EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,016 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast,…
- JRJoe Rogan
(drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
- EWElliott West
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays) Hello, sir.
- EWElliott West
Hello.
- JRJoe Rogan
Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it.
- EWElliott West
You're quite welcome. Good to be here.
- JRJoe Rogan
I really enjoyed you on the Meat Eater podcast, and, uh, that's why I reached out. And, uh, I started w- uh, reading your, uh, the book on the Nez Perce.
- EWElliott West
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
And then I, I picked this up as well, Continental Reckoning. That is ... That's a hell of a book.
- EWElliott West
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
That's-
- EWElliott West
It's a big book. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
That's a big book. How long did it take you to write this?
- EWElliott West
The writing, probably, uh, eight to 10 years. The, uh, research and so forth, more than, more than 20 years, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- EWElliott West
Yeah, long time.
- JRJoe Rogan
So this is a lifetime of work.
- EWElliott West
It is.
- JRJoe Rogan
Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion. One of the most fascinating subjects, I think, in the history of the human race. I mean, it is just such ... It's such an amazing story and such a tragic story and such a crazy story of the amount of change that took place over a relatively short period of time.
- EWElliott West
Yeah, 30 years.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. And how little most people really understand about the actual history of the Native Americans and, and that. One of the things that was most fascinating about the Meat Eater podcast was that at the time that Lewis and Clark had come to America, a hundred years before that, there had been Native Americans that had traveled to France.
- EWElliott West
That's right.
- JRJoe Rogan
And met with the king.
- EWElliott West
That's right. Yep, yep. Yep. Um, that's right. Uh, 18- or 1720s, uh, there was a group of, of native people from Kansas, Missouri area, and they had been courted by the French because the French wanted to expand their fur trade into, uh, into that area, up the Missouri River. So they, uh ... And the Spanish had recently suffered a terrible military defeat there, in sort of what's today Eastern, Eastern Nebraska. So, so the French sent this guy named, uh, Etienne Bourgmont to make contact. Now, he already had contact there. In fact, he had a son by one of the women in the Missouria tribe. Uh, made contact, made some friends, made some allies, uh, courted them, and then to sort of seal the deal, he took back a delegation of about six Indians. Now, this is from Eastern Nebraska. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Which tribe was this?
- EWElliott West
There were several tribes, the Missouria tribe, the Illinois tribe, uh, I think some Osage. Uh, and they were, uh ... And he, he then took them back from there down the Mississippi, down to New Orleans, uh, and then over across the Atlantic, uh, to Le Havre, and then they went by coach from there to Paris. Uh, and they spent several months there, uh, in Paris being fêted by King Louis XV, uh, visiting the Paris Opera, which they said was a great place full of sorcerers. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) Sorcerers.
- EWElliott West
Sorcerers. Uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Why did they describe it as sorcerers?
- EWElliott West
I don't ... I think they figured, uh, these people were just sort of transformed before their eyes, you know. They just became somebody else. They're great actors, of course.
- 15:00 – 30:00
Really? …
- JRJoe Rogan
talked about it before on this show, but it's really interesting that that's the origin of the term bigwig. Uh, that-
- EWElliott West
Really?
- JRJoe Rogan
Did you know about that?
- EWElliott West
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, okay, great.
- EWElliott West
No, uh-huh.
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm gonna tell you something.
- EWElliott West
Okay, great. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
So there was, uh, see if you could find out who these French royals were. But there was, uh, these, uh, French royals who contracted syphilis. They started losing their hair, and so they started wearing these, uh, uh, they'd put these beautiful wigs on. And the more money you had, the bigger your wig was.
- EWElliott West
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
And it became, because the syphilis had just run rampant through this population-
- EWElliott West
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... so many people were losing their hair, and they would-
- EWElliott West
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... get these s- uh, holes in their face-
- EWElliott West
Sores. Right, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and sores. It was really horrific. So these are the gentlemen. Saniel... How do you say his name? Papize? How would you say that?
- EWElliott West
Pepys.
- JRJoe Rogan
Elliot. Pepys?
- EWElliott West
Pepys. Uh-huh.
- JRJoe Rogan
Pepys?
- EWElliott West
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, so at the time, hair loss is a one-way ticket to public embarrassment. Long hair was a trendy status symbol and a bald dome could stain any reputation.
- EWElliott West
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
While Saniel Pepys' brother acquired syphilis, the diarist wrote, "If my brother lives, he will not be able to show his head, which would be a very great shame to me." Hair was that big of a deal. And so the syphilis outbreak sparked a surge in wig-making.
- EWElliott West
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Victims hid their baldness as well as their bloody sores that scored, scoured their faces with wigs made of horse, goat, or human hair.
- EWElliott West
Wow.
- JRJoe Rogan
Perukes were also coated with powder scented with lavender or orange to hide any funky aromas. Although common wigs were not exactly stylish, they were a shameful necessity. That changed in 1655 when the King of France started losing his hair. And so these guys started wearing wigs-
- EWElliott West
(laughs)
- 30:00 – 45:00
Now, when it comes…
- EWElliott West
It wasn't the military, you know. It was this transformation of their world into another, uh, from one world into another in which they didn't fit, so they simply had no choice but to do what they were told if you're gonna live.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, when it comes to the American bison, there, there certainly was, uh, a market hunting aspect of it.
- EWElliott West
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
That they were hunting them for their tongues, they were hunting them for their hides. But there was also, it seems like there was a motivation to remove the Native Americans' ability to sustain themselves. Or was that a, just a peripheral ... Was that like-
- EWElliott West
It- it's a little complicated, (laughs) as usual. Right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- EWElliott West
Uh, you're talking about two things here, first.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- EWElliott West
When you're talking about the, uh ... I think it's fair to say that Indian peoples had their own hand in this. Once buffalo robes ... That is, you, you take a, take a, usually a cow hide and you process, you scrape it out and you, and you work it, you work it into a robe. Um, suddenly those became quite popular, uh, in the East, uh, in England, uh, and in Europe. It was sort of this exotic thing to have in your house. You know, you put it on the wall or you put it- make it into a rug or you use it as a, uh, you're out in a, in a carriage in the winter, uh, you would have these things. It was, it was, uh, something that was, uh, interesting, something that was, all of a sudden it was a fashion, kind of a fad. And suddenly there was this great market for these things, uh, for Indian hunters, native hunters. They've been killing bison of course for their own uses, but now they would do both that and for their hides, which they could turn into robes, which would give them this unprecedented affluence.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- EWElliott West
It was this, it was this business boom among them. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
And also warmth and the build- to sustain during winter.
- EWElliott West
Sure. Well, th- I mean, they had always used it for that. Now, it was a commodity.
- JRJoe Rogan
When did that shift and what, what caused that shift?
- EWElliott West
That was in the eight- uh, 1820s is when it really, when it really booms. Suddenly, you know, there's this, uh, exotic, uh, thing that you can get from the American West, uh, that's, that's kind of cool to have, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- EWElliott West
So that's in the eight- 1820s, and it's a huge trade, you know. Hundreds of thousands of robes are sent down the Missouri and the Mississippi, down to be marketed, uh, marketed out of New Orleans, um, and to be, and to be, and to be sent east. That had an ear- early effect on the decline of the bison population. Uh, in my own- of own research and work on this, uh, I think that something close to a half of the bison population at its peak, um, is explained by that sort of hunting and other kinds of ecological and environmental changes, uh, that were going on in the West. So, long before the hide hunters, the white- th- those white hide hunters went out there and started killing them, Indians were killing them, and essentially for the same reason. In other words, Indians th- themselves became caught up in this commodification, uh, caught up in this international trade, right? Um, and they began to feel the effects of it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- EWElliott West
By the 1850s, there's this, uh, noticeable shortage, decline of, of bison populations. So they're already under pressure. And then, and then somebody figures out, 1872, we know exactly the year, 1872, somebody figures out that you can take a bison hide and you could turn it into industrial leather. (laughs) Now, in the 1870s, there was a worldwide leather shortage. The reason was, uh, industry. Factories needed leather for gaskets for these, uh, machines, uh, belts and these things. A huge demand for it, uh, both here, uh, and in England a- and in Europe. Uh, most of that leather had been coming from Argentina, the huge herds in Argentina, but they were about tapped out.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- EWElliott West
So there's this huge demand, there's huge- there's this big pressing economic question. How ... Where's the leather gonna come from? Um, as, as hundreds of new factories are being built all the time, right? Suddenly somebody figures out buffalos.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- EWElliott West
They can give it. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
So th- the buffalo got it from both sides.
- EWElliott West
That's right. That's right. So they-
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you read Dan Flores' work on the reason why there was these immense buffalo herds in the first place?
- EWElliott West
Sure.
- JRJoe Rogan
He believes that with the decline of the Native American population because of disease, that led to an unprecedented rise in the buffalo.
- EWElliott West
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And that when th- the Europeans came and saw these millions of buffalo on the plain, that this was not normal.
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Yeah. Yes, a lot…
- JRJoe Rogan
that lived in symbiosis with the land. And to, uh, us, people that sort of understand how horrible it is that that's happened, we have this incredible romantic attachment to, to Native Americans.
- EWElliott West
Yeah. Yes, a lot of ways we do. Now, there was, of course, agriculture here.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- EWElliott West
In what's today the United States, uh, in the East, uh, highly sophisticated forms of agriculture, growing a variety of crops. In the Southwest, uh, relying especially on, on corn. But you're right. A good part of what's today the United States, especially the West, uh, were hunter-gatherer peoples and fishers. Um, they had figured out these ways to, uh, these sort of, these incredibly complicated and complex, uh, uh, practiced ways of moving through their year, uh, month by month, week by week, in ways that had, they had practiced and, and learned about over the, over many generations, uh, that allowed them a really remarkably high standard of living. Um, now, there were not large tribes. One of the limitations of a hunter-gatherer society, uh, is you cannot expand in numbers beyond a certain, a certain limit. About 125. You know, that's a... Uh, get bigger than that, you really can't support it. So what you had was this extraordinary splay, this, this extraordinary, uh, variety of, of peoples. You know, hundreds, hundreds of different native groups. Um, today, there are 530 federally recognized tribes (laughs) in the United States.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- EWElliott West
Yeah. Uh, and that's just, those are the ones who have survived, uh, physically and, and culturally. So there's this remarkable, uh, array of peoples, many of them speaking different languages or different dialects, uh, all of them in contact with the, with the others, uh, that with, in this, uh, very, uh, intricate tri- uh, trade relationships.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- EWElliott West
Uh, it was quite a place, you know. And you're right, it, it, it flies, um, dramatically, uh, in the face of what we think was going on back then.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- EWElliott West
This romanticized, simplistic view of the Indian, right? They're just like this, (laughs) this one group of people, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
It's also so interesting that that number of 125 people aligns with we know as Dunbar's number.
- EWElliott West
That's exactly right. That's where it comes from.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- EWElliott West
So you're aware of that. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- EWElliott West
Wonderful book. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. Dunbar's number, meaning that we have in our mind the ability to hold a cer- a relationship with a certain number of people intimately, and then as it spreads out further-
- EWElliott West
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... we can know some people sort of, we kind of know of them, and, but there's just a small group that would be your family, a larger group that would be your tribe, and then there's neighboring tribes.
- EWElliott West
That's right. That's right. It's a fascinating idea.
- JRJoe Rogan
It is fascinating because-
- EWElliott West
He uses the, uh, he used the-
- JRJoe Rogan
... it shows our hard drive.
- EWElliott West
Yep. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
We have a mental hard drive-
- EWElliott West
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... that's sort of designed...
- EWElliott West
Yeah, we do. Yeah. He uses a... It's a great book. Uh, he uses, uh, the idea of gossip. You know, uh, the m- uh, the go- the, uh, the maximum number in which gossip really affects you, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- EWElliott West
(laughs) And you can't get above about 125 before, oh, what the hell? I don't care. So...
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Sure, sure. …
- JRJoe Rogan
upon them.
- EWElliott West
Sure, sure.
- JRJoe Rogan
They're beaten and treated horrifically, so it's v- very hard to watch-
- EWElliott West
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... because you know that that is what happened.
- EWElliott West
Of course, yeah. That's, uh, the boarding schools.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- EWElliott West
That goes way back before 1923. By '23, it's sort of, it's sort of winding down. Um, but yeah, yeah, all sorts, of course, uh, scandalous, uh, news recently in the past year or two about the kinds of, uh, treatment that came out of those, out of those schools. Here and in Canada, the same sort of thing is being revealed in, in, uh, in Canada about the abuses under those, under those schools. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- EWElliott West
It's not just Christianity that's being forced on. They are, uh, required, uh, to speak only English.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- EWElliott West
You know, they're punished if they speak their own languages.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- EWElliott West
Uh, they're forced to give up their, their appearance. They cut their hair, uh, dress in a certain way. Uh-Now, there's a wonderful irony in that show (laughs) . Uh, I said a moment ago, uh, most people, most of the public think of, um, you know, the Indian as if there's one group of people (laughs) .
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- EWElliott West
The, the Indian. Native peoples, of course, didn't think at all like that, uh. They identified with tribal groups. They identified with a band within the tribal groups, uh, but often at odds with each other. You know, uh, they'd been fighting each other like everybody fights everybody else, uh, in, in history. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- EWElliott West
... so their identity was, you know, when you say, uh, "What are you?" They would say, "Well, I'm a Cheyenne, I'm a Comanche, you know, I'm a Tlingit, you know (laughs) , I'm a, I'm a whatever."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- EWElliott West
Uh, "I belong to this guy's band," um. So the idea of an- of the Indian was, uh, completely foreign to them, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- EWElliott West
... until boarding schools. And all of a sudden (laughs) in boarding schools, all the kids, all the young people are taken, required to go to these schools. All of these different groups, uh, they're all living together (laughs) . They're all forced to surrender much of their own individual cultures, those dozens of different cultures that they were, um, um, you know, they had come from, um. And suddenly, it begins to dawn on them, uh, they're now all speaking the same language, right? They're all... (laughs) You know, we've got much more in common than we have differences among us.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- EWElliott West
So there's a way in which, um, you know, the, the supposed purpose of a boarding school was to destroy Indianness, yeah? The famous, uh, phrase, uh, coming from, uh, uh, Colonel Pratt, who was the one who founded Carlisle, was, uh, uh, "Kill the Indian to save the man." Uh, destroy Indian identity in order to allow these people to survive in the modern world, uh.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- EWElliott West
But what the boarding schools did (laughs) was, in fact, create the Indian. They didn't kill the Indian. The Indian didn't exist before that. It created this sense of common identity, uh, this sense of, okay, we may be Comanche, we may be Cheyenne, we may be Lakota, may be Tlingit or whatever, but we're all- we all have this common problem that we're facing, these common difficulties. So we need to think in terms of the Indian-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- EWElliott West
... to bond, to, to, uh, you know, to, uh, uh, to bond together, just like in a smaller scale when these bands decide to, uh, to join and unite in order to fight the military. Now on this much larger continental scale, Indians from all over, Native peoples from all over, uh, the nation now begin to see that they are related, related in their circumstances, not by blood. So the Indian was created, not killed, in the boarding schools.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's fascinating. When they initially tried to move the Natives to reservations-
- EWElliott West
Mm-hmm.
- 1:15:00 – 1:28:01
Wow. …
- EWElliott West
It never goes through a territorial period, they just go straight to statehood because there's so many people, right? Well, historically, uh, i- if the Indians were getting, uh, much of, uh, protection, it, it came from the federal government, uh. Well, the federal government has ... It's not a territory, you know, so it's entirel- it's the state government that's in charge there. And the state government, um, (laughs) state government's attitude was, "Get rid of 'em."
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- EWElliott West
"Get rid of 'em." And the population dropped from, um, estimated 150,000, uh, in 1848, uh, to, uh, 1900, uh, 16,000.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- EWElliott West
100 ... So about 90, about 90%. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whew. Wow.
- EWElliott West
Yeah. It was one of the, uh ... You, you could picture it, uh, this way. Uh, I think we mention to most, most folks, you know, um, where were the great Indian wars? Where were the great Indian defeats? They think typically of the Great Plains, Little Bighorn, you know, Montana, uh, the Dakotas, uh, and the Southwest, New Mexico, Arizona. That's where the movies all are, right? (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- EWElliott West
Those are the ones that we're most aware of, uh, publicly. If the population in California, native population in California dropped as much as we think it did, that would be as if every native person in Montana, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, uh, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, uh, New Mexico, Arizona, uh, vanished.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- EWElliott West
It was if they, they were all gone, all dead.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- EWElliott West
And that was happening on this one, one state, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
One state.
- EWElliott West
... Cali- Com-
- JRJoe Rogan
Because of one commodity.
- EWElliott West
Yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- EWElliott West
It was a absolute nightmare, and yet who knows about it, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Very few people.
- EWElliott West
Who's aware of that, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. That's not really discussed that much.
- EWElliott West
Mm-mm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whew.
- EWElliott West
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
There's a fantastic book about Texas and about the Comanches called Empire of the Summer Moon.
- EWElliott West
Sure. Uh-huh.
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you read it?
- EWElliott West
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Incredible book. Uh, it, uh, it details the difficulty that they had in trying to establish colonies, uh, both in, uh, New Mexico and in Texas.
Episode duration: 2:01:16
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