Transcript
Steve Rinella (0:00)
Oh, oh, oh. O'Reilly.
Dan Flores (0:04)
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Steve Rinella (0:23)
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Dan Flores (1:45)
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. 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.