Ep. 01: West of Everything | The American West

The American West fascinates people from around the world, but there are many different kinds of iconic western stories. Author Dan Flores has spent a career writing about what he calls the Natural West, stories about nature, animals, and people that span thousands of years of time in the western half of America. Although we reflexively think of history in America as new, this first episode emphasizes the West's true age by focusing on the great Chacoan Empire of a thousand years ago and what happened among its refugees in the Southwest in the wake of Chaco’s collapse from environmental causes. Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck https://www.instagram.com/velvetbuckwine. Subscribe 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. 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, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 1:31Speaker 02

  Following the collapse of the Grand Chacoan Empire, refugees founded eight thriving new towns along the Galvesto River of New Mexico, but ultimately found it difficult to sustain an arid-climate civilization across the next 500 years. I'm Dan Flores, and this is The American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck. Crafted for those who live off the beaten path where the hunt meets the harvest, and every glass tells a story. Enjoy responsibly.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  West of Everything.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Thinking of a podcast about the American West and my own take on its history has had me trying to understand recently why the West resonates with us the way it does. Apologies to New England, New York, the South, the Midwest, but the West seems to fascinate the world in a way no other American region can. Why are there television channels devoted 24/7 to playing 75-year-old Western movies so a John Wayne fix is available at just about any sleepless 3 a.m.? Why does a contemporary soap opera Western like Yellowstone succeed with so many people? Why do Germans dress up and play act being residents of the West on their vacation weekends in European forests?

• 3:13Speaker 02

  How does Back at the Ranch Boot Store in Santa Fe sell $5,000 cowboy boots that will never see a stirrup? Why is there a Cowboy Poets' Gathering in Nevada every winter? Why a Gene Autry Museum in LA? A Buffalo Bill Historical Museum in Cody? A National Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City? And why, maybe this is the most serious question here, does the phrase "just like the Wild West" cause all of us to imagine entire freedom of action? A whole lack of restraint? A free-for-all, nobody is regulating? All that reverence and fascination for the West happens for good reason.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Because of its sunshine and the public lands that provide remarkable access to the surrounding landscape, the West is a great place to live in the present. But as we all know, it's the past of the West that's the key to its magic. Those of us who live in the West may love various aspects of the modern world out the door, but we all absolutely adore the Old West, the frontier.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  We've absorbed it by watching films by John Ford and Quentin Tarantino, reading novels by Louis Lamour and Cormac McCarthy, and histories by Stephen Ambrose and Hampton Sides. Of course, there are many versions of the West, and all of us have a personal preference for our favorite version. Clearly, for John Ford or Quentin Tarantino, it's the cowboy West of so many hundreds of Western movies. For others, it's the West of town building, and Wyatt Earp's or Marshall Dillon's imposition of law and order. Or of settlers versus railroads, or the gunfighter stories that Tarantino obviously also loves, and loves to invert. And of course, there's the Indian Wars West

• 5:05Speaker 02

  of a few hundred movies and a few thousand paintings. But as a modern Westerner, a writer and historian who is interested most in the West's remarkable landscapes and animals, the West that does it for me is one most people may not think of as iconic. I'm most drawn to what Western artist Charlie Russell in one of his magnificent paintings called "When the Land Belonged to God." For me, the West that speaks to my deepest soul is the West either side of Lewis and Clark. How the kind of natural West they saw came to be and lasted for so long, plus what has happened to that version of the West

• 5:48Speaker 02

  in the centuries since Lewis and Clark saw it. That's the West I try to understand. To me, that's the true West, a natural West, one that's West of everything else. In part, my West is a kind of a first-contact West, a theme of much science fiction and fascination with exploring places like Mars in the next few decades. It's about travel to strange places, new country and new animals, the meeting place of an exotic, ancient world and modernity. Come to think of it, the natural West is not only our future on Mars, it's also our deep past, when modern humans left Africa more than 50,000 years ago

• 6:32Speaker 02

  and began to explore the rest of the Earth. America's West, in many ways, was a last earthly experience of that first-contact moment in human history.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  When new peoples first meet, everybody experiences first contact. But usually only one side sees the natural world as new and exotic, a new world. The resident people tend to think invasion, and so it is. Yet all of us have ancestors who bequeathed us more than 20,000 years of first-contact experiences in North America. So I think I come by a fascination for stories like this naturally, and of course, so do you. Those of us who are in love with the natural West are usually attracted to the world of native people, to natural landscapes, and to wild animals. Being intrigued by the native West is self-evidently at the core of Western fascination.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Judging by the volume and quality of Western landscape art, and the way the Western landscape becomes a character in so many films, judging by the number of crown jewel national parks in the West, the same can be said of the Western landscape. But let's say at the outset, the West I'm talking about is not synonymous with the frontier. When the Old World came to North America, every place on the continent had a frontier, a meeting point between what existed and what was coming. But the natural West of which I speak is not defined by a moment in time, a frontier. It's a place, a region of plains, mountains, and deserts on the sunset side of the Mississippi

• 8:13Speaker 02

  River. The timeframe of the natural West is not just its frontier stage. The story of this West is much more ancient, and it also takes place more recently than the frontier. Because the past does not remain in the past, but affects us in our own time, the story of the West continues beyond the frontier and into the 21st century.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Many of the Western stories I've written about and will tell in this podcast are the stories of the West's wildlife, very much an ignored topic in the West and elsewhere. The cow and the sheep, and to a certain extent even the saddled horse, are the animals we associate with the West of trail driving, ranching, town building. But I have to observe that not one of them appears in Charlie Russell's "When the Land Belonged to God." Russell's timeless scene of a bison herd flanked by gray wolves pouring over a divide in a landscape we old-worlders would one day call Montana implied that the divine world in the West was Native America.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  So let's start there, but not necessarily at its beginning, at least not yet. Let's commence our exploration of the natural West slightly later in time. We'll return to beginnings in the next episodes with a story that makes the point that the West is not new, but a very old place. This story stretches our imaginations, suggests how central and fragile Western ecologies have always been to human life here, and illustrates the longevity of the human experience in a country we're reflexively still thinking of as the newest part of America.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  On a sun-drenched November afternoon, I sit in t-shirt and shorts, a few feet from the edge of a canyon rimrock, looking through 400 feet of transparent desert air on a thousand-year-old city. My wife Sarah is pulling a bottle of water from her pack a few feet away. Various friends are scattered along rock-caren-marked trails through the uplands behind us, where the faint indentations of ancient highways, 400 miles of them, extend to horizons miles distant. The whole country, sagebrush uplands, the canyon floor, the enclosing rimrocks, and the ruins with odd names that lie in every direction below, is a uniform tannish brown,

• 10:50Speaker 02

  the color of dust, or perhaps the color of abandonment.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  During the time of the Crusades in Europe, this spot and another on the east bank of the Mississippi River, just across from today's St. Louis, held the two largest cities in North America. Both religious centers. With a ceremonial effigy mound of lizards and serpents and a Stonehenge-like circle of upright timbers planted to mark out solstices and equinoxes, the city in the eastern woods, today we call it Cahokia, probably held a fairly permanent population of 30,000 people, larger than London at that time. I first saw Cahokia in the early 1990s with a girlfriend who had Missouri roots and insisted we visit the place. I'd seen mounds, but never anything on the scale of Monk's Mound

• 11:45Speaker 02

  towering up out of the American bottoms like an earthen Chichen Itzen pyramid. After 300 years of urban life, an earthquake mostly destroyed Cahokia City, but not before its population had gone through 20,000 trees and almost all the wildlife for scores of miles around. As for the city whose ruins lay below us now, either side of 10 centuries ago, from 800 AD to 1140 AD, it was the Vatican of the American desert. We call it Chaco, and it's another of our UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Chaco was the closest Native America ever got to an empire like those of the Aztecs, Mayans, or Incas.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  But this was not an empire of warrior armies and conquered provinces. It was an empire of priests who organized many thousands of scattered farming hamlets across 50,000 square miles of today's Four Corners into an economic and religious network. No European principality of the age matched it. What the priests promised was direct intervention with the deities who controlled rain, crops, and animals. Those grand imponderables whose presence made life good and whose absence ruined it. The city of Chaco housed the priests, their families, and a resident population of thousands. It stored and distributed surplus crops. Then at solstices and other

• 13:12Speaker 02

  special times of year, it hosted grand ceremonies to which the outlying residents made holy pilgrimages. At those times, Chaco gathered a population of some 40,000. Looking down now on its buildings and avenues, one suspects both the ceremonies and the nightlife must have been epic. Chaco, America almost seems foreign in the modern United States, as if lifted from the Middle East. The agricultural revolution arrived in this region 1,300 years before the city existed, and pollen studies indicate this development produced two immediate environmental effects: human population skyrocketed, and crops that needed to be boiled before you

• 13:53Speaker 02

  could eat them meant that daily cooking fires soon reduced a robust pinyon juniper woodland to desert. This became a world in need of priests who could intervene with the gods.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Sitting and admiring the sprawling hemispheric architecture of Chaco's largest structure, Pueblo Benito, as its lines and shadows shimmer in the afternoon sun, I know this is a place that reveals much about humanity. Sarah passes the water bottle over to me, and reading my mind sums it up.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  It wasn't until the 1880s that anyone built a larger building than that in America. In its time, this city lasted longer than Washington DC has so far.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Chaco and its satellite hamlets survived, in fact, for 340 years. The shorthand version of its collapse is that it all ended with a series of droughts across the southwest, and that's true. But the many archaeologists who have interpreted Chaco know that much more happened here. When the rains stopped coming, the farmers seemed to act abruptly, dropping their digging sticks in the fields, turning their backs on the grand religious gatherings at Chaco, and relocating across the southwest. Some went north to what we now call Mesa Verde's Cliff Palace, in present Colorado. Most of the people who abandoned the Chacoan world congregated along the Upper Rio Grande,

• 15:20Speaker 02

  eventually founding towns still home to their descendants. The Pueblo peoples, famous for their apartment-like villages, geometrically painted pottery, and turquoise jewelry. Why did Chaco collapse in what sounds like a fit of pique? The evidence, and ultimately the response of the Pueblo's afterwards, points to a crisis we should recognize. Down there in Pueblo Benito, a single room, out of 650 rooms, yielded the remains of 14 people, whose funerary items indicated they represented Chaco's religious and political elites. In the room were flutes, ceremonial staffs, thousands of pieces of turquoise jewelry,

• 16:04Speaker 02

  conch shell trumpets from America's west coast, the remains of macaw parrots from the tropics. The oldest burial dated to 800 AD, and the last from Chaco's abandonment. So those 14 span the entire life of the city. And not just that, the genetics of nine of the 14 showed them to be descended from the same matrilineal line, from a woman who evidently had been there at Chaco's founding. Disparities in wealth and quality of life, along with the resentments they produce, are familiar to modern Americans. Isotope comparisons of the bones of the priestly class in Chaco's great houses with those

• 16:48Speaker 02

  of farmers from the villages indicates that the elites consumed far more protein from the meat of deer and pronghorns. They were better fed, grew almost two inches taller, suffered less from disease, had three times the survival rate for children under five, and lived longer. They were also conspicuous consumers of high-status goods, from beautiful pots to copper bells, from turquoise jewelry to parrots.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  In the late 1800s, an early archaeologist working in Chaco shipped more than 70,000 high-status items just from Pueblo Benito to the American Museum of Natural History. The farming class suffered this gap between rich and poor as long as the elites delivered on their promise to make it rain. But when drought came and the priests were powerless to stop it, the lower classes attacked and killed many in the upper class. They also embraced a new belief: the Kachina religion. By the year 1160, massive three-story public buildings like Chetro Kettle, a 400-room

• 17:57Speaker 02

  great house in Chaco that was built with 50 million sandstone blocks, 26,000 timbers, and extended for 450 feet beneath a canyon wall, stood completely abandoned. As for animal life in the Chacoan region, diet studies in the collapse's aftermath imply that rabbits and rodents were almost the only huntable animals left. Their need for protein perhaps explains why some of the new villages were founded close to the bison plains.

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• 20:54Speaker 02

  One March afternoon in the early 2000s, I opened the passenger door of a pickup, stretched out a hiking boot to the ground, and had one of those "small steps for man" moments. Until I exited that pickup and began to walk on a surface that spoke, it crunched, it crinkled. I'd never had the kind of visceral understanding of America's ancient past I was now experiencing.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  I was walking into a place known to southwestern archaeologists as the San Lazaro ruins. With every step, my boots were landing on broken shards of Indian pottery half a foot deep. That brought a profound realization. I was walking on ground that humans long before me had lived on for some 300 years. In every direction, the ground underfoot was a thick, continuous surface of curving, angled, shattered pottery, the pieces set at all angles and drawing the eye with painted zigzags and designs in blacks and reds. This is how the people who lived here 700 years ago must have experienced a stroll

• 22:06Speaker 02

  around their town, I thought. It's how the pioneers of archaeology in the West, the Adolf Bandeleers, the Alfred Kitters, and Edgar Hewlitz, no doubt felt the first time they walked across the ruins of Chaco or Mesa Verde, or the country I was in now, the Galastel River country south of Santa Fe. I was having this experience because I'd become friends with a remarkable Santa Fe character named Forrest Finn. Among many aspects of Finn's world that seemed more than improbable was that he actually owned the ground where the ruins of San Lazaro stood. That's why we were here.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  He was proudly showing off his possession of the largest ancestral pueblo village site in the Santa Fe area. A native Texan and a former Vietnam fighter pilot who'd survived being shot down to become a successful art gallery owner in Santa Fe, Finn was in his late 70s then, his body lean, his silvery hair still in a military buzz cut. When we struck up a friendship, I found him garrulous, hugely energetic, and despite a slender education, fiercely opinionated. True to his Texas roots, those opinions included a hatred for the federal government and a distrust of educated elites, although he could occasionally be impressed by experts.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Finn was as dedicated to Old West history as fundamentalists are to old-time religion. His home came across as a combination museum, archive, and archaeology lab. He outdid anyone in my experience with his boyish Huck Finn-like romance about Western adventure, which led him to invest prodigious energy in several seriously crazy projects that made many people wince. One was acquiring and doing amateur excavations at a major site like San Lazaro. The last of Forrest's grand ideas, when he was in his 80s, got him national exposure that wasn't always admiring.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  He buried a treasure chest containing more than $2 million of precious artifacts from around the world in a secret location in the West, then self-published a book featuring a page of verse offering clues to its hiding spot. More than one person died and untold thousands trekked the West's vast public lands in search of a treasure that, to Forrest, offered ordinary folks a chance to reprise a classic Old West opportunity: finding loot and making a mint off nature.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  San Lazaro had once been one of eight major Indian towns that, post-Chaco, spread across the Galiseo River near where Spain would found Santa Fe in the year 1610. The entire four corners is lousy with the surviving ruins of advanced farming civilizations that made the Southwest into one of the most densely lived-in parts of North America a thousand years ago. Long before Europeans came here, other humans hoped and dreamed, lived, loved, and died, and left their mark on this oldest place in America. In fact, 800 years ago, there was a far larger population of people

• 25:29Speaker 02

  living in the Galiseo River country than actually live here now. That's a claim few other American regions can make.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  A great drought in the southwest, the most severe one in the past thousand years, was the apparent proximate cause that brought them here. In a sense, they were religious refugees, fleeing that hereditary religious class that had insisted they could intervene with the gods to send life-saving rain. So the search for a new center place led some of the former Chaco Puebloans to the beautiful windswept Galistejo country. Here's what they found. A high desert with 320 days of annual sunshine, prompting their name for it, "Place Near the Sun." Rainfall that rarely reached to double figures but still made for green mountains and dwarf

• 26:25Speaker 02

  forests. A river, albeit small, with spring-fed tributaries sometimes flowing water. Sowable ground, sandstone for bricks and suitable soil to make adobes. A small mountain range long known and famous foreign-wide for its sky-blue stones. Ample firewood to boil their crops. In the grassland basin, bands of striped pronghorn antelope, mule deer in the hills, and elk, sheep, and bears in the mountains. Eagles soaring overhead, packs of gray wolves howling in the night, lions slinking through the rocks, and sacred coyotes trotting by with a quick, sharp-eyed look.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Crystal and air for watching the sun's progress along the horizons. Nights brilliant with jittering stars, the steady glow of traveler planets, and the occasional light that flies. The colonizers spoke two different Puebloan languages, Tano and Caressan, so living near one another were bilingual. They wore garments made from the cotton they grew and ornamented themselves with turquoise jewelry. The women wore their dark hair long while men affected a bowl cut. They painted colorful designs on pottery known as Rio Grande Glazeware, that frequently included images of parrots or macaws, brilliantly marked birds traded up from Mexico and not

• 27:52Speaker 02

  native to anywhere in the southwest. Farm implements they fashioned from fire-hardened juniper, arrow points largely from local black obsidian glass, and their axe blades from an aluminum silica called fiber light they mined in the high Rockies nearby. Their domestic animals were dogs and turkeys. Their ancestors had domesticated turkeys around the year 1000 when huntable wildlife near their villages declined and left them protein poor. Water manipulation and desert agriculture required cooperative effort, so these were town dwellers. They lived in apartment-like rectangular buildings with flat roofs resting on massive support beams,

• 28:37Speaker 02

  with plastered walls occasionally built of stacked stone, but more commonly in the Galastel country of puddle-dried adobes. The buildings often were three to five stories, with entrances, cooking, and daily life carried out on the top roof level. The lower levels accessed by descending ladders into rooms that featured gleaming polished floors and walls often painted with murals. The buildings commonly grouped around central plazas. The plazas highlighted circular underground ceremonial rooms known as kivas, with fireplaces, perimeter benches, and a central hold, a supapu it was called,

• 29:20Speaker 02

  representing humanity's point of emergence from a world below into the present world.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  San Lazaro left the largest ruins of all the Galastel villages. Its ruins cover 57 acres and feature the outlines of 27 separate buildings with 1,941 ground-floor rooms and a remarkable total of 5,000 rooms. It was settled around 1290, and despite a pair of debilitating droughts in the 1400s, continued to grow for 200 years when its peak population was nearly 2,000 people. That's six times the size of any 21st-century Galastel Valley town.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  By then, many local resources were likely depleted, and the town was abandoned in the early 1500s. The immediate catalyst to that exodus may have been something dramatic, for in 1581, a Spanish party found the town half destroyed. Finn's most remarkable San Lazaro discovery, for which he had the good sense to call in professional archaeologists and native descendants, came in 1992, when he unearthed two plaster Cachina masks and other stored sacred objects. The magnificent mask appeared to represent black bears and were likely associated with a bear clan or medicine society.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Various dating techniques placed the masks a few years on either side of 1500. Cachina mask would be one of the most unlikely objects any Puebloan would ever abandon. Whatever happened at San Lazaro around 1500 must have come on remarkably suddenly. When European colonizers arrived in the early 1600s and introduced fulsome new sources of protein, 4,000 sheep and 1,000 goats arrived with those first Spanish settlers. Pueblo people fully reoccupied San Lazaro. Before long, though, swelling resentment over having to provide crops and labor

• 31:31Speaker 02

  and its Spanish suppression of the Cachina religion led San Lazaro's warriors to become leaders in the Great Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which drove the Europeans out of New Mexico for a dozen years. But the Pueblo's citizens were alarmed enough at the possible consequences of this that everyone ended up fleeing San Lazaro, leaving a 400-year-old city to dissolve into silence and adobe.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  There were at least seven other similar long-lived towns in the Galiseo Country, harboring at various times several thousand more of these former Chacoans. Several were farther east and close to the high plains, where they had to survive Apache raids after those Athabaskan speakers migrated in from the far north. But like the townspeople of San Lazaro, their inhabitants fled soon following the Pueblo revolt, when the Spanish absence allowed for even more Plains Indian raids, this time by Comanches, thundering their horses through a rimrock break that's still known today as Comanche Gap. The Spaniards called the westernmost Pueblo town they found in the Galiseo Country San

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Marcos. It was near a little mountain range the newcomers named Los Surios, the Little Hills, that had been mined since the time of Chaco for lead used to glaze pottery and for the ultimate trade item from the southwest: sky-blue turquoise. A thousand years ago, Indian miners pulled turquoise ore out of shafts in a miner's Surios Peak called Chalchiwedel, the name from the Aztec language, and a little mountain with an outsized reputation. An image of this little mountain graces the Temple of the Sun Pyramid in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  I've explored its ancient shafts some, but always with hair-raising alarm and shock at the fearlessness of Indian miners. The fortunes of these towns flourished and ebbed as the centuries passed. When they were all occupied, with unexploited resources available in the 1300s and 1400s, the combined population of these Galiseo River towns may have been more than 6,000. Because rainfall was essential for their economy, yet droughts also strike the Galiseo, they made a science of cloud and wind study, no doubt hopeful as modern residents still are when grand, anvil-headed clouds, full of moisture, towered up from the mountain ranges in summertime.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Their religion was less theocratic and more decentralized than at Chaco, and featured clan leaders dressed in the elaborate costuming representing Cochina emissaries to the deities of nature. The Cochina religion lives on among their descendants today.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Although none of these towns survives today, half of these Galateo pueblos lasted longer than the United States has existed. But as is evident from a place like San Lazaro, for all their successes, the Galateo Pueblans struggled with long-term sustainability. The year-round fires to boil their crops meant that firewood cutting and gathering pushed farther out year after year. One of the first scientists to investigate the ruins of their towns, Nels Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History, took a revelatory photograph of the San Lazaro site in 1912, 132 years after its abandonment. That photo showed

• 35:20Speaker 02

  a still barren landscape, almost entirely stripped of trees and shrubs for two miles around. With the diaspora that followed Chaco's collapse, the new pueblo town of Pecos, northeast of the Galateo country, developed a mutualistic arrangement with plains hunters to trade pueblo crop products for dried bison meat. There's no evidence these Galateo villages ever managed something similar. So with eight towns and several thousand residents, huntable wildlife likely took a significant hit. One bit of evidence comes from San Lazaro's archaeology's astonishing number of bones and skulls, many of them cracked open to

• 36:03Speaker 02

  get at marrow or brains from the goats and sheep Spanish settlers introduced.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  By the 1600s, protein was obviously a dietary addition the Galileal Pueblo residents were avid for. Their several hundred-year habitation did leave the incoming Europeans a beautifully grassed basin and valley, and a healthy Galileal river that flowed over the surface of this landscape. The ecological changes that left exotic weeds and spreading junipers and produced a river that slashed arroyos and stream beds 25 feet deep, all came later with pasturages for New Spain's horse herds and flocks of sheep and goats. And when the Americans came, with millions of cattle and renewed mining in the local mountains.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Beyond walking across the broken pots at San Lazaro, my own most vivid experience of the lingering presence of this former Galileal world has come from hiking the remnant lava dykes that rise like black dragon backbones from the yellow grasslands here. Centuries ago, my Galileal neighbors lavishly adorned these lava boulders with petroglyphs. Not a handful, not a few dozen, but with thousands of white outlined images carefully pecked into the black rock surfaces. For capturing some of the essentials of their world and their presence, nothing else brings them to life like these. Today, we call petroglyphs and pictographs "rock art," but of course, they express a

• 37:43Speaker 02

  more specific cosmic meaning than any decorative or narrative art. Picking my way from boulder to boulder atop these dykes in keening morning winds, the images have sometimes given me a Sistine Chapel feeling, at other times, the open-mouthed reaction one has to the Las Vegas Strip. There are elaborately costumed cochina figures on these rocks, and having once stood in freezing December weather in Zuni Pueblo and watched a towering shalaco cochina clacking its two-foot wooden beak while dancing a solstice blessing inside a brand-new home, it's hard for me to separate the sacred from the entertaining in these images.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  I also can't help imagining date nights and holding hands under a full moon, gobsmacked at white visions leaping out at you from the silvery black. The imagery is mind bending in variety and detail. There are mythical creatures like giant horned water serpents, but also real rattlesnakes, often two in tandem. Thunderbird eagles, badgers, coyotes, bears, all revered animals the Pueblos preserved. There are gleaming four-pointed planets, an endless variety of different cloud terraces, which is the home of the Cachina gods, and those appear in conjunction with water serpents, mountain lions, a woman's nether parts.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  There are faces with or without masks, handprints, lengthy zigzag lines, spirals, fields of dots, warrior figures protected by circular shields. While history and their struggles at sustainability mean the Pueblo people no longer live along the Galiseo River, which is my home today, their descendants remain along the Rio Grande nearby, and I like to go to the annual ceremonies they open to the public. But like so much of the human story, the past here, and even in Chaco, somehow still seems just out of my grasp. We humans focus on the moments we exist in.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Touching the past is the forever problem of history.

• 40:13Speaker 01

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• 42:50Speaker 01

  I'm Steve Rinella. I'm joined here by Randall Williams.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  And we're gonna do a little thing where after we listen to Dan Florrie's American West podcast, we get to come in, we have the privilege, we get to come in and ask questions. And hopefully for you listeners, some of the questions we ask might reflect some of the questions that you have. And maybe we'll do a little thing where if you have questions, you know, we will do this. Send your questions in and then at some point we'll, we'll send your questions and at some point we'll be able to do a roundup with Dan and get your questions answered. But in the meantime, here's our questions.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  And this is very familiar to us as former students of Dan's.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. Thanks to you guys for doing this, by the way. Really appreciate it.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Oh, no, it's great. You got, you want to start?

• 43:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think in the start of this episode, you, you're talking about many Wests. And there's certain Wests that have, you know, lived on and on in pop culture, especially for Americans living in the 21st century. But you kind of challenge people to understand the West as a much larger place than the West of cowboys and Indians and of overland trails and everything like that. So I wonder, what is it about the West that seems to have

• 44:19Speaker 04

  grabbed a hold of, of our imaginations? And what has particular about cowboy culture that's grabbed our imaginations? And then what do we gain by opening our eyes to sort of the deep time West?

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I, I'm putting together a podcast here, 26 episodes of it, that will be about different kinds of things than most people think of when they think of Western history. There are no gunfights. There are no mining strikes.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  There's no Marshall Dillon. What I'm interested in is a different kind of West, and I think this is maybe the value of something like this. A part of the Western story that's not really been known or written about very much, and certainly not in pop culture portrayed, so that people get to understand it. And what that West is, is something I call the Natural West, which is, it's a West of the native people. It's a West of wildlife, abundance beyond imagining for wildlife, and many, many different species.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  And it's a story of the West that really hinges a lot around kind of an initial reaction to a place that's different, new, and very unfamiliar to people coming out of the East in particular. I mean, I think people coming up, say, from Mexico into New Mexico or California don't see the West as being that different. Their usual reaction to the country further north is that it's cold, but it's similar.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  That's an interesting point, man.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how they characterize it. Man, it's really cold up there.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Kind of got similar thing going on, just cold.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, the country looks a lot the same, but man, it's cold. But what I'm kind of interested in is the deep time story, all the way back to the Pleistocene and the earliest people who were here, and how they interacted with Western animals, because we have some pretty epic alterations that take place in this story. I mean, we lose a lot of animals 10,000 years ago. Then we have a period where we go for 10,000 years in the West, and it looks as if native people in particular are pretty benevolent. I mean, there's only one extinction during that time period, and I try to, I try to

• 47:04Speaker 02

  figure out why that is, how it happened that way. And then a lot of the rest of the episodes have to do with a kind of an exploratory first contact experience from people like Lewis and Clark, for example.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  And a whole host of people later in the 19th century. And also with what transpires in a west in the 19th century with all this abundant wildlife, where there are really no rules, no regulations. It's just kind of a free for all. And pretty much what you would predict for a free for all, things don't turn out all that great for a lot of the animals and of course, a lot of the native people either. But it's those stories in contrast to, you know, Marshall Dillon and town building and the California gold rush, the Mormon settlement of Utah.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  These are the things that I've been writing about for 35 years, basically. I never was interested much because other people had already done it to write about the mining rushes or the Indian wars. I was always looking for something different and new to write about that I thought would sort of tell a story that nobody quite knew yet. And that's really what this podcast does.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  There's a thing I've wondered about, there's an impression I have on source material, about source material, east versus west source material. And you might not share the same impression, but if you have this impression, maybe you can speak to it would be, this is a very roundabout way of arriving at the point, but when Randall and I were reading about the long hunters. So this, this group of Euro-American deer skin hunters that were first pushing over the Appalachian Mountains and going into Kentucky, basically all the country, country south of the Ohio River, west of the Appalachian range, south of the Ohio, pushing into that area.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  And we kind of marvel that the paucity of materials and the, and the.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  The, the lack of sort of like a, the lack of natural observation, the lack of nature observation. What is there was collected like very deliberately by a historian who went and talked to some of the key players, children, spouses, grandchildren, and tried to put together a little history of these first Euro Americans to push into this area. But there's just not a ton there. And that is at, say, seventeen seventy-six.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  What happens that when you get, what happens in the next thirty, forty years where all of a sudden it seems like everyone is so literate?

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  And everyone is just observing and, and writing about, trying to, you know, writing about the sights they see, counting things. Right? Like really putting a record down. Then now you can look at the West and part of what's so inviting about it is there's something to, there's something there to read about.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  And you, it's really hard to get like you just, when, when looking at people coming into Kentucky, again, for instance, coming into Kentucky, it's like there's, there's hints of things. Where you're like, you, you gather it must've been really different, but there's no just vivid pictures of what they're seeing. Did people also learn to read and write? Like, like, what, like, how do you, how do you explain that?

• 50:49Speaker 02

  Well, I, I explain it in, in three ways, I guess. One is that starting in eighteen hundred, a lot of the expeditions into the West are government expeditions. And those people are giving, given specific instructions to keep a record, keep a really close record. I mean, Jefferson tells Lewis and Clark, for example, you know, any animals that you see that aren't found in the maritime states, collect them, write a description, learn as much about their natural history as you can. And I think that's one of the things. I think another thing is that There are a lot of Europeans coming over in the early 19th century. The Thomas Nuttalls, the John Bradberrys.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  And those guys tend to look at darkest North America, sort of the way the Brits were looking at Africa then, where, wow, man, this is, this is some amazing part of the world that none of us has ever seen. And so, we gotta keep a record of all of it. We've got to, you know, we've got to preserve what it looks like.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  And I think, really, there was an actual market for literary work about the West, starting around, probably as early as 1810. And I think the, you know, the Nicholas Biddle journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which came out in 1814, I mean, those things sold like hotcakes in the East. And I think that made people understand that, wow, okay, all I gotta do is go out to the West, you know, and write some, some account. And it even led to, I mean, and I have found two or three of these, what were basically made up accounts

• 52:41Speaker 02

  by people who never actually went to the West, but they talked to people and read other people's stuff and sat down and wrote an account of their own journey.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Like, it was enough of a thing that there was value in faking one?

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Yes, there was. And you could sell a faked book. There's one particular guy, a guy named John Maylie, who wrote a faked book about an expedition he took up the Red River. And he sold it for like $5,000 or something, which of course at the time was a huge sum of money. But the publisher he sold it to went broke in the panic, the depression of 1819, and they never did publish it. So it kind of exists just as a manuscript, which I have actually examined and examined closely enough to realize, bullshit, this guy did not do any of this.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  But man, like, it's off your subject matter, but can you just imagine that if a century prior to Lewis and Clark, you'd have taken people with that mandate and that skill set, and you'd said, I want you to cross over the range divide, I want you to descend the Ohio.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Descend the Mississippi, come back overland.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  On the natural trace or whatever.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  And like, do your thing. Like, write, write down about all the stuff.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  And write down about all of it.

• 54:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, you have to, I mean, in that era, you really have to sort through what material there is to get glimpses of the natural world. And obviously, there's a literature from the earlier colonial period of, you know, English gentlemen going up the Savannah River.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it, it doesn't read. The William Bartram kind of stuff.

• 54:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it reads as very sort of, I don't know, pre-modern. Not, not in the technical sense, but pre-modern. I mean, it's very antiquarian.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, you read, that's true. You read like the account of Cabesa de Vaca. It feels like it's like an extended acid trip, you know, like, you, you're kind of like, what? Really? There's no way. You know what I mean? That's, you're kind of like, it doesn't paint a vivid picture. And I think that something, you're, you're right, like, something happened linguistically where we go over this hump and all of a sudden you can understand what people are talking about.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I, I'm pretty sure it's that a market emerged for it. There was a market, you know, America, where we're interested in possibilities for making money. And here was this wild new country

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  that everybody around the world, including all Europeans, were really intrigued by. And so people began to realize, well, hell, I, I just, you know, I try to, I try to keep notes. Maybe I embellish a little bit even.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  And so I think that's kind of one of the explanations for what happens. Starting about 1800, 1810, that suddenly you start getting a lot more primary source accounts. You have to use them, you know, with a grain of salt sometimes.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Well, I, I wasn't really aware of that, man. And, and you turned me on to that, to be suspicious. And studying writing, we'd always, in studying fiction writing, we always learned about the.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  The unreliable narrator as a fictional device.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Right? Like in a, you're reading a novel and the reader sort of becomes aware like that part of the thing is not to trust the narrator, which is common in movies and other stuff, right? Like it's built, it's a built in tension. I never thought of it in, in historical journals, never thought of it. And I had read Tough Trip Through Paradise.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  And I'd emailed you or ran into you, whatever it was, and asked you about Tough Trip Through Paradise. And remember you said, um, basically, you know, be careful. He plays a little, I think you said something, he gets a little fast and loose and some of the things don't quite add up. And I just read it like gospel.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I think one is inclined to do that until you begin to realize that, you know, the classic one in the West is the account of James Ohio Patty, who, you know, I mean, that book was probably published 10 different times in the 19th century. And so there are a bunch of different versions. He changed them up.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  We, we quote him and have been warned about him.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  But, um, we quote him.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. But he's got some good, some good details. Yeah, he does have some good details. And I mean, who knows? What I think, for example, with people like that, like Patty and maybe like John Maylie, is they actually did, I think Maylie knew enough to convince me that he had talked to people. He had talked to people who knew about it, but when he started going up the Red River and started describing the landmarks, I mean, I could tell by the time you got to about the third or fourth day, this guy ain't nowhere on any Red River that existed then or now. I mean, so it was, you know, it's a market for stuff and it produces a huge abundance of material to use, but somehow you have to be careful.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  I'm reading one right now. It's like 60 years.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  It's a guy that wound up in Montana.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Wound up having, he had a trading for, he had a trading post in Missoula for a while, can't remember his name. Sixty years, like Indian fighter and trader or something. And a lot of the stuff in there, there's a lot of stuff in there where you, you read it and you're like, you accept as legit, like some of the observations or ways they use things, right? Like little tricks of the trade. You're like, that has to come from a level of knowledge, but other parts of it. You know, he's talking about a, I sent Randall a passage about Sharps Buffalo rifles and Randall's like, they didn't exist. So he's mystery, later he's misremembering, whatever, you know what I mean? He's like, he feels like he had one at a time when he didn't actually have one.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  Before Christian Sharps had made a rifle.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, but here's the thing, like my old man fought in World War II. Okay, my dad's long dead. My dad fought in World War II. I could tell you, he told me about getting and carrying around with him a Thompson submachine gun. Right? Now, I could go and put down, like my dad was in World War II and had a Thompson submachine gun. And he might be like, well, no, no, no, I didn't have it there, I had it later. But you know what I mean? Like, like I just remember war Thompson submachine gun. And you could see someone later, just out of expediency.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Bleeding it together.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Just putting it all in there and then someone later saying there's, that couldn't have been true.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  He wouldn't have had it, he, I don't know, he couldn't have had it at Anzio. He could have had it later in France, but he wouldn't have had it at Anzio.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  Well, it becomes, those, these kinds of things become even more difficult when you're dealing like with, in this particular podcast with the, the people in Chaco. Where we have no written accounts. All we have to go on is archaeology and material culture objects. And so, and now genetics, obviously, that story about the, you know, the 14 people who are all related to one another, buried in a single room in Pueblo Bonito, that. Makes the whole story of telling the deep time history of the West even more difficult. Cause now you don't really have, you may have, I mean, and I have used them this way.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  There are great coyote stories going back thousands of years. And I have occasionally used a coyote story associated with a particular group that I think would make a point about them. But that's literally the only kind of storytelling you get. It's oral history. And so you have to, you have to approach things that way as, you know, really carefully.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  But that's where my, that's where my observation, I guess, falls apart. Cause I was talking about the vivid descriptions. But when it comes to the pueblo sites, some of the ancient pueblo sites, here's these really, these guys doing really vivid descriptions. And they're stumped.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  The vivid description is of someone being like, what in the hell happened here? Do you know what I mean? It's not even like a vivid, they're, they're just describing being awestruck by, by what they see as a ruin.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so what we're grappling with then is, you know, so people got into Chaco in the 1850s for the first time, 1850s, 1860s. And so we've essentially got 170 years of archaeological speculation. And so the way you try to figure it out is you sort of track that story through to hopefully the most recent versions of, well, here's what it kind of looks like what happened. But that kind of evidence is never quite as foolproof as Lewis and Clark saying, today, for the first time, we saw and shot a buffalo.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the, the story of the West, when you go back in time is based on a kind of a, uh, an evidentiary base that you have to even be more careful with. But it's the only way we have to figure out what happened.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  Have you ever read Black Range Tales?

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  It's a gold miner, um, he's knocking around New Mexico, mostly, um, 1860s. But one of the things really stuck with me is here, here's this guy in the 1860s. And he's talking about basically trying to loot pueblo sites. And in the 1860s, he's lamenting that all the good stuff's been hauled away.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  In the 1860s.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  And then he describes like amazing things that other guys have carried off.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's that, yeah, absolutely. That's been going on forever. As soon as those villages, like in the Galaseo Valley, were abandoned, there's no question, there were people out there poking around, seeing what they could find.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  Just instantly.

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, just instantly. Yeah, and so who knows what all disappeared, but sometimes really great finds are, you know, they remain. And I mean, those Kachina masks that Forrest Finn found there in San Lazaro Pueblo in 1992, man, that's a, you just don't find that stuff. In part because nobody ever leaves it. And something that we don't understand happened at San Lazaro around 1500 that caused that population of that town to flee so suddenly that either some,

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  you know, some magician, some healer, some shaman, maybe he got killed and couldn't go for his, his goods, or some attack came so suddenly that everybody just fled. I mean, so sometimes you get lucky like that, and Forrest got pretty lucky on that one.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  It's like finding a modern day house where they didn't even take their passports.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  Well, damn, I'm super excited for the series. I can't wait to learn all this stuff that's coming, so thanks.

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  Well, thanks to you guys for joining me with this.

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