Ep. 699: The American West with Dan Flores

Summary

Summary of The MeatEater Podcast – Ep. 699: The American West with Dan Flores

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Introduction

In Episode 699 of The MeatEater Podcast, host Steven Rinella welcomes esteemed historian and New York Times bestselling author Dan Flores to delve deep into the intricate history of the American West. Building upon Rinella's passion for the outdoors, the discussion intertwines themes of hunting, environmental history, conservation, and the profound relationship between humans and nature.

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Pigeon Catching Controversy in New York

The episode kicks off with a surprising discussion about the pigeon catching controversy in Brooklyn. Corey Jacobsen highlights the economic aspect of pigeon catching, explaining how pigeons are sold to dog trainers for a price increase from $7 to $8 per pigeon, equating to a 12.5% rise ([06:16]).

Dan Flores adds context, mentioning the historical presence of pigeons introduced by the French in the late 1500s and their establishment in urban environments: “Pigeons being a non-native bird. But pigeons have been there... since around the late 1500s” ([08:02]).

The conversation underscores the ethical and ecological implications of such practices, emphasizing the disturbance caused to local pigeon enthusiasts and the broader environmental impact.

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Hunting Desert Bighorn Sheep vs. Audad

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to the controversial hunt of Desert Bighorn Sheep and the impact of Audad (Barbary sheep) in Texas. Randall discusses how the increasing popularity of Audad hunting poses a threat to native bighorn sheep populations: “As this gains popularity, land managers, landowners will become incentivized to host Audad on their properties. And he feels that this could lead to a net loss in suitable bighorn habitat” ([16:35]).

Dan Flores elaborates on the difficulty of managing Audad populations without the presence of their natural predators, highlighting the ecological imbalance: “The primary problem... is we don't have big hunting hyenas and American cheetahs and all these cats, particularly, that preyed on horse foals” ([41:12]).

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Conservation Efforts and Research at UTEP's Indio Research Station

Randall and Jordan Siller recount their hunting expedition hosted by Dr. Phil Lavretsky at UTEP's Indio Research Station in West Texas. They emphasize the conservation efforts aimed at controlling Audad populations to benefit Desert Bighorn Sheep: “They hunt two days and we did our best to help the conservation aspect and tried just shooting to use was our main objective” ([19:11]).

The team discusses the genetic research being conducted to understand the different strains of Audad introduced to Texas and the potential for hybridization: “They were surveying strains to see... they were trying to figure out if they could be hybrid strains” ([37:02]).

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Rewriting Western History: The Role of Animals

Dan Flores shifts the conversation to his approach in redefining Western history by incorporating environmental elements and the roles of animals. He argues that understanding the long-term relationships between humans and wildlife provides a more comprehensive view of history: “Taking the animals seriously has probably been a step towards just revising the whole story of the West” ([80:35]).

Flores highlights the transformative impact of species like beavers on North American ecology, asserting that their removal led to significant environmental changes: “Beaver ecology totally transformed the continent. They made it a much more humid and wetter place” ([81:20]).

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Personal Insights and the Evolution of Human-Nature Relationships

Throughout the episode, Dan Flores shares personal anecdotes that shaped his interest in environmental history. From his family's deep roots in Louisiana to his childhood fascination with the Western landscapes, Flores illustrates how personal history intertwines with broader historical narratives: “I grew up hunting... but I was also fascinated with the West because of my family's stories” ([63:02]).

He discusses the importance of understanding ancient human cultures and their interactions with the environment, emphasizing that history is not merely a sequence of events but a tapestry woven from diverse human experiences: “When you start using archaeology and paleontology, the past starts getting deeper and deeper” ([77:00]).

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Lewis and Clark's Lesser-Known Expedition

A particularly intriguing segment explores the often-overlooked Freeman and Custis Expedition of 1806, Jefferson's second attempt to explore the West via the Red River. Dan Flores provides a detailed account of how mischarted rivers led to the expedition's premature end due to encounters with Spanish forces: “Jefferson set about preparing an expedition to go into the southern parts of the Louisiana Purchase... and they had to turn back” ([45:08]).

Flores explains the geopolitical tensions of the era and how this expedition was intentionally sidelined in historical memory to celebrate only the successful Lewis and Clark journey: “That's why you've never heard of it... Jefferson was willing to just sort of sweep it under the rug” ([55:43]).

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Human History and the American West

In the latter part of the episode, Dan Flores delves into the deep history of human habitation in North America, challenging the simplistic narratives often portrayed in mainstream history. He emphasizes that the American West has been shaped by human activity for over 23,000 years, contrasting this with the recent European exploration: “The story of America is that right now we think at least 23,000 years old” ([62:05]).

Flores argues for a more nuanced understanding of Native American contributions and their sophisticated relationships with the environment, advocating for a history that recognizes the complexity and longevity of indigenous cultures: “The orthodoxy has been trying to run their own stories about their own cultures away” ([105:30]).

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with Steven Rinella highlighting upcoming episodes of Dan Flores' podcast, "The American West with Dan Flores," which promises to delve further into the untold stories and deep history of the Western United States. Rinella encapsulates the essence of the discussion by emphasizing the importance of reshaping historical narratives to include environmental and indigenous perspectives.

Dan Flores leaves listeners with a compelling invitation to rethink their understanding of the American West, encouraging a deeper appreciation of its rich and multifaceted history.

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Notable Quotes

• Steve Rinella: “Audad DNA doc also turkey DNA doc” ([06:07])
• Randall: “No, they're not east of here” ([03:19])
• Dan Flores: “Taking the animals seriously has probably been a step towards just revising the whole story of the West” ([81:20])
• Dan Flores: “The story of America is that right now we think at least 23,000 years old” ([62:05])

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Looking Ahead

Listeners are encouraged to subscribe to Dan Flores' new podcast, "The American West with Dan Flores," available on all major podcast platforms. The series promises to offer a fresh perspective on Western history, exploring themes from ancient human cultures to modern conservation efforts.

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This summary provides an in-depth overview of Episode 699, capturing the essence of the discussions between Steven Rinella and Dan Flores. By weaving together historical insights with contemporary conservation issues, the episode invites listeners to engage with the American West's rich and often overlooked legacy.

Transcript

[Steve Rinella]

I've been running FHF bino harnesses for over a decade, and for the last couple years, it has been the FOB because it's quiet, it's tough, and it just plain works. And it's easy to work. I've worn it in damn near every environment you can think of. Desert, mountains, snow, heat. And it has never let me down. Now they've made it even better. They got new colors, more modularity, and like everything FHF makes, it's built right here in the usa. This is gear you can count on season after season. Pick up yours now@fhf gear.com this is the Me Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt.

[Dan Flores]

The Meat Eater podcast.

[Steve Rinella]

You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast ass is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light.com f I r s t l I t.com before we start today's show, we'd like to touch on Dr. Randall's hair a little bit.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Yes.

[Steve Rinella]

You got screwed at the barber.

[Corey Jacobsen]

I don't want to say screwed, but there was a miscommunication. I was going for a more minimalist touch up and we ended up.

[Steve Rinella]

You wanted to keep your length in the back.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Yeah, I wanted to keep my length in the back. And I was. I was. I'd sort of made peace with it. And then Seth showed me the other day a photo from when we were out doing the Sig shoot, and I saw that flow and I.

[Steve Rinella]

Just. Blowing in the wind.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Corey Jacobsen]

I missed it so badly.

[Steve Rinella]

The reason I wanted you to talk about that, because Corey just had an interesting observation that there's a river you like to fish, and you say that the river never fishes good two days in a row.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

So if you have a great day, you know not to go back.

[Randall]

Yeah. You better pick another stream for sure.

[Steve Rinella]

Because it can't fish two days in a row.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And he's proposing that if you get a great haircut somewhere, don't go back because it's gonna not be good.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Because what are the odds lightning's not gonna strike twice?

[Randall]

Never in the same spot.

[Steve Rinella]

Halibut fishing, it goes in weeks, week on, week off. So if you're like. If people are up fishing at our fish shack and you call up the last thing you want to hear, because if you're going up, like let's say they're up there last week of July, you're going first week of August. What you want? You think you want hot reports. You don't. No. You want horrible reports.

[Corey Jacobsen]

You make that phone call wanting some bitching and moaning.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Because they're like, oh, my God, it's on fire. You're like, I'm not even gonna go now. Yeah. Because it's gonna be. It'll die. It'll be the dead. I'll be there for the dead week. You want it to be that no one's catching nothing, then you're gonna go up and have a phenomenal time. Yeah.

[Randall]

No, that's the same with this little riffle that I'm speaking of. Just east of here.

[Steve Rinella]

You just winked at me. Does that mean it's not east of here?

[Randall]

No.

[Steve Rinella]

We're joined today by the esteemed professor, former professor of American history, current author of all kinds of books. New York Times best selling author Dan Flores has been on the show a handful of times in the past. I'll just come flat out and say it. He's my most. He's my favorite historian and one of America's most celebrated historians. 11 books if you listen to Rogan's podcast. Dan's been on Rogan's podcast a couple times, talking about his book as well. Started his career as. Not started. You were a writer, but also a teacher.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, I. I basically started as a freelance magazine writer before I went off and, you know, did the strange thing of getting a PhD.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. I mean, me and Randall can relate.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. And becoming an academic, so. Yeah, you guys can relate. Randall can relate. I know.

[Steve Rinella]

Not only that, but I took. When I was in graduate school, I took a class with Professor Flores and Randall took presumably many classes.

[Corey Jacobsen]

A handful.

[Steve Rinella]

A handful of classes. And now Dan is doing a. Where Dan is doing a podcast on our podcast network called the American west with Dan Flores. And we're going to talk about some of the themes that will emerge in that podcast as he tells a. I would say an unconventional telling.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Of the American West. How? How. Don't get into enormous detail, but how would you describe your approach? Because you were an environmental historian.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, that's right. I trained to be an environmental historian. And for people who don't know what that is, it's basically somebody who studies and writes about and taught classes too, about the relationship between people and nature. So that's a pretty big topic, you know, allows for a lot of things and what. It doesn't do much because I also Taught the American West. It doesn't do much of the standard American west stuff. You know, I mean, I never did really talk much about mining strikes and the Overland trail migrations and Indian wars and gunfights and all that. I was interested in stuff that pertained to the kind of environmental relationship between people and the natural world in the west and in the country. And so that's really what this podcast boils down to.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Fewer okay corrals and more wildlife.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, that's exactly it.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Speaking of wildlife, pigeon catching controversy.

[Jordan Siller]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

In New York. And this makes sense to me, the price. Like, my boy sells pigeons to dog trainers.

[Jordan Siller]

Oh, now he's. Now he's on to selling them.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, he's. He makes good money selling pigeons.

[Jordan Siller]

Oh, yeah. No, I didn't know that.

[Steve Rinella]

I thought, well, this year he just did a. If you go from $7 to $8, what percent increase is that?

[Corey Jacobsen]

That's a tough one to figure out.

[Steve Rinella]

I told him, say tariffs did it, man.

[Jordan Siller]

Wait, how.

[Dan Flores]

12 and a half percent.

[Jordan Siller]

How much does he. Is that how much?

[Dan Flores]

I think that's right. Yeah.

[Jordan Siller]

Wait, is that how much he sells them for?

[Steve Rinella]

He just was. He just. He just. He had a new client and. And he was saying what? Because last year he was getting seven a piece and he had a new client. He just threw out eight. Not a blank. Take as many as I can get. So. Point being, it doesn't surprise me now what he what? So he gets pigeons out of grain silos.

[Jordan Siller]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

Because guys are storing grain. The last thing you want is pigeons in the grain. You know, you don't want them in the grain. So he gets them out of grain silos and whatnot, out of barns. And people use them for dog training.

[Jordan Siller]

Oh, I didn't. I thought he got paid to capture them. I didn't realize that he was turning them around.

[Steve Rinella]

He would pay to get them.

[Jordan Siller]

Okay, Right.

[Steve Rinella]

But I'm saying picture now that a pigeon is worth that amount of money.

[Jordan Siller]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay. Some guy has thought to himself, apparently. Well, now where are there a lot of pigeons? And he has noted that in Brooklyn, there's a lot of pigeons. And some guys are taking some industrial pigeon catching strategies to these parks in Brooklyn, which is really causing a lot of distress for local pigeon lovers. It's a little bit weird because I think that. I don't know if New York does, but there's a thing called Avatrol. There's a. There's a poison that municipalities will use on pigeons. It's kind of like a un you know, so I think that for them to see a guy jump out and net a bunch is probably like definitely disturbing. But I mean, if you looked at the darker side, there's like a darker side to pigeon removal that they're probably not aware of. Pigeons being a non native bird. But pigeons have been there. I mean, the French delivered introduced pigeons along the St. Lawrence, I think the late 1500s. I mean, there's been pigeons on the ground street pigeons. It's Linnaean name. If you see a pigeon flying around town, it's Linnaean name is Columba Livia, I believe is what it is. And people are worked up because guys are catching these things and they're probably get like the guests are selling them into the pigeon market. Some guy cleared 150 out of a park, Bushwick.

[Jordan Siller]

I. I thought this was going the direction of roller pigeons, which is why I paid attention. Jordan. Jordan Siller sent me this.

[Steve Rinella]

This is a dude selling. This is a dude selling pigeons for some purpose. I used to, on occasion when I lived in Brooklyn and I would go down and I would just nab them and put them in my pockets and we, I'm not kidding you, we would grab them and we'd make pates with them. Me and my chef buddy and I just put them right in my pockets. We got all kinds of videos of it.

[Jordan Siller]

Oh my gosh. We need to put this together. This is a new episode. Well, what, what's the hand grabbing Pigeons.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. You just put a little bit of viral Steve and you just put them. And I'd always want to leave the scene with them alive. So we just put them in our pockets and make little patties with them.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Your pockets all bouncing garment is best.

[Steve Rinella]

For any kind of coat. Like a down puffy type coat and put them in your pockets.

[Randall]

But kangaroo pouch.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. The thing to keep in mind thinking on here, if any person, like if you went to any. I shouldn't say any. If you went to most wildlife managers and you asked them if you could wave a magic wand and it would make street pigeons disappear, they would wave the wand, you know. But then you get into like different things. Like I used to go to even farmers and ranchers that like would hate wild pigs. But you'd say, if I could wave a magic wand and a wild pig would never ever, ever again walk on your property, would you want me to wave it? And they'd think go, no, I just don't want as many. You know. So that's going on there. You can get stung Though, if you're the guy doing this. If you're listening.

[Jordan Siller]

On to you.

[Steve Rinella]

If you're listening, they are fixing to. They're fixing to get you under animal cruelty.

[Randall]

So they haven't caught this person yet.

[Steve Rinella]

Huh.

[Randall]

Wonder how deep they're diving.

[Steve Rinella]

But if he's getting. Let's say he's getting New York prices.

[Jordan Siller]

I feel like. Wouldn't that be. Oh, okay.

[Steve Rinella]

Let's say he's getting 10 bucks per.

[Jordan Siller]

Does that mean Jimmy gets to.

[Steve Rinella]

No, I'm just saying he's making, like.

[Jordan Siller]

You know, making money.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, he's like the last of the old New York market hunters. There's a thing I found out about. Buddy of mine told me about it. Have you ever heard. Randall, did I ask you about this?

[Jordan Siller]

We were. We, like, started talking about it the other day, but we didn't go into it.

[Steve Rinella]

The International Order of Saint Hubertus.

[Corey Jacobsen]

That's how I'd pronounce it. Not a expert, though.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I don't know how. This was never on my radar. You know why you don't know about it? Same reason I don't know about it.

[Corey Jacobsen]

I'm not a member.

[Steve Rinella]

You have to be asked to join. The International Order of Saint Hubertus is a true nightly order. I mean, you can look at their website. They even do that thing where, like, you'll have the first letter of a paragraph and you put it in a red box, like, once upon a time.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Oh, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Like the ol. That's when you know it's legit.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

You know what I'm saying?

[Corey Jacobsen]

There's got to be a technical term for that.

[Dan Flores]

No doubt.

[Steve Rinella]

The International Order of Saint Hubertus is a true knightly order. In the historical tradition, the order is under the royal protection of his Majesty King Juan Carlos of Spain, the Grand Master Emeritus in his Imperial and Royal Highness Archduke Andreas Salvatore von Hodsberg. Loving grin of Austria.

[Corey Jacobsen]

It's a lot of syllables.

[Steve Rinella]

And our current grandmaster is His Imperial and Royal Highness Istivan von Habsburg Lothringen, Archduke of Austria, Prince of Hungary. The International Order of Saint Hubertus is comprised of an international group of individuals. Orden's bro. Who are passionate about the sports of hunting and fishing and who are vitally interested and actively involved in the preservation of wildlife, its habitat. In the tradition of ethical hunting and fishing, they got members who are dedicated to upland bird hunting, duck hunting, and hunters of, quote, larger and big game. Never been asked. If Randall gets asked to be in this and I don't, I'm gonna be pissed.

[Corey Jacobsen]

No, I was just Thinking we should start our own secret order.

[Steve Rinella]

Here's what they stand for.

[Randall]

That's okay.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Instead of skull and bones, we'll just go with skulls and skulls.

[Steve Rinella]

Here's what they stand for. To promote sportsmanlike conduct in hunting and fishing. To foster good fellowship among sportsmen from all over the world. To teach and preserve sound traditional hunting and fishing customs. To encourage wildlife conservation and to help protect endangered species from extinction. To promote the concept of hunting and fishing as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. To endeavor to ensure that the economic benefits derived from sports, hunting and fishing support the regions where these activities are carried out. And to strive to enhance respect for responsible hunters and fishermen. If I get into that, I'm. You know, I don't have any tattoos. I'm getting that crap. It's got a crest.

[Randall]

Where's it going? On your lower back?

[Steve Rinella]

No, right here.

[Randall]

Oh, that's where it has to go.

[Steve Rinella]

Put the first one. Yeah. Not like Spencer, who ran out of places to put him.

[Corey Jacobsen]

He said with no small amount of judgment.

[Steve Rinella]

Before we get into Dan, can you guys tell us about your audit hunt? But can I start by telling about how controversial it is?

[Randall]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Are you familiar with the controversy?

[Randall]

Well, is it similar to asking folks if they want to get rid of pigs and if you. That most of them would say no because they're, you know, they turn quite a profit?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. So people like you guys. People like you guys getting all excited, flying all around the country to hunt. Our dad are killing bighorns?

[Jordan Siller]

Not exactly.

[Randall]

I think there'll be a wrinkle in that story. Let that sink in.

[Steve Rinella]

You hate bighorn sheep.

[Jordan Siller]

Thanks for putting us in a box, Steve.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay. Tell us about your trip.

[Randall]

Yeah, I don't think that's true.

[Steve Rinella]

No, no, no, I'm joking.

[Jordan Siller]

Wanna. Wanna start?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. Paraphrasing Heffelfinger.

[Jordan Siller]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. We're. We're definitely gonna address that because that's part of the. That's part of the conservation story.

[Steve Rinella]

I'll just cut right. I'm being too. I'm being. I'm being.

[Jordan Siller]

No, no, that.

[Randall]

That's. That's by promoting AAD hunting.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Meaning that AAD are. They're. They're a. They're a sheep species from North Africa. North Africa. And they. They run wild. And they run wild in Texas.

[Randall]

Not a sheep. They're auded.

[Dan Flores]

They're close.

[Steve Rinella]

Their own.

[Dan Flores]

More closely.

[Randall]

They're closer to goats, but people call.

[Jordan Siller]

It Barbary sheep, Right?

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, I guess that's where I got that idea.

[Jordan Siller]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

So not. Not a true sheep. Correct. Obviously. Okay.

[Randall]

Related, but not. Not a true sheep.

[Steve Rinella]

They've gone feral. They do quite well in Texas. And people point out that it's been pointed out. Not just, not just pointed out. I think it's. According to Heffelfinger, it's like an objective reality that all that are detrimental to bighorn sheep recovery. So indeed, in all fairness, I mean, to overblow it, Heffelfinger has pointed out he feels that there is like an increasing popularity in audit hunting because you can hunt them year round.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Poor man. Sheep hunt.

[Jordan Siller]

He's right.

[Steve Rinella]

You don't have any kind of bag limits. Like it's kind of the, you know, it's like the, you know, it's like the wild west of all that hunting right now.

[Jordan Siller]

Yep. You're not going to get a sheep probably ever in your life. So if you want to try for something adjacent to it, go down in.

[Steve Rinella]

The desert and, you know, run around in the rim rocks. They're down there. And he feels that as this gains popularity, land managers, land owners will become incentivized to host all dad on their properties. And he feels that this could lead to a net loss in suitable bighorn habitat. But I was hunting all day when you guys. When your mommy's was wiping your noses.

[Randall]

How old are you?

[Steve Rinella]

51.

[Jordan Siller]

So Steve made it cool before. It was cool.

[Steve Rinella]

No, I went one time.

[Jordan Siller]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

No, I went two times.

[Jordan Siller]

I'm just trying to be cute.

[Steve Rinella]

I went two times and I was not. I guess I was. I wasn't really aware of the issue. But anyways, tell about your guys trip. Yeah.

[Randall]

Well, a couple weeks ago, Corinne and I and Corinne's significant other, Matt were hosted by Dr. Phil Lavretsky.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, the duck.

[Jordan Siller]

The duck doc.

[Randall]

DNA guy.

[Jordan Siller]

The duck doctor DNA doc now. Now. Auded DNA doc also turkey DNA doc. Yep, he's got all the names.

[Randall]

He hosted us down in west Texas on UTEP's. The Indio research Station.

[Jordan Siller]

Yep. He's at the. Yeah, so. So we weren't at, you know, a ranch where you, you run a research facility. Yeah. University of Texas at El Paso has a research facility that's about 35 or 40.

[Randall]

I think it's 40,000.

[Jordan Siller]

So that's where we were.

[Randall]

Right on the Rio Grande.

[Steve Rinella]

I somehow missed all these details.

[Randall]

You're looking at Mexico, the mountains in Mexico, the whole time. Glorious, stunning country.

[Corey Jacobsen]

He.

[Randall]

He wanted us to come down in February or January when it was cooler. And the best time we could pull it off was in early April. And so odds were that it was going to be hot while we were down there. But we got really lucky with a cold front that rolled in just days before we landed. And they were still trying to squeak out of that cold front. And I don't think it ever got above 70 degrees. We hunted two days and we, we did our best to help the conservation aspect and tried just shooting use was our main objective.

[Steve Rinella]

So this facility is hostile to the audience.

[Randall]

I mean they've just made themselves at home. Yeah, yeah, there are desert bighorn that roam in and out. But this is just south of the Elephant mountains, I believe, which has a herd of bighorn sheep and they'll bleed over into this ranch. But the aud out have made themselves at home. There weren't a lot of aud out around or at least they weren't easy to find. We made it look easy in two days, but it was because the weather was so nice. We were able to hunt all day, glass them up in the morning and take hours to get in within rifle range and, you know, slowly pack them out without worrying about wasting any of the meat.

[Corey Jacobsen]

But the university does want to get rid of them or reduce the numbers.

[Randall]

Well, that's kind of the general vibe in West Texas is to keep the numbers reduced for desert bighorn sheep. You're never going to be able to get rid of audad just because they've made themselves at home and they do so well in that landscape. But yeah, desert bighorns certainly sit higher on the pedestal down there. But aud are very close because of the outfitting opportunity, the trophy hunting. Big air quotes.

[Steve Rinella]

Can you pass that, that thing down here so I can look at it?

[Jordan Siller]

Yeah, I can't. 50 pounds. Corey shot a really barbary huge sand ram. So ste, like I guess your hand doesn't even fit around the, the whole horn there. But yeah, just more, more on that. You know the Phil, Phil's lab, he's, he's trying to figure out certain new techniques to test aspects of the odd ad. So like they, everyone that we shot, we collectively got four. They all got nasal swabbed and they all got a piece of meat cut out of them for testing for various diseases and such. But to my understanding, that research facility is potential grounds for desert bighorn reintroduction.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh really?

[Jordan Siller]

So there are it. It would be possible to put together some kind of study or test to see how many females would need to be taken out of the population in order to accommodate. I don't really know the right language, but you Know to accommodate some number of big horns. Exactly, exactly.

[Steve Rinella]

Are you counting up that he's like 11 or 12 years old?

[Randall]

That's what we guesstimated. Somewhere between 10 and 13. It's so hard to tell. I mean, well, the.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, the. The annuli are rubbed off on the outer. On the end.

[Randall]

Very smooth. Now, I also brought in the ewe that I shot, which was an older ewe as well, and just as beautiful of a trophy. And the meat is 10 times better.

[Steve Rinella]

Because these have a real bad eating reputation. Yeah.

[Randall]

Which I don't understand. Well, it's just like people who say antelope aren't good to eat or sagey mule deer, you know, they just don't know how to cook more than cereal.

[Jordan Siller]

Yeah. I felt like the meat flavor is so incredibly mild. I mean, I. I shot the littlest of them of the four. I thought that I was aiming at a ewe, and then it ended up being a. Was termed a sub adult. You could kind of like lift it with one hand. And I haven't eaten off of. I ate a little bit of his heart, but the meat is much like lighter pink and seems tender as heck because he's really young. But we threw ribs on the grill one of the days, and our first night of dinner at Dr. Phil's house, he just put. I forget what cut, but he just grilled it up and it. You know, he says it's like sirloin to him.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, really?

[Jordan Siller]

I thought it was absolutely delicious. So kind of riffing off a Jesse Griffiths, you know, eat a hog, save the world. Phil's new tagline is save a sheep, eat an aad.

[Randall]

So, yeah, he whipped up a. Again, I don't know what cut it was, but an odd ad Steak and an elk steak. I couldn't tell the difference.

[Jordan Siller]

It was really good.

[Randall]

Tenderness flavor.

[Jordan Siller]

It was really good. It just. You even smell the meat and it doesn't. It's. It's. Yeah, it's just really. It's really clean.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, man. They got a bad reputation.

[Jordan Siller]

Yeah, they do. I don't. I don't.

[Steve Rinella]

Like I said, like, reputations aren't really based on that much.

[Jordan Siller]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

But a lot of times it's based on what some dude said about it.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And then it's some dude else parrots, what he said.

[Jordan Siller]

Yeah. And then it just, you know, as a total echoes out, man.

[Steve Rinella]

I've talked about this annoyance a whole bunch because it's happened to me and my wife a few times. Are you subscribed to something and Then like, you don't use it anymore, but it's just kind of like hidden in the details of your credit card and you just, you don't look at things as carefully as you should and you wind up paying like monthly fees on junk that you're not using. Well, you know what? 85% of people have at least one paid subscription that is going unused each month. Well, thanks to Rocket Money, you can see all your subscriptions in one place so you can monitor them and cancel the ones you're not using anymore in order to save you money. This is why you should check out Rocket Money. Because it is a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel unwanted subscriptions. It monitors your spending and helps you lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Rocket Money has over 5 million users. They've saved those users a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when using all of the app's premium features. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to rocket money.com me eater today that's rocket money.com me eater rocket money.com me eater hey guys, it's Steve Rinella here. When I was a little kid, my, my number one piece of hunting equipment was my mom who would always drive us around to go hunting. She would take me out to check my traps. Never asked anything in return. Very, very supportive. When I knew that I wanted to find a to get a life in the outdoor industry or become a writer, she had my back. Never made any other suggestions otherwise and just helped me push and pursue for what I wanted and helped me maximize the amount of time I got to spend out hunting, fishing, trapping. Now this Mother's Day, if you love your ma like I love mine, you can show her that you see the hard work and dedication that she put in and raising you. From now until Mother's Day, First Light is offering free shipping on all women's products. Whether she's chasing down adventure just out in the field, First Light's gear is built to keep up. Give her gear that works as hard as she does. Head to firstlight.com today and take advantage of free shipping. That's First Light. F I R S T l I t e.com for Mother's Day savings. So how many did you guys see all together?

[Randall]

Oh, well, the group that Corinne and I both got, our adult and sub adult rams. There were 23 in that group. And then I guess we saw two other solo rams and Another small group. So we probably saw close to 50 in two days. Two full days of hunting, though. And then sun up till sundown when.

[Jordan Siller]

You were gutting yours in the field. Matt and I went off on a, on a little nearby knob and there were probably like 10 in that group. So they're around. They're, they're, they're, their behavior is interesting. Like if you, you know, like Corey, Corey shot first and, and then I shot second.

[Steve Rinella]

That was chivalrous of you, Corey.

[Randall]

Those 400 yards.

[Jordan Siller]

Yeah, no, no, I didn't. You know, we, we, we had hiked in.

[Steve Rinella]

I'll take the first shot.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Cory wanted to check the dope for Corinne.

[Jordan Siller]

No, he, Cory was so awesome the entire time.

[Steve Rinella]

Stand back, kids.

[Jordan Siller]

What we haven't covered is that I was like, tremendous dead weight on that hunt. This is the hardest. It was so hard for me. Not, not just physically and it was hot and it was. But just the terrain is punishing. Like, I think it was you who said, at some point, Steve, like, even the thorns have thorns down there. I mean, you're not going to grab onto anything. It's so like shaley and every step, like the rocks, that everything is just, you know, shifting under your feet so you can't get on stable ground. And I knew I'd always had like a little bit of a fear of heights and incline, but. Oh, goodness. I mean, this. I was, I like shut down at points, so. Can't, can't. Not Courier Phil or Matt. Like, I had my hand held quite a bit through this experience.

[Steve Rinella]

Literally your handheld.

[Jordan Siller]

Well, yes, at one point, literally my hand was held.

[Randall]

We were on the highest point of the ranch.

[Jordan Siller]

Literally, my hand was held, which I.

[Randall]

Think was about 6,000ft. And to get the two sheep out, it took us eight and a half hours to pack out. By far the most brutal pack out I've ever been.

[Jordan Siller]

Probably. Let's, let's shave a third of the time off because they stopped and waited for my ass a lot.

[Randall]

Yeah, it was so hot though, we had to stop again. It probably wasn't 70 degrees, but there's zero shade. And we were, I'll admit, we were out of water by 2:00. Yeah, I mean, we were sipping the last little bits of our water on our way out of there. It got a little touch and go towards the end there.

[Jordan Siller]

Definitely got in my head about that. But, you know, they, they don't like, you know, maybe deer, elk, like, they'd be gone. But I took a long time between or after his shot and I didn't get mine with the first shot and there were still other odd ad hanging out. So their behavior is weird. I mean, yeah, you were saying they didn't know where the shot came from, but it's not like one shot and they were all gone. So they hung around, presented other opportunities to.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, I find it interesting how the different states look at their attitude about the animal in New Mexico. It's a draw. It's a draw tag and you don't draw it. Yeah, like I put in, I put.

[Jordan Siller]

It in every year for New Mexico audit.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I put it every year.

[Jordan Siller]

Huh.

[Steve Rinella]

My buddy, my buddy's got a spot. He says they go there and sometimes you see like you'll be looking at a hillside.

[Jordan Siller]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

And at first you don't think there's anything there, but once you start looking, he's like, there'd be like 30, 40 of them on the hillside. And every time they draw a permit, every time one of his buddies draws a permit, they just get an odd ad. I've been applying now for I think 10 years in New Mexico. You know, New Mexico doesn't do the points right. I've been applying in 10 years, 10 years to draw an AUD tag in New Mexico and I've never drawn it. So it's like they kind of became like an honorary. They're sort of interesting. They're managed, you know, like you look at with Texas wild hogs. Texas is so serious about wild hogs. They dropped any license requirement you need. There is no license requirement for hogs, obviously. No season, no bag limit, no license requirement. You go to California to hunt hogs, you got a tag, full big game license and you needed to tag the hog. Just like different states have really different attitudes about how to, how to treat and handle non native wildlife.

[Jordan Siller]

And then I think that also maybe goes back to what Heffelfinger is saying. Like there's obviously probably a delicate balance between the state wildlife agency and then the, you know, the ranches that sell a dad hunts. Just having to be careful about, you know.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, yeah, the ranch control, the ranch controls the access. Another way that like another interesting way that New Mexico handles this issue is with the, you know, the ibex in the Florida mountains. The Florida, well, you can stand on one end of the Florida mountains and see the other end. It's like a containable little mountain range. It maybe, I don't know, maybe. Am I wrong? Could you walk around the Florida mountains in two days maybe? Yeah.

[Dan Flores]

If you were a good in shape hiker.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, you like picture you like standing and be like, there they are. Like, you see little island in their entirety. There's ibex in the Florida mountains or non native. So another non native species. It's very hard to draw a ibex tag in the Florida mountains. There's actually a thing where it's like a once in a lifetime. If you draw for a billy or ram, whatever they call. Meanwhile, their management strategy is it's always ibex season. Not in the Florida mountains. Oh yeah.

[Randall]

If they exit the mountains, then it's full.

[Steve Rinella]

So like it's like, it's, it's. They're like, this is the ibex place. You have to apply and probably will never get a chance to hunt it. As soon as one of them soccer steps out of those hills, it's fair. It's just, you just got to go get a tag and go for it. So you just come up. They have these little, I don't know, man. Like they're kind of weighing like interest. People are very interested in it. They're kind of weighing interest against other ecological considerations when they figure out how to do it. Like in Florida, they have that island with the sandbar on it and you have to draw a tag to hunt a sandbar on the island. I'm guessing if those sandbar were cut loose on the main Florida peninsula, they'd have a very different attitude about the sandbars, you know.

[Randall]

Yeah. Super cool animal. If anybody's thinking about hunting one, shoot an E or two before you shoot a ram.

[Jordan Siller]

Yeah, I think he was like, for every ram anyone takes, you need to.

[Steve Rinella]

Shoot like that was Heffelfingers. Yeah, I, I like to miss quote.

[Jordan Siller]

He every day, though.

[Steve Rinella]

I, I misrepresent something he told me every day.

[Corey Jacobsen]

And then he doesn't call you out on it, which is a nice thing.

[Jordan Siller]

But I'll just plug Phil's lab again. It's the population evolutionary genetics lab at utep, University of Texas at El Paso. And if anyone feels like, you know, donating some tax deductible monies to their research lab. And I think they'll probably end up doing more on Audad and looking at desert bighorn, the potential for reintroduction. That's giving to dot utep. Edu forward slash conservation. You probably did not retain that information. I will put a link in the show notes.

[Steve Rinella]

And what was the episode he came on?

[Jordan Siller]

Oh, he's been on.

[Steve Rinella]

What do we call it?

[Jordan Siller]

Yeah, wild ducks. Really wild. That was the first episode a year or two ago.

[Steve Rinella]

So if you Remember, Batman's been on radio live. Yeah. If you remember back, we did an episode where in some places it's so weird this is even allowed. In some places you can like pen raise mallards, like pretend mallards and cut them loose to kind of like have like a pretend duck hunt. But then those pen raised ducks are breeding into our wild duck populations and affecting their behavior, screwing up migration patterns, life cycles, fitness. And he came on to talk about how through the, through their genetic survey work, they're able to see from these, reintroduction from that, these, from these pen raised operations, they're able to see a genetic spread as the genetics of those ducks expand outward. And how far into how far I guess it would be how far west they're finding traces of these ducks. Michael Chamberlain is beginning a new thing on wild turkeys. The impact of, you know, people get all excited when they shoot a white turkey. Real excited. Usually what's happened is you've shot a turkey, people love it. But what's probably happened is you shot someone's turkey, right. You shot someone's feral turkey. And so there's a new project coming out where they're going to start looking at the impacts of domestic turkeys finding their way into wild turkeys and interbreeding into wild turkey populations.

[Randall]

Well, as Corinne mentioned, while we were out there, Phil took meat samples and he was. They're trying to figure out there was two different strains of audad that were introduced to Texas originally back in the 50s, I believe. And now we're trying to figure out which strain were we hunting and harvesting. And could they be hybrid strains? Could the two different groups have, you know, blended together and made a hybrid.

[Steve Rinella]

Odd ad who caught them loose in the first place?

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. And why Texas Parks and Wildlife?

[Steve Rinella]

I was, I was thinking, yeah, because yeah, it was.

[Randall]

And now they're, you know, people very much don't like Texas Parks and wildlife because they're, you know, aerial gunning a dad to help with desert bighorn sheep just because they have to. If you want to protect the sheep, you gotta minimize the audad population.

[Corey Jacobsen]

It's funny that we, I think like generally you could say that wildlife management has this dark period and then there's a turning point and then there's sort of the good old days of post Pittman Robertson. And we figured it out, you know, but so many of these non native introductions carried on until fairly late in the 20th century. And not all of them necessarily have the same ecological implications. But like Himalayan snowcocker, like in the 70s, you know, and you think about now, non natives are such an issue for us, but it's really not all that long ago.

[Steve Rinella]

No, I mean, Hungary, like, Hungarian part ain't American partridge.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Right, right.

[Steve Rinella]

But some.

[Jordan Siller]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, in turn. So you can hunt turkeys in 49 states. Turkeys are native to 38 states.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

So, I mean, like, some stuff is. Right? It's. There's no some stuff. There's no, like, demonstrated deleterious effect.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Yeah, no, and that's. I mean, I recognize that, but. Yeah, it's. It's funny how quickly we've. We've shifted with some of these species and recognizing the impacts, you know?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Even in the fishing world, there is.

[Steve Rinella]

One last introduction I want to do. I. Whenever I'm in Hawaii, I always think on those hot lava rocks. I always think, how much rattlesnake could love it.

[Randall]

That's all right.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, I mean, it's the last introduction.

[Corey Jacobsen]

10,000 pet dogs in Hawaii just droned.

[Steve Rinella]

To a male and a female rattlesnake on the Kona coast. I just feel like they'd be so happy. There'd be so much to eat on those hot rocks.

[Corey Jacobsen]

I have zero interest in a rattlesnake being happy.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. Yeah, no kidding.

[Steve Rinella]

When I'm standing on one of those hot lava rocks, I can just picture the sound.

[Jordan Siller]

We really need some TSA agents now to follow you, make sure I'm not.

[Steve Rinella]

Showing up with my rattlesnakes.

[Dan Flores]

So, you know, Hawaii is the only state in the Union where coyotes have not colonized.

[Steve Rinella]

Is that right?

[Dan Flores]

It is. It's the only one.

[Steve Rinella]

Maybe I'll do that, too.

[Dan Flores]

Well, I mean, those endangered nae nays would. Would not be around for very long if coyotes ever got to.

[Steve Rinella]

What is that? I never heard that bird.

[Dan Flores]

Right. It's a goose. It looks like a. It's a species of goose. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's got another name, though, right?

[Dan Flores]

Oh, I've ever heard is Nene, which is probably the Hawaiian name, I'm guessing.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. I mean, probably, you know, Anglo missionaries maybe called them geese. Who knows? But, yeah, I think. I think they're generally known by Nene these days.

[Randall]

Yeah, I believe it's a dance, too. The whip and Nene, right, Bill?

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, that's right.

[Randall]

But one conversation we had on a rock when we were with this genetic scientist out there, we were talking about, like, at what point in evolution is an animal native versus invasive?

[Steve Rinella]

You know, Dan's got some. Right.

[Jordan Siller]

That's why it's a great segue.

[Randall]

Trying to roll out a segment.

[Jordan Siller]

Yeah, well, yeah, see, he's taking after you.

[Steve Rinella]

Dan's been on the show making his case for wild horses. Do you feel like remaking? Because you know what I was going to ask you about first, we're going to give you a pick.

[Dan Flores]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

I was going to ask you to tell everyone the story of the other.

[Dan Flores]

Lewis and Clark, the other Lewis and Clark.

[Steve Rinella]

Or you can, you can try to sell, you can try to, you can sell everybody on the H as a Native American animal.

[Dan Flores]

Well, the horse is quick. He's taken B. I'll say the horse is quick because the horse and its ancestors have been here for 56 million years. They have only been absent for about 8,000 years. And so, you know, and I've talked to paleontologists in Canada who say from the fossils they have of the last horses in America that are 10, 11,000 years old that they, they had, they can't tell the difference readily between those and the horses that Europeans brought from the old world over here. And so, I mean, that's, I think what you can say about the horse is the horse is either an exotic with an asterisk or it's a native with an asterisk. And I prefer the native with an asterisk because I tend to think in terms of deep history and long time. And so an animal that's been here for 56 million years and only gone for a wink of an eye time, to me, is a native animal. I mean, that's why they went wild so readily and so quickly when they were reintroduced in the West. The primary problem, of course, is that they were reintroduced without their Pleistocene predators accompanying them. And so that's why we're having such difficulty in controlling them, is we don't have, you know, big hunting hyenas and American cheetahs and all these cats particularly, that preyed on horse foals. But yeah, this is an animal that, you know, although it's created a huge kind of outcry by a lot of people as a, as a non native, I mean, it's actually an animal that's been here for a long time. So, yeah, that one's a pretty quick story.

[Steve Rinella]

It's compelling. It's compelling. Now talk about the tell, folks, about the other Lewis and Clark.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, this is a story that I know most Americans do not know. And it has to do with something called historical memory, because there are some things, and you know this when you, we study history, Randall knows it very well. Some things we remember and make a part of the ongoing story of the country and some things that are swept under the rug. And so at a time when the United States was a brand new country, that's the period when Lewis and Clark, Jefferson, Lewis and Clark into the west, 1804 and 18 to 1806, we were a country with a little bit of a self esteem problem because we were brand new. The Brits were still sort of acting like at any moment they were going to reinvade and take the colonies back. And so Jefferson after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. I mean, if you think about the Lewis and Clark expedition and the map in your mind that you remember from school of the Louisiana Purchase, one of the things that will quickly occur to you is that why was Jefferson interested in only exploring the northern piece of it? Why didn't he have some interest in all the rest, which was a much larger chunk of ground? To be sure, the southern boundary was less set than the northern boundary because Jefferson tried to claim that the southern boundary of the Louisiana persis was the real Grand River. And of course, here is Spain with colonies in Texas and New Mexico on the north side of the Rio Grande, who contested that.

[Steve Rinella]

It's weird because he wound up being kind of right. Oh yeah, well, I mean, like over time, ultimately.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, ultimately, that's, that's how it played out. But so after, and to get to the story here, after the Lewis and Clark expedition was underway, Jefferson set about preparing an expedition to go into the southern parts of the Louisiana Purchase. And the river that he decided was the very best river to explore in the north. It was the Missouri and the Columbia, obviously those two in the south. What he decided to do was to explore the Red River. That's the river that is the boundary today between Texas and Oklahoma. And he picked that river because he thought it came out of the Southern Rockies near Santa Fe. And so what he was organizing as a second expedition was to send a party up the Red river to its source in the Southern Rockies near Santa Fe. And then the party would cross over to the Arkansas, also believed to be to have its headwaters in the southern mountains and to come back to civilization down the Arkansas River. So this was not going to be an expedition that went all the way to the coast the way Lewis and Clark's was planned, because there was no idea of a northwest passage in the southern reaches of the west. And of course, that's what Lewis and Clark were looking for. They were trying to find the fable Northwest Passage for commerce. So anyway, the second expedition was essentially based on a flawed Premise. Jefferson and just about everybody else who made maps of the west at the time followed Alexander von Humboldt's map of the west, which he had put together.

[Steve Rinella]

He's probably in that order of Hubertus with that name.

[Dan Flores]

Alexander von Humboldt, Yeah, he's a major, he's a Prussian naturalist who explored South America, had a ton of students who followed in his wake. Like Prince Maximilian on the Missouri was one of von Humboldt's students. And he's the guy who comes up with all kinds of sort of early notions about ecology. So von Humboldt had put together a map of the west from sources in the archives in Mexico. And he saw that there was a river coming out of the Southern Rockies near Santa Fe that flowed eastward. And the French in Louisiana knew there was this river, the Red river, in their part of the world that flowed from the West. And so von Humboldt put those two together and told Jefferson that the Red river headed in the Southern Rockies and you could send a party up it and it would take them all the way into what is now New Mexico and Colorado. The problem with that was that von Humboldt did not have any sources that actually tied those two rivers together. And so the river that he saw in New Mexico heading near Santa Fe was actually the Pecos, which is a tributary of the Rio Grande. And the Red river that Jefferson sent his party up heads in what we now call the Llano Estacado Plateau. It comes out of Palo Duro Canyon, which most people have heard of, this big giant canyon that's on the eastern side of this plateau in West Texas and New Mexico. So it was a river that actually didn't head in mountain. It would have led the explorers, the American explorers, out into the middle of the southern high plains and left them still, like 10 days travel from New Mexico, from Santa Fe. Anyway, Jefferson didn't know that, and he insisted that the Red was the river that he wanted to explore because there were all sorts of wonderful stories about what was up at the headwaters of the Red River. So he put together this expedition in 1806, two years after Lewis and Clark set out. As Lewis and Clark were returning from the Pacific, Jefferson put together this party of more than 50, 50 people, including a military escort led by a guy named Captain John Sparks, who was a close friend of Meriwether Lewis's and William Clark's. They had all grown up in Virginia. And Jefferson selected an Irish, basically, he was a geographer named Thomas Freeman to lead the expedition. And he picked as the first American trained naturalist to explore in the West, a young man he knew from Virginia. His name was Peter Custis, and he was just about to get a doctorate in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. So the expedition is known to the people who know about it as the Freeman and Custis Expedition up the red river in 1806. And these guys started.

[Steve Rinella]

They had 50 dudes.

[Dan Flores]

They had 50 dudes.

[Steve Rinella]

How many dudes were Lewis and Clark?

[Dan Flores]

Well.

[Steve Rinella]

40.

[Corey Jacobsen]

40.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, about 40, 42, I think, is the top figure, because one guy died, and they sent one guy back for bad behavior. But Congress also, interestingly, about this second expedition, appropriated twice the money for it that they appropriated for Lewis and Clark. Now, you know, people who know about the expeditions know that Meriwether Lewis actually spent a whole lot more money than Congress had appropriated for him. But this second expedition had twice the funds appropriated. Jefferson referred to it as the Grand Expedition. And it set out up the Red river in April of 1806, reached the last point of civilization on the Red the town of Natchitoches, which was an old French town on the Red river in central Louisiana. And then. And we've talked about this, Steve. I know because you've been interested in it. One of the things they had to do to get on the Red river above Natchitoches was to detour around what we think is probably the biggest log jam anywhere in North America. It was called the Great Raft. And this thing extended for about 140 miles up the Red River. And so it was impossible to travel on the river. And they had to go through all these bayous and swamps around to the east of it to get around the raft and back to the river. So they did that, and they were above the Great Raft in the early summer of 1806 and getting ready to head west.

[Steve Rinella]

I got to have you pause.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, sure.

[Steve Rinella]

Can you remind me, how do they end up getting rid of that raft?

[Dan Flores]

It took the invention of nitroglycerin. Yeah. When nitro was invented in the 1860s. 18. Early 1870s, actually, it was possible for a guy named Captain Henry Shreve, for whom Shreveport is named, to go out with what he calls snag boats and pull the raft apart enough to place charges of nitro under it. And they basically blew it apart, Just.

[Steve Rinella]

Sent all that wood out, took it.

[Dan Flores]

Took them 10 years to do it. Yeah. But, yeah, it was a gigantic wow, man. Yeah. It took the invention of a new explosive device, essentially nitro, to do it.

[Steve Rinella]

This show is sponsored in part by BetterHelp. Now, I know that there is a stigma, especially among guys I find a stigma against using therapy because people might think it was weak. I was actually raised differently where my dad was quite open about the fact of having relied on therapy after coming home from the war to make some adjustments. Well, mental health awareness is growing, but there's still some progress to be made. 26% of Americans who participated in a recent survey say they have avoided seeking mental health support due to a fear of judgment. When people hesitate to get help, though, it doesn't just affect them, it impacts families, workplaces, entire communities. This is mental Health awareness month. So let's encourage everyone to take care of their well being and break the stigma. The world is better when people are healthy and happy. A BetterHelp has over 10 years of experience matching people with the right therapist from their diverse network of more than 30,000 licensed therapists with a wide range of specialties. We're all better with help. Visit betterhelp.com meater to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com meater nothing to be ashamed of.

[Dan Flores]

So anyway, this expedition is on the Red river and they're headed west and they're bound for Santa Fe and they have all these wonderful objectives that they're going to do. And Peter Custis is doing natural history. I mean, he, you know, Meriwether Lewis is kind of self trained as a naturalist. Peter Custis was trained in a university. And they get about 650 miles up the Red river and round a bend and discover a Spanish force four times their size arrayed across the river. And they hear word that another, this Spanish force is from Texas. And they hear that another Spanish force, the largest one ever sent out from Santa Fe, is coming down the upper Red River. And so Spain determines that it is not going to allow the Americans to explore into country where the boundary has not been resolved between the United States and Spain. And Jefferson had included in his letter of instructions to both Meriwether Lewis and to Thomas Friedman a line that said, if your further progress is opposed by a force authorized or not authorized by a nation, in other words, either an Indian group or some force authorized by a nation, I want you to turn back with the information you've already gathered rather than attempt to go forward. Because I don't want to risk the lives of American citizens in a confrontation with an overwhelming force. Meriwether Lewis never confronted anything like that because even the Spaniards tried to stop Lewis and Clark, but they were so far to the north the Spanish forces could Never find them on the Missouri. And they sent several expeditions out to stop Lewis and Clark.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, hold on that for a minute.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Like why does no one talk about where these Spanish guys. How can you not hear the stories about the Spanish guys trying to find Lewis and Clark? Like where were they looking?

[Dan Flores]

They were, they were launched primarily from Texas. I mean, San Antonio had the biggest presidios of any of the Spanish colonies in what were known as the provincias Internus, the internal provinces of the north. And so they were launched from there, but they never got the one that got farther as never got out of what is now present day Kansas. Never even got really to the, to the Missouri River.

[Steve Rinella]

What obstacles were preventing them from getting up there?

[Dan Flores]

Usually poor planning, poor execution leaders who were not up to the task. And on at least one of the groups encountered an opposing force of native people that turned them back. So they were those forces that were trying to intercept Lewis and Clark were, you know, they didn't really get close, but the Red river was a lot closer to these Spanish presidios in Texas. And they successfully got a 200 man force led by a guy named Captain Francisco Viana. And they put up a perimeter across the Red River. And Freeman and his party round a bend, they see the Spanish force. They stop for three days and have a diplomatic conference with parlay. A parlay with the leader of the Spanish force. And this Spanish leader, Viana, was basically, he was polite, but he was firm. My orders are you are not to be allowed to progress any further on the river. And so Freeman consulted his orders from Jefferson which said, if you're confronted by an overwhelming force, I want you to turn back with the information you have. And the Americans turned around and went back. And so what I would say about this is that the reason you've never heard of it and nobody else really very much in America has ever heard of this expedition is because at a time when the United States had a little bit of a self esteem problem as a young country, we were perfectly willing to celebrate the success of Lewis and Clark getting to the Pacific. But the second presidential expedition being turned around by a foreign power and told to retrograde to American territory, that was one that I mean, even Jefferson was willing to just sort of sweep under the rug.

[Steve Rinella]

Effectively.

[Dan Flores]

Effectively. So yeah, I did a talk one time at the 200th anniversary of Lewis and Clark in St. Louis under the arts, hosted by the National Park Service. And they asked me to talk about this expedition. And immediately before me there was this Hispanic Historian from, I think he was from Arizona who got up and did a talk and his whole talk was about, man, I really wish some Spanish force had managed to stop Lewis and Clark. That would have really changed. And I got up after this guy and said, you know, I'm going to make all your dreams come true. Because it happened exactly that way, but with another party with the second expedition.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Dan Flores]

So it's one of those kind of unknown stories. And you know, the podcast I'm doing for you guys is a lot of it is like that. It's the Western stories that you've not really ever heard or been exposed to with a lot of emphasis, as we were saying a few minutes ago, on wildlife, on native people, on the landscapes, the great landforms of the west and all that. But that's what I've tried to do with most of my career is sort of work on things that other people hadn't done already.

[Steve Rinella]

What if you, if, if you had to say, like, what are some of the things that people miss the most? What are some of the most common misses that people have about the American West? Is it like the, the antiquity or.

[Dan Flores]

I think that's very definitely one. I mean, the west and if you, in the Southwest in particular, you can't miss this because of all the ruins all over the, you know, the Southwest, as you know, when you and I were at Chaco a few months ago and the time we went to the Clovis side, I mean, there are these unmistakably ancient still visible. There's still visible evidence of people having lived in the west for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And in a lot of the rest of the country, because of higher humidity and dense forests and rainfall, I mean, evidence of long term occupation is often really much more difficult to see. But in the arid part of the, of North America, it's still there and it's still visible. And so that antiquity is a part of it. I mean, the, the, you know, our sense about American history is wow. I mean, it's only, you know, 400 years old. We've only been here since the 1600s, and wow, this is a brand new place. Well, the truth is, of course, the story of America is that right now we think at least 23,000 years old. That's when we have evidence for the first people getting over here. So one of the things I tried to do in this podcast is at least spend some of it, the first two or three episodes, talking about these really ancient occupations and how people lived and their interactions with the natural world and wildlife and all that. Because it's a story that I think really shapes the future, if you believe, and I always make this argument about history, is that the past doesn't stay in the past. We're occupying a world that was shaped by our ancestors, by other humans. And the world that we're in right now is what it is in large part because of what they did. And that's kind of one of my themes, I think, in this podcast, at.

[Steve Rinella]

The end of Dan's podcast episodes, what we've been doing is we've been doing a little Q and A where Dan does his material. It's kind of a. In the best way possible, lecture format. You take a subject, talk about it, but then the subjects bleed into each other.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And at the end, me and Randall get to ask questions. In the spirit of that, Randall, I'd like to point the next question.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Oh, I didn't.

[Steve Rinella]

Whatever you think is the most interesting thing. Oh, if not, I'll do it.

[Corey Jacobsen]

I mean, Dan, I think this is not necessarily specific to the podcast, but I think people would probably be interested to just hear your story about how you grew up, and you've got sort of an interesting past that some might not maybe expect from a professor of history and published author.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. Well, so at least on my dad's side, my mom's side of the family was pretty much sort of standard Anglo, Scots, American through the upper southern states and into the Midwest and all. And so that's part of my lineage. But probably the more interesting one, in part, because that's where I grew up, and I still have family there, is from Louisiana, because that town, Natchitoches, I mentioned a few minutes ago, which is, you know, I always have fun telling people this. That's the oldest European town in Louisiana, not New Orleans.

[Steve Rinella]

Is it really?

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. Natchitoches is four years older than New Orleans. It was founded in 1714, and my ancestors got there in 1716. So, yeah, so we've been in Louisiana for a very, very long time. But I had.

[Steve Rinella]

What brought them there? Do you know?

[Dan Flores]

Well, I had two different sides of the. Of the story in Louisiana, and I don't know why my French ancestors showed up. And that's the predominant line in that side of my family. But they're. I mean, my last name is Flores, which is a Spanish name. And the reason I have that name is because when the French founded Natchitoches in 1714, the Spaniards farther west were so alarmed at this French incursion because they were Afraid the French were going to go up the Red river into the West. And they were absolutely right about that. That they plunked down 10 miles away from Natchitoches a little presidio manned by about 25 or 30 young soldiers. And these guys, one of whom was my ancestor, the flories ancestor. Here they were in the Louisiana wilderness with no available potential marriage partners. And so my.

[Steve Rinella]

Except the enemies.

[Dan Flores]

Except the enemies 10 miles away. So my ancestor married to a French family in Natchitoches, and he's like, you.

[Steve Rinella]

Guys ain't all bad.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, absolutely. They were Catholics, at least. Anyway, so we got absorbed into the French story in Louisiana. And I think the reason I probably grew up being fascinated with the west is because one of the stories that we always talked about in the family was there were some groups four or five generations back who were traitors to the Indians in the West. And so I grew up hearing stories about Pierre Lafitte, Pierre Bouillife, who was my great grandfather four times back. And he had been a sort of a major player in the Indian trade to the west out of Natchitoches and had gone. I don't know if he ever got all the way up to the Wichita villages far up the Red river, but he certainly was a pretty major player in Indian trade in Louisiana. And I knew that they had gone west. So I kind of grew up with the idea of, you know, the west was always this part of the country that beckoned. And when I was four years old, my family went on a national park tour. And one of the places they went was into New Mexico. And so by the time I was about 10 or 11, I was having these dreams of these beautiful blue skies, cotton ball clouds, sand dunes, red cliffs. Had no idea where that had come from until I was about 37 or 38 years old. And I was back in Louisiana for family reunion. And I mentioned to an aunt of mine, you know, I've always had these strange dreams. That's why. About the West. That's why I ended up going west. And she said, well, I wonder if that had anything to do with that national park tour we took you on to New Mexico when you were 4. Oh, I guess maybe it did. And, you know, so it's the kind of thing that you sort of forget but clearly colors your subconscious for a long time. So that was part of it. And as soon as I, you know, had a. Was able to drive a car, and my parents would let me go out overnight, first thing I did was drive 500 miles to the west, just to see what the country was like. And. Yeah, and I've never forgotten how exciting it was when night fell the first time on that drive. And I could see the lights of towns 30 and 40 miles away, because growing up in Louisiana, you can't see 40ft away, the vegetation is so dense. And it was very exciting to be able to see. See country.

[Corey Jacobsen]

And you spent a fair bit of time running around outside in your. In your youth, right?

[Dan Flores]

Oh, I did. Yeah. I grew up in a little small town where the woods were, you know, 100 yards away. And so. And we didn't have enough guys in the town to field one baseball team, let alone two baseball teams to play one another. So what I got to do for recreation was essentially read books and roam around in the woods. And, you know, and I certainly grew up hunting. I wasn't too interested in fishing, but I was certainly interested in hunting. And I did that through a lot of my teen years, into my early 20s. And, you know, as Randall knows, when I was living in Montana, I mean, I can't say that I ever actually hunted, but three times, because I wanted venison in my freezer. I bought a deer tag and shot a little, you know, yearling or for corn, mule deer buck out the window of my living room out in the. Out in the horse.

[Steve Rinella]

I remember when I first met you, I remember you telling me that. And you're very careful not overplay the circumstances.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. And so I couldn't say that was a hunt that was more harvesting a deer for the freezer. That was, you know, but I, I still. I mean, I was in my 40s and 50s, and I still remembered how to do it, at least.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dan Flores]

Well, you.

[Corey Jacobsen]

You also wrote for Field and Stream and, you know, Field and Stream, Sports.

[Dan Flores]

Of Field and Outdoor Life. Yeah, those are. When I started as a writer, that's who I wrote for. That was the. The magazine world that I knew. And so I. I was an English major as an undergraduate and then had an English professor in a creative writing course when I was a junior who had us write things that we thought, you know, you might approach a magazine for, query a magazine about. And I had the fun of writing a piece, and before the semester was over, going into his office and saying, sports Afield just bought that piece I wrote for you back in February. And so that was very fun. And I had a, you know, just like you did, Steve, at Outdoor. What's the magazine?

[Steve Rinella]

Outside.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, Outside. I had an editor at Sports of Feel in particular, who I guess saw some potential in me. And he gave me a few pointers and took the first three or four things I wrote and introduced me to editors at Field and Stream and Outdoor Life. And I ended up finally for Outdoor Life. Before I went to graduate school and got a PhD in history, I wrote a conservation column for Outdoor Life for their regional pages. They had these pages in Outdoor Life that were designated for particular regions. And I wrote a conservation column for the one on what was known as the Mid south. And I wrote a conservation column for Louisiana woods and Waters. So this was all before I ever went to, you know, went to graduate school and, you know, the professor thing.

[Steve Rinella]

I got a lot of friends who wind up being that they're in occupation professionally. They wind up in an occupation they would have had no idea existed when they were a kid. Yeah, I mean, you asked your kid what they want to do and be like detective, fireman. Yeah, veterinarian. Right. And then people have jobs that they don't even. They don't find out. A lot of times you don't even know what you're doing was a thing until you're in your 20s, in your 30s. You probably had. You probably didn't use the word growing up. I want to be an environmental historian.

[Dan Flores]

No, you are absolutely right. I never once said that. I. So I was not the first person in my family to go to college. My dad had gone to college, but so I knew something about university life, a little bit about it. But I actually went to college on an athletic scholarship and with the idea, because my dad had played semi pro baseball and he wanted me to be a baseball player and with the idea of actually doing that, and it didn't last. I didn't play baseball in college for more than two years. We got a new coach. He and I didn't like one another. And so that was sort of the end of that. But what I had sort of discovered, you know, a baseball player who's an English major is a little bit of an unusual character. And I began to meet professors who started pointing me in the direction of where I went. And one of them was this guy, this creative writing guy I mentioned who when I talked to him about my future, I said, I want to be a writer. This is my idea. I've always thought, you know, as a kid growing up and reading books, that's what I wanted to do. He said, well, most people who write usually do something else as a day job. And I said, well, like what? And he said, well, I mean, like me, this Guy wrote Western novels. He said, like me. I mean, you're a professor, and they actually reward you for writing books when you're a professor. And that put the idea into my head for the very first time that, well, okay, so I think maybe what I'll do is I'll go ultimately to graduate school and become a professor of some kind, and then that will enable me or give me enough time to be able to write, too. So that's kind of what I did. But you're exactly right. As a kid, I never said I'm going to grow up and, you know, be an environmental historian at the University of Montana.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dan Flores]

That never happened.

[Steve Rinella]

One of the things I've picked up through my relationship with you and talking to you about American history, and then also, I also kind of absorbed it a little bit from reading and conversations with the historian Elliot west is this thing about the west where I think that if you fall into the. Into the trap, maybe that's not the best word for it, but if you fall into the mindset that the west was just sitting there untouched. Right. Whereas Elliot west put it that, like, Native Americans were just in. In a static. They were just basically waiting for Europeans to show up.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

In this static state. And then you get this idea that then. And then Lewis and Clark go out there. No one had been there before them. They go out there, and then it's just like this tidal wave is unleashed. And it all happens like that. It all happens through the 1800s.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

That sense of how Western history went for me really started to fall apart when I learned that from the time the first European descended the Mississippi. Okay. So from the time the first European descended the Mississippi, it was 100 years.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Until the next European descended the Mississippi. Or as Elliot west pointed out in one of his essays, when Lewis and Clark hit the Great Plains, there were people. There were Native Americans on the Great Plains whose parents had been to Paris and come home. And then you start realizing that this. The job of understanding contact. Right. Of understanding, like, European contact isn't like this little, like, blip through the 1800s. It's centuries long.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, well, Elliot steered you correctly. I mean, that's been one of the things that even in my own career, I mean, I started out being trained to do a more classic kind of Western history where really it does kind of begin with Lewis and Clark or maybe if you start being imaginative about it. Okay. It starts with, you know, Spanish settlements in New Mexico. I mean, so the place where I live, you know, Santa Fe, it's about 10 years ago, 15 years ago now. It celebrated its 400th anniversary as a town. Santa Fe was founded in 1610. That's almost 200 years before Lewis and Clark start up the Missouri River.

[Steve Rinella]

No, that's incredible, man.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, there's already.

[Steve Rinella]

If you go from today, like, to under. I always like to understand this. Okay, it's 2025. Okay. If you go that. That distance of time, think about where that puts you.

[Dan Flores]

Oh, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

You know.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

So the. The. The distance between. The distance between Lewis and Clark in the Northern plains and the founding of Santa Fe, the founding of a European, like, kind of cosmopolitan city in New Mexico was the distance that separates us from 1825.

[Dan Flores]

From 1825, yeah. At a time when we were just now starting to try steamboats on the western rivers. Yeah. So it's that kind of distance. And so you have to, you know, as a historian, you start learning to incorporate that into your thinking. And. And once I started having the fun of doing that, I started pushing it back farther and farther because it became evident. So historians primarily rely on written documents. Right. But if you decide, okay, and as environmental historian, I was trained to do this, you don't just rely on the written documents. You also rely on archaeology and paleontology and ecology and all these other fields. And if you start using those, then suddenly the past starts getting deeper and deeper and deeper for you. I mean, you can't come up with a great quote from anybody from, you know, 10,000 years ago. You don't know exactly what we call people. Clovis and Folsom. We don't really know what their names actually were for themselves because we named them after the towns where their archaeologists first found remains of them. So it's a kind of a deep time pass that's not perfect, but it allows you to think in terms of a really deep and ancient history. And when you start doing that, that's kind of how I translated the human past in America going back 23,000 years to start thinking about the past of the animals here. Because many of the animals in North America, I mean, like horses and their ancestors 56 million years back. Camels are another family of animals that had their origins in America and died out here while surviving in the rest of the world. They go back 46 million years. Passenger pigeons went back 15 million years. Bison, actually, which we, of course, is now our national mammal in America. We have concluded that probably the oldest arrival of bison in North America was only about 400,000 years ago. So they're actually quite recent arrivals compared to something like passenger pigeons. Mammoths got here 17 million years ago. So doing that deep time for humans, I think was the, it was a ready step from that to start looking at all these animals around us. And as we were talking yesterday, talking to you and Randall both about this, I mean one of the things I've decided to do because I couldn't see that anybody else was really doing it in writing Western history, was to start taking the animals seriously, to stop thinking about them as, okay, beavers are just, you know, there's just this lumpin animal that everybody that produced the beaver trade and start actually looking at. So what did the presence of beavers over 5 million to 7 million years, that's how we think they've been here. What did that do in North America? And you began to realize, well, hell man, beaver ecology totally transformed the continent. They made it a much more humid and wetter place. And when we started extracting them from the world, it suddenly dried out a lot of America because it undermined an ecology that they had built up over a really long period of time. So taking the animals seriously, I think has probably been a step towards, you know, just revising the whole story of the West. In America, you know, one of the.

[Steve Rinella]

Biggest gaps that puzzles me and I think it'd be like a, it'd be a cool book and there would not be any quotes in it, like you said. But like personally I focus a lot of attention on and I love reading about and talking with experts on the Ice Age, the first Americans.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

The Clovis culture, Folsom culture, different migration theories. That's of great interest to me. And then you have, where we talk about some of these, the first Europeans to make their way in the Southwest and they encounter, probably to their surprise, cities. I mean, cities.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, absolute cities where there were cities. If you go back a thousand years, there were cities in the American Southwest that were, that were bigger than London. Like more people living in them, you know what I mean? Architecture, religious facilities, irrigated croplands. Like how did we get from, how did you get from these bands? I mean these like bands of 30 or 40 or 50 hunters running around with stone tipped tools. Like how do you get to the cities? And I don't think that that's understood. I mean it's understood, but I don't think that's like that people like that narrative hasn't been told.

[Dan Flores]

No, I think it hasn't. Certainly not for kind of public consumption. I mean among the archaeologists David Stewart, with his book Anasazi America. I mean, I think he probably told that story. I mean, I certainly rely on his treatment quite a bit in trying to analyze that. And to get from. I mean, we start with Paleolithic big game hunters like the Clovis and Folsom people. And once those animals are gone, and they're gone by about 10,000, 9,000 years ago, essentially what you get is a long period of hunter gatherers where the focus is on smaller animals. I mean, there's still deer and elk and things out there. And so the big game is smaller and there's an enhanced focus on vegetable products, on plant foods. And so the hunter gatherer, the very name implies that you've got a new focus on plants. You're beginning to rely some. And once the focus on plants is there, then you're set up for some human genius at some point to say, well, you know, this particular plant that produces this thing we now call Teosinte, which produces this little tiny corncob, but sometimes there's a slightly bigger one. Is there some way that we can take the plants that make the slightly bigger ones, and if the next generation, the corn cob is even a little bit bigger than that, plant those. And of course what they're doing is that they're domesticating plants. And I think the reason we reached that stage, because we reached it in the old World many thousands of years before this happened in the Americas. The reason being, of course, is the Americas are settled by humans a lot later than, say, Europe and Asia get settled by humans. And so the whole process over time is at an accelerated rate in the old World compared to the Americas. But what happened in both places, I think, to push us in the direction ultimately of crops and domesticated animals is that as the human population grew, relying on hunting got harder and harder to do because animals became more and more difficult to find. And you finally reach a point, I think, where everybody knew when during hunting and gathering stages that you had to keep the human population low. And one of the ways they did that was basically they engaged in not only abortions, but infanticide whenever a band of 120 people, they had too many children one year. I mean, the leaders knew if we let this go on, we are screwing ourselves to the hilt. And so we've got to control our population. And that became obviously a psychological burden for people, especially for women who were carrying kids, babies. So everybody is looking for a way to escape it. And the domestication of crops and animals became a way. It's hard to grow the population now just by relying on hunting because we've thinned the animals to the point where we can't really grow the human population. But what if we start domesticating things? What if we start domesticating plants and growing them ourselves? What if we take these wild goats, these gazelles in the old world, in North America, wild turkeys become the primary domesticated animal. What if we take these and raise them? And that allows us then to avoid this speed bump of having to so assiduously keep the population down. And that then produces, of course, the great agricultural revolution, the so called Neolithic revolution in the old world and 5,000 years later in the Americas. And so those cities that you and I have walked around in Chaco Canyon Historic park, of course is the primary and most dramatic one in North America. Those cities resulted from the evolution basically of hunting and gathering culture into an agricultural sort of, in Chaco's case, an empire really of hundreds of small farmers growing corn, beans and squash that they had imported up from Mexico. Because Mexico in North America was where the first domestication of plants took place. And that domestication then enabled larger populations that were capable of producing a city like Chaco, which, you know, Chaco was such a dramatic and large place. Huge buildings. There were not buildings the size of those built in Chaco in North America until the 1880s. We don't have any buildings the size of something like Pueblo Bonito until, you know, only basically 150 years ago in the United States. But this is a story. It's sort of like that, you know, that other Lewis and Clark expedition story I was telling. It's not one that plays to historical memory in America. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people who go to Chaco who are utterly shocked to find the ruins of that place because grow up on the east coast. Nobody ever talks about fact that there was giant city.

[Steve Rinella]

No, people lived in tents.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, people lived in tents and stickons and. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

I was gonna. I think I told you about this before. Do you remember that? The physi. I think he's a physiologist. Jared Diamond.

[Dan Flores]

Oh yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Wrote that. He wrote a book. Guns, Germs and Steel.

[Dan Flores]

Germs and Steel, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Did he pass away, Jared Diamond?

[Dan Flores]

I don't think he has passed away, no. I think he's. He's still around.

[Steve Rinella]

He kind of begins with this question. I think I told you about this before. Who was it that took on the Incans? Was it Pizarro?

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, Juan Pizarro.

[Steve Rinella]

He begins with this question, like, why was it that Pizarro came from Spain to attack the Incans? Why didn't. I don't know who the leader of the Incans was. Why didn't the Incan empire go and attack Spain? And I think that there's a point. If you'd have gone, if you'd have been like, if you'd have visited Earth right at that time of the ascendancy of Chaco, he might have been like, I think someday these people are going to go and find Europe. Do you know what I mean? It would have seemed like it was heading that direction. But then there's certain things like that misses like the wheel.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. They don't. They do not. There's no. And so one of the strange things about the wheel is that there are actually figurines, little small figurines in Aztec Mexico that show wheels, but there's not an application of the wheel in any kind of. Of utility form because they have not proceeded to the domestication of a beast of burden that would pull a wheeled vehicle. And so, yeah, the wheel is a very strange one. But, I mean, your question is really on the mark, because at the same time that Chaco was at its height, that's about just roughly a thousand years ago. I mean, all those great cities in the Mayan empire on the Yucatan Peninsula were also at their height. And Tenochtitlan, which is what, Mexico City.

[Steve Rinella]

Is that how you're supposed to pronounce that?

[Dan Flores]

I think so.

[Steve Rinella]

I always thought it was like a Tenach. Yeah, Tenochtitlan.

[Dan Flores]

Well, I mean, you may be. Yeah, you may be more accurate than I am, but the people that could.

[Steve Rinella]

Answer that question are.

[Dan Flores]

That's what I call.

[Corey Jacobsen]

That's what I call a reading word, you know?

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, it is a reading word, but that city was also, I mean, it was absolutely at its height. And in many respects, these big cities of Mesoamerica, you know, I mean, you guys have probably been to Chichen Itza and seen the pyramid there, which, I mean, the first time I went there, you could still climb it. They won't let you climb it anymore. No, they won't let you go up the steps to the top anymore, you know, and it is precipitously steep, there's no question. But, you know, I had the fun 15 or so years ago of climbing to the top of, you know, this temple of Kukulkan, the temple of Venus. And I mean, holy cow, man, that's just. It's impressive as hell when you're there. But we come out of a, you know, a Western European kind of sensibility that we were on top of the world, we were the leaders of civilization. I mean, Western Europe is, I mean, that's what Guns, Germs and Steel about is about. His argument, Jared Diamond's argument in that book is that the reason Western Europe managed to prevail over all those other places is that it happened to sit at the far end of the largest landmass on earth. Eurasia also connected to Africa. And so Europeans got to benefit from all the human inventions that took place all over Eurasia and Africa.

[Steve Rinella]

The flow was smooth.

[Dan Flores]

The flow was smooth. And everything that was invented in China, gunpowder managed to get to Western Europe. Whereas the Americas are completely isolated from the rest of the world. Not only from the ideas of the rest of the world, but, you know, as we all know, from the diseases that evolved through the domestication of animals. And living with domesticated animals, Europeans, Old Worlders ended up developing all sorts of really pretty horrific diseases. And when they brought them over to the Americas, I mean, what really conquered the Americas, this is the germs part of Guns, Germs and steel is these, these exotic diseases that native people had absolutely no immunity to.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. You know, another one about to notch to notch to lawn.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

When you think about sort of your, if you don't have the luxury of spending a lot of time studying history and you get this idea of, you know, people living in tents and small scale habitations, that that's what Europeans found. It always struck me that when they, when they, when the Spanish got there, they had zoos. Yeah, yeah, they had zoos with, I mean, not foreign animals from other continents, but they had zoos holding animals like bison from places that they wouldn't even the, the, the, the, the, the residents of those cities could have gone and seen animals on the streets that they would have no prayer of encountering in normal life. Things collected from far away, from far to the south, from far to the north brought. And you could go like, where's that from? You know, it'd be like as weird as when you take your kids, they see a giraffe that people would have that experience and see. Like, yeah, like they would have, you know, a jaguar, they would have a buffalo, they would have birds from South America.

[Dan Flores]

Well, it's pretty clear that, you know, aggregates of charismatic and intriguing animals from the far edges of, of human knowledge assemble together for public viewing. In effect, the word, of course, our word is zoo. That is a very old human impulse. I Mean, and you know, we have no idea, it's possible that the Clovis people had something like that. But as you pointed out, we certainly do know that the Aztecs, which had an empire that stretched for hundreds, thousands of miles in every direction, they were doing that very thing. They were collecting animals out at the far reaches of their empire and bringing them to the citadel city of the empire and assembling them into zoos for, you know, for the public entertainment of their citizenry. I mean, that's, that's so, you know, I mean, I've, I've have argued in my books, especially in Wild New World, the most recent one, that, which is a book about, you know, the long term story of humans and, and animals in North America, that this is something, and I know I derived this from Paul Shepard from reading Paul shepherd many years ago, that this fascination with the natural history of the living world around us is something that is impossibly ancient in the human story. Every time we look back into the past, we find examples of it and it survives today. And one of the ways it survives, I mean, I don't have children myself. I know you do though, and I'll bet this happened with you because it happens with, every time I visit somebody's home and they have young kids and they show me the nursery, there are always little elephants and buffaloes and monkeys. And so what that is getting at is that it's knowledge about natural history and about other living creatures that is the very first step in kind of the organization of the brain, in creating a taxonomy of the world around you. You know, and then when, for little boys in particular, when you get to be 8 or 10 years old, you know, you start collecting hot wheeled cars and things like that. And that provides you with the next step of taxonomy. But that human desire to kind of organize everything into an understandable world really starts with animals. And that's why we do this with toddlers. The first thing you teach them really is the difference between, well, this is a picture of an elephant, it has this long trunk, and this is a picture of a horse, it has this tail. And that probably, you know, is something we humans have been doing for 2 million years.

[Steve Rinella]

Have you ever thought about why American, why American people, when they put a mobile above the crib, why is it African fauna generally?

[Dan Flores]

Now that's, that's a good question, you know, and why is it elephants, Elephants and giraffes?

[Steve Rinella]

I mean, because they're so distinguishable. I don't know.

[Dan Flores]

They're distinguishable, interestingly, of course, it's the living Pleistocene that we're showing them. And so there may be. I mean, Randall, take it away, man. You should maybe do a piece on the evolution of something like that.

[Steve Rinella]

The mobile.

[Corey Jacobsen]

I was just thinking, when you were talking about animals, I was like, yeah, why don't we just hang desks and chairs around the. This is your world. This is what you'll have. Keyboards.

[Dan Flores]

A keyboard.

[Corey Jacobsen]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And a phone.

[Dan Flores]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

It must be some deep. Like the. The. The African fauna must be some, like, deep thing about the cradle of. You know, like you're speaking to some deep genetic memory of the cradle of Africa or something, or it's just easy to tell apart. Yeah.

[Corey Jacobsen]

And I also think it's like, those are real animals, you know, like, they're big, they're toothy, they got wild horns.

[Steve Rinella]

They're.

[Corey Jacobsen]

There's something about. I don't know, there's something about the exoticism of those creatures compared to what we see around us today. So I still look at something like an ibex, and I'm just like, that's an animal.

[Dan Flores]

When I was writing Wild New World, I kept encountering over and over again the stories, especially when you get to the 20th century, when most of the charismatic animals in North America are gone by that time, are reduced to such small numbers that you hardly ever have a chance to see them. I kept encountering over and over again these people who become really prominent conservationists in the United States, you know, and found all sorts of organizations from the Sierra Club on, who acquired their fascination for nature and for the wild by going to Africa. And they came back from Africa and decided, okay, we're going to try to do something like that. And it's a kind of an indication size and variety, size and variety and an indication, you know, and of course, Africa, as a result of the big game parks there, preserved these animals so that people could go and see them. But it speaks in a way to the fact, you know, to Thoreau's lament back in the 1850s, that he lived in this impoverished world because his ancestors in New England had already taken out all these animals that he wanted to watch because he kept these meticulous notes about when the birds, particular species of birds arrive in the spring and when they nest and when the beavers are hatching or having their kits. So he goes through all this process and realizes, oh, my God, I'm missing the lynx, I'm missing the moose. I'm missing black bears. Those have all been taken out. He could read the accounts of the first colonists in New England who were describing pigeon flights and huge numbers of wolves. And here he sits in the 1850s and all of that is gone. And he feels like, as he says, I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth except demigods have come along before me and plucked from the heavens the best of the stars. And so I think in some ways, what I kept running into with all these American conservationists who had to go to Africa first before they were realizing how important it was to, you know, campaign on behalf of nature in America had something to do with the fact that we lost so much of the magic in North America. And it's like, in order to get it, you had to go somewhere else to glimpse it.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dan Flores]

In order to glimpse it and understand.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, we've touched on this in the past. It's kind of a. Like a. Like a conundrum of history and talking about Native peoples. We talked about this when we were talking about, like, Chaco society and things. Is there is a sort of a custody battle, a cultural custody battle about, you know, like, whose story is what. Right.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Like, do. If you're not Native American, do you have a right to. A right r I g H t to write w r I T e about Native culture?

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And. And, and as you're telling, like, when you're talking about it, is there a cult? Like a. Like a European bias, a colonial bias? You won't get it. Right. And when we've talked about this, I don't think you. You don't. You don't punt on it. But you have a great point. As you said, like, there's human history. Right. Like, as a human being, you're interested in human history.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And human history travels all around the world. And it. And it's weird to put. This is my words, not yours. I'd like you to speak on it. But it's weird that you would then start drawing sort of like borders of where your interest in human history can't go, you know?

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Like, how have you grabbed. Because you've had to been challenged about that being a history. Like in teaching and writing about the American west and teaching about Native peoples, you had to have encountered the sentiment of, like, well, who are you?

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

To go telling people about that, you know?

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, I would. I would say so. One of the. The probably important steps in my career was I. I published an article in a really fancy academic journal, the Journal of American history, in 1992 about what happened to the buffalo. And it was a complete recasting of the story. And for the first time, and this was a period of time, the 1980s, 1990s, probably back to the 1970s, when a lot of people in the environmental movement were sort of using Native people as, you know, here were our stand ins for conservation living and environmental living. I mean, you all remember the famous ad where the Indian steps out of his canoe onto the shore of Manhattan island, and he steps out and there's trash all underfoot and a tear rolls down his face. Well, that particular piece that I did about what happened to buffalo was. It was not only a complete recasting of the story and kind of an environmental telling of the story. I pulled in things that nobody had ever pulled in before, like when horses were reintroduced into the Americas and went wild. I mean, they obviously were drinking the water and grazing the grass that bison had also been subsisting on. And so they had an effect. And there were a whole numbers of things that I plugged into that story that I told. A changing climate. In the middle of the 19th century, there was a drought that lasted for like, 15 years on the Great Plains and reduced the numbers of buffalo. So I went through this whole sequence of five or six sort of new and compelling. Obviously, they were compelling because a lot of other historians, like Eliot west, sort of immediately picked up on this, these compelling reasons for what happened. And one of the things I also did was I pointed out, which, you know, people were kind of shy about doing at the time, that Native people had been seduced into the market economy. And just as we were talking about this yesterday, it was a situation where Europeans were offering a transformative technology, metalware, guns. And if you didn't do it in exchange for. For bison robes, and if you didn't participate in it, and everybody else, all the other Native groups around you did, you ended up disadvantaging yourself to the point where you might not survive. Whereas the Southern Cheyennes, just down the way, were going to do very well because they, in fact, were participating in the market trade.

[Steve Rinella]

And they're now armed with guns, and.

[Dan Flores]

They'Re armed with guns, and they're armed with all sorts of metal tools. And so I talked about that. And so what that meant, of course, was that in 1992, an article comes out that recasts the whole story about what happened to buffalo in the 19th century, and it also talks about the Indian role in it. Well, I immediately, as you might suspect, had various Native people get in touch with me and say exactly what you were referring To a few minutes ago. What gives you the right to say this, to write about this? One of the people who did so was Vine Deloria. And Vine Deloria, who was a very famous Indian author in those days, he was at the University of Colorado. He was famous for books like God is Red, Custer Died for your Sins. And Vine Deloria called me up and said, I read your piece, and I think it's really good. And what I want you to do, if you would, is come down to the University of Colorado and spend three days with me. We're having a conference. I'm bringing in the wildlife managers from a bunch of the western reservations. And I want you to come down, but I don't want you to speak. I don't need you to tell them the story that you just wrote about buffalo. I just want you to come down here and sit beside me and listen to them. And I said, okay, I will do it. And that's exactly what I did. And so I never. Vine Deloria never asked me to speak. And for three days, I sat right beside him, sort of in the protection of this guy who was this looming figure, and listened to all these wildlife managers talk about the Native approach to managing wildlife. And of course, what he was interested in having me do was to understand the Native approach to managing wildlife. But what I brought away from that particular experience, and I have said this in every book that I have written that includes a section on Native people since and on all kinds of other people, is that just as you inferred me a few minutes ago, I'm interested in the human story. And I think as a human, I have a perfect right to write about humans. An R I G H t to be able to write about humans, regardless of their culture. And I think in a way, the whole impulse was, you know, I'm an Italian American. Only I can write about Italian Americans. Only I can write about Christopher Columbus or something. I think that's a stage in our. Our development that probably is kind of dropping away some, because I think, to me, the argument that we're all human beings and that we should be interested in the human story everywhere, among every group of people. We all come from the same source. We're all part of the evolutionary river, the Darwinian river. That's the stronger argument here. And so I stand by that.

[Steve Rinella]

It'd be. I think it'd be in many ways, you know, an impoverished world if you weren't able to bring all those different perspectives to things, you know? Yeah, I think, like that big picture of like, the human story is pretty compelling when you imagine that when. When all. When humans spread all around the world and they started to meet back up. They were meeting back up. Do you know what I mean? You kind of lose sight. You sort of lose sight of that. That, like, that people, these groups moved around and it was so long, they kind of forgot about each other. They lost track of each other. But then all of a sudden, they come back and they're like, wow, yeah.

[Dan Flores]

Look what you did with your time.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, you guys got so tan.

[Dan Flores]

And everybody is fascinated, you know, everybody is fascinated by. By everybody else. I mean, that's part of the whole first contact, you know, notion is that we get to see these people who maybe 30,000 years ago, we actually knew some of their ancestors or our ancestors knew their ancestors. And now, once again, we're meeting up and seeing them and wow, look. Look what you guys did with your time and your place. And it's absolutely fascinating. I mean, that's sort of the whole premise of cultural anthropology, is that, oh, my God, you know, humans have sort of fractured into tens of thousands of cultural groups with all these different deities and all these different ideas of creation and, wow. Isn't it incredible to sort of listen to what you guys have to say about what you think is going on with human life? So, yeah, I mean, that's because, like, you and I think, like all of us sitting around the table and probably most of the people listening to this, I'm fascinated with all those differences. Yeah. I would say the stronger argument is it's the human story that compels us, and nobody has any kind of lock on a particular one. I mean, I'm certainly willing to concede that some people might not want to share the details of their religious practices and ceremonies and all that. That's everybody's perfect, right? But the bigger story, I think, is ours for understanding because that's how we. We managed to figure out who we are.

[Steve Rinella]

I took this class one time called the Structure of Modern English. And in it, the guy had said, the professor, I can't remember who taught that class, but he said if at the end of the Civil War, if you had built an impenetrable barrier along the Mason Dixon Line, that at this point those two populations wouldn't be able.

[Dan Flores]

To communicate with one another.

[Steve Rinella]

You wouldn't communicate anymore. So you imagine that little gap and that kind of like. So when you imagine these. These. These peoples getting separated, he's talking about not being able to communicate in 100 years, a couple hundred Years.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Imagine these groups of people separating and you get to watch what, like 10,000 years of being subject to different climates and then different founder effects. Just. It could be as small as personality differences.

[Dan Flores]

That's a very good point. Absolutely.

[Steve Rinella]

And the wildly different directions.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

People go in terms of religion. You see these crazy themes, animism, you know, all these cultures holding out the ideas that landscape features have a sort of spirit or personality. You see these continuities that they'll. That folks will eventually figure out agriculture, if they can. They'll get better and better at launching projectiles. Right. They'll, like. A lot of them will figure out vertical walls. Right. But other wheel. Yeah, but other things are just so different, man.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, other things are so different. Now that's a. That's a really great argument, and that's why it's fascinating to explore it and to approach all of it with a curious and open mind and to allow yourself to be completely intrigued without falling back on the kind of where, okay, so our ideas are better than their ideas. I mean, it's not a case of better, it's a case of different. And how did you guys arrive at this particular notion? But there are some, obviously some commonalities that are all over the planet. And you know, the old animistic religion ideas that you just mentioned, where there are deities in wild animals and there are deities in landforms and all of that, that is so widespread as part of the European tradition, too. The Druids, for example, of only 1200, 1500 years ago in Western Europe are certainly practitioners of that kind of animistic approach to religion. So it's something that is so widespread that it's clear, it probably dates back a very, very long time. I argue in Wild New World, in fact, that the idea that native people have of being kin to other animals, so the European line about that went in a different direction. Where humans are. We're the only ones created in the image of God and the only ones with an everlasting soul, then everything else is different. And that actually is an anomaly compared to the idea that. Which is kind of a proto Darwinian idea that we're all related to one another, we're all part of the same kind of kinship order. And it requires somebody like Darwin using science in the 19th century to finally bring the European world back to that recognition because it had gone in a sort of an unusual direction with the notion, well, humans are completely different from everything else out there. I mean, we're special, we're exceptional, and everything Else is something else, while rather.

[Steve Rinella]

Than being entangled in this kind of elaborate give and take relationship where you had to show. You had to show honor to other species, or else other species would deprive you of the benefits of their use.

[Dan Flores]

That's it? Yeah. Yeah, that's it. And that, I think, is very old in the human experience.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, I'm gonna. I'm gonna close with a couple details here. The American west with Dan Flores will premiere May 6th. You can find it anywhere you find your podcasts. It'll pop up every other Tuesday. Yeah.

[Jordan Siller]

On its own feed.

[Steve Rinella]

It'll be in a cat in the history category. If you're. If you're shopping around. I have here short show description and then show description. But the short show description is only two lines shorter. I'm gonna do the big dog.

[Jordan Siller]

Do the big dog.

[Steve Rinella]

Dan Flore celebrates the American west by chronicling the heroes, scoundrels, and events that shaped its history, from the Battle of Adobe Walls to the Mountain Meadows Massacre. What goes back more than that? Where's the other one?

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, it's gotta be the other one. That sounds like an early.

[Steve Rinella]

Longtime Western author, Dan Flores presents a big picture history of an American west you've never encountered. Covering a vast span in a western America whose landscapes and wild animals drew people from around the world, this podcast tells a new story of our most fascinating region. To give people a sense, the series opens up with kind of a overview. It's called west of Everything. Opens up with some of the deep antiquity and introduces some of the broader themes. Episode two is clo visia. Is that how you like pronounce that?

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Clovisia the Beautiful, about the. The. The early human cultures, Clovis cultures, ravens and coyotes. America is episode three. And that gets into that. That long period we talked about between early arriving humans, what happened between then and European contact, and how did people seem to have developed a very, I'll call it harmonious or static environment, static relationship with the natural world. All of a sudden we go 10, 000 years and there's like one extinction.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

In 10, 000 years of human history in the New World, there's one extinction.

[Dan Flores]

That's right.

[Steve Rinella]

And then, man, we get busy.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

On extinctions, it changes pretty rapidly after that, old man. America is a story of kind of, why does the coyote or the coyote. Why does the coyote come in as such a complex religious figure in Native American culture? The wild new world of the American Serengeti is episode five about, you know, everybody's idea of the Serengeti in Africa about that. That was the perception that people who arrived on the grain plains had at first. It was. It was. It was as. It was a Serengeti of its time. Survivors from a Lost World. Episode six talks about the American pronghorn. There's an episode on something we touched on today, Jefferson's other Lewis and Clark, and that. That's the first seven episodes.

[Dan Flores]

It's the first seven, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

So a lot of stuff, if you're a fan of American history, if you're a fan of the west, this is a lot of stuff that you probably don't know about, but that will really shape your understanding of these other big moments and puts those other big moments into context.

[Dan Flores]

I think my favorite phrase for something like this is that it will rearrange the furniture in your head.

[Steve Rinella]

So when you get to be like I do, reading about the battle Little Bighorn, you'll have a much more expansive view of how that you'll have a. Instead of a Those few days that led up to that, you'll have a. What are the thousands of years that led to this moment?

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

All right. Thank you, Dan, for coming on. Can't wait for the show.

[Dan Flores]

Oh, thanks for all of this, Steve. I appreciate it, man.

[Jordan Siller]

Everyone subscribe to the new feed. Very important. Thank you.

[Steve Rinella]

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