Ep. 699: The American West with Dan Flores

What you want? You think you want hot reports, You don't want horrible report.

times talking about his book as well. Started his career as not started you were a writer but also a teacher. Yeah.

the American West. Don't get into enormous detail. But how would you describe your approach because you were an environmental historian?

the standard American West stuff, you know. I mean I never did really talk much about mining strikes and the overall and trail migrations and Indian wars and gunfights and all that. I was interested in in stuff that pertained to the kind of environmental relationship between people and the natural world in the West and in the country. And so that's that's really what this podcast boils down to.

the grain. So he gets them out of grain silos and whatnot, out of barns and people use them for dog training.

But there's a thing called a vatroll. There's a there's a poison that municipalities will use on pigeons. It's kind of like an un you know. So I think that for them to see a guy jump out and net a bunch, it's probably like doubt be disturbing by I mean, if you looked at the darker side, there's like a darker side the pigeon removal that they're probably not aware of pigeons being a non native bird. But pitches have been there. I mean the French delivered introduced pigeons along

the Saint Lawrence, I think the late fifteen hundred. I mean there's been pigeons on the ground. Street pigeons. It's Lenaian name. If you see a pigeon flying around town, it's Lenaian name. Is Columba, Olivia, I believe is what it is. And people are worked up because guys are catching these things and they're probably like the guests are selling them into the pigeon market. Some guy cleared one hundred and fifty out of a park.

your property? Would you want me to wave it? And they think and go, no, I just don't want as many, you know. Uh, so that's going on there. You can get stung though, if you're the guy doing this. Mm hmm, if you're listening to you, if you're listening, they are fixing to they're fixing to get you under animal cruelty.

Habsburg Lothringen, Archduke of Austria, Prince of Hungary. The International Order of Saint Hubertus is comprised of an international group of individuals Ordun's Brothers, who are passionate about the sports of hunting and fishing, and who are vitally interested and actively involved in the preservation of wildlife its habitat in the tradition of ethical hunting and fish. They got members who are dedicated to upland bird hunting, duck hunting, and

hunters of quote larger and big game. Never been asked if Brandley was asked to be in this and I don't, I'm gonna be pised.

of humanity. To endeavor to ensure that the economic benefits derived from sports, hunting and fishing, support the regions where these activities are carried out, and to strive to enhance respect the responsible hunters and fishermen. If I get into that, I'm you know, I don't have any tattoos. I'm getting that it's got a crest.

not mean to overblow it. Halfle Finger has pointed out he feels that there is like an increasing popularity in awed hunting because you can hunt around, you don't have any kind of bag limits, Like it's kind of the you know, it's like the the you know, it's like the wild West of Awdad hunting.

ever got above seventy degrees. We hunted two days and we did our best to help the conservation aspect and tried to just shoot and use at first was our main objective.

the weather was so nice. We were able to hunt all day, glass them up in the morning and take hours to get in within rifle range, and you know, slowly pack them out without worrying about wasting any of the meat.

for various diseases and such. But to my understanding, that research facility is potential grounds for desert big horn reintroductions. Oh really, so there are it would be possible to put together some kind of study or tests to see how many females would need to be taken out of the population in order to accommodate I don't really know the right language, but you know, to accommodate number exactly exactly?

heck because it because he's really young. But we threw ribs on the grill one of the days and our first night at dinner at doctor Phil's house, he'd just forget what cut, but he just grilled it up and it you know, he he he says it's like sirloin to him, and I thought it was absolutely delicious. So kind of riffing off of Jesse Griffiths, you know, Eat a hog, Save the world.

onto anything. It's so like Shaley and every step, like the rocks, that everything is just you know, shifting under your feet, so you can't get on stable ground. And I knew I'd always had like a little bit of a fear of heights and incline, but oh goodness, I mean this I was, I like shut down at point, so I can't, can't not courier Phil or Matt like. I had my handheld quite a bit through this experience.

points right. I've been applying in ten years, ten years to drawn aud ad tag in New Mexico. I've never drawn it. So it's like they've kind of became like an honorary. They're sort of the thing they're managed, you know, like you look at with Texas wild hogs. Texas is so serious about wild hogs they dropped any license requirement you need. There is no license requirement for hogs obviously, no season, no bag limit, no license requirement. You go to California to hunt hogs, you gotta tag full big

game license and you need to tag the hog. Just like different states have really different attitudes about how to treat and handle right not native.

to do it. Like in Florida they have that island with the sandbar on it and you have to draw tagged on a sandbar on the island. I'm guessing if those sandbar were cut loose on the main Florida peninsula, they'd have a very different attitude about the sandbars, you know.

real excited. Usually what's happened is you've shot a turkey. People love it. But what's probably happened is you shot someone's turkey, right, you shot someone's fair old turkey. And so there's a new project coming out what we're going to start looking at the impacts of domestic turkeys finding their way into wild turkeys and interbreeding into wild turkey populations.

it out, you know. But so many of these non native introductions carried on until fairly late in the twentieth century, like and not all of them are necessarily have the same ecological implications, but like Himalayan snowcocker, like in the seventies, you know, and you think about now non natives are such an issue for us, but it's it's really not all that long ago.

over there. And so I mean that's I think what you can say about the horse is the horse is either an exotic with an asterisk, or it's a native with an asterisk. And I prefer the native with an asterisk, because I tend to think in terms of deep history and long time, and so an animal that's been here for fifty six million years and only gone for a wink of an eye time, to me is a native animal. I mean, that's why they went while so readily and

so quickly when they were reintroduced in the West. The primary problem, of course, is that they were reintroduced without their plaistosine predators accompanying them. And so that's why we're having such difficulty in controlling them, is we don't have you know, big hunting hyenas and American cheetahs and all

these cats, particularly that preyed on horse folds. But yeah, this is an animal that you know, although it's created a huge kind of outcry and by a lot of people as a non native, I mean, it's actually an animal that's been here for a long time. So yeah, that one's pretty quick, pretty quick story.

some things that are swept under the rug. And so at a time when the United States was a brand new country, that's the period when Lewis and Clark, Jefferson Lewis and Clark into the West eighteen four and eighteen to eighteen six, we were a country with you know, a little bit of a self esteem problem because we were brand new. The Brits were still sort of acting like at any moment they were going to reinvade and take the colonies back. And so Jefferson after the Louisiana

Purchase of eighteen oh three. I mean, if you think about the Lewis and Clark expedition and the map in your mind that you remember from school of the Louisiana Purchase, one of the things that will quickly occur to you is that why was Jefferson interested in only exploring the northern piece of it? Why didn't he have some interest in all the rest, which was a much larger chunk

of ground. To be sure, the southern boundary was less set than the northern boundary because Jefferson tried to claim that the southern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase with the real Grand River, and of course here is Spain with colonies in Texas and New Mexico on the north side of the Rio Grand who contested.

decided to do was to explore the Red River. That's the river that is the boundary today between Texas and Oklahoma. And he picked that river because he thought it came out of the Southern Rockies near Santa Fe. And so what he was organizing as a second expedition was to send a party up the Red River to its source in the Southern Rockies near Santa Fe, and then the party would cross over to the Arkansas, also believed to be to have its headwaters in the southern mountains, and

to come back to civilization down the Arkansas River. So this was not going to be an expedition that went all the way to the coasts the way Lewis and Clark's was planned. Because there was no idea of a northwest passage in the southern reaches of the West and of course, that's what Lewis and Clark were looking for. They were trying to find the fable Northwest passage for commerce. So anyway, the second expedition was essentially based on a

flawed premise. Jefferson and just about everybody else who made maps of the West at the time followed Alexander von Humboldt's map of the West, which he had put together.

southern Rockies near Santa Fe that flowed eastward. And the French in Louisiana knew there was this river, the Red River in their part of the world, that flowed from the west, and so von Humboldt put those two together and told Jefferson that the Red River headed in the southern Rockies and you could send a party up it and it would take them all the way into what

is now New Mexico and Colorado. The problem with that was that von Humboldt did not have any sources that actually tied those two rivers together, and so the river that he saw in New Mexico heading near Santa Fe was actually the Pacer which is a tributary of the Rio Grande, and the Red River that Jefferson sent his party up heads in what we now call the Yano

Westacado Plateau. It comes out of Palo Duro Canyon, which most people have heard of, this big giant canyon that's on the eastern side of this plateau in West Texas and New Mexico. So it was a river that actually didn't head in mountains. It would have led the explorers, the American explorers, out into the middle of the southern high plains and left them still like ten days travel

from New Mexico from Santa Fe. Anyway, Jefferson didn't know that, and he insisted that the Red was the River that he wanted to explore because there were all sorts of wonderful stories about what was up at the headwaters of the Red River. So he put together this expedition in eighteen oh six, two years after Lewis and Clark set out.

As Lewis and Clark were returning from the Pacific, Jefferson put together the party of more than fifty fifty people, including a military escort led by a guy named Captain John Sparks, who was a close friend of Meriwether Lewis's and William Clark's. They had all grown up in Virginia, and Jefferson selected an Irish basically he was a geographer named Thomas Freeman to lead the expedition, and he picked as the first American trained naturalists to explore in the West,

a young man he knew from Virginia. His name was Peter Custis, and he was just about to get a doctorate in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. So the expedition is known to the people who know about it as the Freeman and Custis Expedition up the Red River in eighteen oh six, and these guys starting, they.

Jefferson referred to it as the Grand Expedition, and it set out up the Red River in April of eighteen oh six, reached the last point of civilization on the Red the town of Nakotash, which was an old French town on the Red River in central Louisiana. And then, and we've talked about this, Steve, I know, because you've been interested in it. One of the things they had to do to get on the Red River above Necklish was to detour around what we think is probably the

biggest logjam anywhere in North America. It was called the great Raft, and this thing extended for about one hundred and forty miles up the Red River, and so it was impossible to travel on the river, and they had to go through all these balues and swamps around to the east of it to get around the raft and back to the river. So they did that, and they were above the Great Raft in the early summer of eighteen oh six and getting ready to head west.

Custis was trained in a university. And they get about six hundred and fifty miles up the Red River and round a bend and discover a Spanish force four times their size a arrayed across the river. And they hear that another this Spanish force is from Texas, and they hear that another Spanish force, the largest one ever sent out from Santa Fe, is coming down the upper Red River.

And so Spain determines that it is not going to allow the Americans to explore into country where the boundary has not been resolved between the United States and Spain. And Jefferson had included in his letter of instructions to both Meriwether Lewis and to Thomas Freeman a line that said, if you are if your further progress is opposed by a force authorized or not authorized by a nation. In other words, either an Indian group or some force force

authorized by a nation. I would I want you to turn back with the information you've already gathered rather than attempt to go forward, because I don't want to risk the lives of American citizens in a confrontation with an

overwhelming force. Whether Lewis never confronted anything like that, because even the Spaniards tried to stop Lewis and Clark, but they were so far to the north the Spanish forces could never find them on the Missouri and they sent several expeditions out to stop Lewis and Clark.

them back. So they were those forces that were trying to intercept Lewis and Clark were, you know, they didn't really get close, but the Red River was a lot closer to these Spanish presidios in Texas, and they successfully got a two hundred man force led by a guy named Captain Francisco Vianna, and they put up a perimeter across the Red River and Freeman and his party round of Ben they see this Spanish force. They stopped for three days and have a diplomatic conference with parlay with

the leader of the Spanish force. And this Spanish leader, h Vianna, was basically he was polite, but he was firm. My orders are you are not to be allowed to progress any farther on the river. And so Freeman consulted his orders from Jefferson, which said, if you're confronted by an overwhelming force, I want you to turn back with the information you have, and the Americans turned around and

went back. And so what I would say about this is that the reason you've never heard of it, and nobody else, really very much in America has ever heard of this expedition is because at a time when the United States had a little bit of a self esteem problem as a young country, we were perfectly willing to celebrate the success of Lewis and Clark getting to the Pacific.

But the second Presidential expedition being turned around by a foreign power and told to retrograde to American territory, that was one that I mean, even Jefferson was willing to

just sort of sweep under the rug effectively effectively. So yeah, I did a talk one time at the two hundredth anniversary of Lewis and Clark and Saint Louis under the Arts, hosted by the National Park Service, and they asked me to talk about this expedition, and immediately before me there was this Hispanic historian from I think he was from Arizona who got up and did a talk and his whole talk was about, man, I really wish some Spanish force had managed to stop Lewis and Clark that would

have really changed. And I got up after this guy said, you know, I'm going to make all your dreams come true because it happened exactly that way, but with another party, with the second expedition.

thousands of years. And in a lot of the rest of the country because of higher humidity and dense forests and rainfall, I mean, evidence of long term occupation is often really much more difficult to see. But in the arid part of North America, it's still there and it's still visible, and so that antiquity is a part of it. I mean our sense about American history as well. I mean it's only you know, four hundred years old. We've only been here since the sixteen hundreds, and wow, this

is a brand new place. Well, the truth is, of course, the story of America. Is it right now? We think at least twenty three thousand years old, that's when we

have evidence for the first people getting over here. So one of the things I tried to do in this podcast is at least spend some of it the first two or three episodes talking about these really ancient occupations and how people lived and their interactions with the natural world and wildlife and all that, because it's a story that I think really shapes the future if you believe. And I always make this argument about history is that

the past doesn't stay in the past. We're occupying a world that was shaped by our ancestors, by other humans, and the world that we're in right now is what it is in large part because of what they did. And that's kind of one of my themes. I think in this podcast.

that's the oldest European town in Louisiana, not New Orleans. Yeah, Nacotash is four years older than New Orleans. I was found in seventeen fourteen and my ancestors got there in seventeen sixteen. So yeah, so we've been in Louisiana for a very very long time.

name is Flores, which is a Spanish name. And the reason I have that name is because when the French founded Nacotash in seventeen fourteen, the Spaniards farther west were so alarmed at this French incursion because they were afraid the French were going to go up the Red River into the West, and they were absolutely right about that. That they plunked down ten miles away from Nakotish a little presidio manned by about twenty five or thirty young soldiers.

And these guys, one of whom was my ancestor, the Flores's ancestor. Here they were in the Louisiana wilderness with no available potential marriage partners, and so my sees except the enemies ten miles away. So my ancestor married it to a French family in Nacotish. And so you guys ain't all bad, Yeah, they absolutely they were Catholics at least. Yeah. So yeah, So we got absorbed into the French story

in Louisiana. And I think the reason I probably grew up being fascinated with the West is because one of the stories that we always talked about in the family was there were some groups four or five generations back who were traders to the Indians in the west, and so I grew up hearing stories about Pierre Lafitte, Pierre Bouie Lafitte, who was my great grandfather four times back, and he had been a sort of a major player in the Indian trade to the west out of Nakotash

and had gone I don't know if he ever got all the way up to the Wichita villages far up the Red River, but he certainly was a pretty major player in Indian trade in Louisiana, and I knew that they had gone west. So I kind of grew up with the idea of, you know, the west was always this part of the country that beckoned. And when I was four years old, my family went on a National park tour and one of the places they went was

into New Mexico. And so by the time I was about ten or eleven, I was having these dreams of these beautiful blue skies, cottonball clouds, sand dunes, red cliffs. Had no idea where that had come from until I was about thirty seven and thirty eight years old, and I was back in Louisiana for a family reunion and I mentioned to an ad of mine, you know, I've always had these strange dreams. That's why about the West.

That's why I ended up going west. And she said, well, I wonder if that had anything to do with that National Park tour we took you on to New Mexico when you were four. Oh, I guess maybe it did. And you know, so it's the kind of thing that you sort of forget but clearly colors your subconscious for a long time. So that was part of it. And as soon as I know, I was able to drive a car and my parents would let me go out overnight, first thing I did was drive five hundred mise to

the west, just to see what the country was like. Yeah, And I've never forgotten how exciting it was when night fell on the first time on that drive, and I could see the lights of towns thirty and forty miles away, because growing up in Louisiana, you can't see forty feet away. The vegetation is so dense, And it was very exciting to be able to see, ye see country.

but I was certainly interested in hunting. And I did that through a lot of my teen years into my early twenties. And you know, as Randall knows, when I was living in Montana. I mean, I can't say that I ever actually hunted, but three times, because I wanted venison in my freezer, I bought a deer tag and shot a little you know, yearling or four corn mule deer buck out the window of my living room out in the horse.

And so I was an English major as an undergraduate and had an English professor and a creative writing course when I was a junior who had us write things that we thought, you know, you might approach a magazine for query, a magazine about And I had the fun of writing a piece and before the semester was over, going into his office and saying Sports a Field just bought that. That's that piece I wrote for you back

in February. And so that was very fun. And I had a you know, just like you did Steve at Outdoor what's the magazine outside. I had an editor at Sports of Feel in particular, who I guess saw some potential and me, and he gave me a few pointers and took the first three or four things I wrote, and introduced me to editors at Field and Stream and Outdoor Life, and I ended up finally for outdoor Life.

Before I went to graduate school and got a PhD in history, I wrote a conservation column for outdoor Life for their regional pages. They had these pages in Outdoor Life that were designated for particular regions. And I wrote a conservation column for the one on what was known as the Mid South. And I wrote a conservation column for Louisiana Woods and waters. So this was all before I ever went to went to graduate school. And you know what, the professor thing, I.

the word growing up. I want to be an environmental historian.

play baseball in college for more than two years. We got a new coach and I didn't like one another, and so that was start of the end of that. But what I had sort of discovered, and I'm a baseball player who's an English major is a little bit of an unusual character. And I began to meet professors who started pointing me in the direction of where I went. And one of them was this guy, this creative writing guy I mentioned who when I talked to him about my future, I said, I want to be a writer.

This is my idea. I've always thought, you know, as a kid growing up reading books, that's what I wanted to do. He said, well, most people who write usually do something else as a day job. And I said, well, like what he said, Well, I mean, like me. This

guy wrote Western novels. He said like me, I mean, you're a professor, and they actually reward you for writing books when you're a professor, And that put the idea into my head for the very first time that well, okay, so I think maybe what I'll do is I'll go ultimately to graduate school and become a professor of some kind, and then that will enable me or give me enough time to be able to write too. So that's kind

of what I did. But you're exactly right. As a kid, I never said I'm going to grow up and you know, be an environmental historian at the University of Montana.

Is this thing about the West, right, I think that if you fall into the into the trap, maybe that's not the best word for it, but if you fall into the mindset that the West was just sitting there untouched, right, whereas Elliott West put it, like Native Americans were just in the static they were just basically waiting for Europeans to show up in this static state, and then you get this idea that then and then Lewis and Clark go out there. No one had been there before them.

They go out there, and then it's just like this tidal wave is unleashed, and it all happens like that. It all happens through the eighteen hundreds. That sense of how Western history went for me really started to fall apart when I learned that from the time the first

European descended the Mississippi. Okay, so from the time the first European descended the Mississippi, it was one hundred years until the next European descended the Mississippi, or, as Elliott West pointed out one of his essays, when Lewis and Clark hit the Great Planes, there were people there were name of Americans on the Great Plains whose parents had

been to Paris and come home. And then you start realizing that this the job of understanding contact, right of understanding European contact, isn't like this little like blip through the eighteen hundreds. It's centuries long.

I mean, so the place where I live, you know, Santa Fe Is it's about ten years ago, fifteen years ago now it celebrated its four hundredth anniversary as a town. Santa Fe was founded in sixteen ten. That's almost two hundred years before Lewis and Clark.

eighteen twenty five from eighteen twenty five. Yeah, at a time when we were just now starting to try steamboats on the Western River. Yeah, so it's that kind of distance, and so you have to, you know, as a historian, you start learning to incorporate that into your thinking. And once I started having the fun of doing that, I started pushing it back farther and farther because it became evident.

So historians primarily rely on written documents, right, but if you decide, okay, in this environmental history, and I was trained to do this, you don't just rely on the written documents. You also rely on archaeology and palaeontology and ecology and all these other fields. And if you start using those, then suddenly the past starts getting deeper and deeper and deeper for you. I mean, you can't come up with a great quote from anybody from you know,

ten thousand years ago. You don't know exactly what we call people Clovis and Folsome. We don't really know what their names actually were for themselves, because we named them after the towns where their archaeologists first found remains of them. So it's a kind.

and ancient history. And when you start doing that, that's kind of how I translated the human past in America, going back twenty three thousand years to start thinking about the past of the animals here, because many of the animals in North America, I mean, like horses and their ancestors fifty six million years back, Camels or another family of animals that had their origins in America and died out here while surviving in the rest of the world,

they go back forty six million years. Passenger pigeons went back fifteen million years. Bison actually, which we of course is now our national mammal in America. We have concluded that probably the oldest arrival of bison in North America was only about four hundred thousand years ago, so they're actually quite recent arrivals compared to something like passenger pigeons.

Mammoths got here seventeen million years ago. So doing that deep time for humans, I think it was a ready step from that to start looking at all these animals

around us. And as we were talking yesterday, talking to you and Randall both about this, I mean, one of the things I've decided to do because I couldn't see that anybody else was really doing it in writing Western history was to start taking the animals seriously, to stop thinking about them as Okay, beavers are just you know, there's just this lumping animal that everybody that produced the beaver trade and start actually looking at So what did

the presence of beaver's over five million to seven million years that's how we think they've been here? What did that do in North America? And you began to realize, well, hell man beaver ecology totally transformed the continent. They made it a much more humid and wetter place. And when we started extracting them from the world, it suddenly dried out a lot of America because it undermined an ecology that they had built up over a really long period

of time. So taking the animals seriously, I think has probably been a step towards, you know, just revising the whole story of the West in America.

interest to me. And then you have where we talked about some of these the first Europeans to make the way in the Southwest and they encounter, probably to their surprise, cities. I mean cities.

fulsome people. And once those animals are gone, and they're gone by about ten thousand, nine thousand years ago, essentially what you get is a long period of hunter gatherers where the focus is on smaller animals. I mean, there's still deer and elk and things out there, and so the big game is smaller, and there's an enhanced focus on vegetable products, on plant foods, and so the hunter gatherer the very name implies that you've got a new

focus on plants. You're beginning to rely some and once the focus on plants is there, then you're set up for some human genius at some point to say, well, you know this particular plant that produces this thing we now call teocente, which produces this little tiny corn cob,

But sometimes there's a slightly bigger one. Is there some way that we can take the plants that make the slightly bigger ones, and if the next generation the corn cob is even a little bit bigger than that plant those and of course what they're doing is that they're domesticating plants. And I think the reason we reached that stage because we reached it in the Old World many

thousands of years before this happened in the Americas. The reason being, of course, is the Americas are settled by humans a lot later than say, Europe and Asia get settled by humans, and so the whole process over time is an accelerated rate in the Old World compared to

the Americas. But what happened in both places, I think to push us in the direction ultimately of crops and domesticated animals, is that as the human population grew, relying on hunting got harder and harder to do because animals became more and more difficult to find. And you finally reach a point I think where everybody knew when during hunting and gathering stages, that you had to keep the

human population low. And one of the ways they did that was basically they engaged in not only abortions, but infanticide. Whenever a band of one hundred and twenty people they had too many children one year. I mean, the leaders knew if we let this go on, we are screwing ourselves to the hilt, and so we've got to control our population. And that became obviously a psychological burden for people, especially for women who were carrying kids, babies. So everybody

is looking for a way to escape it. And the domestication of crops and animals became away. It's hard to grow the population now just by relying on hunting, because we've thinned the animals to the point where we can't really grow the human population. But what if we start domesticating things. What if we start domesticating plants and growing them ourselves. What if we take these wild goats, these gazelles in the Old World, in North America, wild turkeys

become the primary domesticated animal. What if we take these and raise them? And that allows us then to avoid this the speed bump of having to sew assiduously keep the population down, and that then produces, of course, the Great agricultural Revolution, the so called Neolithic Revolution in the Old World and five thousand years later in the Americas. And so those cities that you and I have walked around in Chaco Canyon Historic Park, of course is the

primary and most dramatic one in North America. Those cities resulted from the evolution basically of hunting and gathering culture into an agricultural sort of in Choco's case, an empire really of hundreds of small farmers growing corn, beans and squash that they had imported up from Mexico, because Mexico in North America was where the first domestication of plants took place, and that domestication then enabled larger populations that

were capable of producing a city like Chaco, which you know, Chaco was such a dramatic and large place, huge buildings. There were not buildings the size of those built in Chaco in North America until the eighteen eighties. I mean, we don't have any buildings the size of something like Pueblo Benito until, you know, only basically one hundred and fifty years ago in the United States. But this is

a story. It's sort of like that, you know, that other Lewis and Clark expedition and story I was telling. It's not one that plays to historical memory in America. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people who go to Chaco who are utterly shocked to find the ruins of that place. Because grew up on the East coast, nobody ever talks about the fact that there was giant city.

go and find Europe do you know. I mean, it would have seemed like it was head in that direction. But then there's certain things like that misses, like the wheel.

the wheel is a very strange one. But I mean your question is is really on the mark because at the same time that Chako was at its height, it's about just roughly a thousand years ago. I mean, all those great cities in the Mayan Empire on the Yucatan Peninsula were also at their height, and uh ten oach teat line, which is what Mexico city. I think. Well, I mean, you may be, it may be more accurate than I am.

And it is precipitously steep, there's no question. But you know, I had the fun fifteen or so years ago climbing to the top of you know, this Temple of cuckl Khan, the Temple of Venus, and I mean, holy cow, man, that's just it's impressive as hell when you're there. But we come out of a you know, a Western European kind of sensibility that we were on top of the world.

We were the leaders of civilization. I mean Western Europe is I mean, that's what guns, germs and steel about is about his argument, Jared Diamond's argument in that book is that the reason Western Europe managed to prevail over all those other places is that it happened to sit at the far end of the largest land mass on Earth, Eurasia, also connected to Africa, and so Europeans got to benefit from all the human inventions that took place all over

Eurasia and Africa. The flow was smooth, The flow was smooth, and everything that was invented in China gunpowder managed to get to Western Europe, whereas the Americas are completely isolated from the rest of the world, not only from the ideas of the rest of the world, but you know, as we all know, from the diseases that evolved through the domestication of animals and living with domesticated animals, Europeans old worlders ended up developing all sorts of really pretty

horrific diseases and when they brought them over to the America's I mean, what really conquered the Americas. This is the germs part of guns, germs and steel, is these these exotic diseases that native people had absolutely no immunity to.

they when the Spanish got there, they had zoos. Yeah, they had zoos with I mean not foreign animals from other continents, but they had zoos holding animals like bison from places that they wouldn't even the residents of those cities could have gone and seen animals on the streets that they would have no prayer of encountering in normal life. Things collected from far away, from far to the south, from far to the north, broad and you could go like, where's that from you? It'd be like as weird as

when you take your kids they see a giraffe. That people would have that experience and see it like yeah, like they would have, you know, a jaguar, they would have a buffalo, they would have birds from South America.

human impulse. I mean, and you know, we have no idea it's possible that the Clovis people had something like that, but as you pointed out, we certainly do know that the Aztecs, which had an empire that stretched for hundreds thousands of miles in every direction, they were doing that very thing. They were collecting animals out at the far reaches of their empire and bringing them to the citadel city of the empire and assembling them into zoos for

you know, for the public entertainment of their citizenry. I mean,

that's that's so, you know. I mean, I've I've have argued in my books, especially in Wild New World, the most recent one that which is a book about, you know, the long term story of humans and animals in North America, that this is something and I know I derived this from Paul Shepherd, from reading Paul Shepard many years ago, that this fact, with the natural history of the living world around us, is something that is impossibly ancient in the human story. Every time we look back into the past,

we find examples of it, and it survives today. And one of the ways it survives, I mean, I don't have children myself. I know you do, though, and I'll bet this happened with you, because it happens with it. Every time I visit somebody's home and they have young kids, and they show me the nursery, there are always little elephants and buffaloes and monkeys, and so what that is getting at is that it's knowledge about natural history and

about other living creatures. That is the very first step in kind of the organization of the brain, in creating a taxonomy of the world around you, you know. And then when for little boys in particular, when you get to be eight or ten years old, you know, you start collecting hot wheeled cars and things like that, and that provides you with the next step of taxonomy. But that human desire to kind of organize everything into an understandable world really starts with animals. And that's why we

do this with toddlers. The first thing you teach them really is the difference between well, this is a picture of an elephant. It has this long trunk and it has and this is a picture of a horse, it has this tail. And that probably you know, is something we humans have been doing for two million years.

chance to see them. I kept encountering over and over again these people who become really prominent conservationists in the United States, you know, and found all sorts of organizations from the Sierra Club on who acquired their fascination for nature and for the wild by going to Africa. And they came back from Africa and decided, Okay, we're going to try to do something like that. And it's kind of an insides vary size and variety and an indication,

you know. And of course Africa, as a result of the big game parks there, preserve these animals so that people could go and see them. But it speaks in a way to the fact, you know, to Thro's lament back in the eighteen fifties that he lived in this impoverished world because his ancestors in New England had already taken out all these animals that he wanted to watch.

Because he kept, you know, these meticulous notes about when the birds, particular species of birds arrive in the spring, and when they nest, and when the beavers are hatching their or having their kits, and when. So he goes through all this process and realizes, oh my god, I'm missing the lynx, I'm missing the moose, I'm missing black bears.

Those have all been taken out. He could read the accounts of of the first colonists in New England who are describing pigeon flights and huge numbers of wolves, and here he sits in the eighteen fifties and all of that is gone, and he feels like, as he says, I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth, except demigods have come along before me and plucked from

the heavens the best of the stars. And so I think, in some ways, what I kept running into with all these American conservationists who had to go to Africa first before they were realizing how important it was to you know, campaign on behalf of nature in America has something to do with the fact that we lost so much of the magic in North America. And it's like, in order to get it you had to go somewhere else.

And and and as you're telling like when you're talking about it, is there a cult like a like a European bias, a colonial bias? You won't get it right. And when we've talked about this, I don't think you don't. You don't punt on it, but you have a point, as you said, like there's human history, right, Like as a human being, you're interested in human history, and human history travels all around the world. And it's weird to

put this is my word is not yours. I'd like to speak on it, but it's weird that you would then start drawing sort of like borders of where your interest in human history can't go, you know, like, how have you grapped? Because you've had to be challenged about that being a history, Like in teaching and writing about the America West and teaching about Native peoples, you had to have encountered the sentiment of like, well, who are you to go telling people about that?

recasting of the story and for the first time. And this was a period of time the nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties, probably back to the nineteen seventies when a lot of people in the environmental movement were sort of using Native people as you know, here were our stand ins for

conservation living, environmental living. I mean, you all remember the famous ad where the Indian steps out of his canoe onto the shore of Manhattan Island and he steps out and there's trash all underfoot and a tear rolls down his face. Well, that particular piece that I did about what happened to Buffalo was it was not only a complete recasting of the story and kind of an environmental

telling of the story. I pulled in things that nobody had ever pulled in before, like when horses were reintroduced into the Americas and went wild. I mean, they obviously were drinking the water and grazing the grass that bison had also been subsisting on, and so they had an effect. And there were whole numbers of things that I plugged

into that story that I told. A changing climate. In the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a drought that lasted for like fifteen years on the Great Plains and reduced the numbers of Buffalo and there so I went through this whole sequence of five or six sort of new and compelling. Obviously they were compelling because a lot of other historians, like Elliott West sort of immediately picked up on this, these compelling reasons for what happened.

And one of the things I also did was I pointed out, which you know, people were kind of shy about doing at the time, that Native people had been

seduced into the market economy. And just as we were talking about this yesterday, it was a situation where Europeans were offering a transformative technology metalware guns, and if you didn't do it in exchange for bison robes, and if you didn't participate in it and everybody else, all the other native groups around you did, you ended up disadvantaging

yourself to the point where you might not survive. Whereas the southern Cheyennes just down the way, we're going to do very well because they, in fact were participating in the market trade.

and it also talks about the Indian role in it. Well, immediately, as you might suspect, had various Native people get in touch with me and say exactly what you were referring to a few minutes ago, what gives you the right to say this, to write about this. One of the people who did so was Vinedaloria and Vine Deloria, who was a very famous Indian author. In those days he

was at the University of Colorado. He was famous for books like God Has Read Custarded for Your Sins, and Vinedaloria called me up and said, I read your piece and I think it's really good. And what I want you to do, if you would, is come down to the University of Colorado and spend three days with me. We're having a conference. I'm bringing in the wildlife managers from a bunch of the western reservations and I want you to come down, but I I don't want you

to speak. I don't need you to tell them the story that you just wrote about Buffalo. I just want you to come down here and sit beside me and listen to them. And I said, okay, I will do it, and that's exactly what I did, and so I never find Laurie never asked me to speak, And for three days I sat right beside him, sort of in the protection of this guy who was his illumining figure, and listened to all these wildlife managers talk about the Native

approach to managing wildlife. And of course what he was interested in having me do is to understand the Native approach to managing wildlife. But what I brought away from that particular experience, And I have said this in every book that I have written that includes a section on Native people since and on all kinds of other people.

Is that, just as you inferred a few minutes ago, I'm interested in the human story, and I think as a human I have a perfect right to write about humans, an right to be able to write about humans, regardless of their culture. And I think in a way, the whole impulse was, you know, I'm an Italian American. Only I can write about Italian Americans. Only I can write

about Christopher Columbus or something. I think that's a stage in our development that probably is kind of dropping away some because I think, to me, the argument that we're all human beings and that we should be interested in the human story everywhere among every group of people, we all come from the same source. We're all part of the evolutionary river, the Darwinian River. That's the stronger argument here, and so I stand by that.

absolutely fascinating. I mean, that's sort of the whole premise of cultural anthropology is that, oh my god, you know, humans have sort of fractured into tens of thousands of cultural groups, with all these different deities and all these different ideas of creation, and wow, isn't it incredible to sort of listen to what you guys have to say about what you think is going on with human life?

So yeah, I mean that's because like you, and I think, like all of us sitting around the table, and probably most of the people listening to this, I'm fascinated with all those differences. Yeah, I would say the stronger argument is it's the human story that compels us, and nobody has any kind of lock on a particular one. I mean, I'm certainly willing to conceive that some people might not want to share the details of their religious practices and

ceremonies and all that. That's everybody's perfect right. But the bigger story, I think is ours for understanding, because that's how we managed to figure out who we are.

these these peoples getting separated. He's talking about not being able to communicate in one hundred years, a couple hundred years. Imagine these groups of people separating and you get to watch what like ten thousand years of being subject to different climates and then different founder effects. Just it could be as small as personality differences. That's a very good point, absolutely, And the wildly different directions people go in terms of religion.

You see these crazy themes animism, you know, all these cultures holding out of the ideas that that landscape features have a sort of spirit or personality. You see these continuities that they'll that folks will eventually figure out agriculture if they can, they'll get better and better at launching projectiles, right, They'll like a lot of them will figure out vertical wall, right, but on the wheel.

arrive at this particular notion. But there are some obviously some commonalities that are all over the planet, and you know, the old animistic religion ideas that you just mentioned, where there are deities in wild animals, and there are deities in landforms and all of that that it's so widespread as part of the European tradition too. The Druids, for example, of only twelve hundred and fifteen hundred years ago in Western Europe are certainly practitioners of that kind of animistic

approach to religion. So it's something that is so widespread that it's clear it probably dates back a very very long time. I argue while a New World in fact, that the idea that native people have of being kin to other animals, to the European line about that when in a different direction where humans are we're the only ones created in the image of God and the only ones with an everlasting soul, and everything else is different.

And that actually is an anomaly compared to the idea that which is kind of a proto Darwinian idea that we're all related to one another, we're all part of

the same kind of kinship order. And it requires somebody like Darwin using science in the nineteenth century to finally bring the European world back to that recognition because it had gone in a sort of an unusual direction with the notion while humans are completely different from everything else out there, I mean, we're we're special, we're exceptional, and everything else that's something else.

do the big dog the Dog. Dan Floy celebrates the American West by chronicling the heroes, scoundrels, and events that shaped its history, from the Battle of Adobe Walls to the Mountain Metals Massacre. What goes back more than that? Where's the other one?

some of the broader themes. Episode two is Clovisia. Is that how you like pronounce that?

such a complex religious figure in Native American culture? The Wild New World of the American Serengetti is episode five about you know, everybody's idea of the Serengetti in Africa, about that that was the perception that people who arrived on the Grand Plains had at first. It was it was it was it was a Sarngetti of its time.

Survivors from a Lost World Episode six talks about the American prong horn there's an episode on something we touched on today, Jefferson's other Lewis and Clark and that, Uh, that's the seven.