Latest / The Chuck ToddCast / Interview Only w/ Megan Kate Nelson - The American West You Didn’t Get In History Class

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Interview Only w/ Megan Kate Nelson - The American West You Didn’t Get In History Class · The Chuck ToddCast

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  Speaker 2: Well.
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  Speaker 1: Joining me today is the author of a new book Parents.
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  Speaker 1: The author is Megan Kate Nelson and what she wrote
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  Speaker 1: is basically, it's a challenge to the mythology of America
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  Speaker 1: and the West. If you will write the mythology that
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  Speaker 1: pioneers moved across a free land, subdued the wilderness and
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  Speaker 1: indigenous peoples and the process created this piece of American
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  Speaker 1: character that many people out west still cherish today. And
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  Speaker 1: there's certainly, you know, there's a lot of you know,
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  Speaker 1: there are certainly plenty of good things that happened out
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  Speaker 1: west that ended up traveling east, probably the biggest thing being,
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  Speaker 1: of course, women's suffrage. But what is you know, as
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  Speaker 1: you as everybody knows, I'm we're all obsessed with sort
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  Speaker 1: of getting history rights and not always just falling for
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  Speaker 1: the elementary school version of events. So, Megan, welcome to
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  Speaker 1: the podcast.
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  Speaker 2: Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
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  Speaker 1: Well before we get started with the Westerners and sort
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  Speaker 1: of your interest in the frontier and sort of trying
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  Speaker 1: to essentially re educate, if you will, those of us
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  Speaker 1: who might not be as familiar. What got you into
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  Speaker 1: that topic?
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  Speaker 3: What have you?
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  Speaker 1: What? What got you to where you are today? How'd
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  Speaker 1: you get to become somebody who was obsessively studying this
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  Speaker 1: era of American history?
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  Speaker 3: You know that journey began when I was very young.
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  Speaker 3: I grew up in Colorado, my parents did. Yeah, so
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  Speaker 3: I am, I'm a legit Westerner. We're in Colorado, Jeff
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  Speaker 3: south of Denver, Littleton, ok So, the suburbs of the
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  Speaker 3: Front Range. Yes, and my parents didn't really like to fly,
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  Speaker 3: and so every summer we took these vacations by car,
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  Speaker 3: where I was trapped in the back seat with my
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  Speaker 3: annoying older brother. Perhaps you've had a similar experience.
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  Speaker 1: And yeah, all we could afforda road trips in Florida.
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  Speaker 1: So I saw every nook and cranny of Florida back
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  Speaker 1: in the day. We didn't make it. We didn't make
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  Speaker 1: it much past Georgia. But I am jealous. I've done that.
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  Speaker 1: I did a Denver to La road trip once. Oh,
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  Speaker 1: I mean, if that is, I'm sorry, I'm jealous of
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  Speaker 1: your childhood. We had the flat you know, the highest
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  Speaker 1: peaks in Florida landfills.
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  Speaker 2: So yes, I know, I know, very flat, very flat state. Yeap.
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  Speaker 3: And we so basically I saw the country by car.
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  Speaker 3: By the time I went to college, I had been
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  Speaker 3: to the to forty five of the lower forty eight
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  Speaker 3: states in a meaningful way, and so I experienced what
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  Speaker 3: it was like to move from region to region where
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  Speaker 3: you kind of it stopped being the West and became
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  Speaker 3: the Midwest, or it went from the South to the Midwest,
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  Speaker 3: or to the north and you know, people talked differently,
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  Speaker 3: there were different food ways, it was a different climate.
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  Speaker 3: So I was often thinking about region. And then I
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  Speaker 3: went I went to Harvard undergrad. So this is my
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  Speaker 3: first time living on the East Coast. And when I
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: told people I was from Colorado, I mean, these are
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  Speaker 3: very smart people, chuck, and they said, did you ride
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  Speaker 3: your horse to school?
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  Speaker 1: Wow? I'm sorry.
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  Speaker 3: You know.
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  Speaker 1: You did not go to college in the nineteen fifties
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  Speaker 1: or the eighteen fifties, right, I mean no, I assume
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  Speaker 1: you at the College of the nineties or odds right.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, very good, yes, nineteen nineties. But still yeah, I
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  Speaker 3: had to explain to someone. I had to actually, because
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  Speaker 3: you know, years before the Internet, I had to go
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  Speaker 3: find a map and show this guy that Colorado was
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  Speaker 3: not Utah.
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  Speaker 2: He was insisting that it was. And you know, so
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  Speaker 2: so that was all.
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  Speaker 1: Those square states look alike exactly exactly.
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  Speaker 3: So I just thought, you know, people still have this
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  Speaker 3: really entrenched idea of what the West is. You know,
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  Speaker 3: it's not a land of nineteen seventies suburbs like the
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  Speaker 3: one I grew up in. You know, it's ranching west,
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  Speaker 3: the mountains, skiing, you know, this kind of vivid image
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  Speaker 3: that people have, and this just endured, and then in
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  Speaker 3: twenty nineteen, David McCullough came out with his final book,
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  Speaker 3: The Pioneers, and that book had the title it was
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  Speaker 3: something like the Pioneer, the Eastern settlers who brought American
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  Speaker 3: ideals West or something like that.
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  Speaker 2: It was like the perfect evocation of the frontier myth
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  Speaker 2: and the Pioneer.
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  Speaker 1: Those were fighting words for you.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, well it was fighting words for most academics who
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  Speaker 3: have been trying to fight the frontier myth for fifty
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  Speaker 3: years now but not succeeding. And you know, everyone went
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  Speaker 3: crazy and published journal articles about this, and of course
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  Speaker 3: The Pioneers was on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks.
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  Speaker 1: David McCollough, I mean, he's he's gonna he's he earned that,
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  Speaker 1: he did earn his reputation the heart.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, yes, but I but again, I was like, okay,
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  Speaker 3: we're still well, we're still here with this, even though
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  Speaker 3: we're starting to see some changes in Western TV and
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  Speaker 3: movie things like Gobless has a more kind of interesting,
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  Speaker 3: diverse vision of the West, and then the show yell us,
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  Speaker 3: I would argue.
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  Speaker 1: And I know, I'm sure, I'm not going to sit
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: here and defend Taylor shared in a variety of ways.
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  Speaker 4: Yep.
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  Speaker 1: But he's at least improved things in pop culture slightly.
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  Speaker 1: And I say slightly because let's just say missus Todd
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: and I cringe. He has this view of women in
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  Speaker 1: general that is very, very hard to the longer you
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: watch Taylor Shart and the harder it is over. But
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  Speaker 1: he does try hard to be more accurate about the West.
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  Speaker 2: He does.
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  Speaker 3: He does, and he to me kind of exemplifies where
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  Speaker 3: we are right now, which is this push and pull
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  Speaker 3: right Like, he has these very traditional visions of someone
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  Speaker 3: like Dutton, who is, you know, the rugged individualist, the cowboy,
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  Speaker 3: and then he'll have an entire episode devoted to missing
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  Speaker 3: and murdered indigenous women and you're like, oh.
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  Speaker 1: God, yeah, thank you, right, no, yeah, no, that's why
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  Speaker 1: it's sort of like, that's why we can't quit him
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  Speaker 1: exactly exactly. Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: So all of these things kind of boiled up together
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  Speaker 3: around twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, and I thought, you
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  Speaker 3: know what, you know, what if we started to kind
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  Speaker 3: of think about Western history a little bit differently, and
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  Speaker 3: what if we thought about instead of the pioneers, we
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  Speaker 3: think of all of the different kinds of people who
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  Speaker 3: built the American West, as Westernerners like to kind of
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  Speaker 3: get away from that whole pioneer frontier myth.
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  Speaker 2: And then I was off and running.
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  Speaker 1: Well, it's interesting you use in some ways, it's a
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  Speaker 1: very traditional way to tell a story, right, You use
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  Speaker 1: different characters, different points of view on different things. But
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  Speaker 1: you don't begin with one of your characters. You begin
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  Speaker 1: with the essentially going after the person I guess you
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  Speaker 1: believe created the myth, mister Jackson Turner.
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  Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, Frederick Jackson Turner.
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  Speaker 3: I was on a panel a couple of weeks ago
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  Speaker 3: with some other Western historians and we were joking that,
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  Speaker 3: you know, it's a Western history if Frederick Jackson Turner
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  Speaker 3: shows up in the prologue or the epilogue or both.
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  Speaker 2: And he does, in fact.
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  Speaker 3: Show up in those ways in this book, because in
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  Speaker 3: eighteen ninety three he gives a paper at the American
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: Historical Association meeting, which is held in conjunction with the
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  Speaker 3: World's Fair in Chicago, which is you know, this obsesses
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  Speaker 3: cultural historians because it's such an.
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  Speaker 1: Amazing the World's Fair stuff. I know, you know it really,
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  Speaker 1: you know, I I remember going to the remnants of
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  Speaker 1: a World's Fair in Knoxville and the remnants of a
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  Speaker 1: World's Fair in New Orleans back in the early eighties
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  Speaker 1: road trips by the way, part we did get north
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  Speaker 1: of Florida once in a while, and having my parents
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  Speaker 1: try to explain, you know, there was a time that
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  Speaker 1: World's Fair was a big deal. Yeah, and then eventually
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  Speaker 1: it ended up in Knoxville, Tennessee. No offense to Knoxville, right.
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  Speaker 2: That's right, that's right.
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  Speaker 3: It was a huge deal. And this is an amazing moment.
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  Speaker 3: And what I found so interesting about that is that
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  Speaker 3: Turner gives this paper, he kind of has this manifesto,
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  Speaker 3: and it's a very new argument for the time that
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  Speaker 3: American ideals in American institutions don't actually come from European antecedents,
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  Speaker 3: which is what historians had been arguing for forever, but
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  Speaker 3: they're actually rooted in this process of frontier formation and
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  Speaker 3: conquest that you know, white men are moving progressively west,
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  Speaker 3: and as they face nature and indigenous peoples and conquer both,
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  Speaker 3: then they settle down. They build towns, they build churches
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  Speaker 3: and schools, and this is what creates the American character
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  Speaker 3: and but was What's interesting about that moment is every
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  Speaker 3: you know, a lot of people think that Turner actually
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  Speaker 3: created that thesis out of whole cloth, but it actually
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: had been brewing for a very long time, and he
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  Speaker 3: actually admitted that later. He's like, oh, yeah, this was
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  Speaker 3: kind of in the zeitgeist. This was kind of out there.
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  Speaker 1: How was that any different than the popularized mythology of
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  Speaker 1: how America itself was settled by the right British columnists, right, Like,
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  Speaker 1: it feels like it's just a version of that.
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  Speaker 3: Yah, it's a it's a different kind of version with
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  Speaker 3: it different valence still the kind of religious that religious mission.
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  Speaker 3: The frontier myth really dovetails beautifully with manifest destiny, with
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  Speaker 3: the American dream, with this whole idea of you know,
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  Speaker 3: the Europeans errand into the wilderness, particularly English, because they
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  Speaker 3: of course ignored the fact that the Spanish and the
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  Speaker 3: French were in North America before them.
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  Speaker 2: But yeah, so he gives.
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  Speaker 3: This paper, no one really cares, but then it gets published.
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  Speaker 3: Teddy Roosevelt writes him a nice letter like, yeah, I
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  Speaker 3: totally agree, and it gains so much momentum in the
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  Speaker 3: field of history that it dominates US history and Western
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  Speaker 3: history for more than one hundred years, the sort of vision.
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  Speaker 1: I have a theory, but I don't want to I
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  Speaker 1: don't want to throw the question. I don't want to
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  Speaker 1: bias your thought here, but.
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  Speaker 2: I'll tell you mine in the new tell of yours.
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  Speaker 3: My theory is that it is just a very compelling, linear,
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  Speaker 3: simple narrative. It literally moves in one direction from east
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  Speaker 3: to west. It does not engage with much complexity. And
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  Speaker 3: you know, we like those kinds of stories. We like
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: complicated stories, but really like we we need it to.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: Be organized and neat.
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  Speaker 3: And also it's it's a story of triumph, and who
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: doesn't want a story of no?
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: I would just add in, I think we've still had
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: scar tissue from the Civil War, we still scar tissue
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: from reconstruction, still had a stark issue from slavery, and
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: talking about the West, you could ignore all this other
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: st papers over the uncomfortable pieces of the nineteenth century history.
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  Speaker 1: And a guy like Teddy Roosevelt, who many you know
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: it is, he is in many ways Trumpian. I don't
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: think you know, I don't think we fully, but he
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: is a marketer and he sort of he does and
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: it doesn't you know, when you throw all that together.
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  Speaker 1: So I think we're I think I think that's essentially
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  Speaker 1: I'm in agreement with you. But I think I think
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: the Civil War itself and the fact that that's still
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: a recent memory.
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  Speaker 2: Oh definitely. And this is something, Yeah, this is some
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: starring the country.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, and white Americans can kind of rally around this
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: idea of the West, this.
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  Speaker 1: History, having a deal with the slavery question.
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  Speaker 3: Exactly right, exactly, Yeah, as long as they can get
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: rid of indigenous people's and you know, settle the land
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  Speaker 3: as it should be settled, that's the that's the kind
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: of key component of that. But yeah, this is the
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: this is the white Northerners and Southerners American dream, a
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: shared American dream in the wake of the Civil War.
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: I would definitely agree with that that this becomes another
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: part of their reun union and why they are able
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: then to come back together as a country because they
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: agree on how to shape the West for the future
• 14:08
  Speaker 3: of the nation.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: So talk about your ability to research. Let's go through
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: the folks you do, because you know, it's not like
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: there was probably a lot of English language on this.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: I'm sure you had to go into Mexican history, a
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: little bit, a little bit into European history, a little
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: bit into that. How hard was it to tell these
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: stories of our examples? You tell it through Psychaagea, Jim Beckworth,
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: Maria Gertrudis, Barcelo Ovando Hollister, Little Wolf, Ella Watson, and
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: Polly Bemis. Yes, so tell me how you've found got
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: your research and all of that on these folks.
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so some of the stories are harder than others.
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: Whenever you are conducting research on women or people of color,
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: it's always harder because they don't enter the written record
• 14:56
  Speaker 3: in the same.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: Way, and journals weren't present. There weren't things like that.
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: Right exactly, And much to my frustration and probably to
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: every other historian's frustration, that people who have these amazing
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: lives rarely write their autobiographies. I mean, Jim Beckworth is
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: one of the only ones who was truly satisfying in
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: that way. So basically, when you have someone like Zaka Joeia,
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: who left no written record and really was not famous
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: in her lifetime. This is one of the things that
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: interested me and surprised me is she wasn't even really
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: famous until the twentieth century. She wasn't taken up as
• 15:35
  Speaker 3: a kind of symbol of American womanhood until nineteenth basically
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: nineteen oh four. So this, you know, she didn't leave
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: any records, No one thought she was anything really special
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: in the moment, but she appears more than one hundred
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: and fifty times in the Lewis and Clark journals, and
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: she is always doing something or saying something. And I
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: write narrative history, and so I make arguments in my books,
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: but I'm really putting you on the ground with people
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: as they're doing things and saying things. So that was
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: really important to me to be able to find this
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: evidence which was corroborated by other journal writers who were with.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: Her on the core So were Lewis and Clark. That
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: was a core piece of context for you.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: Oh, yes, absolutely, so this was. Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: Her story is embedded first in an indigenous world of
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: North America, which becomes the American West, which is huge
• 16:36
  Speaker 3: and interconnected by trade networks and kin networks.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: And then the other major context.
• 16:42
  Speaker 3: Is the Louisiana Purchase, the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, and
• 16:46
  Speaker 3: then this Lewis and Clark expedition, which is the first
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: of the big federal, federally funded surveys where men, it
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: was almost always men went out into all parts of
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: the con and explored it and mapped it and sent
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: back specimens. So was this was really the kind of
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: first moment when they did this? And this is why
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: I think this is a vital moment for the creation
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: of the frontier myth in American history, because they wrote
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: about it and they sent back all of these reports
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: and specimens.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: Tell me, I'm just curious, what's the what's the most
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: unique source material you found that just was really helped
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: fill in some gaps that others hadn't been able to
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: fully put together.
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: That's such a great question. I think what has really
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: revolutionized my research lately, and I know a lot of
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: other historians is newspapers dot Com interesting. Yeah, they digitization
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: has been incredible.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: And that site that I promise trudging through various small
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: library towns all over them might or might not have
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: had microfiche and things like that, right exactly.
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: And I promise that I am not, you know, a
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: sort of paid advertiser for them, but I really feel
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: like it sometimes. But because it's so great, it's such
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: a great website, you know, you pay a yearly fee,
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: but you it's word searchable, and then the amount of
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: material they have is just incredible. So I could put
• 18:19
  Speaker 3: in Bepcworth in all of the different spellings of his name.
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: I was just going to say he had a lot
• 18:25
  Speaker 3: of different spellings, and you have to account for that
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: with a lot of nineteenth century sources that they're going
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: to misspell pretty much in everyone's name.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: And you just see him pop up everywhere. And you see.
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: Maria Hertardiz Barcelow, who is this woman who's born in
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: Sonora and ends up running a gambling empire in Santa Fe.
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: She starts to emerge because all of these American travel
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: writers start kind of depicting her and interviewing her and
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: writing about her and again under sometimes they call her Latulas,
• 18:58
  Speaker 3: sometimes they call her metam to lose, sometimes they call
• 19:01
  Speaker 3: her Barcelo.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: It's it's a huge wide range, but they are.
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: They emerge, They emerge from these sources, and it's really
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: quite incredible. So the one I think the most one
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: thing that shocked me when I found it, and this
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: is also something I'm not sure if you've run into
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: this with other histories, you've written you've read, but people
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: met who you never or like, engaged with one another
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: or crossed paths in ways that you don't expect.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: So I found I love.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: I love those moments, and I still don't always believe them.
• 19:35
  Speaker 4: When you know, I know, like you're like, really those
• 19:39
  Speaker 4: two were like in the same bar, you know, yeah,
• 19:41
  Speaker 4: you know, really Picasso and Einstein may have run into
• 19:44
  Speaker 4: each other in Paris, seriously, like, you know.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems incredible.
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: But Jim Beckworth, who was born into slavery, brought to
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: Saint Louis by his enslaver father in eighteen oh seven
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: and then sort of became the forest gum of the
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: American West, Like he just he.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: Shows up everywhere, huh, everywhere everywhere. It was really kind
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: of incredible.
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: And he ended up as a scout and a participant
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: in the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. It was like
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: a real kind of mark on his reputation that he
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: engaged in that action and killed some Southern Cheyenne individuals,
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: and he so he testified to the US military and
• 20:25
  Speaker 3: Ovando Hollister, who's one of my other protagonists who's a
• 20:29
  Speaker 3: newspaper man at the time in Colorado wrote about that
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: trial and wrote in defense of Jim Beckworth because there
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: was a lot of talk about like should he be
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: allowed to testify because he's black? And Jim Beckworth then
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: wrote him a letter which then Hollister published. And to
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: my knowledge, no one else has ever found this before,
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: and I found it. I was able to find it
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: because Colorado historic newspapers had digitized all of these you know,
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: any little newspapers for mining sounds, all across Colorado.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: This episode of the Chuck Toodcast is brought to you
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  Speaker 1: by Wild Grain. Wild Grain is the first bake from
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• 22:58
  Speaker 1: This is why we need more local news today. We
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: have no idea what stories that the Megans of one
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: hundred years from now are going to want rite about.
• 23:06
  Speaker 3: Absolutely. Yeah, so that was really fun. I think that
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: was my kind of find where I was like, this
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: is incredible.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: I can't believe it.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: That's the best part of going down history rabbit holes
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: is playing detective in some ways, right, you almost feel
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: like you're a detective.
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: On that front. What's interesting is when you when you
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: start your various protagonists here is it's you know, it's
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: you realize that the Hollywoodization of the West, right, you know,
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: which then adds its own imprint on the mythology, particularly
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: in the in the arguably in the fifties and sixties,
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: and in particular is you realize they all had a
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: little bit of this history, and because some of these
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: characters are make their way into these into these movies
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: as sort of as caricatures or but you they said,
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: they became very familiar to me at least always like
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: You're like, okay, so now I see where that idea
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: for that character came from, right, it was It was
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: just interesting when you realize it wasn't totally detached from history.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: It was just simply detached from the from the reality.
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: That's probably right, Yeah, I mean, and I think this
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: is what is also compelling about miss like this, So
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: this explains part of that too, is there is a
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: basis in reality.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: Of course there is.
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: I mean, of course, there were tens of thousands of
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: white Easterners moving west in Connaestoga wagons.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: Of course there were. But they were not the only ones.
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: They were not the only ones.
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: And you know, the women who were in the West
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: were not all as Westerns would have it, either prostitutes
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: or you know, really sweet loving school teachers. You know,
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: they had they had other lives, some extraordinary, some completely normal.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: You know, given that, and I think it's Netflix is
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: about to reboot A Little House in the Prairie.
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: I saw that.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: Your fear and hope with how that's portrayed.
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: I mean, my fear is that it will just be
• 25:06
  Speaker 3: a kind of retread of all of the familiar themes
• 25:11
  Speaker 3: of Westerns and kind of Midwesterns that we've had in
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: American culture. What I would love to see though, and
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: what that I mean, that show did a fairly good
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: job really of showing you just sort of normal life,
• 25:25
  Speaker 3: everyday life.
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: And I think that's what we usually miss right in.
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: That's the stuff it did well. It glosses over the
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: tough stuff.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, tough stuff.
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: There's a nod to it here there. And you know
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: it's funny, you know that. Look, I will admit I
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: love the show. As a kid. I did.
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, me too. I have the brains.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: When you watch it as an adult, you're like, okay,
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: I had a little more to it than I thought.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: And you know what I would love to see is
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: a just a fully fleshed out world, you know, where
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: you do see indigenous people's, you do see immigrants moving through,
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: you know, in that region, it would be mostly from Europe.
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: So it would be someone more like Ella Watson in
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: The Westerners, who comes from Canada from a Scott's Irish
• 26:12
  Speaker 3: family and ends up in Kansas and Nebraska and then
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: moves to Wyoming and tries to start this cattle ranch.
• 26:19
  Speaker 3: So that's the kind of figure, you know, who I
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: would really love to see in this millia like people
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: the amazing movement across the West in all directions, Well.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: I bring that up, and I want to get to
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: the all directions part here because how much did Laura
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: Ingalls Wilder books accentuate this myth in your mind? How
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: much did it contribute to the mythology.
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: I think they really did contribute a lot, especially for
• 26:46
  Speaker 3: people of our generation who grew up with those shows
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: and with the books.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: Right, and I.
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: Think especially for Little Girls, because the main characters were girls.
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: That was the thing unusual and different, that was a depiction.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: We gave it its own form of forward leaning to
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: just put in those terms. I wouldn't quite call it progressive,
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: but right right.
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: Exactly exactly, but it gave us, you know, as a
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: as a young girl kind of reading those stories, you know,
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: they all the daughters had their own personalities, you know,
• 27:21
  Speaker 3: but the family was white.
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: They were heteronormative.
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: You know, there was this notion of single families just
• 27:29
  Speaker 3: going out into the wilderness and building their lives and
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: succeeding almost entirely.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: On their own.
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: Although there is a lot of community engagement in that show,
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: and that is important. But one of the things that
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: the Frontier myth really glosses over is how much federal
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: help white settlers had.
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: I mean they had the Homestead Act.
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they had the Homestead Act passed in eighteen sixty two,
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: which gives anyone loyal to the United States, so confederates
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: need not apply, or at least known confederates, gives them
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: one hundred and sixty acres to develop as they will.
• 28:07
  Speaker 3: Then the eighteen sixty two and eighteen sixty four Pacific
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: Railway Act. Here comes the trans Transcontinental Railroad, which makes
• 28:15
  Speaker 3: it possible to travel quickly and also to send whatever
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: you are growing or tending in the West to markets.
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 28:25
  Speaker 3: So now the trans continent, the Transcontinental Railroad, enables the
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: rise of the cattle industry, right. It enables the rise
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: of this moment in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties West,
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: where we have cattle barrens and huge cattle drives from
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: Texas all the way up. They're driving them to rail lines, right.
• 28:45
  Speaker 3: And then you can ship all of your produce, you know,
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: if you're growing wheat or you're growing vegetables, you can
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: ship it back and forth. And that enables people to
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: survive in the West. Right. And then also most importantly,
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: the US military is out there basically federally funded. They
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: had built forts, and their job is to protect white
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: settlers and to try to rein in, if not exterminate
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: altogether tribal nations across the American West. So those three
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: components themselves. I mean there were other kinds of laws
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: on the territorial and state level and then the federal level,
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: which are really helpful. But I mean I always find it,
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: you know, kind of hilariously and egregiously ironic that the
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: American West often you know, people are like, oh, we're
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: anti federal, Like.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: Well, we're not.
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: We don't like big government. When the American West is
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: built government on federal money. It's built on federal money
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: and help.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: Yes, well, you know, keep the government, you know, keep
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: your hands off my medicare exactly resonates ridiculous. Let's talk
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: about the idea, right, it's the myth is east to west.
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: But as you want to say, look, there was you
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: just talked a couple of stories about you know, you
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: people would emigrate through Canada make their way west. Obviously
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: you had Mexicans that in some ways it was always
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: their land and you know they just whether they traveled
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: there or were there. You had Native Americans, and then
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: you you also had some Asian, some Asian travel on there.
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: So tell me about in particular let's start south to north.
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so this was so Maria heretreduce Barslow is sort
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: of my my one protagonist who really embodies this particular movement,
• 30:36
  Speaker 3: as I noted before, born in Sonora when it was
• 30:39
  Speaker 3: New Spain that became Mexican in the middle of the
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: Mexican Revolution, where they freed themselves from Spain in.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: Eight one of three countries twenty one.
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, basically, And by that point she was already
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: her family had emigrated northward to a little town south
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: of Albuquerque, and then she had married and her husband
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: taught her to play this card game called Spanish Monty,
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: which is Spanish deck is a forty card deck, so
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: ten cards of four suits, and he taught her to
• 31:15
  Speaker 3: play it, and it turned out she was great at it.
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: She had super amazing memory, very mathematical mind, and was
• 31:24
  Speaker 3: really good at it and started to win.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: All Right, I have to ask, because I know if
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: listeners are going to say, what's the modern card game,
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: it's most it would be closest to resemble Spanish Monty.
• 31:36
  Speaker 3: It might be something like blackjack, because what you're doing.
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: And I actually did learn to deal it because I
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: couldn't figure out how she made so much money because
• 31:46
  Speaker 3: she ultimately became a dealer, and so.
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: This was for gambling. I mean she was winning, she
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: was winning cash with this.
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: Oh yes.
• 31:53
  Speaker 3: And basically what it is is there you have, you know,
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: the forty card deck and there are five cards in
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: each hand.
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: You deal out the first two, you bet.
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: On the it's a it's a betting game where you're
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: betting on whether the suit is going to show up
• 32:07
  Speaker 3: on the fifth card of every given hand. So you
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: deal out to people have a chance to bet, like
• 32:14
  Speaker 3: do they think it's going to be is the fifth
• 32:16
  Speaker 3: card going to be a club or you know, is
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: it going to be one of these two? Then you
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: deal out the next two and people have a chance
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: to bet, and then you.
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: Turn the fifth card.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: You're just playing percentages if you're really doing.
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: The second head, Ye, exactly, but it.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: Is Blackjeck meets poker in some form.
• 32:31
  Speaker 3: Yes, And it's you know, because you have a single dealer,
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: a big table, there's no limit on the number of
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: players who can play. And she is in Santa Fe
• 32:43
  Speaker 3: ultimately in the eighteen thirties, So this is the Santa
• 32:45
  Speaker 3: Fe Trail is coming into town. The Chihuahua trail is
• 32:49
  Speaker 3: coming from Mexico. There are constantly people on the road,
• 32:53
  Speaker 3: very crazy, oh yeah, and very mobile. So even though
• 32:57
  Speaker 3: she has technically settled in Santa Fe, she's.
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: Still her life is still.
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: Based around all of this movement in multiple directions, and
• 33:06
  Speaker 3: she takes advantage of it because all of these mostly
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: men but also some women come in and gamble at
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: her gambling saloon and they almost always lose, and they
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: have to come in.
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: She set it up.
• 33:19
  Speaker 3: I mean, it was so genius, and of course you
• 33:21
  Speaker 3: would do this now too. You have to enter the
• 33:23
  Speaker 3: gambling saloon through the actual saloon like the bar, and
• 33:29
  Speaker 3: so you please.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: Vegas figured this out a long time, right, Like I
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: guess we now know who Vegas learned it from. Right,
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: She's the godmother god.
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: It was exactly exactly. I mean, she made so much
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: money that she was investing in currency, she was investing
• 33:44
  Speaker 3: in mules, she was loading money to Anglo businessman.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: I'm guessing she didn't drink, or she didn't drink as
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: much as she and everybody else in that room would
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: drink age in order to win all that money.
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: I think maybe she was one of those people who
• 33:58
  Speaker 3: either drank a tiny little bit or pretended, you know,
• 34:01
  Speaker 3: kind of through a river, right, Yeah, exactly, exactly. So
• 34:06
  Speaker 3: she's one of these people who's moving from south to north,
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: and this, you know, gives us this vision of the
• 34:11
  Speaker 3: West as as a profoundly kind of Hispanic place. This
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: is a place, especially the Southwest, but also the larger
• 34:21
  Speaker 3: west as well, because there are relationships across the region
• 34:27
  Speaker 3: for people coming from Mexico.
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: Is she tell me how you learned her story?
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: I ran into her actually when I was researching my
• 34:37
  Speaker 3: third book, The Three Cornered War, because a lot of
• 34:41
  Speaker 3: that action takes place in Santa Fe, so I had
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: I had a couple of women in that book and
• 34:48
  Speaker 3: was researching kind of just women in New Mexico. So
• 34:51
  Speaker 3: I ran into her, and I was like, oh man,
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: she is so great that she died in eighteen fifty two,
• 34:55
  Speaker 3: so this was not she. I couldn't fit her into
• 34:59
  Speaker 3: the Civil War book. So I just kind of saved her.
• 35:02
  Speaker 3: I was like, when the opportunity comes again, I need
• 35:06
  Speaker 3: to write about her because her her story is so extraordinary.
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: But at the same time, you know, she operates as
• 35:12
  Speaker 3: a woman in Mexico, where she had she had a
• 35:14
  Speaker 3: little more rights, a little bit more freedom than in
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: the US. But once the US comes in in eighteen
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: forty six, I mean, she sees the writing on the walls.
• 35:23
  Speaker 3: She knows what's happening, and so she brings in the
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: US soldiers and all of their appointees and cultivates them
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: as customers and is and as allies.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: Uh them, join them, right, exactly. Little diplomacy, yeah, exactly.
• 35:38
  Speaker 3: But if she had lived longer, I think she would
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: have experienced a lot of basically a downturn in her
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: financial prospects because of the way that the US government
• 35:49
  Speaker 3: was regulating women's property and their ability to have money
• 35:54
  Speaker 3: and their ability to hand it down to their errors,
• 35:57
  Speaker 3: things like that.
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: Tell me about the folks that came from the north
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: where they all that was sort of where the European
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: immigration came from.
• 36:06
  Speaker 3: That's where so that's where some some of it came from,
• 36:09
  Speaker 3: and some Canadian specifically Canadian immigration from north to south.
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: And that interested me. Also.
• 36:18
  Speaker 3: Little Wolf, who is northern Cheyenne, does a great deal
• 36:21
  Speaker 3: of moving from north to south and then south back
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: to north to and from his homelands. The Missouri River
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: tends to be a very well.
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: Trafficked river way.
• 36:36
  Speaker 3: This in this peerage in Beckworth moves north and south,
• 36:39
  Speaker 3: and even saka Jaweya, who we really only think of
• 36:42
  Speaker 3: as moving west with the Lewis and Clark and then
• 36:45
  Speaker 3: back again, she actually started her life moving west to east.
• 36:49
  Speaker 3: But then later in her life she went from her
• 36:53
  Speaker 3: the Knife River villages in the Upper Missouri down south
• 36:57
  Speaker 3: to Saint Louis and then back again. So but a
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: lot of the European migration either came through New Orleans,
• 37:06
  Speaker 3: so a lot of the German migrants to Texas and
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: to other parts of the West came through that port.
• 37:13
  Speaker 3: But also then Canadian any kind of Canadian immigrants, anyone
• 37:18
  Speaker 3: who had come through that way, came then south. So
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: Ella Watson's family was one of those families, and they
• 37:25
  Speaker 3: took up homestead land in Kansas and began to farm it.
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: And she ultimately was not a farmer, but she had
• 37:35
  Speaker 3: really great cooking skills, and so she found work everywhere.
• 37:37
  Speaker 3: She was able to work as a cook and a
• 37:39
  Speaker 3: housekeeper really across the American West.
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: And then.
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: She'd asked this sooner, what's your time frame in this book?
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: Oh, it's huge, which was unusual for me.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: I mean your pre Civil war, sometimes your post Civil war.
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: So and I know each person's story slightly different, starts
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: at a different time, which probably in itself was challenge
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: for you, right, like, because there's history, it's hard to
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: avoid going chronologically, but you have these different characters that
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: in some ways are pieced together differently.
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Roughly it's a nineteenth century story.
• 38:13
  Speaker 3: So roughly it kind of most of the stories start
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: around eighteen hundred and then most of the action is
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: kind of ends in the eighteen nineties, although Little Wolf
• 38:25
  Speaker 3: lives until nineteen oh four and Polybemus lives until nineteen
• 38:28
  Speaker 3: thirty three, so we have a lot of her life
• 38:32
  Speaker 3: to discuss in the final final chapters of the book.
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: But really, this is a nineteenth century story.
• 38:38
  Speaker 3: This is sort of the core century for the emergence
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: of the American West as an actual region, and then
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: also in the American imagination.
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: Tell me about the Chinese immigrants and the workers that
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: were there and how you deal with that.
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: Yes, So poly Bemis was my is my protagonist for
• 39:00
  Speaker 3: that particular movement, and through her I was able to
• 39:04
  Speaker 3: talk about a lot of West East movement, which is
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: again we don't talk about very much in the history
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: of the American West. Chinese migrants first came to the
• 39:13
  Speaker 3: US for the California gold Rush in eighteen forty eight
• 39:16
  Speaker 3: forty nine. Many of them stayed and provided kind of
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: anchor communities for future migrants to come to help build
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: the Central Pacific Railroad, which was the kind of western
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: half of the Transcontinental, and then they dispersed across those
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: rail lines into other mining towns across the West in
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: the eighteen seventies and eighties, and poly bemus Is trafficked
• 39:43
  Speaker 3: to first California and then Idaho kind of in that
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: later moment, she arrives.
• 39:49
  Speaker 5: In labor or for labor labor, it was unclear kind
• 39:55
  Speaker 5: of what she was there to do there was it
• 39:57
  Speaker 5: was possible possible that she could have been trafficked to
• 40:00
  Speaker 5: become a domestic servant.
• 40:03
  Speaker 3: It was possible that she was brought to either be
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: a second or third wife to someone who was a
• 40:10
  Speaker 3: Chinese miner who was living in this Idaho town, or
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: as a prostitute, to either work in a saloon, or
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: to just be kind of the property of another.
• 40:24
  Speaker 2: One of these and some.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: Of these, I mean, I remember reading in one book
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: that I read about the railroads that some of these
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: Chinese workers were sort of brought over on a false
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: promise that it was Some of them signed contracts that
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: they thought were going to you know, they were just
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: coming to earn some money and then they were going
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: to go back, right, And some of them did go back,
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: some of them just disappeared.
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: Yes, And there were labor contracts mostly for men mostly,
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: and I think in this period ninety percent of Chinese
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: migrants were men, and they came specifically, they were recruited
• 40:56
  Speaker 3: in China, their passage was paid, and then they did
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: signed these contracts to work. And some of them became
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: trapped in that labor system and either were not released
• 41:07
  Speaker 3: from their work or had to kind of take matters
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: into their own hands when these contracts, in their view.
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: Were over.
• 41:16
  Speaker 3: Polly Bemus was part of a more traditional Chinese exchange
• 41:21
  Speaker 3: of women's labor, because it was quite common for parents
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: to kind of put their second or third daughters into
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: this kind of trade in girls as workers or as
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: wives or as sex workers, and so she was part
• 41:38
  Speaker 3: of that larger system. But when we find her again
• 41:43
  Speaker 3: in eighteen eighty, she had been trafficked to this town
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: called Warren in Idaho, and it was a Chinese majority community.
• 41:51
  Speaker 3: And I think this is what will surprise people, right,
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: Like as we were talking about before, in westerns, like
• 41:57
  Speaker 3: if you think of a show like dead Wood or
• 41:59
  Speaker 3: you know, any any kind of Western, there will be
• 42:01
  Speaker 3: Chinese migrants.
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: There are always just a family or a grourk or
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: a this it's an a. It's like, well, we've got
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: to depict a Chinese person in here somewhere because we
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: can't well, we won't be credible at all if there's
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: no Chinese characters in this program.
• 42:18
  Speaker 2: Right, exactly so.
• 42:20
  Speaker 3: But she enters this town where she very likely could
• 42:25
  Speaker 3: speak the language of most of the people there, and
• 42:27
  Speaker 3: you have to. And this is again one of those
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: things where I'm like, oh my god, how how it
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: would have been so amazing if she had written an
• 42:35
  Speaker 3: autobiography or someone had interviewed her for more than they
• 42:38
  Speaker 3: did later about this local Idaho newspaper on newspapers dot Com.
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: Now, I think I'm guessing that you didn't find right.
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: Actually, there were a lot of newspapers in Idaho and
• 42:48
  Speaker 3: they wrote about Chinese people a lot. And then later
• 42:52
  Speaker 3: after she became kind of discovered in the nineteen twenties
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: by tourists.
• 42:59
  Speaker 2: They wrote about her quite a bit, but.
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the sort of notion that she would be trafficked
• 43:06
  Speaker 3: all that way, you know, thousands and thousands of miles
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: and sent by herself basically into this new space, but
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: then to find other Chinese people there and to be
• 43:16
  Speaker 3: able to speak with them. And by eighteen eighty when
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: we have a census record, she's a housekeeper and she
• 43:24
  Speaker 3: is working for a man named Charlie Bemis, who she
• 43:26
  Speaker 3: does later marry, but she helps him run all of
• 43:30
  Speaker 3: his businesses and she ultimately ends up on a farm
• 43:35
  Speaker 3: on the Salmon River. And this is how people come
• 43:38
  Speaker 3: to know her because tourists start coming down the river
• 43:42
  Speaker 3: and their ranch, it was called Bemas Ranch, was a
• 43:46
  Speaker 3: pretty good place to put in.
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: Actually it still is.
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: Whenever I talk to people about poly Bemus, if they
• 43:51
  Speaker 3: are whitewater rafters or fly fishermen, they have heard of
• 43:56
  Speaker 3: Bemus Ranch because they have pulled in there. It's still there.
• 44:00
  Speaker 3: She is buried there with her husband, Charlie, and you
• 44:03
  Speaker 3: can come in and take a tour.
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: There's a kind of historical.
• 44:07
  Speaker 3: Marker which is fantastic, but otherwise it's extremely hard to
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: get to and the Salmon River is not for the
• 44:13
  Speaker 3: faint of heart. Do not go out there if you
• 44:16
  Speaker 3: do not have some experience. But yeah, so she lived
• 44:20
  Speaker 3: a very very long life. But she also led a
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: life where restrictions were kind of hanging over her head
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: because in eighteen eighty two we have the first passage
• 44:31
  Speaker 3: of the Chinese Exclusion Act. In eighteen eighty three that
• 44:34
  Speaker 3: is renewed under the Geary Act, and she is forced
• 44:37
  Speaker 3: to have her picture taken and register with the US government,
• 44:42
  Speaker 3: and she must have this certificate on.
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: Given that we're talking about birthright citizenship, which of course
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: the original case is about a Chinese. Yes, it is
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: a Chinese individual. Was she born in the continental United
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: States or was she born in shea was not.
• 44:54
  Speaker 2: No, she was born in China.
• 44:55
  Speaker 3: So she would have been if she had been kind
• 44:58
  Speaker 3: of caught without her certificate and without any way to
• 45:03
  Speaker 3: prove that she had been living in the US since
• 45:07
  Speaker 3: before the Chinese Exclusion Act, she would have been deported.
• 45:11
  Speaker 3: So yeah, that there were efforts increasingly in the late
• 45:16
  Speaker 3: nineteenth century to really control and surveill and kind of
• 45:21
  Speaker 3: wall off people who were considered an American and that
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: included Chinese immigrants Japanese immigrants. It also included Indigenous Americans
• 45:30
  Speaker 3: like this is the real height of the reservation era
• 45:35
  Speaker 3: in the United States as well in the eighteen eighties
• 45:37
  Speaker 3: and eighteen nineties.
• 45:42
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  Speaker 1: And yes, I too, am a customer. Let's talk about
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: Ovando Holliston Bye. Yes, the lone sort of white pioneer.
• 47:24
  Speaker 2: The lone white guy. Yes.
• 47:27
  Speaker 3: I first ran into him when I was writing again
• 47:29
  Speaker 3: the Three Cornered War, because he wrote one of the
• 47:32
  Speaker 3: best records that we have at the history of the
• 47:35
  Speaker 3: first Colorado Regiment. So he was a super fascinating guy.
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: He was born in the eighteen thirties and he went
• 47:44
  Speaker 3: his parents took him to New Lebanon, New York, which
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: was a Shaker community, so he grew up as a Shaker.
• 47:51
  Speaker 3: He was there from the time he was five years
• 47:53
  Speaker 3: old until he was probably twenty or twenty one, and
• 47:57
  Speaker 3: then he was allowed to choose whether he was going
• 48:01
  Speaker 3: to stay, and he chose to leave, and from there
• 48:05
  Speaker 3: he went to Kansas and then to Colorado as part
• 48:08
  Speaker 3: of the eighteen fifty eight eighteen fifty nine gold Rush,
• 48:11
  Speaker 3: and he was one of these guys who was living
• 48:15
  Speaker 3: in Colorado perfectly situated to volunteer for the US Army
• 48:20
  Speaker 3: when the Civil War broke out.
• 48:22
  Speaker 2: So his original plan was to go.
• 48:24
  Speaker 3: Back to Kansas and serve for a Kansas regiment, but
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: they got kind of stuck in Colorado and he ended
• 48:33
  Speaker 3: up joining the First Colorado and fighting in a couple
• 48:36
  Speaker 3: of major battles against Confederate Texans who had invaded New
• 48:40
  Speaker 3: Mexico in an attempt to take the entire West for
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: the Confederacy, which is a theater of the war.
• 48:47
  Speaker 2: We don't really talk.
• 48:48
  Speaker 3: About it all in Civil War history, so it was captivating.
• 48:52
  Speaker 2: He was a very good writer.
• 48:54
  Speaker 3: He was kind of, you know, developing his own writerly
• 48:58
  Speaker 3: sense during this moment, and so again he was my
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: kind of person for the Civil War West.
• 49:07
  Speaker 2: But his post Civil.
• 49:08
  Speaker 3: War life was even more interesting because he had grown
• 49:11
  Speaker 3: up with Shakers. He was an abolitionist and also a
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: feminist because he believed in the equality of all people,
• 49:23
  Speaker 3: at least white and black people.
• 49:25
  Speaker 2: What became very clear.
• 49:27
  Speaker 3: Though, after his years of living in the West and
• 49:30
  Speaker 3: after he left the US Army, he became a newspaperman.
• 49:34
  Speaker 3: He founded a newspaper in Blackhawk, Colorado, and then kind
• 49:38
  Speaker 3: of went on to work for the Rocky Mountain News,
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: and he agitated vociferously against indigenous people and argued that
• 49:49
  Speaker 3: the US Army had to come into Colorado, Colorado had
• 49:52
  Speaker 3: to become a state in order to kind of get
• 49:56
  Speaker 3: the money and the funding they needed to finally defeat
• 49:59
  Speaker 3: every tribal nation and that still had land and was
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: still protecting that land and their own sovereignty in Colorado.
• 50:07
  Speaker 3: So he became an anti indigenous agitator. And then in
• 50:11
  Speaker 3: eighteen sixty eight he moves to Utah to report on
• 50:16
  Speaker 3: the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, but then becomes an
• 50:19
  Speaker 3: anti Mormon agitator because he thinks of them, he's a
• 50:24
  Speaker 3: totally diehard Republican, which at the moment, you know, it's
• 50:28
  Speaker 3: the opposite of what it is today.
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: And so the Party of Lincoln.
• 50:33
  Speaker 3: And he sees both indigenous peoples and Mormons as standing
• 50:39
  Speaker 3: in the way of the Republican vision for the West,
• 50:42
  Speaker 3: which is this frontier pioneer vision, white settlement across the West,
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: you know, farmers and ranchers, kind of making the land
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: pay and in his view, bring him young. And the
• 50:54
  Speaker 3: Mormons had too much of a stranglehold on business in Utah,
• 50:58
  Speaker 3: so he kind of out rageously moved to Salt Lake
• 51:03
  Speaker 3: City and lived three blocks from the Temple Square and
• 51:08
  Speaker 3: agitated against Mormons. He was one of the most hated
• 51:10
  Speaker 3: men in Utah.
• 51:14
  Speaker 2: But he lived there until he died.
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: I see why you keep wanting to say. And he
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: was raised a Shaker, you know, this was like that.
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: This is not crazy. Yes, well it is always a
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: reminder how we're respectful of anything we we know three
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: dimensionally are It's easy to scorn something that we see
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: in two dimensional right, in two dimensional visions. I guess
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: we ought to close with obviously, little Wolf and sort
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: of how and and you know this is how frankly,
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: how Native American tribes are depicted both in our pop culture.
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: That's if anything has improved a lot over the last
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: thirty years in the stories of the West, it has
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: been that. I mean, I guess you know it has been.
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: It does feel like each successive decade we get a
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: little bit better at our depiction of Native Americans. So,
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: but it also gets it to the the diffence. Tell
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: me how you discovered Little Wolf story and how you
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: thought you were able to verify it.
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I had written before about Sitting Bull
• 52:30
  Speaker 3: and then also about the Navajo peoples and Cherikawua apaches,
• 52:33
  Speaker 3: particularly in Vengas, Colorados in the southwest, and so I,
• 52:38
  Speaker 3: you know, had some experience in indigenous studies, but the
• 52:41
  Speaker 3: history of every tribal nation is different. And when I
• 52:45
  Speaker 3: was thinking about, you know, which Westerner would be a
• 52:52
  Speaker 3: really good person to kind of follow during the eighteen
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: seventies and eighties, you know, I had read about Little
• 53:00
  Speaker 3: Wolf kind of on the edges of some of the
• 53:03
  Speaker 3: Sitting Bowl material, because he is an ally during Sitting
• 53:07
  Speaker 3: Bull's campaign against the United States in seventy five and
• 53:11
  Speaker 3: seventy six, although he doesn't actually fight at Little Big
• 53:15
  Speaker 3: Horn because he's off hunting somewhere else, but his tribal
• 53:20
  Speaker 3: nation pays for that, for that loss or their victory
• 53:27
  Speaker 3: and the US loss. And then I started reading about
• 53:31
  Speaker 3: this amazing exodus that he led in eighteen seventy eight
• 53:35
  Speaker 3: and eighteen seventy nine from Indian Territory where the Northern
• 53:40
  Speaker 3: Cheyenne had been forced after surrendering to the US government
• 53:44
  Speaker 3: in eighteen seventy seven in the wake of Little Big Horn.
• 53:47
  Speaker 3: And there's a big US Army retribution, like under the
• 53:51
  Speaker 3: direction of US grant for.
• 53:54
  Speaker 2: That battle and for that loss of Custer.
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: And his cavalry, and you know, they had been forced
• 54:02
  Speaker 3: into Indian territory. They were living there in Little Wolf.
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: Who was this really extraordinary leader he had become. He
• 54:10
  Speaker 3: was the only man to have held three different leadership
• 54:13
  Speaker 3: roles simultaneously within Northern Chyen politics and culture, and everyone
• 54:21
  Speaker 3: really trusted him. He was a great military strategist.
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: He was also a.
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: Really good diplomat and a good leader of his own people,
• 54:27
  Speaker 3: and he always had their best interests in mind. And
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: he could see because you know, the Northern Chian homeland
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: is huge. It ranges from southeastern Montana into Wyoming and
• 54:39
  Speaker 3: parts of Nebraska and Dakota's and that climate and landscape
• 54:45
  Speaker 3: compared to Indian Territory, which is Oklahoma today, extraordinarily different.
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: And he knew that his people were not going to
• 54:53
  Speaker 3: survive like this was. They were not going to be
• 54:56
  Speaker 3: able to make a future in Indian Territory. And so
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: within the year he planned and executed a fifteen hundred
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: mile exodus where he was in a running battle with
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: various US troops until he got his people back to
• 55:11
  Speaker 3: their homeland, and only then did he actually surrender to
• 55:15
  Speaker 3: the US Army. And it was with the stipulation that
• 55:18
  Speaker 3: his people be able to remain, and he was able
• 55:22
  Speaker 3: to convince a bunch of really hardcore US Army generals
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: in the West that they should remain where they wanted
• 55:32
  Speaker 3: to live and where they needed to live. And it
• 55:35
  Speaker 3: was really an extraordinary moment. In eighteen eighty four, they
• 55:39
  Speaker 3: are able to get their own reservation.
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: So he doesn't do that. The Native American communities that
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: do exist in places in fairly substantial numbers in South
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: Dakota and Montana, they wouldn't be there.
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think his success really had an
• 55:57
  Speaker 3: immense effect. I mean, this is the same moment where
• 55:59
  Speaker 3: they US is forcing the Lakota onto reservations at Standing
• 56:03
  Speaker 3: Rock and Pine Ridge, and you know, this is this
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: is one of those moments where we see indigenous defensive
• 56:11
  Speaker 3: sovereignty and homeland really went out. And you know, there
• 56:15
  Speaker 3: are other kind of darker stories wounded me, you know,
• 56:20
  Speaker 3: the the defeat and murder of Sitting Bul, but this
• 56:24
  Speaker 3: is one of the stories. And I really wanted to
• 56:27
  Speaker 3: emphasize that this, this did happen too, you know, that
• 56:30
  Speaker 3: that they did manage to come back home and to
• 56:35
  Speaker 3: build lives for themselves and they're still there. They're still there.
• 56:39
  Speaker 3: This is also something really important, you know, let me.
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: I want to sort of land the plane here more, okay,
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: and sort of the you know, one of the things
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: that I think we fight about now, and this is
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: culturally is his point of views of history, right, you
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: know sort of. And the example I like to use is,
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: you know, with most history books, now, I want to
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: know a lot more about the author before I even
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: read the book, just because I know, look where I
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: always say, We're all born with original bias, right, human
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: beings are wherever you're born. You know, I'm born in Miami,
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: I'm interested in that you're born in Colorado, you're spending
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: all the time, you're interested in the West. That in itself, right,
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: that that is an original bias of interests. So the
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: point is is that obviously, as human beings, whatever it is,
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: you're born with original bias. But I always like to
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: use examples. I've probably written, I've probably read five different
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: books about the eighteen seventy six election, and the facts
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: don't change, but the point of view of the author
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: is what changes the interpretation. So, and I think this
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: is a real challenge. I think about it myself whenever
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: I've dabbled in this is how do you take what
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: you think versus what you research? How do you We
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: all have our own bias as you as you go
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: through this, how do you deal with yours? I think,
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: frankly it's very I know where you're coming from. So
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: I think you've made it fairly clear. I think the
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: reader gets it. How intentional do you feel that is?
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: And how much do you think the historians don't do
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: this enough?
• 58:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah?
• 58:16
  Speaker 3: I mean we all try to write that line right
• 58:18
  Speaker 3: between being completely objective and then also understanding that we
• 58:24
  Speaker 3: do come from a subject position and that we yeah,
• 58:27
  Speaker 3: we're interested in what we're interested in.
• 58:30
  Speaker 2: And I grew up in the West.
• 58:32
  Speaker 3: I grew up, you know, during the rise of multic culturalism,
• 58:36
  Speaker 3: so you know, I read a lot of the classics.
• 58:40
  Speaker 3: I read a lot of you know, novels and histories
• 58:43
  Speaker 3: by white men about white men. But then I also
• 58:47
  Speaker 3: read Frederick Douglass, and I also read you know, Uncle
• 58:50
  Speaker 3: Tom's Cabin, and then a lot of you know, kind
• 58:54
  Speaker 3: of feminist theory and all kinds of things. So that
• 58:56
  Speaker 3: has shaped kind of who I am as a historian.
• 58:58
  Speaker 3: Then I'm interested in complicated stories. I'm interested in short
• 59:03
  Speaker 3: stories that really show the reality of the diversity and
• 59:07
  Speaker 3: complexity of US history. And definitely, I mean, I think
• 59:12
  Speaker 3: there will probably be people who are like, well, you know,
• 59:14
  Speaker 3: you have picked these seven people and they're all.
• 59:17
  Speaker 2: Coming from you know places.
• 59:19
  Speaker 3: And I have been very overt about like, I do
• 59:21
  Speaker 3: want to talk about this person who moved to this way,
• 59:24
  Speaker 3: you know, and they are in their way extraordinary, but
• 59:27
  Speaker 3: they are also quite typical in other ways that they
• 59:30
  Speaker 3: are representative of larger communities. And I think I can
• 59:34
  Speaker 3: make those claims by doing all of the research not
• 59:38
  Speaker 3: only on the person themselves, but also the communities around them,
• 59:43
  Speaker 3: that this is not just I'm making a huge claim
• 59:47
  Speaker 3: about who Westerners were, only looking at seven people across
• 59:51
  Speaker 3: a huge span of time, but that I can connect
• 59:55
  Speaker 3: them to these larger movements and these larger communities. And
• 59:58
  Speaker 3: I think that's that's the line I think most historians today.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: No, I feel like your your contribution is the way
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: I look at it, which is, you know, we're painting
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: this huge tapestry. I guess, of whatever, maybe I'm mixing
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: my metaphors here, that every historical every sort of historical
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: record only adds. You add to the tapestry. Right, You add,
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: and you're adding more context, more colors to something that
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: might have been binary or black and white, or whatever
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: you want to like. I said, so I get that. Now,
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: let's imagine yourself and the your meeting with the I
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: think Colorado has a state school superintendent. Maybe it'sappointed by
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: the governor, I think, but you think about the Western
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: history you received in school, and how would you improve
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: the curriculum in a way to just more honestly depict
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: the West? Right? And you can you can. I can
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: almost hear the complaints from a from another group of
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: people who would say, where's my you know, no, no, no, no,
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: we must teach it this way because this is the
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: way I was taught. And the fact of the matter is, no,
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: if we have more information, you know, it's like, oh,
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: we discovered you know, it's like we're not going to
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: take away where we only taught division and multiplication. So
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: why aren't we only teaching that? Right? Like, you know,
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: we all get it in the sciences. We struggle sometimes
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: with it in the social sciences. So how how would
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: you recommend teaching Western history today being mindful of the
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: climate we also live in, right?
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah?
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 3: I mean, well this is really super interesting now too,
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 3: because Colorado is having its one fifty while the nation
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 3: is having its two fifty.
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 2: It is the centennial state.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 3: So it's interesting to think about how we're going to
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 3: think about Colorado history moving forward.
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 2: And I think one of the.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 3: Ways to do it is to say, okay, what if
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 3: we focus on Colorado's like Ovando Hollister, Jim Beckworth who
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 3: lived there for quite some time, Jean Baptiste Sharboneau, who
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 3: was Secondgawaya's son who lived there for a little bit,
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 3: and we think about all of these people circulating in
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 3: and out of Colorado, and then we also do something
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 3: which you know, I grew up, and I think I
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 3: don't even think I learned the history of Denver. I
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: think it was all ghost towns and boom and bust
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 3: and like you know, and Denver assume you had.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: Did you have a year where they supposedly taught you
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: Colorado history?
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 2: I mean I must meet school, I mean I must have.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: But I think it was all it was all kind
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 3: of first the Indians were here, and then there were
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 3: silver mines, you know, and then and then there's the
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 3: ski industry.
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 2: I think there was a lot kind of missing.
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: A lot happened in the YadA YadA, Yeah exactly.
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 3: And you know, I really do believe people like to
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 3: read about and learn about people. I mean, there are
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 3: the kind of nerds among us who are like, I
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 3: love dates and I want.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: To know you're not wrong. I'm always I've learned more
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: about an era reading about reading about an individual and
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: their navigation to it, Like I'm you know, the best
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: book I read about the railroads, frankly for me, was
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: a biography of Leland Stanford. Yeah, yep, and so you
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: know it is I agree, I think it is easier
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: to follow a narrative if an individual to learn about
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: an era and a geography.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, And I would love to see if
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: we could kick up a bunch of names of you know,
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 3: nineteenth century Coloradom's from a host of different communities and
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 3: then kind of hand those out to students and have
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 3: them do the research.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 2: Because that's the fun too.
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 3: I mean you talked earlier about historians being detectives, and
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 3: we really are, and that's a really kind of fun
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: part of it is to go and really dig some
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 3: things up. So I think that would be really fun.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 3: But yeah, also looking you know, foregoing all of the
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 3: interest in Deadwood and Tombstone and you know, ghost towns
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 3: and be like Denver, can I confess?
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: I just you know, Tombstone might be one of my
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: favorite movies ever. I'm sorry, does it disappoint? Do you
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: think less of me if I admit that? I mean
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: at least, I mean, you know, I won't be your huckleberry?
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: I know that. Yeah, that's sorry, But you're you're not wrong.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: I mean there is look I I have you know,
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: I'm I'm a dude, so I have I have done
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: the Deadwood thing. I have done Tombstone and and and
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: some of that, but with the knowledge that yeah, this
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: is not fully correct.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah, or at least it's I mean, Deadwood, the TV
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 3: show actually is pretty decent. All of those people actually existed,
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 3: but you know, their lives were just so outsized and
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 3: so based in violence and so just kind of incredibly dramatic.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: Then how violent do you believe the West really was?
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 3: I mean I think that it was especially kind of
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: in the time before territorial government. People did take matters
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 3: of justice into their own hands. There were fights law, Yeah,
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 3: there were fights in the street that ended up in deaths.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 3: And but you know, I think that would be really interesting.
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 3: I'm not sure anyone has done a study of like
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 3: what the actual murder rate was in one place as
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 3: compared to today, And I if I had to guess,
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 3: I would think it wouldn't be so different, right, I
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 3: think it wasn't like crazy Wild West shootouts every day,
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 3: people dying all the time. I mean, they probably died
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 3: more of disease, quite frankly, than anything else.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: So a lot of books like this trigger the next project.
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: Do you know what your next project is?
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 2: I do I do the next project?
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 3: I go, yeah, absolutely, I go, I'm going back to
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 3: the Civil War, but staying in the West. So the
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 3: next book is the story of a Kiowa and Comanche
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 3: raid on a biracial ranching town in North Texas in
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 3: eighteen sixty four during the American Civil War. So I
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 3: get to talk about I mean basically, and I think
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 3: you will agree with this too. One of the major
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 3: arguments is Texas is weird, and I think that's pretty
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 3: a consistent historical argument across This.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: Is a contradiction all the time, all the time. No,
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: it is, and you know, in some ways that makes
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: it a rich place to go tell stories.
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, and it becomes Texas becomes the sort of
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 3: dream of the Confederacy in the last year of the war.
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 3: That's where Jefferson Davis is headed when Richmond falls, that's
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 3: you know, the last battle is there at Palmito Ranch.
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 3: We have Juneteenth in Texas. So there's a lot of
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 3: really interesting This is another story for me.
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: It brings togethering of contradictions, right both, that's where exactly
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: you know, you know, Juneteenth is is essentially that's the
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: origin story and at the same time it's where Jefferson
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: Davis was looking for.
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 2: Exactly, so exactly.
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's another book that brings together the kind
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 3: of white and black and indigenous West, which you know,
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 3: and these are the kinds of stories I like to tell,
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 3: the complicated ones. But yes, hopefully that one will also
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 3: have a kind of built in narrative that'll that'll bring
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 3: you in and be as compelling as the kind of
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 3: frontier myth while still giving you a good a good
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 3: sense of the reality of life on the ground.
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: Well, I've kept you an hour, which is probably means
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: we gave away too much of the book.
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 2: But no, that's fine, that's fine.
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: Grab it. It's it's wonderful. And I can't wait for
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: you know, our friends at Netflix and Amazon to type
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: by the rights to your book and say, let's do
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: a story. Especially I think we I think we've got
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: to do a story on our gambling Mexican woman.
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 2: Oh, I mean, don't you think, like Selma hyak is.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: Like, just let's do a nice series on her, right
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: like that?
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 2: Please?
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: That's that would be fun, interesting and might accidentally teach people.
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 2: Something that would be amazing. I would love that.
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: Megan, congrats, this was great, appreciate it.
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 2: Thanks so much, Chack. Thanks for having me on