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- [00:01]
Host 1
Oh oh oh.
- [00:02]
Dan Flores
O'Reilly.
- [00:04]
Narrator
Check engine ABS or maintenance light on. Take the guesswork out of your warning lights with O'Reilly Veriscan. The service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ASE Certified Master Technicians. And if you need help, we can recommend a shop for you. Ask for O'Reilly Veriscan today.
- [00:23]
Dan Flores
Oh, oh, oh, oh. O'Reilly.
- [00:28]
Narrator
Auto Parts.
- [00:30]
Host 1
You ever feel that deep pull to the land to know it? To build something that lasts that itch for your own wild country? Well, it ain't just a daydream in 2025. It matters more than ever whether you're a lifelong hunter or just starting out, dreaming of land to explore to leave something real. Or there is a trailhead where you can start. It's called land.com the biggest online network for rural trail property. Find the right agent and explore everything from timber tracks to ranches. Get the tools you need to buy that dream generational property. Stop dreaming about it and head to land.com. it's your place to find your open space when you're in the back country. Don't forget your own back country. Keep it pristine and confidently clean by bringing along wet extra large Dude Wipes. Just like your truck gets muddy out in the wild, soaking your butt, you never clean your vehicle with dry paper towels, so why would you clean your butt with dry toilet paper? Wetter cleans better, so ditch the itch and switch from TP to wet extra large Dude Wipes. Dude Wipes. It is the best clean pants down. They're available at Amazon. That's where I usually order mine from, but you can get them at Walmart nationwide. Fantastic product. Proud to be doing ads for these boys at Dude Wipes.
- [01:46]
Narrator
Simultaneous with the appearance of the United States and the advance of its frontier westward to the Mississippi river, an intriguing trade developed around vast herds of horses.
- [01:57]
Dan Flores
That had become wild in the West.
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Narrator
An animal economy that outlasted the fur trade but collapsed in the 1920s in the face of modernity.
- [02:07]
Dan Flores
I'm Dan Flores, and this is the.
- [02:09]
Narrator
American west, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at velvetbuckvinyards.com enjoy responsibly bringing home all the pretty horses. In the summer of 1834, two years after his famous adventure painting the Tribes of the Missouri river and Northern Plains, artist George Catlin got his first opportunity to portray the counterpoint world, the southern.
- [03:02]
Dan Flores
Plains of what is now western Oklahoma.
- [03:06]
Narrator
Fate and luck offered Catlin a singular chance to see firsthand the similarities and differences between these two regions of the early 19th century American West. On the Missouri, Catlin had traveled and lived with fur traders from the big companies and had duly painted and mourned the great destruction then underway there. On the southern prairies, however, the artists saw relatively little of the American economic engines that were destroying so many ecologies in the northern West. On these southern prairies, it was not furbearers but an altogether different animal that caught his attention. Traveling in the vicinity of the Wichita Mountains that summer of 1834, this was how he described his the tract of country over which we passed is stocked not only with buffaloes, but with numerous bands of wild horses, many of which we saw every day.
- [04:05]
Dan Flores
Catlin went on.
- [04:07]
Narrator
The wild horse of these regions is a small but very powerful animal, with an exceedingly prominent eye, sharp nose, high nostril, small feet, and delicate leg, and undoubtedly have sprung from a stock introduced by the Spaniards. No other denizen of the plains is so wild and so sagacious as the horse, Catlin wrote, so remarkably keen is their eye that they will generally run at the sight when they are a mile distant, and when in motion will seldom stop short of three or four miles. Like many others, the artist was struck with the beauty of the horse in its wild state. Some were milk white, some jet black, others were sorrel and bay and cream color, and many were an iron gray, and others were pied, containing a variety of colors on the same animal. Their manes were profuse and hanging in the wildest confusion over their necks and faces, and their long tails swept the ground. Interestingly, at almost the same point in time, back in the horse country of Kentucky, John James Audubon, Catlin's fellow painter, wrote that he'd become acquainted with a man who had just returned from the country and the neighborhood of the headwaters of the Arkansas river, where he'd obtained from the Osages a recently captured four year old wild horse named Barrow. While the little horse was by no means handsome, as Ottoman said, and had cost only $35 in trade goods, Ottoman was intrigued enough to try him out. He proved a delight. He had a sweet gait that covered 40 miles a day. He leapt over woodland logs as lightly as an elk, was cautious, but a quick study in new situations, and strong and fearless when coaxed to swim the Ohio River. He was steady when birds flushed and Audubon shot them from the saddle to top all. He left a superb $300 horse in the dust Ottoman quickly bought barrel for $50 silver and and gloating over his discovery, concluded that the importation of horses of this kind from the western prairies might improve our breeds. Generally, with an audition like Barrow's, one is tempted to say, no kidding. But what intrigues me most about Catlin's and Audubon's wild horse epiphanies is that they seemed almost clueless about a phenomenon that had been underway in the west for almost two centuries. Simultaneous with the evolution of the fur trade in the northern west, the wild horse herds of the Great Plains had generated an economy of capture and trade that had transformed the native world. It had dominated much of the western trade in European settlements from Louisiana to California since the 1780s, and wild horses from herds like those Catlin saw had been driven up the Natchez trace to markets in Kentucky and the south, at least since 1790. That neither of these artists seemed aware of this speaks volumes about the underground character of the early horse trade in the west, which was never a corporate venture like the fur trade, but usually carried out by private, independent mustangers. That word an English garbling of the Spanish. The presence of wild horses in the west first drew the attention of most Americans with Louisiana Purchase. By then, wild horses had been running free in the California valleys, in the deserts of the Southwest, and especially on the Great Plains for many decades. But as was true of so many aspects of the west, it was Thomas Jefferson, during the years when he was serving as vice president in the Adams administration, who was the first American to understand that horses had become a part of the natural history and economy of the West. In his conversations about the west with his informants in 1798, Jefferson began to hear stories about an intriguing individual known as the Mexican traveler. The traveler's real name was Philip Nolan, and he was an American adventurer who, Jefferson discovered had journeyed numerous times into the unknown Southwest, returning driving herds of captured and traded horses into Louisiana and then up the Natchez Trace to the horse markets of Kentucky. Jefferson was fascinated. He wanted to know more. The image that emerges from from his queries is of a shadowy character, a literate, athletic and adventurous young man who was confident enough in his abilities to attempt things no one else had tried. The Mississippi scientist, Sir William Dunbar, knew Nolan, and he told Jefferson he thought the young man lacked sufficient education and was flawed by eccentricities many and great, as Dunbar put it. Nevertheless, he added, nolan was not destitute of romantic principles of honor united to the highest personal courage. Another informant, a lawyer in New Orleans told Jefferson that in his opinion, Nolan was an extraordinary character, one whom nature seems to have formed for enterprises of which the rest of mankind are incapable. As early as 1790, Jefferson learned, when Nolan was barely 20, he had embarked on a two year journey into the west, ultimately meeting and traveling with Wichitas and Comanches and giving those tough appraisers of human nature a quite favorable early impression of Americans. On this trip, Nolan apparently journeyed all the way to New Mexico, meanwhile learning that the numerous Southern Plains tribes were dissatisfied with Spanish trade and hoped to replace their former trade partners, the French, with a new source of guns and European goods. The Osages from farther east were enemies of these Western groups and making every effort to block traders from St. Louis from contacting the tribes of the Deep Plains. Nolan had in mind addressing that opening from a different direction. What really caught Jefferson's attention, though, was that Nolan had not returned from the west with the usual Indian processed furs. It was horses he had brought back from these forays, some of them wild ones, that he and his associates had captured. Nolan himself told his friends that he found the savage life less pleasing in practice than speculation. I could not Indianfy my heart, he said. But he'd gone on a second expedition into the Deep Plains in 1794, and a third one in 1796. He returned with 250 horses in 1796, drove them to Frankfort, Connecticut, and that had brought Nolan and his horses to the attention of important people who now invested in him. So in 1797, packing $7,000 worth of trade goods and with what he said were 12 good rifles and but one coward, he launched a fourth expedition. When he returned in 1798, he was driving a herd, some estimated at 2,500 animals, some of which brought $150 apiece. And Kentucky at this point in Nolan's career, he found a letter awaiting him requesting natural history information on Western horses. At the only moment in the age of the world, it read, when the horse might be studied in its wild state. Those words were from Vice President Thomas Jefferson, who wanted badly to have a conversation with Nolan about the West. So Jefferson wrote a follow up letter telling Nolan he very much wanted to purchase one of those western horses, which I am told are so remarkable for the singularity and beauty of their colors and forms. According to several informants, young Nolan and an inhabitant of the western country, a master of the fascinating language of Indian hand signs, who was probably the same Joseph Talapoon who, who would go west with Anthony Glass, departed for Virginia in 1800 with a fine paint stallion for Jefferson. Somehow, though, neither Nolan nor the paint horse ever got to Monticello. I'm tempted to guess that somewhere along the way, Nolan lost Jefferson stallion on a bet or in a game of chance. So the West's Mexican traveler stood up. The man about to be elected the third president of the United States. Nolan was now in preparation for a fifth, and his fate would have it, final expedition to the West. Although he claimed that I have long been tired of wild horses, the money was just too good. This time, he took two dozen men and a large quantity of goods. But by now, Spanish officials had grown increasingly alarmed at Nolan's trips. In the 1780s, Spain had proclaimed wild horses in her territories government property and had placed a tax on captured animals. That meant that any horses Nolan captured or traded for would be illegal contraband. Yet By December of 1800, the party was far out on the southern plains and and what seems to have been Nolan's favorite mustanging country, the Grand Prairie, southwest of today's Fort Worth. There they built corrals and started capturing wild bands. But In March of 1801, Indian scouts for a Spanish force sent out to arrest Nolan located them. When Nolan refused to surrender, the Spaniards attacked, killing Nolan and capturing more than a dozen of his men. At the age of 31, the Mexican travelers, pre Lewis and Clark adventures in the west were over. Thomas Jefferson never got to understand what deep time, science and history have now told us about the West's wild horses. It's a story that commences with an irony. Old Worlders understood that their ancestors had brought the horse to the Americas and that after initial fear of it, indigenous peoples in both north and South America had adopted the animal into their lives, where it had revolutionized their cultures. Yet in the depths of time lay a surprising story. Horses are actually evolutionary natives of North America. Their ancestors had begun their evolution into the modern horse on this continent 57 million years earlier, after a vast presence where horses were found from Alaska to Florida. The irony deepened profoundly by 8,000 years ago, horses so similar to the modern version that paleontologists have difficulty telling them apart unaccountably when extinct throughout the Americas. Meanwhile, the horses that had migrated from America into Africa, Asia and Europe survived to become domesticated by humans four to six thousand years ago. So the barbed horses that danced and nickered beneath the Spaniards were ancient American horses, their zebra like legs and dorsal back stripes still intact. Now they had returned to their evolutionary homeland. Except it was a homeland with many of their Pleistocene predators.
- [16:42]
Dan Flores
Gone.
- [16:44]
Narrator
This big history is why horses were so successful in going wild in the West. By the 1650s, the Southwest's native peoples were riding horses into the very landscapes that had shaped horses hooves, teeth, and behavioral patterns for millions of years. When the Pueblo Indian 1680 revolt Liberated Spanish livestock in and around Santa Fe, Horses and horse culture famously made their way decade by decade to tribes northward up the Rockies. But in the chaos, many animals also ran loose into the country. Meanwhile, in Texas, the Spanish Franciscans often turned surplus mission livestock out into the wild. So by 1715, from Texas to New Mexico, the whole country featured wild horses, rapidly replicating Pleistocene America. Three quarters of a century later, the same phenomenon was underway in California. By the time Americans were eyeing the west across the region's southern latitudes, wild horse herds had become enormous. A Spanish bishop in Texas wrote in 1805 that everywhere he traveled, there were great herds of horses and mares found close to the roads and herds of 4 to 6,000. By 1800, residents of California's missions and presidios, having had virtually no horses in the 1770s, regarded escaped horses in the surrounding countryside as such threats to grass and water that they shot them on sight. On the Great Plains, wild horses now struck observers as an iconic experience of the region. One traveler was stunned to see that, as he put it, the prairie near the horizon seemed to be moving with long undulations like the waves of an ocean. Then realized that the ocean waves were actually herds of mustangs blanketing the entire prairie. Another wrote that as far as the eye could extend, nothing over the dead level prairie was visible except a dense mass of horses, and the trampling of their hooves sounded like the roar of the surf on a rocky coast. Wandering herds of wild horses are so numerous, another wrote, that the land is covered with paths, making it appear the most populated place in the world.
- [19:22]
Tech Advertiser
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- [19:26]
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- [19:40]
Narrator
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- [19:41]
Tech Advertiser
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- [19:42]
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- [20:00]
Host 1
Hey, I'm not ashamed to tell you I'm a big dude wipes fan. I keep dude wipes in my backpack. I keep Dude Wipes at our fish shack. I keep dude wipes in my truck, garage, wherever the hell. I just keep them around. And Al, you know one of the reasons I got kids, man, when you got kids you learn that you keep them around because little butts make big messes. When nature calls for your kid, answer with the pristine clean of Little Dude Wipes. They're gentle enough for little cheeks and strong enough for toddler streaks. So they can be the first generation that never has to suffer the agony of dry toilet paper. The next time your kid goes number two, show them their number one with Little Dude Wipes. Little Dude Wipes are wet extra large flushable wipes. Alcohol and chemical free. They're the same size as Extra Large Dude Wipes. Perfect for the big messes the little kids make. Kids are known to get a little stinky Wipe away the funk with Little Dude Wipes Bubble gum. The bubble gum scented flushable wipe free Little Stinker. Also available in fragrance free Little Dude Wipes are made with 100% plant based based natural fibers so you can keep the planet healthy for your little dude. Available exclusively at Walmart nationwide. And remember, check out the bubble gum. You'll get a kick out of it.
- [21:14]
Narrator
Step into the world of power, loyalty and luck.
- [21:18]
Dan Flores
I'm gonna make him an offer he.
- [21:20]
Narrator
Can'T refuse with family. Canolies and spins mean everything.
- [21:24]
Dan Flores
Now you want to get mixed up in the family business.
- [21:27]
Host 1
Introducing the godfather@champacasino.com test your luck in.
- [21:31]
Narrator
The shadowy world of the Godfather slots.
- [21:34]
Dan Flores
Someday I will call upon you to do a service for me. Play the Godfather now@Champacasino.com Welcome to the family.
- [21:40]
Narrator
No purchase necessary VGW Group void We're prohibited by law 21 + terms and conditions apply. In Pleistocene America, horses had sometimes made up as much as 25% of the biomass of grazing animals. And by the 1800s, the wild bands were heading in that direction. Writer J. Frank Dobie once guessed that by 1800 there were 2 million wild horses in the West, a million of them on the prairies south of the Arkansas River. On the Southern Plains, a million wild horses would have been about 12% of bison numbers. So from seed herds not just in New Mexico and Texas, but but California, the Columbia Plateau, and Wyoming's Red Desert. Wild horses were spreading out all over the west. The Southern plains herds drew Indian peoples from everywhere, bringing Utes, Shoshones, Crows, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, Lakotas, even Blackfeet, and most famously Comanches to The horse country below the Arkansas River. As with bison and beavers, useful animals in such enormous numbers fill the human mind with thoughts of acquisition, wealth and power. With thoughts, in other words, of a potential economy. I've imagined this economy as a great horse funnel which took in hundreds of thousands of horses from its flared inn on the plains and then funneled them to trade markets like St. Louis, Natchitoches, Natchez and New Orleans. The demand came from Americans on the homesteader frontier who needed animal powered energy to push westward from the Appalachians to the Mississippi and beyond. As with the fur trade farther north, the Native people began as and remained major players in the trade. In good part because the horse trade was based on a pre existing Native economy involving inter tribal exchange. From the start, horses were such revolutionary agents of cultural change for Native people, that exchange of the animals became a central feature of western Indian life. There were annual horse fairs in places like the Black Hills and at fixed villages like those of the Mandan Idotsas on the Missouri and the Wichitas on the Red River. Even middleman groups emerged. The horse trade even contributed to the breakup of the Cheyennes into two geographic divisions, a northern one and a southern one that became a central player in distributing horses northward up the plains. The Comanches, another group drawn from the north to the southern plains because of horses, literally reconceived themselves in the context of horses and trade. They raided other tribes and Spanish ranches for both horses and children, training the latter as herders in an economy that became more pastoral by the decade. They marketed their animals northward to horsepower Northern Plains tribes westward to the New Mexicans via trade fairs and in places like Pecos, Picarees and Taos, and eventually eastward to the Americans. To a significant degree then, the Native people created the western horse trade, built their status systems around horse ownership and used the horse trade to manipulate Euro Americans anxious for profits and alliances with them. There were downsides. As with groups like the Comanches and Lakotas, the horse trade produced territorial expansion. Entire cottonwood groves along rivers like the Arkansas also disappeared as tribes endeavored to get their herds through snowy winters. And because winners on the northern plains could be hard on horse survival, raids for replenishment of tribal stock ripple from north to south every spring, as happened in the fur trade with the mountain men. A point came when the Americans attempted a similar step. With millions of horses running free, they tried their hand at capture. Catching wild horses may have begun as a North African or Iberian technique. By the time Americans entered the horse economy. Many different peoples seem to have mastered it. Nolan may have learned the art from the French and Spanish settlers of Louisiana, towns like Bayou Pierre and Natchitoches. But the best descriptions of trade volume mustanging strategies came from a third group involved in the horse trade, the Hispanic residents of Texas. In the first six years of Spain's tax on captured wild horses, Texas horse catchers paid up on 17,000 captured wild horses, a great many of which appear to have ended up east of the Mississippi river, carrying American farmers and merchants and supplying mounts for southeastern Indians like the Chickasaws and the Seminoles. As one San Antonio official put it, the number of mustangs in all these environs is so countless that if anyone were capable of taming them and caring for them, he could acquire a supply sufficient to furnish an army. But this multitude is causing us such grave damage that it is often necessary to shoot them. Catching wild horses in volume became a kind of wilderness art form, with its own material culture, its own internal turn terminology. It differed from trapping by aiming at live animal capture, although making that happen was more difficult than you'd think. We know all this because of a French scientist named Jean Louis Brlandier, who in the 1820s witnessed and described the process of volume wild horse capture. Once must. Sangers were among the herds and and stallion bands. The first step was understanding the landscape, to know how to sight what Berlandier called the corral. These are immense enclosures situated close to some pond, he wrote. They were built of planted posts with horizontals lashed to them with rawhide, and were large enough that once inside, a herd could be swept into a circling, milling country confusion. The entrance, Berlandier wrote, is placed in such a way that it forms a long corridor, one consisting of brush wings fanning out a half mile or more from the capture pen itself, and usually oriented towards the south, so that prevailing southwesterly winds would envelop an approaching herd in its own dust cloud, blinding it. To start the action, mustangers divided themselves into three groups, each with different roles. A group of well mounted riders, the adventadores, had the task of startling the herd into flight and pushing it towards the funnel leading to the pen. The herd would find itself squeezed into a flight path by a second group of mustangers, the puestos, who were the most skilled riders and whose role consists of conducting that dreadful mass of living beings by riding full gallop along the flanks and gathering there in the midst of suffocating dust, the partial herds, which sometimes unite at the sound of the terror of a large Herd Verlandier wrote at the moment of truth, as the wide eyed horses were sweeping at bright breakneck speed into the trap, a third group of mustangers, the Enceradores, were charged with closing the gate, sometimes dashing in to open it for an instant to allow stallions and older horses to escape. The scenes that followed had such an emotional load that Mescaneros had a specialized vocabulary. For them it was a jargon rife with the language of death. Some horses died from sentimento, or brokenheartedness over capture, others from despacio, nervous rage. Another term of art was adiondo stinking. It referred to a capture corral ruined for use from the effect of having been too often jammed by with panicked and dying animals. Berladier ended his story this way. When these animals find themselves enclosed, the first to enter fruitlessly search for exits, and those in the rear trample over the first. It is rare that in one of these chases a large part of the horses thus trapped do not kill one another in their efforts to escape. It has happened that the Mestonieros have trapped at one swoop more than 1,000 horses, of which not a fifth remained. What made these Southern Plains horse trade expeditions shadowy and Northern Plains fur activities well known was actually a simple difference. The horse trade featured live, not dead animals, so horses became their own transportation to markets. There was no need for corporate investment in freight wagons, steamboats or shipping. That also meant a meager historical trail in an economy for which so few day by day accounts exist. 1808, 1809 Trader Anthony Glass's journal, conveying a story I told in a prior podcast episode, provides one of the best looks at the otherwise little known Western horse trade. Glass's journal allows us to recreate a history in our heads where one had barely been imaginable before. It took a full decade after Spain and the US finally agreed on the Red and Arkansas rivers as the official boundary between the two North American powers. Before another American horse trader would leave us an account rivaling Glasses. In those years, scores, very likely hundreds, of unknown and undocumented American horse traders traversed the plains running wild horses, trading for animals from the Indians, and probably encouraging such a general theft of horses across the the west that one observer estimated that 10,000 were stolen from Spanish ranches almost every year. Murky accounts exist for a few of these traders. The osages plundered Alexander MacFarlane and John Lemons mustanging party in 1812, Auguste Pierre Chouteau, Jules de Monde and Joseph Philibert of St. Louis opened up a Significant horse trade with the Comanches and Rapahoes between 1815 and 1817. And Caphius Ham and David Burnett became modestly famous horse traders in the same years. As did Jacob Fowler, who left us a journal written in phonics along with Hugh Glenn. Then came Thomas James of St. Louis, whose book Three Years among the Indians and Mexicans left us a nicely close grained look at the mustangers west. James set a pattern to come. He was both a mountain man and a mustanger. He'd first gone west by ascending the Missouri to the Three Forks in 1809 and 1810. And he didn't make his first trip onto the southern plate until 1821. Riding out from Fort Smith in present Oklahoma before being confronted by Comanches under Spanish orders not to allow Americans to approach Santa Fe. Eyeing those splendid Comanche horse herds, Thomas James got a sense of the possibilities. Invited to trade for horses the next summer, James did so. The result was a three year expedition from 1822 to 1824 that was financed with $5,500 in goods. Ascending the Canadian River, James party of 23 finally met the Wichitas under their headman Elsarre and the trading commenced. James quickly bought 17 that he knew would fetch $100 apiece back in the settlements. Eventually the Wichita's introduced him to the Comanches. A band under big star. And James got a taste of a little twist. The Comanches put on horse trading. They were perfectly willing to trade their best horses since they had every intention of stealing them back. Despite the frustrations, the life of a western horse trader held a real allure. James was smitten. I began to be reconciled to a savage life and enamored with the simplicity of nature. Here there were no debts, no sheriffs, no marshals, no hypocrisy or false friendships. Once he had assembled a drove of 323 high quality animals, James departed for the settlements, but not before Alsire made a present of his own fine war horse Chicoba and urged James to return the next year to the headwaters of the Red where The Wichitas grazed 16,000 fine ponies. That would have been the horse trader's promise of the Golden Fleece. But James never returned. Pushing his herd eastward, he lost all, all but 71 to stampedes and what must have been a biblical attack of horseflies. More attrition followed as he penetrated the woodlands. If James can be believed. When he finally reached St. Louis for his troubles, he had just five horses left. That was precisely the number he had.
- [36:43]
Dan Flores
Started with three years earlier.
- [36:47]
Narrator
As the wild horse herds spread farther north and west, the trade expanded geographically and in volume. The markets evolved too. Overland. Immigrants plying the trails across the plains needed a constant supply of fresh horses. And during the war with Mexico in the late 1840s, the U.S. army of the west needed remounts for its cavalry. So between 1822 and 1850, the horse trade shifted to a new phase. In 1834, the trade and Intercourse act for the Indian country made horses a legal trade item in the West. The trading firm of Bent st. Vrain & Co. Got its license that same year and built Bent's Fort on the north side of the of the Arkansas river the next year. That trade took a leap forward in 1840 when the Cheyennes made peace with the Comanches and Kiowas. So much so that the horse and mule trade became the key to Bent's Fort's success. The Colorado traders benefited from wild caught and Indian horses from off the surrounding prairies. But they also reaped profits from the large number of horses that former mountain men seeking new animal resources with beaver now entirely trapped out, drove eastward from California. Mountain man old Bill Williams claimed that the greatest coup of his long career in the west was stealing 4,000 horses from California ranches and driving them to Bents Fork. Jim Beckwourth, long adopted into the Crow tribe, arrived at Pueblo in 1846 with a thousand horses from California, trading almost all of them to Stephen Carney's army of the West. Former beaver trappers Solomon Sublette and Joseph walker came with 10 drovers and 500 California horses. @ about the same time, with with the beaver gone and the buffalo slaughter not yet underway for western outdoorsmen, the horse trade was now pretty much the story. So the trade kept shifting ever northward because of the Oregon trail. By the 1850s, Fort Laramie had become the epicenter of the trade. But especially in the years after the Civil War, as the slaughter of bison took away the wild herds of competition for grass and water, wild horses underwent a population explosion on the northern plains, filling the red desert of Wyoming and the badlands of Montana and the Dakotas with wild bands. Like almost all the rest of the West's wild animals, except in the most parched deserts, the vast horse herds did not survive the long into the 20th century. Ranchers paid their cowboys to shoot wild horses on sight, then bait the carcasses with poison to kill wolves and coyotes. It was a strange kind of murder to shoot an animal exactly like the one you were riding, but it was Doubly efficient for ranchers who dreamed of a world without wild horses or wolves. Enough horses were still out there that during the Great war, World War I, Miles City furnished Allied buyers 32,000 of them. That helped the British and French hold off the Germans till the Yanks arrived. Then modernity hit, and with it a story that tied past and future. One of the markers of the modern world in the Roaring twenties was the remarkable growth in household pets. The wild horse trade finally acquired a corporate player when kennel ration, the first of the national pet food companies, began to put up plants in the Midwest. Some of the mustangers building capture corrals in the badlands of eastern Montana evidently were unaware that the horses they were selling to buyers in fancy suits at the railroad stations were going to pet food slaughterhouses. One of them, a young man named Frank Litz, learned the truth around a campfire one night. Whereupon Litz bought 150 sticks of dynamite and a train ticket to Illinois with the intent of performing eco terrorism on a dog food plant there. Guards caught him before he could set off his charges. But I like to imagine that a wild horse somewhere nickered when that story.
- [41:44]
Dan Flores
Circulated in the West.
- [42:00]
Tech Advertiser
Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient.
- [42:04]
Tech Advertiser Voice
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- [42:18]
Narrator
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- [42:19]
Tech Advertiser
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- [42:20]
Narrator
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Tech Advertiser Voice
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- [42:38]
Host 1
Hey, I'm not ashamed to tell you I'm a big dude wipes fan. I keep dude wipes in my backpack. I keep dude wipes at our fish shack. I keep dude wipes in my truck, garage, wherever the hell. I just keep them around. And also, you know, one of the reasons I got kids, man, when you got kids, you learn that you keep them around because little butts make big messes. When nature calls for your kid, answer with the pristine clean of little dude wipes. They're gentle enough for little cheeks and strong enough for toddler streaks. So they can be the first generation that never has to suffer the agony of dry toilet paper. The next time your kid goes number two, show them their number one with little dude wipes. Little dude wipes are wet, extra large flushable wipes, alcohol and chemical free. They're the same size as extra large dude wipes. Perfect for the big messes the little kids make. Kids are known to get a little stinky. Wipe away the funk with little dude wipes Bubblegum. The bubble gum scented flushable wipe free little stinker. Also available in fragrance free Little dude wipes are made with 100 plant based natural fibers so you can keep the planet healthy for your little dude. Available exclusively at Walmart nationwide. And remember, check out the bubble gum. You'll get a kick out of it.
- [43:52]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [44:17]
Narrator
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Host 2
Dan when we talk about wildlife in North America, a lot of the debates fall around what animals belong where and what animals should be where.
- [44:38]
Host 1
That's how I speak of them.
- [44:39]
Host 2
Yeah, I mean, well, I think just generally speaking, you're talking about wolves in the west, you're talking about invasive species, you're talking, you know, like what animals should properly be in a certain place. And, and obviously that depends on your chronological framework. Right. And so here I think horses are one of these species that when people look at them on the landscape today, they say these things shouldn't be there, they don't belong. But you obviously take a different approach to that.
- [45:08]
Dan Flores
Yeah, I take the, the deep time approach. And so, you know, what one has to. So to be sure, old world horses brought here by Spaniards, the Brits, the French, they had gone through several thousand four to six thousand years of domestication and alterations in their confirmation and, and so forth and size and everything. So they had certainly been bred to some different, you know, confirmations than classic old American horses. But the horse is one of those animals like the wolf, like the camel actually, which is another one that causes people to scratch their heads. The are animals that evolved in North America, you know, after the Chicxulub impact took out the dinosaurs and evolution sort of started again and began producing the age of mammals. Horses were one of the creatures that evolved in North America. And so because I like to think in, in big picture terms, it seems to me hard to justify an argument completely that the horse doesn't have some place on American soil since it's been here for 56, 57 million years, then was only absent for about 8,000 or so years before Old Worlders returned horses to North America. And you know, as I argued in.
- [46:49]
Narrator
That podcast, that's this is one of.
- [46:51]
Dan Flores
The reasons why horses did so well when they got here. I mean, they were completely pre adapted. Their teeth, their hooves, their speed, everything about their behavior had all been shaped by North America. And so they get back here. And one of the reasons I make a point about that is because there are places where Europeans tried to introduce horses, like South Africa.
- [47:14]
Narrator
And they had a very difficult time.
- [47:16]
Dan Flores
Getting horses to actually survive in any numbers in South Africa. But in North America, man, as soon as they got loose, they were instantly sort of, you know, out there replicating the Pleistocene. But what I think is, you know, been an issue for most people in thinking about that is that we all know historically that horses in the last 400 years came from Europe to North America or one of the species that was brought here and were new then. And so that's how our perception of history is often a fairly short one. And so that's how we think of the story of the horse. It's something that came from Europe and ended up in America a few hundred years ago. And of course, now we, as we all know, wild horses in the west especially, have produced some almost impossibly difficult issues for the BLM in particular, where most wild horses are. And I mean, I always try to make the point when people bring that up as well. The problem with the introduction, the reintroduction, the recovery of horses in North America is that we didn't at the same time bring all of their Pleistocene predators over with them. Just the horse made it. Nobody had tried to domesticate the saber tooth cat. And so we didn't bring any of their predators along to America with them. And that's been the difficulty, but especially in an America where we've suppressed or eliminated the populations of predators. As you've got an animal out there that once had big predators and they're not there anymore.
- [48:58]
Host 1
But I mean, you have to realize that you're laying a lot of traps for yourself because, because horses were here, okay? And then since someone brought horses back, it's okay to view them as having like, continuity, that they're sort of, you know, they're a native animal with an asterisk. But would you Take it so far as to advocate on bringing camels back, or does it need to be that they came back 400 years ago, not today?
- [49:33]
Dan Flores
Well, you know, we did try to bring camels back.
- [49:35]
Host 1
That's right. And it didn't work out.
- [49:37]
Dan Flores
No, it didn't work. But we did make an effort to return camels. I mean, and not because Americans in the 1850s understood that camels were an evolutionary North American species, but.
- [49:53]
Host 1
And it wasn't on the Spanish mind when they brought horses.
- [49:55]
Dan Flores
It wasn't on their mind either. I mean, we haven't known this, in fact, for more than about half a century. So this is something that's relatively new in our consciousness, which is, I think, one of the reasons why acceptance of the idea has kind of lagged. I mean, I'm kind of intrigued by the story of camels. I've never really read deeply into it, but, you know, I know that camels were used, for example, in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, in the desert country. And they did reasonably well. I mean, they were domesticated camels.
- [50:33]
Narrator
They never went wild.
- [50:35]
Dan Flores
But when a few of them got abandoned, there were so few of them. I don't think camels have the same reproductive turnover that horses do. There were so few of them that the ones that were left, basically, when people saw them, they shot them. Indians, native people, arrowed them. When they saw.
- [50:52]
Host 1
Well, it was at that time.
- [50:53]
Narrator
Yeah, yeah, it was the 1850s and.
- [50:56]
Dan Flores
1860S, and there were still some camels in the west as late as the 1880s. So that period in the. Okay, yeah, the Civil War, before and after the Civil War, there were actually camels in the West. But now that particular attempt, that didn't take the way the horse thing did. Yeah.
- [51:16]
Host 1
What was the horse trader, Nolan, what was his first name?
- [51:19]
Dan Flores
Philip.
- [51:22]
Host 1
You mentioned Philip. You. I'm sure, in the interest of time, you mentioned Philip Nolan, that someone said he had eccentricities.
- [51:33]
Dan Flores
Many and.
- [51:34]
Host 2
Great, many great.
- [51:36]
Host 1
So if I today was talking about someone and I said, you know, Randall, he's got certain eccentricities, he's going to get an image in his mind, you know, like, not exactly, but he's going to sort of catch me my drift, you know, what were they?
- [51:54]
Dan Flores
Well, the guy who said that was William Dunbar. He was a scientist in Natchez, Mississippi, who knew Nolan, and he never elaborated. And I don't think that was. That was in a letter to Thomas Jefferson who was asking about this guy.
- [52:07]
Host 1
So I couldn't tell is he like a sexual deviant or like what like. Or is just behavioral or what.
- [52:14]
Dan Flores
I don't know exactly what he was referring to, but Nolan was. He was one of those kind of people who. He dominated a room everywhere, pretty clearly everywhere he went, you know, And I don't know that this exactly happened, but I suspect it may have happened. Philip Nolan evidently was the kind of guy who, being introduced in a Comanche camp for the first time, would pick out the biggest, meanest looking dude and walk up to him and shove him. And so he exhibited that kind of cocksure confidence that I think enabled him to do a lot of the things that he did. And I suspect that Dunbar was. Who was. You know, he's a cultured guy out of Edward Scotland and highly educated. He was a very well known scientist at the time. I suspect he thought Nolan was. I mean, because he says something like he lacked a sufficient education.
- [53:28]
Narrator
But he did have principles of honor tied to.
- [53:34]
Dan Flores
A tremendous amount of personal courage.
- [53:37]
Narrator
And so I think he was the kind of guy who was in a different class than.
- [53:40]
Dan Flores
Than Dunbar was. He was somebody who Dunbar probably didn't entirely understand, but Nolan did. He did cut a large figure in that part of the world.
- [53:54]
Narrator
A lot of people knew who he was.
- [53:56]
Dan Flores
He never married, but he very clearly had a girlfriend in every port. He had girlfriends in Natchez and Natchitoch in Arkansas, and probably in every Indian encampment that he went to. And one of the kind of intriguing things about his death was he probably wouldn't have been killed in that Spanish attack on these mustangers in 1801 when he died, because the accounts of it.
- [54:29]
Narrator
Say that a stray ricochet bullet caught.
- [54:35]
Dan Flores
Him in the forehead. Oh. And so it wasn't even that he was actually successfully targeted.
- [54:43]
Narrator
It's just that he got taken out.
- [54:45]
Dan Flores
By a kind of a, you know, one in a hundred chance where a bullet, a stray bullet, hits him in the head and kills him.
- [54:52]
Host 1
Has he been treated fictionally in film? Have you seen.
- [54:56]
Dan Flores
Well, there is. I'm trying to remember who wrote this book, the Man Without a Country, it was called. And the protagonist in that book was a guy named Philip Nolan. But there's always been some suspicion about whether he was based. This character was based on Philip Nolan, the real Philip Nolan, or just on some invented character. But there is a book with a guy named Philip Nolan as the main character called Man Without a Country. But no, no one has really.
- [55:26]
Narrator
He's.
- [55:27]
Dan Flores
He's a. To me, a pretty ripe character for doing that, because, I mean, here's one of the things I've always been stunned by this guy's only 20 years old when he first goes to the West. And this is almost 20 years before Lewis and Clark. Yeah, I mean, this is long before Thomas Jefferson ever sends out his expeditions. Here is this single guy. He probably occasionally would go with companions. I know he had a. The guy that he was about to take to Monticello to take that, that paint stallion to Jefferson was a fairly well known figure on the southwestern frontier. A guy named Joseph Talpin, who knew a lot of the languages and usually went along with some of these traders. So I think he, Nolan probably went with somebody like that on some of these trips. But I mean, holy cow.
- [56:21]
Narrator
Taking off at the age of 20.
- [56:23]
Dan Flores
And on, on that particular trip, that first trip, there's every evidence that he got as far as New Mexico. Yeah.
- [56:29]
Host 1
And no, just incredibly ballsy, man, I'm telling you.
- [56:32]
Dan Flores
You know, just taking out. And he knew good and well that the Spaniards regarded this as their territory.
- [56:40]
Narrator
So if they catch him, you know.
- [56:42]
Dan Flores
The results are not going to be good. But nonetheless, and he, he manages to somehow ingratiate himself with all sorts of Native people while he's doing it.
- [56:55]
Host 2
One thing that caught my eye in this episode is a parallel with the buffalo robe trade in that, you know, like when, when people went up to try to encourage tribes to catch beaver, there's an account of a Mandan chief telling someone from the Hudson's Bay Company if we could catch them on horseback in a real hunt, that sounds fine, but we're not about to do this crawling around in the bowels of the earth thing. And both of these you highlight with the horse trade, like the buffalo rope trade, it's based on a pre existing native economy. And so the transition from indigenous economies to this global market economy sort of happens seamlessly, whereas it's more fitful with the, with the beaver trade. And I just wonder if you can sort of elaborate on that pattern that we see again and again.
- [57:53]
Dan Flores
Yeah, it's. The horse trade was very definitely based on an earlier form of trade exchange between native people. And you know, and there's some wonderful stories I didn't, I didn't tell them in this episode, but there's some wonderful stories about, about native people first encountering someone approaching them on horseback or with horses to trade to them. And those, those encounters are mostly farther north among groups like the Blackfeet and the Assiniboine, who are pretty far removed from where horses are first running wild in the west, which is down in the southern West. But they kind of, you know, they.
- [58:36]
Narrator
They look at the animals and they.
- [58:37]
Dan Flores
Don'T exactly know how to react to them. They, you know, there's an account of the. Of some Blackfeet leader offering the first horse he ever sees some buffalo meat. Yeah. And, you know, the horse, of course, shies and throws its head, and he has to be told, that's not what these animals eat. They're more like. They're like elk. And that's the best. Usually when a. A Native person who's trading horses and taking them to a tribe for the first time does. So that's the. The way he does it. But he uses the elk as the. As the example. So it requires the culture, too.
- [59:18]
Narrator
It's not just the animal.
- [59:19]
Dan Flores
You have to take the culture along with it. You have to show people what it.
- [59:24]
Narrator
What the animal eats, how you care for it, how you hobble it to.
- [59:28]
Dan Flores
Keep it close by and not running off, how you write it, how you do all these aspects of, of the equine arts that all has to be be taught. But it does fit pretty seamlessly into an existing mode of exchange between Native people, and it does transform some of those modes. As I mentioned in the podcast, you know, the reason we think there's a division between Northern Cheyennes and Southern Cheyennes, Northern Cheyennes are today in Montana, Southern Cheyennes and Western Oklahoma is I wanted.
- [60:05]
Host 1
To ask you about this.
- [60:05]
Dan Flores
Yeah. The Southern Cheyennes managed to find themselves or went far enough south to get into the horse country, and they stayed. They were drawn, like the Comanches and the Kiowas, to that part of the world where horses were first available, either wild or easily stolen from Spanish settlements. And so that became, you know, the inducement for a segment of the Cheyennes to go south and remain and not return to the north where the larger body of their tribe was. But, I mean, there are all kinds of wonderful stories. I was just a reader on a article in the journal Science about two years ago about some archaeological excavations in Colorado where radiocarbon dating indicates. And these were horse bones, and radiocarbon dating was indicating a time frame between about 1620 and 1670, which is before the Pueblo Revolt, which we've long used as the. The moment when horses really are spread across the West. And it's one of the reasons I. I said in the podcast and I told the people who are working on this article, I mean, there are accounts in the Spanish documents that what they were doing when Spain settled in New Mexico, they brought their horse herds with them, of course, and, and sheep and goats and cattle and what they often did was to train young Pueblo men to be the herders of these various domestic animals. And some of those. There are accounts that some of these young Pueblo horse guys who are herding horses would also learn how to ride and would mount up and take off into a west where no native people had ever really ridden before. And they clearly, some of them, by 1650 or so, managed to get up into. Into Colorado, which seems to be the explanation for that site. But yeah, it's, It's a revolutionary.
- [62:17]
Narrator
The advent of a revolutionary animal that's.
- [62:20]
Dan Flores
Not been present in North America for 8,000 years. And it sort of transforms the native world and their trade possibilities. And it becomes, particularly on the southern half of the west, the kind of counterpart for the. To the fur trade up north.
- [62:38]
Host 1
I feel like tastes and horses must have changed a lot because these guys, Nolan and others that are catching horses, they're catching horses to just directly supply people's horse needs. Yeah, I remember I had a much older. Have a much older half brother, and he'd always been out in Colorado as a game warden and a guide. And I remember being. When I was 10 years old, I went out and hung out with him. We were driving around somewhere, and there's a bunch of wild horses. And I remember him saying to me, I asked because he had horses, and I asked him about those horses, and I remember him saying, they're all knot heads. And I kept looking at. I remember this so clearly. I kept looking at him, trying to understand what that meant, what he meant by not like a knot head. Then I realized he's saying, you know, they're these, they're all idiots.
- [63:27]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [63:28]
Host 1
Or whatever.
- [63:29]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [63:29]
Host 1
So is it that people have just gotten, I'm anything. I'm anything but a horseman. Is it people that have just changed their tastes for other breeds? Because now these wild, these feral horses, wild horses, whatever you want to call them, depending on your. How you view the issue, they're not like extraordinary. Extremely popular as riding horses, right?
- [63:51]
Dan Flores
No, they're not. I mean, you know, and they've, They've been wild, and so they're difficult. You know, horses are not particularly easy to train to ride anyway.
- [64:03]
Narrator
I mean, I have had horses.
- [64:04]
Dan Flores
I had horses for many years. I, I, I had a horse when I was living in Texas and I took him to Montana. It was a paint horse that I got in North Dakota. He was supposed to have been a horse that sitting bulls people had taken to Canada. And then when they came back to the States, they brought the ancestors of this horse back that probably. That probably just cost me an extra hundred dollars for the horse.
- [64:31]
Host 1
Like an.
- [64:31]
Dan Flores
I'll tell you what else. Yeah, it was a good story. Special horse, Special horse. But this horse I got as a.
- [64:37]
Narrator
Five month old cult.
- [64:39]
Dan Flores
And by the time he was about a year and a half old, I was. I was first putting blankets on his.
- [64:44]
Narrator
Back, and then I put a buffalo robe on his back.
- [64:47]
Dan Flores
And then I started leaning over him and finally sliding over him. And after doing that a few times, I swung my leg over him and he never bucked. One time we just. And then I. For a long time, I didn't put.
- [65:03]
Narrator
A bridle in his mouth.
- [65:04]
Dan Flores
I just wrote him with a hackamore, which of course is a leather band across his nose. And so I wrote him pretty much.
- [65:11]
Narrator
In the way bareback and with a.
- [65:13]
Dan Flores
Hackamore pretty much in the way a lot of native people would have ridden their horses. And he was quite. He certainly was, you know, a knucklehead later in his life. But when he was. Till the time he was about five years old, he was a really good horse. And then I moved off to Montana and I had to leave him in Texas for about three years before I could create a situation to bring him up. And I had turned him loose in a pasture with a bunch of other horses and he learned a bunch of bad habits and I was never able. So I ended up getting other horses after that that were better than he was. But I did have that experience, which was a very interesting kind of a replication maybe of how native people would have done it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And it was not really very difficult at all. He was really. He was really pretty easy to.
- [66:06]
Narrator
Wasn't really breaking him, it was just.
- [66:08]
Dan Flores
Finally getting on him and riding him, you know, and he was pretty easy to do that with. But it's, you know, one of the things I didn't include, and I didn't include a lot of things that I know about this because I've written about it in other places. But in the episode, I didn't talk about things that are fairly, I suppose you could say explanatory in terms like that, because, for example, in that Berlandier story about how Hispanic mustangers in Texas would catch those horses and how you would lose sometimes 80% of them in the process of corralling them and catching them because they would trample over one another and then they would die of, as the terms went, of brokenheartedness over capture or nervous rage over capture. The other thing he said that I Didn't include. He said that these Hispanic mestaneros in Texas could render those horses, the ones that survived. They could render them green broke in less than an hour.
- [67:21]
Narrator
Really? They could get them out of those corrals.
- [67:24]
Host 1
No kidding.
- [67:25]
Dan Flores
And within an hour, they would have them green broke. And that's what happened with a lot of the horses that those mustangers in the 20th century up in the Montana badlands, they were catching wild horses and selling them to the buyers for the allies to use them in World War I. And they were just spending an hour or so green breaking them. And so I've always had, because I've had horses and experience what horses can.
- [67:55]
Narrator
Be like, I've always had the idea.
- [67:56]
Dan Flores
That, oh, my God, they took those horses over to France and let Brit soldiers who didn't know anything about riding horses get on them.
- [68:07]
Narrator
I mean, what a frigging rodeo that would have been with animals that, you know, were actually wild mustangs. I mean, it would have been a crazy thing.
- [68:17]
Dan Flores
No doubt. Some. Someone must have written a, you know, a journal entry or something about it. Yeah.
- [68:22]
Host 1
Well, thanks, Dan.
- [68:23]
Host 2
I appreciate it.
- [68:24]
Dan Flores
Oh, you bet.
- [68:41]
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Ryan Seacrest
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