Ep. 08: Beyond the Earth’s Curve, Mysteries

00:00:01
Speaker 1: 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 Flores, and this is the American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer just in time for the season that calls us home.

00:00:32
Speaker 2: A portion of.

00:00:33
Speaker 1: Every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters and wildlife, enjoy responsibly beyond the Earth’s curve mysteries. Sometime in the century we’re in, maybe even by twenty fifty, a nation or one of our proliferating private space companies will fly a drone through the Valumeronaris 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 Valumeronneris 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, but absolutely dwarfs that Arizona Marble in every particular measurement. Literally an other worldly desert landscape, the Valu Marionnaris truly is west of everything. Also a good modern stand in to help understand the way many explorers and map makers thought about the American West two hundred years ago.

00:02:08
Speaker 2: What’s out there?

00:02:09
Speaker 1: 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 its horizons will obscure the opposing canyon walls one from the other, even in a gorge twenty five thousand feet deep? Was that canyon formed by the biggest flood in Solar System history?

00:02:43
Speaker 2: Was their life there then? Is their life there now?

00:02:48
Speaker 1: In the case of the West, in the early eighteen hundreds, 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 where their elephants unicorns are dragging 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. At the beginning of the nineteenth 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 spond 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. 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 maned John Coulter, a place where mud pots bubbled and scalding water spewed, or were absorbing the story of Hue Glasses mauling by a giant bear down on the southwestern frontier, there was another story remarkable enough to rival those. In the years between eighteen ten and eighteen thirty five, versions of it circulated through the saloons of towns like Natchez, New Orleans, and Nacotish in Louisiana, and San Antonio and Austin in Texas. Culture’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 eighteen hundreds, but in the West, by then the story was almost forgotten. John Coulture and Hugh Glass, like so many other Americans heading into the West, launched from Saint Louis and traveled up the Missouri River. The counterpart to Saint Louis on the southern plains was the old French city of Nacotish in Louisiana, founded in seventeen fourteen and the last outposts of supply on the River, a watercourse 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 up river. Like the Mandans and the Aricaras on the Missouri, the Wichitas had built fixed towns as far up the Red as farming was possible. Catto and speakers related to the Pawnees and sometimes called by that name, The Wichitas freely welcomed traders and explorers, as did the nomadic Comanchee 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. As I described in the last episode of the American West. Thomas Jefferson’s eighteen oh six 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, words 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 eighteen o six and seven, Spanish and American armies actually circled one another west of Nacolush 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 planes. By the first decade of the eighteen hundreds, the American foot was in the door to the southwest, and it was still pushing, led by their point man in Nacodish doctor John Sibley, a new Englander. President Jefferson appointed Indian agent for the region in eighteen oh five. 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 Nakotish instead. Sibley’s invitation produced two great councils in Nacodish with the tribes of the Southern Plains in the year eighteen oh seven, feasts and gift giving kept by forty seven year old Sibley, wrapping himself in an American flag before the assembled throng, then wrap the same flag around high ranking warriors from the western tribes.

00:09:05
Speaker 2: Sibley told the tribes.

00:09:07
Speaker 1: That the Americans were natives of the same land you are, in other words, white Indians. For their part, the Comanches claim 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 Nakotis to trade, they averred, was too inconvenient. So Sibley promised that if they would spurn the Spanish and fly US 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 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.

00:10:09
Speaker 2: Within a few weeks of these.

00:10:10
Speaker 1: 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 thirty five 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. 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. Early in eighteen o eight, 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 two thousand dollars 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. 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 seventeen nineties, Americans like Philip Nolan had been driving herds of wild horses that had 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 medals, even of golden cities. In the fifteen thirties, the shipwrecked spaniard Cabeza Devaca 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. A few years after that, having failed to find cities of gold among the Zunis and Pueblo people, Francisco Coronado and fifty of his men travel led most of the way across the southern plains because a clever and manipulative native informant told them that in Quaverra, the Wichita country, the Indian leaders wore bracelets of metal. Carnado interpreted that to mean silver or gold, until in Quavera 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 seventeen seventies they were actually joined by a fresh version, this time from a source that seemed unusually reliable.

00:13:40
Speaker 2: Word went out that the.

00:13:41
Speaker 1: Highly experienced French trader from Nacanus Athena’s day Messiree had returned from a foray up the Red River in seventeen seventy two with an account of widespread Indian excitement over what the frenchman heard was a giant mass of silvery metal out on the disc planes. This mystery was apparently located somewhere on the Comancheria 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. Perhaps these stories were just misunderstood exaggerations, like those of Cabeza, Devaka or Coronado. But maybe there was something truly valuable out there in the vast distances towards the sunset at the Grand councils in eighteen oh seven. Sibley had naturally inquired what the Indians knew of such stories. One of the Comanche headman, 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 or plenty. It’s difficult now to know exactly what Sibilan or Anthony Glass believed a journey to the interior might ultimately reveal in the West, but at the time Orleans Territorial Governor William Clayburn was highly suspicious Sibley, the governor claimed, accurately, was supplying Glass with US flags to carry to Indians whom the Spanish government believed.

00:15:20
Speaker 2: To be their subjects. With respect to Glass, who had.

00:15:24
Speaker 1: Decided to outfit himself with a military jacket and dress sword, Clayburn heard that Sibley was now referring to the hardware store owner as Captain Glass. 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 Clayburn further argued to Washington that while Glass portrayed himself as a horse trader. The Glasses party 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 eighteen oh eight departure up the Red River, he intended to trade. His outfit included sixteen pack horses to ferry that two thousand dollars in trade goods, along with a remuda of thirty two additional mounts. His party was hardly an invading army. There were only eleven of them. Among them were three pass veterans of the Red River trade, a mixed blood interpreter Joseph Lucas whose Indian name was Tallapoon, and a pair of horse traders named John Davis and William Alexander, who had been among the Wichitas and Comanches two years earlier.

00:16:40
Speaker 2: The party also.

00:16:41
Speaker 1: 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 root Glass plan involved an eastern detour around the Great Raft, the enormous log jam that blocked the Red River above Nakaish, 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.

00:17:17
Speaker 2: To the Wichita towns far up river.

00:17:21
Speaker 1: Once Stead looped the Great Raft, their course would be northwesterly, not intersecting the Red River itself again until they were nearly to the Wichita villages. 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 in others experience 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 of travelers into the unknown. Like most people who journeyed across the West in those days, Glasses 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 Kashata village on the Red and with a party of Catto 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 pinewood 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 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 glasses. Party crossed to the north side of the Red River on August eighth. He found the country remarkably pleasant, as he said, with herds of bison in sight everywhere. They looked, deer as tame as domestic stop since no one bothered to hunt them, and the Wichita towns now only fifty miles up River. Three days later, a large party of well mounted Indians escorted the Americans into their villages. A trio of town’s 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. Like the Mandans and Ricaras 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 waha Kai or great bear, who struck Glass as about fifty years old. When Glass delivered his speech to the assembled tribe extolling American friendship, it was clear Awa was the first personality among them, as responsible as Sibley for making glasses 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. 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, all lies 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 o Sages were well supplied with guns from American traders out of Saint Louis, but when the Wichitas pursued the raiders, only a third of the Wichita party could muster firearms of any kind. In the weeks just before the Americans had arrived, Glass learned the Osages had made off with five hundred Wichita horses in broad daylight. The raiders were so well armed the Witchitals had merely watched in sullen silence, unable to raise any resistance.

00:22:41
Speaker 2: To the outrage.

00:22:45
Speaker 1: 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 Wichitas, specifically with an Indian couple, a highly distinguished warrior named Tatsuk, 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 Wichitas 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 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 eighteenth and nineteenth, he confided in his journal that he had been informed of a remarkable piece of metal some days journey distant to the southward on the waters of River Brazos.

00:24:22
Speaker 2: Later, he wrote, hearing more of.

00:24:24
Speaker 1: This singular metal, to which they attributed singular virtues and curing diseases, I resolved to obtain permission to see it if I could, and proposed to them to go with me. 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 wichitas Glass approached with his hope to see the object very likely the headman Awagkai, 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. Two weeks later, on October of eighteen oh eight, Glass and a party of Wichita’s that included his new friend Tatasuk, the grand chief Owa Kai, 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.

00:25:48
Speaker 2: Tatasuk told him they would.

00:25:49
Speaker 1: 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. Leaders objected the mystery, after all, was on their land. After some altercation, Glass wrote, 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 Wichitas. 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. Here is how Glass described the remarkable events that culminated on October fourteenth, eighteen oh eight. 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.

00:27:16
Speaker 2: At the center of the.

00:27:17
Speaker 1: Pipes, beads, and bags of pollen, their eyes fell on a dimpled, blackish metal object 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 arrowpoints 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, which meant it could not be a giant nugget of silver.

00:28:12
Speaker 2: But what then? In wonder?

00:28:15
Speaker 1: Glass contrived to file off some samples. Then their vast party rode away, leaving the object to its splendid isolation. The stories of Anthony Glass and of this baffling Western mystery began to unwine from one another at this point. Except for his interpreter and the teenager Peter Young, the rest of glasses 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 the Comanche bands along the Colorado River of Texas. By the first of eighteen oh nine, he had turned back towards the wichitav 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. By late February he was back in the Wichita towns, and on March the twenty first, he Lucas and Young finally set out for Nacolus with their horse herd. They arrived in May to discover that their adventures had inflamed the whole frontier. Doctor 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 residents 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 thousands of pounds weight. A singular kind of mineral and 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, and 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 quick silver color. If it is not platina or platinum.

00:30:31
Speaker 2: I do not know what it is.

00:30:34
Speaker 1: Simply had sent a sample to Philadelphia to be essayed.

00:30:38
Speaker 2: He wrote.

00:30:39
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, what he had heard might be one hundred thousand pounds of it, yet lay out on the distant prairie, a giant nugget of platinum. That was the consensus, and not just among the frontier traders. Even Sibly, 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 planes 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 Nakelash and led by George Shamp and William Alexander, included 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 doctor Sibley. They set out in the early summer of eighteen oh nine. The other party, led by another Glass party man John David, 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, who soon enough appeared with the Wichita and Comanche owners, with whom they had apparently struck a trade deal. The Shamp 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 Nacolush. The field had become even more crowded, though, word reached them that a fifty two men 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 planes behind them, Shamp’s party made it to the Red Fashioned a barge and headed downriver.

00:32:59
Speaker 2: They and their arrived to wild.

00:33:01
Speaker 1: Excitement in Nacotish on June fourth of eighteen ten. For nearly a year, the mysterious object resided in Nacotish, while various would be investors offered varying sums to buy the shares from the retrieving party. In eighteen eleven, Sibley and others arranged to boat the baffling object to New Orleans, accompanied by two members of the shamp 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 medal had assayed as some kind of alloyed iron. After all their effort and all the excitement, the object had no value. Of course, an essay 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, and 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 eighteen oh three, residents of the village of Le Guel, France, had reported that during a night of flying stars, stones had rained from the sky onto their town. Four years later, a Yale professor named Benjamin Sillimon happened to be on hand to see a similar shower of debris from the heavens near western Connecticut. Sillimon 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, he now believed such objects were related to shooting stars or meteors. However, by eighteen oh eight, scientists were writing in American journals and using the term meteorites to refer to debris from the sky, gaining access to the metallic mass. In eighteen fourteen, a newly aware professor Sillimon 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 one thousand, six hundred and thirty five pound mass became the prize meteorite and the largest in the world for most of the nineteenth century. In an effort to recreate its discovery in the eighteen twenties, Silimon interviewed doctor Sibley and Nacadish and prevailed on him to send along a copy of Glasses Journal with the first description anyone had written of this mystery.

00:36:15
Speaker 2: From the West.

00:36:18
Speaker 1: 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 Nacotish when Sibley delivered the bad news, and Darby.

00:36:32
Speaker 2: Spoke to two of them.

00:36:34
Speaker 1: They were convinced they had been swindled. In Darby’s opinion, the persons engaged were in general too ignorant to understand the decisive results of such tests and unwilling to abandon a pleasing delusion.

00:36:49
Speaker 2: The result was.

00:36:50
Speaker 1: That, for at least the next two decades, accounts of silver and platina out on the plains became an unending frontier conversation.

00:37:00
Speaker 2: In the Southwest.

00:37:02
Speaker 1: Ordinary history has preserved those conversations, primarily in the form of the lost silver Mine of Alamo casualty Jim Bowie.

00:37:14
Speaker 2: As for the.

00:37:14
Speaker 1: 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 sent something profound about it. Among our current hypotheses for how life arose on Earth, one with a strong following involves meteorites. 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 our NA 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.

00:38:53
Speaker 3: Dan.

00:38:54
Speaker 2: A thing you mentioned.

00:38:56
Speaker 4: Is what’s the name of the canyon on Mars, the v a Ma nears, 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 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 shore line.

00:39:21
Speaker 2: Looking out in the.

00:39:23
Speaker 4: 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 right, and which you can. You know, you can kind of demonstrate with certain objects where the curvature of the Earth gets in the way.

00:39:36
Speaker 2: Even if you can see island sometimes can appear out of the water.

00:39:40
Speaker 4: Even if you could see infinity, you still wouldn’t see the other continent 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 be the same as standing on the continental shelf. Yeah, and you might see the other side.

00:40:06
Speaker 2: You couldn’t see that.

00:40:07
Speaker 4: I had to keep like think about that being like, oh, yeah, that’s a great point.

00:40:12
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:40:12
Speaker 1: 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 Solar System, and you know, 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 eighteen hundred. But one of the mysteries about this valum Mariner’s Canyon, which is this gigantic canyon twenty five thousand feet deep.

00:40:51
Speaker 2: Is that Mars is so small that the question is whether.

00:40:56
Speaker 1: 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.

00:41:14
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, you have flat earthers if you had flat Mars ors that get there and they’d be like, ah, there.

00:41:19
Speaker 2: It is, I knew it. It does end.

00:41:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it’s 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 fifty or sixty years, once we have drones flying around Mars. And it’s to me kind of analogous to some of the things that people were wondering about with respect to the West in eighteen hundred.

00:41:46
Speaker 2: What’s out there and.

00:41:48
Speaker 1: 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.

00:41:58
Speaker 4: And I thought it was a great parallel Yeah, well, yeah, like our questions about our questions about Mars being a great parallel to and then plus all the fantastical ideas people.

00:42:08
Speaker 1: Had, Yeah, they had a lot of fantastical ideas, and you know, and the one 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 Culter’s Hell, where John Coulter comes back after Lewis and Clark expedition and goes into what is present day Wyoming in 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. 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 long standing myth of the Southwest harboring all kinds of precious metals that you know, had sent everybody from Cobza, well not Cobza to Vaca really because he sort of starts the whole idea of there being precious metals in the in the West. But uh, certainly Coronado. Coronado’s expedition was all about the idea that, uh, just as in Mexico and in Peru, probably the American Southwest held untold, unfathomable riches. And that’s sort of the kind of genre that this particular story plays in.

00:43:41
Speaker 5: I think, Dan, when I read this, the comparison to Mars and the the Canyon, it triggered for me a memory of house sitting for you one summer in the Bitter Root, and I went into the shed where he kept the batteries for 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’s no other context and Sydney. It’s been a while trying to figure out why that was there, but.

00:44:24
Speaker 2: It was a place to put it.

00:44:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, in the Solar But I the next thought I had was.

00:44:34
Speaker 5: Like, you have a special fascination with outer space, and there are all these parallels and pop cultures.

00:44:40
Speaker 3: I didn’t.

00:44:43
Speaker 5: I just remember talking about when the movie John Carter from Mars came out. You were excited for that because it was vastly disappointed, vastly disappointed. But like all this early sci fi culture drew so strongly on the parallel to the West. And yeah, I don’t know if you can expand on that, but I mean it’s sort of an under It’s one of those things where when you take a step back and re examine what you know, it makes sense, and you see these parallels clearly, but it’s something that didn’t really occur to me naturally.

00:45:18
Speaker 2: Well.

00:45:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I have always probably been fascinated with.

00:45:24
Speaker 2: Space and space.

00:45:25
Speaker 1: Expiration, probably because I was one of the Star Trek kids in the sixties. I mean I was probably sixteen 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 space.

00:45:42
Speaker 2: But it also does have.

00:45:43
Speaker 1: A space expiration and Western exploration, to me, are pretty strong analogs 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 Africa and went to the Middle East, and went to Europe and went to Asia and finally found the America’s 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.

00:46:24
Speaker 2: I’m not alone in that.

00:46:25
Speaker 1: 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, and John Boone has this wonderful experience of getting to go out in 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 mine expanse 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’s the story goes. And I tried deliberately not to reveal what this object was out there until we get to the end 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.

00:47:41
Speaker 2: With with space, Yeah.

00:47:43
Speaker 1: I clearly, you know, was willing to invoke Mars and the and the giant canyon on Mars.

00:47:51
Speaker 4: You know what, when you when you read about you mentioned Coronado, and you read about coronat Or and you get this sense of I use the word fantastical or like they have these it seems like they’re driven by these like overblown expectations, cities of gold and all this. But if you look at like what they were able to sack from the Aztecs, I mean, was it overblown jonesy? 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.

00:48:28
Speaker 1: It was staggering wealth in fact, So the combination of the sacking of the Assec Empire and the destruction of the Incas in Peru produced two hundred times over the amount of gold and silver that had ever been known in the Old world. 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 Spain and these Spanish explorers like Carnado or so convinced that farther north there’s going to be another one of these grand discoveries.

00:49:06
Speaker 4: Because you look at him and party wants to be like you idiots.

00:49:10
Speaker 2: But then on their head they’re like, well, look, yeah, look what happened.

00:49:13
Speaker 4: Yeah, so two hundred times more, two.

00:49:15
Speaker 1: Hundred times the amount of gold and silver that had existed in the Old world came out of those mines and in the New world. And so it was yeah, it was Yeah, it was a spectacular discovery. And so that’s one of the reasons you can look at someone like Carnado 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 Zooni. 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 Cornado takes fifty of his men and strikes out from New Mexico across the plains and travels all the way into present day Kansas on the Arkansas River and finds this country Quaverra, which is the country of the Wichita Indians when they were living up on the Arkansas and as I say in the Peace, 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 the story, and that’s kind of what propels the primary story in this piece, is that there is something. It’s just when you see it through the eyes of expectation, you’re very likely going to be disappointed. As these traders from Louisiana and Missus Zippy who go to this tremendous effort to haul back this object from the Southern pliance had up being they’re disappointed.

00:51:07
Speaker 2: Ultimately it doesn’t pay off.

00:51:09
Speaker 5: For one of the people that you write about in this in this piece is I think George Sibley, John Sibley, Doctor John’s. Yeah, the Indian agent. And that’s a term that you see again and again in accounts from the nineteenth nineteenth century, you know, US West history, and 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 food stuffs and resources, especially as the reservation.

00:51:58
Speaker 4: You’re sometimes sometimes an exploiter and.

00:52:01
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, exactly, I mean tremendously powerful people.

00:52:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were tremendously powerful. And doctor 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 acting in effect, the Indian agent’s role is to act as kind of a diplomatic go between between the government in Washington and the native people themselves. 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 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 in the West. And the reason Sibley becomes important is because he’s the Indian agent of a part of the West in the early nineteenth century 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 that got turned around by Spain, that’s the milieu in 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 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 from Spanish 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 Wichitas or the Comanches, will take down the Spanish flags flying over your villages and run American flags United States flags up your flag poles, 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 simply says something like whoever offers Indians the best trade can always control their politics. What we’re going to 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 agriculturists and not hunters, and as Americans, we’re going to offer you guns and ammunition. We’re going to 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 Wichitas and the Comanches with the promise that I mean, what the traders are going for is they’re bringing back horses that they’ve traded for, plus whatever the strange object is that everybody has heard rumors about, and the other aspect of courses, they’re going to trade them guns. And I tried in that story to explain why the Wichitas and Commanches in particular desirous of having firearms, because they’ve got an enemy, the O Sages, who are well armed from their trading partners in Saint Louis, and the O Sages are attempting to block Saint Louis traders from getting out to the which Taws and the Comanches so that they can when they want to as they do three times while Glasses with them, this trader, Anthony Glasses living in the Witchdov villages. Three times you O Sage is right in and just steal half the horse herds that the Wichitas have and sort of, you know, wave somen of a bitch at them as they’re riding away because they know that these Indians out on the deep planes aren’t well armed.

00:57:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, a good parallel would be us today, you know, saying to Iran, like, we don’t want you to have that.

00:57:37
Speaker 4: Well, we’re going to block other people from Britain to you. That’s exactly the technologies that we have that we’d rather.

00:57:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, we don’t want you to have that. And here somebody else pops up and says, oh we’ll trade it. Yeah, well we’ll absolutely supply you.

00:57:55
Speaker 1: And so that’s what the United States, that’s what JEFFERSONI and Indian policy must of it was about during 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 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 thirty or forty 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 oar. We’ve been hearing about in the Southwest for decades and decades and decades. And they go out and somehow Glass is able to persuade the Wichitas and the Comanches, probably with promises of trade of guns and so forth, to take him to see this object. And he’s they’re the first white people to ever see it. The Indians had never let any other white people see it before.

00:58:59
Speaker 4: Well, Dan things, the insights man, Yeah, you bet, we should probably say or should we tell people, well, they’re going to hear.

00:59:06
Speaker 1: What this object is. But of course what the what the object is is it’s the largest meteorite iron nickel meteorite discovered in the world in the nineteenth century. And these guys, these traders, hauled back to civilization thinking it is a gigantic nugget of platinum.

00:59:30
Speaker 4: With a lot of exertion, but a lot of exertion. Ye