Randall Williams

I'll correct my kids now and then. They'll say, when cave people were here. And I'll say, it seems like the Ice Age people that were here didn't have a real affinity for caves. Yeah.

I'm Steve Rinella. I'm joined here by Randall Williams. Hello. And we're going to do a little thing where after we listen to Dan Flory's American West podcast, we get to come in. We have the privilege where we get to come in and ask questions. And hopefully for you listeners, some of the questions we ask might reflect some of the questions that you have.

Maybe we'll do a little thing where if you have questions, we will do this. Send your questions in, and then at some point we'll send your questions, and at some point we'll be able to do a roundup with Dan and get your questions answered. But in the meantime, here's our questions.

And this is very familiar to us as former students of Dan's. Exactly.

Oh, no, that's great. You want to start?

Yeah. Yeah. I think in the start of this episode, you're talking about many Wests. And there's certain Wests that have, you know, lived on and on in pop culture, especially for Americans living in the 21st century. But you kind of challenge people to... understand the West as a much larger place than the West of cowboys and Indians and of Overland trails and everything like that.

So I wonder, um, what is it about the West that seems to have grabbed a hold of, of our imaginations and, and what has particular about cowboy culture that's grabbed our imaginations? And then what do we gain by opening our eyes to sort of the deep time West?

That's an interesting point, man.

Kind of got a similar thing going on, just cold.

There's a thing I've wondered about. There's an impression I have on source material, about source material. East versus west source material.

And you might not share the same impression, but if you have this impression, maybe you can speak to it, would be... This is a very roundabout way of arriving at the point, but when Randall and I were reading about the long hunters, so this group of Euro-American deerskin hunters that were first pushing over the Appalachian Mountains and going into...

Kentucky, basically all the country south of the Ohio River, west of the Appalachian Range, south of the Ohio, pushing into that area. And we kind of marveled at the paucity of materials and the lack of natural observation, the lack of nature observation.

What is there was collected very deliberately by a historian who went and talked to some of the key players, children, spouses, grandchildren, and tried to put together a little history of these first-year Americans to push into this area. But there's just not a ton there. And that is at, say, 1776. Yeah.

What happens in the next 30, 40 years where all of a sudden it seems like everyone is so literate?

And everyone is just observing and writing about the sites they see, counting things, right? Like really putting a record down that now you can look at the West and part of what's so inviting about it is there's something there to read about. And it's really hard to get.

When looking at people coming into Kentucky, again, for instance, coming into Kentucky, it's like there's hints of things where you gather it must have been really different, but there's no just vivid pictures of what they're seeing. Did people also learn to read and write? How do you explain that?

Like it was enough of a thing that there was value in faking one.

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.

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.

Yeah, you read... That's true. You read, like, the account of Cabeza de Vaca. It feels like it's like an extended acid trip, you know, like you're kind of like, what? Really? There's no way. I mean, that's kind of like it doesn't paint a vivid picture. And I think that's something you're right. Like something happened linguistically.

Where we go over this hump and all of a sudden you can understand what people are talking about.

I wasn't really aware of that, man. And you turned me on to that to be suspicious. In studying writing, in studying fiction writing, we always learned about the unreliable narrator. as a fictional device.

Right. Like in a, you're reading a novel and the reader sort of becomes aware, like that part of the thing is not to trust the narrator, which is common in movies and other stuff. Right. Like it's built, it's a built intention. I never thought of it in, in historical journals, never thought of it.

And I had read tough trip through paradise and I'd emailed you or ran into you, whatever it was and asked you about tough trip through paradise. I remember you said, um, Basically, you know, be careful. He plays a little. I think you say he gets a little fast and loose and some of the things don't quite add up. And I just read it like gospel.

We quote him and have been warned about him, but we quote him.

I'm reading one right now. It's like 60 years. It's a guy that wound up in Montana. He had a trading post in Missoula for a while. I can't remember his name. 60 years, like Indian fighter and trader or something. And a lot of the stuff in there, there's a lot of stuff in there where you read it and you're like, you accept as legit, like some of the observations or ways they use things, right?

Like little tricks of the trade. You're like, that has to come from a level of knowledge, but other parts of it, you know, he's talking about a shot. I sent Randall passage about sharps, Buffalo rifles and, and,

randall's like they didn't exist so he's a mystery later he's misremembering whatever you know i mean he's like he feels like he had one at a time when he didn't actually have one before christian sharps had made a rifle yeah but here's the thing like my old man fought in world war ii okay my dad's long dead my dad fought in world war ii i could tell you he told me about getting and carrying around with him a thompson submachine gun right

Now, I could go and put down, like, my dad was in World War II and had a Thompson submachine gun, and he might be like, well, no, no, no. I didn't have it there. I had it later. But, you know what I mean? Like, I just remember war, Thompson submachine gun. And you can see someone later just out of expediency... Bleeding it together.

Just putting it all in there, and then someone later saying that couldn't have been true.

He wouldn't have had it... I don't know. He couldn't have had it at Anzio. He could have had it later in France, but he wouldn't have had it at Anzio.

Cause I was talking about the vivid descriptions, but when it comes to the Pueblo sites, some of the ancient Pueblo sites, um, Here's these guys doing really vivid descriptions, and they're stumped. The vivid description is of someone being like, what in the hell happened here? Do you know what I mean? It's not even like a vivid... They're just describing being awestruck by...

By what they see as a ruin.

Yeah.

Have you ever read Black Range Tales?

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.

Just instantly.

Mm-hmm.

It's like finding a modern-day house where they didn't even take their passports.

Well, Dan, man, I'm super excited for the series. I can't wait to learn all this stuff that's coming, so thanks.

you just straight into a question I had, you kind of inadvertently walked into a question I had, um, which was, I know that in North America there were dozens, probably hundreds of religions of some sort, right.

Um, around a theme of animism, right. If you go to Western Europe, you kind of said that you think of this, but if you could expand on it, if you go to Western Europe back to some point, I don't know when, was it that religions mirrored that there as well? Or was it a totally different belief system that made this sort of primed them

for like the abrahamic religions meaning like islam judaism christianity right i mean did they go from animism and thinking that they were related to bears and that mountains had a spirit and a personality into like monotheism or do you think that that the that the path was more gradual and they just developed a sort of different world view that made Christianity eventually appealing.

It's very humane that you keep your audience in mind.

got one last one for you um with your book wild new world where you do you you tell the story of wildlife in america and you start you know with the chick's lube impact or like the destruction of the dinosaurs which happened just off the coast of our you know kind of the coast of our current day country and then you track all the way through to the present and then you kind of dabble in the future for a minute like

I'm not going to go read one of those for every continent right now, but I'm dying to read that for South America. There's the language barrier, but does that kind of work exist? Does what you do, are you aware of a South American counterpart, an Asian counterpart, an African counterpart who are saying like, who are doing that type of work in those places.

Does that book exist about South America?

Well, Dan, thanks, man. I look forward to jumping into the next episode.