Elliott West reveals how Native American-European interactions began in the 1720s, with Osage and Illinois tribes visiting France’s King Louis XV and Paris Opera. Disease like smallpox decimated Indigenous populations by 90–94%, while California’s gold rush (1848–1852) saw state-backed genocide reducing its Native population from 150,000 to 16,000. Horseback empires—Comanches, Lakotas—flourished for millennia before U.S. military and railroads dismantled them, ending a 5,000-year global era. Hollywood’s mythic Westerns gloss over this violence, but West’s Continental Reckoning exposes the brutal, industrialized roots of America’s expansion and identity. [Automatically generated summary]
Continental Reckoning, the American West in the Age of Expansion.
One of the most fascinating subjects, I think, in the history of the human race.
I mean, it is just such an amazing story and such a tragic story and such a crazy story of the amount of change that took place over a relatively short period of time.
Yeah, and how little most people really understand about the actual history of the Native Americans and that.
One of the things that was most fascinating about the Meteor podcast was that at the time that Lewis and Clark had come to America, 100 years before that, there had been Native Americans that had traveled to France.
1720s, there was a group of Native people from Kansas, Missouri area, and they had been accorded by the French because the French wanted to expand their fur trade into that area, up the Missouri River.
And the Spanish had recently suffered a terrible military defeat there in sort of what's today eastern Nebraska.
So the French sent this guy named Etienne Bourgmont to make contact.
He already had contact there.
In fact, he had a son by one of the women in the Missouri tribe.
Made contact, made some friends, made some allies, courted them.
And then to sort of seal the deal, he took back a delegation of about six Indians.
The Missouri tribe, the Illinois tribe, I think some Osage.
And they were, he then took them back from there down the Mississippi, down to New Orleans, and then over across the Atlantic to Le Havre.
And then they went by coach from there to Paris.
And they spent several months there in Paris, being feted by King Louis XV, visiting the Paris Opera, which they said was a great place full of sorcerers.
Well, there were Bourgmont himself had lived for years among the Indians and was an expert on the Missouri River.
So he was a Frenchman who came over, enlisted in the Army, deserted, sort of went native, became a Courie de Bois, a French mountain man, took up with the Indians, had this child by this woman.
So he knew the languages quite well.
And there were other – remember these Indians, as you can tell in this story, were very cosmopolitan, very sophisticated.
They knew English, or some of them did.
So I think the point to remember is that this long before our image of Americans coming into this area, there was all sorts of contact between Native peoples and Europeans, all sorts of exchanges.
It was really a mixed world, a world that was far more complex, far more interesting, in my opinion, than the usual way that we remember it.
It was sort of a slow seminar of these cultures, the cultures coming together.
And so there are many ways, in which the Indians were far more sophisticated and well-traveled, far-traveled, than the Americans who were coming in there.
We think our national myth has it that when Lewis and Clark, this is in 184, 1806, Lewis and Clark make their way up the Missouri River into the West, that that's sort of the start of the history of the West.
Before that, Lewis's famous quote as they left the Mandan villages in 185 says, we're heading up, he compared himself to Columbus.
They said, we're heading into this place where the foot of civilized man has never trodden.
Which is a fascinating book because they essentially document the spread of disease without meaning to do it, because that is really where it all started from.
And, you know, there's always been this confusion as to what happened to the Mayas, but it's probably the same exact thing that happened to 90-plus percent of the Native Americans that contacted smallpox.
He was the first movement to encounter what we know today as the Southwest.
He was part of a shipwrecked expedition on the Texas coast, and he and a few others, including a black African slave, Esteban Stephen, they were the ones who made their way, first enslaved by the Indians, and then they gradually made their way across the southwest up to what is today Arizona, like the Zunis, and then made their way southward into Mexico.
And if you look at the history of the human race across the planet, rather, it's one of the most transformative stories in such a short amount of time where everything changed so rapidly because it coincides with the Industrial Revolution and all these things happen.
And then you have massive cities appearing in these places where there was nothing before.
Yeah, I've discussed this many times with Graham Hancock, and one of the things that he has brought up recently is the use of LIDAR.
And then through this use of LIDAR, they found these grids and what appears to be irrigation systems and streets and structures and foundations and all of it unexplained.
And all of it was essentially covered by vast rainforests.
One of the more interesting things that we found was that when you look at the rise of syphilis in Europe, that some are connecting at least some forms of syphilis to European settlers who had come to America and then gone back to Europe and brought syphilis with them.
So at the time, hair loss is a one-way ticket to public embarrassment.
Long hair was a trendy status symbol and a bald dome could stain any reputation.
When Samuel Pepys' brother acquired syphilis, the diarist wrote, if my brother lives, he will not be able to show his head, which would be a very great shame to me.
Hair was that big of a deal.
And so the syphilis outbreak sparked a surge in wig making.
Victims hid their baldness as well as their bloody sores that scored, scoured their faces with wigs made of horse, goat, or human hair.
Peruches were also coated with powder scented with lavender or orange to hide any funky aromas.
Although common wigs were not exactly stylish, they were a shameful necessity.
That changed in 1655 when the king of France started losing his hair.
And so these guys started wearing wigs, and everybody started wearing wigs.
And the bigger your wig was, the more famous and rich and established you were.
So that is part of the story, is this exchange of disease and the lack of immunity and how much of a devastating effect this had on the North Americans who did encounter the Europeans.
Also the fact that, especially later on, when time passes, the greater mortality rate among Indians was because of the general degeneration of their condition.
Just like when we see in COVID, people who are the poorest, people who have the least medical care, people who are, they're the ones who are most vulnerable.
Well, the population declined by as much as 90 or even 94 percent.
Disease is an important factor.
But think of it now.
If smallpox hits an Indian village, let's say, in the Dakotas, it kills, unlike other diseases, smallpox is sort of democratic in the sense that it kills all ages.
It kills the most productive, it kills the hunters, it kills the mothers who are nursing their children.
So the secondary effects of that kind of loss, what would happen if Austin, Texas lost 40% of its people?
And the other 60% may survive, but not for long.
The whole system, everything collapses.
So it's an absolutely devastating effect when you have those kinds of epidemics.
It's fascinating because that pessimism seems to still be prevalent in a lot of English people.
This pessimism as far as your ability to improve your lifestyle.
I've many English friends that have come over here and say the attitude in America is that you can go out and you can forge your own path, you can do things, but in England, there's this like they're very dismissive of that.
Yeah, just the kind of human that did that really sort of establishes the ethic of what it means to be an American, because these are wild, risk-taking people.
And these are the people that essentially first established America.
I mean, or as far as Europeans, you have to be a wild person to take that kind of a chance.
It's also extraordinary that there was this enormous continent far bigger than Europe that was available, that, you know, that you could go there and establish a new life to.
I'm retired now, but what I used to tell my class is, imagine that suddenly the news hits that there is another universe that we didn't know was there.
Yeah, we can look at it from that perspective, marvel at it, but man, from the perspective of the natives that lived here, what a horrific invasion and what a devastating effect it had on their way of life, their culture, and how much is missing from their cultural memory because of this devastation of 90% of their population.
Well, it's not only by itself for human beings, but it's also by itself for native wildlife, which is another incredible aspect of this story of American expansion.
I watched the Ken Burns documentary on the American buffalo.
Buffalo were just the most dramatic example of dozens, scores of species of animals in the New World, in North America, that were driven either to extinction completely or really close to it.
Dan Flores, I think he's been on your own.
Dan has this marvelous new book, A Wild New World, that goes into that, goes into that in some detail and describes it.
As I remember from the book, Dan says that at no point in modern history have so many different species been eradicated so quickly.
What that is, it's not just that they're being hunted and exploited for the profit of people who are coming into.
That's really part of an even larger process that is the complete transformation of a world.
That's one of the things that I try to emphasize in this book.
Between 1850 and 1880, the western third of North America was literally remade, ecologically, not just culturally, socially, ecologically, ecologically.
It was made over into a new world.
And that world, of course, was not one that Native peoples knew how to work.
Their existence relied on them being able, relied on centuries of knowledge gained from this intricate understanding and use, sort of choreographed life of this place, of this place, relying upon its resources.
Animals, also plants, of course, crops and so forth.
And the Europeans come in and they just transform it quickly.
Very quickly.
Very quickly.
So what are you going to do?
That is what defeated the Indians.
It wasn't the military.
It was this transformation of their world into another, one world into another in which they didn't fit.
So they simply had no choice but to do what they were told if you're going to live.
Now when it comes to the American bison, there certainly was a market hunting aspect of it, that they were hunting them for their tongues, they were hunting them for their hides.
But there was also – it seems like there was a motivation to remove the Native Americans'ability to sustain themselves.
Or was that a – just a peripheral – was that like – It's a little complicated as usual.
Suddenly, you know, there's this exotic thing that you can get from the American West that's kind of cool to have, right?
So that's in the 1820s.
And it's a huge trade.
Hundreds of thousands of robes are sent down the Missouri and the Mississippi down to be marketed, marketed out of New Orleans and to be sent east.
That had an early effect on the decline of the bison population.
In my own research and work on this, I think that something close to a half of the bison population at its peak is explained by that sort of hunting and other kinds of ecological and environmental changes that were going on in the West.
So long before the hide hunters, the white, those white hide hunters went out there and started killing them, Indians were killing them.
And essentially for the same reason.
In other words, Indians themselves became caught up in this commodification, caught up in this international trade, and they began to feel the effects of it.
By the 1850s, there was this noticeable shortage, decline of bison population.
So they're already under pressure.
And then, and then somebody figures out, 1872, we know exactly the year, 1872, somebody figures out that you can take a bison hide and you can turn it into industrial leather.
Now, in the 1870s, there was a worldwide leather shortage.
The reason was industry.
Factories needed leather for gaskets, for these machines, belts and these things.
A huge demand for it, both here and in England and in Europe.
Most of that leather had been coming from Argentina, the huge herds in Argentina.
But they were about tapped out.
So there's this huge demand.
There's this big pressing economic question.
How?
Where is the leather going to come from?
As hundreds of new factories are being built all the time, right?
But he says that he believes that this insane number of bison that people at first witnessed, this was because the Native Americans had declined so much there was no pressure on them.
Especially when we came to a place that we didn't really have an understanding of the ecosystem like North America.
Another thing that Dan talks about that's really fascinating was that horses originated from North America but were wiped out, but had already been transferred to Europe and to other parts of the world and then were reintroduced when Europeans came here.
They evolved on the southern plains over 50 million years from a critter called a hierarchium, which is about the size of a collie, into the modern, into the modern horse.
That took millions of years.
And fairly late in that story, that is to say, only two or three million years ago, they migrated along with all kinds of other animals.
Camels, for example, evolved alongside horses in the southwest.
And they made that trip over Beringia, over the land bridge there.
Randall Carlson, who's been on my podcast multiple times, he's a proponent of that.
And there's a lot of scientific evidence in terms of core samples and micro diamonds that seem to indicate that around 11,800 years ago, North America and a good 30% of the world was hit when we passed through a comet shower.
And that that was the end of the ice age and that it happened not just then, but it happened another time somewhere in the 10,000 range.
And that that was what melted almost instantaneously most of the North American ice cap that covered half the continent and miles of ice and all that.
And that he thinks that that was the origin of the mass extinction along with human beings.
I'm trying to bring Randall together with someone who is an expert, like Dan Flores.
I'd love to bring Randall and Dan Flores together so they could sort of compare notes because both of them are working on the same problem from different angles.
Well, it's so interesting that we still have some animals left over, like the pronghorn antelope that moves at speeds that don't make any sense considering the predators that are available for it.
They're so much faster than everything else because they had to evade the North American cheetah.
There's a place called Catalina Island in California where what they're trying to do now is use snipers and helicopters to wipe out the deer population.
And of course, that's the kind of context that you could put in the decline of native peoples here.
What we're doing, what we're doing is messing with the ecological arrangement in ways that make it impossible for certain animals that have adapted to that to survive.
The difference was, of course, that Indians are human beings and human beings have the imagination to imagine a different way and to respond to it in ways that others can't.
One of the more fascinating and horrific aspects of the story of the decline of the native population in America is that they had this incredibly unique lifestyle that really wasn't available anywhere else in the world at that time.
Most of the rest of Europe and Asia had sort of changed and moved to agriculture and moved to cities.
And these people had these immense tribes, super sophisticated hunter-gatherer civilizations that lived in symbiosis with the land.
And to us, people that sort of understand how horrible it is that that's happened, we have this incredible romantic attachment to Native Americans.
Now there was, of course, agriculture here in what's today the United States in the East, highly sophisticated forms of agriculture, growing a variety of crops in the Southwest, relying especially on corn.
But you're right, a good part of what's today the United States, especially the West, were hunter-gatherer peoples and fishers.
They had figured out these ways to these sort of incredibly complicated and complex practiced ways of moving through their year, month by month, week by week, in ways that they had practiced and learned about over many generations that allowed them a really remarkably high standard of living.
Now, there were not large tribes.
One of the limitations of a hunter-gatherer society is you cannot expand in numbers beyond a certain limit.
About 125.
You get bigger than that, you really can't support it.
So what you had was this extraordinary splay, this extraordinary variety of peoples, hundreds, hundreds of different Native groups.
Today, there are 530 federally recognized tribes in the United States.
Wow.
And that's just, those are the ones who have survived physically and culturally.
So there's this remarkable array of peoples, many of them speaking different languages or different dialects, all of them in contact with the others in these very intricate trade relationships.
It was quite a place, you know.
And you're right, it flies dramatically in the face of what we think was going on back then.
This romanticized, simplistic view of the Indian, right?
Yeah, Dunbar's number, meaning we have in our mind the ability to hold a relationship with a certain number of people intimately, and then as it spreads out further, we can know some people sort of, we kind of know of them, but there's just a small group that would be your family, a larger group that would be your tribe, and then there's neighboring tribes.
And what's interesting also about Dunbar, I'm sure you remember this one from his book, when you get down below 125, smaller groups, there's also groups in which there's a certain intimacy where you can absolutely trust these people.
Well, that's one of the things that's fascinating about things like the battle at Little Bighorn because the Native American groups had figured out, listen, we've got to get together.
The only way we're going to stop these invaders is if we band together and form a much larger group.
Now, the battle itself, of course, a larger battle lasted much longer, or more than a day, about two days, as these part of them, part of the command under Reno, retreated to this hill and was besieged and held under siege for a day and a half.
Like I say, they were under siege there for two or three days.
It was another few days before the first other group of the army, of the cavalry, arrived.
Then they had to spend a few days taking care of the wounded, doing what they can.
Then they took the survivors to the Missouri River to get on a steamboat to head down to Bismarck.
And it was at that point that the news began to travel about this unprecedented defeat by American forces.
So the battles on June 25th, put all those days together.
When do you think the first news arrived of this catastrophe?
July 4th.
July 4th, 1876, the 100th, 100th anniversary of the approval of the Declaration of Independence, our 100th, our 100th birthday, news arrives of this crushing of Custer.
The nation, the military, was not going to let that stand.
So this was part of the reasons there was this extraordinary effort to destroy these people.
So they very quickly broke up into these constituent bands and tried to get away as best they could.
As their land was being overrun, as these appalling treaties were being forced upon them, they kept their word.
And then finally in 1877, the government said, okay, that's enough.
You've got to come into this reservation.
And the ones who were living off of it had to then, within one month, within a month, they had to pack up everything.
They had to leave their homeland that they had known for generations.
They had to cross the Snake River at its highest point, somehow get their families, women, children, kids, old folks, across this river to gather, to go into this reservation, end of a way of life.
Even though the treaty that required them to do that was a fraud.
And on the eve, literally the day before they were to go on to the reservation, to be forced out of the reservation, these young men sort of snapped.
And these young men took off and killed a bunch of white folks that they had grudges against.
That then triggered this war, triggered this larger outbreak against whites.
That then, of course, brought the army in.
And the army tried to put this down.
But as I researched that book, the question that kept coming back to me was, why?
Why did they do that?
Because at the time of the war, they were completely at peace with the Americans around them.
They had adapted beautifully.
They were prosperous cattlemen.
They were raising cattle.
They had silver tea sets, for Pete's sake.
They were more prosperous than the whites who were living in the area.
They threatened no one.
They were living on lands that the whites didn't want.
Why then?
Why force them in?
What's the reason?
And the only reason I can think of was the little bighorn.
This year before this humiliating defeat at the hands of the Lakotas and the Cheyennes, with that, the government said, okay, that's it.
Everybody, even our best friends, have to give up.
And they have to come in into reservations where we will control them.
But one of the things that 1923 documents, it stars Harrison Ford, and it's very interesting, but it documents these women that are forced from their tribe to go into these schools where their Christianity is forced upon them.
They're beaten and treated horrifically.
It's very hard to watch because you know that that is what happened.
But what the ruling schools did was, in fact, create the Indian.
They didn't kill the Indian.
The Indian didn't exist before that.
It created this sense of common identity, this sense of, okay, we may be Comanche, we may be Cheyenne, we may be a Lakota, we may begin or whatever, but we all have this common problem that we're facing, these common difficulties.
So we need to think in terms of the Indian to bond to bond together.
Just like on a smaller scale when these bands decide to join and unite in order to fight the military, now on this much larger continental scale, Indians from all over, Native peoples from all over the nation, now begin to see that they are related, related in their circumstances, not by blood.
So the Indian was created, not killed, in the boarding schools.
When they initially tried to move the natives to reservations, how did they, were they doing it because where the natives were, there was valuable resources?
Were they doing it because geographically they could control them better in these regions?
Which is historic, like when we look back at it now, it's like one of the most horrific aspects of it, that we just try to eliminate them and just integrate them into our culture.
Even the people who were called, it was sort of a formal term, Friends of the Indians.
They were an organization called the Friends of the Indians.
And they were, honestly, in their own hearts, they thought that they were doing what was necessary for the best for these people.
But they said the only way we can do that, the only way that these people can be saved, is to transform them into people like us, to make them into our, to integrate them into our culture.
And that depended on really basically three things.
It was they had to become farmers, because, you know, from the beginning in this country, you know, that's sort of the ideal life.
That's how you begin your integration into the American economy, farming, the Jeffersonian vision of the ideal farmer.
They've got to be Christian.
They have to have this common religion.
And education.
We've got to take their young people, and we've got to put them in schools where they will not only learn the basics of the three R's and so forth, but they'll be culturally educated.
They will be culturally transformed.
So these boarding schools were meant to transform these people into Americans.
So yeah.
So you often hear the term genocide thrown around.
And there are times in American history when that was absolutely true, when there was an effort to simply eradicate Indian peoples.
But the whole reservation system was not meant for that.
Sometimes it turned out that way.
But the purpose of it was this control and transformation.
That's what was supposed to happen.
And then when that happened, once that was done, then the reservations would be done away with.
Now it's not true, I think, that once, there's some really interesting works going on right now by a historian named Benjamin Badley, who is studying in California.
In the gold rush, there were Indians who said, oh, they're going to give me a bunch of stuff for this stuff.
Was it Well, there was traffic back and forth, but it's very slow, Overland Trails, over months and months.
And when it came to the East, a lot of people said, oh, come on.
One more rumor about the riches in the West and so forth.
So it wasn't until December 4th, 1848, when the president, James Polk, in his annual message to Congress, said, yep, it's true.
It's true.
They found gold out there, and there was a lot of it, a lot of it.
And people are making thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars out there.
But the point here is that from January 1848, when gold was discovered, to the end of 1848, nobody in the East really either knew about this.
There were rumors, or believed it.
So that's why we call the gold rushers 49ers.
Because it's the next year that they go out there in these extraordinary numbers.
But the question then is, what was happening out there at the time, right?
What's happened is we had the 48ers.
People from Oregon, people from Australia, people from Tasmania, people from the first Chinese ever coming over, especially people from the South, Sonorans, people coming from Mexico, Peruvians, Chileans.
So when the 49ers get out there, the Americans get out there, and they look around, they say, who are these people?
So it's what I call in the book the second conquest of California.
The first and, of course, in the war with Mexico.
But then suddenly, this is the richest place on earth, quite literally, at that time.
And it's being, the gold era is being mined by these people that we considered not Americans.
So we've got to get rid of them.
Indians, right?
The rest of them, there's what's called the Chile War, in which Chileans are driven out of their guns.
So these people are either driven out completely or they're confined to the edges while the 49ers, while the 49ers take, including, of course, the Indians.
This is what triggered one of the few cases in which this is clearly genocide, in which there was a concerted formal effort to eradicate Indian peoples who were on these goldfields.
The California legislature funded bond issues to pay for militias to go kill Indians.
Congress reimbursed California, the legislature, to pay for those expeditions.
It was what Ben Madley, who wrote the book on this, calls a killing machine.
One of the few times in American history when we just say absolutely, yes, this was attempted.
Yeah, it was one of the you can picture it this way.
I think we mentioned to most folks, you know, where were the great Indian wars?
Where are the great Indian defeats?
They think typically of the Great Plains, Little Bighorn, you know, Montana, the Dakotas, and the Southwest, New Mexico, Arizona.
That's where the movies all are.
Those are the ones that we were most aware of publicly.
If the population in California, native population in California, dropped as much as we think it did, that would be as if every native person in Montana, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, vanished.
Part of that story has to do with what we were talking about earlier, and that is horses.
Yes.
This was one of the great revolutions.
I call it the other American Revolution.
And in the book, I call it the Grass Revolution.
Because remember, horses now had, of course, started here, went to Asia, became extinct here, and the Europeans brought them back.
Coronado was the first to bring them into where they had been born onto the South Plains.
And what year was this?
Coronado?
1540s, in the 1540s.
And then the Spanish came for good at the end of the 1500s, establishing Santa Fe along the Rio Grande River.
They brought horses.
And then it wasn't until around 1680 with this rebellion of Pueblo Indians in the Santa Fe area that drove the Spanish out for 12 years that these horses began to spread across the West.
Now, they had begun to spread before, and we're coming to understand now that there were probably more of them out there than we realized, earlier than we realized.
But the explosive growth of horses out of New Mexico comes after 1680.
1780, 100 years later, Indian peoples across the plains in the southwest and in the Rocky Mountains have all developed, adapted the horse, adopted and adapted to that horse into what we call horse cultures.
That is, these ways of life that depend upon the horse.
Without the horse, you can't do what you want to do.
It's like we have a car culture, right?
And this gave them, among other things, great military power, economic power, but also military power.
And the key to that, Joe, was the fact that horses are herbivores, right?
And they're adapted to this, the second largest grassland on earth, the Great Plains.
And when you put a human on a horse, then it becomes something else.
It becomes what I call a horse man, that is horse hyphen man, right?
Not a horseman.
It becomes, it's like you take these two animals and you fuse them into one thing.
And this animal, like a centaur, right?
This animal has the power and the speed and the grace and the beauty of a running horse.
And it has the brain of a human being.
It has the imagination and the innovation and the arrogance of a human being.
So that's a new animal.
It's bad news for the bison.
Really bad news for the bison.
Because the first time you have a grass-eating predator, you have a killer.
You have a killer that can draw upon the same energy and the grasses that the bison do.
And it's ultimately fatal for them.
But at the same time, it becomes this, these horse cultures become extraordinary military machines.
And that's what the Comanches were.
That's what the book is about.
And that was this other American revolution.
The same time that our revolution in the East is going on, there's this revolution in life and power in the middle of what's today the United States with the rise of these native empires.
The Comanches and the Lakotas and others.
These become these sort of superpowers.
They dominate.
They dominate the middle of America.
And they just kick the bejabbers out of the Spanish.
It's not until the Americans show up with their numbers, overwhelming numbers, and with their new technologies.
What we see when you look at the Little Bighorn, when you look at the defeat of the Comanches, when you look at the defeat of those other Indian tribes, what you're seeing is the end of a 5,000-year epoch in world history, an epic that began at the same place.
They develop these trade networks of trading horses up to the northern plains where the winters are so severe that they had terrible losses every year.
So they would sell horses, trade horses, up to the north.
This is a very sophisticated arrangement.
But they were the masters of it.
And it served them well until the Americans show up in numbers.
There's a friend of mine who has a ranch out here, and he finds hundreds, if not thousands, of them a year.
And he actively sifts through them, and he puts them up on his website on his Instagram page, and he sent me one of them.
And this is just one of who knows how many, if not hundreds of thousands of these have been found in this area where these people lived for a long time surviving off the buffalo and wild game and primarily eating only meat,
which gave them a big advantage over the Americans who came here who needed carbohydrates and who they couldn't go a day or two without eating without being completely diminished.
Whereas they were, just because their body had adapted to eating meat, they were essentially in ketosis.
And they were eating meat and it didn't bother them to go a day without food.
And also their strategies, their ability, you know, we think of Native Americans, we think of archers as having a quiver on their back and they pull an arrow from the quiver and put it in.
But they carried multiple arrows in each finger.
So in the four fingers of the hand, they would have four arrows sitting in their hands ready to go.
And they had the ability to cycle them through the bow very quickly.
Whereas the Europeans had a musket and they had to put the ball in there and the gunpowder and tap it down.
And the whole thing took like 30 seconds to get one shot off under extreme pressure of these Native Americans who were extremely adept on horseback and who actually would ride sideways so they would hide behind the body of the horse.
Now, by the time the real hammer came down, the whites had repeating rifles and they had pistols.
But still, in terms of fighting on those terms, a Comanche on horseback was far more effective.
They were called shortbows.
And they were very powerful.
We think of longbows or crossbows as ones with a great power.
But these things were, you know, they could, hunting bison, they could shoot an arrow when these shortbow arrows under these shore poles, and it would go through a bison.
Yeah, well, what was documented in Empire of the Summer Moon was the use of the revolver and that the military didn't really have a desire to acquire the revolver.
But the Texas Rangers did.
And the reason why they did is they recognized that there's a need to have multiple bullets in some sort of a cylinder that you could replace.
And so when they started doing that, that's when they started to gain ground over the Comanche.
And then, of course, the Henry rifle, the repeating rifle, all these different things that happened after that.
And it's just, it's interesting that this sort of independent philosophy of Texans probably had a lot to do with how difficult it was to take over this place.
Well, I think that so many of the people in Texas and elsewhere, you know, they were just sort of ordinary folks.
And you wouldn't really, they really didn't have to go through the kind of transformation, you know, of kind of adaptive transformation that would produce those kinds of abilities.
But the ones on the cutting edge, you know, the ones out there, that was true of them.
There were, at the very end of this, right before it all fell apart, they were on sort of government land had been set aside far north Texas up at the border of Oklahoma.
Stayed on that, but didn't last.
The animosity, the unalloyed hatred, mutual hatred between Comanches and Texas, it's hard to exaggerate it.
It was just, you know, it was like Palestinians and Israelis, Hamas and Israelis.
It's just, you could not reconcile it.
And so the government was trying to give these folks a chance to become farmers and the rest of it.
So they put them on this piece of land.
But the Texans kept at them, kept at them, kept at them.
And finally they said, enough of that.
You're going back to the panhandle.
So besides that, no, Texas has only a couple of reservations by the end of the story, one in East Texas.
The reason is, of course, that this hostilities, these hostilities between Texans and Indians is so extreme that they're either all Indians or either all killed or driven out.
I think I was very naive when I started to look back and you're going to do what?
Because, you know, as I've already said a couple of times, it's this 30-year period when so much happens all over the place so fast in so many ways, so many changes, all of them bouncing off each other, all of them influencing each other.
It's just this bewildering series of things, of events.
The hardest part, hard part of any book, one of my friends told me, he says, the hardest thing about writing a book is making it a book.
Making it one thing as opposed to just a whole series of note cards put together.
But it went beyond hard for this.
You had to come up with some way to fit it together with a narrative, an arc over time, with themes to try to hold it together.
Well, it's just, it must be so hard to put together something that if we put it into perspective today, imagine that kind of change happening from 1993 to 2023.
Put that in your head and imagine the world changes.
The theme that I came up with it here, the closest thing I had to it to tie it together was something really big happens in this country in the second half of the 19th century.
And we all recognize that.
Any American historian will agree with that.
And what happens is the narrative of this country, the basic story of the United States, shifts onto a new track.
We're changing all the time, of course, but sometimes things really change.
And this was one of them.
When this American story moves in a new direction, that would carry it into what we think of as modern America.
Carry it into the America where we know the 20th and the 21st centuries.
If you go back, if you're looking at a time machine, you don't twirl a dial, go back to, say, 1850 and before that, you're in another world.
It's one that's very difficult for us to identify with.
1900?
You know, we're industrialized.
We're tied to the world in new ways.
We're technologically far more sophisticated.
We're a people much more of a polyglot nation.
The whole idea of citizenship of who is an American, all that has changed.
And it happens during that period.
Well, if you, all Americans, all American historians agree with that.
If you were to ask them, how do you explain that?
What accounts for this shift?
The most common answer to that by far, up until now, has been the Civil War.
It was a Civil War, you know, that establishes the primacy of the federal government.
It's a civil war that expands citizenship through emancipation.
It's a civil war that helps as a go to us to industrialize, to turn into this modern economic superpower.
It's all true, undeniable.
What I argue in this book is that expansion in the 1840s, the discovery of gold, which comes exactly at the same point, and what happens in the West during these 30 years from 1850 to 1880, those things are as important as the Civil War in helping us understand how we became modern in the making of the making of modern America.
Expansion, those 30 years of incredible changes, were as important as the Civil War in turning us into a modern industrial power, in expanding citizenship.
In this case, not just free people, but Indians, Hispanics, Chinese, and the strength of the power of the federal government, which takes on all kinds of new responsibilities because of the West, from national parks to the Department of Interior to outward looking into the world.
It's because of this happening that we, what I call the orientation, the reorientation of America.
We turned into the Pacific.
We become a Pacific-facing nation as well as an Atlantic-facing nation.
We began to move into what we know today as a people who are looking continuously across the Pacific to China, to the other nations over there.
All of those things that we associate with being modern have as much to do with expansion as they do with the Civil War.
So the basic idea is you cannot possibly understand America as the America that we know from the 20th and 21st centuries without looking at this story, without taking into account what follows from the acquisition of 1,200,000 square miles over three years and what happened following that.
I mean, we have this whole genre of film in America called Westerns, which is really interesting, right?
Because we have spaghetti westerns that were actually made in Italy with Trin Eastwood and all these films that detail these heroic Americans who fight off the Indians.
And our narrative is the people that are on the wagon train, they're just trying to have a good life and they're getting attacked by the Indians.
For 40 plus years, I taught a course called The West of the Imagination, which wrestles with exactly that question.
What is it about Western history that is so seemed to sort of compels us to take this story of the West and to turn it into this simplistic, romanticized story?
And I think there are various ways to approach it.
The most basic way is simply in a way to sort of restate the question by saying that there is something about the West, and this goes way back to European history, even before Columbus.
There's something about the direction West that invites us to imagine new worlds.
People living in Europe, the one direction in which they knew absolutely nothing was West.
You look into the Atlantic, and so they were able to imagine all of these wonderful myths.
There's something about that.
There's something that sort of carries through on that.
But in particular, in this country, people need the West, need the West to be something.
It's their need that produces a story.
It's not what's happening out there.
We need to make the West into what we need.
We need the West to be what we require in this particular time.
So, for instance, after the Civil War, this country is trying to remake itself into one nation.
We're trying to heal these wounds, to stitch the nation back together.
We need stories about what we have in common, whether you live in South Carolina or whether you live in Pennsylvania.
What do we have in common?
Well, one thing we have in common is we're conquering the West.
We're doing this together.
All Americans.
It's a heroic, very positive American view story.
In that story, among other things, we've got to earn our way into this country.
That means we've got to suffer.
So all of these tales of suffering pioneers and so forth.
But also, of course, Indians, the threat of Indians, overcoming the threat of Indians.
That's a heroic American story.
In other words, we've got to bleed our way into full possession, full possession of the West.
Don't bother me with complications like this is Indians' country.
This is their country.
Don't bother me with the fact that they're just trying to defend their land.
But it's also, I think we could also make the mistake of painting it in these sort of starkly tragic, occasionally genocidal terms.
There is absolutely something to the point of view that these are just ordinary people going out there to try to make better lives.
Right.
My early passion was what we call social history, which is the history of everyday life.
And so I was fascinated by these people who went out there, took off solar farm or whatever, picked up and went out to Oregon or someplace.
Why were they doing that?
And what was it like?
What was it like for them?
And I looked at, I read hundreds of letters and diaries and journals and memoirs of this.
And I've yet to find one to read one example of somebody saying, well, tell you what, it's going to be tough out there, but we've got to go out there and get rid of the Indians.
They had these images of who the Indians were and what sort of a danger they had.
But they weren't out there to dispossess the Indians.
They were out there to get a better farm out there to make a better life.
That's the American story.
But in doing that, as I said earlier, in doing that, they took part in this effort, took part in this complete transformation of this world that destroyed the Indian life.
They made it impossible for Indians to live where they had.
And it took me a long time to research it, to write it, put together.
And I also try to make it as much as I can a human story.
I try to give it what I say in there, give it a story with a somebody-ness, you know, a sense of what it was like for individuals, for individuals out there.
And that means you make it very complicated.
You know, there are no simple moral messages as much as we'd like for them to be.
It's not.
That's part of the accuracy of it.
I also try to respect, you know, as we've talked about, Americans have this romanticized view out there.
In particular, things like cowboys, cattle drives, right?
Homesteaders.
Well, the fact is, those are the stories that fascinate us.
And I try to honor that fascination.
Those were great stories.
You know, the stories, Overland Trails, these wagon trains, these families picking up, walking 1,500 miles.
Those are great stories.
The story, the lives of cowboys, cattle drives, and all the rest of that, those fascinate us for good reason because they're fascinating.
What I try to do is to respect that fascination at the same time of trying to tell those stories as fully as I can with as much nuance as I can and to bring in new understandings.
To point out, for example, in ranching, who knew that the great ranching empires, the Great Plains, were run mostly by corporations.
Really?
Yeah.
There were hundreds of corporate ranches out there.
It was stock being sold in New York and Boston and Edinburgh.
There was a very tight connection between Edinburgh investors and ranches out on the Great Plains.
No, the livestock was raised in the plains, and then it was typically fattened up in a place like Iowa and then slaughtered in Chicago, Kansas City, placed like that.
Now, over time, by the end of the century, close to the end of the century, they developed a refrigerator refrigeration.
So they were able to send slaughtered beef back, but they wouldn't send the animals, wouldn't send the animals themselves.
But the point is, it was ranching for all of our images of lonesome cowboys out there, cattle drives.
Ranching was an international corporatized business.
One more way in which we see the West as modernizing America.
It was as much a corporatized enterprise as iron and steel or petroleum in the East.
And you slaughter it at that particular time of the year to do it.
What happens after the, it starts in California, actually.
The first time you see modern ranching develop is before the Civil War out in California to feed the gold miners.
But then it becomes a national phenomenon after the Civil War when We began to raise cattle on a mass scale on public land out on the Great Plains.
Now you have a modern transportation system.
Railroads make their way out onto the plains.
So you can take cattle in Texas, southern Texas.
You can drive them north on public domain.
That's the grass is free.
The fuel for the whole thing is government, coming out of the government, free.
You load them up on cattle cars in Abilene or Dodge City, ship them to the East to fatten them up and then to slaughter.
In other words, it becomes a nationalized business and then international business, and it becomes funded in the same way that other new national businesses are.
Corporations.
It's all coordinated by the revolution of communication through the telegraph.
So we're using these new revolutionary technologies like the telegraph and the railroad and new revolutionary economic systems like that of corporate America, sort of these concentrations of capital, to create this new national international business.
It's all part of the national story.
But it's a national story in the West that we've turned into this kind of exotic, romantic story.
We miss the fact that it's really critical to what's going on across the country.