Explaining Frontier Era America

Summary

History 102: Explaining Frontier Era America with Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett

Podcast Information:

• Title: History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
• Host/Author: Turpentine
• Episode: Explaining Frontier Era America
• Release Date: April 14, 2025

---

Introduction to Frontier Era America

In this episode of History 102, Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett delve deep into the American Frontier period, spanning from 1790 to 1890. They explore how this century of expansion shaped the social, cultural, and economic fabric of the United States.

Rudyard Lynch begins by sharing personal anecdotes about his family’s frontier history, emphasizing the generational patterns of migration and risk-taking behavior:

"My ancestors were mostly part of the Midlander, Pennsylvania west migration out to Nebraska... every single generation, we followed the frontier." [03:00]

The Frontier's Impact on American Society

Lynch and Padgett discuss the constant mobility of frontier life and its impact on American identity. Lynch highlights the relentless movement westward driven by restlessness and entrepreneurial spirit within his family:

"They started out in the east coast, then they went to Ohio, then Indiana, then Nebraska... they moved to the frontier and restarted." [03:30]

This mobility fostered a society characterized by high social mobility, religious fervor, and entrepreneurial mindset, traits that have persisted in American culture.

Land and Environmental Changes

The conversation shifts to the environmental transformation caused by frontier expansion. Lynch explains how the removal of predators led to overpopulation of species like deer:

"There's more deer now than there were in the Native American period because we've removed all their predators." [07:22]

Padgett adds that wilderness areas have been expanding in the U.S. due to factors like improved agricultural efficiency and urbanization:

"Wilderness has actually been expanding in the US since the 70s... it's underestimated how much space there is." [08:44]

The Great American Desert and Agricultural Innovation

The duo examines the agricultural development of the Great Plains, previously deemed unfarmable until innovations in the late 19th century:

"They needed to invent barbed wire to farm the Great Plains... this transition is where we went from cowboy culture to farmer culture." [17:03]

Lynch discusses the introduction of new plows and barbed wire, which enabled large-scale farming and the eventual settlement of areas once considered the Great American Desert.

Cowboy Culture vs. Farmer Culture

A significant portion of the episode contrasts cowboy and farmer cultures, illustrating the sociological shifts during westward expansion:

"It's interesting to see this cowboy culture that developed... they were operating out of the interest of this huge industrialized system." [17:03]

Lynch and Padgett explore how the arrival of farmers transformed the socio-economic landscape, leading to cultural tensions exemplified in works like the musical Oklahoma!.

Violent Aspects of the Frontier

The narrative acknowledges the violence inherent in frontier life, both among settlers and between settlers and Native Americans:

"Cow towns had higher violence than the general towns today... the Mormons actually did kill 100 people." [24:00]

They debunk the overly romanticized view of the Wild West, emphasizing that while violence was prominent, it was often localized and influenced by specific groups like the Mormons.

Cultural Patterns and the Theocracy of Mormons

Lynch provides an in-depth look at the Mormon community, highlighting their unique societal structure and the challenges they faced:

"The Mormons were part of this brand of religious boosterism... They were shunted west due to this discrimination." [29:00]

He discusses how Mormon theocracy and communal living influenced their migration patterns and interactions with broader American society.

The Founder’s Mindset and Frontier Values

Exploring the psychological traits fostered by frontier life, the hosts compare these to modern American behaviors:

"Humans like hardship, and they need it to a certain degree... the frontier provided enough struggle that people had to make themselves strong." [35:06]

Lynch likens frontier life to a natural filter, cultivating resilient and self-reliant individuals who embody American idealism.

Different Cultural Diasporas in American Expansion

The episode breaks down the regional cultural diasporas that migrated westward, detailing how groups like New Englanders, Quakers, and Scots Irish established distinct communities:

"The New Englanders shed the theological side to become more mercantile and chill... The Quaker diaspora built their towns around markets." [46:37]

This segmentation contributed to the diverse cultural landscape of the United States, each group bringing unique values and practices.

Impact of Politics and Slavery on the Frontier

Lynch and Padgett delve into the political tensions surrounding westward expansion, particularly the role of slavery in exacerbating regional conflicts:

"The balance of power was tipping in the North's favor... slavery was clearly a major component of the Civil War." [75:00]

They analyze how compromises like the Missouri Compromise attempted to balance slave and free states, ultimately failing to prevent the Civil War.

Mexican-American War and Westward Expansion

The final segment covers the Mexican-American War, illustrating how military conquest facilitated the expansion of U.S. territory:

"Andrew Jackson practically single-handedly created the Southern frontier... he forced the Cherokee out west with the Trail of Tears." [82:30]

They discuss key figures like Andrew Jackson and Kit Carson, highlighting their roles in territorial acquisition and the subsequent impact on Native American populations.

"The American Civil War forced the U.S. to take a more active military role... it was a period of rapid transformation from a continental to a transcontinental empire." [96:23]

---

Conclusion

Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett provide a nuanced examination of Frontier Era America, emphasizing the complex interplay of migration, culture, politics, and environmental change. They argue that the frontier period was pivotal in shaping the resilient and dynamic American character, despite the inherent conflicts and moral ambiguities.

"Frontier America is probably the holistically healthiest society in history... it was an incredibly wealthy and socially cooperative society." [35:06]

This episode offers a comprehensive overview for listeners interested in understanding the foundational dynamics that propelled the United States into its modern form.

---

For more insightful discussions on critical moments in history, subscribe to History 102 on the Turpentine podcast network.

Transcript

[Rudyard Lynch]

This Mother's Day, give mom more than a gift. Give her lasting comfort. I'm Tyler, founder at Cozy Earth. Our bamboo sheets and ultra soft pajamas are crafted with breathable temperature regulating fabric to keep her cozy year round. It's comfort that feels like home. Because home feels like mom. With a 100 night sleep trial and a 10 year warranty, you know she'll be in good hands.

[Tyler]

Go to cozyearth.com Spotify and use code.

[Austin Padgett]

Spotify to save up to 40%.

[Narrator]

That's cozyearth.com Spotify. Welcome to History 102. Where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist, Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Hi everybody. This is Rudyard and our co host Austin. And today we're going to talk about the American frontier. Say hi, Austin.

[Austin Padgett]

Hello. Welcome to the frontier.

[Rudyard Lynch]

How are you liking your coonskin hat? Your, your coonskin cap?

[Austin Padgett]

It's early in the year, so I think I got a young one. But we're making it work. Gotta stay warm.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I keep seeing. So I frequently walk around at night, past midnight. It's one of my hobbies. Or actually I used to do it more, but I've gotten progressively less restless. So I do it less, but I used to do it more. And I see these huge opossums walking around late at night. Texas. And I don't really see them back in Pennsylvania, but they're funny animals and it's just the first thing I thought of. Oh yeah, I keep this huge stuffed capybara next to my, next to my workplace.

[Austin Padgett]

I call it Walter, the largest rodent.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Some say yeah, I bought it in.

[Austin Padgett]

Mexico, but yeah, costumes are hilarious. I stuck my finger in one's mouth because it was playing dead on a, on a cage trap. After furiously trying to like get out of a cage, I came up to it and pretended to be dead while it had its claws gripped around and its teeth gripped around the cage. Just, that's like nobody dies like that. So it wasn't fooling me. But I touched his teeth. He didn't do anything.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Also sticking your mouth in a possum. Possum. Sticking your finger on a possum's mouth is how the God Tear from Norse mythology lost his hand. It's a wolf. That's also peak libertarian behavior. Like if there's a test, the amount of people who said I would stick my finger in a possum's mouth would be Ten times overrepresented libertarians.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. Anybody who goes around, like, making animal videos, catching stuff, those are definitely going to be more likely.

[Rudyard Lynch]

No, I just meant like the. I meant the risk taking behavior, and it is not giving a fuck. Right?

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So this is my cowboy jacket. I bought it in New Mexico when I was driving from California to Texas a few years ago. Made in India, which I think is symbolic of something. This is an American cowboy jacket made in India. And this is my bowie knife. I keep it around my desk. It was a traditional type of knife from the American frontier. And so of all the videos we're going to make, this is the topic where I have the most relatives who are part of it. Where I have a lot of my family were on the frontier because my mom's side of the family are Anglos from Nebraska. And the way that worked is that Nebraska kind of became this seepage for people across the continent who ended up there, which was how the frontier works. And it was very fluid. And so my ancestors were mostly part of the Midlander, Pennsylvania west migration out to Nebraska. But I have other ancestors from Massachusetts down to South Carolina. And they did a lot of crazy stuff. And I had ancestors who there was a consistent pattern where they would move to a frontier, they would start a business, the kid would get bored, then they'd lose the family money, move to the frontier and restart. And they did like six or seven different businesses that way. And this was a generational pattern of behavior. And because they were so restless, they would follow the frontier with each generation. So they started out in east coast, then they went to Ohio, then they went to Indiana, then they went to Nebraska. And so every single generation, we followed the frontier. And so I have five ancestors who died in the Indian wars, at least, because my family were always right up against it in just the most dangerous places because they were largely bored.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. That's funny I mentioned my family was around that area, Appalachia, from the 1600s until the Rust Belt took off in the 40s. Some split off to Ohio. But yeah, my father still will never touch a deck of cards because some relative down the line lost their entire farm gambling. So that's kind of that risk taking behavior.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. My best friend is from an old Yankee family. They've been in the same town in Massachusetts for 400 years. And I joke that my risk taking behavior, which for those that know me is a trait I have, stems from my frontier ancestors. And he'll joke that you're fishing, family couldn't stay in one place they just kept wandering around and trying new stuff. But this is an interesting way to start with the frontier period because it is a time of constant mobility, especially over a very short period of time. Where when we're talking about frontier America, I am describing 1790 until 1890. It's a 100 year period between the American Revolution and. And the defeat of the final Native American tribe in America, that being the Sioux. And the Sioux at the Battle of. I'm gonna forget the name of that battle. It was. They had. The Sioux had the dance where they thought they could do a buffalo dance to bring back the spirits of their ancestors to fight the white man through a magical spell. And then the whites just shot them.

[Austin Padgett]

The buffalo or the boat.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Oh, the Sioux doing a buffalo dance, right? Yeah, there was a buffalo.

[Austin Padgett]

They brough buffalo back who tried to kill us. And then we beat the buffalo.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The Americans did mass murdering of the buffalo. And that was partly because we could and for capital reasons. And it was also. And it was also just to wipe out the natives way of life. Where when I was growing up, I hunted. And in Delaware and Pennsylvania, you have to memorize each type of bird and you have a tag limit for the day and for the month. And this is something that. That's enforced as a way to just get around the mass animal killings we did in the 1800s, where in Pennsylvania we have 13 million deer, 13 million people in 20 million deer. Due to basically over regulation of hunting as an overcompensation for the 1800s. Because you had.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, go ahead. There's more deer around now in America than before British people showed up.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. There's more deer now than there were in the Native American period because we've removed all their predators. And the actual amount of America we use for land is pretty small. America is an almost entirely empty country. And that's something people from other parts of the world or even Americans in cities don't realize. If you drive across. I walked across the entire state of Connecticut, which is one of the more populous states in America. And I would walk on top of mountains, seeing miles in each direction. And I did not see civilization for like four days in a row for multiple periods. So one of the most populous states in America. Walking across the whole state, almost none of it was populated. So America is almost entirely empty. And so with the removal of the external predators, there's still the land for the deer. And so the deer became overpopulated. And so growing up, the deer would have their own plagues where they Became incredibly susceptible to disease. I would see, when I went to school, I would go past a rotting deer corpse every single day and I would just look at it and I saw it decompose over the course of a month. But I saw dead deer everywhere. And the deer were experiencing overpopulations that eat out the forest. And there were ecological issues all downstream from not having enough predators.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And wilderness has actually been expanding in the US since the 70s. Not because of the small percent of land that, you know, you go to in national parks that's famous, but just there's general wide landscape being exposed coming back because of gains in efficiency in agriculture and urbanization. So there's mountain lions in upstate New York now. The wolf's range has increase dramatically because with afforestation comes the biodiversity as well. So even going through Asia, you'll be shocked at Indonesia, which is island country with 300 million people. There's vast wilderness. So it is. I think in general, it's underestimated.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

How much space there is.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The exception is western Europe. If you go around Western Europe, it's just city, city, farmland, city, whatever. Same thing as, I think, China and India and places like that. But. So there were these huge herds of buffalo that went from Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania out to Alaska and the Rockies. And there were so many buffalo that early explorers were just in complete shock about it, where they said it was like seeing entire human cities. I'm gonna look up largest herd of buffalo found. And then there were also these carrier pigeons where these would flock across Appalachia. And there were so many of them, they would block out the sky. And what happened was, due to the mass hunting without restriction, the white people shot all the buffalo until they were practically a nigh extinct species recently. And then we had to reintroduce the buffalo into a certain. A few pieces of land to just keep their population stable. And the carrier pigeon is extinct now. So that was how much we basically raped nature. And it's interesting as well, where what you said with there's actually significantly more forests in America today than a century ago, where it's often. It wouldn't surprise me if the amount of forest land we've regained since is like France and England combined. I've seen a map of it. It's an insane number. And it's especially pronounced in New England, where there used to be no forest in states like Vermont or New Hampshire that are almost entirely forest. Because back in the colonial and early Republic period, New England was this hub of highly industrious Farmers who use the land really productively. And then what happened with the rise of the American Midwest is those guys just moved to Illinois or Iowa or Nebraska or Ohio. And now New England is almost entirely empty. There's no farmland, it's just city and forest.

[Austin Padgett]

We have a bunch of stone walls at our the house where I grew up in New York that cover multiple fields that are just woods now. So there's just plots in the woods of stone walls where you can see where the farmland used to be.

[Rudyard Lynch]

When I was on the Appalachian Trail, I would see a lot of those different walls. And on top of that, I slept in a few abandoned towns. Because in the northeast US you have plenty of towns from earlier on in our history. They're just so completely abandoned and they've been reclaimed by the forest. So I just stumble in on them. And I actually slept in a few. I pitched my tent in the ruins of this 300 year old town.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, it's really cool. We found some ruins on my brother's place and had a big YouTuber metal detector guy. I wish I could remember his name because he has a huge show. He came by and found a bunch of stuff.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Cool, huh? So frontier 1790 to 1890. And in that time period, America went from Pittsburgh and Chattanooga, or the Appalachian Mountains, which are slightly west of the American Atlantic seaboard, to the West Coast. And furthermore, in that time period, the Americans hit the west coast by 1848, which is when we took California. And So in a 50 year time frame, the Americans vaulted from Pittsburgh to San Francisco. And so we're going to split this time period into two different subsections. The first being the the crossing of the continent, which ends in the Mexican American War and the California Gold rush. And then the second period being the filling in of the continent because this is a weird thing where the Great Plains or the middle of the country was considered unfarmable until the 1880s and 90s, which is why early settlers jumped across the Great Plains to Utah and California first. And then we filled in the middle of the continent and it was called the Great American Desert. Even places like Nebraska or Kansas that are covered in trees because the soil there is so thick that normal plows will break under how thick the soil is. Because all of this stuff and foliage and fertilizer from further north was pushed down by the glaciers in the last ice age. And that's why Pennsylvania has better lands than New England, where Pennsylvania is the most fertile area of the east coast. New England doesn't have any really good Farmland is because New England's soil in the last ice age was dragged south by the glacier and dropped in Pennsylvania, which was the edge of the glacier. And growing up, we had this huge former glacier rock outside our house and the. So northeast glacier. Oh, yeah. On top of that, they needed to invent barbed wire to farm the Great Plains where they were. There's a great book called the Great Plains by Webb, which talks about how the Americans ruled to agriculturally colonize the Great Plains. But it involved a new type of plow that would slick the fertilizer off. And then that land became the most fertile farmland in the world. And then you also needed barbed wire because America spent a ludicrous amount of its total national revenue on building fences. Just block in farmland mostly so that cattle and other animals wouldn't walk into your corn fields. And the issue with that was that there weren't enough trees in the Great Plains to build fences. So they needed to invent barbed wire because otherwise the cows would just eat a farmer's land. And this transition, which occurred in the late 19th century, is where we went from cowboy culture to farmer culture. And there's a musical called Oklahoma, which is set in early, like 1903 Oklahoma. And they sing about how the cowmen and the farmers fought each other, not literally physically, but sociologically. And that was because in the Wild west period, or we only really had cowboys who are at a 20 year frame, we see cowboys as emblematic of the American character, but they really existed in a 20 year frame where there was this time when the Americans had not yet developed the technology to farm the Great Plains. So you had these huge herds of thousands of cows that would live out in the Great Plains, and then their masters would ride them to places like Kansas City or Austin or St. Louis, have them butchered there, and then sent out to the Northeast and Europe to be refrigerated and salted. And so it's interesting to see this cowboy culture that developed this own very nomadic subculture that could have been something out of medieval Central Asia, operating out of the interest of this huge industrialized system.

[Narrator]

We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. It's a bull market. It's a bear market. Rates will rise or fall. Can someone invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 41,000 businesses have future proofed their business with Netsuite by Oracle, the number one cloud erp, bringing accounting, financial management inventory HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. With real time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. When you're closing the books in days and not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. If I had needed this product, it's what I'd use. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and sees your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com Zen the guide is free to you at netsuite.com Zen netsuite.com Zen so it's a new year, 2025, and one of the recurring questions I've already been receiving is should I start my own business? Can I do it all on my own? Now more than ever, my answer is a resounding yes. With tools like today's sponsor, Shopify, it's never been easier to start pursuing your dreams. Shopify makes it simple to create your brand, open for business and get your first sale, no coding or design skills required. They also help with the details like shipping, taxes, payments, and have social media tools that connect all your channels and create shoppable posts, allowing you to focus on the important stuff like growing your business. What happens if you don't act now? Will you regret it? What if someone beats you to the idea? Don't kick yourself when you hear this again in a year because you didn't do anything now established in 2025 has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com momentofzen all lowercase go to shopify.com Moment of Zen to start selling with Shopify today. Shopify.com momentofzen.

[Austin Padgett]

And what were the similarities to Central Asian cultures? Just kind of a wild herding culture.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So horse herding peoples tend to share a lot of archetypal similarities due to the way the geography works where grasslands geographies are hard enough that you can't just normally farm them, and so you need a certain degree of toughness to survive. But they're also not hard enough that they're not easy to populate. They're not like the Sahara or the desert or the Amazon, and they tend to prioritize mobility, warrior aggression, masculinity, independence, lawlessness, and also a strong warrior spirit and an idea that basically morality is practical because when you're out in the grassland with your cows and your men, what matters is fighting nature. And you can see why other herder cultures like the Scots Irish, where the Celtic peoples of the British Isles were herder peoples, how that Celtic herding culture could so easily transpose itself itself on the American Great Plains, right?

[Austin Padgett]

They had a whole new frontier basically to revive a culture that had previously been taken over by agriculture and where they came from.

[Narrator]

We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

[Rudyard Lynch]

This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more.

[Austin Padgett]

Sales going cha ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Sell wherever your customers are.

[Austin Padgett]

Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today.

[Tyler]

Even if you think it's a bit overhyped. AI is suddenly everywhere. From self driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it's coming and fast. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power, so how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? Time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or oci. OCI is a blazing, fast and secure platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, plus all of your AI and machine learning workloads. OCI costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for networking, so you're saving a pile of money. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to oci, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters and Suno AI. Right now Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to oci for new US customers with minimum financial commitment. Offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for this special [e-mail] cognitive that's oracle.com cognitive any founders out there?

[Narrator]

I'm guessing your moments in Zed look a little different. You find peace in extending your Runway, building and shipping faster. Nail in your investor presentations. If you're looking for more of these moments in Zen, you need Brex. Rex built a simplified scalable financial staff just for founders. In fact, one in three US startups already use it. Rex offers high limit corporate products with built in expense software plus high yield banking with 100% liquidity. Everything you need to grow faster trusted by 30,000 companies including the fastest growing AI startups to global enterprises with trillion dollar market caps Brex helps founders spend smarter and move faster in three key 1. Fast simple cards and banking that extend your Runway. 2. AI powered expense automation that accelerates building. 3 One scalable global platform that grows with you. Because Brex knows that founders end means less time on finance and more time building. Get [e-mail] grow again. That's brex.com grow.

[Austin Padgett]

And then that's when you get into kind of some of the conceptions of the Wild west as a wild place with a lot of, you know, killing, like honor killings, like you see a lot in herder cultures. And I looked at the stats just to refresh myself and the. The cow towns had higher violence than the general towns. The general towns were like Chicago rate today. The cow towns were about five times more violent. A hundred out of a hundred thousand.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's South Africa.

[Austin Padgett]

But. But in their early years it was a thousand out of a hundred thousand. And that doesn't mean a thousand people died. That means like 40 people died, but because there's not that many people. But that was just like right when the cow towns popped up. But it stabilized pretty quick. And still in the overall numbers, they're pretty small because. So, you know, pretty much, you know, Little House on the Prairie is more accurate than the average Clint Eastwood movie. Besides the propaganda within Little House on the Prairie. Yeah, yeah. And then you had this new show that's out about American Primeval. And I watched it and the first thing was like 100 people died in a massacre. And I was like, oh great, you know, the Wild west myth. And then I looked it up and it was the Mormons actually did kill 100 people. That was a real example. I just thought that was funny that the Mormons were one of the biggest outliers. So you have like a Mormon raid and very early year cow towns are the biggest violent periods of the West. Not that many total dead in terms of European violence.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Internal this was one of the very important points at the Wild west that the American government was so weak that you should view the frontier period as the Anglo American people spreading west. And then the government just happens to keep tabs on them, which is a consistent theme of colonialism. Where as an example, back in the colonial period, the British made a policy that white Americans weren't allowed to settle west of the Appalachians and they were completely unable to enforce that. The Scots Irish especially were pushing up against the lower Appalachians and they had already crossed them by the time of the American Revolution and had settlements in places like Kentucky and Ohio and Tennessee. But what that shows is that America had so much dynamic pressure. People just got shoveled west. And it was this organic process that just happened. Because also keep in mind America's population in this time period doubled every 15 years, which is why the Americans able to push west west so quickly. And so white people just populated the West. And then they fought in militias. So this was mostly done by the locals who were fighting themselves. There were a few federal armies that went out west. My ancestor Matt Anthony Wayne, for example, fought at the Battle of Fallen Timbers outside Toledo, Ohio. And he conquered the area of modern Ohio in Michigan and the. So there were some of that. And that got especially more pronounced after the time of the US Civil War. But for a lot of this, it was just frontiersmen. And this is where American gun culture comes from, where on the American frontier you were legally owned, you were legally required to have a gun because you had to defend your town and your family due to militia duties. And a lot of the frontier period should better be seen as a tribal war in a place like Africa than actual national governments fighting each other. Because you had two tribes, the natives and the whites. And what almost always happened was that the whites would move into a new land. There sometimes was payment to buy the land from the natives. The native. The natives start shooting the whites farm animals. The whites get angry. There's normally a miss. There were very frequently miscommunications over property rights. And then this escalates because both the whites and the natives had honor cultures at that time. And then what happens is the whites just kill the natives and then kick them off. So it was this war between mostly white militias versus the natives. But then the whites also fought each other. And of course the natives fought each other. That's one of the most important parts of Native American history. But as an example of this, in my home state, Pennsylvania, the Scots Irish had. The Scots Irish fairly frequently, legitimately fought the plurality Quaker settlers. And then there was also battles between the Puritans in Scranton and then the other Quakers. There were skirmishes over New Jersey between Quaker and Puritan settlers. It's funny, the Quakers were pacifists as a government, but what always happened was that the frontiers people were more loose about this and they actually did the fighting. And that was writ large where you had internal wars inside South Carolina and North Carolina, between the coasts and the frontiers in the colonial period and early Republic period, and with the Mormons, who are an interesting test case. They're just a fascinating group of people. Where they started out in upstate New York. And this was during a time period of profound religious upswelling. It's the Second Great Awakening, where America had the first Great awakening in the 1740s, the second great awakening in the 1840s, and funnily enough, in the 1940s, we had another religious awakening. And I imagine we'll have another one in the 2000-40s. But there were lots of interesting cults here. And there's a character to frontier America that people used to know about Bearouins forgot called the Booster. And the booster is the 1800s equivalent of the guy selling nootropics and alpha male courses. The Booster was a character who would hang around, say, hey guys, you should join my new town. We should raise VC capital to build a new city in Michigan. You should join my religion. You should buy my product. And so America was completely awash with this type of person, more so than today. It used to be said that every Yankee young man had an invention where this had an invention or he had a mechanical trick he invented, or his own patent. This was an incredibly creative and dynamic society. And the colonization of America was made almost entirely by American capitalists. But the Mormons were part of this brand of religious boosterism, where in the 1840s, in the Yankee diaspora of upstate New York, Ohio, Vermont, whatever, you had this huge, like, cult popularity. And the most popular cults were the Millerites, who believed that the world was about to end. And when the world didn't end in the 1840s, it was known as, quote, the great disappointment, because they all wanted the Book of Revelation so much. And Joseph Smith was from Vermont, grew up in upstate New York, and he started having visions from God where the Angel Gabriel gave him gold tablets that he lost. And he created the religion of Mormonism, which is the strangest American sub religion where. Where Mormonism's like, it has so many legends unto itself, it's hard to differentiate in fact and fiction. So apparently you get. Every Mormon gets a planet in the sky, and you have to, like, get your entire genealogy. You should get as much of your genealogy as possible. And they don't drink alcohol and they love Dr. Pepper and they used to practice polygamy, which was a big no no then. And so Joseph Smith formed this. And when you look at the genetic map of America, the Mormons are completely indistinguishable from Yankees genetically. So they were from that area and they kept getting bumped west where they formed their own communities. And so they went to. They went from. Started. They were in Ohio they moved out to Missouri. The locals in Missouri literally tried to wage genocide against the Mormons to make them leave every single place the Mormons would lose would, would arrive. The other locals would say, we will literally kill you if you come here. And in the Scots, Irish and Midlander parts of America they would literally have a policy. Any Mormons that enter this area will be shot on site. So the Mormons kept getting pushed west due to this discrimination. And by the time of the 1830s they thought let's move to Utah, which is part of Mexico at this point. By the time they reached Utah, the US had already conquered it from Mexico. And they formed their society there based around, they called it Deseret. And they claimed everything from Los Angeles up to Canada into Denver. They took over. They wanted to take half of the American West. Then the US military showed up and said, psych, no, you will never have self governance to drop polygamy. Because they saw polygamy then as bad as we see slavery now. Approximately. This was a very Christian society. And then the Mormons finally banned polygamy in the 1890s and they established Utah as this Mormon practically ethno state where the Mormons had all the positions in the government and they had the power and they, they became a state pretty late in the 1890s once they dropped polygamy and they and their some of their stranger practices. But a few other facts that the Mormons I'll throw out. They were a centrally managed theocracy where the Mormon Church would strategically tell people where to settle. So the Mormon Church was literally picking spots in the American west to seed Mormons with strategically to grow as much as possible. And the Mormons were also the society in the world which treated women the best. Which is funny because they also practice polygamy. And the Mormons have been known in America for being kind of strange. They're perceived as a sort of cult by a lot of Americans. But they're also known for being incredibly upstanding and moral and tactical tax paying in kind in that stuff.

[Austin Padgett]

That's really interesting. And it's funny you mentioned the 1740s. 1840s. You can go back also to the 1640s because oh, the, the Massachusetts Bay guys remind you perfectly of a booster culture, the high Calvinist who went to establish a theocracy in an unknown land with 20,000 people before anybody was there. That, that is very much in that vein.

[Rudyard Lynch]

1540S was when England converted to Protestantism.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. So probably. Well, yeah, we don't want to get too Deterministic around the cycles, because there's a lot of them. But we could keep finding matches, probably. Yeah, yeah. But those are really good examples. And when there's this opportunity, like a frontier or a big civilizational change, you get people picking up on the idea that this is an impact to make a much larger outsized impact on the future. For whatever you do now, everything you do in these periods is going to reverberate 10 times into the future.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And they kind of understood their opportunity to establish large cultural domains.

[Rudyard Lynch]

They were very aware of that. And you can see it in what they named cities, where this was a society that was significantly more literate and intelligent than ours. And that's true by any metric you'd pick. And you look at the early frontier period, especially where you have Ithaca, New York, you have Syracuse, New York, you have Spartansburg, Georgia, you have Memphis, Tennessee. And it's true on a smaller level, too, where you drive around Los Angeles, and Los Angeles streets are basically named after obscure English historic figures or Sir Walter Scott characters. And so, you know, this was a society where they were constantly dropping these classical illusions. Cincinnati from Cincinnatus, one of the greatest Roman leaders, because they had this profound sense of historic destiny and understanding of their responsibility. And European writers picked up fairly early, fairly early that America would be a great country. From going to the frontier where de Tocqueville said that America was the country of the future. Then I read a book by Crecy, who was this big military historian of the 1850s, and he said, america will be the next great country, and they'll have 100 million people soon. Which was true. And this was a time period that was very complex where they had multiple different schools of opinion. But there was definitely a school of opinion of both Americans and outsiders who saw what America would rise to be. And a lot of them was because they went to the frontier and they saw such a culturally healthy society.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Which speaks to also how we said the culture sustained itself. It was supervised by the government.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

But there were. It's easy to see it as, you know, people taking advantage of opportunity in this wild no man's land. But the real result of a no man's land is that your culture and your values and your norms and your honor become even more important.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

And so they had functional systems and thrived throughout the period in ways that would make a European impressed with the. The governance of this area, even though it was, to them, a theoretical impossibility. And, yeah, the Europeans still always constantly think about the wild, wild west, the Germans, the French, the Italians, they're obsessed with it because the idea of it is so foreign to them. Like the idea that it could exist, the stereotypes of it being bad or the idea that it could work is all just blows their mind.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I think it's traits the Europeans had and they feel nostalgic for, but they feel they had to have thrown away because a lot of the European thinkers who went to America were impressed. They were saying one of the Americans best traits is they have none of the nihilism of the French Revolution, where they said Europeans had filled with cynicism and nihilism, and they said Americans had none of that. And they were constantly shocked at how cheerful and cooperative and friendly and hardworking Americans were. I think frontier America is probably the holistically healthiest society in history. And what I mean that is that having a basis in anthropology, I look at different societies and I compare them, and I would say the mid 20th century in the Western world was the best time to be a person, in that you had the last threat of disease, you had the greatest wealth, greatest comfort. But the thing with the 20th century is that it was a society that was already experiencing the results of decadence that would ultimately, like, reach the point where we are now, where everything's falling apart. And in the American frontier, this was a society where life was harder. And there's a great video game called the Oregon Trail, which talks about, like, you have diphtheria, you broke your leg crossing a creek, your wagon's broken. But humans like hardship, and they need it to a certain degree. And so the frontier was interesting because you were taking the most advanced society in the world, where you're looking at the British, who had spent centuries actively cultivating their social structure to produce a society that could punch massively above its weight, because England was one of the most underpopulated countries in Europe at the time. And then they imported them to North America. And the American frontier was just the right amount of challenge in that you had to clear out the forests. And it's interesting because my grandmother, I have. I have multiple people in. I have multiple people in my family who obsessively study genealogy back centuries. So my grandmother read through our ancestors notes of what the frontier was like. So they spent a lot of time cutting down the forest because she has records from in Ohio. They went there in the 1790s, and they were just clearing out the forest. They said the forest went for forever. And it was kind of terrifying. And I had another ancestor in Kansas, who they were trying to do commercialized agriculture. And they hired German employees they said were cheerful and who were cheerful and good workers and they liked them. But they were talking about the price of. The price of various agricultural things and that stuff. Most of my ancestors were commercial farmers. They were. And this was a common thing with the frontier, the frontiers. People weren't stupid peasants. They were like hustler businessmen who had. Who knew a lot about agriculture and they knew how to do this. And there was a business of frontiering where there was a class of person like my ancestors went to a frontier, set it up, sell it off, get bored, do it again. And so the frontier provided enough struggle between clearing the land, opening up the area that people, people had to make themselves strong to do it. But it wasn't hard enough that it brought out legitimate trauma. And so frontier America is a society where it's very hopeful and very optimistic because early America had insanely high social mobility. Their social mobility then is significantly higher than ours. It might actually be the most socially mobile society in history. So most socially mobile society ever. Everyone was religious and God fearing, but it wasn't really a tyrannical or superstitious religion. So they had a strong sense of self and identity. They had near complete family formation. It was an incredibly wealthy society. No one, no one was really. No one starved on the frontier and few were hungry. It was a society with. That was highly socially cooperative, in which social classes weren't that big. And it was just a very fluid, very cheerful, very intrepid can do society. And that was something that Europeans were highly shocked by. And it's. I have another point. Do you do something you want to say, though?

[Austin Padgett]

Just a great example of that is that there was this guy and Tennessee, I think, and he was supposedly around £400. And there was this law that if you built a cabin, then you could have a 600 acre plot around it. And so on that interpretation, he went out in the woods and he just chopped down trees like three times faster than everybody else. All the Indians in the region were afraid of him and ran away. Thought he was like a spirit. He was just this solo guy trucking on the frontier where no one else was building, like multiple, multiple, multiple cabins, 400 pounds, just like eating more meat than anybody had access to probably in Europe in like hundreds of years, unless you, you were a king. So he probably looked like a modern gym guy, you know, like ridiculous. So you have these like insane characters that are able to like, push themselves to limits.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

On this frontier that you haven't seen anywhere else or to this day, possibly he'd be a. And he didn't get to keep the cabins because it was only one, but he just built. He just built them all.

[Rudyard Lynch]

He would be a right wing influencer today. He definitely would have appeared on the Nick Fritus show.

[Austin Padgett]

He would be on Instagram live streaming his cabin guild and then he'd go on Nick Fritus's show.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, the. So it's interesting you say that because one of my favorite authors, David Hackett Fisher, one of the ways he writes about the frontier is he looks at individual stories of frontiers people. And I normally don't like that style of history, but David Hackett Fisher is such a good author, he pulls it off where you realize this was a very interesting society and you'll realize lots of very strange things happened. Where he'll talk about, you have these like singular Chad figures or the frontier or the. The mountain men, where the mountain men were the first stage of the frontier in each case. And they would go out, talk to the natives, trap fur, then do these other things. And they went surprisingly far. A lot of the same guys who helped populate Kentucky were ended up later out in Wyoming or the Scots Irish produced a lot of these guys. There was this sub cast which Andrew Jackson is the best embodiment of of some Scots Irish Chad, who wanders across the west fighting in six wars against the Natives, getting involved in the formation of multiple state governments. And this was a society that just produced these characters or you'll read about. There was this guy in Virginia in the 6 1700s who like studied like he was in his free time. He was comparing African languages to Latin and Greek and trying to make anthropologies of Africa. So this wasn't a stupid society by any means. And Louis Lamour, who's the biggest cowboy writer who grew up at the end of the American west, what he would say is that the guys in the frontier were surprisingly cultured and surprisingly smart. Where it reminds me of the Appalachian Trail, where the Appalachian Trail, which I hiked when I was a teenager, it had the best, one of the best filters of people I met. The people I met on the Appalachian Trail were holistically nicer, smarter and just generally more cool than the general population.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting. And why do you think that is?

[Rudyard Lynch]

I once asked my dad and he said because the entire general population is based around making money. And so if you want to make money, you have to pay under the lowest common denominator. And the Appalachian Trail is a Filter for doing something hard. And because it's not based around making money, it doesn't really pollute. It doesn't pollute the collective culture.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. You could say maybe it's even outside of the boomer economy or. Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. So now there's several narratives of what America's identity was over America's history. The first narrative in the early Republic was that America was a nation that was based around its republican values or democratic values. And the second narrative in the Mid to late 19th century was America had its identity from its fundamental Anglo Saxon cultural roots. It's the blood of the American people. The narrative that got popularized at the turn of the 20th century was by Frederick Jackson Turner, who I've read. And his narrative is that the American character was fundamentally built off the frontier because the frontier created this social fluidity and challenge which allows American intrepidness and the social classes to be weaker. It allowed American ingenuity and creativity and these other things. And I do fundamentally agree, but I, I am more so in America is America's identity stems from its Anglo Saxon roots because I see so many cultural similarities to Canada, Australia, Britain that had different frontiers or no frontier. But I do think that the frontier is completely seminal to America. And it's something that, due to the later narratives where the narrative around World War II was that America's strength, America's greatness, stemmed from its diversity. And then the narrative in the last 20 years is that America is an innately enslaving, evil settler colonial country. So these are the five different narratives over American history about what America's identity is. But I wouldn't understate the frontier.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Well, the frontier can also be evoked and used like the value of that spirit to return us to original Western values derived from Anglo Saxon history. Anyways. And yeah, it's like you said, it's the, the, the money making machinery we operate in now is so unfront here. Like, it's so. It's. Oh, like you said the other day, it's a helicopter. Helicopter parenting applied to the economy through legal bureaucracy. Yeah, it's the opposite of frontierism. Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I watched a YouTube video today where there's this hotel, I forget its name. It's like something tree. It's like Doubletree. And they give out cookies, warm cookies whenever guests arrive. And you can just walk up and ask for a warm cookie. And investors wanted to take that out because they didn't make money on it. And I'm a, I'm a branding and a media guy and I'm like, you idiots. If you have a distinctive bit for your brand, don't give it up. Because it's hard to get distinctive bits for your brand. You have to cultivate your brand over years. Don't throw away the brand. If you throw away the brand, the brand, you lose everything, right?

[Austin Padgett]

That's like cutting down a tree or throwing away a precious. You have to like, find those things and build around them, not your core.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The warm cookies are such good branding. Like I remembered it, it was fun. So the way the frontier. There were several steps of the frontier. The first was just spilling west in the early Republic period, because as I said before, before the American Revolution, there were a few bases of Anglo settlement west of the Appalachians. Interestingly, the French and Indian War or the Seven Years War, globally one of the most important wars in world history, which created the British Empire. As we talked about last podcast, that war started because George Washington at the time was a British officer who got into a skirmish with the French fort at Pittsburgh. And the British did conquer Pittsburgh, name it after their prime minister, Pitt the Elder. And Pittsburgh's fascinating and I can definitely see why it started the Seven Years War because Pittsburgh is a very. Its geography is crazy. Where it's where three rivers come together. The Shenandoah, the Monongahela and the Ohio. So the three rivers are together. And the British ascertained whoever controls Pittsburgh, which is the juncture in the Appalachians and the start of the. It's the Pittsburgh's where you go west to reach the Great Lake. And the greater Mississippi Valley is the strategic choke point. And Pittsburgh became one of the most important cities in the, in the country. And the biggest steel manufacturer is a huge industrial center. And after the Revolution, the Americans just had free range. And as I said before, my ancestor Matt Anthony Wayne did the first big conquest where he took out the area of Ohio and Michigan. And one of the important choke points in American history in general that people forget is that, is that in the colonial period, the American east coast states all had claims to the areas west of them. And they would literally fight over it. Connecticut and New York had skirmishes over their, over their, their land conflicts. And Virginia claimed everything out to the Pacific as well as the Carolinas. And in the 1790s, every East coast state made a deal to give up all of their lands west of the eastern seaboard to make them new states. And ever since I heard about that as a teenager, I thought that's an incredibly important historic point because I think the east coast states they totally could have decided to keep it. But the level of political unity and political deftness to get these east coast states to give up their western lands, lands without really getting anything for the greater national good, I just find deeply impressive.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Maybe it took away some stress from the arms race of having to compete for westward expansion, which actually wasn't in any of their interest. It was more in the interest of who wanted to go there, not necessarily the state population. And growing up right on the Vermont border, there's a huge stone which was put there because for decades the the Green Mountain Boys in Vermont would fight the New Yorkers over the border by moving the border rock. And they'd have skirmishes and fights and they would mostly just get drunk and then move it. And a couple weeks later the other guys would get really drunk and move it back the other way. And the only way that they ended it was by getting a rock that was big enough that neither of them could move. And then that's the border today. Today.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Fun fact, at the time of the American Revolution, Vermont was the frontier. And Vermont was claimed by both New York and New Hampshire. What then happened? Apologies for the background noise. What then happened is that the is that Vermont became taken over by a paramilitary organization called the Green Mountain Boys who declared independence illegally. And then America brought them in as a new state after the Revolution. And keep in mind that in the early Republic period, until the time of the US Civil War, the US Was seen as a confederation of different independent sub countries where it was these United States as a plural. And that was because America had a series of very strong subcultures that were incredibly different from each other and were different economically, religiously, politically, socially, that did not like each other. And we agreed to a decentralized government predominantly so that the local regional governments would not have to control each other. And for the frontier period, it's useful to see Upper South, Lower South, Upper North, Lower north or Greater Pennsylvania, New England with the Yankees, Virginia and then the Carolinas, each of which had their own colonies to the west. And if you look at modern American genetics, most Americans belong to one of those genetic groups which when you look at the genetic map of America, it spans west until out to the Great Plains, the hundredth parallel. Where the genetic groups from the east coast go out, they go out pretty far west. And these are distinct genetic groups where the genetic difference in British Americans from the north and the south, there should be a desert or a mountain range on the Mason Dixon Line, because the difference is that large. And so what happened with the frontier was that each of those four subcultures colonized the west, created cultures that were quite similar to the ones back in the east before sputtering out at the Great Plains when the terrain doesn't work for them.

[Austin Padgett]

You're right, because if you look at the map, it does go how you would imagine the states would look like if those frontier states were actually competing.

[Rudyard Lynch]

For land, rather than exactly so sociologically, it was basically true that these east coast states established colonies to their west. And each of these cultural regions were pretty different. It's funny, the best history of America I've ever read is the Shaping of America by Meinig. And it's a four volume geographic history of America. And the thing that makes it so good is he does a geographical analysis of every part of American history and every major region. So you get to know how Colorado was populated, you get to know what the industrialization of the upper Midwest was like. And he goes through this. Where the Puritan Yankees started out with this very constrictive culture in New England. And as they went west, they shed the theological side of it to become more mercantile and more chill. And so New England had an enormous diaspora, driven either by their enormous birth rate and secondarily by people migrating out of New England's terrible soil. And so the New Englanders populated upstate New York, the north of Pennsylvania, parts of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, parts of Illinois, this whole northern tier. And this region was the wealthiest part of America in the 19th century, where there was a time when upstate New York, in Michigan, or some of the wealthiest places in the world where this region, they kept a lot of the positives of Yankee culture without the negatives. So that's the first region. The second was the Quaker diaspora out of Pennsylvania, of which my ancestors were part, which went through Ohio, most of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas. And this was a very pluralistic free society. Methodism was the most popular, where there was a time when a third of Methodists, a third of Americans were methodists in the mid 19th century. And in. In the Yankee diaspora, they built their towns around churches because New England was a theocracy. In the Midlands, Quaker diaspora, they built their towns around markets because there was this mercantile society. And in the south, they built them around courthouses because. I don't really have a good answer. I think it's because slavery required a greater degree of policing. But the mid Atlantic, that axis, it's been severely underrated where the New Englanders tend to write history so that they are the dominant Drivers of, of Northern excellence. And New Englanders write the history so that basically the rest of the north doesn't exist. But that's not how it worked. Where the Industrial Revolution started in both the, the mid, the mid Atlantic diaspora and New England and the culture that became general American culture was the average American accent, food like building style came from 19th century Ohio, Pennsylvania and upstate New York because that was where America's demographic and population and industrial center was. And the middle American culture of mind your own business and property rights and hard work and tolerance and cheerfulness. It stems from the mid Atlantic cultural region. But the problem with said culture is that it can be quite naive and provincial and silly at times.

[Austin Padgett]

And when did this New England Northern culture become the dominant culture within the US with media or institutions kind of before that. In more subtle ways, the north and.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The south were jostling for dominance over the early Republic period. I call American Revolution to American Civil War the early Republic period. By the way, I've said it like a dozen times so far, but I wanted to clarify. And you can see the Civil War as the culmination of that, of that, of that jostling. And the north had more literal wealth and the south had more wealthy people because the southern plantation style created these very wealthy, the cultured elites, while the north was more dispersed, but they had more total economic power. And the south grew at twice the geographic speed the north did. But the north grew as twice the population the south did. So by the time we get to the US Civil War, it was sparked by the south realizing that with immigration and the Industrial Revolution, the North would be able to peacefully abolish slavery without their consent. And that the balance of power was tipping in the North's favor. So the north gained total predominance with the US Civil War and then the Rust Belt lost it around a little bit after World War II.

[Austin Padgett]

And where were the Quakers and Appalachians in all this? Just kind of watching and then doomed to the destiny of their battle.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The Quakers were instrumental in a lot of the Industrial Revolution where the bank of America was built around Quakers that Jackson took down and then Philadelphia was. Philadelphia was probably the biggest industrial center in the country at that point. Maybe New York, maybe New York beat us. But New York was less of a pure industrial center and more of like a mercantile place. And so the Quakers were part of that process. But the Quakers also gave out power. Where the Quakers lost power of Pennsylvania pretty quickly because they were silly. But until the 1960s era, Pennsylvania was run by people who were Called friendly people who were not Quakers, but they had Quaker values and were sympathetic to Quakerism. To get further south, another interesting line is North America is divided. In the northern states, cook with butter and they have cattle and they have corn. This is the normal. This is like your. What you consider to be a normal American diet. Once you get into Appalachia. Sorry, it's wheat, cows, and butter. Once you get into Appalachia, because butter doesn't keep. In the south, people would cook with lard or pig fat. And Appalachia spread so rapidly across the map, where the Scots Irish made it out to Oregon and Texas and Kansas because they were practicing herding, where they would have these herds of cattle. And it was a Scots Irish saying that if you can see another man's smokestack, your area is too crowded. So the Scots Irish spread really lightly, and they did well in the frontier period. For those that don't know, the Scots Irish were a people from the English Scottish borderlands in the north of the north of Ireland who migrated to Appalachian America in the late colonial period. And they have this manly warrior culture that resulted in things like country music and cowboy culture and that stuff. So they settled the land quite lightly. And they did really well in this time period because their warrior culture was very useful for fighting the natives, but also because they hadn't been intertwined in the industrial economy yet. They didn't fall into the issues the Scots Irish have now, which are the Scots Irish are not adapted for an industrialized society. They don't have the work ethic. They don't have the sense of, like, linear time. They're. They're individualistic and disagreeable people. And the real decay of Appalachia and the Scots Irish world that occurred in the late 19th and then into the 20th centuries.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And they're especially not suited for blue pill economy or.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

Helicopter economy that just destroying destroys them.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, go ahead, finish that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The Scots Irish are vastly overrepresented in conservative circles today. If you look at. If you look at broader Celtic ancestry among conservative leadership, Celtic ancestry is significantly overrepresented.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Makes sense with all the themes. Relevant themes right now. And what. So if the cultural centers of New England were churches, Midlands were markets, so the south was the courthouse. Would Appalachians be the woods? Because they were kind of like spread out.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Appalachians didn't have towns. I'm being kind of cruel there. But the Appalachians were part of the. They would have built their towns around courthouses too, because most Appalachians were part of the Greater south, where the Appalachians settled in South Illinois, South Indiana, South Ohio. And those places are still seen as extensions of Southern culture. It's interesting. People treat Ohio as a really boring state, but Ohio is a fairly interesting history where after the American Revolution, Ohio was literally split up by east coast states where Pennsylvania, where the middle New England and the south, they all carved out different geographic tracks of Ohio and settled their people there on purpose. So Pennsylvania had the area around Cincinnati. The Virginians had a lot of the Southeast. And then Connecticut had Cleveland. And so it's interesting to see Ohio get militarily divided up by east coast states. But the Scots Irish, they didn't have many cities, but they did mix with Virginian culture, where Virginia actually exported more people to the West Western states than every Northern state combined. Because Virginia was going through sociological and economic decline in this time period due to the. Slavery is not sustainable ecologically. It hurts the land really quickly. So by the time of the U.S. civil War, Virginia had significantly less people than it did before, and it was significantly poorer. So the Virginians expelled this huge diaspora and that Virginian diaspora. And David Hackett Fisher's got a great book called Bound Away. They went through the lower Midwest, they went to Tennessee, they went to Texas, down through the Piedmont of the South. It was huge. Virginia's populated an entire continent. And fun fact. Berkeley University is named after Sir William Barkley, who was the founder of colonial Virginia, who actually helped introduce mass slavery to America. Although Sir William Berkeley was the creator of modern Virginia, you can say introduced slavery, but he also just made the south because he imported the South English nobility and formed an aristocracy of them there. And I find it hilarious. Berkeley University was founded by a Virginian who was naming it after the founder of Virginia. And how would they feel at that today?

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. A Cavalier culture is an interesting one because it's technically very offensive to the values of the modern left, but it also kind of pairs well with imperial culture.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Is connected to the left. And I always did one. I always kind of leave out the Cavaliers because they're the only one of those groups that didn't get a dominant channel through the actual map. But they still spread out a lot.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

So. And would you say they're mostly spread out within the Appalachian zone?

[Rudyard Lynch]

So if you look at the genetics, there's two Virginian genetic groups, one of which is through the upper Midwest, and then a second Virginian genetic group through Tennessee down to Texas. And the first group reaches out to the Chesapeake, and the bottom group has. Reaches out to like Richmond and Norfolk. So according to the genetics, the Cavaliers and the Scots Irish mixed together enough genetically, they became a similar genetic group. Because I don't know how to read that. It doesn't fill with my anthropological understanding. But when you're looking at Tennessee and Texas and and Kentucky in those states, you're looking at this mix of Cavalier and Scots Irish culture that was so intertwined that it just made the Upper south right.

[Austin Padgett]

It's almost like the Cavaliers just filled fit into the role of clan leader and the Scottish culture. The thing is, well, culture anyways, it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Was lots of Virginians, but I don't know how much Cavalier stuff made it because the Cavaliers, for those that don't know, they were a pre established Virginian aristocracy that dominated the Chesapeake region in the early Republic. And that kind of cavalier aristocratic culture only stayed in Virginia. And it's also why Virginia provided the best leadership of the American Civil War for the south. Because the Virginians had this sense of noblesse oblige and aristocracy and learning and tradition that the rest of the South's elites had lost. And it's why in the American Civil War, the eastern front of the Confederacy fought so much better than the western front. And so it was ethnic Virginian people. And I see so much Cavalier signs in Texas, it's so obvious Texas was populated by Cavaliers. And I'll see that like cavalier blank everywhere. But it was a mix that left out the old European style aristocracy of Virginia.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. That got mostly left there. Got it. And then what are we covering next? What kind of period are we?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Deep South? Deep south is the last region of America we haven't had. So the Deep south was a majority black community based around South Carolina and Georgia that was based around slave agriculture. So an interesting things. At the time of the American Civil War and the American Revolution, it was widely assumed that it was widely assumed that slavery would die out because slavery was actually not economical with their structure. And the founding fathers just thought this is going to die out by itself. But interestingly, a Connecticut Yankee who was part of Nathaniel Greene's posse, because Nathaniel Greene was this Connecticut general who was awarded massive lands in the south in exchange for helping fight for the south in the American Revolution, he invented the cotton gin and leave it up to a Yankee to invent the one piece of technology that made the south blow up where blow up. But the cotton gin made the processing of cotton vastly easier by compressing the cotton. And this resulted in the massive growth of slavery. So the founding fathers, including Southerners, were almost Unilaterally against slavery. But by the time you get to the American Civil War, Southerners were vociferously for slavery to at a point where anti slavery opinions were not allowed in a lot of the South. And so you saw this growth in slavery as an institution. And over the course of this time period, the South's locus of power shifted from Virginia further south and west more towards the area around Mississippi and Alabama. Because slavery created this huge cotton kingdom where they would export it to the factories of the north and they would export it to Britain and France due to the Industrial Revolution. And this was America's most important export at the time. It was very important to the global economy and it created a lot of very wealthy people where the, the heiress, the, the wealthy plantation owners of the, of the Deep south they were the wealthiest and often sometimes the most cultured people in America. So the south had this very strong elite culture, but they had lost the sort of aristocratic gifts that the Virginians had. Was why the Virginians provided so much leadership. And the Deep south operated under this culture that was practically a police state where all white men had to own guns and go on the patrol to keep the slaves down. Because the Deep south was the only region of America that was majority black. The south in general was about a third black. And you had these strange dystopian things. Whereas the population center moved from Virginia down to. Down to the Deep south is you had these slave breeding plantations in the Upper south where they would purposely just produce baby slaves that grew up as individuals to sell them further south where there was a need for human labor. And the America was the only country in the world where black slave populations were sustainable. And interestingly, the black population grew at the exact same speed as the white population did through natural.

[Austin Padgett]

I guess it. And it would probably match the demand for the expansion on the farms. However many farms, more farms you had with the expansion of white people, the more demand for slaves. And so they would match that rate fairly accurately. And with the majority it almost turns it into kind of a HEL type society.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

And then I guess if you have all that free time then the least you can do is read some books and become a little educated while everyone else is picking your cotton. Yeah. And yeah, it's, it's, it's a weird one because slavery does not work for, for an economy. Like if you just wanted to make slavery legal and people started doing it, it would mess stuff up. But they can kind of isolate that dynamic by creating a different class of, of people that's not integrated with the rest of society. So you don't, yes. You don't feel the pain of that bad economic decision. And then, and then you get all this, you have the concentrated wealth in the south. And then this is kind of where I, I get an interesting point about the Civil War because it's very sensitive around, you know, slavery caused the Civil War and then people dispute that. And why do people get so sensitive about it? Because slavery was clearly a major component. And I think it's because you have, you think about the Imperial Yankees, right? The, the Yankee Yankees trying to expand their, their governing control. You think of 50 plus years of tariff battles where the different. If you get a bigger voting bloc in the south, they're going to put tariffs on the northern goods and vice versa. So that creates kind of like an existential power play for special interests. And so I don't think the special interests in the north actually like the Yankee imperialists. I don't think they cared about slavery. I think they saw a political opportunity. But I think the people of the north cared about slavery a lot. And the people of the south cared about slavery. And especially the elites of the south that were manipulating those, their political response, all the concentrated wealth centers that are going to be able to influence things. Those, they care about slavery as well. So it, it's like you clearly cannot separate slavery from the Civil War. And I think that's why people get mad about it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah. I think everything you said is accurate. I agree with that. The frontier was seminal in the American Civil War. It was probably the most important factor because the north and the south are both growing so rapidly. And I can't overstate how quickly this happened where it was. There were many times the American Civil War who lived through the American Revolution. And in that time, America went from Pittsburgh to Kansas and California. So it happened really quickly. And we built up these states where it's crazy that places like Ohio or Michigan were operating as these industrial bases for the Civil War. And they weren't even states within living memory. So it happened very quickly. And change brings out destabilization, where the big issue was due to the rapid expansion of both societies, the north and the south, it created this profound destabilization where for the longest time they had to admit one slave and one free state at the same time. Because you needed a balance in the Senate between the north and the South. And what happened over time is that this created a lot of political tension with the Missouri Compromise being an example, where Missouri had both Northern and Southern settlers. And they agreed to let it be a slave state with the understanding that nowhere west of Missouri would be a slave state. So the north said, we'll give you this one south if you back off later. What happened, though, is that the south realized that most of the North American continent is not hospitable for slave agriculture, especially the Great Plains. So the south thought, wait, the entire rest of the country is going to be free states, which means the north is going to outvote us. Which was a big drive for the Civil War. And the south also wanted to conquer the Caribbean and Nicaragua, where you had an American adventurer who briefly conquered Nicaragua to make it a state as a way to counterbalance the North's growth. And it was. It was widely believed at the time that the Mexican American War would cause the US Civil War, that the US Civil War, not. Not that way. People knew at the time of the US Civil War that stemmed from the Mexican American War because the introduction of Texas and of people thought that New Mexico and Arizona would become slave states, at least the Southern halfs of them. It gave the south enough leverage that the Civil War became in question. Because the Mexican American War took all of this territory to the south and the west of the territory the Americans had.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Which means you could theoretically balance it out. And there were probably a lot of people in the north who were super racist, who were really mad that the south was trying to make Nicaragua state. Okay. Expand the black population or something.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah, no, they. That. They definitely said that at the time.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The. So I want to get through how America required the territory, acquired the territory. So at the. At the time of the American Revolution, the US had everything east of the Mississippi river except Florida, which is a Spanish colony. Andrew Jackson, who was a fascinating character, just took Florida. I need to focus on Andrew Jackson because he is probably the most emblematic frontier character possible. He grew up in a poor Scots Irish family in North Carolina. He. He was. He was forced. His family was forced to house a British soldier, which was one of the worst practices of the 18th century, where governments would force people to house soldiers, house soldiers in their own homes for free. And then he fought the British soldier as a child in the American Revolution. Moved out to area around Nashville in Tennessee, built up a big reputation there. He would constantly fight duels. And he is the American president who by far has killed the most people outside of war. And he built up this militia where in the War of 1812, he sailed down down the Mississippi river until he reached New Orleans, which the British were attacking because we were at war with the British in the Napoleonic wars, where we tried to conquer Canada and failed. He beat the British army, which fought at Waterloo there. And he also crushed the Creek Confederacy, which ruled Alabama and Mississippi then. So Andrew Jackson practically single handedly created the Southern frontier. It's his child. And then he forced the Cherokee and those people out west with the Trail of Tears, where the area on southern Appalachia had the most advanced native kingdoms called the Seven Civilized Tribes. They practiced capitalism, they had their own library, they converted to Christianity. He said, psych, you're all going to Oklahoma. Which was kind of a dick move on our part. And Oklahoma, it only passed through one vote because the north voted against it because they didn't want the south to grow. And we created Oklahoma as a slave, sorry, not as a native reservation where we shoved all these native kingdoms from the Southeast. And then we backstabbed Oklahoma in the 1890s and made it a state, filled it with white people. And so Andrew Jackson became president and he was the first Scots Irish president. And it was widely seen at the time in the Northeast, this is a barbarian invasion because you can't let the Scots Irish run the country. And then he destroyed the bank of America based out of Philadelphia. I have passed that building a hundred times at least because I used to live in Philly. And so he shows how the frontier destroyed the old east coast aristocratic culture that dominated the American Revolution to make a more populist culture. Because Andrew Jackson was the start of the frontier getting enough power to outvote the East Coast.

[Austin Padgett]

And by showed, you mean blueprint. Yes, because you look at the similarities between the Jacksonian political machine and the Trump political machine today, and it's very, very similar. I thought of an interesting example too, down south with Davy Crockett. And Davy Crockett's opposition to Trump is very similar to Rand Paul's opposition to Trump with the tariff debates or other issues or foreign policy or constitutionality, where they have kind of a similar views. Davy Crockett endorsed Jackson and his first term as president, but Davy Crockett also went against him on a governor. He endorsed the Whig governor, which was a new party that was emerging as a counter force to the Jacksonian Democrats. And the Jacksonians weren't even called the party that they represented. They were called Jacksonians, kind of like maga. It's called MAGA instead of Republican. And so Jackson, part of the Trail of Tears was. Everybody in Davy Crockett's state wanted the Trail of Tears. They wanted to get rid of the Cherokee in that area, probably opportunistically around the land. It is a shame because the Cherokees traded more than they raided, and that's why there's so many of them still around there compared. Compared to the Apache. But so the Tennessee people wanted them out. And Jackson and Davy Crockett was the only guy who voted against it. And he then went to Texas to start a revolution against Jackson's government. And so you could say, like, Davy Crockett was correct for going against the Trail of Tears, but you could also say that Jackson was correct in building the political machine that enabled him to kill the bank. And the Trail of Tears was part of that. So it just shows how kind of complicated reality is.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I think it's also, there's a certain point where I see us complaining about our frontiersman ancestors as it's a pretty spoiled thing to do because we're living on the fucking land they conquered, where the only reason we're here is because they did it. And what they would tell us is we did this so that you could have this, so show some gratitude. And that's an attitude almost everyone in history would have except this society. Only this society says that unilaterally denounces conquest and aggression and the law of the jungle. And it's because we're so removed from reality. We are not the masters of reality. We're just fed storylines. We have to work with them. But a lot of bad things did happen with the natives. And I want to focus on that in the next episode, which is the Native America Americans. I'm purposely saying half the story here and having the other half there. And so we took the area west of the Mississippi in the Louisiana Purchase, which France briefly got back from Spain for the complex Napoleonic War reasons. And Napoleon briefly had a dream of establishing a North American empire based out of Haiti. But then after his invasion of Haiti failed, he said, I'm never going to use this. Just take it. America. And this is a huge area that stretches out as the Rockies, the Dakotas. And so America took it pretty cheaply. And then we started populating people west of the Mississippi. And Mexico gained independence from Spain. And Mexico went through its Warring States warlords period. And they were briefly run by Santa Ana, who was kind of this militaristic Chad dictator who's lived an insane life. I want to have a Mexican history episode soon, talk at Santa Ana. But what happened was that the Mexicans offered Anglo Americans to settle in Texas. And so they did so and they very rapidly outnumbered the native population because they're only about, not the native, the Latino population. Because Texas had the Comanche Confederacy, which was like the size of England in the middle. It was a native horse tribe. Then you had the Latinos settling in the south, in the east, and there were like 4,000 of them. Then 40,000 Anglos came immediately. So the Anglos immediately populated the eastern third of Texas. And what happened then is the Anglos asked for self governance. And Mexico had an inordinate amount of pride for a failed state. The Mexicans saw everything the Americans did as an insult to their honor. And then it escalated. And because the Americans weren't paying attention to the Latino like systems of politeness and court intrigue and that stuff, they said, hey, we just want self governance. The Mexicans are. No, you were too direct. And so Texas declared independence and it was an independent country for like 10, a little less than 10 years. The two biggest states in continental America, California and Texas are so. Because they were brought in as independent countries and Texas was based out of Austin and they were able to fight independence from the Mexicans, where the Texans by themselves, they held out at the Alamo where they lost. Then at the Battle of San Jacinto, they wiped out the Mexicans. And America wanted to incorporate Texas because they were Anglos like us. The thing is, the north wouldn't allow it because they didn't want to incorporate an area the size of France into the South's alliance because Texas was already a slave state. So what happened is that a Southerner became president. And Polk is probably one of our best presidents ever. And he is the only president who completed every single campaign promise he did because he was basically, his goal was just to conquer Mexico. So there was a frontier dispute in South Texas between the Mexicans and the Americans. The Americans used this as a casus belly to attack Mexico. And the Mexican American war is one of the most disastrous defeats for a nation ever. It's crazy. And people at the time actually thought that Mexico might win because Mexico was a fairly untested country that had just gotten independence. And Mexico in the colonial period seemed incredibly impressive is that the Mexicans already lost in Texas. An adventurer called Fremont just conquered California with his buddies. And then under Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor, the Americans, who had just established a well trained professional military right before they invaded Mexico, went to Veracruz, seized the Mexican capital and then said, psych. Mexico, you're giving us house. Half of our land. Half of your land. So we took California, Arizona, Parts of Colorado, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas. From the Mexicans.

[Austin Padgett]

And the fighting out west with the Mexicans was wild and it involved kind of a long process of explorers. This might be a good time to mention Kit Carson.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Have you heard of Kit Carson?

[Rudyard Lynch]

I know of him from like Boomer TV shows, but not.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, he's like the premier western trailblazer where he established a lot of these early trails and would help guide people through. And they traveled water to water and everything was done on mules. Like we think of the west as horses. All the serious westward expansion, all the like linear traveling, not ranching, that was all mules because they were more reliable for multiple reasons. And there was this crazy mix of like Spanish colonial remnants, post Spanish, like grimy conquistador cultures where they're blended with the, the natives and they have these like, everything is really dirty and there's like mud huts and. And the ground is dirty. Yeah. Kind of like Zorro. Great movie. And they would have these random battles where you'd have like Spanish cavaliers with long spears meeting up randomly against like cowboys, you know. Yeah, like a really weird mix of stuff. And Kit Carson hit in a bunch of cactuses during one of this battle. So he's like avoiding horses on spears. Everybody's dying. He's crawling for miles through cactuses. Yeah, just a wild environment.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So interesting. The conquest of California is kind of fascinating because as I said before, Fremont just showed up and California was briefly a republic, but not really. It wasn't like Texas. And the west coast in the frontier period was seen as this hyper masculin, masculine mining society. Because it's funny, the Mexicans were in California for centuries and within two years of the Americans conquering it, they struck gold. So California was established by Gold rush settlers. And. And part of me thinks the Gold rush is indelibly edged into California's character because California is the society of basically trying to make daring gold strikes, whether in media or in tech or those sorts of things. And early accounts of the west coast because north of California it was an entirely logging based economy, except Oregon, which practiced agriculture. And Oregon actually had a lot of settlers from the upper south, which is why Oregon was the state in early 20th century America with the most KKK members outside the South. So Oregon was split between Yankee settlers who populated the coasts and Scots, Irish and Germans in the interior. And interestingly, Portland, Oregon is named after Portland, Maine. And they had a coin they would toss and it was either going to be named Boston or Portland because the west coast was populated in part by Yankees or New Englanders who sailed around South America to hunt whales for lamp oil in the North Pacific out by Kamchatka. Moby Dick is about this. And so the Yankees used Hawaii as their base and they would sell furs to China. And so the first ruling class of San Francisco and Portland and Seattle were New Englanders who sailed the long way around the bottom of South America. And some people did that to get to the west coast because it was really arduous across the continent where the Oregon Trail is a great example where it spanned. It was earlier on in the 1840s, people would hike from Ohio or Missouri to reach Oregon across the continent. And it became this insane endeavor where they would. Because the, the middle of the continent was unpopulated at that point. So with the west coast, they've kept that creative edge and that dreamer spirit where they're the cutting edge of Western civilization. But also because the west coast never went through a multi century period of cultural formation, it. The west coast can spiral into delusion and hyper and solipsism fairly easily.

[Austin Padgett]

So it's basically like the coast is like New England culture, but a little bit less holistic, kind of more like a ghost of New England culture that's more unstable in its separation from its cultural core. And then I think you also have some examples of booster culture out there where you have these, you know, glorified American kind of army guys or guys who claim to be conquerors. They're with the army and they'd be like, yeah, send me out there. And they would just kind of ride through towns and claim them and makes, make stuff up and then actually end up having to fight the Spanish sometimes because there was way more stuff to claim than people to fight over it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And another thing with Kit Carson that's really interesting is they were getting chased, I think by the Apaches. Yeah, through somewhere around maybe, maybe Texas. And it is, it's the exact story of Herodotus and Greece running from the Persians because they're, they're escaping. They cannot stop moving. If they, you know, they're maybe three days ahead. If they stop moving, they're dead. It's a desperate situation. They, they, I don't know, they lost some supplies or something. So they, and they're end up in this Indian territory and they have to go through. And they stumble through this ancient archaeology, which is the largest, you know, Mesoamerican archeology in that region. It's just a whole bunch of mud architecture. Like I forget the name of the site. But they, they've made some significant ones long ago that were big civilizations that disappeared a long time ago.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And they are just like desperately recording as. Yeah, that, that probably. And they're desperately recording as much as they can. They stay there for a whole night. The two guy archaeologists stay even behind the rest of the crew, which is an absolutely insane thing to do in this environment. And they're just writing down everything they can, taking what they can and then they, they go and catch up and just have to keep moving through.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And nobody else went there again for a while.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Interesting. New Mexico was the one area with a sizable Latino and native population because they had a pre established civilization called the Puebla that were the most advanced people in the American West. They had cities while no one else in the American west did. So they remained the only state in the American west that was never plurality white as New Mexico. For that reason in this is a great transition for me to end. But once you hit the hundredth parallel or a certain line in the Great Plains where you can't have agriculture normal style agriculture is. First of all you see the breakdown of Albion Seed America or the cultures that go back to Britain and the East Coast. And then after that you see, you see the need for the American empire to use a government bureaucracy to maintain force. Because out in the deserts of the west you can't use groups of militias in order to control the land. You need to have railroads, you need to have military bases and you need to have a national federal government. So after the period of the US Civil War, you saw the filling in of the continent, which was a process partly relating to the agricultural innovations we spoke about before. But for example, at the end of the frontier period, you saw the Battle of Wounded Knee, which was. When was that? That was when Custer lost. Right. That was where an American army got wiped out by the natives. General Custer sounds like it.

[Austin Padgett]

Wounded knees sounds pretty bad.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So that was an American field army from the U.S. civil War. Because the U.S. civil War forced the U.S. to take a more active military role. And the U.S. at the time of the U.S. civil War also built the transcontinental railroad which stretched from Missouri to California. And the reason the north could do that was that the south had blocked the north from building such a railroad because it would be filled by Yankees or Northerners. And this is a period when you know the frontier is about to finish. Because once you can take a railroad from California to the East Coast, America has been bounded together by what Meinig calls it like an iron. A continental iron line. In Meinig's third book for the Shaping of America, which I said before, is the best history of America today. There's continental America and then there's transcontinental America. So it's fascinating because you see several trends. First of all, with the need to establish control over the dry, arid American west, you saw the rise of the American state, which ultimately tried to destroy the regional cultures. Secondarily, you saw the rise of mass industrialization, where even at the time, people said the end of the frontier will lower quality of life in America. And that was completely true. Where the late 19th century saw an absolute quality of decline for the average American due to the frontier not creating labor. Labor fluidity, which made the average American's quality of life good. And pretty soon after the frontier period, you saw the consolidation of these enormous industrial firms based out of the Midwest, where these previous industries like timber or oil or steel were unified into these huge conglomerates based in the Rust Belt, where New York, Chicago and Philadelphia divided up the continent, in a lot of cases, economically. And so with the frontier and its final conquest, you're seeing America move from this continental frontier nation to this transcontinental empire. And it's crazy that within five years of the final defeat of the Sioux, the Americans were conquering the Philippines and Cuba.

[Austin Padgett]

Wow. That. It is amazing how fast it amped up. And it makes so much sense because remember I said earlier with Kit Carson, there's these random military figures that are pretending to conquer towns.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Do big battles. And it's like maybe 50 people fight 50 people one time. Yeah. And post Civil War, there's no shortage of those officers to be posted out there and no shortage of soldiers to go with them. And all these schemes suddenly become not only possible, but automatic. I don't think there was any contestation after that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. The only tribes that we had to fight after the Civil War were a few hunter gatherer peoples in the Great Plains, like the.

[Austin Padgett]

And I meant the Spanish. Yeah. There's no resistance from them at this point.

[Rudyard Lynch]

We had. By the time of the U.S. civil War, we had wiped out every major. We had conquered every single population center and every single bit of arable land west of the Mississippi. So thank you for your service and I will catch you next week for the Native Americans.

[Austin Padgett]

Excellent.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Bye.

[Narrator]

History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ 102. If you like the episode subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.