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- [00:01]
Dan Flores
Following the collapse of the Grand Chacoan.
- [00:04]
Steve Rinella
Empire, refugees founded eight thriving new towns.
- [00:08]
Dan Flores
Along the Galisteo river of New Mexico, but ultimately found it difficult to sustain an arid climate civilization across the next 500 years.
- [00:19]
Steve Rinella
I'm Dan Flores and this is the.
- [00:21]
Dan Flores
American west, brought to you by Velvet.
- [00:25]
Steve Rinella
Buck crafted for those who live off the beaten path, where the hunt meets the harvest and every glass tells a story.
- [00:32]
Dan Flores
Enjoy Responsibly.
- [00:46]
Steve Rinella
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.
- [36:26]
Randall Williams
I'm Steve Rinella. I'm joined here by Randall Williams.
- [36:29]
Sarah
Hello.
- [36:30]
Randall Williams
And we're going to do a little thing where after we listen to Dan Flores American west podcast, we get to come in. We have the privilege. We get to come in and ask questions. And hopefully for you listeners, some of the questions we ask might reflect some of the questions that you have. And maybe we'll do a little thing or if you have questions, yeah, we will do this. Send your questions in, and then at some point we'll. We'll send your questions and at some point we'll be able to do a roundup with Dan and get your questions answered. But in the meantime, here's our questions.
- [37:00]
Sarah
And this is very familiar to us as former students of Dan's, so.
- [37:04]
Randall Williams
Exactly.
- [37:05]
Dan Flores
Yeah. Thanks to you guys for doing this, by the way. Really appreciate it.
- [37:09]
Randall Williams
Oh, no, that's great. You got. You want to start.
- [37:15]
Sarah
Yeah. I think in the start of this episode, you're talking about many Wests, and there's certain Wests that have lived on and on in pop culture, especially for Americans living in the 21st century. But you kind of challenge people to understand the west as a much larger place than the west of cowboys and Indians and of overland trails and everything like that. So I wonder, what is it about the west that seems to have grabbed a hold of our imaginations and what has particular about cowboy culture that's grabbed our imaginations? And then what do we gain by opening our eyes to sort of the deep time West?
- [38:11]
Dan Flores
Yeah. So I'm putting together a podcast here, 26 episodes of it, that will be about different kinds of things than most people think of when they think of Western history. There are no gunfights. There are no mining strikes. There's no Marshall Dillon. What I'm interested in is a different kind of West. And I think this is maybe the value of something like this, a part of the Western story that's not really been known or written about very much, and certainly not in pop culture portrayed so that people get to understand it. And what that west is is something I call the natural west, which is it's a West of the native people It's a west of wildlife abundance beyond imagining for wildlife and many, many different species. And it's a story of the west that really hinges a lot around kind of an initial reaction to a place that's different, new, and very unfamiliar to people coming out of the east in particular. I mean, I think people coming up, say, from Mexico into New Mexico or California don't see the west as being that different. Their usual reaction to the country farther north is that it's cold, but it's similar.
- [39:50]
Randall Williams
That's an interesting point, man.
- [39:52]
Dan Flores
Yeah, that's how they. That's how they characterize it. Man, it's really cold, cold up there.
- [39:56]
Randall Williams
I got similar thing going on, just cold.
- [39:59]
Dan Flores
Yeah, the country looks a lot the same, but man, it's cold. But what I'm kind of interested in is the deep time story, all the way back to the Pleistocene and the earliest people who were here and how they interacted with Western animals. Because we have some pretty epic alterations that take place in this story. I mean, we lose a lot of animals 10,000 years ago, then we have a period where we go for 10,000 years in the West. And it looks as if native people in particular are pretty benevolent. I mean, there's only one extinction during that time period. And I try to figure out why that is, how it happened that way.
- [40:44]
Steve Rinella
And then a lot of the rest.
- [40:46]
Dan Flores
Of the episodes have to do with a kind of an exploratory first contact experience from people like Lewis and Clark, for example, and a whole host of people later in the 19th century. And also with what transpires in a west in the 19th century with all this abundant wildlife, where there are really no rules, no regulations. It's just kind of a free for all. And pretty much what you would predict for a free for all. Things don't turn out all that great for a lot of the animals and of course, a lot of the native people either. But it's those stories. In contrast to Marshall Dillon and Town Building and the California gold rush, the Mormon settlement of Utah, these are the things that I've been writing about for 35 years. Basically. I never was interested much because other people had already done it to write about the mining rushes or the Indian Wars. I was always looking for something different and new to write about that I thought would sort of tell a story that nobody quite knew yet. And that's really what this podcast does.
- [42:09]
Randall Williams
There's a thing I've wondered about. There's an impression I have on source material, about source material, east versus west source material and you might not share the same impression, but if you have this impression, maybe you can speak to. It would be. This is a very roundabout way arriving at the point. But when Randall and I were reading about the long hunters, so this, this group of Euro American deer skin hunters that were first pushing over the Appalachian Mountains and going into Kentucky, basically the country south of the Ohio river, west of the Appalachian Range, south of the Ohio, pushing into that area. And we kind of marveled at the paucity of materials and the, the, the lack of sort of like a, the lack of natural observation, the lack of nature observation. What is there was collected like very deliberately by a historian who went and talked to some of the key players, children, spouses, grandchildren, and try to put together a little history of these first Euro Americans to push into this area. But there's just not a ton there. And that is at say 1776.
- [43:29]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [43:31]
Randall Williams
What happens that. When you get what happens in the next 30, 40 years where all of a sudden it seems like everyone is so literate.
- [43:40]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [43:41]
Randall Williams
And everyone is just observing and writing about, trying to, you know, writing about the sights they see, counting things. Right. Like really putting a record down. Then now you can look at the West. And part of what's so inviting about it is there's something to, there's something there to read about.
- [44:01]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [44:01]
Randall Williams
And you, it's really hard to get like you just when, when looking at people coming into Kentucky again, for instance. Coming into Kentucky, it's like there's, there's hints of things where you're like, you, you gather it must have been really different. But there's no, just vivid pictures of what they're seeing. Did people also learn to read and write? Like, how do you explain that?
- [44:25]
Dan Flores
Well, I explain it in three ways, I guess. One is that starting in 1800, a lot of the expeditions into the west are government expeditions. And those people are given specific instructions to keep a record, keep a really close record. I mean, Jefferson tells Lewis and Clark, for example, you know, any animals that you see that aren't found in the Maritime States, collect them, write a description, learn as much about their natural history as you can. And I think that's one of the things. I think another thing is that there are a lot of Europeans coming over in the early 19th century, the Thomas Nuttalls, the John Bradbury's. And those guys tend to look at darkest North America sort of the way the Brits were looking at Africa. Then where, wow, man, this is, this is some amazing part of the world that none of us has ever seen. And so we got to keep a.
- [45:29]
Steve Rinella
Record of all of it.
- [45:31]
Dan Flores
We've got to, you know, we've got to preserve what it looks like.
- [45:36]
Steve Rinella
And I think really there was an.
- [45:41]
Dan Flores
Actual market for literary work about the west starting around probably as early as 1810. And I think the, you know, the Nicholas Biddle journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which came out in 1814. I mean, those things sold like hotcakes in the East. And I think that made people understand.
- [46:02]
Steve Rinella
That, wow, okay, all I got to do is go out to the west.
- [46:05]
Dan Flores
You know, and write some.
- [46:08]
Steve Rinella
Some account.
- [46:09]
Dan Flores
And it even led to. I mean, and I have found two.
- [46:13]
Steve Rinella
Or three of these, what were basically made up accounts by people who never actually went to the west, but they talked to people and read other people's.
- [46:23]
Dan Flores
Stuff and sat down and wrote an account of their own journey.
- [46:27]
Randall Williams
Like it was enough of a thing that there was value in faking one.
- [46:31]
Dan Flores
Yes, there was. And you could sell a faked book. There's one particular guy, a guy named John Maley, who wrote a faked book about an expedition he took up the Red river, and he sold it for, like, $5,000 or something, which, of course, at the time was a huge sum of money. But the publisher he sold it to went broke in the panic, the depression of 1819, and they never did publish it. So it kind of exists just as a manuscript which I have actually examined and examined closely enough to realize, bullshit, this guy did not do any of this.
- [47:11]
Randall Williams
But, man, like, it's off your subject matter. But can you just imagine that if, a century prior to Lewis and Clark, you'd have taken people with that mandate and that skill set and you had said, I want you to cross over the range divide. I want you to descend the Ohio, descend the Mississippi, come back Overland. Yeah, the Natchez Trace or whatever.
- [47:36]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [47:36]
Randall Williams
And, like, do your thing, like, right. Right down about all the stuff and.
- [47:40]
Dan Flores
Write down about all of it.
- [47:41]
Sarah
Yeah, you have to. I mean, in that era, you really have to sort through what material there is to get glimpses of the natural world. And obviously, there's a literature from the earlier colonial period of, you know, English gentlemen going up the Savannah.
- [48:00]
Randall Williams
Yeah.
- [48:01]
Sarah
I mean, it doesn't read the William.
- [48:02]
Dan Flores
Bartram kind of stuff.
- [48:03]
Sarah
It reads as very sort of, I don't know, pre modern. Not in the technical sense, but pre modern. I mean, it's very antiquarian. Yeah, you read.
- [48:12]
Randall Williams
That's true. You read like the account of Cabeza de Vaca. It feels like it's like an extended acid trip. You know, like, you're kind of like, what? Really? There's no way. I mean, that's. You kind of like, it doesn't paint a vivid picture. And I think that something. You're right. Like something happened linguistically where we go over this hump and all of a sudden you can understand what people are talking about.
- [48:35]
Dan Flores
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's that a market emerged for it. There was a market, you know, America, where we're interested in possibilities for making money. And here was this wild new country that everybody around the world, including all Europeans, were really intrigued by. And so people began to realize, well, hell, I just, you know, I try to. I try to keep notes. Maybe I embellish a little bit even.
- [49:03]
Randall Williams
Yeah.
- [49:04]
Dan Flores
And so I think that's kind of one of the explanations for what happens starting about 1800, 1810, that suddenly you start getting a lot more primary source accounts. You have to use them, you know, with a grain of salt sometimes.
- [49:21]
Randall Williams
Well, I. I wasn't really aware of that, man. And you turned me on to that to be suspicious. In studying writing, we'd always. In studying fiction writing, we always learned about the. The unreliable narrator as a fictional device.
- [49:38]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [49:39]
Randall Williams
Right. Like in a. You're reading a novel and the reader sort of becomes aware, like that part of the thing is not to trust the narrator, which is common in movies and other stuff. Right. Like, it's built. It's a built in tension. I never thought of in. In historical journals. Never thought of it. And I had read Tough Trip Through Paradise.
- [49:58]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [49:58]
Randall Williams
And I'd emailed you or ran into you, whatever it was, and asked you about Tough Trip Through Paradise. I remember you said, basically, you know, be careful. He plays a little. I think he says he gets a little fast and loose and some of the things don't quite add up. And I just read it like gospel.
- [50:15]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [50:15]
Randall Williams
You know.
- [50:16]
Dan Flores
Well, I think one is inclined to do that until you begin to realize that, you know, the classic one in the west is the account of James Ohio Patty who. You know, I mean, that book was probably published 10 different times in the 19th century. And so there are a bunch of different versions. He changed them up.
- [50:34]
Randall Williams
We quote him and have been warned about him, but we quote him.
- [50:38]
Sarah
Yeah, he's got some good. Some good details.
- [50:41]
Dan Flores
Yeah, he does have some good details.
- [50:43]
Steve Rinella
And I mean, who knows what.
- [50:44]
Dan Flores
I think, for example, with people like that like Patty and maybe like John Maley is. They actually did. I think Melee knew enough to convince.
- [50:52]
Steve Rinella
Me that he had talked to People he had talked to, people who knew about it.
- [50:57]
Dan Flores
But when he started going up the Red river and started describing the landmarks, I mean, I could tell by the time you got to about the third or fourth day, this guy ain't nowhere on any Red river that existed then or now. I mean, so it was.
- [51:14]
Steve Rinella
You know, it's a market for stone.
- [51:16]
Dan Flores
Stuff, and it produces a huge abundance of material to use. But somehow, you have to be careful.
- [51:22]
Randall Williams
I'm reading one right now. It's like 60 years. It's a guy that wound up in Montana, wound up having. He had a trading fort. He had a trading post in Missoula for a while. I can't remember his name. 60 years, like fighter and trader or something. And a lot of the stuff in there. There's a lot of stuff in there where you. You read it and you're like. You accept as legit, like, some of the observations or ways they use things, right? Like little tricks of the trade. You're like, that has to come from a level of knowledge, but other parts of it, you know, he's talking about a shot. I sent Randall a passage about Sharp's buffalo rifles, and Randall's like, they didn't exist, so he's a mystery later. He's misremembering whatever, you know, I mean, he's like. He feels like he had one at a time when he didn't actually have.
- [52:10]
Sarah
One before Christian Sharps had made a rifle.
- [52:12]
Randall Williams
Yeah. But here's the thing. My old man fought in World War II. Okay. My dad's long dead. My dad fought in World War II. I could tell you. He told me about getting and carrying around with him a Thompson submachine gun. Right now I could go and put down, like, my dad was in World War II and had a Thompson submachine gun. And he might be like, well, no, no, no, I didn't have it there. I had it later. But, you know, I mean, like. Like, I just remember war. Thompson submachine gun. And you could see someone later, just out of expediency, bleeding it together, just putting it all in there. And then someone later saying, there's. That. That couldn't have been true. Yeah, he wouldn't have had it. He. I don't know. He couldn't have had it at Anzio. He could have had it later in France, but he wouldn't have had it at Anzio.
- [52:54]
Dan Flores
Well, it becomes those. These kinds of things become even more difficult when you're dealing, like, with. In this particular podcast with the. The people in Chaco, where we have no written accounts. All we have to go on is archeology and material culture objects. And so. And now genetics, obviously, that story about the, you know, the 14 people who are all related to one another, buried in a single room in Pueblo Bonito, that makes the whole story of telling the deep time history of the west even more difficult, because now you don't really have. You may have. I mean, and I have used them this way. There are great coyote stories going back thousands of years, and I have occasionally used a coyote story associated with a particular group that I think would make.
- [53:47]
Steve Rinella
A point about them.
- [53:49]
Dan Flores
But that's literally the only kind of storytelling you get.
- [53:54]
Steve Rinella
It's oral history.
- [53:56]
Dan Flores
And so you have to. You have to approach things that way as, you know, really carefully.
- [54:04]
Randall Williams
But that's where my. That's where my observation, I guess, falls apart, because I was talking about the vivid descriptions. But when it comes to the pueblo sites, some of the ancient pueblo sites, here's these really. These guys doing really vivid descriptions, and they're stumped.
- [54:19]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [54:20]
Randall Williams
The vivid description is of someone being like, what in the hell happened here?
- [54:24]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [54:25]
Randall Williams
I mean, it's not even like a vivid. They're just describing being awestruck by. By what they see as a ruin.
- [54:31]
Dan Flores
Yeah. So. So what we're grappling with then is, you know, so people got into chaco in the 1850s for the first time. 1850s, 1860s. And so we've essentially got 170 years of archaeological speculation. And so the way you try to figure it out is you sort of track that story through to, hopefully, the most recent versions of, well, here's what. It kind of looks like what happened. But that kind of evidence is never quite as foolproof as Lewis and Clark saying, today, for the first time, we saw and shot a buffalo.
- [55:10]
Randall Williams
Yeah.
- [55:11]
Dan Flores
Yeah. So the. The story of the west, when you go back in time, is based on. On a kind of an evidentiary base that you have to even be more careful with. But it's the only way we have to figure out what happens.
- [55:29]
Randall Williams
Have you ever read Black Range Tales?
- [55:32]
Dan Flores
I don't think so.
- [55:33]
Randall Williams
It's a gold miner. He's knocking around New Mexico, mostly 1860s. But one of the things really stuck with me is here. Here's this guy in the 1860s, and he's talking about basically trying to loot pueblo sites. And in the 1860s, he's lamenting that all the good stuff's been hauled away in the 1860s.
- [55:56]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [55:57]
Randall Williams
He describes, like, amazing things that other guys have Carried off. Yeah, right.
- [56:02]
Dan Flores
Yeah. Well, it's that. Yeah, absolutely. That's been going on forever. As soon as those villages like in the Galiso Valley were abandoned, there's no question there were people out there poking around, seeing what they could find.
- [56:14]
Randall Williams
Just instantly.
- [56:15]
Dan Flores
Yeah, just instantly. Yeah. And so who knows what all disappeared, but sometimes really great finds are, you know, they remain. And I mean, those Kachina masks that Forrest Fenn found there in San Lazaro Pueblo in 1992, man, that's a. You just don't find that stuff in part because nobody ever leaves it. And something that we don't understand happened at San Lazaro around 1500 that caused that population of that town to flee so suddenly that either some, you know, some magician, some healer, some shaman maybe got killed and couldn't go for his, his goods or some attack came so suddenly that everybody just fled.
- [57:11]
Randall Williams
Mm.
- [57:12]
Dan Flores
I mean, and so sometimes you get lucky like that. And Forest got pretty lucky on that one. Yeah, yeah, that's a.
- [57:19]
Randall Williams
You know, it's like founding them, finding a modern day house where they didn't even take their passports.
- [57:23]
Dan Flores
Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right.
- [57:26]
Randall Williams
Well, damn super excited for the series. I can't wait to learn all this stuff that's coming. So thanks.
- [57:30]
Dan Flores
Well, thanks to you guys for joining me with this.