Steve Rinella (24:42)

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Rob Gronkowski (26:08)

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Dan Flores (27:14)

Like most of us, I live in the valley of a river. It's called the Rio Galisteo, a stream that runs sometimes and seeps into the sands most of the time. Just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Galisteo is no grand watercourse, but it does string a cottonwood corridor through the high desert and and the celebrated American naturalist Aldo Leopold once used it as an example of how waterways were ruined when Europeans brought their domestic stock to the West. Leopold told the story of a drunken immigrant who in 1849 was able to walk across the Rio Galisteo successfully on a 20 foot board plank. Yet in the 20th century, he wrote, the Galisteo had sliced its stream bed into so many eroded gullies known as arroyos, that a drunk wouldn't stand a snowball's chance of making the far bank. In many places, a 20th century plank across the Rio Galisteo would have to span 250ft of torn up stream bed. I've little doubt the cow and the sheep made their contribution to this ecological set piece, but I also know the naturalists arrived too late in New Mexico to see what else had happened here in an earlier time. Heading on the flanks of Thompson Peak in the southern Rockies, the Galisteo was one of the streams the western trappers we call mountain men picked clean of beavers in the 1820s. Drawn to the southern mountains in the wake of Mexico's success, throwing off Spanish rule, then the Republic of Mexico's opening of the Southwest to outside trade. Trappers from the states began to operate out of Santa Fe and taos. Shortly after 1821 they fanned out across the mountains all the way to the high parks of Colorado. And they made astonishingly quick work of every beaver colony they could find. One party of trappers cashed in $50,000 in New Mexico furs in St. Louis in 1831. Local authorities tried to control the carnage with a law banning non resident trapping. The Americans ignored it. By 1832, trappers were even scouring the nearby high plains in their rush to de beaver every last trickle of water set aside for a moment the predictability of it all, the deaths of wild animals in return for a brief few years of profits. And take the long view. As it had done in the east, beaver removal in the west abruptly terminated millennia of hydraulic engineering. A world where beavers had turned western rivers into ribbons of dammed ponds. And year round water storage now yielded to flashing runoffs that cut gullies and arroyos in places like New Mexico. Leopold may have blamed sheep and cows, but the destruction of the west beavers also appears visible on the land even two centuries later. Along with the practical extinction of bison in the wild, the extirpation of millions of beavers in just three short decades is at least an event modern Americans recall from the West's Slaughterhouse Century 1820-1920. The Western Beaver hunt was merely an extension of beaver mania that had gathered momentum from the time of Henry Hudson. But by the time the beaver trade moved west, the US was already giving it a peculiarly American cast. In neighboring Kentucky, Canada, the British Crown planned and regulated the fur trade, granting a government sanctioned monopoly to the Hudson's Bay Company right next door to the US this offered lessons in efficiency, decent treatment of the labor force and even some conservation of the target animals. But back in 1763, King George's similar attempts to regulate wild animals in the American colonies had infuriated everyone from Virginia to New York. The American approach to market capitalism was too freewheeling and anti regulation to be patient with a setup like Canada's. So America went for no market planning beyond the natural laws of Adam Smith capitalism. In that clear space, the country's first big business enterprise, immigrant John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company made a heroic effort to dominate the fur trade by out competing everyone else. The son of a butcher in the German town of Waldorf, Johann Jakob arrived in America in 1783. After first spending a Stretch in London. Mastering English in 1808, Astor founded the American Fur Company and began his quest to control the fur market. He built and supplied trading posts, first in the Great Lakes country, then in the West. Vying with Astor's fur behemoth was a myriad of small private enterprises. They were eager and could wreak havoc on animals, but weren't always professionally run. One of the most notable was Manuel Lisa's Missouri Fur Company. The wilderness trading post that Lisa pioneered in the Missouri river country as early as 1808 were the Walmarts and targets of their day. They provided the native labor force handy box stores for European technology as well as warehouses for the gathered furs. River barges ferried the body parts from beavers, river otters and muskrats downriver to stateside markets. After Astor's wildly ambitious attempt to monopolize the Pacific coast trade collapsed, the British seized his Astoria post at the mouth of the Columbia. In the War of 1812, the American Fur Company refocused on the interior West. Soon enough, it put its chips on a new technological innovation, the steamboat, which could haul more trade goods upriver, as well as heavy coast quantities of furs, now including even bulky bison robes. Back to civilization, where demand seemed insatiable. Astor's corporate design even extended to health care for his labor force, since Indian trade partners laid low by disease would never be able to generate profitable product. In the 1830s, Astor called on the government's brand new Bureau of Indian affairs to vaccinate native people against smallpox. Tragically, the 1830s was too late. One of Astor's steamboats making an annual supply run in 1837, the St. Peter's discovered on the way upriver that it had passengers falling ill with the dreaded pox. Instead of doing the moral thing and Turning back to St. Louis, the St. Peter's continued its run, attempting to mitigate the danger by warning native people at every stop that a contagious disease was on board. The Arikaras and Mandans were unimpressed. The Assiniboines thought the announcement a hoax to preserve trade goods for someone else. The Blackfeet had always refused to kill beavers for the whites because beaver with a capital B was one of their deities. Plus, they valued beaver ponds as critical sources of water on the dry prairie. But they compensated by killing wolves for the trade and had plenty of wolf pelts and bison robes on hand. The Blackfeet had suffered a bout with smallpox in the 1780s, but this band said their historians had never heard of such a Disease. By the time the epidemic of 1837 had run its course course, nearly 20,000 Missouri River Indians had died disfiguring, horrible deaths. One of the most famous Indians in the west interviewed and painted by Western travelers across the previous decade was the Mandan headman Matotope forebears. A strikingly handsome, middle aged war leader, Matotope impressed observers as free, generous and elegant and gentlemanly in his deportment. He had survived a warrior's life. But the invisible virus struck him down without the slightest care for his bravery or grace. Mototepe blamed the traitors. I do not fear death, he is supposed to have said, but to die with my face rotten, that even the wolves will shrink with horror at seeing me. Jacob Halsey, who oversaw the American Fur Company's Fort Union Post, put the moment in terms Astor and the American Fur Company could best appreciate. The losses, he wrote, would be incalculable as our most profitable Indians have died. The most remembered part of the beaver story in the west centers on William Ashley's and Andrew Henry's Rocky Mountain Fur Company, whose reassessment of how to attack beavers would have won a business school's prize for thinking outside the box had such a prize existed. Posts and steamboats were expensive. Like the Blackfeet, several other Plains tribes refused to kill beavers because of their ecological importance. But since colonial times, America had been full of men who fled towns and farms and marriages and desired nothing so much as to spend their lives camping and hunting, a life that seemed natural. So why not sidestep the Indian labor force altogether and have such men trapped for beavers and otters themselves, like Kit Carson and others were doing out of Santa Fe and Taos? They could remain in the west year round, and the new company would use overland wagons to supply them at an annual rendezvous site somewhere out west, then wagon the accumulated loot back to St. Louis. It worked. At least it worked for a few years, as long as the animals lasted. Although barely aware of it, Ashley's and Henry's mountain men became players in animal geopolitics. Because they could clear streams of beaver so quickly, the American trappers were endlessly pushing onto new streams farther west which threatened British colonial claims. So in 1824, at London's request, the Hudson's Bay Company sent trapping brigades into the Rockies with instructions to ruin the country to create a fur desert that would turn the Americans back for millions of years. The streams that ran snowmelt through the canyons of ranges like the Bitterroots, the Limhis and the Wasatch had known beaver colonies at roughly half mile intervals. A hundred colonies, dams and ponds for every 50 miles of a stream and its side creeks. But British brigade leaders Peter Skene, Ogden, John Work and Alexander Ross, with 15 or so trappers plus native wives or girlfriends to do the cooking and pelt preparation, were easily up to the task of obliterating all the west slope beavers. Ross described how his brigade of 20 with 212 traps would scatter their sets up the length of a mountain stream in an afternoon. On a typical creek in the bitterroots, they'd catch 95 beavers the following morning and another 60 that afternoon. That usually got every animal in the draw drainage, then on to the next canyon and repeat. Especially during the spring when female beavers were pregnant or already had kits that ruined things proper. This wasn't the all boys world of the seal otter hunt, as the women who went on these pursuits were major players with the skills to dress pelts and keep everyone clothed and fed and pointed in the right direction with that kind of female assistance. From 1823 to 1841, the British brigades destroyed 35,000 western beavers and drained an estimated 6,000 beaver ponds. By now everyone knew what the end of this looked like. There was no chance beavers and river otters could last any longer than white tailed deer had in the East. What they wouldn't have understood, but we do, is how the extraction of sea otters and beavers was devastating finely balanced American ecologies, hundreds of thousands of years old. Without otters to hold them in check, sea urchin populations exploded, then mowed down whole kelp forests whose loss in turn threatened the red algae reefs that grew. Those waving stands of kelp, obliterating every beaver on stream after stream, didn't just deprive the native people of traditional camps. It entirely remade drainage systems all over the continent, altering growth patterns for willows and cottonwoods, destroying wetlands favored by waterfowl, raccoons and moose, in effect drying out America. But the stories we tell ourselves, these mountain men with their rendezvous gatherings, combination hardware stores and all night raves except in leather and at the foot of the Wind river mountains, became American working class heroes. Back east, Daniel Boone's biographers had already devised a romantic take on the masculine American hunter. Now the west broadcast the Boone model as bigger than life figures. Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Buffalo Bill Cody, literary types like James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving became their biographers, as did Herman Melville of the whale hunters. In one of his first books Teddy Roosevelt claimed these men were the first to become Americans. Even the historian Frederick Jackson Turner echoed that. Turner's frontier thesis made a Darwinian claim that it was wilderness life with all those dead animals that turned Europeans into Americans. These heroes out of the adventureland of early America, in fact, were detached, stoic killers. Some of them, yes, were expectant capitalists, but most were not even that. They were killing animals because it was an ancient human, human skill. And many of them were doing so because apparently they didn't know how to do much else. The truest, unvarnished characterization of them came from one of their own. A peer, albeit a literary one, named George Ruxton, a British adventurer and novelist who trapped with the mountain man out of Taos. Ruxton knew his colleagues firsthand. They made up a genus, he said, of men distilled into a primitive state whose personalities assumed what he said was a most singular cast of simplicity mingled with ferocity. The western hunters, he knew, rival the beasts of prey, as he put it, and destroy human as well as animal life with as little scruple and as freely as they expose their their own. So they were brave, stoic killers and true looking for animals. They examined every nook and cranny of the continent and paved the way for the settlement of the Western country. It seems to me that romance about all this is misdirected. Though the west afforded the mountain men freedom from all restraints, their response to that freedom, and here I'm using Ruxton's word, was ransacking the west of its animal life. Tyler redick here from 2311 Racing. The rush of racing. Nothing beats it, but Chumba Casino comes close. Chumba's got fast spins, fun games, daily bonuses and all the action you can handle. Now that's a ride. 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Steve Rinella (44:48)

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Rob Gronkowski (46:03)

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Podcast Host or Interviewer (47:09)

Dan, in this episode, you kind of kick off what is a real dominant arc in the history of sort of the long 19th century in the west, which is just unmitigated exploitation of all kinds of resources. And we've been working on, like I mentioned earlier, we've been working on these histories of market hunters. And it's tough for people to wrap their minds around these individuals committing these really egregious atrocities of wildlife. But then, you know, you also have to look back at the time and consider it in context, like they're not, that's not what they're trying to do. They have a very specific purpose in mind and that is the market requires this. The west provides it and they're the intermediary. I wonder how you sort of wrestle with that question or that tension in, in your writing about this stuff.

Steve Rinella (48:12)

Dan's mean to those guys sometimes.

Podcast Host or Interviewer (48:14)

I know, I know. I feel like you guys sit on opposite sides of that seesaw.

Steve Rinella (48:20)

Dan says downright rude things about some of those people.

Dan Flores (48:23)

Yeah. And some of the people. I remember when you and I were at Country Bookshelf talking about Wild New World, you said, you just hurt my feelings about some of these guys. Well, so here's what I think. I think we've had, you know, probably quite long historiography of romance about this period of the American West. So what I have been attempting to do, and, you know, trying not to go too overboard with it, but what I've been trying to do is to, for one thing, take the. The wildlife of the west seriously and not assume that it's just this, you know, just commodities and fur waiting to be exploited. And so one of the things I've done with a lot of my work is I try to get a lot of natural history in so people can understand the lives that these animals had. Wolves, bison, pronghorns and so forth. And, and understand them as, you know, a. A legitimate part of the west. Because I think especially in the 19th century, the trifecta of things that people are interested in then and now were it was the. The landscapes, these almost alien, arid landscapes that people coming out of Northern Europe or the east had hardly ever been exposed to. People coming out of the Mediterranean world had. But they also found the west to be a very cold place with landscapes they recognize. The other thing that everybody is interested in, no matter where you came from to the west, was the native people who were here and then the animals. Because, for one thing, the animals of the west were different from they. From the animals that were anywhere else in the country. From the east, they were different from the animals of Western Europe. There's a lot more Asian admixture of creatures in the West. So these. These are unusual creatures that fascinate a lot of people. So I've tried to take the animals themselves seriously. And with the idea that we've had a lot of romance written about this particular time period, I have been trying to do it in a way where you where readers of my books or people who listen to this podcast are going to have the furniture in their heads rearranged a little bit and thinking about it, I mean, we're still going to have Jim Bridger out there as he's going to be a Western hero. Kit Carson is going to be a hero of sorts. Those people are still going to stand as major figures in Western history. But I've been trying to create a kind of a look at this, this period of the west that gives you a slightly different angle of approach to it. And when you look at things like. So I would preface the ecological thing I'm about to say by also pointing out that the science of ecology doesn't exist until the 20th century. And so none of these people, who, for example, are wiping out sea otters on the Pacific coast, are taking out beaver colonies all over the country, understand that by doing so, they are wrecking ecologies that formed probably half a million or a million years before and have been in place for tens of thousands of years. They don't think in ecological terms. All they're thinking in terms of is there's a population of sea otters out there. We're going to go get them. And what we know since then, this is one of those examples where, you know, those of us down the timeline understand more about what the consequences were than they did. What we understand now is that they were wrecking ecologies that produce all kinds of alterations across the West. And as I tried to convey in writing about that little river I live on down in New Mexico, the alterations extend right down to our own time. I mean, I live on a river that, because all the beavers were taken off of it in the 1820s and 1830s, the result was that without the beaver dams and the ponds on it, that little stream eroded into crisscrossing arroyos going in every single direction. And the result today is that it's a completely different ecology. It's one of those. One of the things I say quite a bit, I know in this podcast, is the past doesn't stay in the past. It extends into the present day. And so that's the sort of thing I'm trying to. To make people understand with this.

Steve Rinella (53:09)

I only became aware recently that. That people used to struggle with. Well, the Europeans used to struggle with the concept of extinction, that it was. I don't know who debated what side of it, but that it was actually debated.

Dan Flores (53:26)

Oh, yes.

Steve Rinella (53:27)

Could extinction be possible? Because how do you make it conform to Genesis? Or how do you conform extinction to the biblical creation story?

Dan Flores (53:40)

That's.

Steve Rinella (53:40)

I had no idea that people argued about this. Yeah, but what. What do you see? And recognizing that there were dozens of or hundreds of native religions and native cultures and native systems of understanding, but do you see that native peoples had ideas of extinction? Jimmy, like, did they get it?

Dan Flores (54:06)

Well, I think in America, as a result of the Pleistocene extinctions, and obviously they happened far back in time, 10,000, 11,000, 12,000 years before. I think the native people then understood that animals disappear and they completely go away and we don't ever see them again. And so they, I think they understood then that extinction was real in the world. Whether or not, I mean, the question for me, and I have not been able to answer the question to my own satisfaction, is whether or not those memories extended down, like how far? Yeah. Towards the present. And I do not, I don't have an answer for that. But what you led with this very, the idea of extinction very much was a debated topic in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was debated, particularly when, when Europeans especially, and then in America too, began excavating the remains of Pleistocene animals and in some cases dinosaurs, but really more frequently Pleistocene animals. And as early paleontologists tried to reassemble those animals, what they began to realize is that nothing like this lives anymore. Yeah. What is the explanation for that? And that set in motion about a century's worth of debate about whether extinction was actually possible. And the, the biblical Judeo Christian version was, it's not possible. The world was created by a deity. It was created in perfection. Animals created in perfection exist exactly now as they did at the moment of their creation. And in a perfect deity created world, nothing will ever go away. Everything is going to remain. Thomas Jefferson believed that extinction was not possible in the 1790s. But he was persuaded by the naturalists in France, particularly the Comte Buffon, that extinction absolutely looks like it can happen. We don't know why these animals disappeared. And that's why Jefferson had instructions to both Lewis and Clark and Freeman and Custis that southern expedition, when they went west, look for mammoths. Because we found the bones of mammoths in the east. We can't find any east, but maybe they're still out there in the west. But by the 1830s and 1840s, most scientists in both America and Europe began to realize that, wow, these things, they really have disappeared. They're not here anymore. And then we had the, the kind of crushing realization in the 1840s of the extinction of the great Auk, our Northern hemisphere penguin, which was basically wiped out by egg hunters. And suddenly there's a realization that absolutely, animals can disappear. And it looks like one of the reasons they disappear is because of human exploitation.

Steve Rinella (57:30)

I, I see, I, I see examples where native cultures would have a metaph, they would understand extinction, but have A metaphysical idea about it like, like plains tribes as, as the buffalo started to vanish. Plains tribes would be that they, they went back in, that they had come from the earth and they went back into the earth.

Dan Flores (57:55)

Yeah.

Steve Rinella (57:55)

And what's fascinating to me is I was talking to a guy. This is kind of one of the craziest conversations I ever had with someone. It felt like it was time travel. I was talking to a guy in Guyana, a tribal man in Guyana. And they had always had a herd of a couple hundred white lipped peccary that live within striking distance of their village. They cleared out, they couldn't find them. It was a great resource for them. He explained to me face to face. He explained to me that there was another village and there was a shaman in the village who was jealous of their village for having such prosperity and he had locked the peccaries into a mountain. And there's no, like this dude would not have awareness of that idea on the great plains of America that things were locked into the earth. But it's like you're getting at. It's gone this. Right.

Dan Flores (58:53)

And you have to have an explanation.

Steve Rinella (58:54)

But like a different way of explaining that. Like it's gone. Yeah, right. It's just, but it's totally different worldview, you know.

Dan Flores (59:00)

Yeah.

Steve Rinella (59:01)

But capturing the same sentiment that it's.

Dan Flores (59:03)

It'S the same sentiment. It's a different cause effect relationship than we would have with a scientific worldview. I mean, the cause effect relationship for why things happened was different among indigenous people. They had a different argument for this is a consequence, the cause is completely something different. And we would have. The western rational scientific world looks for an evidentiary cause for the consequence. And oftentimes the indigenous world looks for a kind of a what, what we would call a supernatural explanation for why things happen. Yeah.

Podcast Host or Interviewer (59:49)

Earlier you were talking about mountain men and the, the hide hunters as being these initially glorified figures. And now they've. We've reassessed our view of them, but inarguably quite fascinating. Yeah, yeah. But there I think what's interesting is when you look at this in the aggregate, the whole pattern, there are these examples of like the egg hunters with the great auk and, and I think the one, the one storyline that never had really entered my consciousness until later in life was the sea otter hunt and especially under Russian control. I mean they're conscripting native people and killing them and torturing them to go kill otters for their fur.

Dan Flores (60:45)

And.

Podcast Host or Interviewer (60:48)

It'S just striking to me because it's in keeping with this much larger pattern of exploitation of wildlife. But once you look at it and you see all of the little unique aspects of it, then you begin to sort of comprehend the larger picture. I don't know if that makes sense, but, you know, there's some very familiar aspects to the story of wildlife depletion, but there's also these outliers that are pretty horrific and yet again, in keeping with the ones that we're maybe more comfortable with as a culture. Talking about.

Dan Flores (61:25)

Yeah, that one is definitely an outlier because of the conscription of the Aleuts and others. I mean, sometimes they would kidnap a guy's family and hold his family ransom so that he would go and. And do the otter hunt for them. And the reason I think that one really, you know, strikes us as. As egregious as it is is because what we're more used to is something like what happened, you know, with the fur companies and the native people as clients of the fur company. And. And of course, that one is a. That one you have to know about history some to wrap your mind around to realize that Native people, who we accord a kind of a special consideration for the natural world. And, and they almost always have it, there's no question. But they were also confronted with people who had brought in a brand new technology, a metal technology, that if you didn't participate in it and your neighbors, your native neighbors down the river did, then you were suddenly massively disadvantaged. Because if they got metal, if they got guns, if they got knives made of steel and they got arrow points made of iron, then. And you remained with your traditional flint culture, you were massively disadvantaged in the world that was happening around them. And so most people, although there were religious leaders who tried to stop this and said, don't do it. Don't join into this, this hunt. Nonetheless, most people did because they realized that the world had changed so dramatically if they did not participate. And the unfortunate result was that the market hunt usually usually pointed out very specific things that it wanted. It didn't want Native people to, you know, offer them up their. The crops from their fields. It wanted the furs of beavers and muskrats and otters. And so if you want to play the game with the global market, that's what you have to offer us in trade, and we'll then set you up with metalware. And so it's a. It's a part of a kind of a voluntary participation in the market economy over most of the West. That is not true of the otter Thing we were just talking about where people were conscripted into it.

Steve Rinella (63:58)

There's another question about the. The otter country where they're doing sea otters. But to set it up, I'll point out that, like, if you look at a lot of the areas as they marched across the country, you'd kind of come for the fur and stay for the whatever. Right. So these, like, guys that go across the. The Appalachian Mountains to hunt deer, oftentimes those same individuals stay to get into agriculture, stay to get into timber extraction, whatever.

Dan Flores (64:34)

Boonesborough.

Steve Rinella (64:34)

Yeah. So you go like. Or, you know, you hide, hunters go out, and out of that comes these, like, cattle enterprises or whatever.

Dan Flores (64:43)

Right.

Steve Rinella (64:43)

Like, there's. There's no. There's no gap. People show up oftentimes to extract fur, and then they quickly. They don't leave. You follow me. Like, more people come in their footsteps. Can. Are there exceptions to that where there's a big gap? And like, what. What was it like when you came to the Pacific coast for otters? Like, the Russians are down there. Like, after the otters, was there a retraction or was there, like, a thing you stayed for?

Dan Flores (65:15)

No, no, that probably was an exception because almost everybody was coming by ship. And so they were. When the otter hunt was over, when they couldn't find anymore, when the fur seals were too depleted to continue, you know, law of diminishing returns, there's no point in continuing. They usually went back to wherever they were from because a ton of them were from Boston and New York.

Steve Rinella (65:39)

And I mean, then there's like a quiet. There's like an otterless quiet period.

Dan Flores (65:44)

There was indeed, yeah, in the 20s and. And 30s and 40s. I mean, otters don't start recovering until about the 1880s or 1890s. The first seals, because there had been more of them, they recovered a little bit more quickly. But there is also a kind of a subsidence period after the demise of beavers in the interior west, when that Hudson's Bay group of guys I was talking about go in and try to ruin the country and trap all the beavers out of all the streams on the west side of the Continental Divide. There's a period of. Of about 15 years or so where a lot of the mountain men kind of are. I mean, some of them go west with the Oregon Trail, folks who settle in the Willamette River Valley and become sheriffs and things. And I'm going to talk in one of the upcoming episodes about a next step that several of the mountain men do when their Beavers are gone. A lot of them turn to the horse trade and they become traders and horses. And one of the things that some of the classic mountain men do, Bill Sublette, for example, they go to California and either trade for horses or catch wild horses in the rolling golden hills of California, or they. Sometimes they just steal them off Spanish ranches and they drive them east from California and outfit Stephen Carney's army of the west, which needs mounts and remounts. Or they take them to places like Fort Bridger and they supply the wagon trains, the Overland Trail, folks with horses, with fresh stock to get all the way to the West Coast. So there's a. There's a little bit of a lag, but they usually find something like the buffalo hunters. When the buffalo are gone, you got pronghorns, you got elk, you got bighorn sheep. They just go after whatever is left and so. And wolves, because they've learned now that, you know, you can use strychnine and you can poison wolves, you can get a dollar a pelt for a wolf pelt. And so, yeah, so they managed to segue into just whatever animals are left. Yeah. But the mountain man, quite a number of them become horse traders.

Steve Rinella (68:16)

Are you familiar with Vaquero of the brush country?

Dan Flores (68:18)

No, I am, yeah.

Steve Rinella (68:19)

Yeah, that dude, he. He hated the buffalo hunters because he was. He felt they all became criminals, not all became sheriffs.

Podcast Host or Interviewer (68:31)

And there's a line. And there's a line that we cited in the Mountain man project where, like, at the 1837 or 1838 rendezvous, someone writes, a number of them have gone west to become horse thieves. Such a thing has never been heard of until now. Yeah, like it was just this invention of desperation.

Dan Flores (68:52)

Yeah, well, that was the Bill Sublette thing. I mean, he actually did that, and he regarded that as one of his great coups. He went to California and stole a bunch of Spanish horses and drove them back to the plains to outfit the Overland. And a bit Fort Bentz for it was one of the biggest sort of receiving areas for Western horses. But that episode is coming up. I'm going to tell the horse story. I think it may be the next one, in fact, after this, where we'll turn to the horse trade in the west, which is another one of those that's kind of little known. And unlike the sort of thing we've been talking about, I mean, with the horse trade, the idea was to get live animals back to the 70s. Yeah.

Steve Rinella (69:32)

I'm not used to dealing with lives.

Dan Flores (69:33)

Yeah, they're getting live Animals back. And what made horses really great is that they got back there on their own. You didn't have to load them on a steamboat or, you know, pack them up on the back of a pack horse. You could just drive them along and they got to market, you know, on their own accord.

Steve Rinella (69:55)

Good, Randall?

Podcast Host or Interviewer (69:56)

I'm. I'm good.

Steve Rinella (69:57)

I got one last observation for you about my favorite part of that. I can't remember the guy's name. Vaquero. The brush country.

Dan Flores (70:03)

Yeah.

Podcast Host or Interviewer (70:04)

Isn't it J. Frank Doby?

Steve Rinella (70:06)

Yeah, yeah.

Dan Flores (70:06)

J. Frank Dobby.

Steve Rinella (70:07)

Well, no, no, but it's like.

Podcast Host or Interviewer (70:08)

Yeah, it's told.

Steve Rinella (70:10)

It's as told to. From a vaquero of the brush country. But he's talking about. You familiar with the King Ranch?

Dan Flores (70:16)

Oh, yeah.

Steve Rinella (70:16)

Okay. He's talking about one of the guys that would become a King Ranch guy having. Experimenting with taking like. Like injecting cattle with brine into their vascular system to achieve to. That you would somehow preserve. Because it's like, hot, it's humid down the Gulf country of South Texas. Like, everything rots so damn fast.

Dan Flores (70:49)

Yeah.

Steve Rinella (70:49)

So he's toying with the idea. How would you inject like a brine into its vat as it's dying into its vascular system and sort of pickle it?

Dan Flores (70:59)

This is basically salting the meat life, huh?

Steve Rinella (71:04)

Necessity tickles me endlessly, man. It's like that. But he acknowledges that they never got that perfected.

Dan Flores (71:13)

It's one of those things that appears on those redneck solutions.

Steve Rinella (71:18)

Well, thank. Thanks for all the wisdom, Dan. I appreciate.

Dan Flores (71:20)

Oh, man, it's fun. Thanks, guys.

Steve Rinella (71:38)

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