Dan Flores
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Carl Schmitt: The Mind Behind Modern Fascism
The American West with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network, hosted by me, writer and historian Dan Flores, and brought to you by Velvet Buck. This podcast looks at a West available nowhere else. Each episode, I'll be diving into some of the lesser-known histories of the West.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Carl Schmitt: The Mind Behind Modern Fascism
I'll then be joined in conversation by guests such as Western historian Dr. Randall Williams and best-selling author and meat-eater founder Stephen Rinella.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Carl Schmitt: The Mind Behind Modern Fascism
So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th, where we'll delve into stories of the West and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Carl Schmitt: The Mind Behind Modern Fascism
Cops believed everything that taser told them.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: What's New With Andrew Tate?
The American West with Dan Flores is the latest show from the MeatEater Podcast Network, hosted by me, writer and historian Dan Flores, and brought to you by Velvet Buck. This podcast looks at a West available nowhere else. Each episode, I'll be diving into some of the lesser-known histories of the West.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: What's New With Andrew Tate?
I'll then be joined in conversation by guests such as Western historian Dr. Randall Williams and best-selling author and meat-eater founder Stephen Ranella.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: What's New With Andrew Tate?
So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th, where we'll delve into stories of the West and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today.
The American West
Introducing: The American West with Dan Flores
The West seems to fascinate the world in a way no other American region can touch. Why can you get your John Wayne fix on TV at any sleepless 3 a.m.? Why is a soap opera Western like Yellowstone so wildly successful? How do shoe stores sell $5,000 cowboy boots that'll never see a stirrup?
The American West
Introducing: The American West with Dan Flores
And why does the phrase, it's just like the Wild West, cause all of us to imagine full freedom of action that no one's regulating? The American West with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network, hosted by me, writer and historian Dan Flores, and brought to you by Velvet Buck, wine with a backbone.
The American West
Introducing: The American West with Dan Flores
By focusing on deep time and wild animals and the West's unique environments, this podcast looks at a West available nowhere else. Each episode, I'll be diving into some of the lesser known histories of the West, such as North America during the Pleistocene Epoch, the distribution of the first paintings and images of the region, and Thomas Jefferson's second Lewis and Clark expedition.
The American West
Introducing: The American West with Dan Flores
I'll then be joined in conversation by guests such as Western historian Dr. Randall Williams and best-selling author and meat-eater founder Stephen Rinella.
The American West
Introducing: The American West with Dan Flores
So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th for the American West with Dan Flores on the Meat Eater Podcast Network, where we'll delve into stories of the West, gain a deeper appreciation of its history, and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Humans belonging to Clovis and Folsom cultures entered an America teeming with a remarkable diversity of Africa-like creatures, but confronted an extinction crisis that was possibly precipitated by their own arrival. 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.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Numerous examples from around the world testify that upon initially encountering humans, many wild creatures did not associate us with a threat. There is a term of art for this, biological first contact. Wild animals had to learn to be afraid of us. Many died standing and looking, never absorbing the lesson.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Finding naive animals that were easy for human hunters was a powerful motive for our species migrations around the world. But just who were these Clovis people who left so many sites across America, more than 20 excavated ones so far, including some 70 butchered elephants?
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
One recent theory that briefly achieved traction in places like National Geographic came from the Smithsonian's Dennis Stanford, who believed that the direct ancestors of the Clovis people reached America 18,000 years ago from Europe. To say that the scientific community scoffed at Stanford's across-Atlantic ice claims barely does justice to the profound skepticism that followed it.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
While Paleolithic hunters in Europe and America did pursue similar megafauna, and flint points crafted by Western Europe's Solitraean culture superficially resembled Clovis points, other researchers dismissed Stanford's claims that the two groups were the same people. linguistic and genetic conclusions have since refuted Stanford's argument.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Once scientists were able to analyze genomic evidence from archaeological sites, they quickly confirmed a trail of genetic kinship stretching from Siberia, rather than Europe, into the Americas.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
We now suspect that the people who ultimately swept into America first spent several thousand years on the Bering land bridge itself, the so-called Beringian standstill, apparently awaiting more favorable conditions to move southward. That long pause in Beringia may have produced humanity's first domestication of another animal.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Engaged in their own return to America, 25,000 years ago, gray wolves were abundant in Beringia. Since human hunters only ate the fattest parts of the animals they killed, they had leftover lean portions they were willing to share. Some of the wolves had a mutation that made them hyper-social, and puppies with that gene may have been able to bond with humans.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
There probably also were wolf puppies known today as gifted word-learning animals, capable of picking up human language. By the time the two species got to America, humans and their tamed wolves had formed a partnership for the rest of history. Or so goes one theory about dog domestication. Clovis genetics are best represented by a male toddler from a 12,800-year-old burial in Montana.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
He's known as the Anzick child, and he's from a site not far from today's Bozeman. The Clovis child was buried with a large cache of artifacts that included eight Clovis points painted in red ochre. after he played an epic role in reconstructing a history of two continents.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
In 2014, the Anzick boy was reburied by local tribes in Montana's Shields River, near where he had lain for nearly 13,000 years. While we have no surviving mammoth or mastodon populations to study, we do know a good deal about Asian elephant natural history.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And if this closest living relative of mammoths offers clues, America's ancient elephants would have been highly intelligent creatures, especially acute in what biologists call situational intelligence. Their trunks were elephant analogues to our opposable thumbs, with as many as 150,000 muscle subunits.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
20,000 years drops away if you let it because La Brea preserves tangible remnants of a world at the far ends of the earth for ancestors of ours whose migrations had begun in Africa. The Page Museum is a working laboratory of paleontology where visitors can watch scientists labor over the site's latest discoveries.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
As ecological keystone creatures whose activities shaped landscapes, mammoths and mastodons foraged in ways that likely transformed American vegetation the way modern elephants do in Africa.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
They travel their huge ranges with an unusually powerful geographic memory as a recent study of a woolly mammoth's lifetime movements through Alaska 17,000 years ago, reconstructed by analyzing strontium isotope ratios that reference geography in its tusks, now indicate.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
All elephants are what biologists refer to as K species, meaning they do not come into sexual maturity until they're 15 years old or older. A state brought on by periodic musth, the pachyderm version of sexual heat, From insemination to giving birth probably took two years, a generational turnover slow enough to make population recovery difficult in the face of a new threat.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And by the time humans were entering America, mammoths, mastodons, and other archaic elephant species were already suffering from a background rate of extinctions that had been going on for 75,000 years. But as the Rancho La Brea, Folsom, and Clovis sites show, elephants and big cats and many other remarkable creatures still occupied the ground where we now commute and go to sleep in our suburbs.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Only they all disappeared quite suddenly and mysteriously long, long ago. that disappearance is one of the most profound ecological and aesthetic events of continental history.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
As Darwin's ally in the breakthrough to understanding natural selection and evolution, Alfred Russell Wallace wrote, "'In fact, we present-day Americans live in a zoological impoverished world from which all the hugest and fiercest and strangest forms have recently disappeared.'" Wallace was using recently in a big history sense.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
All those hugest, fiercest, and strangest animals vanished from America between about 13,000 and 9,000 years ago. In fact, we lost 30 genera and 40 species, all of them our very largest creatures. Right down to our present moment, these ancient losses make up the most dramatic extinction event since humans have been in North America.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
But science has never grouped the so-called Pleistocene extinctions with the five great planetary extinctions of Earth history. It's different from all of those, which were global, extinguished life on both land and in the oceans, and showed no size bias in the creatures they marked for disappearance. The Pleistocene losses didn't happen in oceans, in Africa, or in Southern Asia.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
They devastated life on Earth only in Eurasia, North America, South America, and Australia. Something very odd seemed to be unfolding in specific parts of the planet during the Late Pleistocene. But there is a common thread. Those were all places where human predators out of Africa, seeking out large animals to hunt, were arriving for the first time.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Many of those are the remains of scavenger predators once lured by the cries of snagged mammoths or the scent of decomposing horses, camels, or ground sloths trapped by surface tar near what was once a water source in a dry landscape.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
The Pleistocene Extinctions, in other words, looked very much like the first act of the Anthropocene, the beginnings of what we now call the Sixth Extinction. This has been a prelude to introducing you to a scientist who was able to imagine how this might have happened. Paul Martin, who passed away in 2010, was one of the country's late 20th century intellectual giants.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
He was also lucky enough to have a brand new tool to play with, radiocarbon dating, invented in 1946 by Willard Libby, who won the Nobel Prize for it. That new tool almost overnight allowed an understanding of something very crucial about the Pleistocene extinctions— When did the various animals disappear exactly, and how did the arrival of humans in America line up with those dates?
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
I got to meet Martin at a point in his career when he seemed to bear a resemblance to a target at a shooting range. At a time when politics and many university departments embraced the idea of ancient peoples as ecological examples for the modern world, there were those who saw Martin's argument that early humans were responsible for extinctions as politically incorrect.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
The popular Native American writer, Vine Deloria Jr., was vitriolic in his condemnation of Martin, which I could tell mortified and baffled the paleobiologist. Between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago, the Saulutrian culture had similarly wiped out Europe's remaining Pleistocene creatures. Clovis and Folsom were not Indian stories, Martin insisted. They were big history human stories.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Martin and I arranged to get together on his visit to the University of Montana where I taught. After two days of wide-ranging conversations, I began to think about Martin in the manner of a Stephen Hawking. When his body had slowed from polio, his vast energy had lit a turbocharger that accelerated his mind.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
The crux of the Pleistocene story, Martin told me, was that North America was a continental island remote from the evolution of humans, and when we finally arrived in numbers in the form of the Clovisians, the well-known slaughter humans had made on island biologies all over the world came to America.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
The skulls and tusks of the elephants extracted from La Brea are impressive, but anyone who tours the museum has to admit the most stunning display is the wall, backlit and yellow, of hundreds of dire wolf skulls. The strapping canids, indigenous to America but memorably revived as fictional Westeros fauna in Game of Thrones, left the most remains here of any species, 1,800 individuals.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
We were a brilliant new predator with sophisticated weapons, dogs, and fire, and baggage like rats. The predation we engaged in changed local ecology so substantially that animals evolved in our absence couldn't survive once we arrived. I realized Martin was giving me a command performance of his Planet of Doom theory, a modern version now buttressed with science, history, and details.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
As Martin put it in his 2006 Twilight of the Mammoths, I argue that virtually all extinctions of wild animals in the last 50,000 years are anthropogenic. By the time the destruction was over, only a handful of America's biggest animals remained, and those were either European or Asian, like caribou or bison, that had prior experience with humans.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Or they were native ones like pronghorns that carried so little fat they offered little inducement for hunters. Otherwise, the Clovisians erased millions of years of evolution. In 2001, independently of Martin, an Australian paleobiologist at the Smithsonian, John Alroy, developed a computer model to test this American extinction story.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Alroy's computers modeled an absolutely classic ecological release. By 1500 years after the human arrival, excepting a few scattered remnants hunters had overlooked but were now too separated to exchange their genes and dying out from lack of genetic diversity, 75% of America's Pleistocene bestiary had been gutted.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Alroy's computer model predicted the extinction or survival of 32 of 41 Clovis prey species. He concluded, long before the dawn of written history, human impacts were responsible for a fantastically destructive wave of extinctions around the globe. Southeast of present-day Tucson, along the Santa Cruz River, there are three famous Clovis sites.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
You suspect in long-ago Clovis lore this may have been a legendary event. Or, given that many similar stories follow it in the historical record of America, maybe what transpired here wasn't legendary at all, just the way things were done. What seems to have happened is that at the most westerly location, now called the Lenner site, a Clovis band surrounded a family group of 15 mammoths.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
The herd apparently huddled together for defense against the assault. But 13 of them, all adolescents and calves, died in the spot. Archaeologists found exactly 13 Clovis points in their remains. But it must not have been an easy thing. In different locations a few miles away, the Escapul and Naco sites, archaeologists found two adult mammoths who had apparently fled the slaughter.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
The large male had died with two Clovis points in his body, but the female must have put up a tremendous fight to protect her young before mortally wounded, she had fled. and her remains, there were no fewer than eight embedded Clovis points. The hunters who killed those mammoths appear to have been absolute professionals.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Our best strategy for understanding America's Pleistocene extinctions may be on an animal-by-animal basis. Clovis hunters almost certainly wiped out the elephants and Folsom people the giant bison. But animals like dire wolves, giant beavers, and big cats may have simply been out-competed by gray wolves and modern beavers and cougars.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Smaller size and earlier sexual maturity fitted the replacements better for an America now inhabited by human predators, the first examples on the continent for what biologists called anthropogenic evolution. Horses and camels do remain enigmas.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Sites of Clovis Age in southern Alberta and Colorado show horse and camel kills, but nothing like the vast number of horses from solutrean sites in Europe. And why did various camelids survive in South America, providing later native people domestic possibilities, but not farther north? As for the Clovisians themselves, they remain maddeningly elusive.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
The fossils of hundreds of coyotes, a brawnier version than our modern animal, make up the third most common species here. But in second place are those ultimate ambush predators of the Pleistocene, the western subspecies of saber-tooths, heavily built cats with a fearsome, snake-like jaw gape and enormous fangs.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
They are us, of course, but it's difficult even to know your recent relatives if all you have to go on are their tools and diet preferences. We know that with the fluted point, a purely American invention not found in Siberia, their thinkers had solved the ancient technology hurdle of affixing points solidly to wooden spears or darts.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
We also know that they were consumer connoisseurs of the best the world had to offer. Clovis artisans fashioned their toolkit from the hardest, sharpest, most vividly colored flints and shirts in North America, whose outcrops existed as a geographic atlas in their heads. They journeyed hundreds of miles to those sources, as if on quest to special magic.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Some of their tool caches featured multiple gorgeous unused points of eight to nine inches in leek with sacred red ochre still adhering to them. One Clovis mystery has always been, why no art? Why nothing like the grand paintings of animals on the cave walls of Chauvet, Lascaux, and Altamira in Europe? There are pebbles in size with crosshatching. There's an elephant carved into a piece of ivory.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Otherwise, we had no hints what they thought of the animals they hunted, of America, of their lives in general. That may be changing with a new 2019 to 2020 investigation of the rock art of a region in the Colombian Amazon known as Serrania La Lindosa. But we'll have to wait to see if the images there really are Clovis or Folsom ones.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
One recent theory is that the Clovisians may have been a northern hemisphere wild type, a group of hyper-aggressive Siberian Vikings. According to modern science, a high-fat diet is a strong trigger for enhanced testosterone. But who they were, really, is us.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
My 23andMe profile shows 3% of my genes are Native American, a common figure for those of us whose European ancestors arrived in America 300 or more years ago. Clovis heredity is within us.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
The Clovis story resonates because we imagine them as ancient versions of ourselves, explorers of hidden continents, the last of the masterful hunters of enormous animals, the culmination of 40,000 generations of hunters. They must have had a sense of that timeless tradition. But to me, the biggest question is this. What did they think?
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
What did they do when so many of the animals they lived among began to disappear, to dwindle to a last few scattered survivors until there were none? What they faced is mirrored by our own 21st century circumstances. Like us, they had lived as their ancestors did, and no doubt had every expectation that the world would continue as it always had.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And so long as there was a Siberia or a Beringia or an America out there, it did. But Earth proved finite, and so did its animals. Much as we are doing today, the Clovisians ran into a wall of limits.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
The replica skull of a saber-tooth from La Brea sits a few feet away as I write this. It's rapier-sharp canines capable of tearing open a sloth or mammoth calf gleaming in rich afternoon light. Each fang measures a full eight inches from gumline to tip.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Well, I tend to think that there are some big discoveries yet to be made. I will say that the advent of genomic research you know, on human remains all over the world is telling us a lot of stuff that we've never known before. And that's kind of the modern version of, you know, radiocarbon dating in the 1950s and stuff. We've now got a way to analyze stuff
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
human remains that is giving us a sense of how people spread around the world and what connections they had with one another. So my guess is, and it's probably a pretty easy thing to guess, is that there's going to be something big out there.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And it's likely to involve something technological like those two, where you have a sudden breakthrough and it's possible to do something you've not been able to do before.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
somewhere in south america you find a genetic marker from 12 000 years ago and it just doesn't make sense it doesn't make sense and you have to and people have to explain it you know and it may take a while it takes science often a lot of time to explain things and there are a lot of kind of false leads and ideas that are put out there that don't last um
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
I mean, that's just the way, you know, human knowledge, especially scientific knowledge works. But yeah, I think there's going to be, you know, we're going to know in the case of the Pleistocene Extinctions, I think in another 30 or 40 years, there's going to be something, some kind of technological breakthrough that enables us to suddenly know a lot more about this than we've known.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
I mean, one to me is our sudden realization that a lack of genetic diversity can be pretty murderous on a species. Because if you start separating a population out so it's not possible for them to breed anymore and exchange genes, they become weak. I mean, there are instances where it's impossible for them to reproduce.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And so I think all of that, that's another variation, obviously, of the genetic revolution. But I think all those things point to some new breakthrough in the future that's going to be fun to see. I mean, I follow a whole bunch of things like that.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
The vast assemblages of hypercarnivore bones at La Brea join the skeletal remains of mega herbivores, mammoths and mastodons, giant bison, pronghorns, llamas, California turkeys, and many more. The predator list is lengthier than just wolves, coyotes, and saber-tooths as well. The cats whose remains have come out of the tar include American cheetahs, step lions, and giant jaguars.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Yeah. No, I don't think they're going to get boring. I think it's going to be fun, and we're going to still be interested. Just like all of us are still interested in this. I mean, none of us is really trained in the fields of paleobiology or anything like that, but we find it fascinating to want to understand things. how this happened. And we want to know more about ourselves.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Well, that part probably will remain completely alien. I mean, we have named these paleo cultures in North America, things like Folsom and Plainview and Clovis, and those are all names of towns near which paleontological and archaeological sites were found. I mean, we have no idea what they called themselves.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
They for sure probably didn't call themselves Clovisians or Folsomites or whatever the Folsom term for the people would be. So we don't know that, and we're very likely not ever to know that. What I am still a little disappointed by, and I'm hoping that this site in South America pans out as an actual rock imagery site for Clovis and Folsom,
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
is the lack of art, especially in comparison to Western Europe, where there are all these marvelous cave paintings that, I mean, tell you so much about. I mean, one of the pieces I read when I was researching Wild New World was about how the artists at Chauvet Cave got the rhythm of the footprints footprints, the feet hitting the ground of quadrupeds exactly right.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And this particular article said it wasn't until the 1890s that modern painters were able to get the rhythm of how horse who have hit the ground when they were running at the same level of expertise that these guys did 15, 16,000 years ago. And so that's very exciting and tells us a little bit about those people.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And it's just disappointing that, you know, we have nothing like that in North America.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Yeah, where's the art? And it's interesting to me, since you brought that up, that the first archaeologists in North America who were looking for evidence of human antiquity here looked in caves. They went to places like Carlsbad and stuff and looked in caves because this was the... I mean, they were thinking by analogy. This was the example they had in Western Europe.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Immense, hyperactive, short-faced bears twice the weight of a grizzly died in the asphalt. So did the enormous Miriam's teratorn, a Pleistocene bird of prey with a 10.5-foot wingspan. The remains span indigenous creatures spawned by continental evolution and migrants from Asia, some ancient to America, some recent arrivals.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
This is where these people are. And so they were looking in places like Carlsbad Caverns for evidence that... early humans in North America would have done the same kind of thing.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And of course, accidentally on the way back, a guy by the name of Edgar Hewitt on the way back from one of those expeditions happened to go past the Clovis site and had some cowboy say, well, you know, we've been finding these kind of strange looking large tool-like objects here on the ground. No caves anywhere around, but they're just kind of lying out here on the plains.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Yeah, on what was a wetland. And, you know, no caves around anywhere. So it's kind of one of those ways, I think, that the people of antiquity, the paleo hunters in particular in North America, are pretty damn distinctive from the people in Western Europe. And in this particular case, I wish the distinction weren't so great because I would love to be able to find some art that they did.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Yeah. I mean, you know, things that to us do not look particularly significant, like the flute on the sides of Clovis and Folsom points. I mean, you can almost miss that when you look at those points. But the That very clearly was a major technological innovation because it finally allowed the secure fastening of a point to a dart, an add-addle dart or a spear.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And so it was one of those human genius breakthroughs where someone realized, if I just... you know, make a flute, make an indentation running down each side of this point, I can now secure my atlatl dart to it and it won't pop off upon hitting an animal. It will instead stay secure and penetrate through the skin.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And that's kind of, you know, as I said, it's not something that you look at and go, wow, this is like the invention of the Model T. Nonetheless, for these people, it effectively was a huge leap forward.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
The mammals and birds may seem alien or vaguely African, but in fact this bestiary was purely classically American, the America of the Pleistocene. The Rancho La Brea victims that left their bones and skulls encased in tar were once representatives of one of the grand ecologies of planet Earth.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Yeah, it could be. And so LIDAR, I suppose, at this stage of the game, I mean, that's certainly a technological breakthrough that's enabled the discovery of all sorts of new, particularly buildings, Mayan structures that are suddenly now visible from above in a way that they never are on the ground. But LIDAR, as far as I am aware of it, it probably is not fine-grained enough
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
to do something like the sort of archaeological sites that you're talking about. No, I wouldn't think so. No, I tend to agree with the anthropologists you were talking to. I think we've got the sites. I think what we probably can improve the interpretation of those sites
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
A portion of every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters, and wildlife. Enjoy responsibly. Clovisia the Beautiful. We hardly know our actual beginnings in America. Even when the stories are set in places we recognize, the characters of our deep time history can be alien to the point of fantasy.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
sites with is going to be something like these big leaps forward we had with radiocarbon dating, which was a huge game changer 75 years ago, and now the genomic revolution, the genetic revolution, which is another enormous game changer for all kinds of things, including these sort of extinctions from the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary. So I think it's going to be something like that.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
I don't know exactly what it is, but it's probably going to be something that suddenly enables us to interpret what we have in a way we've not been able to.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Well, I would say, you know, I mean, I, I may look as if I come from the early 20th century, but I'm actually more a mid-20th century artifact. And so I was born at about the time that radiocarbon dating won the Nobel Prize for a guy. And I have not, I will say that
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
During the 60s and especially the 70s, the late 70s when I was in graduate school, there was a strong disinclination to believe that humans had played much of a role at all. And what it reminded, as I've looked back on it, Now, it reminds me of the sort of reluctance that a lot of people feel about climate change. It's that humans couldn't have done that. We couldn't have done that.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
I mean, a bunch of animals became extinct. That had to have been climate. That had to have been a comet strike. That had to have been something other than humans because... I mean, there's just no way. That's not possible. People armed only with adattles and spears and so forth could not do those sorts of things.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And that, of course, played into and went along with this sensibility back in those same years where... we were kind of, in a way, first discovering native ecology and indigenous knowledge about the world. And we were, of course, looking for some examples, looking desperately for some examples of human beings to say, These people did it right. Here's the way you do it.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
This was a different America than most of us conjure when we imagine the continent Europeans found 500 years ago. But this La Brea world wasn't like the pre-Chixalube age of the dinosaurs absent of humans either. Late in the Pleistocene, our human forebears joined American ecologies as the newest predator here.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
We're not on the right track. We're doing it wrong, but they did it correctly. And, of course, arguing that early arrivals in North America, like Clovis and Folsom people, may have wiped out species that ran against that sentiment that, well, we're trying to find in the past some humans who really lived well on the environment. And so...
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
That changed, I think, sometime, I don't know, probably in the early 2000s, when after one kind of alternative explanation after another was advanced, and none of them really seemed to work. They never did manage to convince many people. I mean, you know, Ross McPhee of the American Museum of Natural History advanced, well, maybe some new disease swept through North America and killed everything.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Well, of course, there was no candidate disease. And then the other problem was most diseases don't kill everything. I mean, they usually leave some piece of a population that often rebuilds with immunity. I mean, all of us are examples of old world diseases that killed many of those that our ancestors survived and allowed us to be born today.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
So, alternative explanations have not so far really worked, and what I've kind of been noticing in the last 10 or 15 years has been a kind of a reluctant, I would say reluctant, but still a sort of a growing consensus that
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
the human arrival in north america still seems to be the best explanation we have for what happened to all those animals and what i ended up arguing in wild new world is that i think you know we talk a lot about the sixth extinction today i think the sixth extinction started
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
35 000 years ago you know i mean when humans started spreading around the world yeah i mean it's just a in contrast to an asteroid strike which wipes out 75 percent of earth's life in you know a matter of a few weeks this has just been a 35 000 sort of slow motion extinction that's been going on for a very very long time and so it's good for us to be alarmed about a sixth extinction i just sometimes try to point out to people
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
I think this has actually been happening for a long time.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
These first Americans lived their lives among La Brea creatures and created the first coast-to-coast human societies in American history. Their presence began to leave the continent and this rich aggregate of impressive animals forever changed.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Well, here's what I kind of suspect. I think we're living through a moment. And I think the moment has been caused by the previous lack of respect that so many bone merchants –
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
in the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries brought to the game of archaeology where they paid not the slightest attention to the desires, wants of the local people who very well could be connected to the ruins or the excavations that they're doing on human remains. What I think is that we're experiencing a moment that's kind of a backlash against that.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And I tend to be one of these kind of people who thinks that we're really kind of all the same, actually. And what we're interested in is the human story, the big story of all of us, which is why I'm intrigued by humans coming out of Africa, spreading through Asia, coming to North America. going to South America.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And I know that people get hung up on the idea of, okay, this particular culture has this view of how the world should be conducted and how scientific research could be conducted. But I am very much interested in the big story of humanity. And I think, ultimately, most people are interested in that.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And so I think when we get past this moment where we're sort of boomeranging from centuries where we had no respect for the remains of these people, that in another who knows how long, but in another century. In fact, I know many people who have already reached this point.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
position where they too are intrigued and interested and they want to know and so i think that at some point in the future i don't know how far out it is that there will be some relaxing of that kind of uh reluctance to allow science to try to answer some of these great questions i just think it's a you know the pendulum has swung at the moment uh at a
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
to a degree that, um, native people are, they don't want this to happen, but I think it'll swing back.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Well, when I mean, you guys all know this as well as I do. But, you know, when you're when you're doing history, history, we always think of history, especially professionally and in the academy. We think of that as being something you do from written sources. And, of course, written sources. only exists for the human story back to about 3,500, 4,000 years ago.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And beyond that, we have no written stories. And so that sort of implies that, okay, so if you're interested in history, that's the end of it. 4,000 years back, you don't have any history anymore. There's no way. I'm not satisfied with that, obviously, because that's a very small slice of the human story. And the
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
The first time we became aware that humans were actually in America during the Pleistocene was barely a hundred years ago, and the place that happened was along the New Mexico-Colorado border. In the days following a flood in the dry Cimarron River,
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And so, I mean, my whole take on something like writing that chapter about what I call Native America after the Pleistocene extinctions and the Holocene period began in North America, I try to write a chapter about the next 10,000 years, which takes you down to 500 years ago when
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
when Europeans and old-worlders began arriving in North America, I was trying to sort of satisfy my own curiosity about that because I couldn't really find very many people who had ventured a guess as to how that story had unfolded. And in a book like that, where I was interested primarily in the relationship between animals and people, I was trying to figure out how...
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
that it happened that when Europeans get here 500 years ago, they land on a continent that they're so impressed with. Now, maybe it's just a comparison to what they had done to Europe, but they're really impressed with the biological diversity of North America. It's kind of an Eden for the animals.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And so the question was, how did we get from 10,000 years ago down to 500 years ago where native people managed to preserve all that? And that presented, obviously, a lot of a lot of questions to try to answer. And I'm sure there'll be people who improve on that story that I told.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
But that was kind of my own attempt to do something about the Native American story that I didn't see anybody else really making a stab at trying to interpret, probably because it's too daunting.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Yes, and a real ripper. There's no question about it. I mean, one piece I read in the National Academy of Sciences from about 2019 argued that we have sacrificed in the last 500 years about a half a million years of evolved genetics. Mm-hmm. on planet Earth as a consequence of all the destruction that we've made to creatures around the world.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And most of the animals that have disappeared have been really charismatic and very common, like passenger pigeons. Passenger pigeons survived in North America for 15 million years, and they couldn't last 300 years after we got here. So there's certainly been that.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
An African-American cowboy named George McJunkin was riding through grassy parkland a few hundred yards below the rimrock of a miles-long mesa that extended eastward from the Rocky Mountains, checking for ranch fence lines damaged by the flood. Suddenly, McJunkin's horse braced, its hooves furrowing into foot-deep mud at the edge of a ragged scar floodwaters had cut into the slope below the mesa.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And then there's that 10,000-year period we were just talking about where I could find evidence for only one extinction, and that was a flightless sea duck on the Pacific coast. But then, of course, there's the period before that, the Pleistocene, where, if anything, the destruction was even on more massive a scale.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And in that instance, not only do we sacrifice an enormous amount of biological diversity and genetics, evolved genetics, but it was the genetics of most of the really large and impressive animals of the globe. and so it's a that's a story in other words that doesn't have it doesn't travel just in one direction it's as if humans realizing
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
wow, we may have really screwed things up or things got screwed up for some reason because I'm not sure they quite understood what had happened. But it seems to have produced a kind of a reaction where for nearly 10,000 years, they are very careful about things.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And, you know, as I said, that's a story that I really had to put together because I couldn't find anyone that was willing to venture a guess about how that had all played out. And yet it's obviously a really big part of American history.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
You bet, Steve. Thanks to both you guys. Randall, you guys were, you know, many years ago, terrific students in the classes that I taught at the University of Montana. It's fun to sit down and do this again. Thank you. Likewise.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
McJunkin leaned out of his saddle to peer into a fresh chasm sliced into the brown shale. What he saw changed the story of America forever. On a similar rainy August day in 2018, some 35 of us are stepping through the lush grass of that same slope as it angles up towards the rimrock of Johnson Mesa.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
We're following David Eck, a New Mexico state lands archaeologist with a long ponytail halfway down his back, who is leading us towards the very spot where George McJunkins' horse had pulled up 110 years before. The topography is now a grassy, shallow drain called Wild Horse Arroyo.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
And as we crowd around its edges, it seems somehow too commonplace to be the scene of one of the continent's most significant historical finds. Nonetheless, this in the flesh is the legendary Folsom Archaeological Site. What McJunkin had done, about where we now stood talking, was to spot in the flood-gashed arroyo bones of an immense size.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
They turned out to be from a herd of bison antiquus, an extinct form of giant bison. But the bones themselves weren't the pièce de résistance. At the time, the sciences of ethnology and archaeology in the United States were firm that American Indians had arrived in North America only a couple thousand years prior to the coming of Europeans.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
In 1926, the black cowboy's plea to have a scientist look at his bone pit reached Jesse Figgins, director of the Colorado Museum of Natural History in Denver. Something of an amateur himself, Figgins was mostly interested in fossil bison that might make exhibits in his museum.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
His team began an excavation of the site in May of 1926 and quickly began finding the skeletal remains of bison of a monstrous size. That was exciting enough. But in their second season of work, on August 29, 1927, Figgins' crew troweled up big history pay dirt.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
As Davidek was gesturing to the dimensions of this near century-old dig, in the pocket of my light Patagonia jacket, my fingers closed over an object that I could fit into my palm. In shape, it was oblate. Think a flattened football, but with an N bitten off.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Beneath my fingers I could feel an irregular surface made so by labor-intensive flaking to create a pointed blade that dwindled to a remarkably thin base. The delicacy of that base was a result of matching flutes skillfully popped from the flint on both sides. In that first summer of digging, Figgesen's paleontologists had unearthed two of these points in the loose dirt of the site.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Eventually, the Denver team would find eight of these stunning fluted points scattered amongst the bones. But it wasn't just the bones and not the points that made fulsome what American Museum of Natural History scientist Henry Fairfield Osborne labeled the greatest event in American discoveries.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
When the second season crew at Folsom flicked the dirt from the ribs of an extinct bison, they were greeted by the sight of one of these fluted points embedded to two-thirds its length in the bone. The bar for proof that humans were part of the American Pleistocene had always been an extinct animal, preserving evidence that as a living creature, it had been killed by human technology.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Now outside the tiny burg of Folsom, New Mexico, that bar was hurdled. America, too, had an antiquity. How much of an antiquity was still in question because radiocarbon dating was yet three decades in the future. Figgins claimed the site was 400,000 years old.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Eventually, archaeology and paleontology would agree that on an October day, a band of three dozen humans had driven into a box canyon, killed and butchered 32 giant bison of the species Bison Antiquus in the spot where I was now standing, and they had done this 12,450 years ago. No one knows now what these ancient bison hunters call themselves or their weapons.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
But while it may sound unlikely, in the 2020s there's no place quite like downtown Los Angeles for acquiring some sense of how the human story began on the continent.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Their beautiful fluted points were likely attached to darts thrown by at-attles or spear throwers. But not knowing much about these early Americans didn't prevent the scientists from naming both the points and the people Folsom after the nearby town. Yet Folsom wasn't the book of Genesis for America's human history. Six years after the Folsom discovery, there was another dramatic revelation.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Out on the featureless sweeps of the southern Great Plains, an ordinary gravel excavation near a tiny farming town named Clovis exposed the bones of long-extinct American elephants, a remarkable 28 of them. Science and the reading public knew that America had harbored various kinds of giant elephants in the deep past.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
But unlike 19th century mastodon finds in the East, this time the skeletons were intermixed with large, 5 to 6 inch long projectile points and tools of an unknown and apparently even more ancient population than the Folsom people. We now know that even these elephant hunters were not the first.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
What has very recently produced certain evidence for even more ancient arrivals in America, likely in boats following shorelines out of Asia, are human footprints. To be precise, 61 footprints, left primarily by children or adolescents in the soft mud of a lakeshore some 23,000 years before the area became New Mexico's White Sands National Park.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
That blockbuster find by a park employee in 2019 ultimately drew a team of researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey to date the seeds of a species of grass crushed by the footprints. Their dating indicates a time frame at the height of the glacial maximum when it would have been impossible to come overland to America. The human footprints aren't the only tracks researchers are finding.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Rancho La Brea Tar Pits, just off Wilshire Boulevard, in the heart of a sprawling Pacific Coast city, is today the most accessible place in the country for picturing in the mind's eye the wild new world migrating humans found when they first saw America.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
There are also mammoth tracks and prints of dire wolves and giant ground sloths. In one fascinating interaction, the tracks appear to show that a young woman carrying a child on her hip, who she occasionally put down, walked a stretch of lake shore and returned by the same path which in the interval both a mammoth and a ground sloth crossed.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
The mammoth paid no obvious attention, but the sloth reacted, rearing on its hind legs in what may have been alarm. So far as we now know, only a scant few intrepid souls came to America this early. They remind me of Viking visitors to America a thousand years ago. Their numbers must have been small, with much of America still empty of humans.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
So 10,000 years later, the elephant hunters we now call Clovis made up the first human culture to spread across all the Americas, an overland arrival that became a rapidly advancing wave 13,000 years ago. The rapidity of their spread suggesting that they encountered few, if any, other human cultures along the way.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Clovis people occupied every American state from Alaska to Florida for more than three centuries. Until a mature United States spread coast to coast, in fact, Clovis stood as the sole human culture that once draped across our entire country. So for three centuries, a very long time ago, America was Clovisia the Beautiful. We are still struggling to understand them.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
They left no oral or written histories of their monarchs or any defining events. We have no sense of their gods or the philosophies they believed in or what language or family of languages they spoke. We know a great deal about their tools and we're developing a sense of them from their bones and more recently from their genetics.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
But starting 13,050 years ago and lasting until 12,750 years ago, the Clovisians placed their stamp on the country and its animals and changed the continent. Their name comes from the place where we first became aware of their existence, an ancient arroyo on the outskirts of the small town of Clovis, New Mexico, on the windswept southern high plains.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
True enough, there's a sense of time-travel shock having your lift drop you in the middle of swirling, honking LA traffic, only to stand face-to-face minutes later with Colombian mammoths fatally mired in tar, trumpeting their despair. Even if the mammoths are robots and their forlorn cries don't drown out the traffic, they and La Brea and the Page Museum still work a kind of magic.
The American West
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
Getting in close to wild creatures holds a fascination that resonates because it taps ancient imperatives still within us. The relationship between prey and their predators involves learning curves, and each side is very good at the algorithm. But prey do have to learn.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Following the collapse of the Grand Chacoan Empire, refugees founded eight thriving new towns along the Galisteo River of New Mexico, but ultimately found it difficult to sustain an arid climate civilization across the next 500 years. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
As for animal life in the Chacoan region, diet studies in the collapse's aftermath imply that rabbits and rodents were almost the only huntable animals left. Their need for protein perhaps explains why some of the new villages were founded close to the bison plains.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
One March afternoon in the early 2000s, I opened the passenger door of a pickup, stretched out a hiking boot to the ground, and had one of those small steps for man moments. Until I exited that pickup and began to walk on a surface that spoke, it crunched, it crinkled. I'd never had the kind of visceral understanding of America's ancient past I was now experiencing.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
I was walking into a place known to Southwestern archaeologists as the San Lazaro Ruins. With every step, my boots were landing on broken shards of Indian pottery half a foot deep. That brought a profound realization. I was walking on ground that humans long before me had lived on for some 300 years.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
In every direction, the ground underfoot was a thick, continuous surface of curving, angled, shattered pottery, the pieces set at all angles and drawing the eye with painted zigzags and designs in blacks and reds. This is how the people who lived here 700 years ago must have experienced a stroll around their town, I thought.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
It's how the pioneers of archaeology in the West, the Adolph Bandoliers, the Alfred Kidders, and Edgar Hewlett, no doubt felt the first time they walked across the ruins of Chaco or Mesa Verde, or the country I was in now, the Galisteo River country south of Santa Fe. I was having this experience because I'd become friends with a remarkable Santa Fe character named Forrest Fenn.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Among many aspects of Fenn's world that seemed more than improbable was that he actually owned the ground where the ruins of San Lazaro stood. That's why we were here. He was proudly showing off his possession of the largest ancestral Pueblo village site in the Santa Fe area.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
a native Texan and a former Vietnam fighter pilot who'd survived being shot down to become a successful art gallery owner in Santa Fe. Finn was in his late 70s then, his body lean, his silvery hair still in a military buzz cut. When we struck up a friendship, I found him garrulous, hugely energetic, and despite a slender education, fiercely opinionated.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
True to his Texas roots, those opinions included a hatred for the federal government and a distrust of educated elites, although he could occasionally be impressed by experts. Finn was as dedicated to Old West history as fundamentalists are to old-time religion. His home came across as a combination museum, archive, and archaeology lab.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
He outdid anyone in my experience with his boyish, Huck Finn-like romance about Western adventure, which led him to invest prodigious energy in several seriously crazy projects that made many people wince. One was acquiring and doing amateur excavations at a major site like San Lazaro. The last of Forrest's grand ideas, when he was in his 80s, got him national exposure that wasn't always admiring.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
A National Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City? And why, maybe this is the most serious question here, does the phrase, just like the Wild West, cause all of us to imagine entire freedom of action, a whole lack of restraint, a free-for-all nobody is regulating? All that reverence and fascination for the West happens for good reason.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
He buried a treasure chest containing more than $2 million of precious artifacts from around the world in a secret location in the West, then self-published a book featuring a page of verse offering clues to its hiding spot.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
More than one person died and untold thousands trekked the West's vast public lands in search of a treasure that, to Forrest, offered ordinary folks a chance to reprise a classic Old West opportunity, finding loot and making a mint off nature.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
San Lazaro had once been one of eight major Indian towns that, post-Chaco, spread across the Galiceo River near where Spain would found Santa Fe in the year 1610. The entire Four Corners is lousy with the surviving ruins of advanced farming civilizations that made the Southwest into one of the most densely lived-in parts of North America a thousand years ago.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Long before Europeans came here, other humans hoped and dreamed, lived, loved, and died, and left their mark on this oldest place in America. In fact, 800 years ago, there was a far larger population of people living in the Galiceo River country than actually live here now. That's a claim few other American regions can make.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
A great drought in the Southwest, the most severe one in the past thousand years, was the apparent proximate cause that brought them here. In a sense, they were religious refugees, fleeing that hereditary religious class that had insisted they could intervene with the gods to send life-saving rain.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
So the search for a new center place led some of the former Chaco Puebloans to the beautiful, windswept Galisteo country. Here's what they found. A high desert with 320 days of annual sunshine, prompting their name for it, placed near the sun. Rainfall that rarely reached to double figures, but still made for green mountains and dwarf forests.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
A river, albeit small, with spring-fed tributaries sometimes flowing water. Sewable ground, sandstone for bricks and suitable soil to make adobes. A small mountain range long known and famous far and wide for its sky blue stones. Ample firewood to boil their crops. In the grassland basin, bands of striped pronghorn antelope, mule deer in the hills, and elk, sheep, and bears in the mountains.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Eagles soaring overhead, packs of gray wolves howling in the night, lions slinking through the rocks, and sacred coyotes trotting by with a quick, sharp-eyed look. crystal and air for watching the sun's progress along the horizons, nights brilliant with jittering stars, the steady glow of traveler planets, and the occasional light that flies.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
The colonizers spoke two different Puebloan languages, Tano and Koresan, so living near one another were bilingual. They wore garments made from the cotton they grew and ornamented themselves with turquoise jewelry. The women wore their dark hair long while men affected a bowl cut.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
They painted colorful designs on pottery known as Rio Grande glazeware that frequently included images of parrots or macaws brilliantly marked birds traded up from Mexico and not native to anywhere in the southwest.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Because of its sunshine and the public lands that provide remarkable access to the surrounding landscape, the West is a great place to live in the present. But as we all know, it's the past of the West that's the key to its magic. Those of us who live in the West may love various aspects of the modern world out the door, but we all absolutely adore the Old West, the frontier.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Farm implements they fashioned from fire-hardened juniper, arrow points largely from local black obsidian glass, and their axe blades from an aluminum silicate called fiberlite they mined in the high Rockies nearby. Their domestic animals were dogs and turkeys.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Their ancestors had domesticated turkeys around the year 1000 when huntable wildlife near their villages declined and left them protein-poor. Water manipulation and desert agriculture required cooperative effort, so these were town dwellers.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
They lived in apartment-like rectangular buildings with flat roofs resting on massive support beams, with plastered walls, occasionally built of stacked stone, but more commonly in the Galiseo country of puddled, dried adobes. The buildings often were three to five stories, with entrances, cooking, and daily life carried out on the top roof level.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
The lower levels accessed by descending ladders into rooms that featured gleaming polished floors and walls often painted with murals. The buildings commonly grouped around central plazas.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
The plazas highlighted circular underground ceremonial rooms known as kivas, with fireplaces, perimeter benches, and a central hold, a sepapu it was called, representing humanity's point of emergence from a world below into the present world. San Lazaro left the largest ruins of all the Galisteo villages.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Its ruins cover 57 acres and feature the outlines of 27 separate buildings with 1,941 ground floor rooms and a remarkable total of 5,000 rooms. It was settled around 1290, and despite a pair of debilitating droughts in the 1400s, continued to grow for 200 years when its peak population was nearly 2,000 people. That's six times the size of any 21st century Galisteo Valley town.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
By then, many local resources were likely depleted, and the town was abandoned in the early 1500s. The immediate catalyst to that exodus may have been something dramatic, for in 1581, a Spanish party found the town half destroyed.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Fenn's most remarkable San Lazaro discovery, for which he had the good sense to call in professional archaeologists and native descendants, came in 1992 when he unearthed two plastered kachina masks and other stored sacred objects. The magnificent mask appeared to represent black bears and were likely associated with a bear clan or medicine society.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Various dating techniques placed the masks a few years on either side of 1500. Kachina mask would be one of the most unlikely objects any Puebloan would ever abandon. Whatever happened at San Lazaro around 1500 must have come on remarkably suddenly.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
When European colonizers arrived in the early 1600s and introduced fulsome new sources of protein, 4,000 sheep and 1,000 goats arrived with those first Spanish settlers. Pueblo people fully reoccupied San Lazaro.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Before long, though, swelling resentment over having to provide crops and labor and its Spanish suppression of the Kachina religion led San Lazaro's warriors to become leaders in the Great Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which drove the Europeans out of New Mexico for a dozen years.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
But the Pueblo's citizens were alarmed enough at the possible consequences of this that everyone ended up fleeing San Lazaro, leaving a 400-year-old city to dissolve into silence in Adobe. There were at least seven other similar long-lived towns in the Galiseo country, harboring at various times several thousand more of these former Chacoans.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Several were farther east and close to the high plains, where they had to survive Apache raids after those Athabascan speakers migrated in from the far north.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
We've absorbed it by watching films by John Ford and Quentin Tarantino, reading novels by Louis L'Amour and Cormac McCarthy, and histories by Stephen Ambrose and Hamptonsides. Of course, there are many versions of the West, and all of us have a personal preference for our favorite version. Clearly, for John Ford or Quentin Tarantino, it's the cowboy West of so many hundreds of Western movies.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
But like the townspeople of San Lazaro, their inhabitants fled soon following the Pueblo Revolt, when the Spanish absence allowed for even more Plains Indian raids, this time by Comanches thundering their horses through a rimrock break that's still known today as Comanche Gap. The Spaniards call the westernmost Pueblo town they found in the Galiceo country San Marcos.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
It was near a little mountain range the newcomers named Los Cerrillos, the Little Hills, that had been mined since the time of Chaco for lead used to glaze pottery and for the ultimate trade item from the southwest, sky blue turquoise.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
A thousand years ago, Indian miners pulled turquoise ore out of shafts in a minor Cerrillos peak called Chalchihuitl, the name from the Aztec language, and a little mountain with an outsized reputation. An image of this little mountain graces the Temple of the Sun pyramid in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
I've explored its ancient shafts some, but always with hair-raising alarm and shock at the fearlessness of Indian miners. The fortunes of these towns flourished and ebbed as the centuries passed. When they were all occupied, with unexploited resources available in the 1300s and 1400s, the combined population of these Galiseo River towns may have been more than 6,000.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Because rainfall was essential for their economy, yet droughts also strike the Galiseo, they made a science of cloud and wind study, no doubt hopeful as modern residents still are when grand anvil-headed clouds full of moisture towered up from the mountain ranges in summertime.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Their religion was less theocratic and more decentralized than at Chaco and featured clan leaders dressed in the elaborate costuming representing Kachina emissaries to the deities of nature. The Kachina religion lives on among their descendants today. Although none of these towns survives today, half of these Galiceo pueblos lasted longer than the United States has existed.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
But as is evident from a place like San Lazaro, for all their successes, the Galisteo Pueblans struggled with long-term sustainability. The year-round fires to boil their crops meant that firewood cutting and gathering pushed farther out year after year.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
One of the first scientists to investigate the ruins of their towns, Nels Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History, took a revelatory photograph of the San Lazaro site in 1912, 132 years after its abandonment. That photo showed a still, barren landscape almost entirely stripped of trees and shrubs for two miles around.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
With the diaspora that followed Chaco's collapse, the new Pueblo town of Pecos, northeast of the Galiceo country, developed a mutualistic arrangement with plains hunters to trade Pueblo crop products for dried bison meat. There's no evidence these Galiceo villages ever managed something similar. So with eight towns and several thousand residents, huntable wildlife likely took a significant hit.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
One bit of evidence comes from San Lazaro's archaeology's astonishing number of bones and skulls, many of them cracked open to get at marrow or brains from the goats and sheep Spanish settlers introduced. By the 1600s, protein was obviously a dietary addition the Galisteo Pueblo residents were avid for.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Their several hundred year inhabitation did leave the incoming Europeans a beautifully grassed basin and valley and a healthy Galiceo River that flowed over the surface of this landscape.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
For others, it's the West of town building and Wyatt Earp's or Marshall Dillon's imposition of law and order, or of settlers versus railroads or the gunfighter stories that Tarantino obviously also loves and loves to invert. And of course, there's the Indian Wars West of a few hundred movies and a few thousand paintings.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
The ecological changes that left exotic weeds and spreading junipers and produced a river that slashed arroyos and stream beds 25 feet deep all came later with pasturage for New Spain's horse herds and flocks of sheep and goats. and when the Americans came with millions of cattle and renewed mining in the local mountains.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Beyond walking across the broken pots at San Lazaro, my own most vivid experience of the lingering presence of this former Galiseo world has come from hiking the remnant lava dikes that rise like black dragon backbones from the yellow grasslands here.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Centuries ago, my Galiseo neighbors lavishly adorned these lava boulders with petroglyphs, not a handful, not a few dozen, but with thousands of white outlined images carefully pecked into the black rock surfaces. For capturing some of the essentials of their world and their presence, nothing else brings them to life like these.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Today we call petroglyphs and pictographs rock art, but of course they express a more specific cosmic meaning than any decorative or narrative art. Picking my way from boulder to boulder atop these dikes and keening morning winds, the images have sometimes given me a Sistine Chapel feeling, at other times the open-mouth reaction one has to the Las Vegas Strip.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
There are elaborately costumed kachina figures on these rocks, and having once stood in freezing December weather in Zuni Pueblo and watched a towering Xalaco kachina clacking its two-foot wooden beak while dancing a solstice blessing inside a brand new home, it's hard for me to separate the sacred from the entertaining in these images.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
I also can't help imagining date nights and holding hands under a full moon, gobsmacked at white visions leaping out at you from the silvery black. The imagery is mind-bending in variety and detail. There are mythical creatures like giant horned water serpents, but also real rattlesnakes, often two in tandem, thunderbird eagles, badgers, coyotes, bears, all revered animals the Pueblos preserved.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
There are gleaming four-pointed planets, an endless variety of different cloud terraces, which is the home of the Kachina gods, and those appear in conjunction with water serpents, mountain lions, a woman's nether parts. There are faces with or without masks, handprints, lengthy zigzag lines, spirals, fields of dots, warrior figures protected by circular shields.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
While history and their struggles at sustainability mean the Pueblo people no longer live along the Galiseo River, which is my home today, their descendants remain along the Rio Grande nearby, and I like to go to the annual ceremonies they open to the public. But like so much of the human story, the past here, and even in Chaco, somehow still seems just out of my grasp.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
We humans focus on the moments we exist in. Touching the past is the forever problem of history.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
But as a modern Westerner, a writer and historian who is interested most in the West's remarkable landscapes and animals, the West that does it for me is one most people may not think of as iconic. I'm most drawn to what Western artist Charlie Russell in one of his magnificent paintings called When the Land Belonged to God.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Yeah, so I'm putting together a podcast here, 26 episodes of it, that will be about different kinds of things than most people think of when they think of Western history. There are no gunfights. There are no mining strikes. There's no Marshall Dillon attacks.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Brought to you by Velvet Buck, crafted for those who live off the beaten path where the hunt meets the harvest, and every glass tells a story. Enjoy responsibly. West of everything. Thinking of a podcast about the American West and my own take on its history has had me trying to understand recently why the West resonates with us the way it does.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
What I'm interested in is a different kind of West, and I think this is maybe the value of something like this, a part of the Western story that's not really been known or written about very much, and certainly not in pop culture portrayed so that people get to understand it. And what that West is is something I call the natural West. which is, it's a West of the native people.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
It's a West of wildlife abundance beyond imagining for wildlife and many, many different species. And it's a story of the West that really hinges a lot around kind of an initial reaction to a place that's different, new. and very unfamiliar to people coming out of the East in particular.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
I mean, I think people coming up, say, from Mexico into New Mexico or California don't see the West as being that different. Their usual reaction to the country farther north is that it's cold. But it's similar.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Yeah, that's how they characterize it. Man, it's really cold up there.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Yeah, the country looks a lot the same, but man, it's cold. What I'm kind of interested in is the deep time story all the way back to the Pleistocene and the earliest people who were here and how they interacted with Western animals, because we have some pretty epic alterations that take place in this story. I mean, we lose a lot of animals 10,000 years ago.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Then we have a period where we go for 10,000 years in the West, and it looks as if native people in particular are... pretty benevolent. I mean, there's only one extinction during that time period. And I try to figure out why that is, how it happened that way.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
For me, the West that speaks to my deepest soul is the West either side of Lewis and Clark. How the kind of natural West they saw came to be and lasted for so long, plus what has happened to that version of the West in the centuries since Lewis and Clark saw it. That's the West I try to understand. To me, that's the true West, a natural West, one that's West of everything else.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
And then a lot of the rest of the episodes have to do with a kind of an exploratory first contact experience from people like Lewis and Clark, for example. and a whole host of people later in the 19th century. And also with what transpires in a West in the 19th century with all this abundant wildlife where there are really no rules, no regulations, it's just kind of a free for all.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
pretty much what you would predict for a free-for-all. Things don't turn out all that great for a lot of the animals and, of course, a lot of the native people either. But it's those stories in contrast to Marshall Dillon and town building and the California gold rush, the Mormon settlement of Utah. These are the things that I've been writing about for 35 years, basically.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
I never was interested much because other people had already done it to write about the mining rushes or the Indian Wars. I was always looking for something different and new to write about that I thought would sort of tell a story that nobody quite knew yet. And that's really what this podcast does.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Well, I explain it in three ways, I guess. One is that starting in 1800, a lot of the expeditions into the West are government expeditions. And those people are given specific instructions to keep a record, keep a really close record. I mean, Jefferson tells Lewis and Clark, for example, you know, any animals that you see that aren't found in the maritime states, collect them.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
write a description, learn as much about their natural history as you can. And I think that's one of the things. I think another thing is that there are a lot of Europeans coming over in the early 19th century. The Thomas Nuttalls, the John Bradberries. And those guys tend to look at darkest North America sort of the way the Brits were looking at Africa then.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
where, wow, man, this is some amazing part of the world that none of us has ever seen. And so we've got to keep a record of all of it. We've got to preserve what it looks like. And I think, really... there was an actual market for literary work about the West starting around probably as early as 1810.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
In part, my West is a kind of a first contact West, a theme of much science fiction and fascination with exploring places like Mars in the next few decades. It's about travel to strange places, new country and new animals, the meeting place of an exotic ancient world and modernity.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
And I think the, you know, the Nicholas Biddle journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which came out in 1814, I mean, those things sold like hotcakes in the East. And I think that made people understand that, wow, okay, all I got to do is go out to the West, you know, and write some some account.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
And it even led to, I mean, and I have found two or three of these, what were basically made up accounts by people who never actually went to the West, but they talked to people and read other people's stuff and sat down and wrote an account of their own journey.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Yes, there was. And you could sell a faked book. There's one particular guy, a guy named John Maley, who wrote a faked book about an expedition. He took up the Red River, and he sold it for like $5,000 or something, which, of course, at the time was a huge sum of money. But the publisher he sold it to went broke in the panic, the depression of 1819, and they never did publish it.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
So it kind of exists just as a manuscript, which I have actually examined and examined closely enough to realize, bullshit, this guy did not do any of this.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Come to think of it, the natural West is not only our future on Mars, it's also our deep past when modern humans left Africa more than 50,000 years ago and began to explore the rest of the Earth. America's West, in many ways, was a last earthly experience of that first contact moment in human history.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Yeah. I'm pretty sure it's that a market emerged for it. There was a market. You know, America, we're interested in possibilities for making money. And here was this wild new country that everybody around the world, including all Europeans, were really intrigued by. And so people began to realize, well, hell. I just, you know, I try to keep notes. Maybe I embellish a little bit even.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
And so I think that's kind of one of the explanations for what happens. Starting about 1800, 1810, that suddenly you start getting a lot more primary source accounts. You have to use them, you know, with a grain of salt sometimes.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Yeah. Well, I think one is inclined to do that until you begin to realize that, you know, the classic one in the West is the account of James Ohio Petty, who. I mean, that book was probably published 10 different times in the 19th century. And so there are a bunch of different versions. He changed them up.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Yeah, he's got some good details. Yeah, he does have some good details. And I mean, who knows? What I think, for example, with people like that, like Patty and maybe like John Maley, is they actually did. I think Maley knew enough to convince me that he had talked to people.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
He had talked to people who knew about it, but when he started going up the Red River and started describing the landmarks, I mean, I could tell by the time you got to about the third or fourth day, this guy ain't nowhere on any Red River that existed then or now.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
I mean, so it was, you know, it's a market for stuff, and it produces a huge abundance of material to use, but some of it you have to be careful with.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
When new peoples first meet, everybody experiences first contact, but usually only one side sees the natural world as new and exotic, a new world. The resident people tend to think invasion, and so it is. Yet all of us have ancestors who bequeathed us more than 20,000 years of first contact experiences in North America.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
where we have no written accounts. All we have to go on is archaeology and material culture objects. And now genetics, obviously, that story about the 14 people who are all related to one another, buried in a single room in Pueblo Bonito. That... Makes the whole story of telling the deep time history of the West even more difficult because now you don't really have you may have.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
I mean, and I have used them this way. There are great coyote stories going back thousands of years, and I have occasionally used a coyote story associated with a particular group that. I think would make a point about them, but that's literally the only kind of storytelling you get. It's oral history.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
And so you have to, you have to approach things that way as, you know, really carefully, but that's where my, that's where my observation, I guess, falls apart.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
So what we're grappling with then is, you know, so people got into Chaco in the 1850s for the first time, 1850s, 1860s. And so we've essentially got 170 years of archaeological speculation. Mm-hmm. And so the way you try to figure it out is you sort of track that story through to hopefully the most recent versions of, well, here's what it kind of looks like what happened.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
But that kind of evidence is never quite as foolproof as Lewis and Clark saying today for the first time we saw and shot a buffalo.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Yeah. So the story of the West, when you go back in time, is based on a kind of an evidentiary base that you have to even be more careful with. But it's the only way we have to figure out what happened.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Yeah, well, yeah, absolutely. That's been going on forever. As soon as those villages, like in the Galiseo Valley, were abandoned, there's no question there were people out there poking around, seeing what they could find.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
So I think I come by a fascination for stories like this naturally, and of course so do you. Those of us who are in love with the natural West are usually attracted to the world of native people, to natural landscapes, and to wild animals. Being intrigued by the native West is self-evidently at the core of Western fascination.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Yeah, just instantly. Yeah, and so who knows what all disappeared, but sometimes really great finds are, you know, they remain, and I mean, those kachina masks that Forrest Fenn found there in San Lazaro Pueblo in 1992, man, that's a You just don't find that stuff, in part because nobody ever leaves it.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
And something that we don't understand happened at San Lazaro around 1500 that caused that population of that town to flee so suddenly that either some – Some magician, some healer, some shaman maybe got killed and couldn't go for his goods, or some attack came so suddenly that everybody just fled.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
So sometimes you get lucky like that, and Forrest got pretty lucky on that one.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Judging by the volume and quality of Western landscape art and the way the Western landscape becomes a character in so many films, judging by the number of crown jewel national parks in the West, the same can be said of the Western landscape. But let's say at the outset, the West I'm talking about is not synonymous with the frontier.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
When the old world came to North America, every place on the continent had a frontier, a meeting point between what existed and what was coming. But the natural West of which I speak is not defined by a moment in time, a frontier. It's a place, a region of plains, mountains, and deserts on the sunset side of the Mississippi River. The timeframe of the natural West is not just its frontier stage.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
The story of this West is much more ancient, and it also takes place more recently than the frontier. Because the past does not remain in the past, but affects us in our own time, the story of the West continues beyond the frontier and into the 21st century.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Many of the Western stories I've written about and will tell in this podcast are the stories of the West's wildlife, very much an ignored topic in the West and elsewhere. The cow and the sheep, and to a certain extent even the saddled horse, are the animals we associate with the West of trail driving, ranching, town building.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
But I have to observe that not one of them appears in Charlie Russell's When the Land Belonged to God. Russell's timeless scene of a bison herd flanked by gray wolves pouring over a divide in a landscape we old-worlders would one day call Montana implied that the divine world in the West was Native America. So let's start there, but not necessarily at its beginning, at least not yet.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Let's commence our exploration of the natural West slightly later in time. We'll return to beginnings in the next episodes with a story that makes the point that the West is not new, but a very old place.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
This story stretches our imaginations, suggests how central and fragile Western ecologies have always been to human life here, and illustrates the longevity of the human experience in a country we're reflexively still thinking of as the newest part of America.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
On a sun-drenched November afternoon, I sit in T-shirt and shorts a few feet from the edge of a canyon rimrock, looking through 400 feet of transparent desert air on a thousand-year-old city. My wife, Sarah, is pulling a bottle of water from her pack a few feet away.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Various friends are scattered along rock cairn marked trails through the uplands behind us, where the faint indentations of ancient highways, 400 miles of them, extend to horizons miles distant.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
The whole country, sagebrush uplands, the canyon floor, the enclosing rim rocks, and the ruins with odd names that lie in every direction below, is a uniform tannish brown, the color of dust, or perhaps the color of abandonment. During the time of the Crusades in Europe, this spot and another on the east bank of the Mississippi River, just across from today's St.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Louis, held the two largest cities in North America, both religious centers. With a ceremonial effigy mound of lizards and serpents and a stonehenge-like circle of upright timbers planted to mark out solstices and equinoxes, the city in the eastern woods, today we call it Cahokia, probably held a fairly permanent population of 30,000 people, larger than London at that time.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
I first saw Cahokia in the early 1990s with a girlfriend who had Missouri roots and insisted we visit the place. I'd seen mounds, but never anything on the scale of Monk's Mound towering up out of the American bottoms like an earthen Chichen Itzan pyramid.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
After 300 years of urban life, an earthquake mostly destroyed Cahokia City, but not before its population had gone through 20,000 trees and almost all the wildlife for scores of miles around. As for the city whose ruins lay below us now, either side of 10 centuries ago, from 800 AD to 1140 AD, it was the Vatican of the American desert.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
We call it Chaco, and it's another of our UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Chaco was the closest Native America ever got to an empire like those of the Aztecs, Mayans, or Incas. But this was not an empire of warrior armies and conquered provinces.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
It was an empire of priests who organized many thousands of scattered farming hamlets across 50,000 square miles of today's Four Corners into an economic and religious network. No European principality of the age matched it.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
What the priests promised was direct intervention with the deities who controlled rain, crops, and animals, those grand imponderables whose presence made life good and whose absence ruined it. The city of Chaco housed the priests, their families, and a resident population of thousands. It stored and distributed surplus crops.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Apologies to New England, New York, the South, the Midwest, but the West seems to fascinate the world in a way no other American region can. Why are their television channels devoted 24-7 to playing 75-year-old Western movies so a John Wayne fix is available at just about any sleepless 3 a.m.? Why does a contemporary soap opera Western like Yellowstone succeed with so many people?
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Then at solstices and other special times of year, it hosted grand ceremonies to which the outlying residents made holy pilgrimages. At those times, Chaco gathered a population of some 40,000. Looking down now on its buildings and avenues, one suspects both the ceremonies and the nightlife must have been epic.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Chaco America almost seems foreign in the modern United States, as if lifted from the Middle East. The agricultural revolution arrived in this region 1,300 years before the city existed, and pollen studies indicate this development produced two immediate environmental effects.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Human populations skyrocketed, and crops that needed to be boiled before you could eat them meant that daily cooking fires soon reduced a robust pinyon-juniper woodland to desert. This became a world in need of priests who could intervene with the gods.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Sitting and admiring the sprawling hemispheric architecture of Chaco's largest structure, Pueblo Benito, as its lines and shadows shimmer in the afternoon sun, I know this is a place that reveals much about humanity. Sarah passes the water bottle over to me and reading my mind sums it up.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
It wasn't until the 1880s that anyone built a larger building than that in America. In its time, this city lasted longer than Washington, D.C. has so far.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Chaco and its satellite hamlets survived, in fact, for 340 years. The shorthand version of its collapse is that it all ended with a series of droughts across the Southwest, and that's true. But the many archaeologists who have interpreted Chaco know that much more happened here.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
When the rain stopped coming, the farmers seemed to act abruptly, dropping their digging sticks in the fields, turning their backs on the grand religious gatherings at Chaco, and relocating across the southwest. Some went north to what we now call Mesa Verde's Cliff Palace in present Colorado.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Most of the people who abandoned the Chacoan world congregated along the upper Rio Grande, eventually founding towns still home to their descendants, the Pueblo peoples famous for their apartment-like villages, geometrically painted pottery, and turquoise jewelry. Why did Chaco collapse in what sounds like a fit of pique?
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
The evidence, and ultimately the response of the Pueblos afterwards, points to a crisis we should recognize. Down there in Pueblo Benito, a single room out of 650 rooms yielded the remains of 14 people whose funerary items indicated they represented Chaco's religious and political elites.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
In the room were flutes, ceremonial staffs, thousands of pieces of turquoise jewelry, conch shell trumpets from America's west coast, the remains of macaw parrots from the tropics. The oldest burial dated to 800 AD and the last from Chaco's abandonment, so those 14 span the entire life of the city.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
And not just that, the genetics of nine of the 14 showed them to be descended from the same matrilineal line from a woman who evidently had been there at Chaco's founding. Disparities in wealth and quality of life, along with the resentments they produce, are familiar to modern Americans.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Isotope comparisons of the bones of the priestly class in Chaco's great houses with those of farmers from the villages indicates that the elites consumed far more protein from the meat of deer and pronghorns. They were better fed, grew almost two inches taller, suffered less from disease, had three times the survival rate for children under five, and lived longer.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
They were also conspicuous consumers of high-status goods, from beautiful pots to copper bells, from turquoise jewelry to parrots. In the late 1800s, an early archaeologist working in Chaco shipped more than 70,000 high-status items just from Pueblo Benito to the American Museum of Natural History.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
Why do Germans dress up and play act being residents of the West on their vacation weekends in European forests? How does Back at the Ranch Boot Store in Santa Fe sell $5,000 cowboy boots that will never see a stirrup? Why is there a Cowboy Poets Gathering in Nevada every winter? Why a Gene Autry Museum in LA? A Buffalo Bill Historical Museum in Cody?
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
The farming class suffered this gap between rich and poor as long as the elites delivered on their promise to make it rain. But when drought came and the priests were powerless to stop it, the lower classes attacked and killed many in the upper class. They also embraced a new belief, the Kachina religion.
The American West
Ep. 01: West of Everything
By the year 1160, massive three-story public buildings like Chetro Kettle, a 400-room great house in Chaco that was built with 50 million sandstone blocks, 26,000 timbers, and extended for 450 feet beneath a canyon wall, stood completely abandoned.