#2058 - Elliott West

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 Beaumont 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. Now, this is from eastern Nebraska.

Wow. They loved it. They were taken to the Court of Fontainebleau.

They showed their expertise at hunting by riding bareback in the water below, the Royal Woods, naked and bareback, shooting pheasants. Had a great time. A woman who was, in fact, the woman who had born Bergman's child, she married a sergeant in Notre Dame. They had a wonderful time. And the men liked just about everything except the men, other men, the French men.

They said they were sort of effeminate and sissy, and they said they smelled like alligators. Alligators. Interesting. Yeah. But this was the 1720s, so that's what, 80 years or something before Lewis and Clark even made it out to that area.

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.

So there's hundreds of years.

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, you know, our national myth, has it that when Lewis and Clark, this is in, you know, 1848, 1866, 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. Right. Lewis's famous quote, as they left the Mandan villages in 1805, 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. Not true. Not true.

Right. Right. So it's these sort of state secrets.

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Fantastic stories about that. So there's that. But then the Europeans come into this area and that line just goes straight up. And it keeps accelerating. It keeps accelerating.

So it's important to remember that change has been going on for 15,000 years in what's today the United States. Interesting changes that I think people don't recognize nearly enough. And they ought to. They ought to. But the pace of that change accelerates at this really astonishing degree.

They don't seem to be culture-related to others in South America. Where did they come from? Right. When did they get there?

Right.

Theodore Roosevelt's granddaughter, incidentally, was one of the key figures in investigating this.

That was there before. But the first documented cases of syphilis, the last time I checked, a very suspicious time, a very suspicious place. It was in Spain in 1493..

fatal, you know, insanity, fatalities. So that seems pretty clear. There's also evidence of syphilitic bone damage among Native peoples going way back in North America. So I think it's pretty safe to say that.

I'm going to tell you something. Okay, great. So there was, see if you can find out who these French royals were, but there was these French royals who contacted syphilis. They started losing their hair. And so they started wearing these, they put these beautiful wigs on.

And the more money you had, the bigger your wig was. And it became, because the syphilis had just run rampant through this population. So many people were losing their hair, and they would get these holes in their faces, sores. It was really horrific. So these are the gentlemen.

Samuel, how do you say his name? Papise? How would you say that? Pepys. Pepys.

Yeah. So, at the time, hair loss was a one-way ticket to public embarrassment. Long hair was a trendy status symbol, and a bald dome could stain any reputation. Well, 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 scoured their faces with wigs made of horse, goat, or human hair. Peruks 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 the term, big wigs.

Shave your head yourself. I enjoy it. That's me. And I have a good shaped head, so I'm lucky. Some people have some funky heads.

So you've got a good head too. Thank you so much.

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.

For instance, it's not quite true that Indians had no immunity to it or that our immunity protected us when we went there. More typically, a case of these diseases, like smallpox, for example, if you got it as a child, it's like measles today, or mumps, or chicken pox. You know, you want your kids to get those because then they're immune. And later on, it's a much more devastating disease if you get it as an adult, as a grown-up.

And so it wasn't that they had genetic immunity to it. Right. They had previous exposure. Right. 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.

You know, just like when we see in COVID, you know, people who are the poorest, people who have the least medical care, people who are...they're the ones who are most vulnerable.

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, these 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?

You know, the whole system, everything collapses. So, it's an absolutely devastating effect when you have those kinds of epidemics.

What was the first initial wave?

Now, when the English came over, theirs was a combination of governmental ambition and a business enterprise. But, in any case, this was all being directed by others in Europe for their own ends. Not the ones who were coming over, but they were there, they were trying to do it for their own purposes.

Then, that raises the question, so, the ones who came over, why were they there? And I think that the most common answer is the one you suggested, better lives. You've got to remember, in Europe, especially a place like England, land was very scarce. So, the possibility of somebody being born into the peasantry or being born on the lower ranks, the possibility of them acquiring land was beyond remote. And then somebody says, okay, if you'll just go across the Atlantic, we'll give you land.

We'll give you a new start. And that's very seductive.

they're very dismissive of that.

But again, they were promoters. They were imperial promoters. They were private promoters. The first English colonies, Jamestown, and then Plymouth, and then Massachusetts Bay, those were all businesses. They were corporations.

It was like Walmart establishing a colony on the moon or something. So they're promoting it. They're trying to persuade people to go over there, to develop it, to raise tobacco, to give them their profits. Huge promotional scheme.

Yeah. What an idea.

Go 100 years earlier than that, 200 years earlier than that. These are incredible risks that these people took.

And even then, when you consider it, when you track it over time, bubonic plague, of course, came in waves, occasional waves. If you look at this as one story over 400 years, it's by itself, nothing like it.

As well as Steve Rinella. And that is a crazy story that no wildlife in this country can survive, being a commodity.

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 to rely on centuries of knowledge gained from this intricate understanding and use, sort of choreographed life 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.

It was this transformation of their world into another, from 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.

Once. buffalo robes, that is, you take usually a cow hide and you process, you scrape it out and you work it. You work it into a robe. Those became quite popular in the East, in England, and in Europe. Sort of this exotic thing to have in your house, you know.

You put it on the wall, or you make it into a rug, or you use it as a... You're out in a carriage in the winter. You would have these things. It was something that was interesting. All of a sudden it was a fashion, kind of a fad.

And suddenly there was this great market for these things for Indian hunters, Native hunters. They've been killing bison, of course, for their own uses. But now, if they would do both that and for their hides, which they could turn into robes, which would give them this unprecedented affluence. It was this business boom among them.

You know, hundreds of thousands of robes are sent down the Missouri and the Mississippi down to be 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, 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's this noticeable shortage, decline of bison population. So they're already under pressure. 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.

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. Where's the leather going to come from? There's hundreds of new factories being built all the time. Suddenly somebody figures out, buffaloes.

Wow. They can give it.

And white-tailed deer at one point in time were on the verge of extinction in the United States. That's right. Because of market hunting.

You get rid of the wolves, the elk population booms.

And you mess with any one part of it and the rest of it's going to change.

But had already been transferred to Europe and to other parts of the world. And then were reintroduced when Europeans came here. What year was that when that started happening?

That's crazy. In the Southwest. And they made that trip over Beringia, over the land bridge there.

But, you know, at the end of the last ice age, at the end of the Wisconsin glaciation, the world changes. We're going through kind of a climate change, as we have today, warming. And that changes the ecology completely. And all kinds of animals, especially in North America, became extinct. Dozens of species became extinct.

Wow.

And, you know, the list just goes on and on.

All of these animals suddenly disappeared because of this, partly because of this ecological change. Now, there's an argument that it wasn't just that. The question is, okay, the lion goes extinct in America. It didn't go extinct in Africa. Horses go extinct in America.

They didn't go extinct over there. It was a global change. So what's the difference? The argument is people. People, by that point, had just been able to make their way over in the other direction.

You know, Beringia was a two-way street, a two-way highway, and there were animals coming over from Asia at the same time that American animals were going over in the other directions. Buffalos, bison evolved in the old world, and then they came over here.

Bison antiquus, if you can imagine one now, the bulls had the horn spread, just like ours do. The horn spread of a bison antiquus was great enough that LeBron James could lie down between the tips of the horns and not touch either one.

Yeah. Does that explain some of these sudden declines of populations?

and that's exactly along those lines. Also, pronghorns can't jump fences.

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, these sort of incredibly complicated, 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 really a remarkably high standard of living.

Now, they were not large tribes. One of the limitations of a hunter-gatherer society is that you cannot expand in numbers beyond a certain limit, about 125.. 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.

And 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. 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. They're just like this one group of people.

I don't care.

Along many Western groups, no person in a particular band could tell another person to do anything. No one had that kind of authority. Right. So how do they stop people from going nuts, doing horrible things?

It's the group's or the band's opinion of you. Right.

Eleven at a football team. Yeah. Close to it. Right. That's a smaller group that works because everybody knows everybody else.

You can rely on each other. So, yeah. And, like you say, it's hardwired.

All of them broke down into these smaller units. And they recognized a kinship. They spoke the same or common or highly related languages and so forth. They intermarried a lot, sort of binding them together. But about that time, as you say, about the time of 1876, 1870s, there was this realization, you know, we've got a real problem here.

We've got a real problem here. And the best shot we have is for us to overcome these, to forge a sense of common identity and a common purpose. It's a kind of rise of what you might call nationalism, a kind of a Sioux, Cheyenne nationalism. And that's new. That's new.

That wasn't there before. So they're evolving, right? They're evolving in their understanding. They're evolving in how they think about it themselves, right? It's this world in constant motion and change.

And what fascinated me about this in this book was how complex it was and how fast it was, and how completely far reaching it was. Everything changes.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes.

You know what's going to happen.

It was 1876.. The battle itself was on June 25th, 1876.. 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 battle's on June 25th. Put all those days together. When do you think the first news arrived, that of this catastrophe?

July 4th. July 4th, 1876.. The 100th anniversary of the approval of the Declaration of Independence. 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 reason that 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. And in less than a year, they were defeated.

The Nez Perce were this extraordinary people in the Pacific Northwest. They were from Idaho, from eastern Oregon. They, too, composed of these different bands, gathered together in this one common identity, the Nimiipuu, which means the real people.

And they were completely at peace with the whites. In fact, Lewis and Clark had been the first Americans, the first white people that they had ever seen. Lewis and Clark came over Lolo Pass. Down. in there, they were starving.

And the Nez Perce took them in, saved them, helped them get some horses and canoes to keep on their way. And on the way back, Lewis and Clark stayed with them more than a month. And they formed, in the eyes of the Nez Perce, they formed this alliance with the Americans. And they swore from this time on, we're friends, we're allies. You help us when we fight.

We'll help you when you fight. And that was in 1806.. They kept that promise from 1806 until 1877.. Wow. 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. It's very interesting, but it documents these women that are forced from their tribe to go into these schools. Where 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.

By 23, it's sort of winding down. But, yeah, all sorts of, of course, scandalous news recently, in the past year or two, about the kinds of treatment that came out of those schools. Here in Canada, the same sort of thing is being revealed in Canada about the abuses under those schools. It's not just Christianity that's being forced on. They are required to speak only English.

They're punished if they speak their own languages. Therefore, they give up their appearance or cut their hair, dress in a certain way. Now,

there's a wonderful irony in that show.

I said a moment ago, most people, most of the public, think of, you know, the Indian, as if there's one group of people. The Indian. Native peoples, of course, didn't think at all like that. They identified with tribal groups. They identified with the band within the tribal groups.

Often at odds with each other. You know, they've been fighting each other like everybody fights everybody else in history. So their identity was, you know, when you say, what are you? They would say, well, I'm a Cheyenne, I'm a Comanche, you know, I'm a Tlingit, you know, whatever. I belong to this guy's band.

So the idea of the Indian was completely foreign to them.

Until boarding schools. And all of a sudden, in boarding schools, all the kids, all the young people are taken, required to go to these schools. All of these different groups, they're all living together. They're all forced to surrender much of their own individual cultures, those dozens of different cultures that they were,

you know, they'd come from. And suddenly it begins to dawn on them. They're now all speaking the same language, right? They're all, you know, we've got much more in common than we have differences among us. So there's a way in which, you know, the supposed purpose of a boarding school was to destroy Indianness.

The famous phrase coming from Colonel Pratt, who was the one who founded Carlisle, was, kill the Indian to save the man. Destroy Indian identity in order to allow these people to survive in the modern world. Wow. But what the boarding 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 Lakota, we may be Tlingit 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 together. Just like, on a smaller scale, when these bands decided 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.

These people, who were, again, hunter-gatherers, living in some place in this remote mountain area in California or Arizona or wherever. Suddenly, they're overrun by these people coming in, overrun because they are living on some of the richest places in the nation. So you've got to get rid of them.

But there's also the reason. this is a way to control them and, in the eyes of the government, to transform them.

Put them on these reservations and you can turn them into the kind of people that you want them to be. Make them American.

So it was both of those things, both of those things together.

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. The Jeffersonian vision, you know, 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 be 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 we 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. Everybody would live in harmony.

Wow. It didn't happen, of course.

You can't eat it. You can't use it as a weapon. So strange.

The Aztec consider it God's scant. This was the excrement of the gods. So strange. Now, it's not true, I think, that once... There's some really interesting work going on right now by a historian named Benjamin Baddeley, 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. Of course. Adapted. They went to work and there were hundreds of Indians who were in the gold fields before the 49ers came. Really?

And slowly, Greg, this is now 1848, so it takes a long time for news to get from California to the east.

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. Wow. 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 is, what was happening out there at the time?

So it's what I call in the book, the second conquest of California, the first one, of course, in the war with Mexico. But then suddenly, you know, this is the richest place on earth, quite literally, at that time. And the gold there is being mined by these people that we considered non-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 the mines. So these people are either driven out completely or they're confined to the edges while the 49ers take over, 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 are on these gold fields.

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 Ben Madley, who wrote the book on this, who calls it a killing machine.

One of the few times in American history when we could say, absolutely, yes, this was attempted genocide.

More gold was mined in California in one year, 1852, than had been mined across the world in the entire 18th century. One year. Wow. There's a story from the fellow who was the head of the San Francisco Mint. It was established in the mid-1850s.

He said that at one time they were processing so much gold in that mint that the furnaces couldn't handle it. And they discovered, to their horror, that gold dust was being blown out of the smokestacks and settling on the area around there. So they had to send out people for like a quarter mile around the mint to sweep up the gold.

And sift through it. On the roofs.

Well, historically, if the Indians were getting much of a protection, it came from the federal government.

Well, the federal government, it's not a territory. So it's a state government that's in charge there. And the state government's attitude was, get rid of them. Wow. Get rid of them.

And the population dropped from an estimated 150,000 in 1848 to 1,916,000.. Wow. So about 90%.

Wow. 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, Montana, the Dakotas, and the Southwest, New Mexico, Arizona.

That's where the movies all are. Those are the ones that we're 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. Wow. As if they were all gone, all dead.

And yet, who knows about it? Very few people. Who's aware of that?

There's a fantastic book about Texas and about the Comanches called Empire of the Summer Moon.

Part of that story has to do with what we were talking about earlier, and that is horses.

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. 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. 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. 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, right? And this animal, like a centaur, 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 in the grasses that the bison do.

And it's ultimately fatal for them, right? 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.

A native empire, right?

That's what we broke when we came in with the Little Bighorn in 1876 against the Comanches. What that book writes about 1874..

It was also the last time that a horse culture arose on earth. The first were about 5,000 years ago in Ukraine. And then, of course, that way of life spreads, spreads across Central Asia. The Mongols, you know, it spreads into northern China. It spreads down into the Mideast.

It leads to the great horseback empires of the Arabs in northern Europe. And then into Europe, to the great Iberian powers like Spain. All of these are military horse cultures. It's a story that goes 5,000 years back. And it ends where the story began 50 million years ago.

With the beginning with the first horses, right? It ends at the same place. 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 epic in world history. An epic that began at the same place. It's incredible.

I don't know. They just, well, first place is, I think Dan Flores would stress this. They were in absolutely the right place. Southern Plains. Dan has a book called Horizontal Yellow, which is the Comanche word for this area.

This is where horses evolved. This is where they were born. This is where they were best adapted. That was Comancheria. That was Comanche.

So they were in just the right place for this proliferation of horses. And they took advantage of it. Something about them was able to fashion, to take advantage of this to a degree that few others did. They were very, very good at it. And what Pekka's book does also is show that this was genuinely an empire.

They had their own foreign policy. They had their own economic system. They had this intricate trade system. So they would sort of outsource the growing of horses. when the Americans came.

They would wait until the Americans were developing horse herds, as well as cattle and other things. Let them do the work. Let them use their grass to develop these horse herds. And then we steal them.

So they're outsourcing, right? Wow. They develop these trade networks of trading horses up to the Northern Plains where the winters are so severe. 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.

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 that have been found in this area.

Yeah. Where these people lived for a long time.

And they were eating meat, and it didn't bother them to go a day without food. They had all these advantages.

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. 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.

the Comanche on horseback was far more effective. They were called short bows. And they were very powerful. We think of long bows or crossbows as ones with a great power. But these things were, you know, they could, a hunting bison, they could shoot an arrow, one of these short bows,

and it would go through a bison. All the way through this animal. And they're incredibly accurate.

doing it that way. Apparently not very accurate. doing it just standing still. That was alien to them.

And then, of course, the Henry rifle, the repeating rifle, all these different things that happened after that.