Ep. 699: The American West with Dan Flores

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Dan Flores https://www.themeateater.com/people/dan-flores, Randall Williams https://www.themeateater.com/people/randall-williams, Cory Calkins https://www.instagram.com/cman_calkins/?hl=en, Corinne Schneider https://www.instagram.com/corinnesschneider/?hl=en, and Phil Taylor https://www.instagram.com/philtaylor25/?hl=en. Topics discussed: Dan's brand new podcast on The MeatEater Network, "The American West With Dan Flores" https://www.themeateater.com/listen/the-american-west/introducing-the-american-west; an unconventional telling of the West by an environmental historian; a pigeon catching controversy in New York; the International Order of St. Hubertus; invasive aoudad as detrimental to native desert bighorn sheep populations; hunting the University of Texas, El Paso's Indio Mountain Research Station https://www.utep.edu/science/indio/ and donating to fund research for bighorn sheep conservation https://givingto.utep.edu/conservation; reintroducing species; deep history and long time with Dan; and more. Subscribe to The American West with Dan Flores now wherever you listen to podcasts! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050 iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/ Pandora: https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272 Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 0:48Steven Rinella?

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• 1:33Steven Rinella?

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• 2:15Steven Rinella?

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• 2:49Speaker 02

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast.

• 2:58Steven Rinella?

  You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Lite. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Lite has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlite.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com.

• 3:20Steven Rinella?

  Before we start today's show, we'd like to touch on Dr. Randall's hair a little bit.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:28Steven Rinella?

  You got screwed at the barber.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  I don't want to say screwed, but there was a miscommunication.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  I was going for a more minimalist touch up, and we ended up.

• 3:42Steven Rinella?

  You wanted to keep your length in the back.

• 3:43Speaker 03

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

• 3:55Steven Rinella?

  Just blowing in the wind.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I missed it so badly.

• 3:59Steven Rinella?

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

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:08Steven Rinella?

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

• 4:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, you better pick another stream for sure.

• 4:14Steven Rinella?

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

• 4:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:16Steven Rinella?

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

• 4:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:23Steven Rinella?

  Cause what are the odds? Lightning's not gonna strike twice.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  Never in the same spot.

• 4:27Steven Rinella?

  Halibut fishing, it goes in weeks, week on, week off. So if you're like, if people are up fishing at our fish shack, and you call up, the last thing you want to hear, cause if you're going up, like let's say they're up there last week of July, you're going first week of August. What you want, you think you want hot reports.

• 4:49Steven Rinella?

  You don't. You want horrible reports.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  You make that phone call wanting some bitching and moaning.

• 4:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, cause they're like, oh my God, it's on fire. You're like, I'm not even gonna go now.

• 5:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:00Steven Rinella?

  Cause it's gonna be, it'll die, it'll be the dead, I'll be there for the dead week. You want it to be that no one's catching nothing. Then you're gonna go up and have a phenomenal time.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, that's the same with this little riffle that I'm speaking of just east of here.

• 5:16Steven Rinella?

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

• 5:19Speaker 04

  No.

• 5:23Steven Rinella?

  Uh, we're joined today by the esteemed professor, former professor of American history, current author of all kinds of books, New York Times bestselling author, Dan Flores, uh, has been on the show a handful of times in the past. I'll just come flat out and say, he's, he's my most, he's my favorite historian and one of America's most celebrated historians. Eleven books. If you listen to Rogan's podcast, Dan's been on Rogan's podcast a couple of times talking about his book as well.

• 5:56Steven Rinella?

  Started his career as, uh, not started, you were a writer, but also a teacher.

• 6:01Speaker 05

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

• 6:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I mean, me and Randall can relate.

• 6:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, and becoming an academic. So, yeah, you guys can relate. Randall can relate, I know.

• 6:19Steven Rinella?

  Uh, not only that, but um, I took, when I was in graduate school, I took a class with Professor Flores and Randall took presumably many classes.

• 6:31Speaker 05

  A handful.

• 6:32Steven Rinella?

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

• 6:58Steven Rinella?

  How, how, don't get into enormous detail, but how would you describe your approach? Cause you were an environmental historian.

• 7:06Speaker 05

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

• 7:50Speaker 05

  to the kind of environmental relationship between people and the natural world in the West and in the country. And so that's, that's really what this podcast boils down to.

• 8:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Fewer OK corrals and more, more wildlife.

• 8:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah.

• 8:06Steven Rinella?

  Speaking of wildlife, uh, pigeon catching controversy. In New York, and this makes sense to me. The price, like, my boy sells pigeons to dog trainers.

• 8:20Speaker 06

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

• 8:23Steven Rinella?

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

• 8:25Speaker 06

  Oh yeah. No, I didn't know that. I thought he was.

• 8:27Steven Rinella?

  Well, this year he just did a, if you go from $7 to $8, what percent increase is that?

• 8:32Speaker 05

  That's a tough one to figure out.

• 8:33Speaker 06

  One.

• 8:34Steven Rinella?

  I told him, say tariffs, did it, man.

• 8:35Speaker 06

  Ten percent. Wait, how?

• 8:38Steven Rinella?

  Twelve and a half percent.

• 8:39Speaker 06

  How much does he, is that how much he sells that?

• 8:41Steven Rinella?

  Did you just figure that out on your head, Dan?

• 8:43Speaker 05

  I think that's right.

• 8:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's right, yes.

• 8:45Speaker 06

  Wait, is that how much he sells them for?

• 8:48Steven Rinella?

  He just, he just, he just, uh, he had a new client. And, um, and he was saying what, cause last year he was getting seven.

• 8:58Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 8:58Steven Rinella?

  A piece. And he had a new client, he just threw out eight, not a blank. Take as many as I can get.

• 9:06Steven Rinella?

  So, point being, it doesn't surprise me. Now, what, so he gets pigeons out of, uh, grain silos.

• 9:14Speaker 06

  Right.

• 9:15Steven Rinella?

  Cause guys are storing grain, the last thing you want is pigeons in the grain. You know, you don't want them shitting in the grain.

• 9:22Steven Rinella?

  So he gets them out of grain silos and whatnot, out of barns, and people use them for dog training.

• 9:27Speaker 06

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

• 9:32Steven Rinella?

  No, he would pay to get them.

• 9:34Speaker 06

  Okay, right.

• 9:36Steven Rinella?

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

• 9:39Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 9:39Steven Rinella?

  Okay? Some guy has thought to himself, apparently, well now where are there a lot of pigeons? And he has noted that in Brooklyn, there's a lot of pigeons, and some guys are taking some industrial pigeon catching strategies to these parks in Brooklyn, which is really causing a lot of distress for local pigeon lovers.

• 10:03Steven Rinella?

  It's a little bit weird because I think that, I don't know if New York does, but there's a thing called Avatral. There's a, there's a poison

• 10:12Steven Rinella?

  that municipalities will use on pigeons. It's kinda like a, you know. So I think that for them to see a guy jump out and net a bunch

• 10:22Steven Rinella?

  is probably, like, definitely disturbing, but I mean, if you looked at the darker side, there's like a darker side to pigeon removal that they're probably not aware of.

• 10:33Steven Rinella?

  Pigeons being a non-native bird, but pigeons have been there, I mean, the French introduced pigeons along to St. Lawrence I think in the late 1500s. I mean, there's been pigeons on the ground, street pigeons. It's Linnaean name, if you see a pigeon flying around town, it's Linnaean name is Columba livia, I believe is what it is. And, um, people are worked up because guys are catching these things, and they're probably, like, the guests are selling them into the pigeon market. Some guy cleared 150 out of a park.

• 11:03Speaker 06

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

• 11:10Steven Rinella?

  This is a dude selling, this is a dude selling pigeons for some purpose. I used to on occasion, um, when I, I lived in Brooklyn and I would go down and I would just nab them and put them in my pockets. And we, I'm not kidding you. We would grab them and we would make patees with them, me and my chef buddy. And I just put them right in my pockets.

• 11:34Steven Rinella?

  We got all kinds of videos of it.

• 11:35Speaker 06

  We, oh my gosh, we need to put this together. This is a new episode.

• 11:40Steven Rinella?

  Well.

• 11:41Speaker 06

  What, what's the hand grabbing pigeons?

• 11:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You just put a little bit of food down and you just put them, and I'd, I'd always want to leave the scene with them alive. So we just put them in our pockets and make little patees with them.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Your pockets all bouncing around.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  What, yeah, what garment is best for?

• 11:57Steven Rinella?

  Just any kind of coat, like a down puffy type coat and, and put them in your pockets.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  But, uh.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  Kangaroo pouch.

• 12:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. The, the thing that came to mind, the thing that came to mind here, if any person, like if you went to any, I shouldn't say any, if you went to most wildlife managers and you asked them if you could wave a magic wand and it would make street pigeons disappear, they would wave the wand. You know? But then you get into like different things. Like I used to go to even farmers and ranchers that like would hate wild pigs. But you'd say, if I could wave a magic wand and a wild pig would never, ever, ever again walk on your property, would you want me to wave it? And they'd think and go, no.

• 12:41Steven Rinella?

  I just don't want as many, you know? Uh, so that's going on there. Um, you can get stung though. If you're the guy doing this.

• 12:53Steven Rinella?

  If you're listening.

• 12:54Speaker 06

  They're on to you.

• 12:55Steven Rinella?

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

• 13:03Speaker 04

  So they haven't caught this person yet, huh? Wonder how deep they're diving.

• 13:08Steven Rinella?

  But if he's getting, let's say he's getting New York prices.

• 13:13Speaker 06

  I feel like New York prices, wouldn't that be, oh, okay.

• 13:17Steven Rinella?

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

• 13:20Speaker 06

  Does that mean Jimmy gets to?

• 13:22Steven Rinella?

  No, I'm just saying he's making like, you know?

• 13:24Speaker 06

  He's making good money.

• 13:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. He's like the last of the old New York market hunters.

• 13:36Steven Rinella?

  There's a thing I found out about Buddy might told me about it. Have you ever heard, hold on a minute. Randall, did I ask you about this?

• 13:44Speaker 06

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

• 13:48Steven Rinella?

  The International Order of Saint Hubertus?

• 13:52Speaker 03

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

• 14:00Steven Rinella?

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

• 14:05Speaker 03

  I'm not a member?

• 14:06Steven Rinella?

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

• 14:23Speaker 07

  Like, once upon a time?

• 14:25Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. Like, the old.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:27Steven Rinella?

  Mm. And that's when you know it's legit.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:31Steven Rinella?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 14:32Speaker 03

  There's gotta be a technical term for that.

• 14:33Steven Rinella?

  No doubt, huh? The International Order of Saint Hubertus is a true knightly order in the historical tradition. The order is under the royal protection of His Majesty, King Juan Carlos of Spain, the Grand Master Emeritus, and His Imperial and Royal Highness, Archduke Andreas Salvatore von Habsburg-Lawinggrin of Austria.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  It's a lot of syllables.

• 15:00Steven Rinella?

  And our current Grand Master is His Imperial and Royal Highness, István von Habsburg-Lawthringen, Archduke of Austria, Prince of Hungary. The International Order of Saint Hubertus is comprised of an international group of individuals, ordens, brothers, who are passionate about the sports of hunting and fishing, and who are vitally interested and actively involved in the preservation of wildlife, its habitat, and the tradition of ethical hunting and fishing.

• 15:43Steven Rinella?

  They got members who are dedicated to upland bird hunting, duck hunting, and hunters of, quote, "larger and big game." Never been asked.

• 15:55Steven Rinella?

  If Randall gets asked to be in this and I don't, I'm gonna be pissed.

• 15:59Speaker 03

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

• 16:04Steven Rinella?

  Here's what they stand for.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  That's okay.

• 16:06Speaker 03

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

• 16:10Steven Rinella?

  Here's what they stand for, to promote sportsmanlike conduct in hunting and fishing. To foster good fellowship among sportsmen from all over the world. To teach and preserve sound traditional hunting and fishing customs. To encourage wildlife conservation and to help protect endangered species from extinction. To promote the concept of hunting and fishing as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. To endeavor to ensure that the economic benefits derived from sports hunting and fishing support the regions where these activities are carried out. And to strive to enhance respect for responsible hunters and fishermen.

• 16:52Steven Rinella?

  If I get into that, you know, I don't have any tattoos, I'm getting that crest, it's got a crest.

• 16:59Speaker 04

  Where's it going on your lower back?

• 17:01Steven Rinella?

  Right here.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  Oh, that's where it has to go.

• 17:04Steven Rinella?

  Put the first one, man.

• 17:07Steven Rinella?

  Not like Spencer who ran out of places to put them.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  He said with, he said with no small amount of judgment.

• 17:17Steven Rinella?

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

• 17:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:25Steven Rinella?

  Are you familiar with the controversy?

• 17:28Speaker 04

  Well, is it similar to asking folks if they want to get rid of pigs?

• 17:32Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:33Speaker 04

  And if you, most of them would say no, because they're, they turn quite a profit.

• 17:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so people like you guys.

• 17:42Steven Rinella?

  People like you guys getting all excited, flying all around the country to hunt oddad are killing big horns.

• 17:51Speaker 06

  Not exactly.

• 17:52Speaker 04

  I think we saved a couple.

• 17:53Speaker 06

  Let that sink in. But continue.

• 17:56Steven Rinella?

  You hate bighorn sheep.

• 18:00Speaker 06

  Thanks for putting us in a box, dude.

• 18:02Steven Rinella?

  Okay, tell us about your trip.

• 18:03Speaker 04

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

• 18:04Steven Rinella?

  No, no, no, I'm joking.

• 18:05Speaker 06

  Wanna, wanna start?

• 18:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 18:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:08Steven Rinella?

  I'm paraphrasing Heffelfinger.

• 18:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, we're, we're definitely gonna address that.

• 18:13Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 18:14Speaker 06

  That's part of the, that's part of the conservation story.

• 18:16Steven Rinella?

  I'll just cover it. I'm being too, I'm being, I'm being too cute.

• 18:18Speaker 06

  No, no, that, that's, that's.

• 18:19Speaker 04

  Sure. By promoting Audad hunting.

• 18:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, meaning that Audad are, they're, they're, they're a sheep species from...

• 18:27Speaker 06

  North Africa.

• 18:28Steven Rinella?

  North Africa.

• 18:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, Saharan.

• 18:29Steven Rinella?

  And they, they run wild in, they run wild in Texas.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  Not a sheep.

• 18:34Steven Rinella?

  Oh, what are they?

• 18:36Speaker 04

  They're Audad.

• 18:36Speaker 05

  They're closely, more closer to goats, aren't they?

• 18:39Speaker 04

  They're closer to goats than sheep.

• 18:41Speaker 06

  But people call them barberry sheep.

• 18:43Steven Rinella?

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

• 18:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, right.

• 18:45Steven Rinella?

  So not, not a true sheep.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 18:47Steven Rinella?

  Obviously, okay.

• 18:48Speaker 04

  Related, but not, not a true sheep.

• 18:50Steven Rinella?

  Uh, they've gone feral. They do quite well in Texas and people point out that, um, it's been pointed out. Not, not just pointed out. I think it's, according to Heffelfinger, it's like an objective reality that Audad are detrimental to bighorn sheep recovery.

• 19:04Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 19:05Steven Rinella?

  So, in all, in all fairness, I don't mean to overblow it. Heffelfinger has pointed out, he feels that there is like an increasing popularity in Audad hunting, because you can hunt them year round.

• 19:16Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 19:17Speaker 05

  Poor man's sheep hunting.

• 19:17Speaker 06

  He's right, yeah.

• 19:18Steven Rinella?

  You don't have any kind of bag limits, like, it's kind of the, you know, it's like the, you know, it's like the Wild West of Audad hunting right now.

• 19:25Speaker 06

  Yep. You're not gonna get a sheep probably ever in your life, so if you wanna try for something adjacent to it.

• 19:33Steven Rinella?

  Go down in the desert and, you know, run around in the rim rocks. They're down there. And he feels that as this gains popularity, um, land managers, landowners will become incentivized to host Audad on their properties. And he feels that this could lead to a net loss in suitable bighorn habitat.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:59Steven Rinella?

  Uh, but I was hunting, um, Audad when you guys, when your mommies was wiping your noses.

• 20:07Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  How old are you?

• 20:11Steven Rinella?

  Fifty-one.

• 20:12Speaker 06

  So Steve made it cool before it was cool?

• 20:16Steven Rinella?

  No, I went one time.

• 20:17Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 20:18Steven Rinella?

  No, I went two times.

• 20:19Speaker 06

  I'm just trying to be cute, Steve.

• 20:21Steven Rinella?

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

• 20:26Speaker 04

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

• 20:35Steven Rinella?

  Oh, the duck biologist.

• 20:37Speaker 06

  The duck doctor. The duck doctor, DNA doc, now, now oddad DNA doc.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  Also turkey DNA doc.

• 20:45Speaker 06

  Yep, he's got all the names.

• 20:47Speaker 04

  He hosted us down in West Texas on UTEP's, the Indio Research Station.

• 20:54Speaker 06

  Yep, he's at the, yeah, so, so we weren't at, you know, a ranch where you go and pay for it. Yeah. University of Texas at El Paso has a research facility that's about thirty-five or forty thousand acres.

• 21:10Speaker 04

  I think it's forty thousand.

• 21:10Speaker 06

  So that's where we were. Mm-hmm.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  Right on the Rio Grande.

• 21:13Steven Rinella?

  I somehow missed all these details.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  You're looking at Mexico, the mountains in Mexico the whole time. Glorious, stunning country. He, he wanted us to come down in February or January when it was cooler. And the best time we could pull it off was in early April. And so, odds were that it was gonna be hot while we were down there. But we got really lucky with a cold front that rolled in just days before we landed. And they were still trying to squeak out of that cold front. And I don't think it ever got above seventy degrees.

• 21:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  We hunted two days.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  And we, we did our best to help the conservation aspect and tried just shooting ewes.

• 21:49Steven Rinella?

  They did.

• 21:50Speaker 04

  Was our main objective.

• 21:52Steven Rinella?

  So this facility is hostile to the oddads?

• 21:57Speaker 06

  I mean...

• 21:59Speaker 04

  They've just made themselves at home.

• 22:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  They're a desert bighorn that roam in and out, but it's, this is just south of the Elephant Mountains, I believe, which has a herd of bighorn sheep and they'll bleed over into this ranch. But the oddad have made themselves at home. There, there weren't a lot of oddad around, or at least... They weren't easy to find. We made it look easy in two days, but it was because the weather was so nice. We were able to hunt all day.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  Got it.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  Glass them up in the morning and take hours to get in within rifle range and, you know, slowly pack them out without worrying about wasting any of the meat.

• 22:35Speaker 03

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

• 22:41Speaker 04

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

• 23:08Speaker 03

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

• 23:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:10Speaker 06

  I can't. I have fifty pounds.

• 23:15Speaker 06

  Corey shot a really, really huge ram. So, like, I guess your hand didn't even fit around the whole horn there.

• 23:30Speaker 06

  But yeah, just more on that, you know, Phil's lab, he's trying to figure out certain new techniques to test aspects of the oddad. So like, everyone that we shot, we collectively got four. They all got nasal swabbed and they all got a piece of meat cut out of them for testing for various diseases and such. But to my understanding, that research facility is potential grounds for desert bighorn reintroduction.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 24:12Speaker 06

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

• 24:30Speaker 03

  Some number of bighorns.

• 24:31Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly.

• 24:35Steven Rinella?

  Are you counting up that he's like eleven or twelve years old?

• 24:37Speaker 04

  That's what we guesstimated, somewhere between ten and thirteen. It's so hard to tell. I mean.

• 24:43Steven Rinella?

  Well, the, yeah, the, the annulire rubbed off on the outer.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:47Steven Rinella?

  On the end.

• 24:47Speaker 04

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

• 24:59Steven Rinella?

  Cause these have a real bad eating reputation.

• 25:02Speaker 04

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

• 25:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I've, I felt like the, the meat flavor is so incredibly mild. I mean, I, I shot the littlest of them of the four. I thought that I was aiming at a ewe, and then it ended up being, um, a, a small ram, um, that was termed as a subadult.

• 25:33Speaker 06

  You could kinda like lift it with one hand. Um, and I haven't eaten off of, I ate a little bit of his heart, but, um, the meat is much like lighter pink and seems tender as heck, cause it, cause he's really young, but, um, we threw ribs on the grill one of the days and our first night of dinner at, uh, Dr. Phil's house. He just, I forget what cut, but he just grilled it up and it, you know, he, he, um, he says it's like cereal loin to him.

• 26:06Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 26:07Speaker 06

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

• 26:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, he whipped up a, again, I don't know what cut it was, but a, an awdad steak and an elk steak. I couldn't tell the difference.

• 26:26Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 26:26Speaker 06

  It was really good.

• 26:27Speaker 04

  Tenderness, the flavor.

• 26:28Speaker 06

  It was really good. It just, you even smell the meat and it doesn't.

• 26:33Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:34Speaker 06

  Uh, it's, it's, yeah, it's just really, it's really clean.

• 26:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, man, they got a bad reputation.

• 26:38Speaker 06

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

• 26:40Steven Rinella?

  But like you said, like reputations aren't really based on that much.

• 26:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:43Steven Rinella?

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

• 26:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:45Steven Rinella?

  And then some dude else parrots what he said.

• 26:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, and then it just, you know, it's a total echoes out.

• 26:53Steven Rinella?

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• 27:37Steven Rinella?

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• 28:22Steven Rinella?

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• 29:02Steven Rinella?

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• 29:29Speaker 06

  So how many did you guys see all together? Oh.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  Well, the group that Corinne and I both got are adult and sub adult rams. There were 23 in that group and then I guess we saw two other solo rams and another small group. So we probably saw close to 50 in two days, two full days of hunting though.

• 29:48Speaker 06

  And then.

• 29:48Speaker 04

  Sun up till sundown.

• 29:49Speaker 06

  When you were gotten yours in the field, Matt and I went off on a, on a little nearby knob. And there were probably like 10 in that group. So they're around. They're, they're, they're, their behavior is interesting. Like if you, you know, like Cory, Cory shot first. And, and then I shot second. That was chivalrous of you Cory.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  That was 400 yards.

• 30:16Speaker 06

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

• 30:20Steven Rinella?

  I'll take the first shot.

• 30:21Speaker 06

  Cory wanted to check the dope for Corinne. No, Cory was so awesome the entire time.

• 30:27Steven Rinella?

  What did his kids go, stand back kids?

• 30:29Speaker 06

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

• 31:14Speaker 06

  Can't, can't knock Cory or Phil or Matt. Like, I, I had my hand held quite a bit through this experience.

• 31:20Steven Rinella?

  Literally your hand held.

• 31:21Speaker 06

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

• 31:25Speaker 04

  We were on the highest point of the ranch.

• 31:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, literally, my hand was held.

• 31:29Speaker 04

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

• 31:39Speaker 06

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

• 31:43Speaker 04

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

• 32:00Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  Towards the end there.

• 32:02Speaker 06

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

• 32:36Steven Rinella?

  I, I find it interesting how the different states look at their, their attitude about the animal. In New Mexico, it's a draw, it's a draw tag, and you don't draw it.

• 32:50Steven Rinella?

  Like, I put it, I put it in every year.

• 32:51Speaker 06

  For New Mexico odd add?

• 32:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I put it in every year. My buddy, my buddy's got a spot. He says they go there and sometimes you see, like, you'll be looking at a hillside. And at first, you don't think there's anything there, but once you start looking, he's like, there'd be like 30, 40 of them on the hillside. And every time they draw a permit, every time one of his buddies draws a permit, they just get an odd add. I've been applying now for, I think, 10 years in New Mex- you know, New Mexico doesn't do the points.

• 33:16Speaker 06

  Right.

• 33:17Steven Rinella?

  I've been applying in 10 years, 10 years to draw an odd add tag in New Mexico.

• 33:23Steven Rinella?

  And I've never drawn it. So it's like, they kind of became like an honorary, they're sort of, uh, they're managed. You know, like, you look at, with, with Texas Wild Hogs.

• 33:36Steven Rinella?

  Texas is so serious about wild hogs. They dropped any license requirement. You need, there is no license requirement for hogs. Obviously, no season, no bag limit, no license requirement. You go to California to hunt hogs?

• 33:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 33:50Steven Rinella?

  You gotta tag. Full big game license, you need to tag the hog. Just like different states have really different attitudes about how to, how to treat and handle

• 34:02Speaker 06

  Right.

• 34:02Steven Rinella?

  non-native wildlife.

• 34:03Speaker 06

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

• 34:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 34:21Speaker 06

  And just having to be careful about, you know.

• 34:25Steven Rinella?

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

• 34:49Speaker 05

  Maybe, yeah. If you were a, a good, in shape hiker.

• 34:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But are you like, picture it, you like, you like standing there and be like, there they are. Like, you see them in their entirety. There's ibex in the Florida mountains. Or non-native, so another non-native species. Uh. It's very hard to draw an ibex tag in the Florida mountains. Um, there's actually a thing where it's like a once in a lifetime if you draw a, a, for a billy or a ram, whatever they call them. Meanwhile, their management strategy is it's always ibex season. Not in the Florida mountains.

• 35:28Speaker 04

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

• 35:31Steven Rinella?

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

• 36:14Steven Rinella?

  they'd have a very different attitude about the sandbars, you know?

• 36:19Speaker 04

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

• 36:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think Heffelfinger is like, for every ram anyone takes, you need to shoot like ten.

• 36:33Steven Rinella?

  I like to misquote Heffelfinger every day though. I misrepresent something Heffelfinger told me every day.

• 36:41Speaker 03

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

• 36:43Speaker 06

  But I'll just plug Phil's lab again. It's the Population Evolutionary Genetics Lab at UTEP, University of Texas at El Paso. And if anyone feels like, you know, donating some tax deductible monies to their research lab, and I think they'll probably end up doing more on Audad and looking at Desert Big Horn, the potential for reintroduction. That's givingto.utep.edu/conservation. You probably did not retain that information. I will put a link in the show notes.

• 37:21Steven Rinella?

  And what was the episode he came on?

• 37:23Speaker 06

  Oh, he's been on a couple. Our Wild Ducks Really Wild. That was the first episode a year or two ago.

• 37:32Steven Rinella?

  So if you remember back.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  He's been on Radio Live.

• 37:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, if you remember back, we did an episode where in some places, it's so weird this is even allowed. In some places, you can like pen raise mallards, like pretend mallards and cut them loose.

• 37:48Steven Rinella?

  To kind of like have like a pretend duck hunt. But then those pen raised ducks are breeding into our wild duck populations and affecting their behavior. Screwing up migration patterns, life cycles, um, fitness. Uh, and he came on to talk about how, uh, through the, through their genetic survey work, they're able to see from these reintroduction from that, these, from these pen raised operations, they're able to see a genetic spread as the genetics of those ducks expand outward. Um, and, and how far into, how far, I guess it would be how far west they're finding traces of these ducks.

• 38:31Steven Rinella?

  Michael Chamberlain is beginning a new thing on wild turkeys. The impact of, you know, people get all excited when they shoot a white turkey. Real excited. Usually what's happened is you've shot a turkey. Butterball. People love it. But what's probably happened is you shot someone's turkey. Right? Um, you shot someone's feral turkey. And so there's a new project coming out where they're going to start looking at the impacts of domestic turkeys finding their way into wild turkeys and interbreeding into wild turkey populations.

• 39:07Speaker 04

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

• 39:34Steven Rinella?

  Who cut them loose in the first place? Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  And why? Texas Parks and Wildlife.

• 39:39Steven Rinella?

  I was, I was thinking. Yeah, cause it's, yeah, it was.

• 39:42Speaker 04

  And now they're, you know, people very much don't like Texas Parks and Wildlife because they're, you know, aerial gunning oddad to help with desert bighorn sheep.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  Just because they have to. If you want to protect the sheep, you gotta minimize the odd ad population.

• 39:57Speaker 03

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

• 40:34Steven Rinella?

  No, I mean Hungarian, like Hungarian par- they ain't American partridge.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 40:39Steven Rinella?

  But some, well, in Tur- so you can hunt turkeys in 49 states. Turkeys are native to 38 states.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:47Steven Rinella?

  I mean, like some stuff is.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:49Steven Rinella?

  There's no, there's some stuff, there's no like demonstrated deleterious effect.

• 40:53Speaker 03

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

• 41:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  Even in the fishing world.

• 41:07Steven Rinella?

  There is one last introduction I want to do. I, whenever I'm in Hawaii, I always think on those hot lava rocks, I always think how much rattlesnake would love it in there.

• 41:18Speaker 04

  That's all right.

• 41:19Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? It's the last introduction.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  10,000 pet dogs in Hawaii just drooned.

• 41:26Steven Rinella?

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

• 41:36Speaker 03

  I have zero interest in a rattlesnake being happy.

• 41:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, no kidding. When I'm standing on one of those hot lava rocks, I can just picture the sound.

• 41:44Speaker 06

  We really need some TSA agents now to follow you.

• 41:48Steven Rinella?

  Make sure I'm not showing up my rattlesnakes.

• 41:51Speaker 05

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

• 41:55Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 41:56Speaker 05

  It is. It's the only one.

• 41:58Steven Rinella?

  Maybe I'll do that too.

• 42:00Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, think about it. Those Nen Nen's, those endangered Nen Nen's would, would not be around for very long if coyotes ever got to Hawaii.

• 42:09Steven Rinella?

  What is that? I never heard that.

• 42:10Speaker 06

  It's a bird, right?

• 42:11Speaker 05

  It's a goose. It looks like a, it's a species of goose, yeah.

• 42:14Steven Rinella?

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

• 42:17Speaker 05

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

• 42:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay, yeah.

• 42:23Speaker 05

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

• 42:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 42:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I believe it's a dance too, the whip in Nen Nen, right Phil?

• 42:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's right.

• 42:40Speaker 04

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

• 42:54Steven Rinella?

  Dan's got some.

• 42:55Speaker 06

  Right, that's why, that's why it's a great segue.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  Trying to roll out a segue.

• 42:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, yeah. See, he's taken after you.

• 43:01Steven Rinella?

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

• 43:08Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 43:08Steven Rinella?

  I was gonna ask you to tell everyone the story of the other Lewis and Clark.

• 43:14Speaker 05

  The other Lewis and Clark expression, yeah.

• 43:16Steven Rinella?

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

• 43:25Speaker 05

  Well, the horse is, is quick.

• 43:26Steven Rinella?

  Ooh, he's taking, he's taking B.

• 43:28Speaker 05

  I'll say the horse is quick because the horse and its ancestors have been here for 56 million years.

• 43:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 43:34Speaker 05

  They have only been absent for about 8,000 years. And so, you know, and I've talked to paleontologists in, in Canada who say from the fossils they have of the last horses in America that are 10, 11,000 years old that they, they had, they can't tell the difference readily between those and the horses that Europeans brought from the old world over here. And so, I mean, that's, I, I think what you can say about the horse is the horse is either an exotic with an asterisk, or it's a native with an asterisk. And I prefer the native with an asterisk because I tend to think in terms of, of deep history and long time.

• 44:18Speaker 05

  And so, an animal that's been here for 56 million years and only gone for a wink of an eye time, to me, is a native animal. I mean, that's why they went wild so readily and so quickly when they were reintroduced in the West. The primary problem, of course, is that they were reintroduced without their Pleistocene predators accompanying them.

• 44:43Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:44Speaker 05

  And so, that's why we're having such difficulty in controlling them is we don't have, uh, you know, big, uh, hunting hyenas and American cheetahs and all these cats particularly that preyed on horse foals. But, yeah, this is an animal that, you know, although it's created a huge kind of outcry by a lot of people as a, as a non-native, I mean, it's actually an animal that's been here for a long time. So, yeah, that one's a pretty quick, pretty quick story.

• 45:19Steven Rinella?

  It's compelling.

• 45:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:21Steven Rinella?

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

• 45:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is a, this is a story that I know most Americans do not know, and it has to do with something called historical memory because there are some things, you know, and you know this when you study history, Randall knows it very well, some things we remember and make a part of the ongoing story of, of the country and some things that are swept under the rug. And so, at a time when the United States was a brand-new country, that's the period when Lewis and Clark, Jefferson, Lewis and Clark into the West, 1804 and 18 to 1806, we were a country with, uh, you know, a little bit of a self-esteem problem because we were

• 46:11Speaker 05

  brand-new, the Brits were still sort of acting like at any moment they were going to re-invade and take the colonies back.

• 46:20Speaker 05

  And so Jefferson, after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, I mean, if you think about the Lewis and Clark expedition and the map in your mind that you remember from school of the Louisiana Purchase, one of the things that will quickly occur to you is that, why was Jefferson interested in only exploring the northern piece of it? Why didn't he have some interest in all the rest, which was a much larger chunk of ground? To be sure, the southern boundary was less set than the northern boundary, because Jefferson tried to claim that the southern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase was the Rio Grande River.

• 46:59Speaker 05

  And of course, here is Spain with colonies in Texas and New Mexico on the north side of the Rio Grande who contested that.

• 47:08Steven Rinella?

  It's weird, because he wanted to be in kind of right.

• 47:11Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:12Steven Rinella?

  Like, I mean, like, over time, you know?

• 47:14Speaker 05

  Ultimately, yeah. Ultimately, that's, that's how it played out. But, so after, and to get to the, the story here, after the Lewis and Clark expedition was underway, Jefferson set about preparing an expedition to go into the southern parts of the Louisiana Purchase. And the river that he decided was the very best river to explore in the north, it was the Missouri and the Columbia, obviously, those two. In the south, what he decided to do was to explore the Red River, that's the river that is the boundary today between Texas and Oklahoma. And he picked that river because he thought it came out of the southern Rockies near Santa Fe.

• 47:57Speaker 05

  And so what he was organizing as a second expedition was to send a party up the Red River to its source in the southern Rockies near Santa Fe, and then the party would cross over to the Arkansas, also believed to be, to have its headwaters in the southern mountains, and to come back to civilization down the Arkansas River. So this was not going to be an expedition that went all the way to the coast, the way Lewis and Clark's was planned, because there was no idea of a northwest passage in the southern reaches of the west. And of course, that's what Lewis and Clark were looking for. They were trying to find the fabled northwest passage for, for commerce. So anyway, the second expedition...

• 48:41Speaker 05

  Was essentially based on a flawed premise. Jefferson and just about everybody else who made maps of the West at the time, followed Alexander von Humboldt's map of the West, which he had put together.

• 48:55Steven Rinella?

  He's probably in that order of who buried us with that name.

• 48:57Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:58Steven Rinella?

  Alexander von Humboldt?

• 49:00Speaker 05

  He's, yeah, he's a, he's a major, he's a Prussian naturalist who explored South America, had a ton of students who followed in his wake, like Prince Maximilian.

• 49:11Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 49:12Speaker 05

  On the Missouri.

• 49:13Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 49:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, was one of von Humboldt's students.

• 49:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 49:16Speaker 05

  And he's the guy who comes up with all kinds of sort of early notions about ecology. So von Humboldt had put together a map of the West from sources in the archives in Mexico. And he saw that there was a river coming out of the Southern Rockies near Santa Fe that flowed eastward. And the French in Louisiana knew there was this river, the Red River, in their part of the world that flowed from the West. And so von Humboldt put those two together and told Jefferson that the Red River headed in the Southern Rockies and you could send a party up it and it would take them all the way into what is now New Mexico

• 50:01Speaker 05

  and Colorado. The problem with that was that von Humboldt did not have any sources that actually tied those two rivers together. And so the river that he saw in New Mexico, heading near Santa Fe, was actually the Pecos, which is a tributary of the Rio Grande. And the Red River that Jefferson sent his party up heads in what we now call the Yano Estacado Plateau. It comes out of Palo Duro Canyon, which most people have heard of. This big giant canyon that's on the eastern side of this plateau in West Texas and New Mexico. So it was a river that actually didn't head in mountains. It, it would have led the explorers, the American explorers,

• 50:44Speaker 05

  out into the middle of the Southern High Plains and left them still like 10 days' travel from New Mexico, from Santa Fe. Anyway, Jefferson didn't know that and he insisted that the Red was the river that he wanted to explore because there were all sorts of wonderful stories about what was up at the headwaters of the Red River. So he put together this expedition in 1806, two years after Lewis and Clark set out. As Lewis and Clark were returning from the Pacific, Jefferson put together this party of more than 50, uh, 50 people, including a military escort led by a guy named Captain John Sparks, who was a close friend of Meriwether Lewis's and William Clark's. They had all

• 51:29Speaker 05

  grown up in Virginia. And Jefferson selected, uh, an Irish, uh, basically, he was a geographer named Thomas Freeman to lead the expedition. And he picked as the first American-trained naturalist to explore in the West, a young man he knew from Virginia. His name was Peter Custis, and he was just about to get a doctorate in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. So the expedition is known, to the people who know about it, as the Freeman and Custis Expedition up the Red River in 1806. And these guys start out-

• 52:10Speaker 03

  They had 50 dudes?

• 52:12Speaker 05

  They had 50 dudes-

• 52:13Speaker 03

  How many dudes were Lewis and Clark?

• 52:14Speaker 05

  Well-

• 52:15Speaker 03

  Forty? Forty, so-

• 52:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, about 40. Forty-two, I think, is the top figure, because they, one guy died and they sent one guy back for bad behavior. But Congress also, interestingly, about this second expedition, appropriated twice the money for it that they appropriated for Lewis and Clark. Now, you know, people who know about the expeditions know that Meriwether Lewis actually spent a whole lot more money than Congress had appropriated for him. But this second expedition had twice the funds appropriated. Jefferson referred to it as the Grand Expedition.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 52:52Speaker 05

  And it set out up the Red River in April of 1806, reached the last point of civilization on the Red, the town of Nakadish, which was an old French town on the Red River in central Louisiana. And then, and we've talked about this, Steve, I know because you've been interested in it. One of the things they had to do to get on the Red River above Naclish was to detour around what we think is probably the biggest log jam anywhere in North America. It was called the Great Raft. And this thing extended for about 140 miles up the Red River. And so it was impossible to travel on the river. And they had to go through all these bayous and swamps around to the east of it to get

• 53:37Speaker 05

  around the raft and back to the river. So they did that and they were above the Great Raft in the early summer of 1806 and getting ready to head west.

• 53:47Steven Rinella?

  I gotta, I gotta have you pause.

• 53:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure.

• 53:49Steven Rinella?

  But can you remind me, how did they end up getting rid of that raft?

• 53:53Speaker 05

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

• 54:21Steven Rinella?

  Just sent all that wood out.

• 54:23Speaker 05

  Took, it took them 10 years to do it. Yeah. But yeah, it was a gigantic log jam, so.

• 54:29Steven Rinella?

  Wow, man.

• 54:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, it took the invention of a, a new explosive device, essentially, nitro to do it.

• 54:37Steven Rinella?

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• 55:22Steven Rinella?

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• 56:04Steven Rinella?

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• 56:50Steven Rinella?

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• 57:32Speaker 05

  So anyway, this expedition is on the Red River and they're headed west and they're bound for Santa Fe and they have all these, you know, wonderful objectives that they're going to do and Peter Custis is doing natural history. I mean, he, you know, Meriwether Lewis is kind of self-trained as a naturalist. Peter Custis was trained in a university. And they get about 650 miles up the Red River and round a bend and discover a Spanish force, four times their size, arrayed across the river. And they hear word that another, this Spanish force is from Texas, and they hear that another

• 58:12Speaker 05

  Spanish force, the largest one ever sent out from Santa Fe, is coming down the upper Red River. And so Spain determines that it is not going to allow the Americans to explore into country where the boundary has not been resolved between the United States and Spain. And Jefferson had included in his letter of instructions to both Meriwether Lewis and to Thomas Freeman, a line that said, "If you are, if your further progress is opposed by a force authorized or not authorized by a nation," in other words, either an Indian group or some force authorized by a nation, "I would, I want you to turn back with the

• 58:56Speaker 05

  information you've already gathered rather than attempt to go forward because I don't want to risk the lives of American citizens in a confrontation with an overwhelming force." Meriwether Lewis never confronted anything like that.

• 59:10Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:11Speaker 05

  Because even, the Spaniards tried to stop Lewis and Clark, but they were so far to the north, the Spanish forces could never find them on the Missouri. And they sent several expeditions out to stop Lewis and Clark.

• 59:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, hold on that for a minute.

• 59:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:27Steven Rinella?

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

• 59:36Speaker 05

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

• 1:00:03Steven Rinella?

  What obstacles were preventing them from getting up there?

• 1:00:06Speaker 05

  Usually, poor planning, poor execution, leaders who were not up to the task. And on at least one of the groups encountered an opposing force of native people that turned them back. So they were, those forces that were trying to intercept Lewis and Clark were, you know, they didn't really get close. But the Red River was a lot closer to these Spanish presidios in Texas. And they successfully got a 200 man force led by a guy named Captain Francisco Viana. And they put up a perimeter across the Red River.

• 1:00:46Speaker 05

  And Freeman and his party, round a bend, they see this Spanish force. They stop for three days and have a diplomatic conference with-

• 1:00:57Steven Rinella?

  A parley.

• 1:00:58Speaker 05

  A parley with the leader of the Spanish force. And this Spanish leader, Viana, was basically, he was polite, but he was firm. My orders are, you are not to be allowed to progress any further on the river. And so Freeman consulted his orders from Jefferson, which said, if you're confronted by an overwhelming force, I want you to turn back with the information you have. And the Americans turned around and went back. And so what I would say about this is that the reason you've never heard of it, and nobody else really very much in America has ever heard of this expedition, is because-

• 1:01:40Speaker 05

  At a time when the United States had a little bit of a self-esteem problem as a young country, we were perfectly willing to celebrate the success of Lewis and Clark getting to the Pacific. But the second presidential expedition being turned around by a foreign power and told to retrograde to American territory? That was one that, I mean, even Jefferson was willing to just sort of sweep under the rug.

• 1:02:05Steven Rinella?

  Effectively.

• 1:02:06Speaker 05

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

• 1:02:46Speaker 05

  Because it happened exactly that way, but with another party, with the second expedition.

• 1:02:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:54Speaker 05

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

• 1:03:27Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:03:40Speaker 05

  I, I think that's very definitely one. I mean, The West, and if you, and the Southwest in particular, you can't miss this because of all the ruins all over the, you know, the Southwest is, you know, when you and I were at Chaco, uh, a few months ago, and the time we went to the Clovis site, I mean, there are these unmistakably ancient, uh, still visible, uh, there's still visible evidence of people having lived in the West for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And in a lot of the rest of the country, because of higher humidity and dense forests and,

• 1:04:25Speaker 05

  uh, and rainfall, I mean, evidence of long-term occupation is often really much more difficult to see. But in the arid part of, of North America, it's still there and it's still visible. And so that antiquity is a part of it. And the, you know, our sense about American history is, wow, I mean, it's only, you know, 400 years old. We've only been here since the 1600s and wow, this is a brand new place. Well, the truth is, of course, the story of America is that right now, we think at least 23,000 years old. That's when we have evidence for the first people getting over here. So one of the things I tried to do in this podcast is at least spend some of it, the first two or three episodes,

• 1:05:08Speaker 05

  talking about these really ancient occupations and how people lived, uh, and their interactions with the natural world and wildlife and all that, because it's a story that I think really shapes the future. If you believe, and I always make this argument about history is that the past doesn't stay in the past. We're occupying a world that was shaped by our ancestors, by other humans. And the world that we're in right now is what it is in large part because of what they did. And that's kind of one of my, one of my themes, I think, in this podcast.

• 1:05:46Steven Rinella?

  At the end of Dan's podcast episodes, what we've been doing is we've been doing a little Q and A where, um, Dan does his material. Um, it's kind of a-

• 1:05:59Steven Rinella?

  In the best way possible, lecture format, you take a subject, talk about it, but then the subjects bleed into each other.

• 1:06:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  Oh, I didn't.

• 1:06:14Steven Rinella?

  Whatever you think is the most interesting thing.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:06:17Steven Rinella?

  If not, I'll do it.

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

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

• 1:06:41Speaker 05

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

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  Is it really?

• 1:07:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, Natchitoches is four years older than New Orleans. It was founded in 1714, and my ancestors got there in 1716, so.

• 1:07:35Speaker 03

  Gosh.

• 1:07:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we've been in Louisiana for a very, very long time, but I had.

• 1:07:40Steven Rinella?

  What brought them there, do you know?

• 1:07:42Speaker 05

  Well, I had two different sides of the, of the story in Louisiana, and I don't know why my French ancestors showed up.

• 1:07:55Speaker 05

  And that's the predominant line in that that side of my family. But there, I mean, my last name is Flores, which is a Spanish name. And the reason I have that name is because when the French founded Nakadish in 1714, the Spaniards farther west were so alarmed at this French incursion because they were afraid the French were going to go up Red the Red River into the West, and they were absolutely right about that, that they plunked down 10 miles away from Nakadish, a little Presidio manned by about 25 or 30 young soldiers.

• 1:08:34Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:34Speaker 05

  And these guys, one of whom was my ancestor, the Flores ancestor, here they were in the Louisiana wilderness with no available potential marriage partners.

• 1:08:49Steven Rinella?

  Except the enemies.

• 1:08:51Speaker 05

  Except the enemies 10 miles away. So my ancestor married to a French family in Nakadish.

• 1:08:58Steven Rinella?

  And he's like, you guys ain't all bad.

• 1:09:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, they absolutely, they were Catholics at least anyway. Yeah. So, yeah, so we got absorbed into the the French story in Louisiana. And and I think the reason I probably grew up being fascinated with the West is because I, one of the stories that we always talked about in the family was there were some groups four or five generations back who were traders to the Indians in the West. And so I grew up hearing stories about Pierre Lafitte, Pierre Bouy Lafitte, who was my great grandfather four times back. And he had been a sort of a major player in the Indian trade to the West out of Nakadish and had gone, I don't know if he ever got all the way up to the Wichita villages far

• 1:09:45Speaker 05

  up the Red River, but he certainly was a a pretty major player in Indian trade in Louisiana. And I knew that they had gone west. So I kind of grew up with the idea of, you know, the west was always this part of the country that beckoned. And when I was four years old, my family went on a national park tour and one of the places they went was into New Mexico. And so by the time I was about 10 or 11, I was having these dreams of these beautiful blue skies, cotton ball clouds, sand dunes, red cliffs. Had no idea where that had come from until I was about 37 or 38 years old and I was back in Louisiana for a family reunion.

• 1:10:27Speaker 05

  And I mentioned to an aunt of mine, you know, I've always had these strange dreams. That's why about the west. That's why I ended up going west. And she said, well, I wonder if that had anything to do with that national park tour we took you on to New Mexico when you were four?

• 1:10:44Speaker 05

  Oh, I guess maybe it did. And, you know, so it's the kind of thing that you sort of forget, but clearly colors your subconscious for a long time. So that was, that was part of it. And as soon as I, you know, had a, was able to drive a car and my parents would let me go out overnight. First thing I did was drive 500 miles to the west just to see what the country was like. And, yeah. And, and I've never forgotten how exciting it was when night fell on the first time on that drive. And I could see the lights of towns 30 and 40 miles away. Because growing up in Louisiana, you can't see 40 feet away.

• 1:11:27Speaker 05

  The vegetation is so dense. And it was very exciting to be able to see.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. See country.

• 1:11:33Speaker 03

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

• 1:11:39Speaker 05

  Oh, I did. Yeah. I grew up in a little small town where the woods were, you know, a hundred yards away. And so. And we didn't have enough guys in the town to field one baseball team, let alone two baseball teams to play one another. So what I got to do for recreation was essentially read books and roam around in the woods. And, you know, and I certainly grew up hunting. I wasn't too interested in fishing, but I was certainly interested in hunting. And I did that through a lot of my teen years into my early twenties. And, you know, as Randall knows, when I was living in Montana, I mean, I can't say that

• 1:12:22Speaker 05

  I ever actually hunted, but three times because I wanted venison in my freezer, I bought a deer tag and shot a little, you know, yearling or four corn mule deer buck out the window of my living room, out in the horse pasture.

• 1:12:41Steven Rinella?

  I remember, when I first met you, I remember you telling me that, and you were very careful not to overplay the circumstances.

• 1:12:48Speaker 05

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

• 1:13:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:02Speaker 03

  Well, you also wrote for Field and Stream and, you know.

• 1:13:06Speaker 05

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

• 1:13:49Speaker 05

  And so that was very fun. And I had a, you know, just like you did Steve at Outdoor, what's the magazine?

• 1:13:57Steven Rinella?

  Outside.

• 1:13:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, Outside. Uh, I had an editor at Sports of Field in particular, who I guess saw some potential in me. And he gave me a few pointers and took the first three or four things I wrote and introduced me to editors at Field and Stream and Outdoor Life. And I ended up, uh, finally for Outdoor Life, before I went to graduate school and got a PhD in history, uh, I wrote a conservation column for Outdoor Life, for their regional pages. They had these pages in Outdoor Life that were designated for particular regions. And I wrote a conservation

• 1:14:39Speaker 05

  column for the one on what was known as the mid-south. And I wrote a conservation column for Louisiana Woods and Waters. Uh, so this was all before I ever went to, you know, went to graduate school and did the professor thing.

• 1:14:54Steven Rinella?

  I got a lot of friends who wind up being that they're in occupation, professionally, they wind up in occupation. They would have had no idea existed when they were a kid.

• 1:15:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:15:03Steven Rinella?

  I mean, you ask your kid what they want to do and be like detective, fireman, veterinarian, right? And then people have jobs that they don't even, they don't find out, a lot of times you don't even know what you're doing was a thing.

• 1:15:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Steven Rinella?

  Until you're in your twenties, in your thirties. You probably had, you probably didn't use the word, um, growing up, I want to be an environmental historian.

• 1:15:27Speaker 05

  No, you are absolutely right. I never once said that. Um, I, so I was not the first person in my family to go to college. My dad had, had gone to college, but, um, So I knew something about university life, a little bit about it, but I actually went, went to college on a athletic scholarship. And with the idea, because my dad had played semi-pro baseball and he wanted me to be a baseball player and with the idea of actually doing that, and it didn't last, I didn't, I didn't play baseball in college for more than two years. We got a new coach, he and I didn't like one another, and so that was sort of the end of that.

• 1:16:08Speaker 05

  But what I had sort of discovered, you know, a baseball player who's an English major is a little bit of an unusual character. And I began to meet professors who started pointing me in the direction of where I went. And one of them was this guy, this creative writing guy I mentioned, who, when I talked to him about my future, I said, I want to be a writer. This is my idea. I've always thought, you know, as a kid growing up and reading books, that's what I wanted to do. He said, well, most people who write usually do something else as a day job. And I said, well, like what? And he said, well, I mean, like me, this guy wrote Western novels. He said, like me, I mean, you're a professor and they actually reward you for writing

• 1:16:53Speaker 05

  books when you're a professor. And that put the idea into my head for the very first time that, well, okay, so I think maybe what I'll do is I'll go ultimately to graduate school and become a professor of some kind. And then that will enable me or give me enough time to be able to write too. So that's kind of what I did. But you're exactly right. As a kid, I never said, I'm going to grow up and, you know, be an environmental historian at the University of Montana.

• 1:17:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, that never happened.

• 1:17:22Steven Rinella?

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• 1:18:05Steven Rinella?

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• 1:18:44Steven Rinella?

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• 1:19:26Steven Rinella?

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• 1:20:08Steven Rinella?

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• 1:20:19Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:21:02Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:21:21Steven Rinella?

  That that sense of how Western history went for me really started to fall apart when I learned that the that from the time the first European descended the Mississippi. Okay, so from the time the first European descended the Mississippi, it was 100 years until the next European descended the Mississippi. Yeah. Or as Elliot West pointed out in one of his essays, when Lewis and Clark hit the Great Plains, there were people, there were Native Americans on the Great Plains whose parents had been to Paris and come home.

• 1:22:10Steven Rinella?

  And then you start realizing that this, the job of understanding contact, right, of understanding like European contact, isn't like this little like blip through the 1800s. It's centuries long.

• 1:22:25Speaker 05

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

• 1:23:10Speaker 05

  Santa Fe was founded in 1610. That's almost 200 years before Lewis and Clark start up the Missouri River.

• 1:23:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's incredible, man.

• 1:23:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's already a town.

• 1:23:21Steven Rinella?

  If you go from today, like to under, I always like to understand this, okay? It's 2025, okay?

• 1:23:30Steven Rinella?

  If you go that, that distance of time, think about where that puts you.

• 1:23:34Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:35Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:23:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:23:36Steven Rinella?

  So the, the, the distance between, the distance between Lewis and Clark in the Northern Plains and...

• 1:23:43Speaker 05

  The founding of Santa Fe.

• 1:23:44Steven Rinella?

  The founding of a European, like kind of cosmopolitan city in New Mexico, was the distance that separates us from 1825.

• 1:23:53Speaker 05

  From 1825, yeah. At a time when we were just now starting to try steamboats on the Western rivers. Yeah, so it's that kind of distance. And so you have to, you know, as a historian, you start learning to incorporate that into your thinking. And, uh, and once I started having the fun of doing that, I started pushing it back farther and farther because it became evident, so historians primarily rely on written documents, right? But if you decide, okay, and as environmental historian, I was trained to do this, you don't just rely on the written documents, you also rely on archaeology and paleontology and...

• 1:24:38Speaker 05

  Ecology and all these other fields, and if you start using those, then suddenly the past starts getting deeper and deeper and deeper for you. I mean, you can't come up with a great quote from anybody from, you know, 10,000 years ago. You don't know exactly what we call people Clovis and Folsom. We don't really know what their names actually were for themselves, because we named them after the towns where their archaeologists first found remains of them. So it's a, it's a kind of a, a deep time past that's not perfect, but it allows you to think in terms of a really deep and ancient history.

• 1:25:23Speaker 05

  And when you start doing that, that's kind of how I translated the human past in America, going back 23,000 years, to start thinking about the past of the animals here. Because many of the animals in North America, I mean, like horses and their ancestors 56 million years back. Camels are another, uh, family of animals that had their origins in America and died out here while surviving in the rest of the world. They go back 46 million years. Passenger pigeons went back 15 million years. Bison, actually, which we, of course, is now our national mammal in America, we have

• 1:26:05Speaker 05

  concluded that probably the oldest arrival of bison in North America was only about 400,000 years ago. So they're actually quite recent arrivals compared to something like passenger pigeons. Uh, mammoths got here 17 million years ago. So doing that deep time for humans, I think was the, it was a ready step from that to start looking at all these animals around us. And as we were talking yesterday, uh, talking to you and Randall both about this, I mean, one of the things I've decided to do, because I, I couldn't see that anybody else was really doing it in.

• 1:26:47Speaker 05

  Writing Western history was to start taking the animals seriously. To stop thinking about them as, okay, beavers are just, you know, there's just this lumpen animal that everybody that produced the beaver trade. And start actually looking at, so what did the presence of beavers over five million to seven million years, that's how we think they've been here. What did that do in North America? And you begin to realize, well, hell, man. Beaver ecology totally transformed the continent. They made it a much more humid and wetter place. And when we started extracting them from the world, it suddenly dried out

• 1:27:27Speaker 05

  a lot of America because it undermined an ecology that they had built up over a really long period of time. So taking the animals seriously, I think, has probably been a step towards, you know, just revising the whole story of the West and America.

• 1:27:46Steven Rinella?

  You know, one of the biggest gaps that puzzles me, and I think it'd be like a it'd be a cool book and there would not be any quotes in it, like you said. But like,

• 1:28:00Steven Rinella?

  personally, I focus a lot of attention on, and I love reading about and talking with experts on the Ice Age, the first Americans.

• 1:28:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:09Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:28:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:28:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolute cities.

• 1:28:34Steven Rinella?

  Where, where there were cities, if you go back a thousand years, there were cities in the American Southwest that were, that were bigger than London. Like more people living in them. You know what I mean? Architecture. Religious facilities. Irrigated croplands.

• 1:28:59Speaker 03

  Like, how did we get from, how did you get from these bands, I mean, these like bands of thirty or forty or fifty hunters running around with stone tip tools? Like, how do you get to the cities? And I don't think that that's understood. I mean, it's probably, it's understood, but I don't think that's like, that, that people, like, that narrative hasn't been told.

• 1:29:23Speaker 05

  No, I think it, it hasn't, certainly not for, for kind of public consumption. I mean, among the, the archaeologists, you know, David Stewart with his book Anasazi America, I mean, I think he probably told that story. I mean, I certainly rely on his treatment quite a bit in trying to analyze that. And to get from, I mean, we start with Paleolithic big game hunters like the Clovis and Folsom people. And once those animals are gone, and they're gone by about ten thousand, nine thousand

• 1:29:59Speaker 05

  years ago, essentially what you get is a long period of hunter-gatherers where the focus is on smaller animals. I mean, there's still deer and elk and things out there. And so, the, the big game is smaller, and there's an enhanced focus on, on vegetable products, on, on plant foods. And so, the hunter-gatherer, the very name implies that you've got a new focus on plants. You're beginning to rely some. And once the focus on plants is there, then you're set up for some human genius at some

• 1:30:41Speaker 05

  point to say, well, you know, this particular plant that produces this thing we now call teosinte, which produces this little tiny corn cob, but sometimes there's a slightly bigger one, is there some way that we can take the plants that make the slightly bigger ones? And if the next generation, the corn cob is even a little bit bigger than that, plant those. And of course, what they're doing is that they're domesticating plants. And I think the reason we reached that stage, because we reached it in the Old World many thousands of years before this happened in the Americas. The reason being, of course, is the Americas are settled by humans a lot later than, say,

• 1:31:24Speaker 05

  Europe and Asia get settled by humans. And so the whole process over time is at an accelerated rate in the Old World compared to the Americas. But what happened in both places, I think, to push us in the direction ultimately of crops and domesticated animals is that as the human population grew, relying on hunting got harder and harder to do because animals became more and more difficult to find. And you finally reach a point, I think, where everybody knew when, during hunting and gathering stages, that you had to keep the human population low.

• 1:32:08Speaker 05

  And one of the ways they did that was basically they engaged in not only abortions, but infanticide. Whenever a band of 120 people, they had too many children one year. I mean, the leaders knew, if we let this go on, we are screwing ourselves to the hilt. And so we've got to control our population. And that became, obviously, a psychological burden for people, especially for women who were carrying kids, babies. So everybody is looking for a way to escape it. And the domestication of crops and animals became a way.

• 1:32:48Speaker 05

  It's hard to grow the population now just by relying on hunting because we've thinned the animals to the point where we can't really grow the human population. But what if we start domesticating things? What if we start domesticating plants and growing them ourselves? What if we take these wild goats, these gazelles?

• 1:33:09Speaker 05

  The old world in North America while turkeys become the primary domesticated animal. What if we take these and raise them and that allows us then to avoid this? The speed bump of having to so assiduously keep the population down. And that then produces, of course, the great agricultural revolution, the so-called Neolithic Revolution in the old world. And 5,000 years later in the Americas. And so those cities that you and I have walked around in Chaco Canyon. Historic Park, of course, is the primary and most dramatic one in North America.

• 1:33:53Speaker 05

  Those cities resulted from the evolution, basically, of hunting and gathering culture into an agricultural. Sort of in Chaco's case, an empire, really, of hundreds of small farmers growing corn, beans, and squash that they had imported up from Mexico because Mexico and North America was where the first domestication of plants took place. And that domestication then enabled larger populations that were capable of producing a city like Chaco, which, you know? Chaco was such a dramatic and large place, huge buildings.

• 1:34:39Speaker 05

  There were not buildings the size of those built in Chaco in North America until the 1880s. We don't have any buildings the size of something like Pueblo Benito. Until, you know, only basically 150 years ago in the United States. But this is a story, it's sort of like that, you know, that other Lewis and Clark expedition story I was telling. It's not one that plays to historical memory in America. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people who go to Chaco who are utterly shocked to find the ruins of that place. Because, grow up on the East Coast, nobody ever talks about the fact that there was a giant city.

• 1:35:22Steven Rinella?

  No, people lived in tents.

• 1:35:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, people lived in tents and

• 1:35:25Steven Rinella?

  Stick huts.

• 1:35:26Speaker 05

  Hogans and, yeah.

• 1:35:30Steven Rinella?

  I was gonna.

• 1:35:32Steven Rinella?

  I think I told you about this before. Do you remember that, uh, the physi- I think he's a physiologist, Jared Diamond?

• 1:35:38Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:39Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:35:41Speaker 05

  Guns, Germs and Steel, yeah.

• 1:35:42Steven Rinella?

  Did he pass away, Jared Diamond?

• 1:35:44Speaker 05

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

• 1:35:48Steven Rinella?

  He kinda begins with this question. I think I told you about this before. Was it, who, who was it that took on the Incans? Was it Pizarro?

• 1:35:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, Juan Pizarro.

• 1:35:56Steven Rinella?

  He begins with this question, like, um, why was it that Pizarro came from Spain to attack the Incans? Why didn't, um, I don't know who the leader of the Incans was. Why didn't the Incan Empire go and attack Spain?

• 1:36:21Steven Rinella?

  And I think that there's a point, if, if you'd have gone, if you'd have been like, if you'd have visited Earth, right? At that time of the ascendancy of Chaco, you might've been like, I think someday

• 1:36:35Steven Rinella?

  these people are gonna go and find Europe. Do you know what I mean? It would've seemed like it was heading that direction. But then there's certain things like, that misses, like, the wheel.

• 1:36:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, they don't, they do not, there's no, and so one of the strange things about the wheel is that there are actually figurines, little small figurines in Aztec, Mexico, that show wheels. But there's not an application of the wheel in any kind of, of utility form because they have not proceeded to the domestication of a beast of burden that would pull a wheeled vehicle.

• 1:37:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:19Speaker 05

  And so, yeah, the wheel is a very strange one, but, I mean, your question is, is really on the mark because at the same time that Chaco was at its height, and so, but just roughly a thousand years ago. I mean, all those great cities in the Mayan Empire on the Yucatan Peninsula were also at their height. And Tenochtitlan, which is what Mexico City became.

• 1:37:48Steven Rinella?

  Is that how you're supposed to pronounce that?

• 1:37:49Speaker 05

  I think so.

• 1:37:49Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I thought it was like a Tenoch.

• 1:37:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:37:51Steven Rinella?

  Tenochtitlan.

• 1:37:52Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, you may be, you may be more accurate than I am, but...

• 1:37:56Steven Rinella?

  The people that could answer that question are no longer with us.

• 1:37:58Speaker 03

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

• 1:38:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a reading word. But that city was also, I mean, it was absolutely at its height. And in many respects, these big cities of Mesoamerica, you know, I mean, you guys have probably been to Chichen Itza and seen the pyramid there, which, I mean, the first time I went there, you could still climb it. They won't let you climb it anymore.

• 1:38:23Steven Rinella?

  Oh, they don't?

• 1:38:23Speaker 05

  No, they won't let you go up the steps to the top anymore. You know, and it is precipitously steep, there's no question. But, you know, I had the fun 15 or so years ago of climbing to the top of, you know, this temple of Kukulkan, the temple of Venus. And, I mean, holy cow, man, that's just, it's impressive as hell when you're there. But we come out of a, you know, a Western European kind of sensibility that we were on top of the world. We were the leaders of civilization. I mean, Western Europe is, I mean, that's what Guns, Jams, and Steel about, is about.

• 1:39:05Speaker 05

  His argument, Jared Diamond's argument in that book, is that the reason Western Europe managed to prevail over all those other places is that it happened to sit at the far end of the largest landmass on Earth, Eurasia, also connected to Africa. And so Europeans got to benefit from all the human inventions that took place all over Eurasia and Africa.

• 1:39:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, the flow was smooth.

• 1:39:31Speaker 05

  The flow was smooth. And everything that was invented in China, gunpowder, managed to get to Western Europe. Whereas the Americas are completely isolated from the rest of the world, not only from the ideas of the rest of the world, but, you know, as we all know, from the diseases that evolved through the domestication of animals and living with domesticated animals. Europeans, old worlders, ended up developing all sorts of really pretty horrific diseases.

• 1:40:03Speaker 05

  And when they brought them over to the Americas, I mean, what really conquered the Americas, this is the germs part of guns, germs and steel, is these exotic diseases that native people had absolutely no immunity to.

• 1:40:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know, another one about T'Nocht, T'Nochtalun?

• 1:40:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:40:22Steven Rinella?

  When you think about sort of your, if you don't have the luxury of spending a lot of time studying history and you get this idea of, you know, people living in tents and small scale habitations, that that's what Europeans found. It always struck me that when they, when they, when the Spanish got there, they had zoos.

• 1:40:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:40:50Steven Rinella?

  They had zoos with, I mean, not foreign animals from other continents, but they had zoos holding animals.

• 1:40:59Speaker 05

  Like bison?

• 1:41:00Steven Rinella?

  From places that they wouldn't even, the residents of those cities could have gone and seen animals on the streets that they would have no prayer of encountering in normal life. Things collected from far away, from far to the south, from far to the north, brought and you could go like, where's that from? You know, it'd be like as weird as when you take your kids, they see a giraffe. That people would have that experience and see like, yeah, like they would have, you know, a jaguar, they would have a buffalo, they would have birds from South America.

• 1:41:37Speaker 05

  Well, it's pretty clear that, you know, aggregates of charismatic and intriguing animals from the far edges of, of human knowledge.

• 1:41:54Speaker 05

  Assembled together for public viewing, in effect, the word, of course, our word is zoo. That is a very old human impulse.

• 1:42:02Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:42:03Speaker 05

  I mean, and, you know, we have no idea. It's possible that the Clovis people had something like that. But as you pointed out, we certainly do know that the Aztecs, which had an empire that stretched for hundreds, thousands of miles in every direction, they were doing that very thing. They were collecting animals out at the far reaches of their empire and bringing them to the citadel city of the empire and assembling them into zoos for, you know, for the public entertainment of their citizenry.

• 1:42:35Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:42:35Speaker 05

  I mean, that's, that's so, you know, I mean, I've, I've have argued in my books, especially in Wild New World, the most recent one, that, which is a book about, you know, the long-term story of humans and, and animals in North America, that this is something, and I know I derived this from Paul Shepard, from reading Paul Shepard many years ago, that this fascination with the natural history of the living world around us is something that is impossibly ancient in the human story. Every time we look back into the past, we find examples of it, and it survives today. And one of the ways it survives, I mean, I don't have children myself, I know you do

• 1:43:20Speaker 05

  though, and I'll bet this happened with you because it happens with every time I visit somebody's home and they have young kids and they show me the nursery, there are always little elephants and buffaloes and monkeys. And so what that is getting at is that it's knowledge about natural history and about other living creatures that is the very first step in kind of the organization of the brain in creating a taxonomy of the world around you, you know? And then when, for little boys in particular, when you get to be eight or 10 years old, you know, you start collecting Hot Wheels cars and things like that, and that

• 1:44:03Speaker 05

  Provides you with the next step of taxonomy. But that human desire to kind of organize everything into an understandable world really starts with animals. And that's why we do this with toddlers. The first thing you teach them really is the difference between, well, this is a picture of an elephant.

• 1:44:25Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:26Speaker 05

  It has this long trunk and it has, and this is a picture of a horse. It has this tail and that probably, you know, is something we humans have been doing for two million years.

• 1:44:42Steven Rinella?

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• 1:45:27Steven Rinella?

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• 1:46:13Steven Rinella?

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• 1:46:55Steven Rinella?

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• 1:47:31Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:47:46Speaker 05

  Now, that's, that's a good question, you know, and

• 1:47:49Steven Rinella?

  Why is it elephants?

• 1:47:51Speaker 05

  Why is it elephants and giraffes?

• 1:47:52Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:47:55Speaker 05

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

• 1:48:12Steven Rinella?

  The mobile. I was just thinking, when you were talking about animals, I was like, yeah, why don't we just hang, you know, desks and chairs around the

• 1:48:22Speaker 03

  This is your world. This is what you'll have. The keyboards.

• 1:48:25Speaker 05

  A keyboard, yeah. And a phone.

• 1:48:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:48:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:48:29Steven Rinella?

  It must be some deep, like, the African fauna must be some, like, deep thing about the cradle of, you know, like, you're speaking to some deep genetic memory of the cradle of Africa or something.

• 1:48:43Speaker 05

  That's what I was thinking.

• 1:48:44Steven Rinella?

  Or it's just an easy to tell apart.

• 1:48:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I also think it's like, those are real animals, you know, like, they're big, they're toothy, they got wild horns, there's something about, I don't know, there's something about the exoticism of those creatures compared to what we see around us today.

• 1:49:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:02Speaker 03

  So I still look at something like an ibex, and I'm just like, that's an animal, you know?

• 1:49:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:07Speaker 05

  When I was writing Well, New World, I kept encountering over and over again the stories, especially when you get to the 20th century, when most of the charismatic animals in North America are gone by that time, are reduced to such small numbers that you hardly ever have a chance to see them. I kept encountering over and over again, these people who become really prominent conservationists in the United States, you know, and found all sorts of organizations, from the Sierra Club on, who acquired their fascination for nature and for the wild by going to Africa. And they came back from Africa and decided, okay, we're gonna try to do something like that. And it's a kind of an indication.

• 1:49:51Speaker 03

  The size and variety.

• 1:49:52Speaker 05

  Size and variety and an indication, you know, and of course, Africa, as a result of the big game parks there, preserved these animals so that people could go and see them. But it speaks in a way to the fact, you know, to Thoreau's Lament, back in the 1850s, that he lived in this impoverished world because his ancestors in New England had already taken out all these animals that he wanted to watch because he kept, you know, these meticulous notes about when the birds, particular species of birds, arrive in the spring and when they nest and when the beavers are. Hatching their or having their kits and when so he goes through all this process.

• 1:50:36Speaker 05

  And realizes, oh, my God, I'm missing the lynx, I'm missing the moose, I'm missing. Black bears, those have all been taken out. He could read the accounts of. Of the first colonists in New England who were describing pigeon flights and. Huge numbers of wolves and here he sits in the 1850s and all of that is gone. And he feels like, as he says, I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. Except demigods have come along before me and plucked from the heavens the best of the stars. And so I think in some ways, what I kept running into with all these American conservationists.

• 1:51:21Speaker 05

  Who had to go to Africa first before they were realizing how important it was to, you know. Campaign on behalf of nature in America has something to do with the fact that. We lost so much of the magic in North America. And it's like, in order to get it, you had to go somewhere else.

• 1:51:41Steven Rinella?

  To glimpse it, yeah.

• 1:51:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, in order to glimpse it and understand.

• 1:51:46Steven Rinella?

  You know, uh. We've touched on this in the past. It's kind of like a, like a conundrum of history.

• 1:51:54Steven Rinella?

  And talking about native peoples. We talked about this when we're talking about like Chaco society and things. Is there, there is a. Sort of a custody battle, a cultural custody battle about, you know, like whose story is what? Right?

• 1:52:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:52:12Steven Rinella?

  Like, do, um, if you're not. Native American, do you have a right to. A right, R I G H T, to write W R I T E about. Native culture.

• 1:52:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:52:30Steven Rinella?

  And, and, um, and is your telling, like, when you're talking about it, is there a cult like a, like a European bias? A colonial bias, you won't get it right? And when we've talked about this, um.

• 1:52:44Steven Rinella?

  I don't think, you don't, you don't punt on it, but you have a great point.

• 1:52:51Steven Rinella?

  As you said, like, there's human history, right? Like, as a human being, you're interested in human history.

• 1:53:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:53:04Steven Rinella?

  And human history travels all around the world and it's weird to put,

• 1:53:10Steven Rinella?

  um, this is my words, not yours. I'd like you to speak on it, but it's weird that you would then start drawing sort of like borders of where your interest in human history can't go.

• 1:53:20Speaker 05

  Can't go.

• 1:53:21Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:53:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:53:22Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:53:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:53:34Steven Rinella?

  To go telling people about that, you know?

• 1:53:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would, I would say, so, one of the, the, uh, probably important steps in my career was I, I published an article in a really fancy academic journal, the Journal of American History, in 1992 about what happened to the buffalo. And it was a, a complete recasting of the story. And, um, and for the first time, and this was a, a period of time, the 1980s, 1990s, probably back to the 1970s, when a lot of people in the environmental movement were sort of using Native people as, you know,

• 1:54:18Speaker 05

  here were our stand-ins for conservation, living and environmental living. I mean, y'all remember the famous ad where the Indian steps out of his canoe onto the shore of Manhattan Island and he steps out and there's trash all underfoot and a tear rolls down his face. Well, that particular piece that I did.

• 1:54:44Speaker 05

  About what happened to Buffalo was it was not only a complete recasting of the story and kind of an environmental telling of the story. I pulled in things that nobody had ever pulled in before, like when horses were reintroduced into the Americas and went wild. I mean, they obviously were drinking the water and grazing the grass that bison had also been subsisting on. And so they had an effect. And there were a whole numbers of things that I plugged into that story that I told, a changing climate in the middle of the 19th century. There was a drought that lasted for like 15 years on the Great Plains and reduced the numbers of buffalo. And there, so I went through this whole sequence

• 1:55:27Speaker 05

  of five or six sort of new and compelling, I obviously they were compelling because a lot of other historians like Elliot West sort of immediately picked up on this, these compelling reasons for what happened. And one of the things I also did was I pointed out, which, you know, people were kind of shy about doing at the time, that native people had been seduced into the market economy. And just as we were talking about this yesterday, it was a situation where Europeans were offering a transformative technology, metalware, guns, and if you didn't do it in exchange for for bison robes, and if you didn't participate

• 1:56:11Speaker 05

  in it, and everybody else, all the other native groups around you did, you ended up disadvantaging yourself to the point where you might not survive. Whereas the southern Cheyennes, just down the way, were going to do very well because they, in fact, were participating in the market trade.

• 1:56:29Steven Rinella?

  And they're now armed with guns.

• 1:56:31Speaker 05

  And they're armed with guns, and they're armed with all sorts of metal tools. And so I talked about that. And so what that meant, of course, was that in 1992, an article comes out that re-cast the whole story about what happened to Buffalo in the 19th century, and it also talks about the Indian role in it. Well, I immediately, as you might suspect, had various native people get in touch with me and say exactly what you were referring to a few minutes ago. What gives you the right to say this, to write about this? One of the people who did so was Vine Deloria.

• 1:57:12Speaker 05

  And Vine Deloria, who was a very famous Indian author in those days, he was at the University of Colorado, he was famous for books like God is Red, Custer Died for Your Sins. And Vine Deloria called me up and said, I read your piece and I think it's really good. And what I want you to do, if you would, is come down to the University of Colorado and spend three days with me. We're having a conference, I'm bringing in the wildlife managers from a bunch of the Western reservations. And I want you to come down, but I don't want you to speak. I don't need you to tell them the story that you just wrote about buffalo.

• 1:57:56Speaker 05

  I just want you to come down here and sit beside me and listen to them. Okay. And I said, okay, I will do it. And that's exactly what I did. And so Vine Deloria never asked me to speak, and for three days, I sat right beside him, sort of in the protection of this guy who was this looming figure, and listened to all these wildlife managers talk about the native approach to managing wildlife. And of course, what he was interested in having me do was to understand the native approach to managing wildlife. But what I brought away from that particular experience, and I have said this in every book that I have written that includes a section on native people since, and on all

• 1:58:38Speaker 05

  kinds of other people, is that just as you inferred a few minutes ago, I'm interested in the human story. And I think as a human, I have a perfect right to write about humans, an R-I-G-H-T, to be able to W-R-I-T-E about humans, regardless of their culture. And I think in a way, the whole impulse was, you know, I'm an Italian-American, only I can write about Italian-Americans, only I can write about Christopher Columbus or something. I think that's a stage in our development that probably is kind of...

• 1:59:22Speaker 05

  Dropping away some.

• 1:59:23Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:59:24Speaker 05

  Uh, because I think to me, the argument that we're all human beings and that we should be interested in the human story everywhere, among every group of people, we all come from the same source, we're all part of the evolutionary river, uh, the Darwinian river, that's the stronger argument here. And so I stand by that.

• 1:59:46Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm. It'd be, uh, I think it'd be in many ways, you know, an impoverished world if you weren't able to bring all those different perspectives to things, you know?

• 1:59:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:59:59Steven Rinella?

  I think like that big picture of like the human story is pretty compelling when you imagine that when, when all, when, when humans spread all around the world and they started to meet back up, they were meeting back up. Do you know what I mean?

• 2:00:15Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 2:00:15Steven Rinella?

  You kind of lose sight, you sort of lose sight of that, that like that people, these groups moved around and it was so long, they kind of forgot about each other. They lost track of each other, but then all of a sudden they come back and they're like, wow.

• 2:00:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. Look what you did with your time. Yeah.

• 2:00:32Steven Rinella?

  You guys got so tan.

• 2:00:33Speaker 05

  And, and everybody is fascinated, you know, everybody is fascinated by, by everybody else. I mean, that's part of the whole first contact, you know, uh, notion is that we get to see these people who maybe 30,000 years ago, we actually knew some of their ancestors. Or our ancestors knew their ancestors. And now, once again, we're meeting up and seeing them and wow, look, look what you guys did with your time and your place. And it's absolutely fascinating. I mean, that's sort of the whole premise of cultural anthropology is that, oh my God, you know, um, humans have sort of fractured into tens of thousands of cultural

• 2:01:18Speaker 05

  groups with all these different deities and all these different ideas of creation. And wow, isn't it incredible to sort of listen to what you guys have to say about what you think is going on with human life?

• 2:01:32Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:01:33Speaker 05

  So, yeah, I mean, that's because, uh, like you, and I think like all of us sitting around the table and probably most of the people listening to this, I'm fascinated with all those differences. Uh, yeah, I, I would say the stronger argument is.

• 2:01:50Speaker 05

  It's the human story that compels us and nobody has any kind of lock on a particular one. I mean, I'm certainly willing to concede that some people might not want to share the details of their religious practices and ceremonies and all that.

• 2:02:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:08Speaker 05

  That's everybody's perfect right, but the bigger story, I think, is ours for, for understanding, because that's how we, we managed to figure out who we are.

• 2:02:18Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:02:42Speaker 05

  communicate. Understand one another.

• 2:02:44Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:02:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:02:58Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:03:12Speaker 05

  That's a very good point. Absolutely.

• 2:03:14Steven Rinella?

  And the wildly different directions.

• 2:03:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:03:17Steven Rinella?

  People go in terms of religion. You see these crazy themes, animism, you know, all these cultures holding out the ideas that landscape features have a sort of spirit or personality. You see these continuities that they'll, that folks will eventually figure out agriculture if they can. They'll get better and better at launching.

• 2:03:44Steven Rinella?

  projectiles, right? They'll like a lot of them will figure out vertical walls. Right? But other things, yeah, but other things are just so different, man.

• 2:03:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, other things are so different. Now, that's a, that's a really great argument. And that's why it's fascinating to explore it and to approach all of it with a curious and open mind and to allow yourself to be completely intrigued without, you know, without falling back on the kind of where, okay, so our ideas are better than than their ideas. I mean, it's not a case of better, it's a case of different. And how did you guys arrive at this particular notion? But there are some, obviously some commonalities that are all over the planet.

• 2:04:37Speaker 05

  And, you know, the old animistic religion ideas that you just mentioned, where there are deities in, in wild animals and there are deities in landforms and all of that, that is so widespread as part of the European tradition, too.

• 2:04:56Speaker 05

  The Druids, for example, you know, of only 1,200, 1,500 years ago in Western Europe are certainly practitioners of that kind of animistic approach to religion. So it's something that is so widespread that it's clear it probably dates back a very, very long time. I argue in Wild New World, in fact, that the idea that native people have of being kin to other animals, to the European line about that went in a different direction where humans are, we're the only ones created in the image of God and the only ones with an everlasting soul and everything else is different. And that actually is an anomaly compared to the idea that, which is kind of a proto Darwinian

• 2:05:41Speaker 05

  idea, that we're all related to one another. We're all, all part of the same kind of kinship order. And it requires somebody like Darwin using science in the 19th century to finally bring the European world back to that recognition because it had gone in a sort of an unusual direction with the notion, well, humans are completely different from everything else out there. I mean, we're, we're special. We're exceptional and everything else is something else while-

• 2:06:12Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:06:26Speaker 05

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

• 2:06:33Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:06:47Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. Yep. On its own feed.

• 2:06:49Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:07:08Speaker 06

  Do the big dog.

• 2:07:10Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:07:22Speaker 05

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

• 2:07:25Steven Rinella?

  Longtime Western author, Dan Flores presents a big picture history of an American West you've never encountered, covering a vast span in a Western America whose landscapes and wild animals drew people from around the world. This podcast tells a new story of our most fascinating region. Um, to give people a sense, uh, the, the, the series opens up with kind of a overview. It's called West of Everything.

• 2:07:56Steven Rinella?

  Opens up with some of the deep antiquity and some and introduces some of the broader themes. Episode two is Clovisia, is that how you like pronounce that?

• 2:08:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:08:07Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:08:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:08:45Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:08:50Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 2:08:52Steven Rinella?

  And then, man, we get busy.

• 2:08:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:08:54Steven Rinella?

  On extinctions.

• 2:08:55Speaker 05

  It changes pretty rapidly.

• 2:08:57Steven Rinella?

  After that. Uh, Old Man America is a story of, um, kind of why does the coyote or the coyote, why does the coyote come in as such a complex religious figure in Native American culture? The wild new world of the American Serengeti is episode five, um, about, you know, everybody's idea of the Serengeti in Africa, about that, that was the perception that people who arrived on the grain plains had at first. It was, it was, it was, it was a Serengeti of its time. Survivors from a lost world, episode six, talks about the American pronghorn.

• 2:09:42Steven Rinella?

  There's an episode on something we touched on today, Jefferson's other Lewis and Clark. And that, uh, That's the first seven episodes.

• 2:09:50Speaker 05

  It's the first seven, yeah.

• 2:09:51Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:10:05Speaker 05

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

• 2:10:11Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm. So when you get to be like I do, reading about the Battle of Little Big Horn, you'll have a much more expansive view of how that, you'll have a, instead of a, those few days that led up to that, you'll have a, what are the thousands of years that led to this moment?

• 2:10:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:10:29Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:10:32Speaker 05

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

• 2:10:35Speaker 06

  Everyone, subscribe to the new feed. It's very important. Thank you.

• 2:11:06Speaker 03

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