
00:02:48.000I got there and I just started to hear about one, the Great Plains and what they were, which was an alien concept to me.
00:02:55.000I wasn't sure what the planes were or why they were different than some other part of the country, the High Plains.
00:03:02.000And I... It came into this idea, it came upon this idea that the last frontier was there, that this is where it all went down.
00:03:10.000This is where, like, the end of freedom and limitlessness, it didn't happen, the frontier didn't push forward until it got to California and then hit the ocean.
00:03:18.000California settled, the east settled, and then there was this one last place that did not.
00:03:22.000And it went on for, and there were reasons for that, one of which was the most hostile Indian tribes in the country, another was that it was, there was no water, water, you know, There was basically only land, no water or timber.
00:03:36.000But so I got into this and then, you know, lo and behold, there's this – I find out because I live in Texas that there's this principle that lives on this, that lived on this land, the Comanches, that determined everything that happened in the American West around them.
00:03:58.000One, this arc of the rise and fall of the most powerful tribe, most influential tribe in American history, the Comanches, which was very cool, from the Spanish and the horse and all sorts of big stuff that goes on.
00:04:08.000And then in the middle of that story was this little story of this little nine-year-old girl with, you know, blonde hair and cornflower blue eyes who gets taken in a Comanche raid in 1836, who ends up becoming the, you know, mother of the last and greatest chief of the Comanches.
00:04:24.000And in fact, her kidnapping and his surrender at the very end of the Comanche's, you know, sort of bookend of 40-year war.
00:04:32.000We never fought a 40-year war against anybody except them.
00:04:35.000So I ran into this story, and I'm just a kid from Connecticut, and it just seemed like the most obvious book in the world.
00:05:43.000So there were rules of the frontier at the time, and we're talking about how savage it was, and the rules of the, at least of the Plains Indians, of which the Comanches were one, that if you were captured as an adult male, you were killed, tortured to death, either quickly or slowly, depending on how much time they had.
00:06:43.000And so what was interesting about the frontier, though, is that those rules applied – so forget about white people arriving in the early 18th century for the moment.
00:06:54.000Those rules had applied to Indian tribes since forever.
00:06:58.000You know, that was the assumption of a raid.
00:07:00.000They all had – it was almost like the golden rule in reverse or the golden rule, do unto others.
00:07:05.000They all expected that kind of treatment.
00:07:08.000None of them were shocked when a baby was killed or a pregnant woman was killed.
00:07:12.000It took the kind of, you know, the Anglo-European civilization of, you know, Newton and Leibniz and the biblical tradition to arrive on the Texas frontier in 1830 and be shocked at what they saw.
00:07:29.000It was a culture of raiding, essentially.
00:07:32.000This is the Comanche culture in particular or Native Americans in general?
00:07:36.000Well, Native Americans in general, Plains Indians in general.
00:07:40.000And, you know, so Plains Indians, we could kind of start, you know, you would know the names of a lot of them, Arapaho and Cheyenne and Sioux, and these were people who operated out in the Great Wide Open.
00:07:54.000What made the Comanche special was that they became the preeminent horse tribe.
00:08:01.000People forget that there weren't any horses in the continent until the Spanish brought them in the 16th century.
00:08:10.000And so the tribes that got the horse and mastered the horse basically altered the entire balance of power on the plains.
00:08:19.000And the tribe that got the horse better than anybody else in terms of breaking and breeding and saddling and riding and stealing and hunting on the back of and fighting with were the Comanches and nobody was their peer.
00:08:30.000And so this was not just a Plains tribe.
00:08:33.000It was the preeminent power on the southern plains.
00:08:36.000Did you know that horses originally evolved here in North America?
00:08:53.000What is his other book about the various large land animals that went extinct here in North America, but the wolf and a lot of the other ones?
00:09:21.000So there's no evidence that any of the native people here really used them until Europeans came, whether it was Cortes or whoever, you know, Cortes with the Aztecs or whoever else came across.
00:09:35.000A horse is so much a part of the story.
00:09:41.000The Spanish are acutely aware of what is going to happen if the horse technology gets out, and they take great pains to not let it get out.
00:09:49.000They don't want to teach the Indians in Mexico or the Indians in North America how to use them.
00:09:55.000But inevitably, the technology does get out.
00:10:00.000Moment in time in 1680 in Santa Fe when there's a great Pueblo revolt and they kick the Spanish out and like tens of thousands of horses get out.
00:10:21.000So how did the Comanches figure out how to have all these horses and how valuable that was where some of the other tribes just hadn't kind of caught on?
00:10:30.000No one knows, and it's interesting, no one knows that because it was only seen in flashes by the Spanish through their kind of northern outposts.
00:10:40.000No one exactly knows what it was, you know, in the heart and soul of a Comanche that could do that better than anybody else.
00:10:46.000And in fact, Comanches, by all descriptions of the time, were not...
00:10:54.000They were kind of short and kind of, you know, bow-legged and they weren't especially graceful and they didn't look like perhaps you would think of the northern Sioux Indians with the nickel.
00:11:06.000I mean that kind of tall and, you know, with the bone structure.
00:11:11.000And then they got on a horse, and then everything changed.
00:11:14.000And even though the Apaches were the first ones to actually get that technology from the Spanish, and they raised havoc with it, but the tribe that got it the best and the most Welcome to my show!
00:11:59.000So the Comanches, over a period of 150 years of sustained combat, moved south from the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, essentially into this 250,000 square mile empire.
00:12:11.000Think of kind of headquartered in the Texas panhandle.
00:12:18.000And this tribe, they were known for being buffalo hunters and they were also known, they weren't really like making artwork or doing a lot of the things that we sort of associate with other Native American tribes.
00:12:34.000And things that we all would associate with Native Americans, you know, this wonderful abilities in dance and music, complex religion and complex religious social structures to go along with it, and all these different things, music and dance and all these things.
00:12:50.000The Comanches, by the time that the kind of Anglo-Europeans run into them, They are a stripped-down culture that looks more like Sparta.
00:12:59.000And one of the reasons they are is because they've been fighting this long war, primarily against the Apaches, but against other tribes over decades.
00:13:06.000And during that time, as they became ascendant militarily, they became less interested in those things.
00:13:13.000They became interested in war conveyed status, right?
00:13:17.000War conveyed numbers of ponies and status and the thing.
00:13:20.000And so, yes, they were a stripped-down war culture.
00:13:24.000I guess to whatever extent we know or something about Sparta would remind you of Sparta.
00:13:29.000That's what's so interesting about it.
00:13:31.000It's such a unique tribe, just a very unique branch of Native Americans that was specifically like this.
00:13:58.000And when you think also of the numbers of them that were there when, say, the Anglo-Europeans and the Americans came through in the 1830s, there was probably 25 or 30,000 of them out there.
00:14:13.000Now, I don't know what 5,000 or 6,000 suggests to you, but it suggests to me like the third baseline at Yankee Stadium or something.
00:14:18.000It's not very many people occupying this gigantic area that became, as I was saying earlier, determinant of everything that happened around it.
00:14:31.000Well, your depictions of how the raid happened where Cynthia Ann Parker got kidnapped and how all these other various raids happened was so terrifying because these people, the initial ones, really kind of had no idea what they were in for.
00:14:49.000So the core – so as I say, my book's about the rise and fall of the Comanches as a tribe, which we've been talking about.
00:14:58.000But then there's this little family, the Parkers.
00:15:00.000And the Parkers did what so many other Texans did.
00:15:04.000And this was the crazy Americans who moved across their frontiers in ways that just were – They were beyond brave and too foolhardy.
00:15:14.000I mean, people, if you look at, say, what happened in Canada or what the Spanish did, there was always, you know, the soldiers would ride in first and set up the presidio, and then the priests would come in and, you know, the mission would be set up, and then the protections would be in place and the institutions,
00:16:03.000And so what they had done is they had taken these head rights or grants from Mexico, which owned Texas at that point.
00:16:11.000They'd been given about 20,000 acres worth, which is a kingdom from their point of view.
00:16:17.000And the Mexicans were giving them this so that they could provide a buffer against the Comanches, basically providing fresh meat for the Comanches.
00:16:24.000And so they built this little fort out there, out right at the – and it was so cool.
00:16:31.000It was not only out in the middle of nowhere, the absolute edge of the frontier, of the Indian frontier, where it was in great danger.
00:16:39.000It was also right at a part where the rainfall drops, you know, below – 30 inches, where we go from around the 98th meridian, where we go from what we think of as the east to the west, where there's no trees.
00:17:04.000At a time when this gigantic Comanche Empire with 20 vassal states and diplomatic relations touches this westward booming American empire.
00:17:16.000All these guys in Washington wearing suits and running around.
00:17:19.000That empire is – and they're touching right at this point and neither has any idea what the other one is.
00:17:26.000The Comanches have no idea that these Parker family is sitting there attached in some way to cities in the east and the burgeoning industrial revolution.
00:18:31.000It's one of the most, what you just said is one of the most striking things about this to me and was when I, you know, the Connecticut kid came to Texas, was that where I grew up, you know, Indians had been, well, when I say subdued, usually killed off by white man's diseases,
00:18:47.000but if not by bullets or treaties or something, I mean, a couple of hundred years before my forebears ever got off the boat.
00:18:55.000There wasn't a frontier, in memory anyway.
00:18:57.000I mean, there were Indian tribes around, and I played baseball with some of them in the summers and so forth.
00:19:02.000I knew of them, but this was a really distant memory.
00:19:07.0001875 is when the last of the Comanches came in, and there was a whole bunch of jostling on and off the res after that into the 20th century.
00:19:31.000And so the difference between that and – And if you go to Texas, there's an area west of Fort Worth, kind of Weatherford, Palo Pinto County, Parker County now, where you can talk to people, and they're still talking about Comanches.
00:19:49.000So that's Texas, and that's why I found it so striking, so really striking.
00:19:54.000It's also striking because you realize over the course of the book, and then more books that I've gotten into subsequently, that this was something that was going on before the white settlers even got there.
00:20:06.000That this way of life and the raiding and the killing, that's not what we associate Native Americans with.
00:20:14.000We associate us with taking the Native Americans' land and then them fighting back, and that's when things get ugly.
00:20:23.000But it turns out this was just a wild way of life that they had had for who knows how many years.
00:20:29.000One of the things that surprised people when I wrote this book – and I didn't know that I was going to be surprising people because I was just reporting what I found – Was that very thing, that this was – I think people are often used to the bury my heart at wounded knee narrative of Native Americans,
00:20:50.000And there's no question that they were victims of a westward rolling empire and 378 broken treaties, and we can just go on and we know what that narrative is like.
00:20:59.000But the narrative that I told was a narrative of power, of Dominance, power, which came with brutality too, and I think it surprised, it was a fact.
00:21:10.000It was a fact that if you go back in time, these Native American tribes, that eventually got crushed, as the Comanches did, and put on a reservation somewhere and had their livelihood taken away from them.
00:21:23.000But, you know, it really – anyway, it's a huge deal and a narrative that I think to me that doesn't take into account – The enormous power and dominance and behavior of Comanches is just missing half the narrative.
00:21:41.000Well, it's so fascinating because it's essentially they were living like Stone Age people, and they were doing it very recently.
00:21:52.000In terms of the way Europe is, you could go and see buildings in Italy that were built long before any of this stuff happened, long before the settlers started encountering them, and they were living like this.
00:22:07.000The way they lived, just chasing the buffalo and killing them, and then eating only buffalo meat, and then doing very little farming, picking some berries and nuts, and that's about it.
00:22:19.000I mean, it was just eating meat and raiding and killing.
00:22:25.000They were nomadic hunter-gatherers, which is what they were.
00:22:29.000And what the horse allowed them to do, which is what they had been before, the horse allowed them to do that only just really, really, really well.
00:22:38.000In other words, they weren't in a position of becoming agricultural Indians.
00:22:42.000The horse gave them this ability to – and as you said, they got everything from the buffalo, clothing and lodging and tools and saddles and bridles and food.
00:22:52.000I mean everything came from the buffalo.
00:22:53.000So the horse just enabled them to do this on an incredibly sophisticated level.
00:22:58.000It's the most sad part of the story is the extirpating of the buffalo.
00:23:03.000I mean, that's not the most sad, but one of their way of life.
00:23:08.000It's almost like you know what happened, but I'm rooting for them in some weird way.
00:23:13.000I mean, I know that they're not going to win, but there's something about the way they lived that seems so exciting.
00:23:19.000And the other thing is the way you described Cynthia Ann Parker...
00:23:25.000Like how badly she wanted to go back to the Comanche and how she missed the way they looked at the world.
00:23:33.000That the world was, in many ways, there was so much magic involved in the way the Comanche viewed the sky and the ground and that there was gods that were looking out for them and that they could literally have magic going into battle.
00:23:48.000Like all this, the romance of this nomadic lifestyle.
00:24:44.000But she ends up being, you know, forcibly re-assimilated.
00:24:48.000So here's someone who completely assimilated once with great success.
00:24:53.000And then in her 30s now, she's taken back into this white culture.
00:24:58.000And in fact, they put her up in a – they were so astounded to see her because she was – Indians weren't the cleanest people in the world.
00:25:05.000I mean her job was to kind of, you know, tan buffalo hides.
00:25:08.000So she – her kind of greasy looking and – You know, didn't look like a white, God-fearing farm woman from Dallas, but they put her up on a pedestal with her daughter and they kind of...
00:26:58.000They've got no responsibilities except to go hunt and have fun and go swimming and learn how to become the greatest riders in the world.
00:27:07.000They've got no institution around them of any kind.
00:27:10.000They've got – and you start to think of why do people go west, you know, away from institutions, away from things that were going to make them less free.
00:27:18.000And so I looked at it and I describe it this way – A 15-year-old Comanche boy may have been like the freest thing that ever existed in America, and I can feel the pull, you know?
00:27:36.000And a lot of people wanted to be Indians, you know?
00:27:39.000You wanted to wear those kind of Native American jackets with the frill, and there was so much of that that was attractive to us, and that was a big part of it, was that they were free.
00:27:52.000You know, Dances with Wolves, obviously...
00:27:54.000You know, when Kevin Costner gets assimilated into that tribe, there's something exciting about it.
00:28:02.000It's sought to be like a more powerful alternative to this Western grind.
00:28:09.000And again, you're out there and you are beyond the reach of any of the normal institutions that we think about – school and work and job and government and religion and church and all the things that bind people in, and most people are happy to be bound by them.
00:28:25.000But many people aren't, and I thought that there was an idea of the West of kind of limitless freedom, this West that predates barbed wire and private property, and it just seemed, I don't know, I still find it just one of the most appealing things to think about.
00:28:43.000And just the fact that it's so recent.
00:28:46.000You're talking about the urban sprawl and barb mire and things along those lines.
00:28:51.000I mean, and it's particularly in Texas where everything's almost private property.
00:28:55.000I mean, just giant ranches everywhere and this was all run by the Comanche.
00:28:59.00098% of Texas is, unlike if you go one state to the west and you're in the big land, public land, government land states, Texas is 98% private now.
00:29:47.000But as far as interviewing them for things that happened two or three hundred years ago, that's not really a – that's sort of a non-starter as a historian.
00:29:54.000Although the book itself is based on lots and lots of interviews with Comanches, but of the era, people who – this was the great – there were some great projects done in the 20s and 30s with Comanches who talked about – You know, who had memories of the 19th century.
00:30:10.000And so a lot of what we know that's in my book that we know about the Comanches and who they are come from all of these interviews.
00:30:17.000And there's a lot in my book that comes from Comanches, but again, of the era.
00:30:21.000So, you know, I just figured that interviewing people today about things that happened a long time ago was probably not that efficient.
00:30:28.000No, for sure not that efficient, but still, to me, it would be kind of fascinating to see where they are now.
00:30:33.000I mean, the Native American reservations in this country have traditionally been pretty horrific, and it's very depressing and sad, and for the people that live there, just...
00:30:43.000So little hope and so little opportunity.
00:30:46.000As you were talking about before, the broken treaties and just to see them having gone from being this incredible war-like tribe to being resigned to these very small patches of land that are usually not very fruitful and not very resource-filled.
00:32:57.000Well, the problem is the way – this is going to get into a lot of detail, but I mean Oklahoma, they basically – in place of reservations, they gave out individual apportionments of land.
00:33:27.000They're in danger of having their culture probably get erased.
00:33:31.000They're pretty – I mean I think they would tell you – I mean I don't want to speak for Comanches or anybody else but that they're pretty strongly organized where they are.
00:34:51.000And if you look at what, from the moment that the last Comanche surrendered, when Quanah and the last of the starving, all the buffalo have been killed now, and so they're coming in, and it's 1875. You know, that very year,
00:35:07.000their old kind of main, I guess, camping ground would be Palo Duro Canyon, one of the biggest canyons in the American West up in the Texas Panhandle, and that's kind of where their sanctuary was, or one of their big sanctuaries was.
00:35:20.000Within that very year, white men already owned Palo Duro Canyon.
00:35:38.000Suddenly white people own the land that the Indians used to be theirs, right?
00:35:43.000The second thing that happens is now we have the cattle drives just before barbed wire and then there's only a few years of cattle drives and then the barbed wire goes up and this happens with just breathtaking speed.
00:35:53.000And I mean from really the moment that they started killing the buffalo off in the, what, 1870 or something?
00:36:07.000And the fact that this young girl, Cynthia Ann Parker, gets kidnapped and gives birth to this man who eventually becomes the last great Comanche chief and literally watches the entire empire change And shift into this what we now call Western world.
00:37:31.000Catastrophic, titanic change had taken place inside of your lifetime, and now you're experiencing something that you didn't even think was possible, and it's the new law of the land.
00:37:42.000It does look like Quanta, doesn't it, in the middle?
00:37:45.000And he was not just ceremonial Indian.
00:37:48.000He was a brilliant man, and one of the things he did is he went to New York.
00:37:54.000I mean, he went to Washington and he testified and there were all these hearings trying to figure out how much land Indians were going to get.
00:38:04.000And Quan of Tours testified this and actually is quite brilliant.
00:38:43.000There is one curious thing about writing about Native Americans is that they didn't write anything down.
00:38:51.000So if you're writing about, say, Winston Churchill, I mean, you can track him from, like, his bath in the morning to his seventh note to Asquith, to his notes to his wife, to all of his proceedings in Parliament, and everything he ever did.
00:39:12.000What you do have are, you know, flashes that are seen by, say, the Spanish originally or the French or Mexicans or Texans and Americans as they come through.
00:39:24.000You're seeing them in flashes as they're presented to you because there are no parish records.
00:39:35.000But that's one of the weirdest things about where they are today in 2019, this idea that they don't have really a reservation or specific giant chunk of land that's theirs.
00:39:47.000They can sort of preserve at least some of this history.
00:39:51.000Yeah, no, it was a peculiarity of Oklahoma that it went that way because there are other states, as we talked about earlier, who do have large reservations to this day.
00:40:03.000Yeah, and if you're writing about them, when you get to sort of the post-reservation period, so let's say into the 1880s, 1890s, The world does change in terms of, you know, things are being written down.
00:40:19.000You know, Quanah becomes a big part of his society.
00:40:27.000I mean, he does all these things that, you know, that you wouldn't necessarily think a glorious chief of the Comanches would do.
00:40:33.000But he does those things, and those are very trackable.
00:40:36.000I mean, you know exactly what he's doing, and you can research them in conventional ways.
00:40:40.000I was fascinated by the peyote rituals, too.
00:40:43.000Now, was that a natural, normal part of Comanche life, or is it something that he adopted from other tribes?
00:40:49.000He adapted it from something that had gone on on the border, on the Mexican border, but he became the founder of the Native American Church, which had a peyote ritual in which he and it became famous for.
00:41:04.000A place I would really like to go back to in American history would be to Quanah's house.
00:41:10.000Quanah got his cattleman buddies to build him.
00:41:13.000First of all, he wanted the U.S. government to build him the house because Quanah was a hustler and he said, could I please have a house?
00:41:18.000They said, no, you can't have a house.
00:41:20.000So he went to his cattleman buddies and they built him this house, magnificent house.
00:41:25.000It was like 4,500 square feet, double porch with these giant white stars in the roof.
00:42:42.000It would have been surrounded by lodges.
00:42:44.000And the reason it would have been that is because people, his own tribe, had come in for help, money, or pay for a funeral, or going back to the peyote ritual, which is a healing ritual.
00:42:57.000And so you would have seen one of the great scenes in the American West.
00:43:01.000And people, when he died in 1911, people found out that he'd given most of his money away.
00:43:08.000To all these people who had come in asking for his help, he had in fact helped them and given most of his cattle ranching money away that he had made.
00:43:15.000Now, this house is owned by one individual?
00:43:45.000So this is not the original location where it's at right now?
00:43:47.000No, the original location was out on what turned out to be later to be a Fort Sill Gunnery Artillery Range, and so they moved it, and so Quanah's A daughter, I guess it was, moved it down into cash, and then it was moved one more time into this amusement park,
00:44:05.000When I went into this amusement park, it was like something out of a, I don't know, a Spielberg movie.
00:44:10.000I mean, you go, I was told the house was back there, and I couldn't really believe it, but so we go in, and You're going by these defunct old roller coasters that are all overgrown with vines like Sleeping Beauty's Castle, you know, and there's cows everywhere and rides and carousels all overgrown.
00:44:29.000And then you go through a series of houses that were also moved there like Frank James' house or something.
00:44:34.000And keep going, keep going, in the back there that thing was.
00:44:42.000He's been approached, as I said, by all sorts of different people, consortiums of people with money who want to buy it or just save it, you know, from literally the Comanche nation I know has wanted to and Texas Tech has and some Dallas people and a number of people.
00:45:00.000And so, to my knowledge, thus far, he refuses to sell or to take their help.
00:46:15.000You would have needed some bolstering for sure, and the foundation would have needed some work, but it has gone way downhill because nothing's been done to it.
00:46:22.000So now, I don't know, but when I walked in there, you really could have, a good carpenter team in a month, you could have shored that thing up.
00:46:41.000And then you would have to actually really replace that wood.
00:46:45.000So at the end of the day, it was going to be...
00:46:47.000A certain percentage of it was going to be new.
00:46:48.000But at least you could sort of get a semblance of what it was...
00:46:52.000And do your best to sort of, I mean, if you had like a real good architect on hand and a real good engineer and someone from some sort of historical society where they could look at it and say, okay, this is, we want to maintain as much of this old stuff as possible while making sure this thing can last for more people to see it.
00:47:11.000I think they could still do that, but I'm no expert, but it's, there's plenty of it that you can save.
00:47:17.000And there's things like, you know, there's that famous, it's in my book, it's a picture of the table, Qantas table there, and you've got the tin ceiling, that's still there, and the floorboards are still there, and those are all the same, you know, the same stuff.
00:49:00.000I mean, he understood from the early going that, quote, the chief of the Comanches was going to be appointed by the commander at Fort Sill.
00:49:10.000You know, it wasn't just going to happen.
00:49:12.000And there were all sorts of candidates jostling for this, and he made sure that it was him.
00:49:16.000That didn't make him any less the leader of his It didn't make him any less of an independent person who the white men had to deal with, but he made sure he had that one buttoned up.
00:50:05.000About certain people running around San Antonio in the 1830s, Davy Crockett would come to mind.
00:50:11.000But we don't know about Jack Hayes, the world's greatest, you know, the Ranger, the guy who sort of invented this anti-Comanche warfare, invented the repeating, you know, he first, he didn't invent, but he first used the repeating five-shot pistol and then, of course, had a hand in the invention of the six-shooter.
00:50:26.000But everybody should know who Jack Hayes is.
00:51:45.000Yeah, so Hayes, so the thing was, okay, San Antonio in the 1830s, late 1830s, you have about 2,000 residents.
00:51:54.000It's the final outpost on the frontier.
00:51:57.000And what's happening is Texas, which now owns Texas, having won its independence, is giving out what they call head rights.
00:52:07.000So if you want to get a head right, meaning free land, so all you had to do to get your free land outside of San Antonio was go survey the land.
00:52:22.000And survey it, and the Comanches would kill them in ever more imaginative ways because the Comanches understood exactly that the instruments did steal the land.
00:52:31.000The instruments were the mechanism of the theft of the land from them.
00:52:35.000And so part of the deal was to keep – how can you keep the surveyors alive?
00:52:40.000And Hayes was originally a surveyor, but he eventually just got good at keeping other surveyors alive.
00:52:46.000And these guys who could do that eventually became known as rangers.
00:52:51.000And they evolved as Comanche fighters, you know, fighting like Comanches did.
00:52:57.000I mean, they learned bird signs to track people.
00:52:59.000They would, you know, make cold camps.
00:55:36.000So in close hand combat, the world changed.
00:55:40.000And not only did that world change, but eventually...
00:55:45.000Everybody was so stunned by this development that the U.S. government ordered a lot of what ended up being Walker Colt's six-shooters for the Mexican War.
00:55:58.000Colt becomes one of the richest men in America, and basically Jack Hayes and Rangers redefine warfare, which is, and people said this about Jack Hayes and It's broadly speaking true.
00:56:10.000Before Jack Hayes, people came into the West on foot carrying a Kentucky long rifle, and after Jack Hayes, they came mounted and carrying a six-shooter.
00:56:19.000Yeah, that was the other thing that was really shocking, was that the U.S. soldiers would try to get off their horse To engage.
00:56:30.000Right, because they didn't think you fought – the only people who fought mounted were the Plains Indians.
00:56:35.000I mean, nobody thought – fighting mounted was not something anybody did.
00:56:39.000If you used a horse, you used it in the Dragoon way, which is you would ride to where you were going to fight, get off the horse, and then fight.
00:56:47.000But Comanches were fully mounted and Rangers were fully mounted.
00:56:50.000And what they used the Texas Rangers for in the Mexican War, which is there were these terrible guerrilla problems and these Rangers just went and cleared out these whole areas and nobody had seen this type of warfare before.
00:57:04.000Nobody had seen this kind of ability to fight and move and move mounted and move with these – well, nobody had ever seen these Walker Colts, these five-pound hand cannon, six-shooters that they had.
00:57:16.000And so these crazy – these rangers that dressed any way they wanted to, you know, sometimes with no shirts on and serapes and crazy hats.
00:57:38.000Because I don't know if the way the Lars Anderson style of shooting, of keeping all the arrows in the fingers that he researched, did he research that from Native Americans or was that ever utilized in Europe or anywhere else?
00:57:52.000His research is – I think he started – and I'm not an expert on him either, but I think he started with other – I mean, he started reading about, you know, anybody who were archers and famous for it and descriptions of them.
00:58:05.000And I believe – I'm sure that did include Native Americans, but it was – no, it was a whole – he looked at the whole world.
00:58:11.000And so, do you think Native Americans, well, we don't know, but I'm just speculating, did Native Americans develop this ability independently?
00:58:18.000Or did they learn it from anyone else?
00:58:21.000Like, it seems interesting that they were living, particularly the Comanches, this incredible nomadic life, and didn't really have a lot of interaction with other people from other places.
00:58:33.000The first interaction from anywhere else is 16th century Spain.
00:58:37.000They already had bow and arrows by then.
00:58:41.000That's the first interaction with Europeans.
00:58:44.000So the question is, did the bow come over on the land bridge?
00:58:52.000It's just – it's so interesting because I don't know if that style of multiple shooting, of being able to shoot so many arrows in a row, had been – I don't think it was implemented by the Europeans.
00:59:05.000The question, though, the more – the question you're getting at is how did the Comanches in particular because when – When these Dodge and Catlin and these various people saw Comanches in Texas in the 1830s, they just flat couldn't believe what they were looking at.
00:59:21.000They couldn't believe their abilities with horses, breaking them.
00:59:25.000I've never seen anything like it before.
00:59:27.000I've never seen anything like it before.
01:00:29.000So the question there, I don't know the answer to that, and I don't know that anyone does.
01:00:35.000What the white men saw just absolutely floored them with abilities with arrows.
01:00:42.000And among other things, they would ask the Indian boys, they'd set up a dime in a tree or a coin, and they'd go, okay, now here, you stand here and close your eyes and aim and hit that.
01:00:52.000And the Comanche boy would miss it by a foot.
01:00:54.000Look at that picture right there of them doing interaction.
01:01:03.000And if you see them from the other side, I've seen trick riders do this, you can't even see them from the other side of the horse.
01:01:11.000And again, this was something that, you know, trick riders after, you know, in the Wild West shows and beyond would do these sorts of things.
01:03:12.000Pull up a video of that guy so we can watch it, because it is pretty amazing.
01:03:17.000It's not that I didn't believe what I was reading, but on some level, it's hard to believe that they can do what people said they could do.
01:03:24.000It's interesting because this guy gets hated on a lot in the archery community.
01:03:27.000It's very funny because they say that a lot of what he's doing is tricks and a lot of what he's doing is nonsense and it's not really true that people actually did that.
01:05:17.000I mean, I don't shoot traditional archery.
01:05:19.000I shoot a compound bow with a sight and I can line it up to the exact yardage and all that stuff.
01:05:23.000But I know enough to know that what this guy's doing is pretty special.
01:05:26.000So he's showing arrows in the quiver versus arrows in his hand, how he can just grab them and pull them.
01:05:31.000Right, so his case is that we all think that it's a quiver, right?
01:05:35.000He says nobody who was any good ever used a quiver.
01:05:38.000You can transport them in a quiver, but in battle you're holding them in a clustered bunch in your hand.
01:05:43.000Just the way we're seeing these people here.
01:05:45.000In these ancient depictions, the actual drawings from hundreds of years ago, the way he did it, holding the arrows in his draw hand, and so he can do it very quickly.
01:06:20.000I mean, three times he hits, in a second, he hits three targets on a bike as he's riding by, which would emulate a horse, other than the difference between the elevation change.
01:06:31.000You know, you go up and down on a horse.
01:06:33.000But the other thing about the stories of the Mongols, that they had developed an ability to shoot as the horse was in the air.
01:06:41.000Because the stomping of the horse's hooves would...
01:06:54.000But it's one of the things that made Comanches Comanches, a mastery of the horse, plus that would now combine with this ability to shoot from a moving horse.
01:07:03.000Now, did they have a particular prowess with archery that was known amongst Native Americans?
01:07:10.000Was it extraordinary amongst other tribes?
01:07:14.000I don't know that for a fact, but I do know the reaction of people who saw them, who had seen plenty of other Indians.
01:07:21.000Nobody had ever seen anything like it at the time.
01:07:24.000Now, was there a group of Northern Plains Indians that could do it?
01:07:38.000You know, I mean, someone really needs to make a movie about Cynthia Ann Parker, about Quanah, about the Comanche, just about what it must have been like for these poor hapless settlers that didn't know they were being used as a meat buffer.
01:08:50.000And I think, as I'm told, even though I wasn't part of it, they came pretty close last summer to doing this, but the budget was too high.
01:08:57.000And the budget was so high, I think, that they thought that the only way they could make their money back is if they had Batman or Wonder Woman in it.
01:09:14.000It's an amazing book, and I can't recommend it enough.
01:09:17.000It changed the way I felt and thought about this whole thing of these settlers traveling across the country and encountering these Native American tribes.
01:09:31.000It completely changed my whole perspective of that era in time.
01:09:38.000Well, the needle sort of swings both ways on the question of Native Americans.
01:09:47.000And as I said, there was sort of a school that was dominant.
01:09:52.000Well, if you actually go back, you have kind of a mid-century impression that sort of the Indians are all bad.
01:10:30.000In my book, I... Objectively speaking, both sides are responsible for atrocities.
01:10:37.000And, you know, one of the things the Rangers learned was no quarter.
01:10:41.000You know, no quarter isn't, you know, when you, if you can imagine all the way into an attack on an Indian village, it's men, women, and children, and imagine what no quarter looks like.
01:11:51.000The center of everything that is, the heart of everything that is, which was a version – well, not a version, but it was a kind of doing for the Sioux what this book did.
01:12:03.000That might have been a choice of mine, for example, would be to go, hey, I'll do the Sioux and Northern Plains Indians.
01:12:30.000I've been in the Civil War now for a few years and writing about the Civil War.
01:12:35.000I have a new book out called Hymns of the Republic about the final year of the war.
01:12:38.000I wrote a biography of Stonewall Jackson.
01:12:40.000And so I've been kind of – I took a right turn.
01:12:43.000Actually, because this book was very successful – I mean, sometimes when you're successful, a window opens and maybe it's never going to open again.
01:12:50.000And that window – In this case, was that I could maybe do what I wanted to do.
01:12:55.000And so I picked Stonewall Jackson, just because I wanted to do Stonewall Jackson.
01:12:59.000And so that made me a right-angle turn into the Civil War, where I've been for a while.
01:13:03.000But the answer is, I'd love to return to Native America.
01:13:07.000Well, it's a whole genre of film in this country, which is so interesting, right?
01:14:40.000Not because I'm a noble person, but just because I just didn't have any agenda.
01:14:43.000I just reported the book and I thought, this is interesting and this is interesting.
01:14:46.000And just laying that out actually means you're avoiding these sort of ideological extremes that, you know, of whatever it may be, that is painting a picture that isn't quite accurate for some other reason.
01:15:47.000It's just the whole idea of going from a surveyor to protecting surveyors to becoming the original Texas Ranger, which is one of the – I mean, Texas Ranger is one of the most iconic – Groups of humans in the history of this country.
01:16:22.000Well, that was what was fascinating about it, is like they had put together these sort of outcasts, and those are the ones that were able to do the job.
01:16:30.000And not only able, but nobody else would do it.
01:16:33.000I mean, these were 23-year-old guys who didn't have families and who just didn't give a shit about anything.
01:16:39.000They were happy to be out in the field for six months without pay, which was often true.
01:16:43.000I mean, they often just didn't get paid.
01:16:46.000They weren't armed, they weren't paid, and they wanted to fight Indians.
01:16:52.000I mean, how many 41-year-olds you know want to do that?
01:16:57.000It's just such a wild group of humans.
01:17:00.000I really do hope you write a book about that.
01:17:03.000Well, I've often thought of pursuing that one, and that gets into other Native American areas.
01:17:09.000Well, listen, man, I mean, just being able to talk about it on here, I'm hoping that it gives it a boost again.
01:17:20.000It's a great subject, and in some ways, I think the reason I was mainly attracted to it is it told you what happened in the American West on some level through this one lens, which is pretty cool.