Dan Flores

So many Germans fascinated with the West and with native people never visited the West, knew very little about it, sort of botched the names of tribes.

And I mean, he was really kind of awful at it.

I lived at one time, taught at a university on the

Yano Estacado, and Carl May evidently made the Yano Estacado into a real focus, a geographic focus.

And in Carl May's books, the Yano Estacado is a mountain range.

Well, Yano Estacado, in truth, is actually a dead flat surface, a plateau, the top of a plateau.

And when I was at Texas Tech back in my early career,

A bunch of the Carl Myer Society came to Texas Tech to hold their annual conference, and they all got off the plane and were stunned to find themselves, rather than in snow-capped mountains, standing out on a bald-ass open plane full of cotton plants.

And so, I mean, I got to do a talk for them, and it was very funny to talk to these Germans.

who had a completely erroneous idea, as I say in the episode.

They had the sort of in a galaxy far, far away idea about the American West.

And that's what Vino Rice came to America with.

But he ended up at this moment that he and Curtis were both working.

The frontier had come to an end.

Many Americans were confronting the whole idea of what historians call frontier anxiety.

I mean, what are we going to do without a frontier?

This is what has made America what it is.

And so you're confronted with, do you do the Curtis thing where you act as if the frontier is not over and you continue to portray the Old West as if it still exists?

Or you do what Vino Rice did, which was he began portraying the Blackfeet he was painting in cowboy hats and jeans and checkered shirts and driving pickups.

And of course, the railroad that employed him was not happy at that.