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- [00:00]
A
A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Megan Kate Nelson, who is of course also a historian and the author of some of my favorite books on 19th century America and the American west, including the Three Cornered War, which you all will probably have heard of. And if you haven't, I'm kind of shocked. Saving Yellowstone and her newest book, which has, by the time this episode is released, literally just come out. And we are talking in large part about today, the Westerners, myth making and belonging on the American frontier. Welcome to the show.
- [01:21]
B
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
- [01:24]
A
Firstly, can I just say, and we talked about this a little bit before the start of the episode, but I want the audience to know about this, that I am much like yourself, a sort of dyed in the wool Westerner who is currently living on the East Coast. And I just want to take a minute and acknowledge that and talk about kind of what we said before, which is that it's a very strange experience, particularly as someone who feels, in my case and I this may or may not be true for you, I feel a sort of intense and long lasting affinity for being from the West. Is that your experience too?
- [02:00]
B
Absolutely. I mean, I haven't lived full time in the west since I was 18 years old and I still think of myself as a Westerner even though I've lived in the east for, for much longer. And I'm, I've always been fascinated by that. I've always been fascinated by regions and regional identity and, you know, taught classes on regional history and literature. And so, you know, this has been a long standing interest of mine, sort of, what does it mean to be a Westerner? But yeah, when I first went to the east coast for college and people found out I was from Colorado, one of the first questions I was always get was, do you ride your horse to school?
- [02:41]
A
Huh? Now they would be like, do you ride your skis to school?
- [02:45]
B
Exactly. Well, that was the second question. Like, do you ski every day. And I am from Littleton, which is a suburb of Denver.
- [02:52]
A
Sure.
- [02:53]
B
You know, grew up in a 1970s suburban development. I had a view of the mountains, but I did not ride a horse to school. And, you know, these were. I went to Harvard undergrad. These are some of the smartest people you've ever met in your life. And this is the perception they have of the West. Right. So. So this has always been really interesting to me, kind of who Westerners are, who gets to be a Westerner at different points. And what does that even mean in our culture and especially, you know, as I think we have daily proof now in our politics.
- [03:30]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And thank goodness you've written a book literally about that and the early sort of conceptions of it. But, I mean, I'm just glad that we have someone on the show who, like, kind of who gets this thing that I feel is kind of innate to me and is incredibly difficult to translate to people who did not have the experience of not just being in the west, but being from or of the west and feeling that as a sort of formative, both personality category, identity category, that this creates a specific way of engaging with. With the world. I also want to say that I find your books in general, and these three that I mentioned earlier are the two that I mentioned earlier, plus the Westerners, both incredibly meaningful because they have such a wonderful way of explicating these things, but also incredibly difficult as a person who's born and raised in the American west and amidst all of these narratives that you do such a wonderful job of complicating in your work. Right. Like, it's a weird thing to be. I mean, when I was in school, we were going to, like, see the end of the Oregon Trail every year. And, like, a lot of what you do is about being from the west and the pioneer mentality and all that. Like, Joan Didion has a good essay on the pioneer mentality and what it's like to be from the West. She has a whole. A whole book of essays on this, actually. But do you have a similar experience of working on this stuff where you both are like, this is meaningful, but it really challenges a lot of the things that you grow up hearing about and learning about yourself as a person within this space?
- [05:04]
B
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think this is one of the debates we always have in the historical profession. Right. Like, do you need to be from a place in order to write about it, or does that make it more complicated? Are you not able to be objective if you are too embedded in that place, or is there a way that you can kind of ride the line? And what I hope I've been doing is riding the line, kind of having that experience where I can put you on the ground in the West. And Westerners understand, you know, completely what this is, but then also describe it in such a way that people who've maybe never been to these places understand or get to know how huge the west is, how big the skies are. And we were talking before in the pre show about the scale of the West. You know, the mountains are impossibly huge. You are moving through these spaces where you don't see anyone for quite a while. There are really huge distances between places. You have a sort of sense of the bigness of nature and of the Earth itself. So there's that kind of aspect of it, and I want to make that clear. And I did have a section in the prologue that ultimately got taken out, but kind of describing what the west is, that you know it when you feel it, instead of seeing it, really. And so the west, for me, is the high and dry. Like when you start to really. Your lips start getting chapped, you kind of. Your breathing gets a little more difficult. You are in this space where your body is kind of registering the change. That's how you know you're moving into a different region. And I think that goes for other regions also in the United States. But I'm, you know, partly, among many things, a landscape and environmental historian. And so. And some might even call me an environmental determinist in some ways. But that's a. That's a huge part of it. And understanding both the nature of the west and then the nature of the West. Right. Is important to me as a historian. But there is that struggle. There is that sort of, how can I remain objective about this place? And how can I actually see the myth of the west from a distance? Yeah. Cause it's so strong. It has such a pull. Right. In our American culture. And it's everywhere. It's in movies and film. It's in fashion. It's in. I mean, Beyonce did a whole country album and was on a horse with a cowboy hat and started this whole kind of sequined, amazing trend of Cowboy Carter. And that is taking the mythic west and, of course, viewing it from a different angle and kind of taking it in a new direction, which I completely appreciate and love. But that is one of those things. It's really hard to separate yourself and kind of tease out, I guess, all of the strands of what the mythic west is and not kind of buy into it yourself and feel romantic about it all.
- [08:13]
A
Absolutely. I mean, it goes with this sort of thing that people say. That is, sometimes they're saying it with derision, sometimes they're saying it appreciatively. Where they do sort of, like, all research is me search stuff, which I actually don't think fits with my own research, really. And is it true? For a lot of people. But there is an element when you're looking at these people that I think is really aided by understanding the, like, holy shit moment of being in the. In the west, which they experience. The people you're talking about in this book experience over and over again, where they come somewhere and think, oh, my God, this is huge, or this is. Is different, or, this is incredible, or there's opportunity or whatever. And part of that, I do think it requires having had at least one or two of those moments yourself in order to actually understand the mentality that you're trying to make visible to your audience. That you have to have been like, oh, I know what it's like to see the Front Range for the first time. I know what it's like to be in the high desert. Like, those things, like, you kind of have to, like, have your own. Oh, my God. In order to be able to understand that the way that other people were experiencing this in the past. And now, obviously, you see the Front Range now, and there are lots of tall buildings around it, too, but that's. You know, the mountains are still pretty damn big.
- [09:34]
B
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And we are, you know, when we're talking about the Front Range, we are talking about the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, you know, extending, I mean, pretty much all the way from Montana to New Mexico. But the Front Range I am most familiar with, of course, is in Colorado. And it's also hard because they didn't start calling the Rockies the Rockies until a certain point, which I still have not been able to identify. They called it the Snowy Range, huh? Yeah. And they didn't call that area the Front Range for a while either. So I had to decide whether I was going to call the Mountain Range that or whether I was going to actually, you know, put readers on the ground before those names even existed. And I decided to go with the former just because I thought it would create a lot of confusion if there was a sudden n. I mean, I think if you're a fiction writer, you can do that a little bit more if you're gonna place your characters kind of in this one singular moment, you can call it the snowy range, but then otherwise, people are gonna be like, what? And this is the challenge, too, is dealing with the complexity of history, but also making it intelligible and clear to yourself as the historian, but also to your readers to deal with really complex ideas and complex histories. But write about it in such a way that it doesn't create confusion.
- [10:56]
A
Yeah, I think about this a lot because I. In my first book, which feels insane to say, the book that I just submitted.
- [11:04]
B
Ooh, congratulations.
- [11:06]
A
Thank you very much. I talk about Lviv in it, which gets called a bunch of different things over time. And I talk about a lot of spaces in parts of Ukraine that have gone back and forth between being like Ukraine or Russia or Poland and trying to decide which word to use for them in order to make it legible. And so often I say, I'll say something like Lviv, which was at that time Lvov or whatever. Like, yeah, it is a weird. It's a weird thing that people don't really think about that. You're gonna have to figure out some of these. These legibility issues for your audience. But that's the work. Like that literally is.
- [11:40]
B
Exactly, exactly. That is the fundamental aspect of the job. Yes.
- [11:45]
A
We should probably talk about the person that we are here to discuss.
- [11:48]
B
We should.
- [11:49]
A
Who did you come here virtually to talk with me about?
- [11:55]
B
So I came here to talk about someone who most people probably have never heard of before, a man named Ovando James Hollister, if you are a real Civil War nerd, if you are a real Southwestern nerd, you might have heard of O.J. hollister, but otherwise perhaps not. And he would be chagrined to know that you don't know who he is, because this was one of his primary goals, was to become well known and to become a well known author in particular. So he was. He had such an interesting life. He was born in the 1830s, had three brothers, another brother who. Who died in infancy, but had three brothers. His parents, when he was only five years old, converted to Shakerism. They were living in Massachusetts at the time. They moved to New Lebanon, New York, and joined that very famous colony of Shakers. Gave up all of their worldly possessions and donated them to New Lebanon. And at that point, Ovando was separated from his parents and he lived with his brothers and cousins. So there were other members of the family that had joined this Shaker community. And he grew up with all boys in this Shaker community, was educated with a kind of practical education. They decided that he would be a farmer when he was a teenager. One of the interesting things about Shakerism, though, is that if you grew up there, you could choose at age kind of 18 to 21 if you wanted to stay or you wanted to go. So he chose to go. And so we find him after that point in the 1850s in Kansas. So he's one of these guys who ends up going west to try and, you know, sort of get some opportunities for himself. But he also went there, I think, because Shakers, part of their belief system was equality amongst races and sexes. And so he was a huge abolitionist. So I was trying to find out if he had gone to Kansas, actually during the Kansas, Missouri kind of fight over slavery and whether slavery was going to be in the territory. But I could. I could not find out. The only trace of him I found was in 1859. So he ends up there, and then he decides he doesn't want to be a farmer and he goes west to Colorado for the Colorado Gold Rush. So he's one of these gold miners. If you have read the Three Cornered War, then you have actually read about Ovando Hollister before because he wrote one of the great kind of accounts of that war from Colorado, from the US army side, from the first Colorado. So he's in the gold mines, he ends up in the US Army. He fights in two of the major battles of that conflict with Texas soldiers at Apache Canyon and Glorieta Pass. But then he develops a hernia which he cannot recover from, and he's discharged from the army in 1863. And then he embarks upon a life as a writer and a booster in Colorado. And this is where he starts to suck a little bit. Because up to this point, you know, what we know about him is his own writing. And he's talking about being an abolitionist. He's talking about fighting with the Confederates who they have imprisoned about slavery and how they are wrong to be advocating for this Confederate cause. He's very overt about it. Then once he kind of starts his own newspaper in Black Hawk, Colorado, and starts becoming a real booster for the state of Colorado, he develops a very anti indigenous stance that is very pro war and pro Native extermination. So he's one of these guys, and you actually find a lot of these people in mid 19th century America who simultaneously argue for abolition of slavery and potentially black equality at the same time that they are arguing for the extermination of Native people. And, you know, to us, that seems completely insane, right? But there Were these people all over the United States? Many white Americans believed these exact same two things. And they could hold these two ideas in their head because both of these ideas to them were about the future prosperity of the United States. And so he really, from this point, from the mid-1860s onward, is using newspapers, is using the books he's writing to advocate for this pioneer vision of the American west that really only includes white men, although he is actually quite an advocate for feminism and for women's equality. But he engages in the latter part of his life in this just insane fight with the Latter Day Saints of Utah. And one of his arguments against them is that he sees polygamy as oppressive toward women. And this is one of the arguments he makes. But this is also part of his larger vision that the United States needs to kind of get rid of Mormonism and bring them into the fold, because this is the vision of a white American pioneer community, does not involve Mormons and polygamy and their kind of system of government. So. So he develops through his life this. This a little bit sketchy and very problematic stance, which kind of takes the shine off his earlier work on behalf of the United States and the Union early in his life.
- [17:49]
A
And I think it's interesting also, because here using the word problematic is not just like, oh, he's problematic, we should cancel him. It's like he's presenting a problem like these things that he believe maybe fit a broader ideological position, which we'll get into, but like, also just are at odds with one another in all of these different ways. And like, that is problematic, as in literally posing a problem for us to reconcile them or for you to reconcile them in your thinking through of him and his life. Maybe the way to handle this one, in terms of how we think through a lot of this stuff, is maybe to go through chronologically his life, because there are different spaces that he's in with different ways of thinking as he's in these spaces and different people he's surrounding himself with. And I think the him sucking, like, develops over time out of these things.
- [18:46]
B
Yes.
- [18:46]
A
But I'm glad that you also brought up his whole, like, Mormonism thing, because that was. Is a fascinating part of the book where all of a sudden he's like, on an anti Mormon quest out of nowhere.
- [18:58]
B
Yes. Which is so interesting considering his Shaker upbringing.
- [19:02]
A
Yeah, exactly. So we'll get there. So you've already explained kind of the Shaker portion of his life, and then he does something which happens a lot with historical figures, particularly ones who have a lot of documentation later in their lives, but not earlier, which is he just pops up somewhere all of a sudden. Right. And he's in Kansas. What is drawing people from places like New York, where he is when he's younger, to Kansas for mining. I mean, obviously money, but yeah. What other than yeah. Hi there, it's Claire. The episode you're currently listening to is free for everybody, but the next one won't be because we're trying to make this show independently and sustainably. We switch off between free weeks and Patreon weeks. So if you're a fan of good, accurate public history made by actual experts, consider supporting our Patreon. It's only one tier, which means everyone who subscribes gets access to the same perks across the board. For the price of a pair of socks, you'll get access to a new episode every week instead of just the bi weekly free ones. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get access to the full episode archive, bonus content, early access to merch, and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives to sweeten the deal. Just head over to patreon.com this guy sucked. Or follow the link in the episode description to sign up.
- [20:26]
B
Yeah, so you know, when he's born in the 1830s, where he ultimately ends up in his life is not part of the United States. Right. It is part of. Well, first of all, it's indigenous country. It's Indian territory of many, many different tribal nations, but it's also northern Mexico. And so it's not really until. It's not until 1848 that what we know of the west kind of comes into the country. And so as he's growing up, it's interesting to see because he never. He never wrote about this part of his life, except in a kind of dreamy sort of way where it's the eve of battle and he's remembering the simpler times of growing up, you know, and running around the fields in. Sure. In New York. You know, he never really talks about this moment and what motivated him as a teenager, someone just becoming an adult, to leave that space and go to Kansas. But what's happening in the 1840s and 50s is that the United States just declares that all of this land, from the Pacific to the Missouri and the Mississippi river, is now part of the United States. And the suggestion there is that it's open for anyone to go and settle it. They're not yet helped by the Homestead act of 1862, but they will be and there's a sort of sense in the 1850s, which is when he's making the decision to leave, that the country's really on a precipice. Right? I mean, Kansas and Nebraska and Missouri are kind of in this violent upswell at the center of this debate about slavery. Because of course, the west is the real center of these arguments that Northerners and Southerners are having. Will slavery be expanded into the territories? This is part of the whole fight in bloody Kansas. Abolitionists and free soilers moving to Kansas and then pro slavery advocates moving there to try and vote in slavery or non slavery as part of popular sovereignty. And this is all happening kind of 1854, 55, 56. And this is right at the moment when Ovando Hollister is trying to decide what his future is going to be. So because abolitionism is so such a huge part of Shakerism, I think that's one thing that's driving him to Kansas. Another thing is that one of his cousins who was a really good friend of his, Charles, he had gone to Iowa. So he was kind of out there in the region. And this is a very important part of migration, no matter who we're talking about, no matter what direction they're moving into the west and through the west and out of the west during this period. A lot of it is with family or with a kind of sense of family. And so I think he sees Kansas as a good place to go for someone of his progressive nature. It also, you know, is a place of abolitionist agitation. Then in 1857, there's a panic and depression which throws all of these young men out of work and they start looking for opportunities elsewhere. And the US has already pushed several indigenous peoples out of Kansas and into Indian Territory and has taken their lands and is offering them up for sale through the land office. So this is where we find ovando Hollister in 1859, is buying this parcel of land. It was hard to find him, though. He kind of disappears. He shows up in a census in 1850 as part of the Shaker community in New Lebanon. And then we have some accounts from his cousin Charles about Ovan o kind of coming out to Kansas. But I was searching through, I was trying to figure out if he had gone with anyone from the Shaker community, establish these places. There was a little town called Hesper, which was a Quaker community. And Shakers had a fair amount kind of in common with Quakers at this time in terms of their worldviews. And I thought maybe he had gone there and Actually one of his family members ends up like living in Hesper. So I was combing through census records and trying to figure out if you know, he had been in this place. But in a lot of these places, in this time in the western territories, if you're trying to find someone, it's incredibly hard. There's not a lot of census taking if they don't voluntarily leave a record, sometimes there is no trace of them. If they don't buy property, if they don't, you know, sue someone, if they don't get thrown in jail, if they don't become the subject of a newspaper article or write a letter to an editor, you really don't know kind of where they are. So it's not until later when he starts writing about his time in the gold mines that we kind of get a sense of, of what he was doing kind of in 1859. There's also an important environmental element which is there is a years long drought that is going on in the Midwest and the west at this point. And so Ovander Holster actually is sort of unlucky in this timing in that he moves to Kansas right as it becomes really hard to become a farmer in Kansas. So he. Yeah, yeah. So he's not doing well. Charles isn't really doing well either. He moves from Iowa with his wife and they buy land right next to him. So it's like, oh, here's family. Right. But what does happen is that in 1859 some prospectors find gold in the Rocky Mountains outside of what will become Denver City. And at this point that whole area is western Kansas also, which is funny to think about, especially considering, I mean, Colorado, if there are any, you know, listeners out there from Colorado. You know there are.
- [26:28]
A
I know there are actually.
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B
Okay, excellent. You know, our natural, and I'm using natural facetiously enmity toward Nebraska, but also Kansas. So the fact that, that so much of eastern Colorado was once Kansas probably chaps a lot of people's hides, right? In Colorado. We don't want to think of ourselves as Kansans at any point in time.
- [26:53]
A
This is a moment for me to give a special shout out to all the teachers at Cottonwood Plains Elementary School in Colorado who, who I know listen to the show because I have heard that they listen to and discuss the show. So there's your. All my Colorado elementary school teachers having
- [27:14]
B
also gone to elementary school in Colorado and gone to pioneer camp during the summer where I learned how to use a printing press.
- [27:25]
A
Wow. This is like I, we used to as I said, go to the Oregon Trail every year. And we learned to churn butter.
- [27:30]
B
Yes, of course you would. Of course you would. Yeah. These places. We need to write something about these places because they were, I mean, pretty incredible. I can still smell, like, the oil of the printing press kind of in the. And how hot it was. Cause it was summer. But yes, yes. Anyway, I don't know if that's still exists in Littleton. It might. I don't know. We'll have to get. We can find.
- [27:56]
A
We can find out.
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B
We can find out. We're going to. And you teachers let us know if you still go there and do those things. Because I've loved letterpress ever since. But yeah, so he. So he's in Kansas, and suddenly all of these prospectors come streaming through, you know, Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa on their way to the Rocky Mountains to make their fortune. And this is also in response to the panic of 1857 too. Right. Like, there' not a lot of opportunity. And so what better than a gold rush to, you know, kind of act as a kind of release valve for that? Right? So Ovando decides, ultimately, you know what? I'm gonna go try this out, because why not? So he strikes out on his own, which is interesting. And he never really lives with family again. And as far as I can tell, doesn't even when he gets married later in his life, none of his family is there at the wedding, so he is on his own, which is interesting and also slightly unusual. He's the only protagonist in the book that doesn't have a kind of strong network of family who he's in touch with constantly. So he was also someone who made friends pretty easily. I think he was one of those guys. And, you know, he grew up with a bunch of guys, and that comes
- [29:19]
A
through in the book. Like, you. You point out that it seems like whenever he pops back up, he's always with people of influence. He always has friends around him. He's sort of, whether intentionally or not, cultivating this network of people who matter or are wealthy or whatever that he then intersects with in these very interesting ways later as well. And you see this early on in him being in these. I think you say, literally, let's see if I can find this.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Because he.
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B
I know he go. He goes up to. I think what you're. What you're thinking about is his friendship with Samuel Curtis. Yes. Who is also a Kansan whose family went to Kansas as part of the kind of bleeding Kansas free soil fight and who had gone to Colorado initially as part of a survey team to lay out the city of Denver. So there is a Curtis street in Denver, for those of you who are from Colorado, is actually named after this guy who bunked with Ovando Hollister in a mining town called Missouri City, which is up by Blackhawk in Central City. So he somehow. And when you see the census record, it's so interesting because he's with these two other guys. He has nothing. He has no property. And Tamiel Curtis has $4,000, which is a lot of money for that time. And I'm like, how did he get. It's like he just became roommates with.
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A
Like he has roommates with $4,000 is also an interesting. Like. Like that the person with $4,000 was like, let's live with him.
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B
Yeah, let's live with him. Let's have a mess together. Because this is what, you know, this is how they lived in.
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A
These boys.
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B
I know. And I think he was. He was always kind of searching, at least in this first part of his life, for these community of men, these communities that he could live with. So it didn't kind of freak him out to be up in the diggings in a community that was 90% male. Yeah, I mean, he may have actually preferred it, but that was how he grew up because they were sex segregated within this community. And so he was with all of his friends. And then later, you know, when he goes into the army, it's the same thing.
- [31:29]
A
Yeah.
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B
So. And he's. He's a guy's guy, I think, in. In this sense that he can make friends easily. He was quite funny and witty. He was well educated. He's constantly referring to Shakespearean plays in his. In his books. So he got a good education with the Shakers, but he also kind of knew how to. How to do things. You know, he wasn't from a wealthy family. He wasn't high falutin. He wasn't any of these things. So he ends up in the gold mines with tens of thousands of other young men from all over the country in the Rocky Mountains, in what's called the Mineral belt. So this is that Central City, Black Hawk area. Golden becomes the sort of gateway little town, even though Denver City really becomes the real one. But, yeah, he's up there when the war breaks out.
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A
Yeah, this is great impetus because say, okay, so then he joins. He joins the 1st Regiment of Colorado Volunteers. Is that right?
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B
Yeah. Ultimately, yes. The vision that he and his friend Sam Cook had. And here's again where he's attaching himself to someone who has connections because Sam Cooke is also Kansan and is connected to James Lane, who's a quite famous Jayhawk and who is putting together his own troops in Kansas. So their thought was actually to recruit a bunch of miners and then go down to Denver City and, you know, buy rifles and get their kits together and then go to Kansas and volunteer. So that was the plan.
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A
I will also add, in case people aren't aware, a Jayhawker is like an armed abolitionist fighter fighting in the Kansas and Missouri territories during the 1850s, what you referred to earlier as a bleeding Kansas period. Just in case anyone's like, what is that? So these are the people he's kind of throwing his lot in with. So it's important to understand that he's joining the war on the side. In this case of. Good.
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B
Yes.
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A
Kind of. Well, kind of question mark. There are asterisks next to that that show up.
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B
Yes. So he's one of these soldiers who, who feels very strongly that this is his duty to join the U.S. army. There's no question, even though there were lots of Confederates and Confederate leaning young men in these gold camps, lots of Southerners, and sometimes there were even fights in the gold camp about whether it was going to go kind of for the Confederacy or for the Union, but he had no doubts that there was no way he was going to fight for the Confederacy. So he believed it was his duty. He believed that the federal government, the U.S. army, was fighting for rights, that the Confederacy was attaching itself to a great evil. He was very definitely anti slavery. He was definitely an abolitionist. So this was part of his, his worldview. And so he volunteers, he helps to recruit this, like, company of 80 guys and they go down to Denver and then the governor of the Territory, because by this time Colorado has actually been admitted as a territory to the United States. It's been separated from Kansas. It has been called Colorado, even though on this President's Day, we should probably note, they wanted to call it Jefferson Territory, after, of course, Jefferson, the President, and then also because in honor of the Louisiana Purchase.
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A
Sure.
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B
Yes. But that didn't fly. So they called it Colorado. And so it is actually organized and there is a territorial governor and he meets with Sam Cooke and he says, actually, we really need you to stay here because we've heard that the Confederates are on the move from Texas and they are coming to take first New Mexico Territory and then Colorado. And so they discuss it with everyone and they decide to stay. I think Ovander Hollister would have had a very different life if things had not gone this way.
- [35:17]
A
And this is left out of. Not left out as in by historians, but of public Civil War memory. That there was all kinds of stuff happening in the western half of the. Of the United States.
- [35:28]
B
Yes.
- [35:29]
A
Like in terms of Civil War skirmishes and people trying to gain control of territory. It was not just something that was happening in the spaces that a lot of people for some reason remember the Civil War happening in. In terms of who are the stakeholders in it. Because actually a lot of the west is made into the space where. Where the imagination around this is happening.
- [35:50]
B
Oh yeah.
- [35:51]
A
So it is interesting because often people, I think, do not remember the west as being fundamentally at issue during a lot of the Civil War.
- [35:59]
B
I mean, even in Colorado. I had no idea growing up in Colorado that there were people like Ovando Hollister who fought in the Civil War in the region, like not just somewhere else.
- [36:12]
A
Yeah.
- [36:13]
B
I mean we always, we went to the Capitol on our field trips and there was a. There isn't any more, but there was a soldiers monument there. And did I know what kind of soldier that was? No, it was a Civil War soldier. No idea.
- [36:28]
A
Fascinating.
- [36:29]
B
I don't know if you growing up in Oregon had any like if that was part of your grown up, any sort of sense. Because there was some action in Oregon too. Like the Pacific Northwest was.
- [36:40]
A
Yeah, no, we did not. Nothing to be clear, absolutely nothing about the Civil War. It's all. Because everything is just like pioneers and the Oregon Trail and.
- [36:49]
B
Yeah.
- [36:50]
A
You know, maybe you might learn a little Lewis and Clark. Like you do learn like some indigenous history. At least growing up that was part of it. And that was because Oregon was seen as progressive compared to everywhere else in terms of what we were allowed to learn about in history class and like what we were actually doing. But even that was still pretty minimal. Definitely not the Civil War at all.
- [37:09]
B
Yeah. And I think that's pretty widespread throughout the west and so even in Colorado and New Mexico it doesn't appear. And this, this is what's so fascinating to me because we talk all the time and in the, in textbooks. Right. The coming of the Civil War is about the West. It is about the land sessions and the acquisitions from Mexico and will there be slavery in the territories. There are all these fights about that. There are fights about the route of the transcontinental railroad. You've got Jefferson Davis importing camels as, you know, a way to provide transportation in the West. And that was in the 1850s when he was the Secretary of War. And they are constantly fighting about this. And then the guns fire on Fort Sumter. And it's like, according to most Civil War historians, no one cares about the west anymore. It's not a part of anything. Nothing's happening there. No what battles, what. But the west was very much, you know, as you were noting earlier, part of that greater vision of the future. Right. The Confederacy wanted the west to expand their empire of slavery. And the United States federal government was like, oh, I don't think so. That's not going to happen. First of all, you literally cannot secede. Second of all, we're not going to let you turn the west into a landscape of slavery. This is a landscape of free labor. This is, you know, of white settlement. This is the future. So this is a real, like, that is the battleground in the west is about the future of the country. But yeah, somehow I. For a lot of different reasons, Civil War historians have focused almost solely on the Eastern theater. A little bit in the trans Mississippi west, but not really anything at all in the far West. And yeah, I'm still fighting.
- [39:02]
A
Yeah. I mean, the way that you see this Civil War plus the west memory often showing up. Cause I'm a big fiction reader. Like, I love literary fiction and often is it's showing up in like, fiction and fictional narratives about the West. I'm thinking of like Taya Albrecht's Inland, which is about. I think he's a Serbian immigrant who comes to the US and buys a camel. Like, buys a Civil War camel and rides it towards California. It's fascinating. It's really, really interesting.
- [39:38]
B
That's amazing.
- [39:38]
A
But yeah, like, it shows up in like, fiction, but not in long term historical nonfiction narratives. So that's a side note. Everyone go read that book. It's really interesting how she's thinking about this, but I think it was an interesting choice on your part when we planned the episode to pick a Union army member. Because I think often this gets whitewashed as a sort of like, everyone who does this is good and they've joined for good reasons and they want good things and. Yes. But also they do a lot of terrible things, particularly in the west, especially their relationship to like, indigenous groups and native peoples around them at the same moment.
- [40:20]
B
Yes.
- [40:20]
A
I really like that you chose him as. I know your guy.
- [40:25]
B
Yeah, it's. It's hard. And I. And I think it's hard when I talk to audiences, especially, you know, people who are really into Civil War history, to kind of think about the US army as not, not entirely a force for good. It's really hard. It's really hard because this is one of our kind of cherished stories is that the north was fighting for a moral cause. They were fighting for emancipation. And, and they were on the right side of history, and the Confederates were on the wrong side. And in the west, the US army was on both the right and the wrong side. But really it was the war, the Civil War itself resulted in this huge troop buildup. There are all of these gold miners who are already there, who join the ranks. And then all of these other kind of professional troops are brought in from other places and concentrated in New Mexico and Colorado. And they have enlisted for three years. And their fight with the Confederates lasts for about four months. And so the vast majority of those troops, some of them kind of garrison towns and forts, many of them are sent after indigenous peoples on overt campaigns of land taking. And also, you know, this kind of new Indian policy emerges in this moment, mostly on the part of James Henry Carleton, who is the head of the Department of New Mexico after September 1862. And he basically says, we're not going to do any more treaties. We're not signing any more treaties with Native nations. Instead, we are going to make war upon them, we're going to force them to surrender, and then we're going to move them to reservations. And the reservation system had been around since the 1830s, but this was a kind of new orientation to just abandon treaty making altogether. And it's interesting to read Ovando Hollister's account, because what he does is, you know, after the fighting in New Mexico, where he takes part in these two major movements that push the Texans back and basically force them to not surrender because the US Commander in charge doesn't want them to surrender because that means he has to take them as prisoners of war and then he has to feed them, which he does not want to do. So they push them out of New Mexico. And the Confederates who are, are from Texas have to, to go on this like, hideous long retreat all the way back through West Texas to San Antonio in the summer. And so at that point, that Confederate invasion of New Mexico is like, done and dusted. So Ovando Hollister and his, his buddies in the first Colorado are just kind of hanging around and, and encamped in New Mexico. And they then are turned toward this new campaign. And you don't really see Ovander Hollister ultimately, you know, he's sick and he can't recover, and he's ultimately given A discharge, a medical discharge from the U.S. army in January of 1863. And he embarks upon his life as a writer. And so when he is writing the history of the first Colorado, he is mostly concerned with the Confederate Texans and with the camaraderie of the men and how they're feeling in camp and all of this stuff. So he articulates a lot of abolitionist ideas. You know, he has this, this great moment as I referenced before, where he's, he's just yelling at these Confederate POWs about slavery and just like, why can you not admit that this is wrong? Like you are wrong. Like why are you on the Confederate side? And they just will not give it up. They will not give it up. But that's what he's mostly concerned about. But when he becomes a newspaper editor in Blackhawk and a newspaper owner, he takes this turn. I mean, he becomes a Western booster. And I think we see this a lot, this kind of boosterism in these new places across the west. And newspapers are a huge part of this. And this is one of the things I also had to reconcile because the book begins as most books about the west begin with Frederick Jackson Turner.
- [44:33]
A
Sure.
- [44:33]
B
So it begins with a historian. And historians and writers have been culpable.
- [44:40]
A
Fascinating to see you talk especially in the book about things like the American Historical association, which still exists and which we still go to every year. Aha. I didn't go this year, but because I was not going to Chicago in January. Sorry.
- [44:52]
B
No, why would you? I mean, it's insane.
- [44:55]
A
Yeah, yeah. Like there's a. Historians as part of the myth makers are very present in the book and throughout the book. And he also is kind of doing, which has happened several times on the show previously, kind of doing a self fashioned historian at the same time as being a journalist, which is always fascinating when someone is being a historian of the thing that they experienced. And also writing about what's happening right now. Like you see a self fashioning of his own narrative, a myth making around himself too, that's appearing really obviously in the stuff that he's writing.
- [45:31]
B
Yeah. And also a very a knowledge of his audience and wanting to be entertaining also because there's a little snippet that I found, I think it was at the Denver Public Library where someone has written to him later in his life to ask if he has the original manuscript for his history of the first Colorado. And he writes that he's kind of embarrassed about that book and that because he may have exaggerated a bit about the chicken stealing, he talks A lot about the horrible things that soldiers get up to when they're really bored and they're encamped camp. Right. And that they, you know, have a sense of their own righteousness and their own power in this space. And so they go running around. We have other accounts of very badly behaved soldiers in this region. So I'm not sure he was exaggerating that much, but it's very clear from that. Just that note that he's making, that he is. He is kind of learning to be a writer and kind of learning to identify himself as a writer and. And knowing that his words are going to have an impact and sort of shape understanding about who the first Colorado was in this moment, what their cause was, all of this. And as a newspaper editor in particular, in the very first editorial, he writes to kind of introduce himself and the new paper to the community. He's pretty overt about it. He's like, look, we're Republicans and we're used to now, I mean, maybe a little bit the idea that journalism is objective, but during this period, there were papers that were overtly either Republican or Democrat like papers. And, you know, he was just like, I'm a Republican and we're gonna. We're gonna print all the news, we're gonna print all the mining news, we're gonna do all these kinds of things, but we are also a Republican paper. So he knows, like, he is taking a stand for the Lincoln administration, like during the Civil War, because this is 1863 in November, where he's taking over this paper. So he's like, we're going to be advocating for the Union cause, We are going to be advocating for emancipation, which has already kind of happened with the Emancipation Proclamation. But he also publishes a lot of anti indigenous material and does not really back away from it. And this again, is where he starts to suck. This is like, you know, you're like, ovando, I thought you might be different. I thought, you know, as a white guy from the east, you were gonna provide me with, you know, a kind of interesting new kind of angle and take on the pioneer man. And I think he does actually, ultimately, because it's a very. He's a very complicated person. And in some ways, actually, this is a weird thing to say as a historian, to kind of position yourself as being in conversation with your subject. But I'm sort of like, thank you though, for being complicated and problematic because that is much more interesting to write about than someone who is either wholly good or just so evil. You can't Find anything.
- [48:55]
A
Yeah.
- [48:56]
B
To really, like, you know, you can't. Yeah. You cannot find any kind of silver lining in anything about their life because, I mean, that's humanity. Right? I mean, yeah, there are definitely 100% evil people as we have daily proof.
- [49:15]
A
Yes, unfortunately.
- [49:16]
B
Unfortunately. Are there a hundred percent good people? I'm a little more skeptical about that. But most people are in between. Most people are on the sliding scale in between. Right. We have our good moments and our bad moments, but really at this point, Ovando Hall Alistair really embraces the Republican Party's vision for the west, which is a white west of settlement and development and production. And he just. He's all in. He's into it. And he supports the Homestead Act. He loves the transcontinental railroad. Like, is hyping that project from the very beginning. Keeps trying to get them to build a spur line to Denver and then a line up to the mining camp so that things become cheaper and it will bring more people to Colorado to settle.
- [50:12]
A
Before we get back to the show, I'm here with my usual quick mid episode shout out to tell you about other multitude shows I think you might enjoy listening to. If you like history that suggests you're the kind of person who's into bizarre and esoteric lore about people doing inexplicable things for equally inexplicable reasons. What if I told you there was a video game series that was basically just many hours of that exact same thing, which has been leaving people saying what the hell? For the last 23 years? What if I told you there was a podcast about that video game? Simple and Clean is a show where hosts Misha Stanton and Mayana Barron talk about Kingdom Hearts, a little video game franchise about really big feelings. Join them every week as they discuss the plot, characters, world building, music, fashion, and societal impact of a thing that by all means probably shouldn't even exist? Never heard of Kingdom Hearts? That's okay. They're here to break it down for you, explain why they love it, and hopefully convince you that it deserves a place in your heart, too. In each episode, Mayana and Misha attempt to unravel how this deceptively expansive game series has touched an entire generation of deeply earnest weirdos. They put out new episodes every Sunday, so go check out simple and Clean. Wherever you listen to podcasts, like literally this app.
- [51:21]
C
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- [51:57]
A
A part that I find compelling in all of this is this combination of things that you're talking about. One, he's a very useful vessel for understanding a bunch of these things, for understanding the intersection of all of these different problems and all the, all of these different worldviews. He's both from the east and of the West. He's an abolitionist, but also believes in the extermination of indigenous peoples. He's a bunch of things at once which is useful in order to understand what people in this space are thinking of in general. He's representative of a bunch of different views at the same time. But also he does this interesting thing where he is at once sort of a booster, like you've said, of Colorado and he wants Colorado to grow and prosper, et cetera. But he's also kind of a propagandist where he's like writing these polemics and writing these things that are encouraging or even celebrating these what we would consider like absolute atrocities at the same time. So he's a good example of someone who's doing two things at once repeatedly all of the time. And that doesn't necessarily mean that there's this thing where one thing is good and one thing is bad, but he's just doing a lot of things and embodying a lot of things at the same time. So he's a very interesting representative of this time period and this place. So he's a good person to pick.
- [53:18]
B
Yeah. And any, any person, any community that stands in the way of the Republican party kind of power over the west he, you know, rails against and that includes Native Americans. He is very kind of supportive even of John Chivington and the Third Colorado and their massacre of the Southern Cheyenne and Narapo at Sand Creek. The only thing. And there's a very interesting, very bizarre moment that I didn't even know about going into the writing of the book. One of the other protagonists in the book is Jim Beckwourth who is at that time time an extremely famous scout and trader and kind of old time frontiersman mountain man who is also the son of a white enslaver and one of his black enslaved women who had come from Virginia and then to St. Louis. So he had been living in Denver and he helped to kind of Guide the third Colorado to Sand Creek and then took part part in the massacre.
- [54:26]
A
Wow.
- [54:26]
B
And that, to me, I mean, Jim Beckworth is another fascinating character. He was going to be. I was like, should it be Ovando Hollister or should it be Jim Beckworth? Because they both kind of suck and. And. But in very different ways. But at one point, there is a military investigation of this event, and Ovando Hollister ends up saying, yeah, the military should investigate it. I mean, maybe they were. I mean, I agree with what they did, but maybe it was a little. It was a little violent to kill more than 100 men and women and children who were unarmed and peaceful.
- [55:01]
A
Yeah. And then like, parade their through. Through the streets afterwards and scalp them and like, all these things that are just like he says. Okay, well, maybe we were a little over the top.
- [55:11]
B
Yeah.
- [55:12]
A
But fundamentally, at base, it needed to be done. Needed to be done.
- [55:17]
B
Yeah, because they continue to stand in the way. But he actually, he supports the idea of the military investigation. And Jim Beckwourth testifies, which is a very unusual moment. Colorado, in their territorial constitution, does not allow black men and women to testify in court. But this is not court. This is a military investigation. So he testifies. And there's another kind of mountain newspaper editor who says all sorts of nasty things about Jim Beckworth, a lot of racist things. And Ovando Hollister takes issue with that and publishes a little piece on that and says, look, like Jim Beckworth is allowed to testify. He can say whatever he wants about this moment. And Jim Beckworth writes a letter to Ovando Hollister's paper, which he then publishes in this Black Hawk mining journal, defending himself. So here again, we see this crazy moment where the indigenous west, the black west, and the kind of white pioneer west are all circulating around each other. They're all kind of defending themselves and their vision of the future. And it's just this sort of, like, wild moment. I had no idea that the two. That these two guys even had any kind of crossover when I started the project. But, yeah, so Ovando Hollister is willing to do that. He's willing to, like, publish a letter from a black scout in his paper, but pretty continuously anti indigenous doesn't have particularly anything really to say about Chinese miners in the Rocky Mountains. Sells some land to a Chinese prospector later in Utah, but really doesn't have anything to say on that point. So, you know, I was hoping for Ovando Hollister to maybe say something in kind of in line with his early progressive values. In this moment. And he just did not.
- [57:12]
A
There's also. You mentioned that he's really into the building of the railroads. Right. But then we'll say he'll demonstrate a lot of anti Chinese racism who are in large part people who are building the railroads that he so desperately wants.
- [57:28]
B
Yes.
- [57:29]
A
For the prosperity of this territory. So there's a moment where it's like you have to pick one. And he says, unfortunately, I'm gonna pick the racism y out of the two.
- [57:38]
B
Yeah.
- [57:38]
A
So also not a good reflection.
- [57:41]
B
Yeah, no, not at all. And he. And he also has. So he moves. Ultimately, he sells his. His paper. He becomes a. An editor at the Rocky Mountain News. He meets a bunch of politicians who are coming to tour Colorado in the years after the war, including Skyler Colfax, who is Grant's vice president. And he ends up meeting Skylar, Colfax's half sister, and they get married in 1869. But before that point, he goes to Utah and he is writing letters to the Denver papers about the completion of the transcontinental because the two sides are kind of coming and everyone knows they're going to meet somewhere in Utah north of Salt Lake City. So he moves there. He moves to this tiny town, Corinth, and buys some land there. Kind of has a kind of prescient, like real estate process.
- [58:39]
A
Be worth something eventually later.
- [58:41]
B
Yeah, exactly. And then he starts writing about Mormons in Utah and wow, this becomes a major crusade for him for more than 20 years. Is this anti Mormon judge just vitriol? And again, this is a community that is standing in the way, in his view of the federal government establishing a hold over Utah, which Ovando Hollister thinks is hugely important. And he is focused. This is another weird moment in his life where I was. This wasn't about him sucking morally, it was about him sucking as a source. Yeah. Where I was like, he's watching basically these two tracks from corn. He's watching these two tracks coming near, closer and closer and closer. And the Central Pacific line is being built by almost solely Chinese workers with some Irish track layers. And then the Union Pacific is being built by a kind of white, some black workers, a lot of Irish workers and Germans. And they are coming together. And he is focused much more on the Union Pacific, which is why he's not talking about the Chinese workers, although he knew full well they were there. He was visiting the camps.
- [59:56]
A
Yes, sure.
- [59:56]
B
Yeah. But he focuses much more on the Union. And then. So he's there coming up on, you know, late April, early May, 1869. And then he leaves and he goes to Denver during the Golden Spike moment. Like, he could have been there. He could have been one of the guys standing on the trains.
- [60:17]
A
You could have said, hey, this guy. We followed through all these other things. Great news. He was also there for this incredible moment that we needed.
- [60:25]
B
Nope.
- [60:26]
A
So he did kind of unfortunately screw you over a little bit.
- [60:31]
B
So I was narratively, oh, Vando, you suck. Why are you not giving this? You know, because he was writing very vivid letters. He was a good writer, and he was writing very vivid letters about Utah and about these growing towns and about the railroad workers and the camps. And then he just left. And I was like, dude, what are you doing? Yeah. And then he came back, and now that the railroad is constructed, he's no longer living in Denver. He marries his wife, they come back, and they live in Corin for a couple of years. And, you know, she's the sister of Skylar Colfax. So we have a little moment where he is a beneficiary of the spoils system. So he gets appointed the tax collector of Utah Territory.
- [61:19]
A
Why not?
- [61:20]
B
I mean, why not? So he's making $2,500 a year. He has a steady job. Like, before this point, he has been. Been writing promotional tracks for Colorado. He's been publishing books and base and, you know, writing for newspapers. Barely eking out living. And so now he has, like, an actual salary, an annual salary, and some financial stability, and he's like, 35 years old. And it's like, well, we can all relate. Yes.
- [61:47]
A
I do feel like, yeah, academics can relate.
- [61:51]
B
Millennials can relate. It's like, no. Well, yeah. Yep. Okay. Yep, there it is also wild that
- [61:57]
A
all this happens before he's even 35.
- [61:59]
B
Yeah.
- [61:59]
A
He's doing all this stuff, and for much of the period we've been talking about, his brain hasn't even been fully developed, you know, only the last 10 years of it. Yes.
- [62:12]
B
He is, you know, fully now a tool of the Republican Party because he is a federal employee. He continues to write for newspapers and to boost what was called gentile, sort of non Mormon migration to Utah.
- [62:31]
A
Yeah.
- [62:32]
B
And was just lobbying for the federal government to just come in and get rid of Brigham Young and lds, just overthrow them and take Utah.
- [62:44]
A
And this is a fascinating moment in American history in general. Like, I, I. Okay, I don't know that much about the history of Mormonism in the west, but what I do know about it, which is, I will still say as a historian, as an Americanist, more than most People, there's wild stuff happening in general. If you look up the history of the Mormon west in America, it is a wild, wild series of events. They're doing all kinds of crazy stuff and also people around them and people opposed to them are just doing all kinds of crazy stuff too.
- [63:19]
B
And they are, they are also essential. I mean they travel west, they're this, these pioneers also. And they, they have their own version of the pioneer frontier myth within the Mormon community and within Mormon history. But they're established in Salt Lake City in 1847, two years before the California Gold rush. So if you think about how gold seekers, if they're going overland, how they're moving to California, they're either going on the southern route kind of through New Mexico, Arizona, which at that point actually was just newly the United States, it's basically still northern Mexico and really functionally belong to tribal nations. Otherwise they're going kind of through on a kind of Oregon Trail to begin with and then the California trail that moves through Salt Lake City. So they are vitally important as a jumping off point point and like suppliers for gold miners moving to California and then coming back. So without them it becomes much harder to get to those California gold fields over land. So that's an interesting thing. Like they are right there, they are perfectly positioned. Also the Confederates thought that the Mormons would come with them against the United States because they had fought, they had rebelled against the US in 1857, 58. And so they thought oh well, they don't like the federal government either. So, so, so we will, we'll just bring them along with us. And the, and they had a 2000 man, very well trained Mormon militia in Utah. Brigham Young decided no, we're going to be neutral. We're not throwing in on either side. And that was really helpful actually for Ovando Hollister and the, the U.S. troops in Colorado and New Mexico because that would have been a problem if they had had 2,000 men marching from the Northw positions like that would have been a problem.
- [65:18]
A
And supply chain issues as we've already
- [65:20]
B
established, major supply chain issues. So the Mormon community is providing interestingly a lot of stability in this moment kind of at mid century. The fact that Ovando Hollister moves there with his wife and basically stays there for the rest of his life, lives in Utah, first in Corin and then in Salt Lake City City and is doing work for the federal government, is agitating politically and economically for Utah Freedom from lds, is making arguments about again like sexism. So he's saying, you know, all of these women are coming west. Like, what are they going to do? They don't want to become part of these polygamous marriages. And this was one of the drums he was definitely beating was about polygamy as it was in the entire U.S. this is the reason Utah doesn't come into the United states until the 1890s, because they. They have to give up polygamy according to the federal government, come into the United States, and they refuse to do it until then. So Ovando Hollister is one of these agitators, and it's amazing. He moves. When he moves to Salt Lake City, he is blocks away from Temple Square, and he is one of a very small minority of non Mormons living in Salt Lake.
- [66:37]
A
And I.
- [66:38]
B
And I'm like, what are you doing, dude? Like, what?
- [66:42]
A
And it seems like in the book, the argument that you're making is that he is like, well, look, I want to rid this place of Mormons. And what I'm going to have to do is come here and convince or do my booster thing and convince non Mormons to move here, especially to, like, Corinth, where he says, everybody, come here and do this. He's doing this because he wants to bring people there and continue to enact his vision of what this space is supposed to look like, what the west is supposed to look like.
- [67:10]
B
Absolutely.
- [67:11]
A
And he's like, these people who are fundamentally a part of this new west, what if it were not them?
- [67:20]
B
Yeah.
- [67:20]
A
Like, what if they. What if we had. I am on record, and I've said a million times on Instagram as, like, a Utah hater. As in, like, I don't love you. I have spent, like, a pretty significant amount of time in Utah. Yeah. And I find it an extremely strange place. Place. It's too alien. Zion is one of the craziest national parks, but you go there and you feel like you're on another planet. The vibes are really weird in a lot of Utah. Like, it's a weird, weird place. But that being said, I still am. Like, he's not just doing these things for, like, altruistic reasons. Right. Like, even his thing, which you talk about in the book about polygamy is still him being like, well, I know better than these women do about what they actually want and deserve. And, like, there's something to be said for, like, okay, maybe maybe some of these women want something different or part of their social structure is one in which it is helpful to have as many women around as possible to handle the Bajillion kids they're having, et cetera. Like, there are lots of reasons that women want, in some cases, to remain polygamous, but he's still there to impose his vision of what they should be wanting and what they do, what he thinks they want and deserve.
- [68:30]
B
Yeah, he was definitely a mansplainer. Yeah, he was a splainer like that. He may have been one of the. I mean, not one of the first. I mean, I'm sure they've been around since.
- [68:39]
A
Yes.
- [68:39]
B
You know, the dawn of time. But yeah, I mean, he. That was definitely his tone. Yeah, that was definitely his tone. Like, this is what we're going to do. This is the vision for Utah does not include Mormons or their wives, and it does not include the Ute or the Paiute or any. Or the Shoshone or any other native people whose lands these actually are. And it also doesn't really include Chinese immigrants either, who have come, you know, because they came originally, actually as part of the gold rush in California in 49, and then became railroad workers and then went to other kind of booming areas, including Montana and 63 and Idaho a little bit later in the 60s and early 70s. 70s. So you have these kind of pockets of like, really heavily Chinese towns in the Rocky Mountains, like, all the way down to basically from Montana to Colorado. And he doesn't really have much to say about Chinese rights. I mean, he's kind of in the wheelhouse of his career in the 1880s, which is the height of immigration restriction, the Chinese Exclusion act, all of these things are passed while he is, you know, alive and well and writing letters to the editor and forming kind of internal to Utah political parties to fight the Mormon power. And he's not fighting for their rights, even though. And this is also an interesting moment because, you know, he grew up a Shaker, and Shakerism and Mormonism are kind of part of the same kind of Second Great Awakening, end of the Second Great Awakening, all kind of taking place in New York and that burned over district initially. So he's kind of part of that world as a young man. And I. And I was kind of wondering, too, he never spoke about this really at all, but, you know, in his rejection of Shakerism, was that also kind of planting the seeds for him to reject a religious system like Mormonism, which had such a strong view of how you were supposed to live and also kind of religion in community. Right. That you are not just, you know, Mormon, you are a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints. You are. That is your community. You know, they have wards, they have, you know, tithing. They have all of this. It's not just about religious belief. It's about community. And I was wondering, you know, I was like, well, I just don't know. He just never. He never reflected on it. He never talked about it. His shakerism. I mean, there's really only one or two clues about it for people to chase down. Like, he's not very overt about it at all. But I think that's really interesting that he would grow up in this kind of world and yet. And some of its values, I mean, he took and some he absolutely did not. And this is what made him complicated, because he is very much. Just as the US army has a complicated legacy in the west, and just as, you know, the Mormon Church also has a complicated legacy and current existence in the West, Vandal Hollister is kind of representing that sort of worldview where. Where he is, on the one hand, espousing some level of equality and a kind of progressive mindset, and then other, on the other hand, really advocating for just the complete annihilation of communities that have been formed over time. And it just. Yeah, that part of it. I was like, God, yeah, why are you sucking so hard right now? Like, I want to be, you know, sad that you're dying in 1892.
- [72:35]
A
Yeah, I was gonna say. And then he dies.
- [72:36]
B
Yeah, and then he dies, and he doesn't get to see LDS finally renounce polygamy and enter the union. Like, which was, you know, his goal. By the end, though, he was super. He was just exhausted. He was writing to friends that he just. He was like, this is just. This fight has taken it out of me. I don't think I'm ever gonna win. And, you know, he dies before. Before it happens. And I sort of wanted to be sad for him about that, but I was just like, well. Well, you're like, okay, there you go. Right? But then, you know, I think he also. He's important for us to think about, to think about how, again, historians and writers have a power in this moment, and I think we do now, too, that we shape the way people see the world. World. And can shape policy, in fact. And people need to use that responsibly. Like, when people use that power for ill. It does not end well for a lot of Americans.
- [73:38]
A
And ultimately, you might, you know, almost 200 years, a little less than 200 years later, have people on a podcast being like, look, man, you shouldn't have written the Things that you wrote and being like, welcome to our podcast about how bad you are are
- [73:54]
B
so.
- [73:54]
A
Hey, you know, okay, we're always saying you got to live. Like, someone's going to make a podcast about you.
- [74:01]
B
That's right. He should have known.
- [74:04]
A
He should have known. This is a wonderful place for us to end. Thank you so, so very much for this. It's given me a lot to think about, both in this actual podcast, but also through reading this book about how I place myself in this. I don't mean traditionalism, because I'm not the person doing the thinking about the west, but, like, this identity that has developed and that I am kind of inexorably a part of or is a part of me. So I really appreciate both your writing, the talking, all of that together. And I do think Ovando Hollister sucks, basically. I think he's complicated. He's more on the spectrum of people that we've talked about on the show. He's on the more difficult side of it because, like, he does some really, really, really horrible things. And he also does horrible things in conjunction with kind of good things. And so he's like, not in like a. I think these things can be bad and coexist with the good things, and that doesn't take away from the badness of them in any meaningful way. But he's not one of these guys where we're like, oh, he was born, was evil and then died. Like, he's a weirder one on this. So thank you for that as well.
- [75:15]
B
He's a little stealthy. He's a stealthy guy who sucks.
- [75:19]
A
Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for coming on. For listeners, Megan can be found on Blue Sky, KN and Instagram. Megan Kate Nelson. And you can get yourself a copy of the Westerners at the link in our episode description.
- [75:33]
B
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a delight talking to you about Ovando.
- [75:41]
A
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of this Guy Sucked, a member of the Multitude podcast collection. This episode was Hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guest Megan Kate Nelson, and edited by master mixer Julia Schiffini. All of our theme music was written and produced by master music maker Marshall Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes, including two extra episodes per month and access to our full archive of episodes, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or to our patreon@patreon.com thesky sucked. See you next week. I'm gonna go eat lunch.
- [76:29]
C
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