In this episode of the Mediator podcast, I speak with historian and author, Dr. John McPherson, about his new book, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion. It's a fascinating look into the early days of contact between Native Americans and Europeans, and how they came to know each other. And how they learned to communicate with each other in the first half of the 19th century, before Lewis and Clark made contact with the Native Americans in the early 1800s and early 1900s. I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you do, please remember to subscribe to my other podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, where I talk about the history of the American west, The Meat Eater Podcast, and The Mediator Podcast, where you can listen to stories about Native Americans from the past and learn more about the people who came before them. If you like the show, please consider becoming a patron patron! or become a patron. Thank you so much for all the support and support the show! Cheers, Joe and the Eaters! - The Eaters and Cheers! "The Joe Rogans Experience" by day, by night, All Day, All Night, by Night, all Day, by Day, By Night, All day, All By Night. - Joe and All Day by Night by Night - by Night - by Day and All By Day, by Night all Day by Day All Day by By Night All Day! by Joe and Night by Day by Day & Night, All Day & All Day By Night by Morning, by Evening, by Morning & Evening by Morning by Morning and Evening, By Day and Evening by Day by Morning/By Night, By Morning, , by Day/By Evening, , All Day all Day By Day by Afternoon/By Late Afternoon, by After Breakfast, by Moon and After Lunch, by Any Time, By Late Afternoons, By Evening, After Evening, and After Night,By Day,By Evening by Night & Evening, I'll See Yaas, I Love & Blessings, I'm Yours Truly, by Meals and Blessings! , I'll be Back? by Moon & Night! I'll Be Back, I ll See You, Meals & Gents & Greetings, - I'll Come Back, I Love You!
00:00:46.000Continental Reckoning, the American West in the Age of Expansion.
00:00:50.000One of the most fascinating subjects, I think, in the history of Of the human race.
00:00:55.000I mean, it is just such an amazing story and such a tragic story and such a crazy story of the amount of change that took place over a relatively short period of time.
00:01:07.000Yeah, and how little most people really understand about the actual history of the Native Americans and that.
00:01:16.000One of the things that was most fascinating about the Mediator podcast was that At the time that Lewis and Clark had come to America, a hundred years before that, there had been Native Americans that had traveled to France.
00:01:37.0001720s, there was a group of Native people from Kansas, Missouri area, and they had been courted by the French because the French wanted to expand their fur trade into that area up the Missouri River.
00:01:51.000So they – and the Spanish had recently suffered a terrible military defeat there in sort of what's today eastern Nebraska.
00:01:59.000So the French sent this guy named Etienne Bourgmont to make contact.
00:02:26.000There were several tribes, the Missouri tribe, the Illinois tribe, I think some Osage.
00:02:32.000And they were – he then took them back from there down to Mississippi, down to New Orleans, and then over across the Atlantic to Le Havre.
00:02:42.000And then they went by coach from there to Paris.
00:02:45.000And they spent several months there in Paris, being fitted by King Louis XV. Visiting the Paris Opera, which they said was a great place full of sorcerers.
00:03:21.000They were taken to the Corte de Fontainebleau.
00:03:24.000They showed their expertise at hunting by riding bareback in the Bois de Boulon, you know, the royal woods, naked and bareback, shooting pheasants.
00:04:19.000Well, there were – Bourgmont himself had lived for years among the Indians and was an expert on the Missouri River.
00:04:29.000So he was a Frenchman who came over, enlisted in the army, deserted, sort of went native, became a, you know, a French mountain man, took up with the Indians, had this child by this woman.
00:04:47.000And there were other – Remember these Indians, as you can tell in this story, were very cosmopolitan, very sophisticated.
00:04:55.000They knew English, or some of them did.
00:04:57.000So I think the point to remember is that this – long before our image of Americans, you know, Coming into this area, there was all sorts of contact between Native peoples and Europeans,
00:05:15.000It was really a mixed world, a world that was far more complex, far more interesting, in my opinion, than the usual way that we remember it.
00:05:26.000To put it into perspective, it's hard for us in 2023 to look back at this time period and really have a context for it.
00:05:38.000But to put it into perspective, so first Europeans arrived here essentially in the 1400s.
00:07:00.000And that had been going on slowly, sort of a slow simmer of these two, of these cultures, the cultures coming together, you know.
00:07:06.000And so the many ways in which the Indians were far more sophisticated and well-traveled, far-traveled, than the Americans who were coming in there.
00:07:16.000We think, you know, our national myth has it that when Lewis and Clark, this is in, you know, 184, 186, Lewis and Clark make their way up the Missouri River into the west, that that's sort of The start of the history of the West.
00:07:31.000Before that, Lewis's famous quote as they left the Mandan villages in 1805 says, we're heading up – he compared himself to Columbus.
00:07:42.000They said, we're heading into this place where the foot of civilized man has never trodden.
00:08:21.000Which is a fascinating book because they essentially document the spread of disease without meaning to do it because that is really where it all started from.
00:08:40.000And there's always been this confusion as to what happened to the Mayas, but it's probably the same exact thing that happened to 90 plus percent of the Native Americans.
00:08:56.000But certainly disease was a very important factor in the conquest of native peoples and the conquest by Europeans of North America and South America.
00:09:06.000Is it clearly established that Cabeza de Baco was one of the first Europeans to make it to the continental United States?
00:09:14.000Or was it possible that others had made it before that, but we don't have record of it?
00:09:19.000He was the first to move to encounter what we know today as the Southwest.
00:09:24.000He was part of a shipwrecked expedition on the Texas coast.
00:09:29.000And he and a few others, including a black African slave, Esteban Stephen, They were the ones who made their way, first enslaved by the Indians, and then they gradually made their way across the southwest up to what is today Arizona, like the Zunis,
00:09:45.000and then made their way southward into Mexico.
00:09:51.000And if you look at the history of the human race across the planet, It's one of the most transformative stories in such a short amount of time where everything changed so rapidly because it coincides with the Industrial Revolution and all these things happen and then you have massive cities appearing in these places where there was nothing before.
00:12:09.000Yeah, I've discussed this many times with Graham Hancock, and one of the things that he has brought up recently is the use of LIDAR. And then through this use of LIDAR they found these grids and what appears to be irrigation systems and streets and structures and foundations and all of it unexplained and all of it was essentially covered by a vast rainforest.
00:12:56.000Do you think that with the Amazon that we're looking at disease there as well, that it's probably European settlers came and – or explorers?
00:13:04.000Trevor Burrus You mean to explain the – I doubt that.
00:13:25.000I suspect if you look at any civilization, it rises, peaks, collapses.
00:13:32.000One of the more interesting things that we found was that when you look at the rise of syphilis in Europe, that some are connecting at least some forms of syphilis to European settlers who had come to America and then gone back to Europe and brought syphilis with them.
00:13:49.000That, too, is being argued about right now.
00:13:53.000But right now, the evidence is quite clear.
00:13:56.000And we're talking about venereal syphilis now.
00:13:59.000Syphilis can also be a kind of a skin infection.
00:15:20.000And so they started wearing these – they put these beautiful wigs on.
00:15:25.000And the more money you had, the bigger your wig was.
00:15:29.000And it became, because the syphilis had just run rampant through this population, so many people were losing their hair, and they would get these holes in their faces, sores.
00:15:48.000So, at the time, hair loss was a one-way ticket to public embarrassment.
00:15:52.000Long hair was a trendy status symbol and a bald dome could stain any reputation.
00:15:56.000While Samuel Peeps' brother acquired syphilis, the diarist wrote, if my brother lives, he will not be able to show his head, which would be a very great shame to me.
00:16:06.000And so the syphilis outbreak sparked a surge in wig making.
00:16:09.000Victims hid their baldness as well as their bloody sores that scoured their faces with wigs made of horse, goat, or human hair.
00:16:18.000Perukes were also coated with powder, scented with lavender or orange to hide any funky aromas.
00:16:25.000Although common wigs were not exactly stylish, they were a shameful necessity.
00:16:28.000That changed in 1655 when the King of France started losing his hair.
00:16:34.000And so these guys started wearing wigs, and everybody started wearing wigs, and the bigger your wig was, the more famous and rich and established you were, so the term big wigs.
00:17:13.000So that is part of the story is this exchange of disease and the lack of immunity and how much of a devastating effect this had on the North Americans who did encounter the Europeans.
00:18:47.000Also the fact that, especially later on, when time passes, the greater mortality rate among Indians was because of the general degeneration of their condition.
00:18:58.000Just like when we see in COVID, you know, people who are the poorest, people who have the least medical care, The people who are – they're the ones who are most vulnerable.
00:19:47.000If smallpox hits an Indian village, let's say, in the Dakotas, it kills – unlike other diseases, smallpox is sort of democratic in the sense that it kills all ages.
00:21:11.000Now, when the English came over, theirs was a combination of governmental ambition and a business enterprise.
00:21:20.000But in any case, this was all being directed, you know, by others in Europe for their own ends.
00:21:26.000Not the ones who were coming over, you know, but they were there.
00:21:28.000They were trying to do it for their own purposes.
00:21:33.000Then that raises the question, who – so the ones who came over, you know, Why were they there?
00:21:39.000And I think that the most common answer is the one you suggested, better lives.
00:21:45.000You've got to remember in Europe, especially places like England, land was very scarce.
00:21:52.000So the possibility of something being born into the peasantry or being born on the lower ranks, the possibility of them acquiring land was beyond remote.
00:22:03.000And then somebody says, okay, if you'll just go across the Atlantic, we'll give you land.
00:22:14.000It's fascinating because that pessimism seems to still be prevalent in a lot of English people.
00:22:22.000This pessimism as far as, like, your ability to improve your lifestyle.
00:22:28.000You know, I have many English friends that have come over here and say the attitude in America is that, like, you can go out and you can forge your own path, you can do things, but in England there's this, like, they're very dismissive of that.
00:24:04.000Yeah, just the kind of human that did that really sort of establishes the ethic of what it means to be an American because these are wild, risk-taking people.
00:24:17.000And these are the people that essentially first established America, or as far as Europeans.
00:24:24.000You have to be a wild person to take that kind of a chance.
00:24:29.000But of course, it's always balanced between what appears to be a dead-end life from where they were.
00:24:36.000All immigration is sort of a push and a pull.
00:24:39.000Americans had a great pull, but they're also being pushed.
00:24:43.000It's also extraordinary that there was this enormous continent, far bigger than Europe, that was available, that you could go there and establish a new life to.
00:24:59.000Imagine now – I'm retired now but I used to tell my classes – imagine that suddenly the news hits that there is another universe that we didn't know was there.
00:26:03.000Yeah, we can look at it from that perspective, marvel at it, but man, from the perspective of the natives that lived here, what a horrific invasion and what a devastating effect it had on their way of life, their culture, and how much is missing from their cultural memory because of this devastation of 90% of their population.
00:26:27.000Except for the Black Death, this was the most horrific thing that has ever happened in recorded human history to Indian peoples in the New World.
00:26:38.000Nothing remotely approaches it except the Black Death, except the bubonic plague.
00:26:45.000And even then, when you consider it, when you track it over time, bubonic plague, of course, came in waves, occasional waves.
00:26:52.000If you look at this as one story over 400 years, it's by itself.
00:26:58.000Well, it's not only by itself for human beings, but it's also by itself for native wildlife, which is another incredible aspect of this story of American expansion.
00:27:08.000I watched the Ken Burns documentary on the American buffalo, and you were in that as well, as well as Steve Rinella.
00:27:16.000That is a crazy story, that no wildlife in this country can survive being a commodity.
00:27:30.000Trevor Burrus It might survive, but it's going to have a real tough time.
00:27:59.000Buffalo were just the most dramatic example of dozens, scores of species of animals in the New World, in North America, that were driven either to extension completely or really close to it.
00:28:17.000Dan Flores, I think he's been on your show.
00:28:41.000And of course you made the essential point.
00:28:45.000What that is, it's not just that they're being hunted and exploited for the profit of people who are coming into.
00:28:53.000That's really part of an even larger process that is the complete transformation of a world.
00:29:00.000That's one of the things that I try to emphasize in this book.
00:29:03.000Between 1850 and 1880, the western third of North America was literally remade, ecologically, not just culturally, socially.
00:29:17.000Ecologically, it was made over into a new world.
00:29:22.000And that world, of course, was not one that Native peoples knew how to work.
00:29:27.000Their existence relied on them being able – relied on centuries of knowledge gained from this intricate understanding and use, this sort of choreographed life of this place,
00:29:43.000of this place, relying upon its resources.
00:29:45.000And also plants, of course, crops and so forth.
00:29:49.000And the Europeans come in and they just transform it.
00:30:14.000Now, when it comes to the American bison, there certainly was a market hunting aspect of it, that they were hunting them for their tongues, they were hunting them for their hides, but there was also, it seems like there was a motivation to remove the Native Americans' ability to sustain themselves.
00:30:34.000Or was that a – just a peripheral – was that like – It's a little complicated as usual.
00:30:44.000You're talking about two things here first.
00:30:45.000When you're talking about the – I think it's fair to say that Indian peoples had their own hand in this.
00:32:19.000Hundreds of thousands of robes are sent down the Missouri and the Mississippi down to be marketed out of New Orleans and to be sent east.
00:32:31.000That had an early effect on the decline of the bison population.
00:32:36.000In my own research and work on this, I think that something close to a half of the bison population at its peak is explained by that sort of hunting and other kinds of ecological and environmental changes that were going on in the West.
00:32:56.000So long before the hide hunters, those white hide hunters went out there and started killing them, Indians were killing them.
00:35:15.000But that he says that he believes that this insane number of bison that people at first witnessed, that this was because the Native Americans had declined so much there was no pressure on them.
00:35:47.000You get rid of predators, the beaver population booms, and all of a sudden, all the creeks are dammed and their lands flooded and so forth.
00:35:54.000So yeah, it's this extraordinarily intricate relationship and connection that we have with the world around us.
00:36:02.000And you mess with any one part of it, and the rest of it's going to change.
00:36:05.000And human beings love to mess with things.
00:36:10.000Especially when we came to a place that we didn't really have an understanding of the ecosystem, like North America.
00:36:17.000Another thing that Dan talks about that's really fascinating was that horses originated from North America, but were wiped out, but had already been transferred to Europe and to other parts of the world, and then were reintroduced when Europeans came here.
00:36:36.000What year was that when that started happening?
00:36:41.000They evolved in the southern plains for 50 million years from a critter called a hieracotherium, which is about the size of a collie, into the modern horse.
00:36:56.000And fairly late in that story, that is to say only two or three million years ago, they migrated along with all kinds of other animals – camels, for example.
00:37:05.000Evolved alongside horses in the southwest.
00:37:09.000And they made that trip, you know, over Beringia, over the land bridge there.
00:39:27.000People by that point had just been able to make their way over in the other direction.
00:39:34.000Beringia was a two-way street, a two-way highway, and there were animals coming over from Asia at the same time that American animals were going over in the other directions.
00:40:18.000Bison antiquus, if you can imagine one now, the bulls have these – the horns spread just like ours do.
00:40:25.000The horn spread of a bison antiquus was great enough that LeBron James could lie down between the tips of the horns and not touch either one.
00:41:32.000Melted almost instantaneously most of the North American ice cap that covered half the continent and miles of ice and all that.
00:41:41.000And that he thinks that that was the origin of the mass extinction along with human beings.
00:41:48.000There was a combination of those two things.
00:41:51.000I've heard that idea, but I frankly don't know enough about it.
00:41:54.000I'm trying to bring Randall together with someone who is an expert, like Dan Flores.
00:42:00.000I'd love to bring Randall and Dan Flores together so they can sort of compare notes, because both of them are working on the same problem from different angles.
00:42:27.000Well, it's so interesting that we still have some animals left over, like the pronghorn antelope that moves at speeds that don't make any sense considering the predators that are available for it.
00:42:36.000They're so much faster than everything else because they had to evade the North American cheetah.
00:43:27.000There's a place called Catalina Island in California where what they're trying to do now is use snipers and helicopters to wipe out the deer population.
00:43:54.000And, of course, that's the kind of context that you could put in the decline of native peoples here.
00:44:00.000What we're doing is messing with the ecological arrangement in ways that make it impossible for certain animals that have adapted to that to survive.
00:44:17.000The difference was, of course, that Indians are human beings and human beings have the imagination to imagine a different way and to respond to it in ways that others can't.
00:44:27.000One of the more fascinating and horrific aspects of the story of the decline of the native population in America is that they had this incredibly unique lifestyle that really wasn't available anywhere else in the world at that time.
00:44:46.000Most of the rest of Europe and Asia had sort of changed and moved to agriculture and moved to cities and these people had these Immense tribes, super sophisticated hunter-gatherer civilizations that lived in symbiosis with the land.
00:45:03.000And to us, people that sort of understand how horrible it is that that's happened, we have this incredible romantic attachment to Native Americans.
00:45:19.000In what's today the United States in the East, highly sophisticated forms of agriculture, growing a variety of crops in the Southwest, relying especially on corn.
00:45:31.000A good part of what's today the United States, especially the West, were hunter-gatherer peoples and fishers.
00:45:38.000They had figured out these ways to—these sort of—the Incredibly complicated and complex practiced ways of moving through their year, month by month, week by week,
00:45:53.000in ways that they had practiced and learned about over many generations that allowed them really a remarkably high standard of living.
00:46:04.000One of the limitations of a hunter-gatherer society is that you cannot expand in numbers beyond a certain limit, about 125. You know, if you get bigger than that, you really can't support it.
00:46:19.000So what you had was this extraordinary splay, this extraordinary variety of peoples, you know, hundreds, hundreds of different Today, there are 530 federally recognized tribes in the United States.
00:46:40.000And that's just – those are the ones who have survived physically and culturally.
00:46:45.000So there's this remarkable array of peoples, many of them speaking different languages or different dialects.
00:46:54.000All of them in contact with the others in these very intricate trade relationships.
00:47:34.000Yeah, Dunbar's number meaning that we have in our mind the ability to hold a relationship with a certain number of people intimately.
00:47:43.000And then as it spreads out further, we can know some people sort of, we kind of know of them and But there's a small group that would be your family, a larger group that would be your tribe, and then there's neighboring tribes.
00:49:36.000And what's interesting also about Dunbar, I'm sure you remember this from his book, when you get down below 125, smaller groups, there's also groups in which there's a certain intimacy where you can absolutely trust these people.
00:50:25.000Well, that's one of the things that's fascinating about things like the battle at Little Bighorn because the Native American groups had figured out, listen, we got to get together.
00:50:37.000The only way we're going to stop these invaders is if we band together and form a much larger group.
00:52:53.000Now the battle itself, of course, a larger battle lasted much longer or more than a day, about two days as he's Part of the command under Reno retreated to this hill and was besieged and held under siege for a day and a half.
00:56:02.000And the Nez Perce took them in, saved them, helped them get some horses and canoes to keep on their way.
00:56:14.000And on the way back, Lewis and Clark stayed with them more than a month.
00:56:19.000And they formed, in the eyes of the Nez Perce, they formed this alliance with the Americans.
00:56:26.000And they swore, from this time on, we're friends, we're allies.
00:56:31.000You help us when we fight, we'll help you when you fight.
00:56:35.000And that was in 1860. They kept that promise from 1806 until 1877. As their land was being overrun, as these appalling treaties were being forced upon them,
00:56:56.000And then finally in 1877, the government said, okay, that's enough.
00:57:02.000You've got to come into this reservation.
00:57:06.000And the ones who were living off of it had to then – within one month, within a month, they had to pack up everything.
00:57:17.000They had to – Leave their homeland that they had known for generations.
00:57:23.000They had to cross the Snake River at its highest point, somehow get their families, you know, women, children, kids, old folks, across this river to gather, to go into this reservation,
00:57:42.000Even though the treaty that required them to do that was a fraud.
00:57:50.000And on the eve, literally the day before they were to go on to the reservation, to be forced out of the reservation, these young men sort of snapped.
00:57:59.000And these young men took off and killed a bunch of white folks that they had grudges against.
00:58:05.000That then triggered this war, triggered this larger outbreak against whites.
00:58:10.000That then, of course, brought the army in and the army tried to put this down.
00:58:17.000But as I researched that book, the question that kept coming back to me was, why did they do that?
00:58:28.000Because at the time of the war, they were completely at peace with the Americans around them.
00:59:46.000But one of the things that 1923 documents, it stars Harrison Ford, and it's very interesting, but it documents these women that are forced from their tribe to go into these schools, where Christianity is forced upon them, they're beaten and treated horrifically.
01:00:03.000It's very hard to watch, because you know that that is what happened.
01:00:10.000That goes way back before 1923. By 23, it's sort of winding down.
01:00:15.000But yeah, all sorts of, of course, scandalous news recently, in the past year or two, about the kinds of treatment that came out of those schools.
01:00:27.000Here in Canada, the same sort of thing is being revealed in Canada about the abuses under those schools.
01:00:35.000It's not just Christianity that's being forced on.
01:00:40.000They're required to speak only English.
01:00:43.000They're punished if they speak their own languages.
01:00:45.000They give up their appearance or cut their hair, dress in a certain way.
01:00:52.000Now, there's a wonderful irony in that show.
01:00:57.000I said a moment ago, most people in the public think of the Indian as if there's one group of people.
01:03:39.000Now on this much larger continental scale, Indians from all over, native peoples from all over the nation, now begin to see that they are related, related in their circumstances, not by blood.
01:03:53.000So the Indian was created, not killed, in the boarding schools.
01:03:59.000When they initially tried to move the natives to reservations, were they doing it because where the natives were there was valuable resources?
01:04:11.000Were they doing it because geographically they could control them better in these regions?
01:04:16.000Like, what was the motivation initially?
01:05:15.000So it was both of those things together.
01:05:18.000Trevor Burrus Which is historic – like when we look back at it now, it's like one of the most horrific aspects of it that we just tried to eliminate them and just integrate them into our culture.
01:06:44.000We have to have this common religion and education.
01:06:50.000We've got to take their young people and we've got to put them in schools where they will not only learn the basics of the three R's and so forth, but they'll be culturally educated.
01:07:15.000So you often hear the term genocide thrown around, and there are times in American history when that was absolutely true, when there was an effort to simply eradicate Indian peoples.
01:07:29.000But the whole reservation system was not meant for that.
01:07:33.000Sometimes it turned out that way, but the purpose of it Was this control and transformation.
01:08:51.000Now, it's not true, I think, that once – there's some really interesting works going on right now by a historian named Benjamin Badley who is studying in California.
01:09:03.000In the gold rush, there were Indians who said, oh, hmm.
01:09:09.000They're going to give me a bunch of stuff for this stuff.
01:09:20.000That was another interesting thing about your discussion with Steve Rinello, that we think of the 49ers as the miners, but there was 48ers.
01:09:37.000And gold was discovered in the American River on January 24, 1848. So, you know, three weeks into 1848. The word then began to leak out, made it to San Francisco.
01:09:54.000And slowly, Greg, this is now 1848, so it takes a long time for news to get from California to the east.
01:10:37.000And people are making thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars out there.
01:10:42.000But the point here is that from January 1848, when Gold was discovered, to the end of 1848, Nobody in the East really either knew about this, there were rumors,
01:12:15.000The rest of them, there's what's called the Chile War in which Chileans are driven out of the violence.
01:12:22.000So these people are either driven out completely or they're confined to the edges while the 49ers, including, of course, the Indians.
01:12:33.000This is what triggered one of the few cases where this is clearly genocide, in which there was a concerted Formal effort to eradicate Indian peoples who are on these gold fields.
01:12:50.000The California legislature funded bond issues to pay for militias to go kill Indians.
01:12:59.000Congress reimbursed California, the legislature, to pay for those expeditions.
01:13:11.000Ben Madley, who wrote the book on this, who calls it a killing machine.
01:13:16.000One of the few times in American history when we could say absolutely, yes, this was attempted genocide.
01:13:23.000Trevor Burrus And it was specifically because of the commodity of gold.
01:16:20.000Those are the ones that we're most aware of publicly.
01:16:25.000If the population in California, Native population in California, dropped as much as we think it did, that would be as if every Native person in California Montana,
01:16:43.000North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona vanished.
01:18:47.000And then It wasn't until around 1680 with this rebellion of Pueblo Indians in the Santa Fe area that drove the Spanish out for 12 years that these horses began to spread across the west.
01:19:06.000Now they had begun to spread before and we're coming to understand now that there were probably more than Out there than we realized, earlier than we realized.
01:19:17.000But the explosive growth of horses out of New Mexico comes after 1680. 1780, One hundred years later, Indian peoples across the plains in the southwest and in the Rocky Mountains have all developed,
01:19:38.000adapted the horse, adopted and adapted to that horse into what we call horse cultures.
01:19:44.000That is, these ways of life that depend upon the horse.
01:19:49.000Without the horse, you can't do what you want to do.
01:19:53.000It's like we have a car culture, right?
01:19:57.000And this gave them, among other things, great military power, economic power, but also military power.
01:20:10.000The key to that, Joe, was the fact that horses are herbivores, right?
01:20:19.000And they're adapted to the second largest grassland on Earth, the Great Plains.
01:20:26.000And when you put a human on a horse, then it becomes something else.
01:21:16.000It's bad news for the bison, really bad news for the bison, because the first time you have a grass-eating predator, you have a killer that can draw upon the same energy in the grasses that the bison do.
01:21:36.000And it's ultimately fatal for them, right?
01:21:40.000But at the same time, it becomes this – these horse cultures become extraordinary, you know, military machines.
01:22:59.000They and the Comanches formed, in effect, one great empire stretched from southern Canada all the way into Mexico, a native empire, right?
01:23:11.000That's what we broke when we came in with a little bighorn in 1876 against the Comanches, what that book writes about, 1874. It was also the last time that a horse culture arose on Earth.
01:23:31.000The first were about 5,000 years ago in Ukraine.
01:23:36.000And then, of course, that way of life spreads across Central Asia, the Mongols.
01:24:21.000What we see when you look at the Little Bighorn, when you look at the defeat of the Comanches, when you look at the defeat of the other Indian tribes, what you're seeing is the end of a 5,000-year epic in world history, an epic that began at the same place.
01:27:09.000They develop these trade networks of trading horses up to the northern plains where their winters are so severe that they had terrible losses every year.
01:27:19.000So they would sell horses, trade horses up to the north.
01:27:23.000This is a very sophisticated arrangement.
01:28:41.000Who knows how many, if not hundreds of thousands of these have been found in this area where these people live for a long time, just surviving off the buffalo and wild game and primarily eating only meat, which gave them a big advantage over the Americans who came here who needed carbohydrates and who they couldn't go a day or two without eating,
01:29:30.000And also their strategies, their ability.
01:29:33.000You know, we think of Native Americans, we think of archers as having a quiver on their back and they pull an arrow from the quiver and put it in.
01:29:40.000But they carried multiple arrows in each finger.
01:29:43.000So in the four fingers of the hand, they would have four arrows sitting in their hands ready to go.
01:29:49.000And they have the ability to cycle them through the bow very quickly, whereas the Europeans had a musket, and they had to put the ball in there and the gunpowder and tap it down, and the whole thing took like 30 seconds to get one shot off under extreme pressure of these Native Americans who were extremely adept on horseback and who actually would ride sideways so they would hide behind the body of the horse,
01:30:39.000We think of longbows or crossbows as ones with a great power.
01:30:42.000But these things were – you know, they could – hunting bison, they could shoot an arrow, one of these short bow – arrows under these short bows and it would go through a bison all the way through this animal.
01:31:36.000Well, what was documented in Empire of the Summer Moon was the use of the revolver and that the military didn't really have a desire to acquire the revolver.
01:32:52.000This whole place transformed so rapidly.
01:32:56.000And it's interesting that the sort of independent philosophy of Texans probably had a lot to do with how difficult it was to take over this place.
01:35:32.000Texas has only a couple of reservations by the end of the story, one in East Texas.
01:35:42.000The reason is, of course, that these hostilities between Texas and Indians is so extreme that they're either all – Indians are either all killed or driven out.
01:35:57.000Which is so extraordinary when you think about the expanse of their empire.
01:36:04.000It's just sort of a purging of them, you know, ethnic cleansing.
01:36:08.000When you set out to write a book this vast—I mean, this is an enormous book— It seems like there's so much information that it's got to be a daunting task to try to figure out how to pull it all together.
01:36:22.000Yeah, that was by far the biggest problem.
01:36:29.000I think I was very naive when I started to look back and you're going to do what?
01:36:36.000Because, you know, as I've already said a couple of times, it's this 30-year period when so much happens all over the place, so fast, in so many ways, so many changes,
01:36:51.000all of them bouncing off each other, all of them influencing each other.
01:36:55.000It's just this bewildering A series of things, of events.
01:37:02.000The hardest part, The hardest part of any book, you know, one of my friends told me, he said, the hardest thing about writing a book is making it a book.
01:37:12.000You know, making it one thing as opposed to just a whole series of note cards put together.
01:37:19.000But that was, it went beyond hard for this.
01:37:24.000You had to come up with some way to fit it together with a narrative, An arc over time with themes to try to hold it together.
01:37:34.000I did my best to do that, but that was by far the hardest part of it.
01:37:44.000Because it seems like it's part of a series, the History of the West series, University of Nebraska series, and we're about to finish with it now.
01:38:10.000Trevor Burrus Well, it's just – it must be so hard to put together something that if we put it into perspective today, imagine that kind of change happening from 1993 to 2023. Put that in your head and imagine.
01:38:30.000The theme that I came up with here, the closest thing I had to tie it together was Something really big happens in this country in the second half of the 19th century.
01:40:47.000What I argue in this book is that expansion in the 1840s, the discovery of gold, which comes Exactly at the same point.
01:40:59.000And what happens in the West during these 30 years, from 1850 to 1880, those things are as important as the Civil War in helping us understand how we became modern.
01:41:17.000Expansion, those 30 years of incredible changes were as important as the Civil War in turning us into a modern industrial power and expanding citizenship.
01:41:29.000In this case, not just freed people, but Indians, Hispanics, Chinese.
01:41:36.000And the strength of the power of the federal government, which takes on all kinds of new responsibilities.
01:41:44.000Because of the West, you know, from national parks to the Department of Interior to outward looking into the world.
01:41:52.000It's because of this happening that we, what I call the orientation, the reorientation of America, we turn into the Pacific.
01:42:00.000We become a Pacific-facing nation as well as an Atlantic-facing nation.
01:42:05.000We began to move into what we know today, As a people who are looking continuously across the Pacific to China, to the other nations over there, all of those things that we associate with being modern have as much to do with expansion as they do with the Civil War.
01:42:25.000So the basic idea is you cannot possibly understand America as the America that we know from the 20th and 21st centuries without looking at this story, without taking into account what follows from the acquisition of 1,200,000 square miles over three years and what happened following that.
01:42:52.000But just without books like this, I think people have sort of this abstract notion of what took place here.
01:43:27.000Well, of course, I could not agree more.
01:43:30.000We can't know who we are as Americans unless you take this into account and unless you get beyond the sort of the mythic romanticized view that we have of that and recognize it as this is the birth of modern America.
01:43:46.000Just as it's going on east and west, of course.
01:43:49.000But the point of the title is it's a continental story.
01:43:54.000It's a story that has to be told and understood from coast to coast.
01:44:00.000There's also a very bizarre aspect of our understanding of the West that has to do with the narratives that are shaped in film.
01:44:10.000I mean, we have this whole genre of film in America called Westerns.
01:44:18.000Because we have spaghetti westerns that were actually made in Italy with Trent Eastwood and all these films that detail these heroic Americans who fight off the Indians.
01:44:31.000And our narrative is the people that are on the wagon train, they're just trying to have a good life and they're getting attacked by the Indians.
01:45:43.000I think there are various ways to approach it.
01:45:48.000The most basic way is simply, in a way, sort of to restate the question by saying that there is something about the West—and this goes way back to European history, even before Columbus—there's something about the direction West.
01:46:05.000That invites us to imagine new worlds.
01:46:09.000People living in Europe, you know, the one direction in which they knew absolutely nothing was west.
01:46:15.000You look into the Atlantic, and so they were able to imagine all of these wonderful myths, you know.
01:47:56.000OK. So all of these tales of suffering pioneers and so forth but also of course Indians, the threat of Indians, overcoming the threat of Indians, that's a heroic American story.
01:48:14.000In other words, we've got to bleed our way into full possession of the West.
01:48:21.000Don't bother me with complications like this is Indian's country.
01:51:45.000My early passion was what we call social history, which is the history of everyday life.
01:51:53.000And so I was fascinated by these people who went out there, took off solar farm or whatever, picked up and went out to Oregon or someplace.
01:52:09.000And I looked at – I read hundreds of of letters and diaries and journals and memoirs of this.
01:52:19.000And I have yet to read one example of somebody saying, well, tell you what, it's going to be tough out there, but we've got to go out there and get rid of the Indians.
01:52:36.000They had these images of who the Indians were and what sort of a danger they had, but they weren't out there to dispossess the Indians.
01:52:43.000They were out there to get a better farm, out there to make a better life.
01:52:51.000But in doing that, as I said earlier, in doing that, they took part in this effort, took part in this complete transformation of this world that destroyed the Indian life.
01:53:06.000It made it impossible for Indians to live where they had.
01:53:11.000When you're writing something like this, it must be an overwhelming responsibility to accurately relay this message to people.
01:53:34.000And it took me a long time to research it, to write it, put it together.
01:53:37.000And I also try to make it as much as I can a human story.
01:53:41.000I try to give it what I say in there, give it a story with a somebodiness, you know, a sense of what it was like for individuals out there.
01:53:51.000And that means you make it very complicated.
01:53:53.000You know, there are no simple moral messages as much as we'd like for them to be.
01:54:47.000The story of the lives of cowboys, cattle drives and all the rest of that, those fascinate us for good reason because they're fascinating, right?
01:54:58.000And what I try to do is to respect that fascination at the same time of trying to tell those stories as fully as I can.
01:55:10.000With as much nuance as I can and to bring in new understandings.
01:55:15.000To point out, for example, in ranching, who knew that the great ranching empires, the Great Plains, were run mostly by corporations?
01:55:55.000The livestock was raised in the plains and then it was typically fattened up in a place like Iowa and then slaughtered in Chicago, Kansas City, places like that.
01:56:07.000Now, over time, by the end of the century, close to the end of the century, they developed refrigeration.
01:56:15.000So they were able to send slaughtered beef back, but they wouldn't send the animals themselves.
01:56:22.000But the point is it was ranching for all of our images of lonesome cowboys out there in cattle drives.
01:56:31.000Ranching was an international corporatized business.
01:56:36.000One more way in which we see the West as modernizing America.
01:56:42.000It was as much a corporatized enterprise as iron and steel or petroleum in the East.
01:57:57.000And you slaughter it at that particular time of the year to do it.
01:58:00.000What happens after the—it starts in California, actually.
01:58:03.000The first time you see modern ranching develop is before the Civil War.
01:58:08.000Out in California to feed the gold miners.
01:58:12.000But then it becomes a national phenomenon after the Civil War when we begin to raise cattle on a mass scale on public land out of the Great Plains.
01:58:25.000Now you have a modern transportation system.
01:58:29.000Railroads make their way out onto the Plains.
01:58:34.000So you can take cattle in Texas, southern Texas.
01:58:37.000You can drive them north on public domain.
01:58:51.000Cattle cars in Abilene or Dodge City, ship them to the east to fatten them up and then to slaughter.
01:59:00.000In other words, it becomes a nationalized business and an international business, and it becomes funded in the same way that other new national businesses are.
01:59:16.000It's all coordinated by the revolution in communication through the telegraph, right?
01:59:26.000So we're using these new revolutionary technologies like the telegraph and the railroad and new revolutionary economic systems like that of corporate America, you know, sort of these concentrations of capital.
01:59:42.000To create this new national, international business.