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Max Perry Mueller, "Wakara's America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West" (Basic Books, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Max Perry Mueller
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
Stephen Hausman
Welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Stephen Hausman. And to hear more interviews like this one, subscribe to my channel, New Books in the American West. For today's episode, I'm speaking with max Perry Mueller. Dr. Mueller is an associate professor of classics and Religious studies at the University of Nebraska. And today we'll be discussing his new book, Wakara's the Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American west, which came out with Basic Books last year in 2025. Welcome to the New Books Network, Max. Good to have you here today.
- [00:41]
Max Perry Mueller
Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor.
- [00:44]
Stephen Hausman
Yeah, it's an honor to have you here. And let's start, just as we always do on this podcast, by hearing a little bit about who you are as a person and as a scholar. So I'd love to hear about your background and in particular, tell us how you got interested in your fields of success. Study.
- [00:59]
Max Perry Mueller
Sure. So I was born in the west, kind of right on the edge of the American west and the Great Plains. I'm, you know, a proud resident currently of the Great Plains here in Lincoln, Nebraska, but I was born in Casper, Wyoming. Right. Yeah. Right. Where the Plains and the. And the intermountain west kind of merge. And so spent the first six years of my life there and then had a kind of peripatetic childhood, but ended up in upstate New York because I study. So I've always been fascinated by the American West. That's where I kind of feel at home in a lot of ways. That and upstate New York. And so, yeah, I kind of joke that I did the reverse Mormon Trail.
- [01:46]
Stephen Hausman
Right.
- [01:46]
Max Perry Mueller
The reverse Mormon trek. I went from Casper, Wyoming, is on the kind of the Mormon trail. Those folks who know the west know about that trail and the Latter Day Saints trek across the west. And so ended up in upstate New York, where I spent most of my childhood. But I have a lot of family out west. And when I was in graduate school and even before, I've always been kind of fascinated with Utah in particular, the folks who dominate that state, historically and contemporarily, the Latter Day Saints. For various reasons, I had Latter Day Saint playmates growing up. I was a child of a single mother, and my Latter Day Saint playmates had these beautiful big families and always were very welcoming. So really always interested in Latter Day Saint history, and that's certainly part of it. But I also love to ski. My true religion is skiing, and that's only half a joke. So I try to study things, or I have tried to study things in Utah so I can have the excuse to go skiing. Right. The archives go bad if I don't visit them in, like, February and March. So that's one of the many reasons I've gotten into these fields of study. Yeah, I'll stop there for now.
- [03:09]
Stephen Hausman
I remember being very jealous in my master's program. One of the historians there studied. I don't remember exactly. It was something like they studied castles in the south of France or trekking off to, like, Marseille and places to do that. And for any grad students listening, you know, there are worse ways to pick your fields of study than, you know, hobbies or, you know, beautiful places to go visit.
- [03:35]
Max Perry Mueller
Yeah, absolutely. You want to. You want to make your career sustainable and enjoyable. And so, yes, a dear friend of mine, Katie Gerberner, who's at University of Minnesota. Right. Does Caribbean kind of early modern history. So she always is going to the Caribbean for her research. So, yeah, that is not a bad piece of advice, I think.
- [03:59]
Stephen Hausman
So I'm also interested in what brought you to the topic of this book. We'll talk a great deal later about who Wakara was and his story, but where did you first encounter this individual and this myth and the story and this history itself?
- [04:15]
Max Perry Mueller
Yeah. So for my dissertation, you and I were talking a little bit about that before we signed on. I studied race and early Latter Day Saint history. So for my first book, which came out of my dissertation, which is called Race in the Making of Mormon People, published by UNC Press in 2017, I looked at how the early Latter Day Saints conceptualize race as a broad category. The Latter Day Saints were, you know, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saints, was really against schisms. Right. He wanted, he saw as part of his mandate to end schisms of all kind, schisms, especially within churches or within the body of Christ, but also political schisms, but also certainly racial schisms. And so his part of the story I tell about how the Latter Day Saints understood their mandate was to restore the human family to its original and by which original, kind of raceless, by which they meant white form. So all the schisms in the human family, whether it's people of African descent and especially for the Latter Day Saints, because of their particular relationship to or view on their early Latter Day Saints, at least, Native Americans, to end the schisms that led to the creation of Native Americans. And so that was one of the. That was kind of the framework of that first book. And so what I did in that first book is followed the development and the changes to Latter Day Saint theology, especially racial theology, when it came to people of African descent. And the Latter Day Saints had, and some would argue still have a particular and a particularly racist view of the origins of people of African descent. And same is true of Native Americans, right? The Book of Mormon in some ways is an Amerindian origin story. And how the Native Americans came to be is one of the stories of the Book of Mormon. And so I followed Joseph Smith and his early family church and its growth and development as it moved west. And really one of the things that the church was this first movement was doing was following being attracted to different populations of Native Americans, seeing it as their mandate to restore Native Americans whom they actually thought were descendants of lost tribes of Israel who had forgotten their true origin or the faith of their forefathers and restore them to their true self knowledge as these ancient Israelites, benighted Israelites, cursed Israelites, and the Latter Day Saints actually believed that they were to restore Native Americans to the original gospel of Jesus Christ. The Native Americans in the Book of Mormon, they're called Lamanites, would become once again white and delightsome people. And they would be restored both culturally and even physically phenotypically to kind of racelessness, which was whiteness according to the early Latter Day Saints. So their first mission, it's important to recognize the first mission, right? If we know anything about the Latter Day Saints or the Mormons, we think of them as a missionary people. The first mission, formal mission, was to a Native American group of people on the border between Missouri and and Kansas Indian Territory in 1830, 1831, trying again to find Lamanites with whom they could covenant and establish the new Jerusalem that they expected to establish to await Christ's imminent return into the new World. They had not much luck between 1830 when the church was formed, until Joseph Smith's successor, Brigham Young, led the Mormons in kind of exile exodus to Utah, to the Great Basin in 1847. And you know, I often say that the Latter Day Saints were pushed west by persecution, but they were pulled west, hoping to find again, using the Book of Mormon language, Lamanites who hadn't been corrupted by other missionaries who could hear the pure Gospel and would be willing to be restored. And so in that first book, when the Latter Day Saints arrived, famously on July 24, 1847, which is pioneer Day, celebrated in Utah as Pioneer Day today, they encountered, they were pulled there and one of the main reasons, by hoping to find a large population of Native Americans and the leader the most. Well, not necessarily the formal leader, but the most powerful man of the Great Basin when they arrived, and I argue, really the most powerful man of the intermountain west and the Southwest at the time was this figure named Wakara. And so in that first book, I write about Brigham Young and Wakera's, really from Brigham Young's perspective, their relationship. And one of the main arguments of my scholarship is that race in America, and I'd say this is true in other cultures too, but specifically in America, is Starts on the page. It's a literary project. Race is created on the page and then read onto flesh and bone bodies. Right. And that. And in terms of the United States, because we're such a religiously oriented people, often those were religious texts that were the storehouses or the creation spaces where race was created. And so I was particularly interested in how, in that first book, how the Latter Day Saints were writing about Wakera, this really powerful figure that they encountered and hoped to convert Hope to covenant with, who would be the Lamanite they'd been looking for. To borrow from a Star wars kind of reference, the Lamanite they were looking for, that they'd covenant with and establish a new relationship with Native Americans. And so in that first book project, I was looking at how the Latter Day Saints were writing about Wal Kera in their archive and then reading what they were writing about onto his actions, often depicting him as, you know, the aggressor when he wasn't doing what they wanted. Right. Their partner when he was doing things they wanted, et cetera. So Wakera was a really, really big figure in my first book project. It's hard not to look at early Mormon native relations without coming across Huaquera. He was such a powerful figure. And so for this next book project, it was pretty clear to me for my second book, I wanted to tell this story from Wakera's point of view. And so I kind of reversed. My goal was to reverse kind of the point of view and tell this encounter not just with Brigham Young, but with other settlers and with kind of the natural world and the more than human world that Wakera inhabited and helped create, or from Wakera's point of view. So that's how we got to got to Wakera. For this next book, Race starts on the page.
- [11:38]
Stephen Hausman
That's a really well put insight. I gotta write that one down for my own. That's very well said. I like that a lot.
- [11:44]
Max Perry Mueller
Well, I take that from Jillapore. I mean, Jillapore, the Name of War, her terrific book, you know, her first book. That's one of the observations she makes about the King Philip's War, which is the creation of American identity, was over against Indian identity and British identity. But how? Because the early British, the early colonists could control the archive. They got to decide who was considered, you know, a Christian, a heathen, an aggressor, an innocent. So that's one of. Certainly one of my inspirations.
- [12:23]
Stephen Hausman
So before we get into the story that you tell here, I want to ask you a little bit about your methodology and your kind of stylistic choices. I mean, you know, myself, I'm working on a book right now, and it's sort of a pretty classically academic monograph. And this book, and I mean this purely as a compliment, is definitely not to that. It's very scholarly, to be sure. But I'm always interested in books that are both scholarly and written in a way that is, I guess we could say, unconventional. For a lot of scholarly monographs, your own narrative and your own story and your own insights and yourself as a character are. Are woven throughout the text here. You're kind of on the trail of Wakera and his America throughout the book. So I'm curious why you made this choice. Why did you decide to include this kind of contemporary story and yourself alongside Wake Hera's story in the 19th century?
- [13:19]
Max Perry Mueller
Yeah, while I was writing this book and I was fortunate enough to have a year of the, you know, now a blessed memory, sort of National Endowment the Humanities, I was able to. And that's one of the only reasons I was able to write it. In a lot of ways, I had a year off to focus on it. I remember waking up and sometimes in cold sweats. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. How am I going to pull this off? You know, my mentor, Laurel Thatcher Oric, you and I spoke about this earlier, always wrestled with. While she was working with chronology and theme. Chronology and theme. And so that was certainly part of the issue I was wrestling with. And yes, it's not a straightforward, you know, this happened, then that happened, then that happened, then that happened. The main reason is because I was, I hope, and I hope I succeeded here, listening to Indigenous. Both Indigenous history of the past, Indigenous peoples of the past and their ancestors, Wakara's ancestors, excuse me, descendants, and Wakera the ancestor. And I mean that both kind of almost spiritually, but also very literally. So, you know, it's a key tenet of Indigenous methodology that you Indigenous Scholars, many Indigenous, I would say almost all reject the idea of this kind of floating head, objective historian who can just kind of look at a body of evidence and, you know, come up with some capital T. Truth found in the body of evidence. No, we are all embodied. We all come from places. We all come from people. And so our own histories, some might call this bias, but I call this truth fact, as do Indigenous scholars, that we can only look at the history from our own perspectives. Obviously, we want to listen to the voices or interlocutors, et cetera. But I thought it was very important to follow my Indigenous mentors, including Wakera's descendants, with whom I work directly, to state where I come from, who are my people? What is my history with the land, with even these historical peoples and their contemporary descendants. So that's one reason it's an Indigenous methodology. If you go to a conference, most Indigenous, or if you ever meet an Indigenous person who's speaking publicly, they'll say, hey, I'm from these people. These are my clan. This is my band. These are my parents, right? And I thought that was. I think that's vital for us to do that. I'm certainly not the only Indigenous or, excuse me, non Indigenous scholar to do that. My great colleague, great and good colleague here at unl, Margaret Jacobs, the great Bancroft winner, Bancroft scholar prize winner. She also does that work in her book on Colorado and settler Native history of Colorado. That's one reason. The other reason, more specifically to Ute history, right? Wakera was a Ute, as Ute as in Utah, the origin of the word Utah, and some of his spiritual and direct descendants, one of whom is the spiritual leader of the northern Ute people, named Larry Cespuch. And he told me something that really helped me think about this, right? Often you hear Indigenous people say, you know, the ancestors are with us. They're always with us. Well, Larry takes it a step farther, and he says, we are the ancestors. We are the embodied embodiment of the ancestors. He looks at his cousin, my great and good friend, Forrest Cutsch, who's a direct descendant of Wakera, and he points to him and says, well, Forrest is the embodiment of Antonga, who is one of the great leaders, another relation of Wakera. So, like, the ancestors are not just like with us, but we embody the ancestors. And so that makes the history that we write, not history. It's not in the past. We are still implicated in it. And I have a history on this land. I'm a descendant of. I use these words advisedly Indian killers, you know, celebrated Indian killers from, you know, early Massachusetts and Maine. And if Larry and Forrest can be the embodiment of the Ute people, including Waker of the past, I think I am the embodiment of some of my ancestors. But the difference is I know better now, and I can enter into. We know better now, and I can enter into better relationships with my contemporary, you know, my fellow American citizens and, you know, indigenous descendants of Wakara and others. So that's one of the reasons why I think tying the present and the present is so implicated, as we know, to the past, and the past is so implicated into the present. That's why I thought that this kind of format was kind of necessary. Good theory, I think, arises organically from the material. And so that was the theoretical orientation and the thematic orientation that arose from my conversations with Wakera spiritual and lineal descendants.
- [18:55]
Stephen Hausman
Well, I think it works remarkably well in that case. And I hesitate to say that it makes it a fun book to read because there's very heavy topics in here, but it definitely makes it a compelling read, for sure. Not that, you know, more conventional books aren't sure, but, you know, it works, I guess, is what I'm saying.
- [19:12]
Max Perry Mueller
Thank you. I'm glad to hear that.
- [19:15]
Stephen Hausman
So let's get into the story that you tell here. And you begin this book by, you know, in some ways, this book is a mystery, or at least you begin the book with a mystery. So I'll start by just asking you what is the mystery that you begin this book with, and what is the import, the importance of this mystery? Why start with this question?
- [19:36]
Max Perry Mueller
Yeah, so I frame, really the whole book as starting and returning to Wakera's burial site. And I'm very careful about this because this is sacred land. I purposely, working with the direct descendants of Wakera and other tribes and bands whose land these burial sites sit, I purposely kind of obfuscate, with their permission and into consultation with them, obfuscated some of the details because, unfortunately, what I don't want to happen is what happened to Huaquera's grave site, which is grave robbing. And so I start with the mystery of. So I start with. Yeah. One of Wahkera's contemporaries, a different Ute leader named Kanash, who made a different choice than Wakera and others. He really allied himself with the Latter Day Saints, and he thought being really close to the Latter Day Saints, close to the settlers, would protect him. Unfortunately, it really didn't in some ways. But we start with Kanash, who is the founder of the kanash band of Utes and Paiutes. It was an intertribal bands created really in the aftermath of colonization and genocide in central Utah. Going to visit Wakera's grave site. And Wakera wasn't the only person buried up there. It was really a cemetery for a lot of Utes and Paiutes up on this big talus field. In a central Utah mountain. And Knash was just. We have this very amazing letter of Kenosh written by a friend of Kenosh, a Mormon friend of Kenosh, who was just flabbergasted, so distraught that Wakera's grave site had been destroyed and the grave site of Kanash's son and brother had been destroyed and grave robbed. And I kind of start with that. And it's both kind of a mystery of what happened, who done it, but also like in a very kind of concrete way, concrete mystery, but also that serves as kind of an analogy or a metaphor about Guaquera's both place in the creation of the American west and his literal and literary removal. Right. He was literally removed from the land through this grave robbing, and he was literarily removed as a founding father of the American West. Right. That's one of the arguments I make that Wakara really is a founder of what we know as the settler American west, but we don't know about him. He's not part of that narrative. Why? Well, because he's a Native American. And in our mythology of kind of manifest destiny that we have inherited and there is no place for a Native founder of the American West. We see Natives as either benighted victims of settler history or kind of belligerence against settler history, or sometimes partners in settler history, but Wakera are really was both a partner and, you know, partner and helped create the American west in very specific ways, but also was a great defender of Native sovereignty. So in our imagination, in our mythology of the American west, there is no place for Wakara. And so, like I said before, this goes to the founding idea of or one of the key ideas of my scholarship, right. Race. And I see this book and not this project, not only is a race history, it's more complicated than race, it's also mostly about sovereignty. Sovereignty is probably a better word and politics is probably a better word, more indigenous focused word than race. But I see this as very much in line with my scholarship, which looks at how race is created on the page and then read onto flesh and bone bodies. So not only was Guaquero written out of the founding history of the American West. His remains were literally removed from the American west, removing him and his claim to the American West. One of the things that indigenous people do to make claims, and this isn't just true for indigenous people. Right. We claim land by cultures, claim land by burying our dead in certain places where we return to. To do rituals and to bury others. Right. That's one way we mark our territory, say that this is our homeland. And that's certainly true for Huaquera. And so his removal, that kind of mystery that I follow through the book is both kind of a, like I said before, a very specific whodunit who removed Wakera's remains. And as kind of a, like I said, kind of a very literal, practical mystery, but also a metaphor for the larger project that I'm trying to uncover, which is the literary erasure of Wakera from the origin myth of the American West.
- [25:15]
Stephen Hausman
Well, I want to dig a little bit deeper into this idea of Wakera as a founder of the American west. And just the idea that's presented in the title itself, this idea of Wakara's America. So when you say that it was a founder of the American west, what does that mean? And what did Wakara's America look like? What do you mean by this phrase?
- [25:37]
Max Perry Mueller
Yes, yes. This is one thing that I struggle with because, you know, here I'll criticize my own book a bit here or, you know, there are always. I mean, that makes for good conversation. Wakera probably didn't have a concept of America. Right. And so that's a little bit anachronistic to kind of ascribe America to him. I don't think he's alone in that. So let me speak very specifically. When I say he's the founder of the American West, I mean it very practically. So Waker got his start, emerged in the early 1840s as the greatest horse thief of the American west. He and other Utes and interracial inter tribal band of horse thieves would travel along the old Spanish trail which linked the outposts, the New Mexican outposts of Santa Fe and Taos to the California missions. And it was the most important overland trail for between the 1830s and 1840s. And Wakara. And really, it was a Ute trail, Right? It was a ute Trail. The Utes really helped establish that trail. And he would go every fall to California to steal horses by the thousands. He would target ranchos, the Californio ranchos, and steal horses by the thousands over a Period of time. You know, a few nights out of a month, he would go and send lieutenants to one rancho and another, and they would gather the horses on the old. The other side of the Calhoun Pass. And then once they had enough horses, they would march them back along the old Spanish Trail for sale in Santa Fe and Taos and Abiquiu. Because New Mexico had a harder time maintaining its own herd of horses, and the rich grasslands of the central San Bernardino Valley in particular, and Southern California supported horses. Horses, of course, are fundamental to the creation of the American West. Without horses, you can't move people, you can't move goods, et cetera. So he literally provides the horsepower that drives the settler creation, the expansion of the American West. Along the way, each season, he would also raid Paiute, his numic language kin, the Paiute in southern Utah. And he would steal and purchase, sometimes coerce Paiute families to give up Paiute children, almost always or very frequently, Paiute girls, who. Whom he would sell as slaves again in California and New Mexico. So now I said he provided the horsepower. He also provided the human power in the form of enslaved peoples who worked as field hands, as house servants, and, yes, as concubines to their masters, especially these young Paiute girls. It wasn't just Paiutes, but that was the tribe or the band he most tribe and band he most frequently targeted. And in the 1840s, he was well known all across the west in all the newspapers. If you look at the newspapers, we hear about Wakara's exploits. And he also charged tribute to the great explorers, mappers of the American west, most famously John C. Fremont. When John C. Fremont, in his second expedition passed through Wakara's territory in 1843, Wakara met him and they exchanged blankets, although John C. Fremont was very upset by the exchange. Like he had to give up a very fancy blanket for not as nice of a blanket to Wakera. But Wakera also helped John C. Fremont map the West. He knew the best mountain passes, the best watering holes, and he described the American west to John C. Fremont and other mappers who wrote it in their journals and then brought that information back to Washington, which became the maps of the American West. So Waquero was a great cartographer of the American West. I already mentioned about his horse stealing and slaving, but he also helped expand the old Spanish Trail. So he was a great road builder of the American west, and that's even before the Latter Day Saints get there. So, I mean, not unlike some of the work on the Comanche, about how the Comanche helped soften up Texas for kind of the annexation of Texas. Guaquera and his band did a similar thing in Mexico era California. His raids helped soften up Mexico, a Mexico era California. So when again, John C. Fremont marched there in 1848, it made it much easier for him to take over to annex California. So in a lot of ways, even before the Latter Day Saints get to Utah and meet Wakera, he's helping to build the infrastructure of the American West. And then, of course, the Latter Day Saints arrive and he ends up partnering. Brigham Young has heard about him long before, I like to say long before Wakara heard about Brigham Young and the Mormons, Brigham Young had heard about Wakara and was even concerned about his small bands of the Vanguard company running into Wakera and the other Utes before they were big enough to like to fight back. So, so, and so, yeah, I'll pause there because I think that just gives us a sense of, like, even before the Latter Day Saints get to Utah, Wakara's really outsized influence on the West. And again, everyone knew him like, he was a major figure in the kind of the, the unfolding drama of the American west that, you know, Easterners were reading about in newspaper articles.
- [32:01]
Stephen Hausman
Well, let's get into the story of Wakera's life and actually begin the story in the book with the end of life. So tell us how he spent his last days and then kind of maybe let's zoom out from there a little bit and talk about the context surrounding his death before we start backward in time from there.
- [32:21]
Max Perry Mueller
Sure, sure. So, yeah, so Wakera, in 1854, he had had several fallings out with the Latter Day Saints who had come into his territory that he had so long dominated. Many factors helped the Latter Day Saints decrease Wakara's power, not the least of which is disease, but also just the number of Latter Day Saints who had poured into Utah. And so Wakera was at a wintering ground or a wintering home in kind of the south, the most southern part of Utah, near a town called Pace, way far south on the Old Spanish Trail. And something happened. Now, normally, Huaquera would. So this is late December, early January, December 1854, early January, 1855. Wakera, like I mentioned, his seasonality. So he would steal horses in the fall, winter, on his return trip, he would enslave Paiutes in the late spring, always ending up where Provo is today, where Lake Utah is. Provo, where BYU is really, if folks know Utah, really, that's the heart of the Mormondom, is Provo, in a lot of ways, less so even than Salt Lake City anyway, because that's where the fish festival was held every spring and summer. The Wakara's band were fish eaters and both managed and kind of got their identity from the fish of this great fishery that existed in Utah Lake before the settlers arrived. So he would end up usually there in the springtime, but he ends up leaving his wintering ground all of a sudden. And I think he got sick. Something made him sick, and I think he's rushing north earlier than he would have normally, because I think he's trying to get home, recognizing that he is not long for the world and he wants to be buried close to home in his sacred, most sacred ground in kind of central Utah. Now, one has to be careful here because he falls sick pretty fast. And more likely than not, it's probably some communicable disease. The Mormons who heard about his death and kind of witnessed his burial described it that he had some kind of lung disease, something pneumonia like symptoms. And yet at different conflicts with Brigham Young. Brigham Young had sent him some letters that I chronicle that were pretty threatening, suggesting that Brigham Young would sometimes lace tobacco. He would send Walkera, perhaps with poison. There's one letter in particular at the height of one of their conflicts that makes that suggestion pretty strong that, hey, maybe Brigham Young might lace his tobacco with poison. So some believe, including Walgera's brother and his heir who took over his band after he died, that the Mormons were at fault for his death and perhaps even poisoned him. And a lot of you to this day believe that it was the Mormons who poisoned Wakera. Brigham Young understanding that Wakara was the biggest impediment to his control over the Great Basin. So, you know, again, another mystery to unfold. And, you know, I'm not speculating this. This is not just some kind of wild speculation. Like I say, there are some. There's a really interesting letter that Brigham sends him that makes a very strong case that he isn't. That he might poison the tobacco he sends Wakera. But the Latter Day Saints did use poison to poison the wells and watering holes of other Native Americans with strychnine and arsenic. They were not above, you know, kind of total warfare, including kind of chemical. Using chemical weapons to kill off and or at least remove native peoples from the land. So that's another mystery that, of course, we'll never be able to solve, but certainly it was a possibility. So that's kind of how he ended his life. His burial was scandalous for the settlers who witnessed it. Huaquera was so powerful and so important, and this wasn't uncommon among Ute and other Numic language. Numic peoples that people would bury when you. When a great leader would die. They were buried with their stuff, with their weapons, their, you know, their fishing gear, some food, but also perhaps their horses and even their wives and slaves. And that's the case for Wakera. So wives were killed, horses were killed. He was buried with a lot of his own material kind of wealth on this big palace field. And the Latter Day Saints who witnessed it, again, kind of were used this, you know, scandalous and deadly. Yes. Horrific burial to just to which reaffirmed their idea that Wakara and other native peoples were so savage that they were kind of beyond redeeming and would eventually have to be removed and. Or killed to make way for the settlers. And, you know, from Guaquera's perspective, the burial. And I thought, this is not something that I wrote enough about in the book. Right. What I think Guaquara was doing in that was preserving his world in miniature, understanding that his way of life, his America, as we talked about, and I perhaps haven't answered your question adequately enough, his America, the kind of America that was both native and settler, a combination of the two, was changing rapidly and was being destroyed. So I think he's in that burial ground trying to preserve it in the land to come. So, yeah, that's a little bit about his burial, which is where I start. You know, again, where I start the book.
- [39:17]
Stephen Hausman
What was the place that Wakara. Wakara, excuse me, call up home. Like, what was his Utah? I mean, obviously he never called it Utah, but what was his Utah like in terms of the politics of the place, in terms of the environment of the place? And then, you know, he lives through a period of great change. How does the arrival of Mormon settlers change the place that he called home?
- [39:39]
Max Perry Mueller
Yeah. Yes. So like I mentioned before, Walker and his band were. Are called the timpanogas bands of Utes, and they were one of many bands of Utes in kind of central and central Utah and. And Colorado. One of the most powerful bands or one of the most powerful tribes of the. Of the 18th century and 19th century. Some scholars believe that the Utes were the first to actually get. Get the horse from the Spanish, and they were the ones who introduced it to the breakaway Shoshone bands who Become the Comanches, et cetera. So they're Great Horse people. But Wakera's band really were first identified by their fish, the fish that they ate and managed. And so the Timpanogos lived and gathered seasonally around Utah Lake, which I call Timpanogos Lake, which is the third largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi. Really beautiful lake. And obviously in Utah, we often think of the Great Salt Lake as the largest body of water. Well, the Utah Lake which flows into it is one of the. Is a great, very large freshwater body of water. And before the settlers arrived, it had 13 endemic species of fish, one of the richest fisheries in the Great Basin in the American West. And you don't have to take my word for it. Every single explorer who comes through, whether that's Escalante and Dominingue in 1776, to others all through John C. Fremont, when they set their eyes on Utah Lake, boy, they imagined recreating great cities because it's such a verdant place filled with woods and grasslands and of course, fish. And so Huaquera's people, the Timpanogos, would gather each spring and have a huge fish festival. And they would eat the bounty of fish that spawned at different times, depending on the species, at different times of year, and would gather and do politics there, sell and trade, marry off young people. So they gathered seasonally to their sacred fishing and hunting ground around Timpanogos Lake, which is now Utah Lake. And of course, they already had, before the Mormons got there, a lot of contact with the settler world, especially from the Spanish settlements in the South. I already mentioned that they had acquired horses and other trade goods, but they had large contact with the Great Plains peoples. Wakera and others were. They weren't bison, they didn't rely on bison. But after the fish festival, they'd head north into northern Utah and then into southern Wyoming and as far west as Nebraska, hunting bison and sometimes trading with, sometimes competing with the Great Plains peoples. And so they were, like many other native nations, integrated into a international trans regional economy and culture. The American west before the Latter Day Saints arrived in 1847. But when the Latter Day Saints arrived, Wakara said, hey, you know what? We've managed to hold onto this land in central Utah for generations. These newcomers don't seem that impressive. I write about how I think he imagined, like the structures they created were pretty poor and not great building. But the Latter Day Saints kept on pouring in and pouring in and pouring in until eventually, really, the big conflict was over. Fish and because the Mormons, their seeds and ways of planting didn't take well to the land of Utah, because they learned to farm in New England, and in England, the settlers were not indigenous to the place. Famously, their crops did not take well. And so these farmers, these farming Mormons and ranching Mormons became fish eaters themselves. And so there's a lot of competition between Wakara's Utes and the Mormons over access to fish. And very quickly the Mormons destroyed the fishery, ate too much fish. They did not understand what Wakera's utes did, that you need to carefully manage the fisheries. You can't just take all the fish during spawning season if you hope to have another season after that. So very quickly they destroyed the fishery. They also created irrigation ditches to water their crops that destroyed the grasslands and very quickly changed the environment. Of central Utah that was Wakera's homeland. At first, though, Wakera saw the Mormons, as I mentioned before, as potential partners and actually more people he could steal horses from and sell his slaves to. So early on, he partnered with Brigham Young in the first few years. And when I say he's the founder of the American west, again, here's what I mean. He led communities of Latter Day Saints to found different small settlements outside the first settlements outside the Salt Lake Valley. Wakera personally led the Latter Day Saints too, especially in the San Pete, San Pitch Valley, places like Manti and Ephraim, and down along the Old Spanish Trail. Again, Huaquer was hoping the Latter Day Saints would become new nodes on his network of trading and raiding. And famously, Huaquera even was baptized and is probably the first Native American to be ordained a Mormon priesthood holder. So the Latter Day Saints and Guaquera have this very interesting friend and foe relationship between 1847 and his death in 1855. And in particular, Brigham Young and Wakara really were competing as equals for control over the Great Basin. As the great, you know, the leader, the most powerful man of the Great Basin.
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Max Perry Mueller
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- [47:15]
Max Perry Mueller
Tennessee, 2012.
- [47:17]
Stephen Hausman
A critical part of the story that we haven't really addressed yet is the native slave trade in the 19th century West. Can you talk a little bit about this practice, how it came to be, and the role that we Cara played in this trade?
- [47:32]
Max Perry Mueller
Yeah. So I mentioned it briefly that part of his seasonal horse raiding and was also slave raiding. And so, you know, here's something again that I listened very carefully to my contemporary interlocutors and now friends, when I first came and approached some of the elders of the Paiute band of. Or excuse me, the knash band of Paiutes, who was actually one of the targets of Wakara's slaving. But also, there are a lot in the Paiute band who are direct descendants of Wakara. I said, you know, I had some great meetings with them, or I had some meetings with them. And I said, hey, here's what I've learned about Wakara. Here's what I've learned about Wakara slave trading. What do you remember? What is your oral history? What is your band's history? And when I first met them, I'm thinking of Rena and Rick Pikavet in particular, who are elders of the knash band of Paiutes. They pointed their finger at me and said, how dare you? Wakara never enslaved. There was no slavery. You've made that up again to justify removing us because you're making us into savages who practice slavery right here. We have. And at first I was taken aback. It was. Well, I have very clear evidence that Wakara participated in a slave trade. But listening to them more closely, what they objected to was the word slavery when they heard slavery. And when we hear the word slavery, we think of chattel slavery as practiced in the American South. And Wakara slavery was very different. Yes, it could be as inhumane and as transactional as that slave trade of people of African descent. Right. Buying and selling people for money and horses and other trade goods, for sure. But it also sometimes could approach kinship. And here's what I mean, sometimes Waker, and he wasn't the only one, would capture or buy young Paiute children, often young Paiute women. And those young Paiute women would sometimes become children and then sometimes wives of their owners. And so Wakera understood slavery, what we call slavery in some ways, as a form of creating kinships, both kinships with other people he traded with, but also with the land itself. Right. His whole mission was to maintain sovereignty over the land and control over the land. I just mentioned how Wakara helped lead and found a small. You know, if anyone knows anything about Utah, Manti is perhaps the most famous of like the great pioneer villages and has a beautiful temple there. Anyway, for Latter Day Saints, going to Mantai is like, you know, going to visit really like a true pioneer Utah community. Well, Wakera is a founder of Manti and helped found Manti. And early on in the first winter he's up there, he gives away one of the things I've shown he gives away places his own blood children, his own children in the homes of settlers. Two daughters in the homes of settlers in Manti. And he expected a child in return. And we have records of actually his co founder, Isaac Morley. From Isaac Morley, that Walkera demanded this one particular baby boy. He was just apparently so infatuated with this one little baby boy. Well, what Wakera is doing there? And for a time, Isaac Morley gave this child to Wakera. Eventually, supposedly the child was returned to Isaac Morley's family. But what Wakerra is doing there is he's trying to exchange family members. If I give you my daughters, you give me your sons. We are more likely, we are blood relations, then we're more likely to trade well with each other. We're less likely to fight, and we will have made a bond with each other and with the land. And so that's why this kind of notion of slavery is much more complicated than kind of, kind of often kind of what a lot of Americans understand as chattel, as chattel slavery. Again, that's not to discount the horror of Wa Kara's slaving. It is very likely that some of the people killed with Wa Kara to go with him to, you know, to the other side, beyond the veil, were enslaved Paiute children. Right. And so, you know, and there are other clear records that when Huaquera was sick with smallpox and other ailments, that they sacrificed Paiute children, hoping that would stave off the illness. So again, not to dismiss the horror and the violence of Wakara slaving, but it's much more complicated than what we often understand as kind of African channel slavery of the South.
- [52:59]
Stephen Hausman
What was the origins of the conflict that I believe you also mentioned a little bit earlier, that comes to be known by Wakera's name as Wakera's War. How does this come about and how does it get that particular name? I mean, we talked earlier about Jill Lepore's the Name of War and how these narratives stick around. So how does this war come about, and how does it get that particular name?
- [53:24]
Max Perry Mueller
Yes, I mean, this is one of the mythologies that I was writing most directly against. So, as Jillapore makes clear, you know, it's one of the oldest American traditions, starting with the King Philip's War, is for settlers to move into a territory, part often partner with the indigenous people of the place initially, who are often willing because of their, you know, this is overly an overgeneralization. But indigenous people don't have the same kind of understanding of land ownership that settlers do, saying, hey, we can share this land. This isn't ours to own. And then the settlers expand, leading to conflict, and that conflict leads to, you know, is often violent. And again, because the settlers almost always have the means of production, of history. Here I am being a little Marxist. Not just the means of production, but the means of production of history, by which I mean, they have the written word, the printing press, they get to write down the settlers and not the natives, who is considered, you know, the aggressor, who is the innocent, who is the heathen, and who's the slave. And that shows up even in the simple practice of naming these conflicts over the native peoples who were part of the, you know, were part of the belligerence, were one side of the belligerence, but were not necessarily, I argue, the instigators. So King Philip's War, the Comanche wars, the Apache wars, the Ute Wars, Black Hawk Wars. Right. It's this. This long tradition of naming the wars after native peoples as if they're really the ones to blame.
- [55:12]
Stephen Hausman
Right.
- [55:12]
Max Perry Mueller
And that happens, and I trace that in real time, and we can follow this in real time in the archive around this conflict that gets named Walker's War, which I dub really, I redub Brigham's War, because it's really Brigham who is the aggressor, and it's not. So the war that gets named Walker's War, really is a smaller skirmish in a longer war that I describe as Brigham's War, that really begins almost as soon as the Latter Day Saints get there. Brigham, yes, thought he could convert a few native peoples, but he understood that most Native peoples were going to object to the expansion of his settlements, and therefore they'd have to be removed or killed. And we talked about slavery. Slavery was one of the ways that Brigham and said to the settlers, hey, what I want you to do is buy up all the Indian children as fast as you can and make them Latter Day Saints. And that was mostly buy up little girls. Native American girls and make them your daughters and sometimes your plural wives. Well, war was so slavery was a way they'd remove Native women and, and children from the land. War was the way they'd remove native men. And so really from the beginning, Waa. Brigham made it very clear that they'd have to wage war against the native peoples. And I trace that. I won't go into too much detail here, but I trace, like Brigham's belligerency, really from 1848, at least throughout the rest of his life and really into the early 20th century with his successors against native peoples of Utah, seeing that as their duty to remove them, not integrate them, but really remove them from the land. But it's the small skirmish that Geats named Wakera's War or Walker's War starts over fish a fish deal gone bad in 1853, in July 1853. It lasts for about 10 months. Again, it's fairly inconsequential, right, in terms of the kind of many quote, unquote wars or battles that Brigham and the Mormons fought against native peoples. But the framing is really what's important. Again, they very quickly, in the Mormons own writing to each other, but also more importantly to their writing to the federal government and into the newspapers, they very, very quickly lay the blame on Wakera, understanding that he's the most powerful man of the Great Basin. And if we can name him publicly and kind of nationally as the aggressor, that'll help us with our case to get the federal government support and popular support to remove him and to remove his people so we can trace in real time, and I trace in real time how very quickly the war gets called Walker's War. Even during this 10 month period between 1853 to 1854. And yes, there were bloody skirmishes. Ironically, Wakera has very little to do with it. Almost always he's writing letters to Brigham. Well, he personally doesn't write letters. He, he was very cosmopolitan, but he wasn't lettered Wakera. He didn't have access to what we would call literacy. And that's a really important part of the book too. But he's sending dispatches to Brigham all the time saying, hey, I don't want this fight. Hey, I don't want you to leave your fields because I need you to stay around and guard your fields. And Brigham was having the settlers kind of go back to their strongholds. And Walkera is saying, don't leave your fields. I need you to harvest those fields so you can give me grain. I need you to care for your cows so I can buy or steal the cows. So he's almost always really against the war that he's named after, or the war is named after him again. So it's the framing that matters very conscientiously. Brigham Young. And he learns this from his own ancestor, Brigham Young. I traced one of Brigham Young's ancestors back to the King Philip's War. He was a foot soldier. One of Brigham Young's ancestors was a foot soldier in the King Philip's War. So it's an American pastime to name these wars after the native peoples who, of course, yes, used violence, but often in protection of their own land and their own sovereignty. But the power of the archive, again, the power of the means of production, of history, allowed the settlers to name the wars after the native peoples. And we still do that to this day.
- [60:19]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [60:50]
Stephen Hausman
So we've been talking for about an hour now and I just want to really underscore to anyone listening to this that this book is really a dense and rich narrative. There's a lot going on in here that we just, we don't have time to talk about all of the really fascinating and telling details. And I want to make sure that we have time to talk a little bit about the end of the book. So I have a couple questions about sort of the end of the story here, understanding that we're skipping over some stuff so that we have time to do so.
- [61:21]
Ryan Reynolds
Sure.
- [61:21]
Stephen Hausman
And I want to talk about bit about Robert Leonard and his role in this story. So again, jumping pretty far ahead. But who was Robert Leonard and what does he have to do with the story of Weara's gravesite and remains and the kind of afterlife of all the history that we've been talking about so far.
- [61:41]
Max Perry Mueller
Yeah, that's a really actually, I don't think anyone who's actually all I've done a fair Number of interviews about the book and we haven't talked about Bob much. And Bob has a very complicated history here and I want to be very, very careful for practical and other reasons. So, you know, I start the book with the fact that in the 1870s, Walkera's grave was robbed. It's not too much to give away to say it was robbed by an agent of the American state. Right. The American government, or the federal government in particular. And that gravesite has been robbed and desecrated really ever since, for a long time, including unfortunately, starting in the 1980s by those, including Bob, who were charged. Bob was an archaeologist for the National Forest Service whose job was to catalog and to survey the rich archeological history of what is Fish Lake National Forest. He was in Fish Lake National Forest, archaeologist for many, many years, Decades. And Bob has a mixed history here in some way. A well respected archaeologist, one person who was well respected by his peers for a long time. But he did the first professional kind of survey in the 1980s of Wakera's grave site. And he did so ironically, arguing that it needed to be protected. But Bob, like a lot of archaeologists, right, this is a history. Part of this book is a history of archaeology and how archaeology has long been associated with white people claiming that they are the true protectors of Native American. You know, they are the true protectors of Native American remains and goods. Patrimony, I think, is the word I'm looking for. Right. And why? Because Native peoples are gone. So it was up to archeologists to protect these sites from expansion, roadways, et cetera. And actually this starts with Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was often considered one of the founders of archeology because he did a lot of grave robbing around Monticello. But he argued if he didn't remove the remains of these graves that they would be destroyed by the plow and roadways. Same thing with Bob in a lot of ways. Bob did surveys of Wakera's grave site and unfortunately also took remains from grave goods from. Not necessarily. Well, most likely remains too, but certainly grave goods from the site. And he argued that if he didn't do it, if he didn't do it, it would be. Ironically, he took those remains to prevent them from being robbed by less, he believed, less altruistic grave robbers. And so, yeah, and Bob and I had many conversations and he shared me with some of his work. But yeah, so that's one of the deep, deep ironies of, of archaeology and the long history of the quote, unquote, science of archaeology that Bob Embodied. And Bob died while I was working on this book. I don't want to say any more about that. To say I'll quote Rena Pikovit, who I mentioned before, who Bob had a relationship with, a very, very complicated relationship, sometimes working well with, but sometimes not. Reina Pikovit was. Is an elder associated with the Knash band of Paiutes. And she said, you know, when Bob took those things, bad medicine. She said it was bad medicine that he took those grave goods which were for a time on display at a museum, a state history museum. And Rena had made sure that eventually those were grave goods were removed from display because they are sacred objects. So it's a complicated history. I'll just mention here that Wakara's remains and the skulls, actually the grave robber who stole them in the 1870s was really only after the skulls, part of the kind of crania craze of the late 19th century, looking to collect crania, because the belief was that, you know, the larger crania, the larger the crania, the more intelligent the race. And so they are still in the possession of, you know, the National Museum, the Smithsonian. The cultural affiliation study has been done for those remains. But it's very. It's a complicated, you know, history. Who will claim them, where would they go, et cetera. And so, you know, Walkera, he's not home in some ways. His skulls and those who were killed alongside him are at the Smithsonian. But other parts of Wakera I chronicle at the end of the book are returning home. The book is not just simply a book about erasure and removal. It's more about seasonal history as opposed to lineal history. I mentioned about the fish. Well, the fish, in collaboration with indigenous peoples and scientists from BYU and University of Utah, one of the most important fish that the settlers almost all destroyed from Utah Lake is being reintroduced. The June sucker in Utah Lake. And the idea is if you center the care of the lake around one of the endemic species of the lake, especially this June sucker, which is an indicator species by which the scientists mean the health of the June sucker population signifies the health of the lake is allowing the Utah lake, which has long been filled with carp and algae and not always healthy, is being restored. And a similar story about Waaquera's horses. And also this history that we're trying to tell, it's not simply a history of erasure and removal. It's a history of return. And so that's one of the main takeaways I hope readers will take from the book, is that it's a long history of diaspora. Right. But Wakera's fish, his horses, his people, his stories, and maybe even soon Wakera's remains themselves might return to him, his homeland. And, you know, I pay attention to land back a lot and, you know, all the restoration of land to Native Nations, Indigenous peoples around, around, around the country. And in, in, in Canada and Mexico too, of course. We're just recording this days after President Trump reduced the Grand Staircase and Escalante national monuments by 90%. That's obviously not a step in the right direction. But there is a lot of movement to restore land to Indigenous people. And I think this, my book, this history, fits into that land back movement. And so, yeah, I want to make that clear. It's not simply a history of removal and erasure, but of return.
- [70:23]
Stephen Hausman
You know, toward the end of my interviews, I always like to ask my guests to kind of think about a takeaway or one big point. They would want their readers to come away from a book understanding. And it seems like you covered that pretty well, that this is not just a story. It's not a simple declensionist story base getting worse for some people, that it's a much more. And, you know, good Native history is told this way. Right. That it's a story of things continuing and of resistance and. Yes, of sadness and tragedy and injustice, but not just of that too. And your book is a really good example of that.
- [70:55]
Max Perry Mueller
Yes, thank you. Yes, I think that's also the truth.
- [70:58]
Stephen Hausman
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So for my last question then, Max, you know, this book has been out for, I think, a little over a year at this point, so pretty new book. But if I know academics like you and me, we always have a couple projects that we're working on at once. Is there anything that you've been working on or anything that you plan on working on in the future that you'd like to talk a bit about now or give us a preview of?
- [71:23]
Max Perry Mueller
Yeah, so it came out in November, so not quite a year, so it'll be a year in November. But I'll just be honest. I think you and I have talked about this before. It's been a really difficult season for me. My wife passed away about seven weeks ago, and obviously the most difficult thing I've ever experienced. And so I was working on a project, and I still hope to work on a project that I was kind of describing, which is kind of a larger history of land back, looking at Native nations and confederacies and arguing as the Utes did with example, with Wakara. Even when they're while Native people were losing their land politically and practically through their practices of sovereignty, they were laying the groundwork for this moment now, which is this restoration of their sovereignty. And looking at eight different nations and confederacies from the Iroquois to the Clamish, et cetera, kind of, and the Utes, the Cherokee, etc. I hope to do that project, but my life has changed drastically and that would require, as this book did, you know, direct work with the Native nations and representatives. But a book that came really straight out and I'm very by the time this probably comes out, it'll be made public. I'm not going to say the publisher, but it's one of the top five big five publishers. I sold my book that I've been working on in part because my wife got sick and I didn't think I was going to be able to travel. A book called More America, more comma America, which is a very much comes out of the idea of Wakera and Wa Kara as a founding father of the American west. And this particular moment of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And since this project is a series of 25 biographies, one biography for each decade of the United States existence, looking at a different founder and a different kind of founder from each decade and pushing back on the idea that America was founded once by some great white men in Philadelphia, but understanding that America is founded kind of always being refounded each decade and by different peoples, often peoples who are excluded from that kind of founding moment, Native peoples, women, et cetera. And Wakara is certainly kind of one of the people in that series of 25 biographies. So I'm proud to say that More America has been sold to a major trade press and will be coming out hopefully in a year and a half's time. And so yeah, that's the conceit of the book, starting with Phillis Wheatley, the great poet from the 1770s. And actually the title comes from a poem she wrote in the 1770s in which that phrase more comma America I get from. So yeah, a bunch of different folks, some well known, some less well known figures, one from each decade of the United States history.
- [74:57]
Stephen Hausman
That sounds like a fantastic book. I can't wait to get my hands on it.
- [75:01]
Max Perry Mueller
Thank you. I'm looking forward to looking forward to working on it.
- [75:05]
Stephen Hausman
Dr. Max Perrin Mueller is an associate professor of classics and Religious studies at the University of Nebraska. His new book is Wakera's the Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American west, which came out with Basic Books last year in 2020. Thank you so much for talking with me today, Max.
- [75:24]
Max Perry Mueller
Thanks for having me.
- [75:25]
New Books Network Host
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooks network.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle newbooksnetwork and subscribe to our weekly Substrac newsletter at newbooks network.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.
- [76:06]
Ryan Reynolds
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