Ep. 08: Beyond the Earth’s Curve, Mysteries | The American West

Despite an ancient Native inhabitation and recent European settlements and forays around the perimeter of the West, in the early 19th century much of the interior West was still a place of conjecture, rumor, and mystery. What was out there? What kind of never-known phenomena did the West hold? For the brand-new United States and its Indian Agents, winning the western tribes with trade was essential geopolitics. But as happened with John Colter’s “Hell,” the future Yellowstone Park, those traders often returned with accounts that were hard to believe. Like Colter and in the same years, a trader named Anthony Glass in the southern West convinced the Comanche and Wichita Indians to reveal to him an astounding western mystery that excited the Southwestern frontier for three decades. Hauled to civilization, it would stand as one of America’s most intriguing contributions to global science from the early West. 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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• 1:04Speaker 02

  Following the Louisiana Purchase, American traders to the tribes on the Red River inadvertently resolved centuries of precious metal stories in the Southwest. But their discovery turned out to be more a boon to global science than an avenue to personal wealth. I'm Dan Florries 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.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Beyond the Earth's Curve Mysteries.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Sometime in the century we're in, maybe even by 2050, a nation or one of our proliferating private space companies will fly a drone through the Vale Marineris Canyon on Mars. Right now, America's NASA is in the lead for that honor, having successfully put a drone in the air on Mars and planning to fly one called Dragonfly on a future mission to Saturn's moon Titan. But whoever explores the Vale Marineris will have a chance to resolve all kinds of mysteries about the biggest red rock fissure in our solar system. A gorge that both resembles the West's biggest, the Grand Canyon,

• 2:50Speaker 02

  but absolutely dwarfs that Arizona marvel in every particular of measurement. Literally an otherworldly desert landscape, the Vale Marineris truly is west of everything. It's also a good, modern stand-in to help understand the way many explorers and mapmakers thought about the American West 200 years ago. What's out there? How will we feel in the close presence of a mystery? In Mars's case, what kind of emotional reaction will we experience watching video footage from a drone flying through a world of soaring red spires and cliffs on an astounding scale? Is it possible the planet is so small

• 3:32Speaker 02

  its horizons will obscure the opposing canyon walls, one from the other? Even in a gorge 25,000 feet deep? Was that canyon formed by the biggest flood in solar system history? Was there life there then? Is there life there now?

• 3:51Speaker 02

  In the case of the West in the early 1800s, the world was equally uninformed. Could rumors of mountains of pure salt in the West be believed? Was there really a single mountain from which waters flowed to the Pacific, the Arctic, the Gulf? Were native people in the West descendants of the lost tribes of Israel? Or did some possibly migrate from Wales? Were there elephants, unicorns, or dragon-like water serpents there? Did masses of precious metals lurk hidden in the mountains or even lie about on the prairie, waiting for the ambitious or the lucky to cash in beyond all their dreams?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  At the beginning of the 19th century, these were all possibilities in the West. Which was real? Because humans evolved to be curious and to be travelers, eventually we'll answer our questions about Mars. We certainly answered all the ones I just posed about the American West. But there's one I wanted to address here more particularly. This mystery spawned several frontier generations to imagine easy, unfathomable riches in the Southwest, aiding a widespread image of America as a kind of Eden of infinite resources, an idea that some still hold.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  It's a story that evokes everything that excites us about venturing into new worlds and finding things we absolutely never expected. In the same decades when fascinated Americans were hearing about a mysterious Western region associated with early mountain man John Colter, a place where mud pots bubbled and scalding water spewed, or were absorbing the story of Hugh Glass's mauling by a giant bear, down on the southwestern frontier, there was another story remarkable enough to rival those.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  In the years between 1810 and 1835, versions of it circulated through the saloons of towns like Natchez, New Orleans, and Natchitoches in Louisiana, and San Antonio and Austin in Texas. Colter's hell became Yellowstone Park, of course, and the Hugh Glass story would morph into a modern movie called The Revenant. On the southwestern frontier, the story I'm about to tell, though, eventually faded away. Ultimately, an eastern scientist put together what had generated such excitement in the early 1800s, but in the West by then, the story was almost forgotten.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  John Colter and Hugh Glass, like so many other Americans heading into the West, launched from St. Louis and traveled up the Missouri River. The counterpart to St. Louis on the southern plains was the old French city of Natchitoches in Louisiana, founded in 1714 and the last outpost of supply on the Red River, a water course that penetrated into the West towards the Rocky Mountains and far distant Santa Fe. For decades, French traders had followed the Red to reach the Wichita villages several hundred miles upriver. Like the Mandans and the Arikaras on the Missouri, the Wichita's had built fixed towns

• 7:25Speaker 02

  as far up the Red as farming was possible. Cattle and speakers related to the Poneys, and sometimes called by that name, the Wichita's freely welcomed traders and explorers, as did the nomadic Comanche bands in the prairies around them. Now, with the Louisiana Purchase, Americans had taken over possession of the Lower Red. Used to manipulating the Spanish and French against one another for Indian affections, the southern plains tribes were intrigued by this new player on the scene.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  As I described in the last episode of The American West, Thomas Jefferson's 1806 attempt to send a Lewis and Clark-type exploration up the Red River had been cut short by a Spanish force. Simultaneously with that confrontation, word spread on the frontier that Aaron Burr, Jefferson's vice president, who had just killed his rival Alexander Hamilton in a duel, was fleeing the US to the southwest, ostensibly to launch an American-style revolution against the Spanish monarchy. With these provocations, for several weeks in the winter of 1806 and '07, Spanish and

• 8:41Speaker 02

  American armies actually circled one another west of Natchitoches in a game of bluff that never got called. When tensions finally relaxed, Spanish officials in the colonies of Texas and New Mexico decided that “in the future, it would be good to avoid any noisy disturbances with the Americans,” as they put it. That decision allowed American traders more freedom to penetrate the plains. By the first decade of the 1800s, the American foot was in the door to the southwest, and it was still pushing. Led by their point man in Natchitoches, Dr. John Sibley, a New Englander President Jefferson-appointed

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Indian agent for the region in 1805, the Americans had a new plan. If government expeditions to the West aroused Spanish suspicions, why not invite potential Indian allies and trade partners like the Wichitas and Comanches to come to Natchitoches instead? Sibley’s invitation produced two great councils in Natchitoches with the tribes of the southern plains in the year 1807. Feasts and gift-giving kept by 47-year-old Sibley, wrapping himself in an American flag before the assembled throng, then wrapping the same flag around high-ranking warriors from the western tribes.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Sibley told the tribes that the Americans were natives of the same land you are, in other words, white Indians. For their part, the Comanches claimed they had so much wealth in the form of horses and mules that the animals were to them like grass. But coming as far as Natchitoches to trade, they averred, was too inconvenient. So Sibley promised that if they would spurn the Spanish and fly U.S. flags over their villages, he would send private traders to them in large numbers. And unlike the Spanish, whose policies forbade arming Indians, the Americans would freely

• 10:48Speaker 02

  trade guns, lead, and powder so the tribes could hunt and prosecute their wars. As Sibley sagely told President Jefferson, whoever furnishes Indians the best and most satisfactory trade can always control their politics.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Within a few weeks of these grand councils, in the town of Natchez on the east bank of the Mississippi, a Pennsylvania immigrant and hardware store owner there decided to take Sibley up on this offer to the tribes. Anthony Glass was around 35 at the time, had recently seen his young wife pass away, and was in a town that swirled with rumors about the mysterious West. Some books on the Natchez Trace, the famed woodlands trail from Natchez to Kentucky and Tennessee, see Glass's hardware store doubling as a depot for outlaws on the trace to fence stolen goods.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  What's more certain about Glass is that he had watched for years as wealth of various kinds had flowed from the West into the South. Now, early in 1808, he determined that the time was right to set out on a Western expedition of his own. He asked Sibley for a license and secured $2,000 in trade goods for the journey. Sibley was delighted enough, there is good reason to believe the Indian agent himself became an investor in the proposition.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Unlike farther north, it was not the pelts of beavers or muskrats that drew traders to the southern plains. Indian processed buffalo robes were available but were too bulky and heavy for private traders to transport. There were deer skins that could be made into leather, to be sure, and honey from European bees spreading westward. But as Sibley and his Comanche contacts had discussed, in the southern west, the primary tradable wealth consisted of the hundreds of thousands of horses running wild across the plains. In a later episode, I'll tell the fuller story of the little-known western horse trade. But since the early 1790s, Americans like Philip Nolan had been driving herds of wild

• 13:09Speaker 02

  horses they'd contrived to capture or had acquired in the Indian trade to furnish stock for the advancing southern frontier. That live horses could walk themselves to market was one of their great attractions. On the other hand, in the southwest, there had always been another possibility for wealth. From the start of European interest in the region, there had been rumors of precious metals, even of golden cities. In the 1530s, the shipwrecked Spaniard Cabesa de Vaca had said that natives somewhere in Texas had presented him with bags of—well, the early editions of his account called them “bags of silver.”

• 13:53Speaker 02

  A few years after that, having failed to find cities of gold among the Zoonies and Pueblo people, Francisco Coronado and 50 of his men traveled most of the way across the southern plains because a clever and manipulative native informant told them that in Quavira, the Wichita country, the Indian leaders wore bracelets of metal. Coronado interpreted that to mean silver or gold, until in Quavira, he met a Wichita headman wearing a metal necklace. The necklace was made of copper. But as the American frontier had advanced past the Mississippi, these stories did not go away. And in the 1770s, they were actually joined by a fresh version,

• 14:38Speaker 02

  this time from a source that seemed unusually reliable. Word went out that the highly experienced French trader from Natchez, Athanase de Mesere, had returned from a foray up the Red River in 1772 with an account of widespread Indian excitement over what the Frenchman heard was a giant mass of silvery metal out on the distant plains. This mystery was apparently located somewhere on the Comancheeria, in Comanche land, but a Wichita Indian claimed to be its discoverer. A band of Pawnees from Nebraska were said to have journeyed hundreds of miles to see the phenomenon and had proclaimed it a deity.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Perhaps these stories were just misunderstood exaggerations like those of Cabeza de Vaca or Coronado. But maybe there was something truly valuable out there in the vast distances towards the sunset. At the Grand Councils in 1807, Sibley had naturally inquired what the Indians knew of such stories. One of the Comanche headmen, who had wrapped himself in the American flag, knew the correct response to a question like that. “Of course,” he said, “in their country, there was silver ore plenty.”

• 16:00Speaker 02

  It’s difficult now to know exactly what Sibley or Anthony Glass believed a journey to the interior might ultimately reveal in the West. But at the time, Orleans territorial governor William Claiborne was highly suspicious. Sibley, the governor claimed accurately, was supplying Glass with US flags to carry to Indians whom the Spanish government believed to be their subjects. With respect to Glass, who had decided to outfit himself with a military jacket and dressed sword, Claiborne heard that Sibley was now referring to the hardware store owner as “Captain Glass.”

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Of course, Sibley rightly believed that as Indian agent, he was furthering Jefferson's own policies towards the Southwest. But it was particularly annoying when Claiborne further argued to Washington that while Glass portrayed himself as a horse trader, the Glass's party's true intent was to conduct a silver mine expedition. Whatever else Glass had in mind, when he assembled his outfit and party for an early July 1808 departure up the Red River, he intended to trade. His outfit included sixteen pack horses to ferry that $2,000 in trade goods, along with a Ramuda of thirty-two additional mounts.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  His party was hardly an invading army; there were only eleven of them. Among them were three past veterans of the Red River trade, a mixed-blood interpreter, Joseph Lucas, whose Indian name was Talapoon, and a pair of horse traders named John Davis and William Alexander, who had been among the Wichitas and Comanches two years earlier. The party also included a fifteen-year-old named Peter Young and a man named George Shamp, who was highly excited about the silver ore Davis and Alexander claimed to have seen on their past expeditions. The route Glass planned involved an eastern detour around the Great Raft,

• 18:03Speaker 02

  the enormous log jam that blocked the Red River above Nakahish, and then a crossing of the Red through a bank-side village of newly-immigrated Creek Indians known as Koshatas. At that point, they would fall onto the regular Indian trail that led from the Lower Red to the Wichita towns far upriver. Once they'd looped the Great Raft, their course would be northwesterly, not intersecting the Red River itself again until they were nearly to the Wichita villages.

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• 20:35Speaker 02

  Two centuries later, we know what happened during the eight months Glass and his party were in the West, what the Red River country was like, the specific people they met, what Glass and others experienced living with Indians, and how the Americans reacted to an astounding mystery because of a simple thing: Glass kept a journal of the trip. In fact, Sibley had insisted that Glass regularly put down the details of his journey. As a store owner, Glass was literate, and there's a good chance few, if any, of the rest of the party were. Glass's journal then is a kind of time travel window into how the West struck this group

• 21:20Speaker 02

  of travelers into the unknown. Like most people who journeyed across the West in those days, Glass's party intended to live off the land. But following an ancient Indian trail did not necessarily make that easy. There was almost no wildlife in the vicinity of the Cachada Village on the Red, and with a party of Caddo Indians ahead of them on the trace through northeast Texas, deer and other animals were spooked. Three weeks of travel, however, gradually brought the party out of the pine woods and into the tall grass prairies at the edge of the Great Plains. The whole country was now becoming a gently-rolling parkland populated with brand-new creatures:

• 22:05Speaker 02

  prairie chickens, wild horses, and prairie dogs, all the first Glass had ever seen. Within a month's travel, they were north of present Dallas, surrounded by "great numbers of wild horses," as Glass put it, "and feasting daily on fresh buffalo." Glass's party crossed to the north side of the Red River on August 8. He found the country remarkably pleasant, as he said, "with herds of bison in sight everywhere they looked, deer as tame as domestic stock since no one bothered to hunt them, and the Wichita towns now only 50 miles upriver." Three days later, a large party of well-mounted Indians escorted the Americans into their

• 22:49Speaker 02

  villages, a trio of towns arrayed on both banks of the Red River in a setting Glass described as "beautiful," "the land of first quality," he said, "with excellent abundant springs of water."

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Like the Mandans and Erycheras on the Missouri, these divisions of the Wichitas were agricultural people who, Glass soon realized, grew large quantities of corn, beans, pumpkins, and melons, so they had a surplus to trade for meat with their buffalo hunting allies, the Comanches. Their towns were made up of framed, thatched houses, as Glass put it, “in the form of a sugar loaf, seventy or eighty feet in diameter at the base and thirty or forty feet high.” Each of the towns had a civil chief, but there was a presiding grand chief, a Wahakai, our great bear, who struck Glass as about fifty years old.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  When Glass delivered his speech to the assembled tribe extolling American friendship, it was clear a Wahakai was the first personality among them, as responsible as Sibley for making Glass’s expedition possible. That reality brought immediate rewards. “The chief is in our mess,” Glass confided in his journal, “and we want for nothing the town affords and live in plenty.” Glass and most of his men spent the rest of August and half of September trading for Indian horses and marveling at Wichita culture. At one point, they watched as mounted bow-wielding Wichita hunters killed every last animal from a herd of forty-one buffalo.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  They also formed a good sense of why the Wichitas and Comanches were so eager to trade for firearms. On three different occasions, Glass woke to discover that an enemy of the Wichitas, the Osages, had raided the villages and stolen horses from their communal herds, including many of the ones he had only just bought. In the third instance, Glass realized with astonishment and fury that an Osage raider was riding what he called “a remarkable paint horse that used to be my own riding horse.” The Osages were well supplied with guns from American traders out of St. Louis, but when the Wichita's pursued the raiders, only a third of the Wichita Party could muster firearms of any kind.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  In the weeks just before the Americans had arrived, Glass learned, the Osages had made off with 500 Wichita horses in broad daylight. The raiders were so well armed, the Wichita's had merely watched in sullen silence, unable to raise any resistance to the outrage. While Alexander and Davis had now departed for a camp of Comanches they knew from prior trips west, Glass had other things on his mind. For one thing, he had made friends among the Wichita's, specifically with an Indian

• 25:54Speaker 02

  couple, a highly distinguished warrior named Tattasuk, "a brave, subtle, and intrepid man", Glass said, "who in fact was a Spaniard captured as a child and raised as an Indian", and along with his wife, who Glass described as "a pawnee woman just as remarkable for her address and intrigue", and Glass was discovering he was living among a people famous for their sexual liberation. "The Wichita's are great libertines, both men and women," the American wrote, "not addicted to jealousy, and nothing is more common than for a man to loan or hire out

• 26:36Speaker 02

  his wife, particularly to strangers who visit the nation." As Glass confessed in his journal, "This couple became my most intimate acquaintance." It seems to have been these friends Glass began to interrogate about the mystery that had obviously played some role in launching his expedition. On September 18th and 19th, he confided in his journal that he had been informed of "a remarkable piece of metal some days journeyed distant to the southward on the waters of River Brazos." Later, he wrote, "Hearing more of this singular metal to which they attributed singular virtues

• 27:20Speaker 02

  in curing diseases, I resolved to obtain permission to see it if I could, and proposed to them to go with me."

• 27:30Speaker 02

  While they had known about this mystery for at least four decades, the Red River tribes had never allowed a white man to lay eyes on it. Various Wichita's Glass approached with his hope to see the object, very likely the headman, Awakai, were resolute in their refusal. So Glass turned to the couple he had befriended, and ultimately elicited from them a promise to show him the tantalizing mystery. Scribbling in his journal by firelight, he put his hopes this way: "The more I heard about the object, the more my anxiety was increased, suspecting from their account of it and great veneration for it, it might be platina, platinum, or something of great value."

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Two weeks later, on October 3 of 1808, Glass and a party of Wichita's that included his new friend, Tattasuk, the Grand Chief Awakai, and the Wichita warrior who had found the object decades earlier, crossed the Red River and headed in a southwesterly direction towards a Comanche village. "In this country," Tattasuk told him, "they would find the mysterious mass that had now become an obsession for Glass and his men." In the Comanche village, things at first did not go well. Its leaders objected. The mystery, after all, was on their land. "After some altercation," Glass wrote,

• 29:00Speaker 02

  "it was finally agreed that if it should turn out to be of considerable value, what it brought should be divided between both Comanches and Wichita's." "But at that point, the mystery's original discoverer was overcome with doubt, and I was obliged to flatter and bribe him to go on," Glass confessed.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Here is how Glass described the remarkable events that culminated on October 14, 1808.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Our whole party now became very numerous, containing of men and women and children, near one thousand souls and three times that number of horses and mules. Moving slowly on to the west, crossing the river Brazos about fifty miles, we approached the place where the metal was, the Indians observing considerable ceremony as they approached. As they neared the phenomenon across open prairie, what the Americans first saw was a wide variety of native offerings surrounding the object in every direction. At the center of the pipes, beads, and bags of pollen, their eyes fell on a dimpled, blackish metal object

• 30:18Speaker 02

  resting on the surface of the ground and balanced on its heaviest end. It was roughly four feet tall by two feet wide and massively heavy. The Indians were reverent; the Americans mystified. A Magnet Glass had brought along showed an attraction to the object, but they could see no rust on it anywhere. It could be indented; it was malleable enough for the Indians to fashion jewelry and arrow points from it, and it peeled like a bell when struck. Rubbing it produced a brilliant polish, and it gave off sparks when struck with a flint. But it was untarnished,

• 31:00Speaker 02

  which meant it could not be a giant nugget of silver. But what, then? In wonder, Glass contrived to file off some samples. Then their vast party rode away, leaving the object to its splendid isolation.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  The stories of Anthony Glass and of this baffling western mystery began to unwind from one another at this point. Except for his interpreter and the teenager Peter Young, the rest of Glass's party now departed with their horses for Louisiana with secret plans several of them began to formulate. Initially Glass traveled farther south to trade with Comanche bands along the Colorado River of Texas. By the first of 1809, he had turned back towards the Wichita villages, first pausing in the Grand Prairie west of today's Fort Worth to try his hand at driving and corralling the thousands of wild Mustangs there.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  By late February, he was back in the Wichita towns, and on March 21st, he, Lucas, and Young finally set out for Nakalish with their horse herd. They arrived in May to discover that their adventures had inflamed the whole frontier. Dr. Sibley was as excited as the men in the taverns and quickly posted this report to his superiors in Washington. "Captain Glass has just returned here from a trading voyage towards the head of Red River. During his travels and residence amongst the Indians where he spent more than eight months, he was conducted by Indians to a place where he saw in large masses of many

• 32:47Speaker 02

  thousands of pounds weight, a singular kind of mineral. It in color resembles iron, but whiter. It is hard as steel, yet malleable as gold or silver. It is obedient to the magnet, but less so than iron. It is not flexible in the greatest heat that can be produced in a blacksmith's furnace. It will neither corrode nor rust by exposure to the atmosphere. It receives a polish as brilliant as a diamond and of a quicksilver color. If it is not platina or platinum, I do not know what it is." Sibley had sent a sample to Philadelphia to be essayed, he wrote.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, what he had heard might be a hundred thousand pounds of it yet lay out on the distant prairie.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  A giant nugget of platinum. That was the consensus and not just among the frontier traders. Even Sibley, the best educated man on the scene, agreed. So there was nothing for it but to go fetch the Red River mystery back to civilization and as fast as possible. In terms of who would do that and how, though, there was no consensus. Glass, for his part, opted out. He'd had his fill of the plains and life with the Indians. But the rest of his party had not, and instead of cooperating with one another, they formed two rival groups for, in effect, a mining rush. One party, launched from Nakalish and led by George Shemp and William Alexander, included

• 34:24Speaker 02

  five of the original Glass Party. Beyond a supply of rifles, ammunition, and blankets, the exact quantity of trade goods they took haven't come down to us, only that they had wealthy benefactors, including the Indian agent Dr. Sibley. They set out in the early summer of 1809. The other party, led by another Glass Party man, John Davis, recruited largely from Natchez in Mississippi and was the first to arrive at the location of the mystery mass. Lacking a means to transport it, however, they attempted to hide it from the other party,

• 35:06Speaker 02

  who soon enough appeared with the Wichita and Comanche owners with whom they had apparently struck a trade deal. The Shemp-Alexander Party had managed to get a wagon to the spot, and levering the huge and heavy mass into the buckboard, they now set out for the Red River with the plan of floating it to Nakalish. The field had become even more crowded, though. Word reached them that a 52-man Spanish cavalry from San Antonio was coming after them with the intent of arresting American interlopers illegally mining platina in Spanish Texas. Setting fire to the plains behind them, Shemp's party made it to the Red, fashioned a barge, and headed downriver.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  They and their prize arrived to wild excitement in Nakalish on June 4 of 1810.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  For nearly a year, the mysterious object resided in Nauchalish while various would-be investors offered varying sums to buy the shares from the retrieving party. In 1811, Sibley and others arranged to boat the baffling object to New Orleans, accompanied by two members of the Champ Alexander Party. There, it was loaded aboard a vessel bound for New York so it could be properly assayed. Within a year, Sibley assembled the anxious members of the group that had labored to retrieve the mass and relayed very bad news. The metal had assayed as some kind of alloyed iron. After all their effort and all the excitement, the object had no value.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Of course, an assay determining that the object was neither silver nor platinum did not answer the elephant in the room question. What on earth was it? In fact, maybe it wasn't of earth after all. In a lucky coincidence, the retrieval of the West's most confounding object took place in the first decade in human history when science was able to answer a question like that. In 1803, residents of the village of La Galle, France, had reported that during a night of flying stars, stones had rained from the sky onto their town.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Four years later, a Yale professor named Benjamin Siliman happened to be on hand to see a similar shower of debris from the heavens near western Connecticut. Siliman was dumbfounded and at a loss, arguing that the pieces must have broken off from the moon or been discharged by some distant volcanic eruption. Following the lead of French scientists who now believed such objects were related to shooting stars or meteors, however, by 1808, scientists were writing in American journals and using the term meteorites to refer to debris from the sky.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Gaining access to the metallic mass in 1814, a newly aware Professor Siliman published the first in a series of experiments on it and surmised that it too was a meteorite. He labeled it a siderite, the new term for an iron nickel alloy meteorite. Since it hadn't been embedded, it was likely a direct motion object that fell at low velocity between midnight and noon in the direction of the Earth's spin. Named Red River, the 1,635-pound mass became the prized meteorite and the largest in the world for most of the 19th century.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  In an effort to recreate its discovery in the 1820s, Siliman interviewed Dr. Sibley in Natchitoches and prevailed on him to send along a copy of Glass's journal with the first description anyone had written of this mystery from the West. Science may have been delighted with Red River, but the frontier traders were never satisfied with this outcome. The American geographer William Darby was in Natchitoches when Sibley delivered the bad news, and Darby spoke to two of them. They were convinced they had been swindled. In Darby's opinion, the persons engaged were in general too ignorant to understand the

• 39:35Speaker 02

  decisive results of such tests and unwilling to abandon a pleasing delusion. The result was that for at least the next two decades, accounts of silver and platina out on the plains became an unending frontier conversation in the Southwest. Ordinary history has preserved those conversations primarily in the form of the lost silver mine of Alamo casualty Jim Bowie.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  As for the native people, while their most pressing need when the Americans arrived was clearly for the weaponry, Spanish trade denied them, they do appear to have known that the giant meteorite was associated with shooting stars, what the Wichitas called "the light that flies." That heavenly association, plus the essential mystery of the object, makes me think their instinct to venerate it was hardly naive. They very well may have sensed something profound about it. Among our current hypotheses for how life arose on Earth, one with a strong following involves meteorites.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  A striking piece of evidence for their possible role in launching life on Earth comes from the discovery that while biology can be equally either left-handed or right-handed, all organic molecules on Earth, even RNA and DNA, are asymmetrically left-handed, which makes meteorites particularly intriguing. Space-derived organic molecules brought to Earth by meteorites have been gathered from all over the world, and like earthly life itself, they show a strong orientation for left-handedness.

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• 43:35Speaker 00

  Dan, a thing you mentioned is the, what's the name of the canyon on Mars?

• 43:41Speaker 02

  The Vaie Marineris.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, you should, if you can take a stab at explaining again like how big it is. But the thing that I took me a minute to realize what you're saying is

• 43:55Speaker 00

  that I'm trying to equate it to like, if you're standing on the shore, like on our earth, if you're standing on a shoreline, um, looking out in the ocean. There's a couple of reasons why you can't see the next continent. But one of them is that the earth rolls off.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  Right. And you, which you can, you know, you can kind of demonstrate with certain objects where the curvature of the earth gets in the way, even if you could see.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  An island sometimes can appear out of the water.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  Even if you could see infinity. You still wouldn't see the other continent.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  Because the curvature of the earth throws you off. But it took me a minute to realize that you're saying that like on Mars, that this canyon could be so big that on one side of the canyon, looking across, it'd be the same as standing on a continental shelf.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  And you might not even be able to see the other side.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  You couldn't see the other side.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  I had to, I had to keep like thinking about that, being like, oh yeah, that's a great point.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, when you're in the Grand Canyon, obviously you can see the other side. You can see the cliffs on the other side. If you're on the south rim, you can see the cliffs on the other side. And when you're down in the bottom of it, you can see the cliffs on both sides. What, one of the questions about this canyon, which is the largest canyon in the, in the solar system. And, you know, and I am invoking it because this is one of those mysteries that's out there. Sort of like the kind of mysteries that the West presented in 1800. But one of the mysteries about this volume Aronaros Canyon, which is this gigantic canyon, 25,000 feet deep, is that Mars is so small

• 45:37Speaker 02

  that the question is whether or not you can stand at the foot of the cliffs on one side and actually see the cliffs on the other side of the canyon. Even though it is a perfectly vertical canyon with the two cliffs opposing one another, the curve of the planet is so sharp that it may put the other side out of view.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, you have flat earthers. If you had flat Marsers, they'd get there and they'd be like, ha!

• 46:01Speaker 02

  There it is.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  I knew it. It does that.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. It's a, so my, as I said, the reason I was invoking that is because it's one of those mysteries that we're probably going to know the answer to in another 50 or 60 years, once we have drones flying around Mars.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  It's to me kind of analogous to some of the things that people were wondering about with respect to the West in 1800. What's out there and what kind of strange things are we going to encounter that have a logical explanation that now seem to be, you know, probably not logical at all?

• 46:40Speaker 00

  I thought it was a great parallel.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, like our questions about, our questions about Mars being a great parallel to, and then plus all the fantastical ideas people had.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, they had a lot of fantastical ideas and, you know, and the one I, I resolved on was, you know, this fairly little known story. But it's, my analogy is that it was kind of the southern west version of Colter's Hell, where John Colter comes back after the Lewis and Clark expedition and goes into what is present day Wyoming and Montana, and he encounters a place that a lot of people didn't believe existed because his descriptions of it seemed to be just, you know, really far out of line. And this was a story from the southern prairies that kind of produced that same effect.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  What in the world is this object that's out there that has native people so excited? And is it truly the realization of this longstanding myth of the southwest harboring all kinds of precious metals that, you know, had sent everybody from Cabeza, well, not Cabeza de Vaca really, because he sort of starts the whole idea of there being precious metals in the, in the West, but certainly Coronado. Coronado's expedition was all about the idea that just as in Mexico and in Peru, probably the American southwest, held untold, unfathomable riches.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  And that's sort of the kind of genre that this particular story plays in, I think.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  Dan, when I read this, the comparison to Mars and the canyon, it triggered for me a memory of house sitting for you one summer in the Bitterroot. And I went into the shed where he kept the batteries for your solar system. And on the wall, it's one of my favorite memories of that place. There's just a little yellowed image. And underneath you had hand labeled it Olympus Mons, the largest mountain in the solar system. And then parentheses Mars. And there was no other context. And Sydney and I spent a while trying to figure out why that was there, but.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  It was a place to put it.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  In the solar room.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  But I, the next thought I had was, like you have a special fascination with outer space. And there are all these parallels in pop culture.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  I didn't know you were a big, generally a big outer space guy.

• 49:25Speaker 03

  I just remember talking about when the movie John Carter from Mars came out. You were excited for that because it was.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  And then vastly disappointed.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  Vastly disappointed, but, but like all this early sci fi culture drew so strongly on the parallels to the West. And yeah, I don't know if you can expand on that, but I mean, it's, it's sort of an under, it's one of those things where when you take a step back and reexamine what you know, it makes sense. And you see these parallels clearly, but it's something that didn't really occur to me naturally.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, I have always probably been fascinated with, with space and space exploration. Probably because, and I was one of, one of the Star Trek kids in the sixties. I mean, I was probably 16 years old or something when Star Trek was first on. And that was, you know, that sort of really compelled me, I think, to be interested in, in space. But it also does have a. Space exploration and Western exploration to me are are pretty strong analogues of one another because there's the whole idea of going into a country that you don't know anything about. And I think humans have done that. We've done that ever since we left

• 50:42Speaker 02

  Africa and went to the Middle East and went to Europe and went to Asia and finally found the Americas. I mean, there's always been that idea of discovery and moving into new realms and finding new things, new creatures, new landscapes, new kinds of landforms. And so, yeah, that, you know, and I know I'm not alone in that. I mean, Kim Stanley Robinson, you know, the, who's probably the best science fiction writer of our time, in his great trilogy, Red Mars, Blue Mars, and Green Mars, his primary character in the first of those, those books is a guy named John Boone. Oh.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  And John Boone has this wonderful experience of getting to go out on a rover with a laptop and do some sort of drug, I'm not sure, I don't remember what they call it, but it's some sort of mind-expanding drug, and driving out through the landscapes of Mars and recording his impressions, you know, of a kind of a discovery of Martian terrain and Martian landforms. So, yeah, there's probably, in writing a piece like this, given the conclusion where that the story goes, and I tried deliberately not to reveal what this object was out there

• 52:07Speaker 02

  until we get to the end of, of the story, because I want there, wanted there to be a little bit of a mystery about what in the world is this, this object that is compelling all this fascination by these traders who are going west. But, yeah, because of its association with, with space, I clearly, you know, was willing to invoke Mars and the, and that giant canyon on Mars.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  You know, when you, when you read about, you mentioned Coronado and you read about Coronado and you get this sense of, um, I used the word fantastical earlier. Like they have these, it seems like they're driven by these like overblown expectations. Cities of gold and all this.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  But, but if you look at like what they were able to sack from the Aztecs. I mean, was it overblown? Do you ever see like, like, like wasn't what they actually, what the Spanish actually like pulled out of the Aztec empire? I mean, that was like staggering wealth for real, right?

• 53:10Speaker 02

  It was staggering wealth. In fact, so the combination of the sacking of the Aztec empire and the destruction of the Incas in Peru produced 200 times over the amount of gold and silver that had ever been known in the old world.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  So when Spain does that, of course, and what that does is that it sets up this expectation that these are not the only two places there are going to be. And so that's why, uh, Spain and these Spanish explorers like Coronado are so convinced that farther north, there's going to be another one of these grand discoveries.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. Cause you look at them and party wants to be like, you idiots. But then on their hands, they're like, well, look.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Look at what's already happened.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. Two, so 200 times more.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  200 times the amount of gold and silver that had existed in the old world came out of those mines in, uh, in the new world. And so it was, uh, yeah.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  I didn't know it was that much.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was a spectacular discovery. And so that's one of the reasons you can look at someone like Coronado and feel a certain sympathy for his expectation. And that's why, you know, he takes, when he doesn't find cities of gold at Zuni. He hears word, as I describe him, from this very clever and manipulative native informant, that far out on the Great Plains, on the prairies, there is a civilization where its leaders wear metal ornaments, necklaces and bracelets and various kinds of other ornaments. And so he, Coronado, takes 50 of his men and strikes out from New Mexico across the plains

• 54:54Speaker 02

  and travels all the way into present day Kansas on the Arkansas River and finds this country, Quivera, which is the country of the Wichita Indians when they were living up on the Arkansas. And as I say in the piece, he does find civil leaders who are wearing jewelry, but it's bronze, it's copper, it's stuff, it's copper actually from the mines up around Lake Superior. So he, so the story, and that's kind of what propels the, the primary story in this piece, is that there is something, it's just when you see it through the eyes of, of expectation,

• 55:35Speaker 02

  you're very likely going to be disappointed as the, these traders from Louisiana and Mississippi who go to this tremendous effort to haul back this object from the southern plains end up being, they're disappointed ultimately, it doesn't pay off for them.

• 55:55Speaker 03

  One of the people that you write about in this, in this piece is, I think George Sibley?

• 56:03Speaker 02

  John Sibley.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  John Sibley.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, Dr. John.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Indian agent, and that's a term that you see again and again in accounts from the 19th century, you know, US West history and...

• 56:19Speaker 03

  It's also one that doesn't really have a contemporary parallel. And it's, I wonder if you could sort of unpack that for people that haven't encountered it before, because it's sort of a diplomat, sort of a trade. Controlling access to foodstuffs and resources, especially as the reservation era. Sometimes an asset, sometimes an exploiter in chief. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean tremendously powerful people.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were tremendously powerful and Dr. John Sibley of Louisiana was a kind of a prototypical Indian agent. He was one of the very first ones. And his duties were rather more limited than what we associate with later Indian agents say after the Civil War, where they are doing things like providing food in order to enable reservation, people who have been placed on reservations to survive. And they're, they're acting in effect, the Indian agent's role is to act as a kind of a diplomatic go between, between the government in Washington and the native people themselves.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  And so this fellow, John Sibley is, I mean, he's not the only one. There are Indian agents particularly appointed by the Jefferson administration in many other places. William Clark becomes an Indian agent after the Lewis and Clark expedition is over. He's in charge of, he's the representative and the diplomat to the Indians of the Missouri River country. So these people are attempting to execute Washington's geopolitical strategy for the Louisiana Purchase and the West. And the reason Sibley becomes important is because he's the Indian agent of a part of the West in the early 19th century,

• 58:16Speaker 02

  where the boundaries are disputed between Spain and the United States. And that's why. When I talked in one of the last episodes about that Jeffersonian expedition up the Red River, they got turned around by Spain. That's the milieu and the context in which Sibley is operating. So, Washington has just attempted to explore the southern parts of the Louisiana Purchase, and the official Jeffersonian expedition has been blocked by a Spanish force and turned around and sent back. And so, what Sibley is attempting to do is to execute Jeffersonian

• 58:57Speaker 02

  policy for the West in a place where everything is vague and the boundaries are not clear. And what he's attempting to do then is to win over the tribes of the deep plains of the southern West. And that's really as far as his ideas extend. Nobody knows exactly how far out the true Southwest, say Santa Fe is, which everybody knows is in possession of Spain. That seems to be rather beyond the reach of somebody like Sibley, but he knows that up a river like the Red River or the Arkansas, there are all these tribes on the plains. So what he's trying to do is he's trying to win them away from Spanish

• 59:42Speaker 02

  control to American control. And his primary attempt in doing that is to send these traders out with the promise of two things. If you, the Wichita's or the Comanches, will take down the Spanish flags flying over your villages and run American flags, United States flags, up your flagpoles and sort of declare yourselves to be Indians of the United States, then what we're going to do in return is we're going to set you up with a trade. If you recall that sort of crafty line where he, Sibley, says something like, whoever offers Indians the best trade can always control their politics.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  What we're gonna do is send traders out, and we know that Spain has not traded guns and ammunition to you. That's against the imperial policy of the Spanish Empire. They do not arm their native people. They try to convert them into being agriculturalists and not hunters. And as Americans, we're going to offer you guns and ammunition. We're gonna trade guns to you. And so that's what a lot of this story hinges around, is simply sending a trading expedition out to the Wichita's and the Comanches with the promise that, I mean, what the traders are going for is they're bringing back horses

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  that they've traded for, plus whatever the strange object is that everybody has heard rumors about. And the other aspect, of course, is they're gonna trade them guns. And I tried in that story to explain why the Wichita's and Comanches in particular are desirous of having firearms, because they've got an enemy, the Osages, who are well armed from their trading partners in St. Louis. And the Osages are attempting to block St. Louis traders from getting out to the Wichita's and the Comanches, so that they can, when they want to, as they do three times while Glass is with them. This trader, Anthony Glass, is living in the Wichita villages. Three times, the Osages

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  ride in and just steal half the horse herds that the Wichita's have, and sort of, you know, wave son of a bitch at them as they're riding away, because they know that these Indians out on the deep plains aren't well armed.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. A good parallel would be us today, you know, saying to Iran, like, we don't want you to have that.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  We're gonna block other people from bringing to you

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  That's exactly it.

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  The technologies that we have that we'd rather you not have.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, we don't want you to have that. And here's somebody else pops up and says, oh, we'll trade it.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  We'd be more than happy to supply that.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  We'll absolutely supply you. And so that's what the United States, that's what Jeffersonian Indian policy, uh, much of it was about during this, these decades is to try to win over the tribes. And one way to win them, the surefire way to win them is through trade. And, uh, you know, and then there's the secondary goal of this particular group of traders who have heard these stories about the Indians for the last 30 or 40 years have been talking about some remarkable large chunk of metal out on the plains and what they all think, what the Americans all think is here's the silver ore we've been hearing about in the Southwest for decades and decades and decades.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  And they go out and somehow Glass is able to persuade the Wixittas and the Comanches, probably with promises of trade of, of guns and so forth, to take him to see this, this object. And, uh, he's the, they're the first white people to ever see it. The Indians had never let any other white people see it before.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  Well, Dan, thanks for the insights, man.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, you bet.

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  We're looking forward to the next app.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  I, we should probably say, or should we tell people, well, they're gonna hear what, what this object is. But of course, what the, what the object is, is

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  it's the largest meteorite, iron nickel meteorite discovered in the world in the 19th century. And these guys, these traders haul it back to civilization, thinking it is a gigantic nugget of platinum.

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  With a lot of exertion.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  With a hell of a lot of exertion.

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