Ep. 08: Beyond the Earth’s Curve, Mysteries

Summary

Podcast Summary: Ep. 08: Beyond the Earth’s Curve, Mysteries

Podcast Information:

• Title: The American West
• Host/Author: Dan Flores
• Description: In this new podcast, Flores chronicles the heroes, scoundrels, and pivotal events that defined the West, blending captivating stories of its charismatic animals, Jeffersonian explorations, and the adventurer-artists who immortalized Native peoples and western landscapes. From well-known tales to hidden gems, Flores uncovers the rich history of the West like never before. Joined by his former students Rinella and Williams, as well as other historians and special guests, Flores shares, debates, and reflects on these stories across 26 dynamic episodes. Listeners gain a deeper understanding of the American West—not just as a historical era, but as a lens for how we experience and appreciate the outdoors today.
• Episode: Ep. 08: Beyond the Earth’s Curve, Mysteries
• Release Date: August 12, 2025

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Introduction to the Mystery of the American West

In Episode 08, titled "Beyond the Earth’s Curve, Mysteries," host Dan Flores delves into one of the lesser-known yet intriguing tales from the American West. Joined by former students Steve Rinella and other historians, Flores unpacks the story of Anthony Glass and his expedition that unearthed a massive, enigmatic metal mass in the Southern Plains—an event that blurred the lines between myth and reality.

Historical Context: The Post-Louisiana Purchase Frontier

Following the Louisiana Purchase, American traders ventured into the tribes along the Red River, inadvertently reshaping centuries-old narratives centered around precious metals in the Southwest. This discovery, while not leading to personal wealth for the explorers, significantly contributed to global scientific understanding.

Notable Quote:

"Following the Louisiana Purchase, American traders to the tribes on the Red river and inadvertently resolved centuries of precious metal stories in the Southwest. But their discovery turned out to be more a boon to global science than an avenue to personal wealth." — Dan Flores [01:45]

The Expedition of Anthony Glass

Anthony Glass, a 35-year-old hardware store owner from Natchez, Mississippi, fueled by rumors and personal ambition, embarked on a western expedition in early 1808. With $2,000 in trade goods and backed perhaps by Indian agent Dr. John Sibley, Glass aimed to uncover the rumored wealth of the Southwest. His journey along the Red River introduced him to the Wichita and Comanche tribes, fostering alliances that were pivotal for his mission.

Notable Quote:

"Anthony Glass... had watched for years as wealth of various kinds had flowed from the west into the South. Now, early in 1808, he determined that the time was right to set out on a western expedition of his own." — Dan Flores [22:47]

Discovery of the Mysterious Metal Mass

On October 14, 1808, Glass and his party, now numbering nearly 1,000 people, discovered a massive metal object near the Brazos River. Described as a 4-foot-tall, 2-foot-wide, and 1,635-pound mass, the metal's properties baffled both the Americans and the native tribes. Initially believed to be platinum or silver, the metal's true nature remained elusive until scientific advancements shed light on its origin.

Notable Quote:

"It was roughly 4ft tall by 2ft wide and massively heavy. The Indians were reverent. The Americans mystified." — Dan Flores [22:47]

The Meteorite Revelation

The enigmatic object was eventually identified as a meteorite—a siderite composed of iron-nickel alloy. This discovery was one of the largest meteorites of its time, significantly contributing to the scientific community's understanding of extraterrestrial materials. Despite Glass's and his party's initial disappointment at the lack of precious metals, the meteorite's significance in scientific circles was profound.

Notable Quote:

"In 1814, professor Silliman published the first in a series of experiments on it and surmised that it too was a meteorite. Since it hadn't been embedded, it was likely a direct motion of object that fell at low velocity..." — Dan Flores [22:47]

Impact on Frontier Mythology and Scientific Discovery

The retrieval of the "Red River" meteorite intertwined with frontier myths, fueling legends of lost silver mines and unending quests for riches. While scientists celebrated the meteorite's discovery, the traders and adventurers found themselves disillusioned. This episode highlights the clash between myth-driven exploration and empirical scientific inquiry that characterized much of the West's history.

Notable Quote:

"Science may have been delighted with Red River, but the frontier traders were never satisfied with this outcome." — Dan Flores [22:47]

Modern Parallels: Exploration of Mars and the Valle Marineris Canyon

Drawing parallels between 19th-century Western exploration and contemporary space exploration, Flores and Rinella discuss Mars' Valle Marineris—a canyon so vast that it challenges current observational capabilities. This comparison underscores humanity's enduring curiosity and the mysteries that continue to drive exploration, whether on Earth or beyond.

Notable Quotes:

"It's to me kind of analogous to some of the things that people were wondering about with respect to the west in 1800." — Dan Flores [47:58]

"Human curiosity, paralleling historical and modern exploration, continues to push the boundaries of what we know." — Dan Flores [50:22]

The Role of Indian Agents: Diplomacy and Manipulation

A significant figure in this narrative is Dr. John Sibley, an early Indian agent appointed by President Jefferson. His role was to act as a diplomat between the U.S. government and Native American tribes, leveraging trade to influence tribal politics. Sibley's strategies, including the promise of firearms and trade goods, were instrumental in shaping the interactions between American traders and the tribes of the Southern Plains.

Notable Quote:

"His primary attempt in doing that is to send traitors out with the promise of two things... trading expeditions sent to the Wichitas and the Comanches with the promise that... they're going to trade for, of course, horses and whatever the strange object is." — Dan Flores [60:18]

Conclusion: Lessons from the Past and the Pursuit of Knowledge

Episode 08 of The American West masterfully intertwines historical narrative with scientific discovery, illustrating how myths can drive exploration and how empirical evidence can reshape our understanding. The story of Anthony Glass and the Red River meteorite serves as a testament to human curiosity and the complex interplay between ambition, belief, and knowledge.

Final Reflections:

"Humans have always been travelers, explorers... There's always been that idea of discovery and moving into new realms and finding new things." — Dan Flores [53:31]

Listeners are left with a profound appreciation for the mysteries that defined the American West and a reflection on how these tales continue to resonate in our modern quest for understanding the unknown.

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Notable Quotes Summary:

1. Dan Flores [01:45]: "Following the Louisiana Purchase, American traders to the tribes on the Red river and inadvertently resolved centuries of precious metal stories in the Southwest. But their discovery turned out to be more a boon to global science than an avenue to personal wealth."
2. Dan Flores [22:47]: "Anthony Glass... had watched for years as wealth of various kinds had flowed from the west into the South. Now, early in 1808, he determined that the time was right to set out on a western expedition of his own."
3. Dan Flores [22:47]: "It was roughly 4ft tall by 2ft wide and massively heavy. The Indians were reverent. The Americans mystified."
4. Dan Flores [22:47]: "In 1814, professor Silliman published the first in a series of experiments on it and surmised that it too was a meteorite. Since it hadn't been embedded, it was likely a direct motion of object that fell at low velocity..."
5. Dan Flores [47:58]: "It's to me kind of analogous to some of the things that people were wondering about with respect to the west in 1800."
6. Dan Flores [50:22]: "Human curiosity, paralleling historical and modern exploration, continues to push the boundaries of what we know."
7. Dan Flores [60:18]: "His primary attempt in doing that is to send traitors out with the promise of two things... trading expeditions sent to the Wichitas and the Comanches with the promise that... they're going to trade for, of course, horses and whatever the strange object is."
8. Dan Flores [53:31]: "Humans have always been travelers, explorers... There's always been that idea of discovery and moving into new realms and finding new things."

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Note: This summary focuses exclusively on the substantive content of the episode, omitting all advertisements, introductions, and outros as per the specified instructions.

Transcript

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[Dan Flores]

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[Dan Flores]

Following the Louisiana Purchase, American traders to the tribes on the Red river and inadvertently resolved centuries of precious metal stories in the Southwest. But their discovery turned out to be more a boon to global science than an avenue to personal wealth. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American west, brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer, just in time for the season that calls us home. A portion of every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters and wildlife. Enjoy responsibly beyond the Earth's curve mysteries. Sometime in the century we're in, Maybe even by 2050, a nation or one of our proliferating private space companies will fly a drone through the Valle Marineris Canyon on Mars. Right now, America's NASA is in the lead for that honor, having successfully put a drone in the air on Mars and and Planning to fly one called Dragonfly on a future mission to Saturn's moon Titan. But whoever explores the Valle Marineris will have a chance to resolve all kinds of mysteries about the biggest red rock fissure in our solar system. A gorge that both resembles the West's biggest, the Grand Canyon, but absolutely dwarfs that Arizona marvel in every particular of measurement. Literally an otherworldly desert landscape, the Valle Marineris truly is west of everything. It's also a good modern stand in to help understand the way many explorers and mapmakers thought about the American West 200 years ago. What's out there? How will we feel in the close presence of a mystery in Mars case? What kind of emotional reaction will we experience watching video footage from a drone? Or flying through a world of soaring red spires and cliffs on an astounding scale? Is it possible the planet is so small its horizons will obscure the opposing canyon walls one from the other, even in a gorge 25,000ft deep? Was that canyon formed by the biggest flood in solar system history? Was there life there then? Is there life there now? In the case of the west, in the early 1800s, the world was equally uninformed. Could rumors of mountains of pure salt in the west be believed? Was there really a single mountain from which waters flowed to the Pacific? The Arctic, the Gulf? Were native people in the west descendants of the lost tribes of Israel? Or did some possibly migrate from Wales? Were there elephants, unicorns, or dragon like water serpents there? Did masses of precious metals lurk hidden in the mountains or even lie about on the prairie, waiting for the ambitious or the lucky to cash in beyond all their dreams? At the beginning of the 19th century, these were all possibilities in the west, which was real because humans evolved to be curious and to be travelers. Eventually, we'll answer our questions about Mars. We certainly answered all the ones I just posed about the American West. But there's one I wanted to address here more particularly. This mystery spawned several frontier generations to imagine easy, unfathomable riches in the Southwest, aiding a widespread image of America as a kind of Eden of infinite resources. An idea that some still hold. It's a story that evokes everything that excites us about venturing into new worlds and finding things we absolutely never expected. In the same decades, when fascinated Americans were hearing about a mysterious western region associated with early mountain man John Colter, A place where mud pots bubbled and scalding water spewed, or were absorbing the story of Hugh Glass mauling by a giant bear down on the southwestern frontier. There was another story remarkable enough to rival those in the years between 1810 and 1835. Versions of it circulated through the saloons of towns like Natchez, New Orleans and Natchitoches in Louisiana, and San Antonio and Austin in Texas. Culture's hell became Yellowstone park, of course, and the Hugh Glass story would morph into a modern movie called the Revenant on the Southwestern frontier. The story I'm about to tell though, eventually faded away. Ultimately an Eastern scientist put together what had generated such excitement in the early 1800s. But in the west. By then the story was almost forgotten. John Coulter and Hugh Glass, like so many other Americans heading into the west, launched from St. Louis and traveled up the Missouri river. The counterpart to St. Louis on the Southern plains was the old French city of Natchitoches in Louisiana, founded in 1714 and and the last outpost of supply on the Red River, A watercourse that penetrated into the west towards the Rocky Mountains and far distant Santa Fe. For decades, French traders had followed the Red to reach the Wichita villages several hundred miles upriver. Like the Mandans and the Arikaras on the Missouri, the Wichita's had built fixed towns as far up the Red as farming was possible. Catawan speakers, related to the Pawnees and sometimes called by that name, the Wichita's freely welcomed traders and explorers, as did the nomadic Comanche bands in the prairies around them. Now, with the Louisiana Purchase, Americans had taken over possession of the Lower Red. Used to manipulating the Spanish and French against one another for Indian affections, the Southern Plains tribes were intrigued by this new player on the scene. As I described in the last episode of the American west, Thomas Jefferson's 1806 attempt to send a Lewis and Clark type exploration up the Red river had been cut short by a Spanish force. Simultaneously with that confrontation, word spread on the frontier that Aaron Burr and Jefferson's vice president, who had just killed his rival Alexander Hamilton in a duel, was fleeing the US to the Southwest, ostensibly to launch an American style revolution against the Spanish monarchy. With these provocations, for several weeks in the winter of 1806 and seven Spanish and American armies actually circled one another west of Natchitoches in a game of bluff that never got called. When tensions finally relaxed, Spanish officials in the colonies of Texas and New Mexico decided that in the future it would be good to avoid any noisy disturbances with the Americans, as they put it. That decision allowed American traders more freedom to penetrate the plains. By the first decade of the 1800s, the American Foot was in the door to the Southwest. And, and it was still pushing. Led by their point man in Natchitoches, Dr. John Sibley, a New Englander President Jefferson appointed Indian agent for the region in 1805, the Americans had a new plan. If government expeditions to the west aroused Spanish suspicions, why not invite potential Indian allies and trade partners like the Wichitas and Comanches to come to Natchitoches instead? Sibley's invitation produced two great councils in Natchitoches with the tribes of the Southern plains in the year 1807. Feasts and gift giving kept by 47 year old Sibley wrapping himself in an American flag before the assembled throng, then wrapping the same flag around high ranking warriors from the western tribes. Sibley took told the tribes that the Americans were natives of the same land you are, in other words, white Indians. For their part, the Comanches claim they had so much wealth in the form of horses and mules that the animals were to them like grass. But coming as far as Natchitoches to trade, they averred, was too inconvenient. So Sibley promised that if they would spurn the Spanish and fly US flags over their villages, he would send private traders to them in large numbers. And unlike the Spanish, whose policies forbade arming Indians, the Americans would freely trade guns, lead and powder so the tribes could hunt and prosecute their wars. As Sibley sagely told President Jefferson, whoever furnishes Indians the best and most satisfactory trade can always control their politics. Within a few weeks of these grand councils in the town of Natchez on the east bank of the Mississippi, a Pennsylvania immigrant and hardware store owner there decided to take Sibley up on this offer to the tribes. Anthony glass was around 35 at the time, had recently seen his young wife pass away, and was in a town that swirled with rumors about the mysterious West. Some books on the Natchez Trace, the famed Woodlands Trail from Natchez to Kentucky and Tennessee, see Glass's hardware store doubling as a depot for outlaws on the Trace to fence stolen goods. What's more certain about Glass is that he had watched for years as wealth of various kinds had flowed from the west into the South. Now, early in 1808, he determined that the time was right to set out on a western expedition of his own. He asked Sibley for a license and secured $2,000 in trade goods for the journey. Sibley was delighted enough that there is good reason to believe the Indian agent himself became an investor in the proposition. Unlike farther north, it was not the pelts of beavers or muskrats that drew traders to the southern plains. Indian processed buffalo robes were available, but were too bulky and heavy for private traders to transport. There were deer skins that could be made into leather, to be sure, and honey from European bees spreading westward. But as Sibley and his Comanche contacts had discussed, in the southern west, the primary tradable wealth consisted of the hundreds of thousands of horses running wild across the plains. In a later episode, I'll tell the fuller story of the little known Western horse trade. But since the early 1790s, Americans like Philip Nolan had been driving herds of wild horses they'd contrived to capture or had acquired in the Indian trade to furnish stock for the advancing southern frontier. That live horses could walk themselves to market was one of their great attractions. On the other hand, in the Southwest, there had always been another possibility for wealth. From the start of European interest in the region, there had been rumors of precious metals, even of golden cities. In the 1530s, the shipwrecked Spaniard Cabeza de Vaca had said that natives somewhere in Texas had presented him with bags of. Well, the early editions of his account call them bags of silver. A few years after that, having failed to find cities of gold among the Zunis and Pueblo people, Francisco Coronado and 50 of his men traveled most of the way across the southern plains because a clever and manipulative native informant told them that in Quivira, the Wichita country, the Indian leaders wore bracelets of metal. Coronado interpreted that to mean silver or gold until, in Quivira, he met a Wichita headman wearing a metal necklace. The necklace was made of copper. But as the American frontier had advanced past the Mississippi, these stories did not go away. And in the 1770s, they were actually joined by a fresh version, this time from a source that seemed unusually reliable. Word went out that the highly experienced French trader from Natchitoches, Athanase de Mezeray, had returned from a foray up the red river in 1772 with an account of widespread Indian excitement over what the Frenchman heard was a giant mass of silvery metal out on the distant plains. This mystery was apparently located somewhere on the Comancherea in Comanche land. But a Wichita Indian claimed to be its discoverer. A band of Pawnees from Nebraska were said to have journeyed hundreds of miles to see the phenomenon and and had proclaimed it a deity. Perhaps these stories were just misunderstood exaggerations, like those of Cabeza de Vaca or Coronado. But maybe there was something truly valuable out there in the vast distances towards the sunset, at the grand councils in 1807, Sibley had naturally inquired what the Indians knew of such stories. One of the Comanche headmen who had wrapped himself in the American flag knew the correct response to a question like that. Of course, he said, in their country there was silver or plenty. It's difficult now to know exactly what Sibley or Anthony Glass believed a journey to the interior might ultimately reveal in the west. But at the time, Orleans Territorial governor William Claiborne was highly suspicious. Sibley, the governor claimed accurately, was supplying Glass with US Flags to carry to Indians whom the Spanish government believed to be their subjects. With respect to Glass, who had decided to outfit himself with a military jacket and dress sword, Cleburne heard that Sibley was now referring to the hardware store owner as Captain Glass. Of course, Sibley rightly believed that as Indian agent he was furthering Jefferson's own policies towards the Southwest. But it was particularly annoying when Cleburne further argued to Washington that while Glass portrayed himself as a horse trader, the Glass party true intent was to conduct a silver mine expedition. Whatever else Glass had in mind when he assembled his outfit and party for an early July 18, 1808 departure up the Red river, he intended to trade. His outfit included 16 packhorses to ferry that $2,000 in trade goods, along with a remuda of 32 additional mounts. His party was hardly an invading army. There were only 11 of them. Among them were three past veterans of the Red river trade, a mixed blood interpreter, Joseph Lucas, whose interview Indian name was Talapoon, and a pair of horse traders named John Davis and William Alexander, who had been among the wichitas and Comanches two years earlier. The party also included a 15 year old named Peter Young and a man named George Shamp, who was highly excited about the silver ore Davis and Alexander claimed to have seen on their past expeditions. The Root Glass plan involved an eastern detour around the Great Raft, the enormous log jam that blocked the Red river above Natchitoches, and then a crossing of the Red through a bankside village of newly emigrated Creek Indians known as Kushattas. At that point they would fall onto the regular Indian trail that led from the Lower Red to the Wichita towns far upriver. Once they'd looped the Great Raft, their course would be northwesterly, not intersecting the Red river itself again until they were nearly to the Witchita villages.

[Steve Rinella]

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[Dan Flores]

Centuries later we know what happened during the eight months glass and his party were in the west, what the Red river country was like, the specific people they met, what Glass and others experienced living with Indians, and how the Americans reacted to an astounding mystery. Because of a simple thing, Glass kept a journal of the trip. In fact, Sibley had insisted that Glass regularly put down the details of his journey. As a store owner, Glass Glass was literate, and there's a good chance few if any, of the rest of the party were. Glass's journal, then, is a kind of time travel window into how the west struck this group of travelers into the unknown. Like most people who journeyed across the west in those days, Glass party intended to live off the land. But following an ancient Indian trail did not necessarily make that easy. There was almost no wildlife in the vicinity of the Cochatta village on the Red, and with a party of Caddo Indians ahead of them on the Trace through northeast Texas, deer and other animals were spooked. Three weeks of travel, however, gradually brought the party out of the pine woods and into the tall grass prairies at the edge of the Great Plains. The whole country was now becoming a gently rolling parkland populated with brand new creatures prairie chickens, wild horses and prairie dogs, all the first Glass had ever seen. Within a month's travel, they were north of present Dallas, surrounded by great numbers of wild horses, as Glass put it, and feasting daily on fresh buffalo. Glass's party crossed to the north side of the red river on Aug. 8. He found the country remarkably pleasant, as he said, with herds of bison in sight everywhere they looked, deer as tame as domestic stock, since no one bothered to hunt them. And the Wichita towns, now only 50 miles upriver. Three days later, a large party of well mounted Indians escorted the Americans into their villages, a trio of towns arrayed on both banks of the Red river and in a setting Glass described as beautiful. The land of first quality, he said, with excellent, abundant springs of water like the Mandans and Arikaras on the Missouri. These divisions of the Wichitas were agricultural people who, Glass soon realized, grew large quantities of corn, beans, pumpkins and melons. So they had a surplus to trade for meat with their buffalo hunting allies, the Comanches. Their towns were made up of framed thatched houses, as Glass put it, in the form of a sugarloaf, 70 or 80ft in diameter at the base and 30 or 40ft high. Each of the towns had a civil chief, but there was a presiding grand chief, a Wahakai, or Great Bear, who struck glass as about 50 years old. When Glass delivered his speech to the assembled tribe extolling American friendship, it was clear Oakai was the first personality among them as responsible as Sibley for making Glass's expedition possible. That reality brought immediate rewards. The chief is in our mess, glass confided in his journal, and we want for nothing. The town affords and live in plenty. Glass and most of his men spent the rest of August and half of September trading for Indian horses and marveling at Wichita culture. At one point, they watched as mounted, bow wielding Wichita hunters killed every last animal from a herd of 41 buffalo. They also formed a good sense of why the Wichitas and Comanches were so eager to trade for firearms. On three different occasions, Glass woke to discover that an enemy of the Wichitas, the Osages, had raided the villages and stolen the horses from their communal herds, including many of the ones he had only just bought. In the third instance, Glass realized with astonishment and fury that an Osage raider was riding what he called a remarkable paint horse. That used to be my own riding horse. The Osages were well supplied with guns from American traders out of St. Louis. But when the Wichitas pursued the raiders, only a third of the of the Wichita party could muster firearms of any kind. In the weeks just before the Americans had arrived, Glass learned the Osages had made off with 500 Wichita horses in broad daylight. The raiders were so well armed, the Wichita had merely watched in sullen silence, unable to raise any resistance to the outrage. While Alexander and Davis had now departed for a camp of Comanches they knew from prior trips west. Glass had other things on his mind. For one thing, he had made friends among the Wichitas, specifically with an Indian couple, a highly distinguished warrior named Tadoussuk. A brave, subtle and intrepid man, Glass said, who in fact was a Spaniard, captured as a child and raised as an Indian, and along with his wife, who Glass described as a Pawnee woman, just as remarkable for her address and intrigue. And Glass was discovering he was living among a people famous for their sexual liberation. The Wichitas are great libertines, but both men and women, the American wrote, not addicted to jealousy. And nothing is more common than for a man to loan or hire out his wife, particularly to strangers who visit the nation. As Glass confessed in his journal, this couple became my most intimate acquaintance. It seems to have been these friends Glass began to interrogate about the mystery that had obviously played some role in. In launching his expedition. On September 18th and 19th, he confided in his journal that he had been informed of a remarkable piece of metal some days journey distant to the southward on the waters of river Brazos. Later, he wrote, hearing more of this singular metal, to which they attributed singular virtues in curing diseases, I resolved to obtain permission to see it if I could, and proposed to them to go with me. While they had known about this mystery for at least four decades, the Red river tribes had never allowed a white man to lay eyes on it. Various Wichitas Glass approached with his hope to see the object. Very likely, the headman Oaxai, were resolute in their refusal. So Glass turned to the couple he'd befriended and ultimately elicited from them a promise to show him the tantalizing mystery. Scribbling in his journal by firelight, he put his hopes this the more I heard about the object, the more my anxiety was increased. Suspecting from their account of it and great veneration for it, it might be platina, platinum, or something of great value. Two weeks later, on October 3rd of 1808, Glass and a party of Wichitas that included his new friend Tadoussuk, the grand chief Owagai, and the Wichita warrior who had found the object decades earlier, crossed the Red river and headed in a southwesterly direction towards a Comanche village in this country. Tadoussuk told him they would find the mysterious mast that had now become an obsession for Glass and his men. In the Comanche village. Things at first did not go well. Its leaders objected. The mystery, after all, was on their land. After some altercation, Glass wrote, it was finally agreed that if it should turn out to be of considerable value, what it brought should be divided between both Comanches and Wichitas. But at that point, the mystery's original discoverer was overcome with doubt, and I was obliged to flatter and bribe him to go on, Glass confessed. Here is how Glass described the remarkable events that culminated on October 14, 1808. Our whole party now became very numerous, containing of men and women and children, near 1,000 souls and three times that number of horses and mules. Moving slowly on to the west, crossing the river Brazos about 50 miles, we approached the place where the medal was, the Indians observing considerable ceremony as they approached. As they neared the phenomenon across open prairie, what the Americans first saw was a wide variety of native offerings surrounding the object in every direction. At the center of the pipes, beads and bags of pollen. Their eyes fell on a dimpled, blackish metal object resting on the surface of the ground and balanced on its heaviest end. It was roughly 4ft tall by 2ft wide and massively heavy. The Indians were reverent. The Americans mystified. A magnet Glass had brought along showed an attraction to the object, but they could see no rust on it anywhere. It could be indented. It was malleable enough for the Indians to fashion jewelry and arrow points from it, and it peeled like a bell when struck. Rubbing it produced a brilliant polish, and it gave off sparks when struck with a flint. But it was untarnished, which meant it could not be a giant nugget of silver. But what then? In wonder, Glass contrived to file off some samples. Then their vast party rode away, leaving the object to its splendid isolation. The stories of Anthony Glass and of this baffling Western mystery began to unwind from one another. At this point, except for his interpreter and the teenager, Peter Young, the rest of Glass party now departed with their horses for Louisiana, with secret plans, several of them began to formulate. Initially, Glass traveled farther south to trade with Comanche bands along the Colorado river of Texas. By the first of 1809, he had turned back towards the Wichita villages, first pausing in the grand prairie west of today's Fort Worth to try his hand at driving and corralling the thousands of wild mustangs there. By late February, he was back in the Wichita towns, and on March 21, he, Lucas and Young finally set out for Natchitoches with their horse herd. They arrived in May to discover that their adventures had inflamed the whole frontier. Dr. Sibley was as excited as the men in the taverns and quickly posted this report to his superiors in Washington. Captain Glass has just returned here from a trading voyage towards the head of Red River. During his travels and residence amongst the Indians, where he spent more than eight months, he was conducted by Indians to a place where he saw, in large masses of many thousands of pounds weight, a singular kind of mineral. It in color resembles iron, but whiter. It is hard as steel, yet malleable as as gold or silver. It is obedient to the magnet, but less so than iron. It is not flexible in the greatest heat that can be produced in a blacksmith's furnace. It will neither corrode nor rust by exposure to the atmosphere. It receives a polish as brilliant as a diamond and of a quicksilver color. If it is not platina or platinum, I do not know what it is. Sibley had sent a sample to Philadelphia to be essayed. He wrote, meanwhile, what he had heard might be £100,000 of it, yet lay out on the distant prairie a giant nugget of platinum. That was the consensus, and not just among the frontier traders. Even Sibley, the best educated man on the scene, agreed. So there was nothing for it but to go fetch the Red river mystery back to civilization and as fast as possible in terms of who would do that and how. Though there was no consensus, Glass, for his part, opted out. He'd had his fill of the plains and life with the Indians, but the rest of his party had not. And instead of cooperating with one another, they formed two rival groups for, in effect, a mining rush. One party, launched from Natchitoches and led by George Champ and William Alexander, included five of the original Glass party. Beyond a supply of rifles, ammunition and blankets, the exact quantity of trade goods they took haven't come down to us. Only that they had wealthy benefactors, including the Indian agent, Dr. Sibley. They set out in the early summer of 1809. The other party, led by another Glass party man, John Davis, recruited largely from Natchez in Mississippi, and was the first to arrive at the location of the mystery mass. Lacking a means to transport it, however, they attempted to hide it from the other party, who soon enough appeared with with the Wichita and Comanche owners with whom they had apparently struck a trade deal. The Champ Alexander party had managed to get a wagon to the spot, and levering the huge and heavy mass into the buckboard, they now set out for the Red river with the plan of floating it to Natchitoches. The field had become even more crowded, though word reached them that a 52 man Spanish Spanish cavalry from San Antonio was coming after them with the intent of arresting American interlopers illegally mining platina in Spanish Texas. Setting fire to the planes behind them, Champ's party made it to the red, fashioned a barge, and headed downriver. They and their prize arrived to wild excitement in Natchitoches on June 4th of 1810. For nearly a year, the mysterious object resided in Natchitoches, While various would be investors offered varying sums to buy the shares from the retrieving party. In 1811, Sibley and others arranged to boat the baffling object to New Orleans, accompanied by two members of the Champe Alexander party. There it was loaded aboard a vessel bound for New York so it could be properly assessed. Within a year, Sibley assembled the anxious members of the group that had labored to retrieve the mass and relayed very bad news. The metal had assayed as some kind of alloyed iron. After all their effort and all the excitement, the object had no value. Of course, an assay determining that the object was neither silver nor nor platinum did not answer the elephant in the room question. What on earth was it? In fact, maybe it wasn't of Earth after all. In a lucky coincidence, the retrieval of the West's most confounding object took place in the first decade in human history when science was able to answer a question like that. In 1803, residents of the village of La Gael, France, had reported that during a night of flying stars, stones had rained from the sky onto their town. Four years later, a Yale professor named Benjamin Silliman happened to be on hand to see a similar shower of debris from the heavens near Weston, Connecticut. Silliman was dumbfounded and at a loss, arguing that the pieces must have broken off from the moon or been discharged by some distant volcanic eruption. Following the lead of French scientists who now believed such objects were related to shooting stars or meteors. However, by 1808, scientists were writing in American journals and using the term meteorites to refer to debris from the sky, gaining access to the metallic mass. In 1814, a newly aware professor Silliman published the first in a series of experiments on it and surmised that it too was a meteorite. He labeled it a siderite, the new term for an iron nickel alloy meteorite. Since it hadn't been embedded, it was likely a direct motion of object that fell at low velocity between midnight and noon in the direction of the earth's spin. Named red river, the 1,635 pound mass became the prize meteorite and the largest in the world. For most of the 19th century. In an effort to recreate its discovery in the 1820s, Silliman interviewed Dr. Sibley and Natchitoches and prevailed on him to send along a copy of Glass Journal with the first description anyone had written of this mystery from the West. Science may have been delighted with Red river, but the frontier traders were never satisfied with this outcome. The American geographer William Darby was in Natchitoches when Sibley delivered the bad news and Darby spoke to two of them. They were convinced they had been swindled. In Darby's opinion, the persons engaged were, in general, too ignorant to understand the decisive results of such tests and unwilling to abandon a pleasing delusion. The result was that for at least the next two decades, accounts of silver and platina out on the plains became an unending frontier conversation in the Southwest. Ordinary history has preserved those conversations, primarily in the form of the lost silver mine of Alamo casualty Jim Bowie. As for the native people, while their most pressing need when the Americans arrived was clearly for the weaponry Spanish trade denied them, they do appear to have known that the giant meteorite was associated with shooting stars, what the Wichitas called the light that flies. That heavenly association plus the essential mystery of the object makes me think their instinct to venerate it was hardly naive. They very well may have sensed something profound about it. Among our current hypotheses for how life life arose on Earth, one with a strong following involves meteorites. A striking piece of evidence for their possible role in launching life on Earth comes from the discovery that while biology can be equally either left handed or right handed, all organic molecules on Earth, even RNA and DNA, are asymmetrically left handed, which makes meteorites particularly intriguing. Space derived organic molecules brought to Earth by meteorites have been gathered from all over the world, and like earthly life itself, they show a strong orientation for left handedness.

[Steve Rinella]

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[Dan Flores]

The Valle Marineris.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, you should, if you can, take a stab at explaining again, like, how big it is. But the thing that I took me a minute to realize what you're saying is that I'm trying to equate it to, like, if you're standing on the shore, like on, on our Earth, if you're standing on a shoreline looking out in the ocean, there's a couple reasons why you can't see the next continent. But one of them is that the Earth rolls off.

[Dan Flores]

That's right. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Right. And you. Which you can, you know, you can kind of demonstrate with certain objects where the curvature of the Earth gets in the way.

[Dan Flores]

Even if you could see islands sometimes can appear.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Dan Flores]

Out of the water, even if you.

[Steve Rinella]

Could see infinity, you still wouldn't see the other continent.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Because the curvature of the Earth throws you off. But it took me a minute to realize you're saying that, like on, on Mars, that this canyon could be so big that on one side of the canyon, looking across, it'd be the same as standing on a continental shelf.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And you might not even be able to see the other side.

[Dan Flores]

You couldn't see the other side.

[Steve Rinella]

I had to keep, like, thinking about that being like, oh, yeah, that's a great point.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. So, you know, when you're in the Grand Canyon, obviously you can see the other side. You can see the cliffs on the other side. If you're on the South Rim, you can see the cliffs on the other side. And when you're down in the bottom of it, you can see the cliffs on both sides. What. One of the questions about this canyon, which is the largest canyon in the. In the solar system. And you know, and I am invoking it because this is one of those mysteries that's out there, sort of like the kind of mysteries that the west presented in 1800. But one of the mysteries about this Valle Marineris canyon, which is this gigantic canyon, 25,000ft deep. Deep, is that Mars is so small that the question is whether or not you can stand at the foot of the cliffs on one side and actually see the cliffs on the other side of the canyon. Even though it is a perfectly vertical canyon with the two cliffs opposing one another, the curve of the planet is so sharp that it may put the other side out of view.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. You know, you have flat Earthers. If you had flat Marsers, they'd Get there and they'd be like, ha, there it is. I knew it. It does end.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, yeah, it's so my, as I said, the reason I was invoking that is because it's one of those mysteries that we're probably going to know the answer to in another 50 or 60 years once we have drones flying around Mars. And it's to me kind of analogous to some of the things that people were wondering about with respect to the west in 1800. What's out there? And what kind of strange things are we going to encounter that have a logical explanation that now seem to be, you know, probably not logical at all.

[Steve Rinella]

And I thought, I thought it was a great parallel. Yeah, well, yeah, like our questions about, our questions about Mars being a great parallel to. And then plus all the fantastical ideas people had.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, they had a lot of fantastical ideas. And you know, and the one I, I resolved on was, you know, this fairly little known story, but it's. My analogy is that it was kind of the southern west version of Coulter's hell, where John Coulter comes back after the Lewis and Clark expedition and goes into what is present day Wyoming and Montana and he encounters a place that a lot of people didn't believe existed because his descriptions of it seem to be just, you know, really far out of line. And this was a story from the southern prairies that kind of produced that same effect. What in the world is this object that's out there that has native people so excited? And is it truly the realization of this long standing myth of the Southwest harboring all kinds of precious metals that, you know, had sent everybody from Cabeza. Well, not Cabeza de Vaca really, because he sort of starts the whole idea of there being precious metals in the, in the west, but certainly Coronado. Coronado's expedition was all about the idea that just as in Mexico and in Peru, probably the American Southwest held untold unfathomable riches. And that's sort of the kind of genre that this particular story plays in, I think.

[Unknown]

Dan, when I read this, the comparison to Mars and the canyon, it triggered for me a memory of house sitting for you one summer in the Bitterroot. And I went into the shed where he kept the batteries for your solar system. And on the wall, this is one of my favorite memories of that place. There's just a little yellowed image and underneath you had hand labeled it Olympus Mons, the largest mountain in the solar system. And then parentheses, Mars.

[Steve Rinella]

And there was no other context.

[Unknown]

And Sydney and I spent a while trying to Figure out why that was there.

[Dan Flores]

But there was a place to put it. Yeah, in the solar room.

[Unknown]

But I, the next thought I had.

[Dan Flores]

Was.

[Unknown]

Like you have a special fascination with outer space and there are all these parallels in pop culture.

[Steve Rinella]

I didn't know you were big, generally a big outer space guy.

[Unknown]

I just remember talking about when the movie John Carter from Mars came out. You were excited for that because it was.

[Dan Flores]

And then vastly disappointed.

[Unknown]

Vastly disappointed. But like all this early sci fi culture drew so strongly on the parallels to the west and Yeah, I don't know if, if you can expand on that but I mean it's, it's sort of an under. It's one of those things where when you take a step back and re examine what you know, it makes sense and you see these parallels clearly. But it's something that didn't really occur to me naturally.

[Dan Flores]

Well, it, yeah, I mean I have always probably been fascinated with, with space and space exploration probably because you know, I was one of, one of the Star Trek kids in the 60s. I mean I was probably 16 years old or something when Star Trek was first on and that was, you know, that sort of really compelled me I think to be interested in, in space. But it also does have a. Space exploration and western exploration to me are pretty strong analogs of one another. But because there's the whole idea of going into a country that you don't know anything about. And I think humans have done that. We've done that ever since we left Africa and went to the Middle east and went to Europe and went to Asia and finally found the Americas. I mean there's always been that idea of discovery and moving into new realms and finding new things, new creatures, new new landscapes, new kinds of landforms. And so yeah, that you know, and I, and I know I'm not alone in that. I mean Kim Stanley Robinson, you know the. Who's probably the best science fiction writer of our time in his great trilogy Red Mars, Blue Mars and Green Mars. His primary character in the first of those, those books is a guy named John Boone. Oh, and John Boone has this wonderful experience of getting, getting to go out on a rover with a laptop and do some sort of drug. I'm not sure, I don't remember what they call it, but it's some sort of mind expanding drug and driving out through the landscapes of Mars and recording his impressions, you know, of a kind of a discovery of, of Martian terrain and Martian landforms. So yeah, there's probably in writing a piece like this, given the conclusion where that this story goes. And I tried deliberately not to reveal what this object was out there until we get to the end of, of the story because I want there. Wanted there to be a little bit of a mystery about what in the world is this, this object that is compelling, all this fascination by these traders who are going west. But yeah, because of its association with, with space. Yeah. I clearly, you know, was willing to invoke Mars and, and that giant canyon on Mars.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, when you, when you read about, you mentioned Coronado and you read about Coronado and you get this sense of. I used the word fantastical earlier. Like they have these, it seems like they're driven by these, like, overblown expectations. Cities of gold and all this. Yeah, but it's, but if you look at like, what they were able to sack from the Aztecs, I mean, was it overblown dreams? Wasn't what they actually, what the Spanish actually like, pulled out of the Aztec Empire? I mean, that was like staggering wealth for real, right?

[Dan Flores]

It was staggering wealth, in fact. So the combination of the sacking of the Aztec empire and the destruction of, of the Incas in Peru produced 200 times over the amount of gold and silver that had ever been known in the Old World. So when Spain does that, of course, and what that does is that it sets up this expectation that these are not the only two places there are going to be. And so that's why Spain and these Spanish explorers like Coronado are so convinced that that farther north there's going to be another one of these grand discoveries.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, because you look at them and party wants to be like, you idiots. But then on the other hand, they're like, well, look.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, look what's already happened.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. So 200 times more, 200 times the.

[Dan Flores]

Amount of gold and silver that had existed in the Old World came out of those mines and in the New World. And so it was. Yeah, it was, yeah, it was a spectacular discovery. And so that's one of the reasons you can look at someone like Coronado and feel a certain sympathy for his expectation. And that's why, you know, he takes. When he doesn't find cities of gold at Zuni, he hears word, as I describe him, from this very clever and manipulative native informant that far out on the Great Plains, on the prairies, there is a civilization where, where its leaders wear metal ornaments, necklaces and, and bracelets and various kinds of other ornaments. And so He, Coronado, takes 50 of his men and strikes out from New Mexico across the plains and travels all the way into present day Kansas on the Arkansas river and finds this country, Quivira, which is the country of the Wichita Indians when they were living up on the Arkansas. And as I say in the piece, he does find civil leaders who are wearing jewelry, but it's bronze, it's copper, it's stuff. It's copper, actually, from the mines up around Lake Superior. So he. So the story. And that's kind of what propels the primary story in this piece is that there is something. It's just when you see it through the eyes of. Of expectation, you're very likely going to be disappointed as the. These traders from Louisiana and Mississippi who go to this tremendous effort to haul back this object from the Southern plains end up being. They're disappointed. Ultimately, it doesn't pay off for them.

[Unknown]

One of the people that you write about in this, in this piece is, I think, George Sibley Johnson. John Sibley, Dr. Johnson. Yeah, the Indian agent. And that's a term that you see again and again in accounts from the 19th, 19th century, you know, US west history. And it's also one that doesn't really have a contemporary parallel. And it's. I wonder if you could sort of unpack that for people that haven't encountered it before, because it's sort of a diplomat, sort of a trade controlling access to foodstuffs and resources, especially as the reservation era.

[Steve Rinella]

Sometimes an asset, sometimes an exploiter in chief.

[Unknown]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, tremendously powerful people.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, they were tremendously powerful. And Dr. John Sibley of Louisiana was a kind of a prototypical Indian agent. He was one of the very first ones. And his duties were rather more limited than what we associate with later Indian agents, say, after the Civil War, where they are doing things like providing food in order to enable reservation people who have been placed on reservations to survive. And they're. They're acting, in effect, the Indian agent's role is to act as kind of a diplomatic go between. Between the government in Washington and the native people themselves. And so this fellow John Sibley is. I mean, he's not the only one. There are Indian agents particularly appointed by the Jefferson administration in many other places. William Clark becomes an Indian agent after the Lewis and Clark expedition is over. He's in charge of. He's the representative and the diplomat to the Indians of the Missouri river country. So these people are attempting to execute Washington's geopolitical strategy for the Louisiana Purchase in the West. And the reason Sibley becomes important is because he's the Indian agent of a part of the west in the early 19th century, where the boundaries are disputed between Spain and the United States. And that's why when I talked in one of the last episodes about that Jeffersonian expedition up the Red river that got turned around by Spain, that's the milieu in the context in which Sibley is operating. So Washington has just attempted to explore the. The southern parts of the Louisiana Purchase, and the official Jeffersonian expedition has been blocked by a Spanish force and turned around and sent back. And so what Sibley is attempting to do is to execute Jeffersonian policy for the west in a place where everything is vague and the boundaries are not clear. And. And what he's attempting to do then, is to win over the tribes of the deep plains of the. The southern West. And that's really as far as his. His ideas extend. Nobody knows exactly how. How far out the true Southwest, say, Santa Fe is, which everybody knows is in possession of Spain, that seems to be rather beyond the. The reach of somebody like Sibley. But he knows that up a river like the Red river or the Arkansas, there are all these tribes on the plain. So what he's trying to do is he's trying to win them away from, from Spanish control to American control. And his primary attempt in doing that is to send these traitors out with the promise of two things. If, if you, the Wichita or the Comanches, will take down the Spanish flags flying over your villages and run American flags, United States flags, up your flagpoles and sort of declare yourselves to be Indians of the United States, then what we're going to do in return is we're going to set you up with a trade. If you recall that sort of crafty line where he simply says something like, whoever offers Indians the best trade can always control their politics. What we're going to do is send traitors out, and we know that Spain has not traded guns and ammunition to you. That's against the. The imperial policy of the Spanish Empire. They do not arm their native people. They try to convert them into being agriculturalists and not hunters. And as Americans, we're going to offer you guns and ammunition. We're going to trade guns to you. And so that's what a lot of this story hinges around, is Sibley sending a trading expedition out to the Wichitas and the Comanches with the promise that. I mean, what the traders are going for is they're bringing back horses that they've traded for, plus whatever the strange object is that everybody has. Has heard rumors about. And the other aspect, of course, is they're going to trade them guns. And I tried in that story to explain why the Wichitas and Comanches in particular, desirous of having firearms because they've got an enemy, the Osages, who are well armed from their trading partners in St. Louis. And the Osages are attempting to block St. Louis traders from getting out to the Wichitas and the Comanches so that they can, when they want to, as they do three times while Glass is with them, this traitor, Anthony Glasses, living in the Wichita villages. Three times the Osages ride in and just steal half the horse herds that the Wichita's have and sort of, you know, wave son of a bitch at them as they're riding away because they know these Indians out on the deep plains aren't well armed.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, a good parallel would be us today, you know, saying to Iran like, we don't want you to have that. Well, we're going to block other people from bringing to you. That's exactly the technologies that we have that we'd rather you.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, we don't want you to have that. And here somebody else pops up and says, oh, we'll trade it.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, we'd be more than happy to supply it.

[Dan Flores]

We'll absolutely supply you. And so that's what the United States, that's what Jeffersonian Indian policy, much of it was about during this, these decades, is to try to win over the tribes. And one way to win them, the surefire way to win them is through trade. And you know, and then there's the secondary goal of this particular group of traders who have heard these stories about the Indians for the last 30 or 40 years have been talking about some remarkable large chunk of, of metal out on the plains. And what they all think, what the Americans all think is here's the silver or we've been hearing about in the Southwest for decades and decades and decades. And they go out and somehow Glass is able to persuade the Wichitas and the Comanches, probably with promises of trade, of, of guns and so forth, to take him to see this, this object. And he's the. They're the first white people to ever see it. The Indians had never let any other white people see it before.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, Dan, thanks for the insights, man.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, you bet. Forward the next up we should probably say, or should we tell people. Well, they're going to hear what, what this object is. But of course, what the, what the object is is it's the largest meteorite, iron nickel meteorite discovered in the world in the 19th century. And these guys These traders haul it back to civilization thinking it is a gigantic nugget of platinum.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, with a lot of exertion.

[Dan Flores]

With a hell of a lot of exertion. Yeah. Foreign.

[Steve Rinella]

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