The American West fascinates people from around the world, but there are many different kinds of iconic western stories. Author Dan Flores has spent a career writing about what he calls the Natural West, stories about nature, animals, and people that span thousands of years of time in the western half of America. Although we reflexively think of history in America as new, this first episode emphasizes the West's true age by focusing on the great Chacoan Empire of a thousand years ago and what happened among its refugees in the Southwest in the wake of Chaco’s collapse from environmental causes. Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon. MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters" and "Mountain Men" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What happened after the collapse of the Grand Chacoan Empire?
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.
Chapter 2: Why is the American West so fascinating?
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of Chaco in Native American history?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 4: How did environmental changes affect the Chacoan civilization?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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Chapter 5: What was life like in the Galisteo River towns?
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.
Like it was enough of a thing that there was value in faking one.
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.
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.
But man, it's off your subject matter, but can you just imagine that if a century prior to Lewis and Clark— You'd have taken people with that mandate and that skill set, and you'd have said, I want you to cross over the range divide. I want you to descend the Ohio, descend the Mississippi, come back Overland.
Yeah.
On the Nash's trace or whatever. Yeah. And like, do your thing. Like write, write down about all the stuff.
Write down about all of it. Yeah. You have to, I mean, in that era, you really have to sort through what material there is to get glimpses. Of the natural world. And obviously there's a literature from the earlier colonial period of, you know, English gentlemen going up to Savannah. Yeah, but a lot of it's indecipherable, though. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't read... The William Bartram kind of stuff.
It reads as very sort of, I don't know, pre-modern. Not in the technical sense, but pre-modern. I mean, it's very antiquarian.
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Chapter 6: How did the Pueblo people adapt after Chaco's decline?
Have you ever read Black Range Tales?
I don't think so.
It's a gold miner. He's knocking around New Mexico mostly, the 1860s. But one of the things that really stuck with me is here's this guy in the 1860s, and he's talking about basically trying to loot Pueblo sites. And in the 1860s, he's lamenting that all the good stuff's been hauled away. Yeah. In the 1860s. And then he describes like amazing things that other guys have carried off. Yeah. Right.
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.
Just instantly.
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.
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.
Mm-hmm.
So sometimes you get lucky like that, and Forrest got pretty lucky on that one.
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