Ep. 10: Start of the Endgame for the Ancient West

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Following the arrival of the global market economy in the West in the early eighteen hundreds, important elements of the biodiversity preserved by thousands of years of native management collapsed in little more than three decades with exploitation of animals that snared Native people, working class Americans, and produced the country’s first millionaires. I’m Dan Florries, and this is the American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer just in time for the season that calls us home. A portion of every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters and wildlife enjoy responsibly start of the endgame for the ancient West. In the year nineteen sixty seven, a famed American painter named Thomas Hart Benton laid down on canvas perhaps the most poignant painting about the trajectory of the nineteenth century American West any Western artist has produced. Benton based Lewis and Clark at Eagle Creek on an eighteen oh five account in the Explorer’s Journals, and in a further nine to reality on an actual place. The painting dramatically captures all the hues and lines and rhythms of the white cliffs of today’s Upper Missouri River breaks National Monument. But what makes Benton’s canvas one of the West’s great paintings is not his use of explorer journals or his abstract rendering of a well known Western locale. Instead, it’s the story the painting tells.

00:01:59
Speaker 2: In Lewis and.

00:02:00
Speaker 1: Clark at Eagle Creek, the west of the previous ten thousand years yet exists, and it looms over the arriving Americans who appear a minor blip in the timeline of a world that’s impossibly ancient. That sense of a timelessness, carried by a sensuous river amid the forms and colors of immense space, dwarf any foreboding about the old world. Having discovered this remote interior piece of the continent. Now let the mind leap a quarter century ahead in time from Lewis and Clark. When the decade of the eighteen thirties dawns, A calm, confident American West has somehow contracted, in both size and grand promise, the Western world that had Lewis and Clark marveling, built by one hundred centuries of native inhabitation and a magnificent diversity and abundance of wild animals had been intact when the explorers past Eagle Creek. But the eighteen thirties is the decade when any resistance to high speed change becomes forever futile. For the West, vastness and abundance were both shrinking. As the fame Maximilian Bodmer expedition on the Missouri River documented so well, the bigger world was beginning to rush. In history doesn’t remain in the past, so it’s not a special insight to realize that no time exists apart from what went before or after human cause. Climate change hasn’t popped into existence in our twenty first century with no advanced warning, and what we do about it or don’t do, will likely affect us and the planet for centuries to come. Still, there are decades in the human story, the nineteen sixties, for instance, when civil rights of all kinds, ecological concerns, and a growing mistrust of war that do stand as exceptional for North America west of the Mississippi River, and especially for the region’s environmental story. The long eighteen thirties decade, which in truth spanned the years from the eighteen twenties through the early eighteen forties was one of those exceptional and memorable times. With his arrival, a West that had been relatively quiescent for thousands of years was morphing into something new so rapidly it shocked many who witnessed it. Stories about the West, as we know have long dazzled world, from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West of more than a century ago to today’s Yellowstone The West stories fascinate because they offer up an endemic world to human design, despite our lingering romance for eighteen thirties accounts of mountain men are the overlanders on the Oregon Trail. However, the West ecological stories have never made much of a dent in our historical memory of the region and its frontier. Nonetheless, much of what happened in the Classic West actually centered around an extensive ecological destruction of the West, Lewis and Clark saw. The truth is that stories like the ones that follow in this episode were central to Western history and to the freedom of action we intitively associate with it. To my mind, stories like this reveal important things that romance about a kick Carson or a Narcissa Whitman obscures from the big picture in roughly chronological order. Then consider how these stories about Western ecologies offer a different way to see the West in the early nineteenth century. At the start of the eighteen thirty decade, the prevailing notion about the West had been captured by the American Exploring expedition led by Stephen Long, which in eighteen nineteen and eighteen twenty had crossed the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Intriguingly, Long’s party was convinced that the ancient quiescent world that scene was still the best future for the West. The region they explored was almost wholly unfit for cultivation, they claimed, and peculiarly adapted as arranged for Buffalo’s wild goats and other wild game and incalculable multitudes. Thus, the West was best left as a frontier, which by no means implied, however, that they believed the West should be left untouched or to the native people or Spanish settlers. That was because the American idea of a frontier rested on the recent history of the Atlantic seaboard, the South and the Mississippi valley. All these had initially functioned as wild lands exploited for their animal.

00:06:55
Speaker 2: Wealth four centuries ago.

00:06:59
Speaker 1: Religion was the ultimate explanation of all things for almost all humans. Like Native peoples, Europeans in America generally understood animals in supernatural terms, but for Europeans the terms were their own. Our colonial ancestors most certainly didn’t regard animals.

00:07:19
Speaker 2: As close kin the way native people did.

00:07:22
Speaker 1: For them, only humans were godlike and exceptional.

00:07:26
Speaker 2: But European religions did.

00:07:28
Speaker 1: Argue that all animals had a divine origin, which meant they had existed unchanged since their moment of creation. That meant that no animal species had ever disappeared in the past, nor could any species ever.

00:07:42
Speaker 2: Disappear now or in the future.

00:07:45
Speaker 1: Extinction, in other words, was impossible in a divinely created world. The Bible was the primary source for settler ideas about the animals they found in America, but European views about animals actually went back farther into.

00:08:00
Speaker 2: Old World history.

00:08:02
Speaker 1: It’s hard to say just how far back. The Greeks are an obvious reference, but it’s difficult not to suspect that much of Greek knowledge may have come from preliterate times. Plato and Aristotle likely were codifying into written form ideas that many generations of earlier Eurasians had thought.

00:08:22
Speaker 2: First.

00:08:25
Speaker 1: Plato and Aristotle began with an essential premise, though there must be a deity, an invisible reality now missing in action, who had created the earth and everything on it. Plato investigated a critical distinction in this idea, that humans were earthy and animal like, but clearly separate from other animals. The explanation for that separation must lie in a difference between us and them Ergo, an invisible and individual spirit in humans that permitted us a connection to the des looking at the orderliness and beauty around him. Aristotle’s contribution was to sketch out that order into one of the most important intellectual ideas in Western thought. He called it the Great Chain of Being, with all divinely created life occupying descending links in the chain arranged in descending order of perfection. Perfection translated into how useful a particular species was to humans. You can say that for two thousand years in.

00:09:32
Speaker 2: One part of the Earth at least, this.

00:09:35
Speaker 1: Became a deeply internalized imagining of how the world worked. It was a big reassuring idea. The vast majority of Europeans who migrated to the Americas in the sixteen hundreds brought with them a Middle Eastern herding culture’s book, the Bible, that answered any questions they had about their proper relationship with animals. At the beginning of the Old Testament, Genesis one twenty eight, God gives Adam on behalf of humanity, dominion over everything that lives. In Genesis nine two and three, the Sacred Book goes on to say, the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beasts of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air. Into your hand are they delivered. The next line, every moving thing that liveth shall be meet for you was the Judaeo Christian stamp of approval on self interested human use of animals. Genesis one twenty seven clarified things even further. God had made humans and no other creatures on earth in his own image, giving humans something that set us apart from all the rest of creation, an immortal soul that promised life after death. It was an easy mitelection size, then, for Europeans to settle on the soul as the possession that made for human exceptionalism.

00:11:08
Speaker 2: There was also.

00:11:09
Speaker 1: Something else new in the West, an argument for self interest whose British author Adam Smith had presented to the world the very year the US was born, seventeen seventy six. Smith’s argument for capitalism rested atop a colonial economic system evolving into what we now call the global market. So by the early eighteen hundreds, the West’s soulless wild animals were now in the sights of an economic system that for two hundred years had been converting American animals into market commodities. In this system, ancient ecological relationships had no meaning. Animals had no meaning beyond satisfying the desires of people who killed them and others who made animal skins into leather or use fur or tea their claws to make statements about human fashions or status among peers. This was an economy that made some who dealt in wild animals very wealthy, our first millionaires. It also supported a colonial working class. Some of those workers the new Americans, but many of them natives who often did very well for themselves killing animals for the trade. The West turn in this system was now under way, and one of the places it hit early was along the Pacific coasts. Here sea otters and fur seals were attracting a frenzied exploitation by the fur hunters of the US and several European nations. Another was along interior rivers like the Missouri and Arkansas, where beavers and many other species of fur bearers were becoming the targets as agents of the American Fur Company, the Missouri Fur Company and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company established trading and rendezvous fairs.

00:13:02
Speaker 2: The global market.

00:13:03
Speaker 1: Economy had long offered America’s native people a metalware firearm technology that transformed their cultures if they would participate in it. Despite warnings from some of their religious leaders, most native people found it impossible to.

00:13:20
Speaker 2: Resist this new wave.

00:13:22
Speaker 1: If you did, you profoundly disadvantaged yourself among other tribes that did create market ties. This wholesale change in the world was now come to the West, and the region quickly became a different place. A level of exploitation that hadn’t happened in ten thousand years was at hand, and it would not be pretty. When Lewis and Clark spent their winter at the mouth of the Columbia River, the global economy’s unquenchable appetite for America’s animals was already a presence on the Pacific coast. The prize the Pacific beaver was the sea otter. Otters frequented the shorelines from Japan to the Aleutians and down the Pacific coast to Baja California in numbers that seemed large, although there were probably fewer than three hundred thousand across their range. As ships from Boston and New York began showing up on the West coast, words spread among satyrs of several nations that prime sea otter pelts had sold for one hundred and twenty dollars apiece in China. One American trader said the fur of the sea otter was so luxurious in the hand two point six million hairs per square inch, that accepting a beautiful woman and a lovely infant, it.

00:14:50
Speaker 2: Was the most extraordinary thing on earth.

00:14:53
Speaker 1: Like humans, like wolves, sea otters are keystone carnivores. Ancient eCos systems had formed around sea otter predation, and so long as the six foot long otters were present, the ecosystems held together and possibly appealing, these one hundred pound members of the family Mastilla day, which includes wolverines, badgers, and weasels, evolved as hunters of fish and sea urchins in shallow shoreline celt beds. Otters kept those kelp forests healthy by devouring as many as one thousand sea urchins a day. Just as we are, sea otters are tool users. At some point in their evolution, otters developed a culture utilizing rocks of a certain size and shape to break open the shells of their prey. There were even variations handed down among regional populations, some otters making do with a single rock, others using two at once.

00:15:56
Speaker 2: Tools were critical.

00:15:58
Speaker 1: As hunters of cold position shorelines, sea otters need to consume as much as twenty five percent of their weight in food daily to stay warm. Important to what befell them is that they do not become sexually mature until they are several years old, bear only a single pop at a time, and sometimes spend a year without producing offspring. In prime feeding grounds, undisturbed otter colonies can increase their numbers by twenty percent a year no more. By the turn of the nineteenth century, they were undergoing an extreme disturbance. In seventeen seventy eight, the global traveler English explorer James Cook sail the shores of Oregon and Washington to Vancouver Island, finding Native peoples who rush to his ships with otter skins, hoping to trade for any kind of metal, even nails. The next year, after Pacific Islanders killed Cook in a shallow bay of the Big Eye in Hawaii, his men sold twenty of those pelts for forty dollars apiece in Canton, China. That wasn’t one hundred and twenty dollars, but it was good enough. The American Robert Gray happened on the mouth of the Columbia River and traded for otter and seal furs up and down the West Coast. The very next year. After circumnavigating the planet, Gray would return to Boston in seventeen ninety, having sold his hall in China for an astonishing twenty one thousand dollars the equivalent of seven hundred and twenty five thousand dollars today. At that point, the Great Otter First Seal Rush was on a destruction of nature, contemplated today with profound unease, although it was clearly conducted without any sentiment whatsoever at the time, it took the Russian Garrisene privle Off just two years seventeen eighty six and seventeen eighty seven to kill seven thousand otters and obliterate every last one on the islands now named for him. That was made possible by biological first contact. Most otters and fur seals had never seen a human before. They were trusting and tame, and with no empathy for living creatures. The hunters violated their innocence when Russia’s professional fur hunters, the pro Mishlniki, descended on America in the wake of these reports, they added the next horrifying step, the force conscription of the Alutes and other native peoples into an animal killing labor force, as had happened in the East. On the mainland, a lucrative exchange of furs for metal technology could seduce native people into killing animals for the market, but Russian traders lacked goods of sufficient quality to pull that off, so they resorted to subterfuge, sometimes kidnapping family members to force native men to pursue otters for them. If in eighteen hundred, naturalists or American presidents doubted extinction was possible by eighteen twenty, the fallacy of that position was becoming all too clear, first in the East and the south, now on the Pacific coast. North America was losing its animals at a frightening rate. Hunters from several nations wiped out otter and fursial colonies with a speed no one could hold in the mind. Demand in China seemed insatiable, and while otters lasted, American ship captains unloading twenty thousand skins a year there in search of laborers to harvest the otters farther south. In eighteen twelve, American ship captains invited Alexander Baranoff of the Russian American Company to send allut hunters down the California coast, with Americans hauling the take to China and splitting the profits with the Russian trappers. In the the next act, Yankee sealers slaughtered more than seventy three thousand fur seals on the Farallone Islands off San Francisco Bay. That got their Russians attention and led them to establish their famous trading posts and fort at Bodega Bay, from which their conscripted native laborers killed eighty thousand animals in just one season, but the seals were so tame and numerous that no native labor force proved really necessary. Using clubs or knives, European and American seal hunters murdered the animals themselves, stripped off the pelts, and left the discarded carcasses to seabirds, condors, coyotes, and bears, then sold the pelts for a dollar apiece in China, less desirable and more numerous than otters. First seals lasted along the Pacific coasts into the eighteen forties, but otters were so pursued and their colonies so stated that by the eighteen twenties there weren’t enough left for hunters to justify chasing down the final few, and that saved them. One of gorg Steller’s few discoveries, the Pleistocene giant, now known as the Stellar’s sea cow, had the unhappy distinction of being the first of these specific creatures the hunters pushed into total extinction. Sea cows were gone by seventeen sixty eight, and if the agents of the market could easily have located them, their other targets would have followed suit. But tiny remnants of otters and fur seals at least remained alive in a few hidden inconvenient spots the hunters missed. Now that same pattern rooted in our predatory evolution and released afresh by market self interest was about to play out.

00:21:56
Speaker 2: In the Inland West.

00:22:06
Speaker 1: Like most of us, I live in the valley of a river. It’s called the Rio Galisteo, a stream that runs sometimes and seeps into the sands most of the time, just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Galisteo is no grand water course, but it does string a cottonwood corridor through the high desert, and the celebrated American naturalist Aldo Leopold once used it as an example of how waterways were ruined when Europeans brought their domestic stock to the West. Leopold told the story of a drunken immigrant who in eighteen forty nine was able to walk across the Rio Galistaeo successfully on a twenty foot board plank. Yet in the twentieth century, he wrote, the Galisteo had sliced its stream bed into so many eroded gullies known as a royos, that a drunk wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance of making the far bank. In many places, a twentieth century plank across the Rio Galisteo would have to span two hundred and fifty feet of torn up stream bed. I’ve little doubt the cow and the sheep made their contribution to this ecological set piece. But I also know the nationalists arrived too late in New Mexico to see what else had happened here.

00:23:27
Speaker 2: In an earlier time.

00:23:29
Speaker 1: Heading on the flanks of Thompson Peak in the Southern Rockies, the Galistaalo was one of the streams the Western trappers we call mountain men, pit clean of beavers in the eighteen twenties. Drawn to the southern Mountains in the wake of Mexico’s success throwing off Spanish rule, then the Republic of Mexico’s opening of the Southwest to outside trade. Trappers from the States began to operate out of Santa Fe and Taos shortly after eighteen twenty one. They fanned out across the mountains all the way to the high parks of Colorado, and they made astonishingly quick work of every beaver colony they could find. One party of trappers cashed in fifty thousand dollars in New Mexico Firs in Saint Louis in eighteen thirty one, local authorities tried to control the carnage with a law banning non resident trapping.

00:24:25
Speaker 2: The Americans ignored it.

00:24:28
Speaker 1: By eighteen thirty two, trappers were even scouring the nearby high plains in their rush to deep.

00:24:34
Speaker 2: Beaver every last trickle of water.

00:24:39
Speaker 1: Set aside for a moment, the predictability of it, all the deaths of wild animals in return for a brief few years of profits, and take the long view. As it had done in the East, Beaver removal in the West abruptly terminated millennia of hydraulic engineering. A world where beavers had turned Western rivers into ribbons of damned ponds and year round water storage now yielded to flashing runoffs that cut gullies and arroyos in places like New Mexico. Leopold may have blamed sheep and cows, but the destruction of the West beavers also appears visible on the land even two centuries later, along with the practical extinction of bison in the while the extirpation of millions of beavers in just three short decades is at least an event modern Americans recall from the West’s slaughter house century eighteen twenty to nineteen twenty. The Western beaver hunt was merely an extension of beaver mania that had gathered momentum from the time of Henry Hudson. But by the time the beaver trade moved west, the US was already giving it a peculiarly American cast. In neighboring Canada, the British Crown planned and regulated the fur trade, granting a government sanctioned monopoly to the Hudson’s Bay Company right next door to the US. This offered lessons in efficiency, decent treatment of the labor force, and even some conservation of the target animals. But back in seventeen sixty three, King George’s similar attempts to regulate wild animals in the American colonies had infuriated everyone. For Virginia and New York, the American approach to market capitalism was too freewheeling an anti regulation to be patient with a setup like Canada’s, so America went for no market planning beyond the natural laws of Adam Smith capitalism. In that clear space, the country’s first big business enterprise, immigrant John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company made a heroic effort to dominate the fur trade by out competing everyone else. The son of a butcher in the German town of Waldorf, Johann Jacob, arrived in America in seventeen eighty three, after first spending a stretch in London mastering English. In eighteen oh eight, Astre founded the American Fur Company and began his quest to control the fur market. He built and supplied trading posts, first in the Great Lakes Country, then in the West. Vying with Astro’s behemoth was a myriad of small private enterprises. They were eager and could wreak havoc on animals, but weren’t always professionally run. One of the most notable was Manuel Lisa’s Missouri Fur Company. The Wilderness trading post that Lisa pioneered in the Missouri River country as early as eighteen o eight were the walmarts and targets of their day. They provided the native labor force, handy box stores for European technology, as well as warehouses for the gathered firs. River barges ferried the body parts from Beaver’s River otters and muskrats down river to state side markets. After Astro’s wildly ambitious attempt to monopolize the Pacific coast trade collapsed, the British seized his Astoria post at the mouth of the Columbia In the War of eighteen twelve. The American Fur Company refocused on the interior West. Soon enough, it put its chips on a new technological innovation, the steamboat, which could haul more trade goods up river, as well as heavy quantities of firs now including even bulky bison robes, back to civilization where demand seemed insatiable. Astor’s corporate design even extended to healthcare for his labor force, since Indian trade partners laid low by disease would never be able to generate profitable product. In the eighteen thirties, Asture called on the government’s brand new Bureau of Indian Affairs to vaccinate native people against smallpox. Tragically, the eighteen thirties was too late. One of Asher’s steamboats making an annual supply run in eighteen thirty seven, the Saint Peter’s discovered on the way upriver that it had passengers falling ill with the dreaded pox. Instead of doing the moral thing and turning back to Saint Louis. The Saint Peter’s continued its run, attempting to mitigate the danger by warning Native people at every stop that a contagious disease was on board. The Aricaras and Mandans were unimpressed. The Ascentiboiins thought the announcement a hoax to preserve trade goods for someone else.

00:29:50
Speaker 2: The Blackfeet had.

00:29:51
Speaker 1: Always refused to kill beaver’s for the whites because beaver with a capital B was one of their deities. Plus they valued beaver ponds as critical sources of water on the dry prairie. But they compensated by killing wolves for the trade, and had plenty of wolf pelts and bison robes on hand. The Blackfeet had suffered about with smallpox in the seventeen eighties, but this band said their historians had never heard of such a disease. By the time the epidemic of eighteen thirty seven had run its course, nearly twenty thousand Missouri River Indians had died disfiguring horrible deaths. One of the most famous Indians in the West, interviewed and painted by Western travelers across the previous decade, was the mandan headman. Mototape forbears a strikingly handsome, middle aged war leader. Mototape impressed observers as free, generous, elegant, and gentlemanly in his deportment. He had survived a warrior’s life, but the invisible virus struck him down without the slightest care for his bravery or grace. Motodepey blamed the traders. I do not fear death, he is supposed to have said, but to die with my face rotten, that even the wolves will shrink with horror at seeing me. Jacob Halsey, who oversaw the American Fur Company’s Fort Union post, put the moment in terms asture in the American Fur Company could best appreciate. The losses, he wrote, would be incalculable, as our most profitable Indians have died. The most remembered part of the beaver story in the West centers on William Ashley’s and Andrew Henry’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company, whose reassessment of how to attack beavers would have won a business school’s prize for thinking outside the box, had such a prize existed. Posts and steamboats were expensive. The Blackfeet several other planes tribes refused to kill beavers because of their ecological importance. But since colonial times America had been full of men who fled towns in farms and marriages and desired nothing so much as to spend their lives camping and hunting, a life that seemed natural. So why not sidestep the Indian labor force altogether and have such men trapped for beavers and otters themselves, like Kick Carson and others were doing out of Santa Fe and Taos. They could remain in the West year round, and the new company would use overland wagons to supply them at an annual rendezvous site somewhere out west, then wagon the accumulated loop back to Saint Louis. It worked, at least it worked for a few years as long as the animals lasted. Although barely aware of it. Ashley’s and Henry’s Mountain Men became players in animal geopolitics because they could clear streams of beaver so quickly. The American trappers were endlessly pushing onto new streams farther west, which threatened British colonial claims. So in eighteen twenty four, at London’s request, the Hudson’s Bay Company sent trapping brigades into the Rockies with instructions to ruin the country to create a fur desert that would turn the Americans back for millions of years. The streams that ran snowmelt through the canyons of ranges like the Bitter Roots, the lim Hies, and the Wasatch had known beaver colonies at roughly half mile intervals, one hundred colonies dams and ponds for every fifty miles of a stream and its side creeks. But British brigade leaders Peter skeen Ogden, John Wirk and Alexander Ross, with fifteen or so trappers, plus native wives or girlfriends to do the cooking and pelt preparation, were easily up to the task of obliterating all the West Slope beavers. Ross described how his brigade of twenty with two hundred and twelve traps would scatter their sets up the length of a mountain stream in an afternoon on a typical creek in the Bitter Roots that catch ninety five beavers the following morning and another sixty that afternoon. That usually got every animal in the drainage, then on to the next canyon and repeat, especially during the spring when female beavers were pregnant or already had kits that ruined things proper. This wasn’t the all boys world of the seal otter hunt, as the women who went on these pursuits were major players, with the skills to dress pelts and keep everyone clothed and fed and pointed in the right direction. With that kind of female assistance, from eighteen twenty three to eighteen forty one, the British brigades destroyed thirty five thousand Western beavers and drained an estimated six thousand beaver ponds. By now everyone knew what the end of this looked like. There was no chance beavers and river otters could last any longer than white tailed deer had in the East. What they wouldn’t have understood, but we do, is how the extraction of sea otters and beavers was devastating finally balanced American ecologies hundreds of thousands of years old. Without otters to hold them in check, sea urching populations exploded then mowed down whole kelp forests, whose loss, in turn threatened the red algae reefs that grew those waving stands of kelp obliterating every beaver on stream after stream didn’t just deprive the native people of traditional camps, remade drainage systems all over the continent, altering growth patterns for willows and cottonwoods, destroying wetland’s favored by waterfowl, raccoons, and moose, in effect drying out America. But the stories we tell ourselves. These mountain men, with their rendezvous gatherings, combination hardware stores, and all night raves except in leather and at the foot of the Wind River mountains, became American working class heroes. Back East, Daniel Boone’s biographers had already devised a romantic take on the masculine American hunter. Now the West broadcast the Boon model as bigger than live figures Kick Carson, Jim Bridger, Buffalo Bill Cody. Literary types like James Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving became their biographers, as did Herman Melville of the whale Hunters in one of his first books, Teddy Roosevelt, playing these men were the first to become Americans. Even the historian Frederick Jackson Turner echoed that Turner’s frontier thesis made a Darwinian claim that it was wilderness life with all those dead animals that turned Europeans into Americans. These heroes out of the adventureland of early America, in fact.

00:37:21
Speaker 2: Were detached, stoic killers.

00:37:24
Speaker 1: Some of them, yes, were expected capitalists, but most were not even that they were killing animals because it was ancient human skill, and many of them were doing so because apparently they didn’t know.

00:37:35
Speaker 2: How to do much else.

00:37:37
Speaker 1: The truest, unvarnished characterization of them came from one of their own appear albeit a literary one, named George Ruxton, a British adventurer and novelists who trapped with the Mountain Men out of Taos. Ruxton knew his colleague’s first hand. They made up a genus, he said, of men dec stilled into a primitive state whose personalities assumed what he said was a most singular cast of simplicity mingled with ferocity. The Western hunters, he knew, rivaled the beasts of prey, as he put it, and destroy human as well as animal life with his little scruple, and as freely as they exposed their own. So they were brave, so it killers and true looking for animals, they examined every nook and cranny of the continent and paved the way for the settlement of the Western country. It seems to me that romance about all this is misdirected. Though the West afforded the mountain men freedom from all restraint, their response to that freedom and here I’m using Ruxton’s word, was ransacking the West of its animal life. Dan.

00:39:13
Speaker 3: In this episode, you kind of kick off what is a real dominant arc in the history of you know, sort of the long nineteenth century in the West, which is just unmitigated exploitation of all kinds of resources. And we’ve been working on, like as mentioned earlier, we’ve been working on these histories of market hunters, and it’s tough for people to wrap their minds around these individuals committing these really egregious atrocities of wildlife.

00:39:50
Speaker 4: But then.

00:39:53
Speaker 3: You know, you also have to look back at the time and consider it in context, Like they’re not that’s not what they’re trying to do. They’re doing I have a very specific purpose in mind, and that is the market requires this, the West provides it, and they’re the intermediary. I wonder how you sort of wrestle with that question or that tension in your writing about this stuff.

00:40:16
Speaker 4: Dan’s mean to those guys sometimes.

00:40:17
Speaker 3: I know, I know, I feel like you guys sit on opposite sides of that.

00:40:25
Speaker 4: Rude things about people.

00:40:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, and some of the people.

00:40:28
Speaker 1: I remember when you and I were a country bookshelf talking about while in the world, you said, you just hurt my feelings about some of these guys. Well, so here’s what I think. I think we’ve had, you know, probably quite long historiography of romance about this period of the American West.

00:40:53
Speaker 2: So what I have.

00:40:55
Speaker 1: Been attempting to do, and you know, trying not to go too overboard with it, but what I’ve been trying to do is to, for one thing, take the wildlife of the West seriously and not assume that it’s just this, you know, just commodities in fur waiting to be exploited. And so one of the things I’ve done with a lot of my work is I try to get a lot of natural history and so people can understand the lives that these animals had, wolves by some prong horns and so forth, and understand them as a legitimate part of the West. Because I think, especially in the nineteenth century, the trifecta of things that people are interested in then and now were It was the landscapes, these almost alien, arid landscapes that people coming out of Northern Europe or the East had hardly ever been exposed to. People coming out of the Mediterranean world had, but they also found the West to be a very cold place. With landscapes, they recognize. The other thing that everybody is interested in, no matter where you came from to the west was the native people who were here, and then the animals, because for one thing, the animals of the West were different from the animals that were anywhere else in the country from the East, they were different from the animals of Western Europe. There’s a lot more Asian ad mixture of creatures in the West, so these are unusual creatures that fascinate a lot of people. So I’ve tried to take the animals themselves seriously, and with the idea that we’ve had a lot of romance written about this particular time period, I have been trying to do it in a way where you where readers of my books or people who listen to this podcast are going to have the furniture in their heads rearranged a little bit and thinking about it. I mean, we’re still going to have Jim Bridger out there, as he’s going to be a Western hero. Kit Carson is going to be a hero of sorts. Those people are still going to stand as major figures in Western history. But I’ve been trying to create a kind of a look at this period of the West that gives you a slightly different angle of approach to it. And when you look at things like so, I would preface the ecological thing I’m about to say by also pointing out that the science of ecology doesn’t exist until the twentieth century, and so none of these people who, for example, are wiping out sea otters on the Pacific coast, are taking out beaver colonies all over the country understand that by doing so, they are wrecking ecologies that formed probably half a million or a million years before and have been in place for tens of thousands of years. They don’t think in ecological terms. All they’re thinking in terms of is there’s a population of sea otters out there.

00:44:07
Speaker 2: We’re going to go get them.

00:44:09
Speaker 1: And what we know since then this is one of those examples where you know, those of us down the timeline understand more about what the consequences were than they did. What we understand now is that they were wrecking ecologies that produce all kinds of alterations across the West, And as I tried to convey in writing about that little river I live on down in New Mexico, the alterations extend right down to our own time. I mean, I live on a river that because all the beavers were taken off of it in the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties. The result was that without the beaver dams and the ponds on it, that little stream eroded into crisscrossing arroyos going in every single direction. And the result today is that it’s a completely different ecology. It’s one of those One of the things, as I say quite a bit I know on this podcast, is the past doesn’t stay.

00:45:04
Speaker 2: In the past.

00:45:05
Speaker 1: It extends into the present day. And so that’s the sort of thing I’m trying to to make people understand with this.

00:45:13
Speaker 5: I only became aware recently that that people used to struggle with well, that Europeans used to struggle with the concept of extinction. That it was I don’t know who debated what side of it, but that it was actually debated could extinction be possible? Because how do you make it conform to Genesis or how do you how do you how do you conform extinction to the biblical creation story? That I know the idea that people argued about this, But what what do you see in recognizing that there were dozens or hundreds of native religions and native cultures and native systems of understanding? But do you see that native people’s had ideas of extinction?

00:46:06
Speaker 4: Do? I mean, like, did they get it?

00:46:10
Speaker 2: Well?

00:46:10
Speaker 1: I think in America as a result of the pleistis sin extinctions and obviously they happened far back in time ten thousand, eleven thousand, and twelve thousand years before. I think the native people then understood that animals disappear and they completely go away and we don’t ever see them again. And so they I think they understood then that extinction was real in the world. Whether or not, I mean, the question for me and I have not been able to answer, the question to my own satisfaction is whether or not those memories extended down subsequent towards the present. And I do not I don’t have.

00:46:57
Speaker 2: An answer for that.

00:47:00
Speaker 1: But what you led with very the idea of extinction very much was a debated topic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was debated particularly when when Europeans, especially and then in America too, began excavating the remains of plesissne animals and in some cases dinosaurs, but really more frequently plesiscene animals, and as early palaeontologists tried to reassemble those animals. What they began to realize is that nothing like this lives anymore. What is the explanation for that? And that set in motion about a century’s worth of debate about whether extinction was actually possible, and the Biblical Judaeo Christian version was it’s not possible. The world was created by a dear It was created in perfection. Animals created perfection exists exactly now as they did at the moment of their creation, and in a perfect deity created world, nothing will ever go away. Everything is going to remain. Thomas Jefferson believed that extinction was not possible in the seventeen nineties, but he was persuaded by the naturalists in France, particularly the com Bouffon, that extinction absolutely looks like it can happen. We don’t know why these animals disappeared. And that’s why Jefferson had instructions to both Lewis and Clark and Freeman and Custis that Southern expedition when they went west, look for mammoths, because we’ve found the bones.

00:48:51
Speaker 2: Of mammoths in the east.

00:48:52
Speaker 1: We can’t find any east, but maybe they’re still out there in the west. But by the eighteen thirties and in the eighteen forties, most scientists in both America and Europe began to realize that, wow, these things, they really have disappeared.

00:49:09
Speaker 2: They’re not here anymore.

00:49:11
Speaker 1: And then we had the kind of crushing realization in the eighteen forties of the extinction of the great Awk, our northern hemisphere penguin, which was basically wiped out by egg hunters. And suddenly there’s a realization that absolutely animals can disappear, and it looks like one of the reasons they disappear is because of human exploitation.

00:49:34
Speaker 4: I see examples where native cultures would have.

00:49:39
Speaker 2: A meta.

00:49:42
Speaker 5: They would understand extinction, but have a metaphysical idea about it, like planes tribes. As the buffalo started to vanish, planes tribes to be that they went back in that they had come from the earth and they went back into the earth. Fascinating to me is I was talking to a guy. That’s kind of one of the craziest conversations I ever had with someone, because it felt like it was time travel. I was taking new guy in Guyana, a tribalman in Guyana, and they had always had a herd of a couple hundred white lipped packery that lived within striking distance of their village. They cleared out they couldn’t find them. It was a great resource for them, he explained to me face to face. He explained to me that there was another village and there was a shaman in the village who is jealous of their village for having such prosperity, and he had locked the packers into a mountain. And like, there’s no like this dude would not have awareness of that idea on the Great Plains of America that things were locked into the earth.

00:50:52
Speaker 4: But it’s like you’re getting at its gone noess.

00:50:56
Speaker 5: Right, and you have to have an explanation, but like a different way of that, like it’s gone yeah right, it’s just but a totally different worldview, you know, but capturing the same sentiment that.

00:51:06
Speaker 1: It’s it’s the same sentiment. It’s a different cause effect relationship than we would have with a scientific worldview. I mean, the cause effect relationship for why things happened was different among indigenous people. They had a different argument for this is a consequence. The cause is completely something different, and we would have the western, rational, scientific world looks for an evidentiary cause for the consequence, and oftentimes the indigenous world looks for kind of a what we would call a supernatural explanation for why things happen.

00:51:49
Speaker 6: Yeah, earlier you were talking about the mountainmen and the hide hunters as being these initially glorified figures, and now they’ve we’ve reassessed our view of them.

00:52:04
Speaker 4: But inarguably quite fascinating. Yeah, yeah, but there.

00:52:10
Speaker 3: I think what’s interesting is when you look at this in the aggregate, the whole pattern, there are these examples of like the egg hunters with the Great Auk, and and I think the one the one storyline that never had really entered my consciousness until later in life was the Sea Otter hunt. And especially under Russian control, I mean, they’re they’re conscripting native people and and killing them and torturing them to go kill otters for their fur, and I it’s it’s just striking to me because it’s in keeping with this much larger pattern of of exploitation of wildlife. But once you look at it and you see all of the little, you know, unique aspects of it, then you begin to sort of comprehend the larger picture. I don’t know if that makes sense, but you know, there’s some very familiar aspects to the story of wildlife depletion, but there’s also these outliers that are pretty horrific and yet again in keeping with the ones that were maybe more comfortable with as a culture talking about.

00:53:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, that one is definitely an outlier because of the conscription of the alliots and others. I mean, sometimes they would kidnap a guy’s family and hold his family ransom so that he would go and do the otter hunt for them. And the reason I think that one, really, you know, strikes us as egregious as it is is because what we’re more used to is something like what happened, you know, with the fur companies and the native people.

00:53:58
Speaker 2: As clients of the fur companies.

00:54:00
Speaker 1: And of course that one is a that one you have to know about history some to wrap your mind around to realize that native people, who we accord a kind of a special consideration for the natural world, and they almost always have it, there’s no question. But they were also confronted with people who had brought in a brand new technology, a metal technology that if you didn’t participate in it, and your neighbors, your native neighbors down the river did, then you were suddenly massively disadvantaged, because if they got metal, if they got guns, if they got knives made of steel, and they got arrow points made of iron, then and you remained with your traditional flint culture, you were massively disadvantaged in the world that was happening around them. And so most people, all the there were religious leaders who tried to stop this and said, don’t do it, don’t join into this this hunt. Nonetheless, most people did because they realized that the world had changed so dramatically if they did not participate. And the unfortunate result was that the market hunt usually usually pointed out very specific things that it wanted. It didn’t want native people to, you know, offer them up there the crops from their fields. It wanted the furs of beavers and muskrats and otters, and so if you want to play the game with the global market, that’s what you have to offer us in trade and will then set you up with metalware. And so it’s a it’s a part of a kind of a voluntary participation in the market economy. Over most of the West, that is not true of the otter thing we were just talking about, where people were conscripted into it.

00:56:02
Speaker 5: There’s another question about the odd country or you’re doing sea otters. But to set it up, I’ll point out that, like if you look at a lot of the areas as they marched across the country, you kind of come for the fur and stay for the whatever. Right, So these like guys that go across the Appalachian Mountains the hunt deer, oftentimes those same individuals stay to get into agriculture, stay to get into timber extraction whatever.

00:56:38
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you go like or you know, you.

00:56:42
Speaker 5: Hide hunters go out and out of that comes these like cattle enterprises or whatever. Right, Like there’s there’s no there’s no gap. People show up oftentimes to extract fur, and then they quickly they don’t leave. You follow me, like more people come in their footsteps. Are there exceptions in that where there’s a big gap, and like, what what was it like when you came to the Pacific coast for odds, like the Russians are down there? Like after the odters, was there a retraction or was there like a thing you stayed for you?

00:57:18
Speaker 1: No, No, that probably was an exception because almost everybody was coming by ship, and so they were when the otter hunt was over, when they couldn’t find anymore, when the first seals were too depleted to continue, it was you know, law of diminishing returns, there’s no point in continuing. They usually went back to wherever they were from, because a ton of them were from Boston and New York.

00:57:43
Speaker 4: And I mean then there was like a quiet there’s like an otterless quiet period.

00:57:48
Speaker 1: There was, indeed, Yeah, and the twenties and and thirties and forty I mean, otters don’t start recovering until about the eighteen eighties or eighteen nineties. The first seals, because there had been more of them, they recover a little bit more quickly. But there is also a kind of a subsidence period after the demise of beavers in the interior West, when that Husses Bay group of guys, I was talking about go in and try to ruin the country and trap all the beavers out of all the streams. On the west side of the Continental Divide, there’s a period of about fifteen years or so where a lot of the mountain men kind of are I mean, some of them go west with the Oregon Trail folks who settle in the Willamet River valley and become sheriffs and things. And I’m going to talk in one of the upcoming episodes about a next step that several of the mountain men do. When their beavers are gone, a lot of them turn to the horse trade, and they become traders and horses. And one of the things that some of the classic mountain men do Bill Sublett, for example, they go to California and either trade for horses or catch wild horses in the rolling golden hills of California, or they sometimes they just steal them off Spanish ranches and they drive them east from California and outfit Stephen Carney’s Army of the West, which needs mounts and remounts. Or they take them to places like Fort Bridger and they supply the wagon trains the Overlin trail folks with horses with fresh stock to get all the way to the west coast. So there’s a there’s a little bit of a lag, but they usually find something like the buffalo hunters. When the buffalo are gone, shit, you got prong horns, you got elk, you got big horn sheep, they just go after whatever is left and so and wolves because they’ve learned now that you know, you can use strychnine and you can poison wolves.

01:00:07
Speaker 2: You can get a dollar a pelt for a wolf pelt, and so.

01:00:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they managed to segue into just a whatever animals are left. Yeah, but the mountain Man, quite a number of them become horse traders.

01:00:19
Speaker 4: Are you familiar with a vicaro of the brush country?

01:00:22
Speaker 1: No?

01:00:22
Speaker 4: I am, Yeah, Yeah, that dude.

01:00:25
Speaker 5: He hated the buffalo hunters because he was he felt that they all became criminals, not all became sheriffs. Right.

01:00:35
Speaker 3: And there’s a line, and there’s a line that we cited in the Mountain En Project where like at the eighteen thirty seven or eighteen thirty eight rendezvous, someone writes a number of them have gone west to become horse thieves. Such a thing has never been heard of until now. Yeah, like it was just this invention of desperation.

01:00:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that was the Bill Sublette thing.

01:00:57
Speaker 1: I mean, he actually did that, and he regarded that as one of his great coups. He went to California and stole a bunch of Spanish horses and drove them back to the planes to outfit the overland and to Bent’s Fort. Bent’s Fort was one of the big sort of receiving areas for Western horses. But that episode is coming up. I’m going to tell the horse story. I think it may be the next to one, in fact, after this, where we’ll turn to the horse trade in the West, which is another one of those that’s kind of little known and unlike the sort of thing we’ve been talking about. I mean, with the horse trade, the idea was to get live animals back to the seventies, and yeah, getting live animals back. And what made horses really great is that they.

01:01:44
Speaker 2: Got back there on their own.

01:01:45
Speaker 1: You didn’t have to load them on a steamboat or you know, pack them up on the.

01:01:49
Speaker 2: Back of a pack horse.

01:01:51
Speaker 1: You could just drive them along and they got to market, you know, on their own.

01:01:55
Speaker 2: Accord. Good Randal, I’m good.

01:02:01
Speaker 5: One last observation for you about my favorite part of that. I can’t remember the guy’s name, Vacaro the Brush Country.

01:02:07
Speaker 3: Is it j Frank Adobie.

01:02:09
Speaker 5: Yeah, well no no, but it’s like it’s as told you from a Vicaro of the Brush Country. But he’s talking about the King Ranch. Okay, he’s talking about one of the guys that would become a King Ranch. Guy having experimenting with taking a like like injecting cattle with brine into their vascular system to that you would somehow preserve because it’s like hot, it’s humid down the Gold Country, South Texas, like everything rots to dam fast. So he’s toying with the idea, how would you inject like a brine into its as it’s dying, into its askular system and sort of pickle it.

01:03:02
Speaker 1: This is basically salting the meats.

01:03:10
Speaker 4: Tickles me endlessly. Man, it’s like that. But he acknowledges that they never got that perfected.

01:03:16
Speaker 1: It’s one of those things that appears on those redneck solutions.

01:03:21
Speaker 4: Well, thank thanks for all the wisdom, Dan Man.

01:03:24
Speaker 2: It’s fun. Thanks guys.

01:03:25
Speaker 5: Things