Tore Olson

Well, once you blow up a mountain, you don't want to do it again.

Yeah, well, San Francisco is a huge railroad town, though I think it's less acknowledged nowadays.

I mean, Stanford University, for example, is founded by Leland Stanford, who is this railroad tycoon of the 1860s and 70s, who was also widely despised in his time for all sorts of unscrupulous business practices.

Well, you just don't have U.S.

Western history if you don't have this violent expropriation and dispossession of native peoples, right?

I mean, to make the West the West, meaning that it should be defined in relation to the East, the backbone of the nation, that takes a lot of violence, right?

Because native people didn't think of Wyoming or South Dakota, which today is South Dakota, as the West.

They thought of it as the center, right, as their home, right?

The Mexicans thought about it as the North.

I think it was part of Northern Mexico, of course.

So to make, you know, a place like Wyoming or California, the West took a lot of violence, took a lot of, um, you know, a lot of this was achieved at the end point of rifle to be certain.

And of course, you know, this cinematic theme of so-called cowboys and Indians has been reinforced so often, but it was extremely rare that cowboys would be the ones engaged in combat with native peoples.

It's really the U S military.

The U.S.

military is the force that's doing so.

By the time the cowboys show up, Native peoples have been largely removed from the picture.

And the story about military encounters between Native peoples, of which there's such tremendous diversity as to how they live, the languages they speak, the cultures they practice, that is a tremendous story that defines many hundreds of years, but really comes to a crescendo in terms of violence and drama in the 1860s and 1870s.

I mean, those are the decades when

Frequent battles between native tribes and the government through the military are happening on a regular basis.

Has everything to do with the Homestead Act, doesn't it?