The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1397 - S.C. Gwynne

00:00:00.000 3...2...

00:00:03.000 Okay.

00:00:04.000 So, very nice to meet you.

00:00:06.000 And your book is fantastic.

00:00:08.000 I really, really loved it.

00:00:09.000 And it's kind of hilarious how this conversation came about.

00:00:13.000 You said you got a call from your publicist because your audiobook spiked.

00:00:17.000 It spiked like crazy.

00:00:18.000 It was like, what Cosmic Dust and the Outer Bands of Jupiter just did that?

00:00:23.000 Because we didn't figure out what it was.

00:00:24.000 It just spiked like crazy.

00:00:25.000 It went nuts.

00:00:27.000 I think it went to number one, briefly.

00:00:30.000 So we thought, what did that?

00:00:32.000 Anyway.

00:00:32.000 And it was from an Instagram post.

00:00:34.000 It was.

00:00:35.000 See, my friend Steve Rinella wrote a book called American Buffalo.

00:00:40.000 And I had put on Instagram how great the book was, and he did the audio version of it.

00:00:46.000 And a friend of mine on Instagram, he goes by the name of The Jackalope.

00:00:50.000 He's a fellow Hunter S. Thompson enthusiast.

00:00:52.000 He said, you gotta read this book.

00:00:55.000 And so he tells me to read your book.

00:00:59.000 And Empire of the Summer Moon.

00:01:01.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:01:02.000 And it was amazing.

00:01:05.000 I mean, he was absolutely right.

00:01:06.000 And it was so good.

00:01:07.000 And I made an Instagram post about that.

00:01:09.000 There it is.

00:01:09.000 Oh, we got a copy of it.

00:01:11.000 Look at that, ladies and gentlemen.

00:01:14.000 It's a fantastic book.

00:01:16.000 There's so much good stuff in there.

00:01:17.000 And I just...

00:01:19.000 It was...

00:01:21.000 It was so sad and so gripping and so riveting.

00:01:26.000 And 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.

00:01:38.000 But God, you just did such a fantastic job of sort of bringing it to life.

00:01:43.000 It's all those things.

00:01:44.000 It's brutal.

00:01:45.000 It's sad.

00:01:45.000 It's incredibly dramatic.

00:01:47.000 I mean, I just think people forget about what the frontier was.

00:01:51.000 It's kind of a nice idea that you get on TV or something, but it was a savage place.

00:01:58.000 Anyway, 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.

00:02:07.000 There was a lot of that, though, right?

00:02:08.000 There was a lot of that.

00:02:09.000 Yeah, I mean, the horrors of it all, it's like, oof.

00:02:13.000 You know, and I knew that that kind of stuff had taken place, but I really never read it so graphically depicted before this book.

00:02:24.000 What motivated you to write about all this?

00:02:27.000 So, this is a book about me.

00:02:30.000 I'm a Connecticut Yankee, Massachusetts, Connecticut guy.

00:02:32.000 I moved to Texas 25 years ago, and I've been there ever since.

00:02:36.000 And I didn't know anything about Texas history.

00:02:39.000 Nothing.

00:02:41.000 Beyond whatever you might know about the Alamo or something or Sam Houston or somebody like that.

00:02:48.000 I got there and I just started to hear about one, the Great Plains and what they were, which was an alien concept to me.

00:02:55.000 I wasn't sure what the planes were or why they were different than some other part of the country, the High Plains.

00:03:02.000 And 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.

00:03:10.000 This 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.

00:03:18.000 California settled, the east settled, and then there was this one last place that did not.

00:03:22.000 And 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. 0.95

00:03:36.000 But 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.

00:03:49.000 And that's not an exaggeration.

00:03:50.000 They were because until – You know, the West wasn't won until they lost it, and that was for sure.

00:03:56.000 And so there were two things.

00:03:58.000 One, 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.

00:04:08.000 And 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.

00:04:24.000 And in fact, her kidnapping and his surrender at the very end of the Comanche's, you know, sort of bookend of 40-year war.

00:04:32.000 We never fought a 40-year war against anybody except them.

00:04:35.000 So 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.

00:04:42.000 It was just the coolest history.

00:04:44.000 It's a crazy story, and I'd never heard of Cynthia Ann Parker before.

00:04:47.000 Now, we have a giant metal picture of her on the wall, because it was so powerful.

00:04:55.000 Your depiction of it, too.

00:04:57.000 I wanted to find out what she looks like. 0.97

00:05:00.000 And what is his name again?

00:05:02.000 Quanna?

00:05:02.000 So Quanna was his – This is on the cover of the book.

00:05:07.000 Right.

00:05:08.000 Because his mother was Cynthia Ann Parker, which was not – that didn't come out and no one found out that until he was much older.

00:05:16.000 So he was born Quanah as a Comanche. 0.94

00:05:18.000 Later, in the reservation period, when people found out who he was, he identified as part of the Parker family also.

00:05:25.000 Oh, wow.

00:05:26.000 Yeah.

00:05:26.000 So as a famous Comanche war chief, and he was one of the most famous and feared, he was Quanah.

00:05:33.000 It's such a crazy story that they killed so many people, but occasionally they would keep people and bring them into the tribe. 0.99

00:05:42.000 Right.

00:05:43.000 So 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.

00:05:59.000 I think?

00:06:25.000 We're good to go.

00:06:27.000 We're good to go.

00:06:43.000 And 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.

00:06:54.000 Those rules had applied to Indian tribes since forever.

00:06:58.000 You know, that was the assumption of a raid.

00:07:00.000 They all had – it was almost like the golden rule in reverse or the golden rule, do unto others.

00:07:05.000 They all expected that kind of treatment.

00:07:08.000 None of them were shocked when a baby was killed or a pregnant woman was killed.

00:07:12.000 It 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.

00:07:26.000 Very interesting.

00:07:27.000 Very savage, very brutal.

00:07:29.000 It was a culture of raiding, essentially.

00:07:32.000 This is the Comanche culture in particular or Native Americans in general?

00:07:36.000 Well, Native Americans in general, Plains Indians in general.

00:07:40.000 And, 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.

00:07:52.000 They were all masters of the horse.

00:07:54.000 What made the Comanche special was that they became the preeminent horse tribe. 1.00

00:08:01.000 People forget that there weren't any horses in the continent until the Spanish brought them in the 16th century.

00:08:10.000 And so the tribes that got the horse and mastered the horse basically altered the entire balance of power on the plains.

00:08:19.000 And 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. 0.99

00:08:30.000 And so this was not just a Plains tribe.

00:08:33.000 It was the preeminent power on the southern plains.

00:08:36.000 Did you know that horses originally evolved here in North America?

00:08:40.000 No.

00:08:40.000 And then they went extinct here, but then they reintroduced them.

00:08:44.000 Really?

00:08:44.000 The Europeans did, yeah.

00:08:45.000 There's a guy named Dan Flores.

00:08:48.000 He's got a bunch of great books, and one of them is called Coyote America.

00:08:52.000 He's got another one.

00:08:53.000 What 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?

00:09:04.000 What is it?

00:09:05.000 Serengeti. 0.80

00:09:05.000 That's it. 0.80

00:09:06.000 The natural west also.

00:09:07.000 Yeah.

00:09:08.000 He's fantastic.

00:09:10.000 And essentially, they all went extinct, all the horses went extinct here, and then they were reintroduced by Europeans.

00:09:15.000 But they had originally evolved here in North America.

00:09:20.000 I didn't know that.

00:09:21.000 So 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.

00:09:35.000 A horse is so much a part of the story.

00:09:39.000 So they come over with the Spanish. 0.97

00:09:41.000 The 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.

00:09:49.000 They don't want to teach the Indians in Mexico or the Indians in North America how to use them. 0.50

00:09:55.000 But inevitably, the technology does get out.

00:09:58.000 And then there's a few moments.

00:09:59.000 There's a great...

00:10:00.000 Moment 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.

00:10:08.000 It's the great horse dispersal.

00:10:10.000 And these are the horses that come into the hands of these plains tribes.

00:10:16.000 So it was in the 1600s that their power and their dominance started to assert itself?

00:10:20.000 Begins.

00:10:21.000 So 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?

00:10:30.000 No 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.

00:10:40.000 No one exactly knows what it was, you know, in the heart and soul of a Comanche that could do that better than anybody else. 1.00

00:10:46.000 And in fact, Comanches, by all descriptions of the time, were not...

00:10:51.000 I don't know, pre-horse anyway, graceful people.

00:10:54.000 They 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.

00:11:06.000 I mean that kind of tall and, you know, with the bone structure.

00:11:10.000 That wasn't the Comanches.

00:11:11.000 And then they got on a horse, and then everything changed.

00:11:14.000 And 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! 1.00

00:11:47.000 The great new power in the plains.

00:11:49.000 The plains are a big place, by the way.

00:11:50.000 The great new power in the plains is going to challenge for the greatest food source out in mid-America, and that was the buffalo herds.

00:11:57.000 And they were in the southern plains.

00:11:59.000 So 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.

00:12:11.000 Think of kind of headquartered in the Texas panhandle.

00:12:16.000 Which is where the buffalo were.

00:12:18.000 And 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.

00:12:32.000 They were mostly just hunting.

00:12:34.000 Right.

00:12:34.000 And 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.

00:12:50.000 The Comanches, by the time that the kind of Anglo-Europeans run into them, They are a stripped-down culture that looks more like Sparta. 0.99

00:12:59.000 And 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.

00:13:06.000 And during that time, as they became ascendant militarily, they became less interested in those things.

00:13:13.000 They became interested in war conveyed status, right?

00:13:17.000 War conveyed numbers of ponies and status and the thing.

00:13:20.000 And so, yes, they were a stripped-down war culture.

00:13:24.000 I guess to whatever extent we know or something about Sparta would remind you of Sparta.

00:13:29.000 That's what's so interesting about it.

00:13:31.000 It's such a unique tribe, just a very unique branch of Native Americans that was specifically like this.

00:13:39.000 They made war and they conquered.

00:13:42.000 And when you think about what they got themselves finally, it's about, I said 250,000 square miles.

00:13:48.000 This probably doesn't mean anything, but think of...

00:13:50.000 West Texas, western Oklahoma, western Kansas, eastern Colorado, and eastern New Mexico.

00:13:56.000 Gigantic chunks of that.

00:13:57.000 That was theirs.

00:13:58.000 And 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.

00:14:10.000 Of which 5,000 or 6,000 warriors.

00:14:13.000 Now, 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.

00:14:18.000 It's not very many people occupying this gigantic area that became, as I was saying earlier, determinant of everything that happened around it.

00:14:31.000 Well, 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.

00:14:47.000 These are the Parkers.

00:14:49.000 Yes.

00:14:49.000 So 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.

00:14:58.000 But then there's this little family, the Parkers.

00:15:00.000 And the Parkers did what so many other Texans did. 0.96

00:15:04.000 And this was the crazy Americans who moved across their frontiers in ways that just were – They were beyond brave and too foolhardy. 0.98

00:15:14.000 I 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, 0.86

00:15:30.000 and then the people would come.

00:15:32.000 In Texas, it was just these rednecks from Tennessee and Alabama coming through with no protection of any kind. 1.00

00:15:41.000 There were no institutions.

00:15:42.000 They were out beyond any form of security or protection or institutions.

00:15:46.000 And so this is what the Parkers were in the 1830s.

00:15:49.000 They were about 90 miles south of Dallas.

00:15:52.000 And you had Spanish in New Mexico, but nothing but Comanches and Apaches between where these people were and that. 0.93

00:16:01.000 So, you know, 800 miles of nothing.

00:16:03.000 And so what they had done is they had taken these head rights or grants from Mexico, which owned Texas at that point.

00:16:11.000 They'd been given about 20,000 acres worth, which is a kingdom from their point of view.

00:16:17.000 And the Mexicans were giving them this so that they could provide a buffer against the Comanches, basically providing fresh meat for the Comanches. 0.97

00:16:24.000 And so they built this little fort out there, out right at the – and it was so cool.

00:16:31.000 It 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.

00:16:39.000 It 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.

00:16:53.000 It happens right there, too.

00:16:55.000 It also happens right at this raid in 1830 that started this out where the little blonde girl is taken.

00:17:02.000 This also happens.

00:17:04.000 At a time when this gigantic Comanche Empire with 20 vassal states and diplomatic relations touches this westward booming American empire. 0.88

00:17:16.000 All these guys in Washington wearing suits and running around.

00:17:19.000 That empire is – and they're touching right at this point and neither has any idea what the other one is.

00:17:26.000 The 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.

00:17:35.000 They would not know what that was.

00:17:37.000 By the same token, the Americans coming west had absolutely no clue that they just hit. 0.66

00:17:45.000 They just did what they shouldn't have done, which was to push into Comanche territory. 0.98

00:17:49.000 It's so crazy that they set them up like that.

00:17:52.000 It's so dark.

00:17:55.000 It's just such a wild time, too.

00:17:58.000 I mean, but also, so recent.

00:18:01.000 I mean, I'm 52, so we're talking about three of my lifetimes.

00:18:04.000 Three of my lifetimes ago, it was on like Donkey Kong down there.

00:18:08.000 Just crazy.

00:18:10.000 I mean, it's hard to believe that that recently...

00:18:27.000 I mean, it was just...

00:18:30.000 It's unbelievable.

00:18:31.000 It'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, 0.58

00:18:47.000 but if not by bullets or treaties or something, I mean, a couple of hundred years before my forebears ever got off the boat.

00:18:55.000 There wasn't a frontier, in memory anyway.

00:18:57.000 I mean, there were Indian tribes around, and I played baseball with some of them in the summers and so forth.

00:19:02.000 I knew of them, but this was a really distant memory.

00:19:05.000 Okay, get to Texas.

00:19:07.000 1875 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. 0.81

00:19:14.000 Yeah.

00:19:14.000 Yeah, 140-plus years ago, not that much.

00:19:16.000 Yeah, so we're talking within a really close generational memory, and that's what's really stunning.

00:19:22.000 And if you talk to – where are you from originally, Joe?

00:19:25.000 Boston.

00:19:25.000 So Boston – okay, you and I – okay, Boston.

00:19:27.000 I was born in Jersey, but did most of my growing up.

00:19:29.000 Most of my family came from Boston.

00:19:31.000 And 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.

00:19:45.000 Really?

00:19:46.000 It's their great-grandfather was killed by them.

00:19:48.000 Wow.

00:19:49.000 So that's Texas, and that's why I found it so striking, so really striking.

00:19:54.000 It'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.

00:20:06.000 That this way of life and the raiding and the killing, that's not what we associate Native Americans with.

00:20:14.000 We associate us with taking the Native Americans' land and then them fighting back, and that's when things get ugly. 1.00

00:20:23.000 But it turns out this was just a wild way of life that they had had for who knows how many years.

00:20:29.000 One 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, 0.81

00:20:49.000 which is as victims.

00:20:50.000 And 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.

00:20:59.000 But 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.

00:21:10.000 It 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.

00:21:23.000 But, 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.

00:21:41.000 Well, it's so fascinating because it's essentially they were living like Stone Age people, and they were doing it very recently.

00:21:49.000 They were doing it like...

00:21:52.000 In 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.

00:22:05.000 It's very romantic.

00:22:07.000 The 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.

00:22:19.000 I mean, it was just eating meat and raiding and killing.

00:22:22.000 They were hunter-gatherers.

00:22:25.000 They were nomadic hunter-gatherers, which is what they were.

00:22:29.000 And 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.

00:22:38.000 In other words, they weren't in a position of becoming agricultural Indians.

00:22:42.000 The 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.

00:22:52.000 I mean everything came from the buffalo.

00:22:53.000 So the horse just enabled them to do this on an incredibly sophisticated level.

00:22:58.000 It's the most sad part of the story is the extirpating of the buffalo.

00:23:03.000 I mean, that's not the most sad, but one of their way of life.

00:23:08.000 It's almost like you know what happened, but I'm rooting for them in some weird way.

00:23:13.000 I mean, I know that they're not going to win, but there's something about the way they lived that seems so exciting.

00:23:19.000 And the other thing is the way you described Cynthia Ann Parker...

00:23:22.000 Post being, air quote, rescued.

00:23:25.000 Like how badly she wanted to go back to the Comanche and how she missed the way they looked at the world. 1.00

00:23:33.000 That 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.

00:23:48.000 Like all this, the romance of this nomadic lifestyle.

00:23:52.000 Yeah.

00:24:16.000 At two different times, they knew where she was.

00:24:19.000 Indian agents figured out where she was, and they made a push to get her back because the idea generally was to get captives back.

00:24:26.000 She wouldn't go.

00:24:27.000 And then suddenly, in a raid, purely by accident, she's captured in 1860 and is dragged back.

00:24:34.000 And she has to show that she's white so that they don't kill her, right? 0.72

00:24:37.000 Right. 0.98

00:24:37.000 She has to show that she's a woman and white so that they don't kill her. 0.98

00:24:41.000 She barely escapes from that. 0.97

00:24:44.000 But she ends up being, you know, forcibly re-assimilated. 0.89

00:24:48.000 So here's someone who completely assimilated once with great success.

00:24:53.000 And then in her 30s now, she's taken back into this white culture. 1.00

00:24:58.000 And 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. 1.00

00:25:05.000 I mean her job was to kind of, you know, tan buffalo hides. 0.98

00:25:08.000 So 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... 0.99

00:25:37.000 We're good to go.

00:25:51.000 I think?

00:25:59.000 I think?

00:26:15.000 Now, the Comanches had a very flat hierarchical organization or a very flat hierarchy.

00:26:20.000 There was like – it may be a war chief and a civil chief, but there was really no – there were no priest clans and hierarchies.

00:26:28.000 It was just flat.

00:26:29.000 And if you were a Tuquana Park or a young warrior and you wanted to get together a raid on the Utes, you could just do it.

00:26:36.000 It was just – you could do what you wanted to do.

00:26:39.000 And so you look at these, this one particular captive was talking about this, and he was talking about being 15 years old.

00:26:47.000 This is before the Comanche men had to fight and really hunt. 0.99

00:26:51.000 They could do some hunting, but they weren't yet in the full responsibility of men.

00:26:56.000 There they are sitting there.

00:26:58.000 They'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.

00:27:07.000 They've got no institution around them of any kind.

00:27:10.000 They'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.

00:27:18.000 And 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? 1.00

00:27:28.000 Yeah, I think we all can.

00:27:30.000 I mean, when we were kids growing up, you know, you didn't...

00:27:33.000 We played cowboys and Indians, you know?

00:27:36.000 Exactly.

00:27:36.000 And a lot of people wanted to be Indians, you know?

00:27:39.000 You 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.

00:27:52.000 You know, Dances with Wolves, obviously...

00:27:54.000 You know, when Kevin Costner gets assimilated into that tribe, there's something exciting about it.

00:28:00.000 Like, it's more noble.

00:28:02.000 It's sought to be like a more powerful alternative to this Western grind.

00:28:09.000 And 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.

00:28:25.000 But 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.

00:28:43.000 And just the fact that it's so recent.

00:28:45.000 That's what's really crazy.

00:28:46.000 Really recent.

00:28:46.000 You're talking about the urban sprawl and barb mire and things along those lines.

00:28:51.000 I mean, and it's particularly in Texas where everything's almost private property.

00:28:55.000 I mean, just giant ranches everywhere and this was all run by the Comanche. 1.00

00:28:59.000 98% 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.

00:29:11.000 That's a weird thing, isn't it?

00:29:12.000 It is.

00:29:12.000 It's very strange.

00:29:13.000 How'd that happen?

00:29:15.000 Well, it happened because that's the way it settled.

00:29:19.000 And the public land states just...

00:29:23.000 For one thing, there was a lot more of apparently sort of useless land in the western states.

00:29:31.000 But anyway, it happened.

00:29:33.000 And in Texas, you're lucky to get yourself a state park here and there.

00:29:36.000 When you were doing research for this, did you meet with any current Comanches?

00:29:41.000 I met with some of them, and I know some of them.

00:29:44.000 Some of them are on my website.

00:29:47.000 But 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.

00:29:54.000 Although 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.

00:30:10.000 And 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.

00:30:17.000 And there's a lot in my book that comes from Comanches, but again, of the era.

00:30:21.000 So, you know, I just figured that interviewing people today about things that happened a long time ago was probably not that efficient.

00:30:28.000 No, for sure not that efficient, but still, to me, it would be kind of fascinating to see where they are now.

00:30:33.000 I 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... 0.99

00:30:43.000 So little hope and so little opportunity.

00:30:46.000 As 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.

00:31:05.000 And that happened to a lot of tribes.

00:31:07.000 I mean, if you look at the Comanches, the Comanches are a pretty small tribe.

00:31:12.000 They're located in their center, although there's no reservations.

00:31:19.000 Excuse me.

00:31:20.000 You all right?

00:31:21.000 Yeah, they don't have a tail end of the flue.

00:31:23.000 They don't have a reservation there, but I'd say the last number I heard was 14,000 or something like that.

00:31:30.000 One of the big, I guess ironically in some ways, determinant factors in how wealthy a tribe is now is proximity to...

00:31:39.000 A major urban area.

00:31:40.000 For example, Chickasaws and Choctaws are in range of DFW, so their casinos there make a lot of money.

00:31:47.000 The Seminoles in Florida.

00:31:48.000 There are some tribes in California who are making a lot of money.

00:31:51.000 If you go up to, say, some of the Sioux reservations, you know, well up north on the plains, they're not near.

00:31:58.000 They're traditional lands.

00:32:02.000 Just don't happen to be close to...

00:32:04.000 Urban centers.

00:32:05.000 Yeah, urban centers.

00:32:05.000 And so there's a little bit of that going on there.

00:32:09.000 But yeah, this is just where we, the U.S. government, put the Indians.

00:32:18.000 And in terms of Plains Indians and Comanches and Arapahoes and Cheyennes and Sioux and everybody else, they never wanted to be farmers. 0.85

00:32:26.000 Farming was exactly what they never wanted to do.

00:32:29.000 And even if you gave them 160 acres, they would sublet it.

00:32:32.000 They would rent it out to usually a white farmer who would farm it and they would take a sharecropping percentage or something.

00:32:39.000 But yes, so they didn't want anything to do with that.

00:32:44.000 And above all, they didn't want to be forced into a type of life that they had never done before and considered it just kind of unseemly.

00:32:52.000 So do Comanches have a reservation today?

00:32:55.000 No.

00:32:55.000 No reservation at all?

00:32:57.000 No.

00:32:57.000 Well, 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.

00:33:10.000 And had them assimilated. 0.56

00:33:11.000 Yeah.

00:33:11.000 So, for example, where I came from in the East Coast, there are reservations.

00:33:15.000 If you go to, say, Colorado, you'll see the Ute Reservation or some of the Sioux Reservations.

00:33:22.000 There's reservations all over the place, not in Oklahoma.

00:33:25.000 Wow.

00:33:25.000 So...

00:33:27.000 They're in danger of having their culture probably get erased.

00:33:31.000 They'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.

00:33:43.000 They have a nation.

00:33:44.000 They do have a nation.

00:33:45.000 It's just they don't have a body of a reservation but they do have a nation.

00:33:49.000 But if they have a nation, they don't have the same sort of laws that have a reservation?

00:33:55.000 No, they actually do.

00:33:56.000 So if you go, for example, I spent some time with the Chickasaws a few years ago.

00:33:59.000 It's incredible.

00:34:00.000 Now, they don't have a, quote, reservation either, but they have little pieces of land that is theirs.

00:34:06.000 But they also have a completely parallel police system, completely parallel legislature.

00:34:11.000 They have parallel healthcare systems.

00:34:13.000 And you can drive through these parts of Oklahoma where, I don't want to say Choctaws or Cherokees or whoever they may be are. 1.00

00:34:22.000 And there are these whole parallel worlds that are existing right in front of you and you don't see them.

00:34:26.000 Wow.

00:34:27.000 Yes.

00:34:27.000 So, no.

00:34:28.000 Actually, I think they're...

00:34:30.000 In a lot of ways, a lot of the tribes in Oklahoma are doing well, but you literally can drive through it and you wouldn't be able to tell.

00:34:40.000 It's just such a stunning amount of change that happened to this continent over a relatively short period of time.

00:34:48.000 Yeah.

00:34:49.000 I mean, really astounding.

00:34:51.000 And 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, 0.78

00:35:07.000 their 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.

00:35:20.000 Within that very year, white men already owned Palo Duro Canyon. 0.59

00:35:25.000 There was already a ranch on it.

00:35:27.000 It was already private property.

00:35:30.000 Within a few years, there's barbed wire going all the way up.

00:35:33.000 I mean, this is happening.

00:35:35.000 So, in other words, you have...

00:35:37.000 You have the transfer of ownership.

00:35:38.000 Suddenly white people own the land that the Indians used to be theirs, right? 0.99

00:35:43.000 The 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.

00:35:53.000 And I mean from really the moment that they started killing the buffalo off in the, what, 1870 or something?

00:35:59.000 1871 to, I mean, full barbed wire.

00:36:02.000 It's less than a couple decades.

00:36:04.000 It's such a great story.

00:36:07.000 And 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. 0.59

00:36:25.000 Yep.

00:36:25.000 He rides in Teddy Roosevelt's inaugural parade.

00:36:30.000 Well, that was also what's crazy about the book, that he meets Teddy and he has a speech with him on stage. 0.92

00:36:37.000 And this is all, I mean, he had killed a lot of white people too, right?

00:36:40.000 A lot of settlers.

00:36:42.000 He didn't talk about it, but yes, he had.

00:36:44.000 Because that's what Comanches did. 1.00

00:36:46.000 Yeah, well, so wise of him also to not talk about it.

00:36:49.000 Right.

00:36:49.000 And not only Comanches, he fought Indians, he fought anybody who was out there.

00:36:53.000 But yes, he didn't spend a lot of time bragging about that.

00:36:57.000 Yeah, I mean, I guess it's just the way they felt about war.

00:37:01.000 What is this, Jamie?

00:37:02.000 The parade.

00:37:03.000 Oh, here's the parade.

00:37:04.000 I don't know which one he is, but there's six of them in the parade.

00:37:08.000 Wow.

00:37:08.000 And what year is this?

00:37:10.000 Mm-hmm.

00:37:12.000 Remember 1908?

00:37:14.000 08, I think.

00:37:31.000 Catastrophic, 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.

00:37:41.000 Is that Quanta there?

00:37:42.000 It does look like Quanta, doesn't it, in the middle?

00:37:45.000 And he was not just ceremonial Indian.

00:37:48.000 He was a brilliant man, and one of the things he did is he went to New York.

00:37:54.000 I 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.

00:38:04.000 And Quan of Tours testified this and actually is quite brilliant.

00:38:08.000 I put his testimony in my book.

00:38:09.000 He's just flat brilliant.

00:38:11.000 He sort of runs circles around the senator who's questioning him.

00:38:15.000 So he played an active role too, but there he is.

00:38:17.000 As you say, he's sitting in a committee room in Congress.

00:38:21.000 I mean, this guy who was this great free warrior on the plains.

00:38:25.000 Now, how long did it take you to research this?

00:38:28.000 You know, I did this partly while I was at a day gig, so I'm not really sure.

00:38:32.000 Probably three or four years, something like that.

00:38:35.000 There isn't as much as you would think.

00:38:37.000 And the reason is, I mean, there's a fair amount, and it's all in Texas, which is good.

00:38:41.000 But...

00:38:43.000 There is one curious thing about writing about Native Americans is that they didn't write anything down.

00:38:51.000 So 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.

00:39:05.000 It's like moment by moment.

00:39:06.000 You take someone like Quanah out on the planes, and you've got pretty much nothing.

00:39:10.000 And so what you have...

00:39:12.000 What 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.

00:39:24.000 You're seeing them in flashes as they're presented to you because there are no parish records.

00:39:29.000 There's no legal records.

00:39:30.000 There's no interviews.

00:39:31.000 There's no things like that.

00:39:33.000 That's so stunning.

00:39:34.000 It's so stunning.

00:39:35.000 But 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.

00:39:47.000 They can sort of preserve at least some of this history.

00:39:51.000 Yeah, 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.

00:40:03.000 Yeah, 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.

00:40:19.000 You know, Quanah becomes a big part of his society.

00:40:22.000 He's setting up cattle leasing deals.

00:40:25.000 He's founding a school board.

00:40:27.000 I mean, he does all these things that, you know, that you wouldn't necessarily think a glorious chief of the Comanches would do.

00:40:33.000 But he does those things, and those are very trackable.

00:40:36.000 I mean, you know exactly what he's doing, and you can research them in conventional ways.

00:40:40.000 I was fascinated by the peyote rituals, too.

00:40:43.000 Now, was that a natural, normal part of Comanche life, or is it something that he adopted from other tribes?

00:40:49.000 He 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.

00:41:04.000 A place I would really like to go back to in American history would be to Quanah's house.

00:41:10.000 Quanah got his cattleman buddies to build him.

00:41:13.000 First 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?

00:41:18.000 They said, no, you can't have a house.

00:41:20.000 So he went to his cattleman buddies and they built him this house, magnificent house.

00:41:25.000 It was like 4,500 square feet, double porch with these giant white stars in the roof.

00:41:31.000 Is that his house right there?

00:41:33.000 That's Star House.

00:41:34.000 It's fallen down now.

00:41:35.000 But yes, in its heyday, it looked really pretty stiffy.

00:41:38.000 So that still exists to this day?

00:41:39.000 It does, and it's about to fall down.

00:41:41.000 Who owns it?

00:41:42.000 Well, this guy who lives in Cache or Lawton, Oklahoma, and who doesn't...

00:41:49.000 Who has been unwilling to accept help or money from everybody from the Comanche Nation. 1.00

00:41:54.000 That's it right there.

00:41:55.000 It always had the stars on the website?

00:41:57.000 Yeah, it did, because he saw that U.S. generals had these stars in their colors, and he wanted more than they had.

00:42:04.000 Wow.

00:42:05.000 But that sits there in Cache, Oklahoma.

00:42:09.000 Now, I've been in it, but it's gotten so beat up now that they don't let you go in it anymore.

00:42:14.000 But it sits there.

00:42:15.000 So as long as we have that there, in 1895, if you went there in the early 1890s, it would have been one of the most amazing scenes.

00:42:25.000 We had people like Geronimo coming to dinner.

00:42:27.000 Roosevelt came to dinner.

00:42:28.000 Nelson Miles, the great general, came to dinner.

00:42:31.000 I think it was a Swiss-Mexican cook.

00:42:34.000 He had six wives.

00:42:36.000 He had 21 children, 19 who grew to adulthood.

00:42:40.000 The house is full of kids.

00:42:42.000 It would have been surrounded by lodges.

00:42:44.000 And 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.

00:42:57.000 And so you would have seen one of the great scenes in the American West.

00:43:01.000 And people, when he died in 1911, people found out that he'd given most of his money away.

00:43:08.000 To 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.

00:43:15.000 Now, this house is owned by one individual?

00:43:18.000 Yes.

00:43:19.000 But it's a historical landmark, and no one's preserving it?

00:43:23.000 They're not doing anything to it?

00:43:24.000 You know, I don't know all the details of it, but it's owned by Wayne Gibson and his sister, as far as I know still.

00:43:30.000 They've owned it for a while.

00:43:31.000 They don't want any help.

00:43:32.000 It was, that house was put into an amusement park years ago to preserve it that was owned by Wayne's uncle, as far as I know.

00:43:39.000 So it was taken apart?

00:43:40.000 It was, was it taken apart?

00:43:42.000 I don't know.

00:43:43.000 They did move it, though.

00:43:44.000 They moved it.

00:43:45.000 So this is not the original location where it's at right now?

00:43:47.000 No, 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,

00:44:03.000 literally.

00:44:05.000 When I went into this amusement park, it was like something out of a, I don't know, a Spielberg movie.

00:44:10.000 I 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.

00:44:29.000 And then you go through a series of houses that were also moved there like Frank James' house or something.

00:44:34.000 And keep going, keep going, in the back there that thing was.

00:44:37.000 The house was sitting there.

00:44:39.000 Wow.

00:44:40.000 Now, it is his.

00:44:41.000 He owns it.

00:44:42.000 He'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.

00:45:00.000 And so, to my knowledge, thus far, he refuses to sell or to take their help.

00:45:07.000 Is that him right there?

00:45:09.000 I think that is.

00:45:11.000 Wayne Gibson, yeah.

00:45:13.000 Come on, Wayne.

00:45:14.000 Hey, so he's a perfectly nice guy.

00:45:17.000 He feels the house is very special in his family, and it is indeed very special.

00:45:21.000 But he won't.

00:45:22.000 The last tour I got with him...

00:45:25.000 As you're going up the main stairwell, there was a four-foot-by-six-inch hole in the roof above the main stairwell.

00:45:33.000 I mean, you can't really have a four-foot-by-six-inch hole.

00:45:37.000 And the rain would just come through.

00:45:42.000 What can you do to preserve a house like this while still leaving it the way it is?

00:45:47.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:45:48.000 You would have to replace the wood.

00:45:50.000 Now, if you replace the wood, is it still the same house?

00:45:52.000 There's arguments about boats.

00:45:55.000 They've found some ancient boats and they've done some rebuilding of these boats.

00:46:00.000 Now, all of a sudden, you're looking at new wood and the shape of this old boat.

00:46:04.000 What is it now?

00:46:05.000 Is it?

00:46:05.000 What is it?

00:46:05.000 Yeah.

00:46:06.000 So I tell you, the first time I walked in there, which was 15 years ago, you wouldn't have needed to do that much work to it.

00:46:13.000 15 years ago?

00:46:14.000 Yeah, you would not have needed to.

00:46:15.000 You 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.

00:46:22.000 So 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.

00:46:32.000 Jesus Christ.

00:46:33.000 Yeah.

00:46:33.000 That's so sad.

00:46:34.000 And I don't know how much of it...

00:46:35.000 I mean, a lot of it was...

00:46:36.000 The problem was with all those holes in it.

00:46:38.000 Stuff that started to rot.

00:46:39.000 And rot is different than...

00:46:41.000 And then you would have to actually really replace that wood.

00:46:45.000 So at the end of the day, it was going to be...

00:46:47.000 A certain percentage of it was going to be new.

00:46:48.000 But at least you could sort of get a semblance of what it was...

00:46:52.000 And 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.

00:47:11.000 I think they could still do that, but I'm no expert, but it's, there's plenty of it that you can save.

00:47:17.000 And 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.

00:47:32.000 So, I don't know.

00:47:33.000 I'm no expert on it.

00:47:34.000 But until the owner, because it's his, until the owner decides to do something to it.

00:47:40.000 Come on, bro.

00:47:41.000 What's his name?

00:47:41.000 I think it's Wayne Gibson.

00:47:43.000 Wayne?

00:47:43.000 Gibson.

00:47:44.000 Come on, Wayne. 0.99

00:47:45.000 It's ridiculous, Wayne.

00:47:46.000 He's a lovely guy. 0.85

00:47:47.000 I'm sure he's a lovely guy.

00:47:48.000 He just doesn't want to do this particular thing. 1.00

00:47:50.000 Get your shit together, Wayne. 0.99

00:47:51.000 It's a giant part of history. 1.00

00:47:53.000 I mean, particularly after you read this story, read your book, it's just so much more interesting.

00:48:00.000 You know, that was the end.

00:48:02.000 That was when this guy had become a cattleman.

00:48:05.000 That's when this guy had sort of assimilated into, not just assimilated, become incredibly successful.

00:48:12.000 I want to say Western, but Western meaning the United States.

00:48:18.000 I keep using that word probably incorrectly.

00:48:20.000 What is the word to use when he's assimilated Eastern?

00:48:24.000 Settler culture? 1.00

00:48:25.000 What would you say when they assimilate into a white man's world?

00:48:32.000 Would you just say that?

00:48:33.000 The white man's world?

00:48:34.000 I suppose. 0.53

00:48:35.000 I guess the white man's world is probably the best way.

00:48:37.000 Anglo-European culture that had come west.

00:48:40.000 But yeah, very much the white man's world.

00:48:41.000 The fact that he'd become a cattleman and become a carousel.

00:48:44.000 I thought it was hilarious too that they wanted him to not have so many wives.

00:48:49.000 They didn't want to have the wives, they didn't want to have the braids, the long, long braids. 0.96

00:48:54.000 I didn't like that, didn't like the wives. 1.00

00:48:56.000 He quantited things his own way.

00:48:58.000 He also played politics brilliantly.

00:49:00.000 I 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.

00:49:10.000 You know, it wasn't just going to happen.

00:49:12.000 And there were all sorts of candidates jostling for this, and he made sure that it was him.

00:49:16.000 That 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.

00:49:28.000 And he was challenged continuously.

00:49:30.000 I mean, there were continuous challenges to him.

00:49:32.000 It's interesting historically that you don't hear about him and the Comanches when it played such a significant part in...

00:49:42.000 We're good to go.

00:50:05.000 About certain people running around San Antonio in the 1830s, Davy Crockett would come to mind.

00:50:11.000 But 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.

00:50:26.000 But everybody should know who Jack Hayes is.

00:50:29.000 Everybody should know.

00:50:30.000 I mean, And Quanah was, I mean, Geronimo is Geronimo, and he's famous largely for one particular breakout in the late 19th century.

00:50:39.000 But, you know, Quanah was arguably the greater man in the reservation period.

00:50:43.000 And, I mean, Geronimo in some ways was kind of a curmudgeon.

00:50:50.000 Yeah, that was another part that I wanted to get to, was Jack Hayes and the creation of the Texas Rangers.

00:50:55.000 We think of the Texas Rangers today, we think of like Chuck Norris.

00:50:59.000 You really don't realize that they were essentially a group that was created to effectively combat the Comanche.

00:51:08.000 Exactly.

00:51:08.000 That's where they came from.

00:51:09.000 It's amazing.

00:51:10.000 The story, when you talk about how It took several iterations of these guys before they figured out how to do it right.

00:51:20.000 And the guys that came out, they're essentially a lot like a lot of depictions of Navy SEALs, like renegades, like wild, rugged rebels.

00:51:29.000 And there they are, there's the original Texas Rangers.

00:51:32.000 Is that Jack Hayes in there?

00:51:35.000 I don't see him.

00:51:36.000 San Antonio's military...

00:51:38.000 There he is.

00:51:39.000 There's Jack Hayes' well, the lightest picture.

00:51:43.000 That's him.

00:51:43.000 That's him right there, huh?

00:51:45.000 Yeah, so Hayes, so the thing was, okay, San Antonio in the 1830s, late 1830s, you have about 2,000 residents.

00:51:54.000 It's the final outpost on the frontier.

00:51:57.000 And what's happening is Texas, which now owns Texas, having won its independence, is giving out what they call head rights.

00:52:07.000 So 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.

00:52:16.000 That's all you had to do.

00:52:17.000 And you had it.

00:52:19.000 And so the surveyors would go out.

00:52:22.000 And 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. 0.99

00:52:31.000 The instruments were the mechanism of the theft of the land from them.

00:52:35.000 And so part of the deal was to keep – how can you keep the surveyors alive?

00:52:40.000 And Hayes was originally a surveyor, but he eventually just got good at keeping other surveyors alive.

00:52:46.000 And these guys who could do that eventually became known as rangers.

00:52:51.000 And they evolved as Comanche fighters, you know, fighting like Comanches did. 1.00

00:52:57.000 I mean, they learned bird signs to track people.

00:52:59.000 They would, you know, make cold camps.

00:53:00.000 I mean, you never made a warm...

00:53:02.000 You never made a campfire if you were around Comanches.

00:53:04.000 I mean, they would...

00:53:05.000 They learned these techniques and techniques of warfare.

00:53:10.000 And they got really good at it.

00:53:12.000 They just had this one problem.

00:53:14.000 And the problem was that they had three shots.

00:53:17.000 They had Kentucky long rifle, bang...

00:53:21.000 And two single-shot pistols.

00:53:22.000 And that's all they had.

00:53:24.000 Against Comanches, who I would encourage all of your listeners to go and look up this guy, Lars Anderson, on the internet.

00:53:35.000 Yeah.

00:53:35.000 He's the bow guy.

00:53:37.000 Yeah.

00:53:37.000 I've seen him before.

00:53:39.000 What he proved, among other things, he went back and he just researched it.

00:53:42.000 And a lot of the things that I frankly found hard to believe about Comanches Once I saw the Anderson videos, you believe them.

00:53:50.000 Anderson, I think it's ten arrows in five seconds.

00:53:56.000 There's no such thing as a quiver.

00:53:58.000 You're holding it as a bunch in your arm.

00:54:00.000 But all these things that we heard that the Comanches could do underneath the horse's neck and rapidity of fire. 0.63

00:54:07.000 Comanches never stood in one place and closed one eye and shot. 1.00

00:54:11.000 They never once did that.

00:54:12.000 They were moving, both eyes open.

00:54:13.000 Anyway.

00:54:15.000 Look at the Anderson video.

00:54:16.000 It's really cool.

00:54:16.000 But what that meant was that Jack Hayes and the Rangers were at an enormous disadvantage.

00:54:22.000 And then, lo and behold, he cut to the East Coast.

00:54:29.000 This inventor named Samuel Colt had come up in the early 1830s.

00:54:34.000 With a prototype of a, it was a really ingenious little pistol.

00:54:39.000 It was a five-shot pistol, eventually made in Patterson, New Jersey.

00:54:43.000 There it is right there.

00:54:44.000 Yeah, is that the Patterson Colt?

00:54:46.000 I hope so.

00:54:47.000 It's just a five-shot chamber that was popping up with the same guy.

00:54:51.000 Yeah, it doesn't look like the Patterson Colt.

00:54:53.000 But anyway, it's a five-shot thing with revolving cylinders.

00:54:58.000 And it was a great idea, right?

00:55:00.000 Absolutely nobody wanted it.

00:55:02.000 I mean, it was like a sidearm for cavalry, but the U.S. didn't have a cavalry, so it didn't really work out.

00:55:08.000 For some reason, Mirabel Lamar, the president of Texas, ordered 180 of these things, and they found their way to Texas.

00:55:15.000 The five-shot Patterson Colts.

00:55:17.000 And somehow Jack Hayes and his guys found out about them.

00:55:21.000 And they got a hold of them, they trained with them, and they immediately understood what it meant.

00:55:26.000 It meant equalizing the warfare against the Comanches.

00:55:29.000 Because now they had five shots, one interchangeable cylinder, now ten.

00:55:34.000 Ten shots in each pistol now.

00:55:36.000 So in close hand combat, the world changed.

00:55:40.000 And not only did that world change, but eventually...

00:55:45.000 Everybody 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.

00:55:58.000 Colt 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. 0.99

00:56:10.000 Before 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.

00:56:19.000 Yeah, that was the other thing that was really shocking, was that the U.S. soldiers would try to get off their horse To engage.

00:56:29.000 Right.

00:56:30.000 Right, because they didn't think you fought – the only people who fought mounted were the Plains Indians.

00:56:35.000 I mean, nobody thought – fighting mounted was not something anybody did.

00:56:39.000 If 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. 0.96

00:56:47.000 But Comanches were fully mounted and Rangers were fully mounted.

00:56:50.000 And 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.

00:57:04.000 Nobody 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.

00:57:15.000 Nobody had seen those either.

00:57:16.000 And so these crazy – these rangers that dressed any way they wanted to, you know, sometimes with no shirts on and serapes and crazy hats.

00:57:24.000 I mean, they were just the rangers.

00:57:25.000 Everybody was scared to death of them.

00:57:27.000 Do we know the history of the bow and arrow amongst the Native Americans?

00:57:31.000 Do we know when it was first implemented?

00:57:34.000 I'm not an expert on it.

00:57:36.000 I mean, I don't know.

00:57:38.000 Because 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?

00:57:52.000 His 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.

00:58:05.000 And I believe – I'm sure that did include Native Americans, but it was – no, it was a whole – he looked at the whole world.

00:58:11.000 And so, do you think Native Americans, well, we don't know, but I'm just speculating, did Native Americans develop this ability independently?

00:58:18.000 Or did they learn it from anyone else?

00:58:21.000 Like, 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.

00:58:33.000 The first interaction from anywhere else is 16th century Spain.

00:58:37.000 They already had bow and arrows by then.

00:58:41.000 That's the first interaction with Europeans.

00:58:44.000 So the question is, did the bow come over on the land bridge?

00:58:48.000 I don't know.

00:58:50.000 Not my field.

00:58:51.000 No, of course.

00:58:52.000 It'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.

00:59:02.000 Maybe the Mongols? 0.96

00:59:03.000 Did they have – I don't know.

00:59:05.000 The 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.

00:59:21.000 They couldn't believe their abilities with horses, breaking them.

00:59:25.000 I've never seen anything like it before.

00:59:27.000 I've never seen anything like it before.

00:59:29.000 No saddle either, right?

00:59:30.000 Yeah, they did have a saddle.

00:59:31.000 That was part of the Spanish technology.

00:59:33.000 Very, very, very minimal.

00:59:35.000 You'll see it in museums.

00:59:37.000 Can you see if you can find one of those saddles?

00:59:40.000 Yeah, a Spanish saddle.

00:59:42.000 Anyway, but particularly the shooting.

00:59:49.000 There it is right there.

00:59:50.000 Wow.

00:59:51.000 Minimal, yes.

00:59:54.000 And one of the ways they could shoot underneath the neck of the horse was to hang a thong off the side of one of the saddles.

01:00:03.000 A thong?

01:00:04.000 Well, a loop, a leather loop.

01:00:07.000 A leather loop that would allow them, because otherwise they would need to be supported as they came down underneath the...

01:00:13.000 And they were fairly small people, right?

01:00:15.000 They were fairly small people.

01:00:16.000 So they would kind of climb off the saddle and hang on the side?

01:00:21.000 Hang on the side.

01:00:21.000 Full gallop, full gallop, shooting...

01:00:23.000 Under the neck. 0.99

01:00:24.000 Accurately, arrows that would kill a man at 30 yards underneath the neck. 0.99

01:00:28.000 Wow. 0.98

01:00:29.000 But people...

01:00:29.000 So the question there, I don't know the answer to that, and I don't know that anyone does.

01:00:35.000 What the white men saw just absolutely floored them with abilities with arrows.

01:00:42.000 And 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. 0.96

01:00:52.000 And the Comanche boy would miss it by a foot. 1.00

01:00:54.000 Look at that picture right there of them doing interaction.

01:00:57.000 That's incredible.

01:00:58.000 Underneath the...

01:00:59.000 So they're basically using the horse as a shield.

01:01:02.000 Yeah, that's the whole idea.

01:01:03.000 And 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.

01:01:11.000 And 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.

01:01:19.000 But...

01:01:20.000 I'm sorry, so go back to what you're saying.

01:01:21.000 So when they were standing still...

01:01:23.000 Oh, so when the Comanche Boy, they asked him to shoot that dime, and the Comanche Boy wouldn't hit. 1.00

01:01:27.000 I mean, he was playing by their rules.

01:01:30.000 They wanted him to stand and aim and whatever.

01:01:34.000 And again, if you see the Lars Anderson videos, there was no such thing as closing one eye.

01:01:38.000 There was no such thing almost as standing still and shooting.

01:01:41.000 It was constant movement.

01:01:43.000 It was shooting from movement wherever they were going.

01:01:46.000 So they were really accurate that way.

01:01:48.000 So it was sort of like the member in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where they say, here, Sundance, try to hit that.

01:01:54.000 And Sundance Kid shoots at it and misses it.

01:01:57.000 And then on his way out, he moves.

01:02:00.000 He says, you mind if I move or something, or I'm better if I move.

01:02:03.000 It's the same deal.

01:02:04.000 It was all about movement, and it was never about anything stationary.

01:02:09.000 Anyway, so yeah, all that.

01:02:10.000 That, to answer, I have no idea how they...

01:02:13.000 I think I'm good at that.

01:02:15.000 That's what's a real shame that they don't have a written history.

01:02:18.000 I mean, that's one of many, many things.

01:02:21.000 That's a real shame that they don't have a written history.

01:02:23.000 And I would have loved to have seen someone be able to do that.

01:02:28.000 I mean, God, how incredible would it be to see what it looked like to see them?

01:02:34.000 I mean, we just missed the motion picture by 67 years.

01:02:39.000 You've got to think they were doing it for hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of years.

01:02:42.000 It's almost like just too magical to capture.

01:02:46.000 Sorry, it's gone.

01:02:47.000 Gone right before you'd invent a camera.

01:02:49.000 I mean, at least we have some photos, some still photos.

01:02:52.000 We do.

01:02:52.000 And I put in pretty big chunks of text into my book of people of the time who saw them and who described it.

01:03:01.000 That's all you can do is just what they saw and how astounded they were.

01:03:06.000 So you must have been pretty excited when you saw that Lars Anderson guy.

01:03:09.000 Oh, yeah.

01:03:10.000 Pull that guy up.

01:03:12.000 Pull up a video of that guy so we can watch it, because it is pretty amazing.

01:03:17.000 It'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.

01:03:24.000 It's interesting because this guy gets hated on a lot in the archery community.

01:03:27.000 It'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.

01:03:36.000 But watch him do it.

01:03:37.000 Yes, I say.

01:03:39.000 Unless that's a trick.

01:03:41.000 It's not a trick.

01:03:42.000 It's not a trick.

01:03:43.000 He's clearly doing what he's saying he's doing.

01:03:45.000 There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

01:03:47.000 I mean, are they tricks in terms of, like, is it something that, like, maybe wouldn't be as effective, but it's really cool to see?

01:03:54.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:03:55.000 But so what?

01:03:56.000 So what?

01:03:56.000 He's still, he's showing you, yeah, he's showing you that you can do things.

01:04:01.000 I mean, he throws a ball and then shoots, look at it, you shoot it with his...

01:04:06.000 Look at that. 0.99

01:04:06.000 He shoot it in the head with his foot. 0.99

01:04:08.000 He's also the rate of discharge, which was one of the things I had trouble believing. 0.92

01:04:12.000 When you see him shoot, it's one every half second.

01:04:16.000 He throws it, catches it, and he can shoot an arrow right after he catches it.

01:04:21.000 Look at how he throws something in the air and then shoots two shots.

01:04:26.000 Two! 0.99

01:04:27.000 He throws it in the air, and then by the time it hits the ground, he hits it twice.

01:04:32.000 I mean, it's incredible.

01:04:33.000 And he's really accurate with this thing.

01:04:35.000 He also, one of his cases is that, you know, he is always moving.

01:04:39.000 It's continuous movement.

01:04:40.000 He never, he doesn't close one eye.

01:04:41.000 He doesn't stand still.

01:04:42.000 He is moving all the time.

01:04:44.000 Yeah.

01:04:44.000 Everywhere he goes.

01:04:45.000 Which is what he said was a trademark of the great, the Magyars and the great, you know, archer cultures.

01:04:50.000 Look at this.

01:04:50.000 Jumps in the air, gets off an arrow before he hits the ground.

01:04:54.000 I mean, amazing.

01:04:56.000 And he's even catching arrows and then shooting them back.

01:04:59.000 Like, pshh. 1.00

01:05:01.000 Anybody that says that what he's doing is nonsense is a fool. 0.99

01:05:04.000 Like, look, I'm an archer. 0.99

01:05:06.000 He's plainly doing it.

01:05:07.000 He's plainly doing it.

01:05:08.000 You are an archer?

01:05:08.000 Yeah, that's why I have an archery range back there.

01:05:10.000 Oh, okay, so you get it.

01:05:11.000 I'm a bow hunter.

01:05:12.000 Yeah.

01:05:12.000 Well, okay, that's...

01:05:13.000 This is really impressive stuff.

01:05:17.000 I mean, I don't shoot traditional archery.

01:05:19.000 I shoot a compound bow with a sight and I can line it up to the exact yardage and all that stuff.

01:05:23.000 But I know enough to know that what this guy's doing is pretty special.

01:05:26.000 So he's showing arrows in the quiver versus arrows in his hand, how he can just grab them and pull them.

01:05:31.000 Right, so his case is that we all think that it's a quiver, right?

01:05:35.000 He says nobody who was any good ever used a quiver.

01:05:38.000 You can transport them in a quiver, but in battle you're holding them in a clustered bunch in your hand.

01:05:43.000 Just the way we're seeing these people here.

01:05:45.000 In 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.

01:05:56.000 Really interesting.

01:05:58.000 It is.

01:05:58.000 It's interesting stuff.

01:05:59.000 This is probably, I mean, because of this one gentleman, it's probably the only way we're really going to know that this was possible.

01:06:06.000 Because no one else is doing anything like this guy.

01:06:09.000 Look at this.

01:06:09.000 He's doing drive-bys on the back of a bike, and he hits...

01:06:13.000 I mean, back that up again so you can see that, because that is insane.

01:06:17.000 Watch how he's doing this right there.

01:06:19.000 Look at this.

01:06:20.000 I 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.

01:06:31.000 You know, you go up and down on a horse.

01:06:33.000 But the other thing about the stories of the Mongols, that they had developed an ability to shoot as the horse was in the air. 0.60

01:06:41.000 Because the stomping of the horse's hooves would...

01:06:45.000 During that pause.

01:06:46.000 So as the horse was up, that's when they would release.

01:06:48.000 So it would have the least amount of impact on their accuracy.

01:06:53.000 It's pretty incredible stuff.

01:06:54.000 But 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.

01:07:03.000 Now, did they have a particular prowess with archery that was known amongst Native Americans?

01:07:10.000 Was it extraordinary amongst other tribes?

01:07:14.000 I 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.

01:07:21.000 Nobody had ever seen anything like it at the time.

01:07:24.000 Now, was there a group of Northern Plains Indians that could do it?

01:07:27.000 I don't know.

01:07:28.000 But the reaction was almost universal by people who had seen a lot of Indian tribes, and they'd never seen that before.

01:07:35.000 Someone needs to make a movie.

01:07:37.000 Yeah.

01:07:38.000 You 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.

01:07:51.000 You know, the whole story.

01:07:53.000 Well, you know, Warner Brothers has been working on this for nine years.

01:07:56.000 Have they?

01:07:57.000 Yeah.

01:07:58.000 Maybe one day.

01:07:59.000 They came, as I understand it, very close.

01:08:01.000 See, this book came out nine years ago.

01:08:03.000 Right.

01:08:03.000 So that's when Warner Brothers was...

01:08:05.000 Right, and the first screenwriter was Larry McMurtry.

01:08:08.000 It was very famous.

01:08:09.000 If you had to pick a screenwriter, it would be Larry McMurtry.

01:08:14.000 You're in the belly of the beast here.

01:08:17.000 You know what it's like.

01:08:19.000 Hollywood just does what it does.

01:08:21.000 I mean, there are two modes here, I think.

01:08:22.000 Hair on fire and glacier.

01:08:24.000 And I've been through both of them over these years.

01:08:27.000 Maybe we can get your hair on fire again. 0.99

01:08:30.000 But no, we've got a great screenplay now that I didn't write, but you know, Derek Cienfrancis, the director, has been attached to it.

01:08:36.000 Are you happy with it, though?

01:08:37.000 I am extremely...

01:08:38.000 I didn't think it was possible to do a two-hour movie about that.

01:08:41.000 Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.

01:08:42.000 So what they did is they basically made it about Mackenzie and Quanah.

01:08:47.000 It's just flat brilliant.

01:08:49.000 So...

01:08:50.000 And 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.

01:08:57.000 And 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.

01:09:03.000 But that might wreck the atmosphere.

01:09:07.000 But yeah, I'd love to see it get done.

01:09:09.000 And it's a wonderful screenplay, and we'll see.

01:09:12.000 No, listen, it's more than that.

01:09:14.000 It's an amazing book, and I can't recommend it enough.

01:09:17.000 It changed the way I felt and thought about this whole thing of these settlers traveling across the country and encountering these Native American tribes.

01:09:31.000 It completely changed my whole perspective of that era in time.

01:09:38.000 Well, the needle sort of swings both ways on the question of Native Americans.

01:09:47.000 And as I said, there was sort of a school that was dominant.

01:09:52.000 Well, if you actually go back, you have kind of a mid-century impression that sort of the Indians are all bad.

01:09:59.000 And the army is good, right?

01:10:00.000 The cavalry is riding out, right?

01:10:02.000 That kind of idea of Indians.

01:10:04.000 And then you have the bury my heart at wounded knee, which is the needle swinging the other way.

01:10:08.000 These people are victims.

01:10:09.000 The army is all evil.

01:10:11.000 Which wasn't true either.

01:10:13.000 And it kind of swings.

01:10:15.000 It swings between one untruth to another untruth.

01:10:18.000 But the actual truth is somewhere in the middle.

01:10:21.000 And you do a great job of depicting that.

01:10:23.000 Like you talk about the horrific crimes that particular army people did do.

01:10:28.000 Yes.

01:10:28.000 Yeah, so there's no...

01:10:30.000 In my book, I... Objectively speaking, both sides are responsible for atrocities. 0.86

01:10:37.000 And, you know, one of the things the Rangers learned was no quarter.

01:10:41.000 You 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.

01:10:51.000 It's not very pretty.

01:10:53.000 And that was certainly Comanche way of doing things, and that was the Texas Rangers way of doing things when fighting Comanche.

01:10:59.000 So, Yeah, you have any number of great massacres perpetrated against Comanches and other Indian tribes.

01:11:10.000 Yeah, I mean, it's amazing.

01:11:13.000 I can't recommend it enough.

01:11:15.000 Well, thank you.

01:11:15.000 Have you thought about writing any other books on Native Americans or is there any other subjects like this that you'd like to tackle?

01:11:22.000 You know, I would have probably.

01:11:26.000 This book became very successful and then there was a wave of other books.

01:11:29.000 There were really not very many books at all before it about this particular Native culture.

01:11:36.000 But then there was a big wave of them right afterward, which inspired by the success of this book.

01:11:43.000 Any good ones?

01:11:44.000 Oh, yeah.

01:11:45.000 Yeah.

01:11:45.000 What was a good one?

01:11:46.000 Let's see.

01:11:51.000 The 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.

01:12:03.000 That might have been a choice of mine, for example, would be to go, hey, I'll do the Sioux and Northern Plains Indians.

01:12:08.000 Won't that be great?

01:12:09.000 But there were some books like that.

01:12:10.000 But The Heart of Everything That Is is a very – I would recommend that one.

01:12:16.000 There was another book actually that came out just before mine called Blood and Thunder that's quite good.

01:12:21.000 But...

01:12:24.000 Anyway, it preempted me on some of the choices I might have made.

01:12:29.000 But I'd like to return to it.

01:12:30.000 I've been in the Civil War now for a few years and writing about the Civil War.

01:12:35.000 I have a new book out called Hymns of the Republic about the final year of the war.

01:12:38.000 I wrote a biography of Stonewall Jackson.

01:12:40.000 And so I've been kind of – I took a right turn.

01:12:43.000 Actually, 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.

01:12:50.000 And that window – In this case, was that I could maybe do what I wanted to do.

01:12:55.000 And so I picked Stonewall Jackson, just because I wanted to do Stonewall Jackson. 0.51

01:12:59.000 And so that made me a right-angle turn into the Civil War, where I've been for a while.

01:13:03.000 But the answer is, I'd love to return to Native America. 0.99

01:13:07.000 Well, it's a whole genre of film in this country, which is so interesting, right?

01:13:11.000 The West, the Wild West movies.

01:13:13.000 I mean, it's a gigantic genre.

01:13:15.000 Of course, Clint Eastwood and so many other great movies, and even the Civil War.

01:13:20.000 There's so many stories.

01:13:22.000 We're trying to tell this insane story of what this country was and what it became and how quickly it all happened.

01:13:30.000 It's so hard for us...

01:13:32.000 When you're born, me, I was born on the East Coast.

01:13:35.000 You know, you live around cities.

01:13:36.000 It seems normal.

01:13:37.000 And then you start hearing about the West.

01:13:39.000 And then you start, like, as you're growing up, you start learning about cowboys and Indians and what happened.

01:13:44.000 But you get this sort of weird version of it where, I mean, in high school, they barely taught you anything.

01:13:53.000 Nothing comprehensive, nothing remotely touching on your book.

01:13:58.000 And then as I got older and I started getting into it more and more, it became this really weird puzzle to me until I read your book.

01:14:06.000 And your book was, I actually listened to it on audio tape, and it was one of the most sort of paradigm shifting.

01:14:16.000 It just completely shifted my perspective on how it happened.

01:14:23.000 Well, I'm glad.

01:14:24.000 I'm glad you experienced it that way.

01:14:26.000 I think people need to hear it. 0.96

01:14:27.000 It is a bit of – I mean, I think from my point of view, it's a bit of me being too dumb or naive to know any better.

01:14:33.000 I mean, I just went in as a reporter and reported. 0.68

01:14:37.000 Without any particular agenda.

01:14:40.000 Not because I'm a noble person, but just because I just didn't have any agenda.

01:14:43.000 I just reported the book and I thought, this is interesting and this is interesting.

01:14:46.000 And 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.

01:14:57.000 So, anyway.

01:14:58.000 Has anybody written a good book on Crazy Horse?

01:15:05.000 Larry McMurtry wrote a pretty good book about Crazy Horse, a small volume.

01:15:10.000 I'm trying to remember.

01:15:11.000 There was a book a few years about Crazy Horse.

01:15:13.000 But anyway, the McMurtry book is pretty good.

01:15:16.000 Yeah.

01:15:17.000 So you may go back to this sort of subject.

01:15:21.000 I may, if I could find the right subject.

01:15:28.000 Jack Hayes was something.

01:15:29.000 I could still go back.

01:15:31.000 Jack Hayes was a really interesting guy.

01:15:33.000 Yeah, well, it seemed like when you were talking about in the book, like this could be a whole other avenue that you could take.

01:15:39.000 I could see going back to Jack Hayes, because he continues to intersect with Native America all through his life.

01:15:46.000 Anyway, so we'll see.

01:15:47.000 It'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.

01:16:01.000 He was the uber ranger.

01:16:03.000 He was the man.

01:16:03.000 He was like 5'8", 5'9", slender, the high voice.

01:16:08.000 Just a bad motherfucker. 1.00

01:16:09.000 Oh, man, was he bad. 1.00

01:16:11.000 And he had all these giant rangers, really mean people.

01:16:16.000 I mean, these were people you did not want to pick the fight with in the Western bar.

01:16:19.000 You know, complete deference.

01:16:21.000 Yeah.

01:16:22.000 Well, 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.

01:16:30.000 And not only able, but nobody else would do it. 0.99

01:16:33.000 I mean, these were 23-year-old guys who didn't have families and who just didn't give a shit about anything. 0.97

01:16:39.000 They were happy to be out in the field for six months without pay, which was often true. 0.99

01:16:43.000 I mean, they often just didn't get paid.

01:16:46.000 They weren't armed, they weren't paid, and they wanted to fight Indians. 1.00

01:16:52.000 I mean, how many 41-year-olds you know want to do that?

01:16:57.000 It's just such a wild group of humans.

01:17:00.000 I really do hope you write a book about that.

01:17:03.000 Well, I've often thought of pursuing that one, and that gets into other Native American areas.

01:17:09.000 Well, listen, man, I mean, just being able to talk about it on here, I'm hoping that it gives it a boost again.

01:17:17.000 Well, thank you for whatever.

01:17:18.000 I'm so glad you like it.

01:17:20.000 It'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.

01:17:34.000 You knocked it out of the park, man.

01:17:35.000 Thank you.

01:17:36.000 And thanks for coming here.

01:17:36.000 I really appreciate it.

01:17:37.000 Thank you.

01:17:38.000 Appreciate it.

01:17:38.000 Bye, everybody.

01:17:41.000 That was awesome.

01:17:42.000 Well, that was painless.

01:17:43.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - December 10, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1397 - S.C. Gwynne

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