Pod Insights Gunfighters Ep. 10: Start of the Endgame for the Ancient West | The American West About this episode When Lewis & Clark saw the West in the first years of the 1800s it still preserved the healthy biodiversity of Native-managed ecologies in place for 10,000 years. Within thirty years, everything had changed. Americans arrived in the West with religious traditions that taught animals were created solely for human use. And they introduced an economic system that made western animals commodities in a global market, an economy that snagged Native people in the trade and created the first American millionaires. By 1840 ancient western ecologies evolved around sea otters, fur seals, beavers and many other species were collapsing in both the interior and on the coasts. For some the period produced romantic figures like the mountain men. Witnessing such destruction, however, even some of their peers saw the casual loss of the ancient West very differently.
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Transcript 10,155 words · 5 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 I got in my hand here, it was just clipped to my pocket, but it's in my hand right now. The Montana. It's MKC, Montana Knife Company's first folding knife. Designed, tested, built by actual hunters. The Montana is the first folder Josh Smith has built at production scale with a team of engineers and machinists who could match what he does on the bench. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. These things are great. You are gonna love this folding knife.
0:34 Speaker 01 With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans. Develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule. So you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com.
1:03 Speaker 02 Following the arrival of the global market economy in the West in the early 1800s, important elements of the biodiversity preserved by thousands of years of native management collapsed in little more than three decades with exploitation of animals that snared native people, working-class Americans, and produced the country's first millionaires. I'm Dan Flores, and this is The American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer, just in time for the season that calls us home. A portion of every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters, and wildlife. Enjoy responsibly.
2:01 Speaker 02 Start of the endgame for the ancient West.
2:14 Speaker 02 In the year 1967, a famed American painter named Thomas Hart Benton laid down on canvas perhaps the most poignant painting about the trajectory of the 19th century American West any Western artist has produced. Benton based Lewis and Clark at Eagle Creek on an 1805 account in the explorers' journals, and in a further nod to reality on an actual place, the painting dramatically captures all the hues and lines and rhythms of the white cliffs of today's Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument. But what makes Benton's canvas one of the West's great paintings is not his use of explorer journals or his abstract rendering of a well-known Western locale.
2:57 Speaker 02 Instead, it's the story the painting tells. In Lewis and Clark at Eagle Creek, the West of the previous 10,000 years yet exists, and it looms over the arriving Americans, who appear a minor blip in the timeline of a world that's impossibly ancient. That sense of a timelessness, carried by a sensuous river amid the forms and colors of immense space, dwarf any foreboding about the Old World having discovered this remote interior piece of the continent. Now let the mind leap a quarter-century ahead in time from Lewis and Clark.
3:40 Speaker 02 When the decade of the 1830s dawns, a calm, confident American West has somehow contracted in both size and grand promise. The Western world that had Lewis and Clark marveling, built by 100 centuries of native inhabitation and a magnificent diversity and abundance of wild animals, had been intact when the explorers passed Eagle Creek. But the 1830s is the decade when any resistance to high-speed change becomes forever futile for the West.
4:13 Speaker 02 Vastness and abundance were both shrinking. As the famed Maximilian Bodmer Expedition on the Missouri River documented so well, the bigger world was beginning to rush in. History doesn't remain in the past, so it's not a special insight to realize that no time exists apart from what went before or after. Human-caused climate change hasn't popped into existence in our 21st century with no advance warning. And what we do about it, or don't do, will likely affect us and the planet for centuries to come. Still, there are decades in the human story, the 1960s, for instance, when civil rights
4:57 Speaker 02 of all kinds, ecological concerns, and a growing mistrust of wars, that do stand as exceptional. For North America west of the Mississippi River, and especially for the region's environmental story, the long 1830s decade, which in truth spanned the years from the 1820s through the early 1840s, was one of those exceptional and memorable times. With its arrival, a West that had been relatively quiescent for thousands of years was morphing into something new so rapidly it shocked many who witnessed it. Stories about the West, as we know, have long dazzled the world.
5:41 Speaker 02 From Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West of more than a century ago to today's Yellowstone, the West's stories fascinate because they offer up an endemic world to human design. Despite our lingering romance for 1830s accounts of mountain men or the overlanders on the Oregon Trail, however, the West's ecological stories have never made much of a dent in our historical memory of the region and its frontier. Nonetheless, much of what happened in the classic West actually centered around an extensive ecological destruction of the West Lewis and Clark saw. The truth is that stories like the ones that follow in this episode were central to
6:21 Speaker 02 Western history and to the freedom of action we intuitively associate with it. To my mind, stories like this reveal important things that romance about a Kit Carson or a Narcissa Whitman obscures from the big picture. In roughly chronological order, then, consider how these stories about Western ecologies offer a different way to see the West in the early 19th century.
6:51 Speaker 02 At the start of the 1830s decade, the prevailing notion about the West had been captured by the American Exploring Expedition led by Stephen Long, which in 1819 and 1820 had crossed the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Intriguingly, Long's party was convinced that the ancient, quiescent world they'd seen was still the best future for the West. "The region they had explored was almost wholly unfit for cultivation," they claimed, "and peculiarly adapted as arranged for buffaloes, wild goats, and other wild game in incalculable multitudes." Thus, the West was best left as a frontier, which by no means implied, however,
7:35 Speaker 02 that they believed the West should be left untouched or to the native people or Spanish settlers. That was because the American idea of a frontier rested on the recent history of the Atlantic seaboard, the South, and the Mississippi Valley. All these had initially functioned as wild lands exploited for their animal wealth.
7:59 Speaker 02 Four centuries ago, religion was the ultimate explanation of all things for almost all humans. Like native peoples, Europeans and Americans generally understood animals in supernatural terms. But for Europeans, the terms were their own. Our colonial ancestors most certainly didn't regard animals as close kin the way native people did. For them, only humans were godlike and exceptional. But European religions did argue that all animals had a divine origin, which meant they had existed unchanged since their moment of creation. That meant that no animal species had ever disappeared in the past,
8:43 Speaker 02 nor could any species ever disappear, now or in the future. Extinction, in other words, was impossible in a divinely created world.
8:53 Speaker 02 The Bible was the primary source for settler ideas about the animals they found in America, but European views about animals actually went back farther into Old World history. It's hard to say just how far back. The Greeks are an obvious reference, but it's difficult not to suspect that much of Greek knowledge may have come from pre-literate times. Plato and Aristotle likely were codifying into written form ideas that many generations of earlier Eurasians had thought first. Plato and Aristotle began with an essential premise, though. There must be a deity, an invisible reality now missing in action, who had created the
9:37 Speaker 02 earth and everything on it. Plato investigated a critical distinction in this idea, that humans were earthy and animal-like, but clearly separate from other animals. The explanation for that separation must lie in a difference between us and them, ergo, an invisible and individual spirit in humans that permitted us a connection to the deity. Looking at the orderliness and beauty around him, Aristotle's contribution was to sketch out that order into one of the most important intellectual ideas in Western thought. He called it the Great Chain of Being, with all divinely-created life occupying descending
10:20 Speaker 02 links in the chain, arranged in descending order of perfection. Perfection translated into how useful a particular species was to humans. You can say that for 2,000 years, in one part of the earth at least, this became a deeply internalized imagining of how the world worked. It was a big reassuring idea.
10:45 Speaker 02 The vast majority of Europeans who migrated to the Americas in the 1600s brought with them a Middle Eastern herding cultures book, the Bible, that answered any questions they had about their proper relationship with animals. At the beginning of the Old Testament, Genesis 1:28, God gives Adam, on behalf of humanity, dominion over everything that lives. In Genesis 9:2 and 3, the sacred book goes on to say, "The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every fowl of the air; into your hand are they delivered."
11:28 Speaker 02 The next line, "Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you", was the Judeo-Christian stamp of approval on self-interested human use of animals. Genesis 1:27 clarified things even further. God had made humans and no other creatures on earth in His own image, giving humans something that set us apart from all the rest of creation, an immortal soul that promised life after death. It was an easy mental exercise then for Europeans to settle on the soul as the possession that made for human exceptionalism.
12:10 Speaker 02 There was also something else new in the West, an argument for self-interest whose British author Adam Smith had presented to the world the very year the US was born, 1776. Smith's argument for capitalism rested atop a colonial economic system evolving into what we now call the global market. So by the early 1800s, the West's soulless wild animals were now in the sights of an economic system that for 200 years had been converting American animals into market commodities. In this system, ancient ecological relationships had no meaning.
12:53 Speaker 02 Animals had no meaning, beyond satisfying the desires of people who killed them and others who made animal skins into leather or used fur or teeth or claws to make statements about human fashions or status among peers. This was an economy that made some who dealt in wild animals very wealthy, our first millionaires. It also supported a colonial working class. Some of those workers, the new Americans, but many of them natives, who often did very well for themselves, killing animals for the trade.
13:26 Speaker 02 The West's turn in this system was now underway, and one of the places it hit early was along the Pacific coast. Here, sea otters and fur seals were attracting a frenzied exploitation by the fur hunters of the US and several European nations. Another was along interior rivers like the Missouri and Arkansas, where beavers and many other species of fur bearers were becoming the targets as agents of the American Fur Company, the Missouri Fur Company, and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company established trading posts and rendezvous fairs. The global market economy had long offered America's native people a metalware firearm technology
14:12 Speaker 02 that transformed their cultures if they would participate in it. Despite warnings from some of their religious leaders, most native people found it impossible to resist this new wave. If you did, you profoundly disadvantaged yourself among other tribes that did create market ties. This wholesale change in the world was now come to the West, and the region quickly became a different place. A level of exploitation that hadn't happened in 10,000 years was at hand, and it would not be pretty.
14:52 Speaker 02 When Lewis and Clark spent their winter at the mouth of the Columbia River, the global economy's unquenchable appetite for America's animals was already a presence on the Pacific coast. The prize, the Pacific beaver, was the sea otter.
15:09 Speaker 02 Otters frequented the shorelines from Japan to the Aleutians and down the Pacific Coast to Baja California in numbers that seemed large, although there were probably fewer than 300,000 across their range. As ships from Boston and New York began showing up on the West Coast, word spread among sailors of several nations that prime sea otter pelts had sold for $120 apiece in China. One American trader said the fur of the sea otter was so luxurious in the hand, 2.6 million hairs per square inch, that accepting a beautiful woman and a lovely infant, it
15:52 Speaker 02 was the most extraordinary thing on earth. Like humans, like wolves, sea otters are keystone carnivores. Ancient ecosystems had formed around sea otter predation, and so long as the six-foot-long otters were present, the ecosystems held together. Impossibly appealing, these 100-pound members of the family Mastillidae, which includes wolverines, badgers, and weasels, evolved as hunters of fish and sea urchins in shallow shoreline kelp beds. Otters kept those kelp forests healthy by devouring as many as 1,000 sea urchins a day.
16:37 Speaker 02 Just as we are, sea otters are tool users. At some point in their evolution, otters developed a culture utilizing rocks of a certain size and shape to break open the shells of their prey. There were even variations handed down among regional populations, some otters making do with a single rock, others using two at once. Tools were critical. As hunters of cold Pacific shorelines, sea otters need to consume as much as 25% of their weight in food daily to stay warm. Important to what befell them is that they do not become sexually mature until they are several years old, bear only a single pup at a time, and sometimes spend a year
17:21 Speaker 02 without producing offspring. In prime feeding grounds, undisturbed otter colonies can increase their numbers by 20% a year, no more. By the turn of the 19th century, they were undergoing an extreme disturbance.
17:39 Speaker 02 In 1778, the global traveler, English explorer James Cook, sailed the shores of Oregon and Washington to Vancouver Island, finding native peoples who rushed to his ships with otter skins, hoping to trade for any kind of metal, even nails. The next year, after Pacific islanders killed Cook in a shallow bay of the Big Island in Hawaii, his men sold 20 of those pelts for $40 apiece in Canton, China. That wasn't $120, but it was good enough. The American Robert Gray happened on the mouth of the Columbia River and traded for otter and seal furs up and down the West Coast the very next year. After circumnavigating the planet,
18:24 Speaker 02 Gray would return to Boston in 1790, having sold his haul in China for an astonishing $21,000, the equivalent of $725,000 today.
18:39 Speaker 02 At that point, the great otter fur seal rush was on, a destruction of nature contemplated today with profound unease, although it was clearly conducted without any sentiment whatsoever at the time. It took the Russian Gerasim Pryvolov just two years, 1786 and 1787, to kill 7,000 otters and obliterate every last one on the islands now named for him. That was made possible by biological first contact. Most otters and fur seals had never seen a human before. They were trusting and tame, and with no empathy for living creatures, the hunters violated their innocence. When Russia's professional fur hunters,
19:24 Speaker 02 the Promishleniky, descended on America in the wake of these reports, they added the next horrifying step, the forced conscription of the Aleuts and other native peoples into an animal-killing labor force. As had happened in the East, on the mainland, a lucrative exchange of furs for metal technology could seduce native people into killing animals for the market. But Russian traders lacked goods of sufficient quality to pull that off, so they resorted to subterfuge, sometimes kidnapping family members to force native men to pursue otters for them. If in 1800, naturalists or American presidents doubted extinction was possible,
20:09 Speaker 02 by 1820, the fallacy of that position was becoming all too clear. First in the East and the South, now on the Pacific Coast, North America was losing its animals at a frightening rate. Hunters from several nations wiped out otter and fur seal colonies with a speed no one could hold in the mind. Demand in China seemed insatiable, and while otters lasted, American ship captains unloading 20,000 skins a year there. In search of laborers to harvest the otters farther south, in 1812, American ship captains invited Alexander Baronov of the Russian-American Company to send Aleut hunters down the California
20:54 Speaker 02 coast, with Americans hauling the take to China and splitting the profits with the Russian trappers. In the next act, Yankee sealers slaughtered more than 73,000 fur seals on the Farallon Islands off San Francisco Bay. That got the Russians' attention and led them to establish their famous trading post and fort at Bodega Bay, from which their conscripted native laborers killed 80,000 animals in just one season. But the seals were so tame and numerous that no native labor force proved really necessary. Using clubs or knives, European and American seal hunters murdered the animals themselves,
21:39 Speaker 02 stripped off the pelts, and left the discarded carcasses to seabirds, condors, coyotes, and bears, then sold the pelts for a dollar apiece in China. Less desirable and more numerous than otters, fur seals lasted along the Pacific Coast into the 1840s. But otters were so pursued, and their colonies so devastated, that by the 1820s, there weren't enough left for hunters to justify chasing down the final few. And that saved them. One of Gorg Stellar's few discoveries, the Pleistocene Giant now known as the Stellar's Sea Cow, had the unhappy distinction of being the first of these specific creatures
22:24 Speaker 02 the hunters pushed into total extinction. Sea Cows were gone by 1768, and if the agents of the market could easily have located them, their other targets would have followed suit. But tiny remnants of otters and fur seals at least remained alive in a few hidden inconvenient spots the hunters missed. Now that same pattern, rooted in our predatory evolution and released afresh by market self-interest, was about to play out in the inland west.
23:05 Speaker 00 You guys have heard me talk all about Montana Knife Company for a few years now on the podcast, hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Every blade they make is a high-performance durable tool that you can rely on whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to MKC.com right now.
23:49 Speaker 00 Make sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications so you get the alert the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders.
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24:36 Speaker 00 You ever get that feeling you're stuck inside staring at screens and a primal urge kicks in? You crave wide open spaces, fresh air, the chance to connect with the land? Well, maybe it's time to find your own piece of the wild. But searching for property can be a maze. That's where Land.com comes in. They've got millions of listings across the country, from mountain ranches to hidden fishing holes. Their search tools are like a seasoned guide, helping you narrow down what you want. Land.com isn't just about buying and selling. It's about finding a place to hunt, fish, explore, or simply sit by a campfire and listen to the crickets. So head over to Land.com today to turn one day into today. Because trust me, there's nothing quite like the feeling of standing on your own piece
25:21 Speaker 00 of earth.
25:25 Speaker 02 Like most of us, I live in the Valley of a river. It's called the Rio Galisteo, a stream that runs sometimes and seeps into the sands most of the time, just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Galisteo is no grand water course, but it does string a cottonwood corridor through the high desert. And the celebrated American naturalist Aldo Leopold once used it as an example of how waterways were ruined when Europeans brought their domestic stock to the West. Leopold told the story of a drunken immigrant who in 1849 was able to walk across the Rio Galisteo successfully on a 20-foot board plank.
26:10 Speaker 02 Yet in the 20th century, he wrote, "The Galisteo had sliced its stream bed into so many eroded gullies, known as arroyos, that a drunk wouldn't stand a snowball's chance of making the far bank." In many places, a 20th-century plank across the Rio Galisteo would have to span 250 feet of torn-up stream bed. I've little doubt the cow and the sheep made their contribution to this ecological set piece, but I also know the naturalists arrived too late in New Mexico to see what else had happened here in an earlier time. Heading on the flanks of Thompson Peak in the southern Rockies, the Galastel was one
26:54 Speaker 02 of the streams the western trappers, we call mountain men, picked clean of beavers in the 1820s. Drawn to the southern mountains in the wake of Mexico's success throwing off Spanish rule, then the Republic of Mexico's opening of the southwest to outside trade, trappers from the states began to operate out of Santa Fe and Taos shortly after 1821. They fanned out across the mountains all the way to the high parks of Colorado, and they made astonishingly quick work of every beaver colony they could find. One party of trappers cashed in $50,000 in New Mexico furs in St. Louis in 1831.
27:38 Speaker 02 Local authorities tried to control the carnage with a law banning non-resident trapping. The Americans ignored it. By 1832, trappers were even scouring the nearby high plains in their rush to de-beaver every last trickle of water. Set aside for a moment the predictability of it all, the deaths of wild animals in return for a brief few years of profits, and take the long view. As it had done in the east, beaver removal in the west abruptly terminated millennia of hydraulic engineering.
28:18 Speaker 02 A world where beavers had turned western rivers into ribbons of dammed ponds and year-round water storage now yielded to flashing runoffs that cut gullies and arroyos in places like New Mexico. Leopold may have blamed sheep and cows, but the destruction of the west beavers also appears visible on the land even two centuries later. Along with the practical extinction of bison in the wild, the extirpation of millions of beavers in just three short decades is at least an event modern Americans recall from the west's slaughterhouse century, 1820 to 1920.
29:03 Speaker 02 The Western beaver hunt was merely an extension of beaver mania that had gathered momentum from the time of Henry Hudson. But by the time the beaver trade moved west, the US was already giving it a peculiarly American cast. In neighboring Canada, the British Crown planned and regulated the fur trade, granting a government-sanctioned monopoly to the Hudson's Bay Company. Right next door to the US, this offered lessons in efficiency, decent treatment of the labor force, and even some conservation of the target animals. But back in 1763, King George's similar attempts to regulate wild animals in the American colonies
29:46 Speaker 02 had infuriated everyone from Virginia to New York. The American approach to market capitalism was too freewheeling and anti-regulation to be patient with a setup like Canada's. So America went for no-market planning beyond the natural laws of Adam Smith capitalism. In that clear space, the country's first big-business enterprise, immigrant John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, made a heroic effort to dominate the fur trade by outcompeting everyone else. The son of a butcher in the German town of Waldorf, Johann Jacob, arrived in America
30:29 Speaker 02 in 1783 after first spending a stretch in London mastering English. In 1808, Astor founded the American Fur Company and began his quest to control the fur market. He built and supplied trading posts first in the Great Lakes country, then in the West. Vying with Astor's fur behemoth was a myriad of small, private enterprises. They were eager and could wreak havoc on animals but weren't always professionally run. One of the most notable was Manuel Lisa's Missouri Fur Company. The wilderness trading posts that Lisa pioneered in the Missouri River Country as
31:10 Speaker 02 early as 1808 were the Walmarts and Targets of their day. They provided the native labor force handy box stores for European technology, as well as warehouses for the gathered furs. River barges ferried the body parts from beavers, river otters, and muskrats downriver to stateside markets. After Astor's wildly ambitious attempt to monopolize the Pacific Coast trade collapsed, the British seized his Astoria Post at the mouth of the Columbia in the War of 1812. The American fur company refocused on the interior west. Soon enough, it put its chips on a new technological innovation: the steamboat, which could haul
31:53 Speaker 02 more trade goods upriver, as well as heavy quantities of furs, now including even bulky bison robes, back to civilization, where demand seemed insatiable. Astor's corporate design even extended to health care for his labor force. Since Indian trade partners laid low by disease would never be able to generate profitable product, in the 1830s Astor called on the government's brand-new Bureau of Indian Affairs to vaccinate native people against smallpox. Tragically, the 1830s was too late.
32:33 Speaker 02 One of Astor's steamboats, making an annual supply run in 1837, the St. Peters, discovered on the way upriver that it had passengers falling ill with the dreaded pox. Instead of doing the moral thing and turning back to St. Louis, the St. Peters continued its run, attempting to mitigate the danger by warning native people at every stop that a contagious disease was on board. The Arikaras and Mandans were unimpressed. The Ascinaboons thought the announcement a hoax to preserve trade goods for someone else. The Blackfeet had always refused to kill beavers for the whites because "Beaver," with a capital B, was one of their deities.
33:17 Speaker 02 Plus, they valued beaver ponds as critical sources of water on the dry prairie. But they compensated by killing wolves for the trade and had plenty of wolf pelts and bison robes on hand. The Blackfeet had suffered about with smallpox in the 1780s, but this band said their historians had never heard of such a disease. By the time the epidemic of 1837 had run its course, nearly 20,000 Missouri River Indians had died disfiguring horrible deaths. One of the most famous Indians in the West, interviewed and painted by Western travelers across the previous decade, was the Mandan headman Matopee Forbears.
34:02 Speaker 02 A strikingly handsome, middle-aged war leader, Matopee impressed observers as free, generous, elegant, and gentlemanly in his deportment. He had survived a warrior's life, but the invisible virus struck him down without the slightest care for his bravery or grace. Matopee blamed the traitors. "I do not fear death," he is supposed to have said, "but to die with my face rotten, that even the wolves will shrink with horror at seeing me." Jacob Halsey, who oversaw the American Fur Company's Fort Union post,
34:43 Speaker 02 put the moment in terms Astor and the American Fur Company could best appreciate. "The losses," he wrote, "would be incalculable as our most profitable Indians have died." The most remembered part of the beaver story in the West centers on William Ashley's and Andrew Henry's Rocky Mountain Fur Company, whose reassessment of how to attack beavers would have won a business school's prize for thinking outside the box had such a prize existed. Posts and steamboats were expensive. Like the Blackfeet, several other Plains tribes refused to kill beavers because of their ecological importance. But since colonial times, America had been full of men
35:28 Speaker 02 who fled towns and farms and marriages and desired nothing so much as to spend their lives camping and hunting, a life that seemed natural. So why not sidestep the Indian labor force altogether and have such men trapped for beavers and otters themselves, like Kit Carson and others were doing out of Santa Fe and Taos? They could remain in the West year-round, and the new company would use overland wagons to supply them at an annual rendezvous site somewhere out West, then wagon the accumulated loot back to St. Louis. It worked. At least it worked for a few years, as long as the animals lasted.
36:09 Speaker 02 Although barely aware of it, Ashley's and Henry's mountain men became players in animal geopolitics. Because they could clear streams of beavers so quickly, the American trappers were endlessly pushing onto new streams farther West, which threatened British colonial claims. So in 1824, at London's request, the Hudson's Bay Company sent trapping brigades into the Rockies with instructions to ruin the country, to create a fur desert that would turn the Americans back. For millions of years, the streams that ran snowmelt through the canyons of ranges like
36:49 Speaker 02 the Bitterroots, the Limhys, and the Wasatch, had known beaver colonies at roughly half-mile intervals, 100 colonies, dams, and ponds for every 50 miles of a stream and its side creeks. But British Brigade leaders Peter Skeen Ogden, John Wark, and Alexander Ross, with 15 or so trappers plus native wives or girlfriends to do the cooking and pelt preparation, were easily up to the task of obliterating all the West Slope beavers. Ross described how. His brigade of 20, with 212 traps, would scatter their sets up the length of a mountain stream in an afternoon.
37:33 Speaker 02 On a typical creek in the Bitterroots, they'd catch 95 beavers the following morning and another 60 that afternoon. That usually got every animal in the drainage. Then on to the next canyon and repeat. Especially during the spring, when female beavers were pregnant or already had kits, that ruined things proper.
37:56 Speaker 02 This wasn't the all-boys world of the seal-otter hunt, as the women who went on these pursuits were major players, with the skills to dress pelts and keep everyone clothed and fed, and pointed in the right direction. With that kind of female assistance, from 1823 to 1841, the British Brigades destroyed 35,000 western beavers and drained an estimated 6,000 beaver ponds.
38:31 Speaker 02 By now, everyone knew what the end of this looked like. There was no chance beavers and river otters could last any longer than whitetail deer had in the East. What they wouldn't have understood, but we do, is how the extraction of sea otters and beavers was devastating, finely balanced American ecologies hundreds of thousands of years old. Without otters to hold them in check, sea urchin populations exploded, then mowed down whole kelp forests, whose loss in turn threatened the red algae reefs that grew those waving stands of kelp. Obliterating every beaver on stream after stream
39:15 Speaker 02 didn't just deprive the native people of traditional camps, it entirely remade drainage systems all over the continent, altering growth patterns for willows and cottonwoods, destroying wetlands favored by waterfowl, raccoons, and moose, in effect, drying out America. But the stories we tell ourselves. These mountain men with their rendezvous gatherings, combination hardware stores and all-night raves, except in leather and at the foot of the Wind River Mountains, became American working-class heroes.
39:50 Speaker 02 Back East, Daniel Boone's biographers had already devised a romantic take on the masculine American hunter. Now the West broadcasts the Boone model as bigger-than-life figures: Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Buffalo Bill Cody. Literary types like James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving became their biographers, as did Herman Melville of the Whale Hunters. In one of his first books, Teddy Roosevelt claimed these men were the first to become Americans. Even the historian Frederick Jackson Turner echoed that. Turner's frontier thesis made a Darwinian claim that it was wilderness life with all
40:32 Speaker 02 those dead animals that turned Europeans into Americans. These heroes, out of the adventureland of early America, in fact, were detached Stoic killers. Some of them, yes, were expectant capitalists, but most were not even that. They were killing animals because it was ancient human skill, and many of them were doing so because apparently they didn't know how to do much else. The truest, unvarnished characterization of them came from one of their own, a peer, albeit a literary one, named George Ruxton. A British adventurer and novelist who, trapped with the mountain man out of Taos, Ruxton knew his colleagues firsthand.
41:15 Speaker 02 "They made up a genus," he said, "of men distilled into a primitive state, whose personalities," assumed what he said was "a most singular caste of simplicity mingled with ferocity." "The Western hunters, he knew, rival the beasts of prey," as he put it, "and destroy human as well as animal life with as little scruple and as freely as they expose their own." So they were brave Stoic killers. And true. Looking for animals, they examined every nook and cranny of the continent and paved the way for the settlement of the Western country.
41:56 Speaker 02 It seems to me that romance about all this is misdirected, though. The West afforded the mountain men freedom from all restraint. Their response to that freedom, and here I'm using Ruxton's word, was ransacking the west of its animal life.
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45:08 Speaker 03 Dan, in this episode, you kind of kick off what is a real dominant arc in the history of, you know, sort of the long 19th century in the West, which is just unmitigated exploitation of all kinds of resources. And we've been working on, like I mentioned earlier, we've been working on these histories of market hunters. And it's tough for people to wrap their minds around these individuals committing these really egregious atrocities of wildlife. But then, you know, you also have to look back at the time and consider it in context,
45:51 Speaker 03 like they're not, that's not what they're trying to do. They're doing, they have a very specific purpose in mind, and that is, the market requires this, the West provides it, and they're the intermediary. I wonder how you sort of wrestle with that question or that tension in your writing about this stuff?
46:11 Speaker 00 Dan's mean to those guys sometimes.
46:13 Speaker 03 I know, I know. I feel like you guys sit on opposite sides of that.
46:17 Speaker 00 Dan says downright rude things about some of those people.
46:22 Speaker 02 Yeah. And some of the people, I remember when you and I were at Country Bookshelf talking about Wild New World, you said, "You just hurt my feelings about some of these guys."
46:35 Speaker 02 Well, so here's what I think. I think we've had, you know, probably a quite long historiography of romance about this period of the American West. So what I have been attempting to do, and you know, trying not to go too overboard with it, but what I've been trying to do is to, for one thing, take the wildlife of the West seriously and not assume that it's just this, you know, just commodities in fur waiting to be exploited. And so, one of the things I've done with a lot of my work is I try to get a lot of natural history
47:17 Speaker 02 in, so people can understand the lives that these animals had, wolves, bison, pronghorns, and so forth, and understand them as, you know, a legitimate part of the West. Because I think especially in the 19th century, the trifecta of things that people are interested in then and now were, it was the landscapes, these almost alien, arid landscapes that people coming out of Northern Europe or the East had hardly ever been exposed to. People coming out of the Mediterranean world had, but they also found the West to be a very cold place with landscapes they recognized. The other thing that everybody is interested
47:59 Speaker 02 in, no matter where you came from to the West, was the native people who were here, and then the animals. Because for one thing, the animals of the West were different from the animals that were anywhere else in the country. From the East, they were different from the animals of Western Europe. There's a lot more Asian admixture of creatures in the West. So these are unusual creatures that fascinate a lot of people. So I've tried to take the animals themselves seriously, and with the idea that we've had a lot of romance written about this particular time period, I've been trying to do it in a way where you, where...
48:41 Speaker 02 Readers of my books or people who listen to this podcast are gonna have the furniture in their heads rearranged a little bit and thinking about it. I mean, we're still gonna have Jim Bridger out there as he's gonna be a Western hero. Kit Carson is going to be a hero of sorts. Those people are still going to stand as major figures in Western history, but I've been trying to create a kind of a look at this, this period of the West that gives you a slightly different angle of approach to it. And when you look at things like, so I would preface the ecological thing I'm about to say by also pointing out
49:26 Speaker 02 that the science of ecology doesn't exist until the 20th century. And so, none of these people who, for example, are wiping out sea otters on the Pacific coast, are taking out beaver colonies all over the country, understand that by doing so, they are wrecking ecologies that formed probably half a million or a million years before and have been in place for tens of thousands of years. They don't think in ecological terms. All they're thinking in terms of is there's a population of sea otters out there. We're gonna go get them. And what we know since then, this is one of those examples where, you know, those
50:09 Speaker 02 of us down the timeline, understand more about what the consequences were than they did. What we understand now is that they were wrecking ecologies that produce all kinds of alterations across the West. And as I tried to convey in writing about that little river I live on down in New Mexico, the alterations extend right down to our own time. I mean, I live on a river that because all the beavers were taken off of it in the 1820s and 1830s, the result was that without the beaver dams and the ponds on it, that little stream eroded into crisscrossing arroyos going in every single direction. And
50:51 Speaker 02 the result today is that it's a completely different ecology. It's one of those, one of the things I say quite a bit, I know, in this podcast is the past doesn't stay in the past. It extends into the present day. And so, that's the sort of thing I'm trying to, to make people understand with this.
51:08 Speaker 00 I only became aware recently that that people used to struggle with, well, the Europeans used to struggle with the concept of extinction.
51:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:20 Speaker 00 That it was, I don't know who debated what side of it, but that it was actually debated.
51:26 Speaker 02 Oh, yes.
51:26 Speaker 00 Could extinction be possible? Because how do you make it conform to Genesis? Or how do you, how do you, how do you conform extinction to the biblical creation story?
51:39 Speaker 02 That's.
51:39 Speaker 00 I had no idea that people argued about this.
51:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:42 Speaker 00 But what, what do you see in recognizing that there were dozens of or hundreds of native religions and native cultures and native systems of understanding? But um, do you see that native peoples had ideas of extinction?
52:02 Speaker 00 Do you mean like, like, did they get it?
52:05 Speaker 02 Well, I think in America, as a result of the Pleistocene extinctions, and obviously they happened far back in time.
52:15 Speaker 00 Hmm.
52:16 Speaker 02 10,000, 11,000, 12,000 years before. I think the native people then understood that animals disappear and they completely go away and we don't ever see them again.
52:28 Speaker 00 Hmm.
52:29 Speaker 02 Um, and so they, I think they understood then that extinction was real in the world. Whether or not, I mean, the question for me, and I have not been able to answer the question to my own satisfaction, is whether or not those memories extended down.
52:48 Speaker 00 Like how far, how far could they go?
52:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, towards the present. And I do not, I don't have an answer for that. But uh, what you led with, this very, the idea of extinction very much was a debated topic in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was debated particularly when uh, when Europeans especially, and then in America too, began excavating the remains of Pleistocene animals.
53:20 Speaker 02 And in some cases dinosaurs, but really more frequently Pleistocene animals. And as early paleontologists tried to reassemble those animals, what they began to realize is that nothing like this lives anymore.
53:36 Speaker 00 Yeah.
53:37 Speaker 02 What is the explanation for that? And that set in motion about a centuries worth of debate about whether extinction was actually possible. And the biblical Judeo-Christian version was it's not possible.
53:53 Speaker 02 The world was created by a deity. It was created in perfection. Animals created in perfection exist exactly now as they did at the moment of their creation. And in a perfect deity created world, nothing will ever go away. Everything is going to remain. Thomas Jefferson believed that extinction was not possible in the 1790s, but he was persuaded by the naturalists in France, particularly the Comte de Bouffon, that extinction absolutely looks like it can happen. We don't know why these animals disappeared.
54:35 Speaker 02 And that's why Jefferson had instructions to both Lewis and Clark and Freeman and Custis, that Southern expedition, when they went west, look for mammoths. Because we found the bones of mammoths in the east. We can't find any east, but maybe they're still out there in the west. But by the 1830s and 1840s, most scientists in both America and Europe began to realize that, wow, these things, they really have disappeared. They're not here anymore. And then we had the kind of crushing realization in the 1840s of the extinction of the great auk, our northern hemisphere penguin,
55:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
55:15 Speaker 02 which was basically wiped out by egg hunters. And suddenly there's a realization that absolutely animals can disappear. And it looks like one of the reasons they disappear is because of human exploitation.
55:30 Speaker 00 I see, I see examples where native cultures would have a meta-
55:37 Speaker 00 They would understand extinction, but have a metaphysical idea about it. Like, like Plains tribes, as, as the buffalo started to vanish, Plains tribes, it'd be that they, they went back in, that they had come from the earth and they went back into the earth.
55:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
55:54 Speaker 00 And what's fascinating to me is I was talking to a guy, this is kind of one of the craziest conversations I've ever had with someone. It felt like it was time travel. I was talking to a guy in Guyana, a tribal man in Guyana, and they had always had a herd of a couple hundred white-lipped peccary that lived within striking distance of their village.
56:17 Speaker 00 They cleared out. They couldn't find them. It was a great resource for them.
56:23 Speaker 00 He explained to me, face to face, he explained to me that there was another village and there was a shaman in the village who was jealous of their village for having such prosperity. And he had locked the peccaries into a mountain. And like, there's no, like, this dude would not have awareness of that idea on the Great Plains of America, that things were locked into the earth. But it's like, you're getting at, it's gone-ness.
56:52 Speaker 00 Right?
56:52 Speaker 02 And you have to have an explanation.
56:54 Speaker 00 But like, a different way of explaining that, like, it's gone. Right? It's just, but a totally different worldview, you know? But capturing the same sentiment, that it's...
57:02 Speaker 02 It's the same sentiment. It's a different cause-effect relationship than we would have with a a scientific worldview. I mean, the cause-effect relationship for why things happened was different among indigenous people. They had a different argument for, this is a consequence. The cause is completely something different. And we would have, the Western rational, scientific world looks for an evidentiary cause for the consequence. And oftentimes, the indigenous world looks for a kind of a, what, what we would call a supernatural explanation for why things happen.
57:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
57:48 Speaker 03 Earlier, you were talking about the mountain men and the, the hide hunters as being these initially glorified figures, and now the, we've reassessed our view of them, but...
58:00 Speaker 00 Inarguably quite fascinating.
58:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
58:05 Speaker 03 But there, I think what's interesting is when you look at this in the aggregate, the whole pattern, there are these examples of like the egg hunters with the great auk. And, and I think the one, um, the one storyline that never had really entered my consciousness until later in life was the sea otter hunt. And especially under Russian control. I mean, they're, they're conscripting native people and, and killing them and torturing them to go kill otters for their fur.
58:45 Speaker 03 And, and I, it's, it's just striking to me because it's in keeping with this much larger pattern of, of exploitation of wildlife. But the, once you look at it and you see all of the little, you know, um, unique aspects of it, then you begin to sort of comprehend the larger picture. I don't know if that makes sense, but you know, there's some very familiar aspects to the story of wildlife depletion, but there's also these outliers that are pretty horrific. And yet again, in keeping with the ones that we're maybe more comfortable with as a, as a culture talking about.
59:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, that one is definitely an outlier because of the conscription of, of the Aleutians and, and others. Uh, I mean, sometimes they would kidnap a guy's family and hold his family ransom so that he would go and, and do the otter hunt for them. And the reason I think that one really, you know, strikes us as, as egregious as it is is because what we're more used to is something like what happened, you know, with the fur companies and the native people as clients of the fur companies. And, and of course that one is a, that one you have to know about, uh, history some to wrap your mind around to realize that native people who we accord a kind of a special consideration
1:00:08 Speaker 02 for the natural world and, and they almost always have it. There's no question. But they were also confronted with people who had brought in a brand-new technology, a metal technology, that if you didn't participate in it and your neighbors, your native neighbors down the river did, then you were suddenly massively disadvantaged. Because if they got metal, if they got guns, if they got knives made of steel and they got arrow points made of iron, then, and you remained with your traditional Flint culture,
1:00:48 Speaker 02 you were massively disadvantaged in the world that was happening around them. And so, most people, although there were religious leaders who tried to stop this and said, "Don't do it, don't join into this hunt," nonetheless, most people did because they realized that the world had changed so dramatically if they did not participate. And the unfortunate result was that the market hunt usually pointed out very specific things that it wanted. It didn't want native people to, you know, offer them up the crops from their fields. It wanted the firs of beavers and muskrats and otters.
1:01:30 Speaker 02 And so, if you want to play the game with the global market, that's what you have to offer us in trade and we'll then set you up with metalware. And so, it's a part of a kind of a voluntary participation in the market economy over most of the West that is not true of the otter thing we were just talking about where people were conscripted into it.
1:01:57 Speaker 00 Here's another question about the otter country, where they're doing sea otters. But to set it up, I'll point out that like, if you look at a lot of the areas as they marched across the country. You'd kind of come for the fur and stay for the whatever, right? So these like guys that go across the Appalachian Mountains to hunt deer, oftentimes those same individuals stay to get into agriculture, stay to get into timber extraction.
1:02:32 Speaker 02 Found Boon's Borough.
1:02:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, so you go like, or you know, you,
1:02:38 Speaker 00 hide hunters go out and out of that comes these like cattle enterprises or whatever, right? Like there's, there's no, there's no gap.
1:02:46 Speaker 00 People show up oftentimes to extract fur and then they quickly, they don't leave. You follow me? Like more people come in their footsteps. Uh, can, are there exceptions to that where there's a big gap? And then like, what, what was it like when you came to the Pacific coast? For otters, like the Russians are down there, like after the otters, was there a retraction? Or was there like a thing you stayed for?
1:03:14 Speaker 02 No, no, that probably was an exception because almost everybody was coming by ship. And so they were, when the otter hunt was over, when they couldn't find anymore, when the fur seals were too depleted to continue, it was, you know, law of diminishing returns, there's no point in continuing. They usually went back to wherever they were from because a ton of them were from Boston and New York.
1:03:39 Speaker 00 And I mean, So then be there's like a quiet, there's like an otterless quiet period?
1:03:43 Speaker 02 There was indeed, yeah, in the twenties and, and thirties and forties. I mean, otters don't start recovering until about the 1880s or 1890s. Uh, the fur seals, because there had been more of them, uh, they recovered a little bit more quickly. But there is also a kind of a, a, a subsidence period after the demise of beavers in the interior west. When that, uh, Hudson's Bay group of guys I was talking about go in and, uh, try to ruin the country and trap all the beavers out of all the streams on the west side of the continental divide. There's a period of about 15 years or so where a lot of the mountain men.
1:04:31 Speaker 02 Kind of are, I mean, some of them go west with the Oregon Trail folks who settle in the Willamette River Valley and become sheriffs and things. And I'm going to talk in one of the upcoming episodes about a next step that several of the mountain men do. When their beavers are gone, a lot of them turn to the horse trade. And they become traders in horses. And one of the things that some of the classic mountain men do, Bill Sablet, for example, they go to California and either trade for horses or catch wild horses in the rolling
1:05:10 Speaker 02 golden hills of California, or they, sometimes, they just steal them off Spanish ranches and they drive them east from California and outfit Stephen Carney's Army of the West, which needs mounts and remounts. Or they take them to places like Fort Bridger and they supply the wagon trains, the Overland Trail folks, with horses, with fresh stock to get all the way to the west coast. So there's a, there's a little bit of a lag, but they usually find something. Like the buffalo hunters, when the buffalo are gone, shit, you got pronghorns, you got
1:05:51 Speaker 02 elk, you got bighorn sheep, they just go after whatever is left. And so, and wolves, because they've learned now that, you know, you can use strychnine and you can poison wolves, you can get a dollar a pelt for a wolf pelt. And so, yeah, so they manage to segue into just whatever animals are left.
1:06:10 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:06:11 Speaker 02 But the mountain men, quite a number of them, become horse traders.
1:06:14 Speaker 00 Are you familiar with Vicaro of the Brush Country?
1:06:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, I am, yeah.
1:06:19 Speaker 00 Yeah. That dude, he hated the buffalo hunters because he was, he felt that they all became criminals.
1:06:28 Speaker 02 Not all became sheriffs, that's right.
1:06:30 Speaker 03 And there's a line and there's a line that we cited in the Mountain Men Project where like at the 1837 or 1838 rendezvous, someone writes, "A number of them have gone west to become horse thieves. Such a thing has never been heard of until now."
1:06:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:06:48 Speaker 03 Like, it was just this invention of desperation.
1:06:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, that was the Bill Siblet thing. I mean, he actually did that. And he regarded that as one of his great coups. He went to California and stole a bunch of Spanish horses and drove them back to the plains to outfit the Overland and to Bent's Fort. Bent's Fort was one of the big, sort of, receiving areas for western horses. But that episode is coming up. I'm gonna tell the horse story. I think it may be the next one, in fact, after this, where we'll turn to the horse trade in the West, which is another one of those that's kind of little-known. And unlike the sort of thing we've been talking about, I mean, with the horse trade, the idea was to get live animals back to the settlements.
1:07:30 Speaker 03 Yeah, like, I'm not used to dealing with live stuff.
1:07:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, they're getting live animals back. And what made horses really great is that they got back there on their own. You didn't have to load them on a steamboat or, you know, pack them up on the back of a packhorse. You could just drive them along and they got to market, you know, on their own accord.
1:07:54 Speaker 00 Good, Randall?
1:07:55 Speaker 03 I'm, I'm good.
1:07:57 Speaker 00 I got one last observation for you about my favorite part of that. I can't remember the guy's name, Vicaro of the Brush Country.
1:08:02 Speaker 03 Yeah. Isn't it J. Frank Dobie?
1:08:05 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:08:06 Speaker 03 J. Frank Dobie.
1:08:06 Speaker 00 Well, no, no, but it's like-
1:08:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's told to-
1:08:08 Speaker 00 It's, it's as told to from Vicaro of the Brush Country, but he's talking about, you familiar with the King Ranch?
1:08:15 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
1:08:16 Speaker 00 Okay, he's talking about one of the guys that would become a King Ranch guy, having, experimenting with taking, like, injecting cattle with brine.
1:08:34 Speaker 00 Into their vascular system.
1:08:37 Speaker 02 To achieve.
1:08:38 Speaker 00 To that you would somehow preserve.
1:08:42 Speaker 00 Cause it's like hot, it's humid down the Gulf country of South Texas. Like everything rots damn fast. So he's toying with the idea, how would you inject like a brine into its, as it's dying, into its vascular system and sort of pickle it?
1:08:58 Speaker 02 This is basically salting the meat while live, huh?
1:09:03 Speaker 03 This is just necessities.
1:09:05 Speaker 00 It tickles me endlessly, man. It's like that. But he acknowledges that they never got that perfection.
1:09:12 Speaker 02 It's one of those things that appears on those redneck solutions.
1:09:17 Speaker 00 Well, thanks for all the wisdom, Dan. I appreciate it.
1:09:19 Speaker 02 It's fun. Thanks, God.
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