Dan Flores (0:01)

Following the collapse of the Grand Chacoan.

Steve Rinella (0:03)

Empire, refugees founded eight thriving new towns.

Dan Flores (0:07)

Along the Galisteo river of New Mexico, but ultimately found it difficult to sustain an arid climate civilization across the next 500 years.

Steve Rinella (0:18)

I'm Dan Flores and this is the.

Dan Flores (0:21)

American west, brought to you by Velvet.

Steve Rinella (0:24)

Buck crafted for those who live off the beaten path, where the hunt meets the harvest and every glass tells a story.

Dan Flores (0:32)

Enjoy Responsibly.

Steve Rinella (0:46)

West of Everything Thinking of a podcast about the American west and my own take on its history has had me trying to understand recently why the west resonates with us the way it does. Apologies to New England, New York, the South, the Midwest, but the west seems to fascinate the world in a way no other American region can. Why are there television channels devoted 24? 7 to playing 75 year old Western movies, so a John Wayne fix is available at just about any sleepless 3:00am why does a contemporary soap opera western like Yellowstone succeed with so many people? Why do Germans dress up and play act, being residents of the west on their vacation weekends in European forests? How does back at the Ranch Boot Store in Santa Fe sell $5,000 cowboy boots that will never see a stirrup? Why is there a Cowboy poets gathering in Nevada every winter? Why a Gene Autry Museum in la? A Buffalo Bill Historical Museum in Cody, a National Western Heritage center in Oklahoma City? And why? Maybe this is the most serious question here. Does the phrase just like the Wild west cause all of us to imagine entire freedom of action, a whole lack of restraint, a free for all? Nobody is regulating all that reverence and fascination for the west happens for good reason, because of its sunshine and the public lands that provide remarkable access to the surrounding landscape. The west is a great place to live in the present, but as we all know, it's the past of the west that's the key to its magic. Those of us who live in the west may love various aspects of the modern world out the door, but we all absolutely adore the Old west, the the frontier. We've absorbed it by watching films by John Ford and Quentin Tarantino, reading novels by Louis lamour and Cormac McCarthy, and histories by Stephen Ambrose and Hampton Sides. Of course, there are many versions of the west, and all of us have a personal preference for our favorite version. Clearly, for John Ford or Quentin Tarantino, it's the Cowboy west of so many hundreds of Western movies. For others, it's the west of Town Building and Wyatt Earps or Marshall Dillon's Imposition of Law and Order or of Settlers versus railroads or the gunfighter stories that Tarantino obviously also loves and loves to invert. And of course, there's the Indian wars west of a few hundred movies and a few thousand paintings. But as a modern Westerner, a writer and historian who is interested most in the West's remarkable landscapes and animals, the west that does it for me is one most people may not think of as iconic. I'm most drawn to what Western artist Charlie Russell in one of his magnificent paintings called when the Land Belonged to God. For me, the west that speaks to my deepest soul is the west either side of Lewis and Clark. How the kind of natural west they saw came to be and lasted for so long. Plus, what has happened to that version of the west in the centuries since Lewis and Clark saw it. That's the West I try to understand. To me, that's the true West, a natural west, one that's west of everything else. In part, my west is a kind of a flat first contact West, a theme of much science fiction and fascination with exploring places like Mars in the next few decades. It's about travel to strange places, new country and new animals. The meeting place of an exotic ancient world and modernity. Come to think of it, the natural west is not only our future on Mars, it's also our deep past, when modern humans left Africa more than 50,000 years ago and and began to explore the rest of the Earth. America's west in many ways, was a last earthly experience of that first contact moment in human history. When new peoples first meet. Everybody experiences first contact. But usually only one side sees the natural world as new and exotic, a new world. The resident people tend to think invasion. And so it is. Yet all of us have ancestors who bequeathed us more than 20,000 years of first contact experiences in North America. So I think I come by a fascination for stories like this naturally. And of course, so do you. Those of us who are in love with the natural west are usually attracted to the world of native people, to natural landscapes and to wild animals. Being intrigued by the native west is self evidently at the core of Western fascination, judging by the volume and quality of Western landscape art and the way the Western landscape becomes a character in so many films. Judging by the number of crown jewel national parks in the west, the same can be said of the Western landscape. But let's say at the outset, the West I'm talking about is not synonymous with the frontier. When the old world came to North America, every place on the continent had a frontier, a meeting point between what existed and what was coming. But the natural west of which I speak is not defined by a moment in time, a frontier. It's a place, a region of plains, mountains and deserts on the sunset side of the Mississippi River. The time frame of the natural west is not just its frontier stage. The story of this west is much more ancient, and it also takes place more recently than the frontier. Because the past does not remain in the past, but affects us in our own time. The story of the west continues beyond the frontier and into the 21st century. Many of the Western stories I've written about and will tell in this podcast are the stories of the West's wildlife, very much an ignored topic in the west and elsewhere. The cow and the the sheep and to a certain extent even the saddled horse are the animals we associate with the west of trail driving ranching town building. But I have to observe that not one of them appears in Charlie Russell's when the Land Belonged to God. Russell's timeless scene of a bison herd flanked by gray wolves pouring over a divide in a landscape we Old Worlders would one day call Montana implied that the divine world in the west was Native America. So let's start there, but not necessarily at its beginning, at least not yet. Let's commence our exploration of the natural west slightly later in time. We'll return to Beginnings in the next episodes with a story that makes the point that the west is not new but a very old place. This story stretches our imaginations, suggests how central and fragile Western ecologies have always been to human life here, and illustrates the longevity of the human experience in a country we're reflexively still thinking of as the newest part of America. On a sun drenched November afternoon I sit in T shirt and shorts a few feet from the edge of a canyon rim rock, looking through 400ft of transparent desert air on a thousand year old city. My wife Sarah is pulling a bottle of water from her pack a few feet away. Various friends are scattered along rock cairn marked trails through the uplands behind us where the faint indentations of ancient highways, 400 miles of them, extend to horizons miles distant. The whole country sagebrush uplands, the canyon floor, the enclosing rim rocks and the ruins with odd names that lie in every direction. Below is a uniform tannish brown, the color of dust or perhaps the color of abandon. During the time of the Crusades in Europe, this spot and another on the east bank of the Mississippi river just across from today's St. Louis held the two largest cities in North America, both religious centers with a Ceremonial effigy mound of lizards and serpents and a Stonehenge like circle of upright timbers planted to mark out solstices and equinoxes. The city in the eastern woods today we call it Cahokia, probably held a fairly permanent population of 30,000 people, larger than London at that time. I first saw Cahokia in the early 1990s with a girlfriend who had Missouri roots and insisted we visit the place. I'd seen mounds, but never anything on the scale of Monk's Mound, towering up out of the American bottoms like an earthen Chichen itzin pyramid. After 300 years of urban life, an earthquake mostly destroyed Cahokia City, but not before its population had gone through 20,000 trees and almost all the wildlife for scores of miles around. As for the city whose ruins lay below us now, either side of 10 centuries ago, from 800 A.D. to 1140 A.D. it was the Vatican of the American desert. We call it Chaco, and it's another of our UNESCO World Heritage sites. Chaco was the closest native America ever got to an empire like those of the Aztecs, Mayans or Incas. But this was not an empire of warrior armies and conquered provinces. It was an empire of priests who organized many thousands of scattered farming hamlets across 50,000 square miles of today's four corners into an economic and religious network no European principality of the age matched. What the priests promised was direct intervention with the deities who controlled rain, crops and animals, those grand imponderables whose presence made life good and whose absence ruined it. The city of Chaco housed the priests, their families, and a resident population of thousands. It stored and distributed surplus crops. Then, at solstices and other special times of year, it hosted grand ceremonies to which the outlying residents made holy pilgrimages. At those times, Chaco gathered a population of some 40,000. Looking down now on its buildings and avenues, one suspects both the ceremonies and the nightlife must have been epic. Chaco America almost seems foreign in the modern United States, as if lifted from the Middle East. The agricultural revolution arrived in this region 1300 years before the city existed. And pollen studies indicate this development produced two immediate environmental effects. Human populations skyrocketed, and crops that needed to be boiled before you could eat them meant that daily cooking fires soon reduced a robust pinyon juniper woodland to desert. This became a world in need of priests who could intervene with the gods. Sitting and admiring the sprawling hemispheric architecture of Chaco's largest structure, Pueblo Bonito, as its lines and shadows shimmer in the afternoon sun, I know this is a place that reveals much about humanity. Sarah passes the water bottle over to me and reading my mind, sums it up. It wasn't until the 1880s that anyone built a larger building than that in America. In its time this city lasted longer than Washington D.C. has so far. Chaco and its satellite hamlets survived in fact for 340 years. The shorthand version of its collapse is that it all ended with a series of droughts across the Southwest. And that's true. But the many archaeologists who have interpreted Chaco know that much more happened here. When the rain stopped coming, the farmers seemed to act abruptly, dropping their digging sticks in the fields, turning their backs on the grand religious gatherings at Chaco and relocating across the Southwest. Some went north to what we now call Mesa Verdes Cliff palace in present Colorado. Most of the people who abandoned the Chacoan world congregated along the upper Rio Grande, eventually founding towns still home to their descendants, the Pueblo peoples, famous for their apartment like villages, geometrically painted pottery and turquoise jewelry. Why did Chaco collapse in what sounds like a fit of pique? The evidence, and ultimately the response of the Pueblos afterwards points to a crisis we should recognize down there in Pueblo Bonito, a single room out of 650 rooms yielded the remains of 14 people whose funerary items indicated they represented Chaco's religious and political elites. In the room were flutes, ceremonial staffs, thousands of pieces of turquoise jewelry, conch shell trumpets from America's west coast, the remains of macaw parrots from the tropics, the oldest burial dated to 800 AD and the last from Chaco's abandonment. So those 14 span the entire life of the city. And not just that. The genetics of nine of the 14 showed them to be descended from the same matrilineal line from a woman who evidently had been there at Chaco's founding. Disparities in wealth and quality of life, along with the resentments they produce, are familiar to modern Americans. Isotope comparisons of the bones of the priestly class in Chaco's great houses with those of farmers from the villages indicates that the elites consumed far more protein from the meat of deer and pronghorns. They were better fed, grew almost two inches taller, suffered less from disease, had three times the survival rate for children under five, and lived longer. They were also conspicuous consumers of high status goods, from beautiful pots to copper bells, from turquoise jewelry to parrots. In the late 1800s an early archaeologist working in Chaco shipped more than 70,000 high status items just from Pueblo Bonito to the American Museum of Natural History the farming class suffered this gap between rich and poor as long as the elite delivered on their promise to make it rain. But when drought came and the priests were powerless to stop it, the lower classes attacked and killed many in the upper class. They also embraced a new belief, the Kachina religion. By the year 1160, massive three story public buildings like Chetro Kettle, a 400 room great house in Chaco that was built with 50 million sandstone blocks, 26,000 timbers and extended for 450ft beneath a canyon wall, stood completely abandoned. As for animal life in the Chacoan region, diet studies in the collapse's aftermath imply that rabbits and rodents were almost the only huntable animals left. Their need for protein perhaps explains why some of the new villages were founded close to the Bison Plains. One March afternoon In the early 2000s, I opened the passenger door of a pickup, stretched out a hiking boot to the ground, and had one of those small steps for man moments until I exited that pickup and began to walk on a surface that spoke. It crunched, it crinkled. I'd never had the kind of visceral understanding of America's ancient past I was now experiencing. I was walking into a place known to Southwestern archaeologists as the San Lazaro Ruins. With every step, my boots were landing on broken shards of Indian pottery half a foot deep. That brought a profound realization. I was walking on ground that humans long before me had lived on for some 300 years. In every direction, the ground underfoot was a thick, continuous surface of curving, angled, shattered pottery. The pieces set at all angles and drawing the eye with painted zigzags and designs in blacks and reds. This is how the people who lived here 700 years ago must have experienced a stroll around their town. I thought. It's how the pioneers of archaeology in the west, the Adolf Bandeliers, the Alfred Kidders and Edgar Hewlett's, no doubt felt the first time they walked across the ruins of Chaco or Mesa Verde or the country I was in now, the Galisteo river country south of Santa Fe. I was having this experience because I'd become friends with a remarkable Santa Fe character named Forrest Fenn. Among many aspects of Fenn's world that seemed more than improbable was that he actually owned the ground where the ruins of San Lazaro stood. That's why we were here. He was proudly showing off his possession of the largest ancestral Pueblo village site in the Santa Fe area. A native Texan and a former Vietnam fighter pilot who'd survived being shot down to be become a successful art gallery owner in Santa Fe. Finn was in his late 70s then, his body lean, his silvery hair still in a military buzz cut. When we struck up a friendship, I found him garrulous, hugely energetic, and despite a slender education, fiercely opinionated. True to his Texas roots, those opinions included a hatred for the federal government and a distrust of educated elites. Although he could occasionally be impressed by experts, Finn was as dedicated to Old west history as fundamentalists are to old time religion. His home came across as a combination museum, archive and archaeology lab. He outdid anyone in my experience with his boyish Huck Finn like romance about western adventure, which led him to invest prodigiously energy in several seriously crazy projects that made many people wince. One was acquiring and doing amateur excavations at a major site like San Lazaro. The last of Forrest's grand ideas when he was in his 80s, got him national exposure that wasn't always admiring. He buried a treasure chest containing more than $2 million of precious artifacts from from around the world in a secret location in the west, then self published a book featuring a page of verse offering clues to its hiding spot. More than one person died, and untold thousands trekked the West's vast public lands in search of a treasure that to Forrest, offered ordinary folks a chance to reprise a classic Old west opportunity finding loot and making a mint off nature. San Lazaro had once been one of eight major Indian towns that post Chaco spread across the Galiso river near where Spain would found Santa Fe in the year 1610. The entire four Corners is lousy with the surviving ruins of advanced farming civilizations that made the Southwest into one of the most densely lived in parts of North America. A thousand years ago, long before Europeans came here, other humans hoped and dreamed, lived, loved and died and left their mark on this oldest place in America. In fact, 800 years ago, there was a far larger population of people living in the Galiseo river country than actually live here. Now that's a claim few other American regions can make. A great drought in the Southwest, the most severe one in the past thousand years, was the apparent proximate cause that brought them here. In a sense, they were religious refugees fleeing that hereditary religious class that had insisted they could intervene with the gods to send life saving rain. So the search for a new center place led some of the former Chaco Puebloans to the beautiful windswept Galisteo country. Here's what they found. A high desert with 320 days of annual sunshine Prompting their name for it. Placed near the sun. Rainfall that rarely reached the double figures but still made for green mountains and dwarf forests. A river, albeit small, with spring fed tributaries, sometimes flowing water. Sowable ground, sandstone for bricks and suitable soil to make adobes. A small mountain range long known and famous far and wide for its sky blue stones. Ample firewood to boil their crops in the grassland basin. Bands of striped pronghorn, antelope, mule deer in the hills and elk, sheep and bears in the mountains. Eagles soaring overhead. Packs of gray wolves howling in the night. Lions slinking through the rocks and sacred coyotes trotting by with a quick, sharp eyed look. Crystalline air for watching the sun's progress along the horizons. Nights brilliant with jittering stars. The steady glow of traveler planets and the occasional light. Light that flies. The colonizers spoke two different Puebloan languages, Tano and Kharassan, so living near one another were bilingual. They wore garments made from the cotton they grew and ornamented themselves with turquoise jewelry. The women wore their dark hair long, while men affected a bowl cut. They painted colorful designs on pottery known as Rio Grande glazeware that frequently included images of parrots or macaws. Brilliantly marked birds, traded up from Mexico and not native to anywhere in the Southwest. Farm implements they fashion from fire hardened juniper. Arrow points largely from local black obsidian glass and their axe blades from an aluminum silicate called fiberlite. They mined in the high Rockies nearby. Their domestic animals. Animals were dogs and turkeys. Their ancestors had domesticated turkeys around the year 1000, when huntable wildlife near their villages declined and left them protein poor. Water manipulation and desert agriculture required cooperative effort. So these were town dwellers. They lived in apartment like rectangular buildings with flat roofs resting on massive support beams with plastered walls occasionally built of stacked stone, but more commonly in the Galiseo country of puddled dried adobes. The buildings often were three to five stories with entrances. Cooking and daily life carried out on the top roof level. The lower levels accessed by descending ladders into rooms that featured gleaming polished floors and walls often painted with murals. The buildings commonly grouped around central plazas. The plazas highlighted circular underground ceremonial rooms known as kivas, with fireplaces, perimeter benches and a central hold. A sipapu, it was called, representing humanity's point of emergence from a world below into the present world. San Lazaro left the largest ruins of all the Galisteo villages. Its ruins cover 57 acres and feature the outlines of 27 separate buildings with 1,941 ground floor rooms and a remarkable total of 5,000 rooms. It was settled around 1290, and despite a pair of debilitating droughts in the 1400s, continued to grow for 200 years, when its peak population was nearly 2,000 people. That's six times the size of any 21st century Galisteo Valley town. By then, many local resources were likely depleted and the town was abandoned in the early 1500s. The immediate catalyst to that exodus may have been something dramatic, for in 1581, a Spanish party found the town half destroyed. Finn's most remarkable remarkable San Lazaro discovery, for which he had the good sense to call in professional archaeologists and native descendants, came in 1992 when he unearthed two plaster kachina masks and other stored sacred objects. The magnificent masks appeared to represent black bears and were likely associated with a bear clan or medicine society. Various dating techniques placed the masks a few years on either side of 1500. Cochina masks would be one of the most unlikely objects any Puebloan would ever abandon. Whatever happened at San Lazaro around 1500 must have come on remarkably suddenly when European colonizers arrived in the early 1600s and introduced fulsome new sources of protein. 4000 sheep and a thousand goats arrived with those first Spanish settlers. Pueblo people fully reoccupied San Lazaro before long, though, swelling resentment over having to provide crops and labor and its Spanish suppression of the Cochina religion led San Lazaro's warriors to become leaders in the great Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which drove the European out of New Mexico for a dozen years. But the Pueblo's citizens were alarmed enough at the possible consequences of this that everyone ended up fleeing San Lazaro, leaving a 400-year-old city to dissolve into silence in adobe. There were at least seven other similar long lived towns in the Galiseo country, harboring, at various times several thousand more of these former Chacoans. Several were farther east and close to the high plains, where they had to survive Apache raids after those Athabascan speakers migrated in from the far north. But like the townspeople of San Lazaro, their inhabitants fled soon following the Pueblo revolt, when the Spanish absence allowed for even more plains Indian raids, this time by Comanches thundering their horses through a rim rock break that's still known today as Comanche Gap. The Spaniards called the westernmost Pueblo town they found in the Galiseo country San Marcos. It was near a little mountain range the newcomers named Los Cerrillos, the little hills that had been mined since the time of Chaco for lead used to glaze pottery and for the ultimate trade item from the southwest, sky blue turquoise. A thousand years ago, Indian miners pulled turquoise ore out of shafts in a minor Cerillos peak called Chalchihuitl, the name from the Aztec language, and a little mountain with an outsized reputation. An image of this little mountain graces the Temple of the Sun Pyramid in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. I've explored its ancient shaft some, but always with hair, raising alarm and shock at the fearlessness of Indian miners. The fortunes of these towns flourished and ebbed as the centuries passed when they were all occupied with unexploited resources available in the 1300s and 1400s. The combined population of these Galiso river towns may have been more than 6,000 because range rainfall was essential for their economy. Yet droughts also strike the Galiseo. They made a science of cloud and wind study, no doubt hopeful as modern residents still are when grand anvil headed clouds full of moisture towered up from the mountain ranges in summertime. Their religion was less theocratic and more decentralized than at Chaco and featured clan leaders dressed in the elaborate costuming representing Kachina, emissaries to the deities of nature. The Kachina religion lives on among their descendants today. Although none of these towns survives today, half of these Galiseo pueblos lasted longer than the United States has existed. But as is evident from a place like San Lazaro, for all their successes, the the Galisteo pueblos struggled with long term sustainability. The year round fires to boil their crops meant that firewood cutting and gathering pushed farther out year after year. One of the first scientists to investigate the ruins of their towns, Nels Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History took a revelatory photograph of the San Lazaro site in 1912, 132 years after its abandonment. That photo showed a still barren landscape almost entirely stripped of trees and shrubs for two miles around. With the diaspora that followed Chaco's collapse, the new Pueblo town of Pecos, northeast of the Galiseo country, developed a mutualistic arrangement with plains hunters to trade pueblo crop products for dried bison meat. There's no evidence these Galiso villages ever managed something similar. So with eight towns and several residents, huntable wildlife likely took a significant hit. One bit of evidence comes from San Lazaro's archaeology's astonishing number of bones and skulls, Many of them cracked open to get at marrow or brains from the goats and sheep Spanish settlers introduced by the 1600s. Protein was obviously a dietary addition. The Galisteo Pueblo residents were avid for their several hundred year inhabitation did leave the incoming Europeans a beautifully grassed basin and valley and a healthy Galiseo river that flowed over the surface of this landscape. The ecological changes that left exotic weeds and spreading junipers and produced a river that slashed arroyos and stream beds 25ft deep all came later, with pasturage for New Spain's horse herds and flocks of sheep and goats, and when the Americans came with millions of cattle and renewed mining in the local mountains beyond walking across the broken pots at San Lazaro, my own most vivid experience of the lingering presence of this former Galis world has come from hiking the remnant lava dikes that rise like black dragon backbones from the yellow grasslands here. Centuries ago, my Galiseo neighbors lavishly adorned these lava boulders with petroglyphs. Not a handful, not a few dozen, but with thousands of white outlined images carefully pecked into the black rock surfaces for capturing some of the essentials of their world and their presence. Nothing else brings them to life like these today. We call petroglyphs and pictographs rock art, but of course they express a more specific cosmic meaning than any decorative or narrative art. Picking my way from boulder to boulder atop these dikes and keening morning winds, the images have sometimes given me a Sistine Chapel feeling, at other times the open mouth reaction one has to the Las Vegas strip. There are elaborately costumed Kachina figures on these rocks, and having once stood in freezing December weather in Zuni Pueblo and watched a towering Shalako kachina clacking its two foot wooden beak while dancing a solstice blessing inside a brand new home, it's hard for me to separate the sacred from the entertaining in these images. I also can't help imagining date nights and holding hands under a full moon, gobsmacked at white visions leaping out at you from the silvery black, the imagery is mind bending in variety and detail. There are mythical creatures like giant horn water serpents, but also real rattlesnakes, often two in tandem, thunderbird eagles, badgers, coyotes, bears, all revered animals the Pueblos preserve. There are gleaming four pointed planets, an endless variety of different cloud terraces, which is the home of the Kachina gods, and those appear in conjunction with water serpents, mountain lions, a woman's nether parts. There are faces with or without masks, handprints, lengthy zigzag lines, spirals, fields of dots, warrior figures protected by circular shields. While history and their struggles at sustainability mean the Pueblo people no longer live along the Galiseo river, which is my home today. Their descendants remain along the Rio Grande nearby. And I like to go to the annual ceremonies they open to the public. But like so much of the human story, the past here and even in Chaco somehow still seems just out of mind. My grasp. We humans focus on the moments we exist in. Touching the past is the forever problem of history foreign.