Who Gets To Belong In The Story Of The West?

Find Michele at bookclues.com

The Westerners MythMaking and Belonging on the American Frontier

We talk with historian Megan Kate Nelson about how the American West gets turned into a story and how that story shapes who counts as a “real” Westerner. We follow seven lives that expose the networks, conflicts and choices that the frontier myth often hides.
• Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis and why it dominated US western history
• Historians as mythmakers along with novelists and filmmakers
• Movement in every direction and the West as a web of networks
• Sacagawea’s real work on the Lewis and Clark expedition and why communities claim her
• Jim Beckwourth as a larger-than-life connector and why parts of his story stay disputed
• Maria  Barcelo’s Santa Fe gambling empire and her use of courts and capital
• Little Wolf and Dull Knife’s strategy to protect the Northern Cheyenne and return home

If you like the interview, please  like and subscribe. And you can find out more about me at bookclues.com. Guys, run to the Amazon store and get this book.

Scribner Publishing

Transcript

Welcome To Crossword

Michele McAloon 0:01

Hi, you're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And this is Michele McALoon, the host of Crossword Books, and we have another just really good book. It's called The Westerners, The Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier, put out by a great American historian named Megan Kate Nelson. And it is just it's just a great historical narrative that I keep saying is really what we are in a golden age of reading for what the United States is producing right now. I hope you enjoy the interview. If you like the interview, please like and subscribe. And you can find out more about me at bookclues.com. Happy listening. God bless.

Meet Historian Megan Kate Nelson

Michele McAloon 0:50

We have a book as large as the American West today. It is such a great historical narrative about the stories of the American West. And I'm here to welcome Megan Kate Nelson. Hi, Megan. Hi, Michelle. Thank you so much for having me on. Oh, we're I'm really excited to talk to you about this book. Megan has written The Westerners, Myth Making and Belonging on the American Frontier. It's just so well woven together. It is such a rich history, and we're lucky to have you on. Megan is a historian, a cocktail enthusiast, my kind of girl, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the author of five books. You really have done so much in history. You're a member of the prestigious Society of American Historians. You also are a regular guest on podcasts and radio shows, which I'm really happy about. And you have now your own podcast.

Megan Kate Nelson 2:01

So I get to to ask them questions about all the fun research they did and and all the arguments in their work based on those resources.

Michele McAloon 2:10

Oh, that's fine. What and what is the name of the podcast? It's called Historians and Their Histories. Okay, great. I'll put it as a link into the show notes so we can find that. I've been a teacher at some of the most prestigious t universities in the country. You really are a working historian, which a working historian who can write well. And that is really a great thing. All right, so let's talk about this book.

Frederick Jackson Turner And The Frontier Thesis

Michele McAloon 2:36

It really is a whopper of a book because you take lies and you intertwine these lies on the basis of that these stories really haven't been told. Let's start with Frederick Jackson Turner, and he you phibit the book around this, and this kind of gives you an impetus for why you tell these stories. So tell us a little bit about him.

Megan Kate Nelson 3:00

Right. So I mean, I was on a panel with a couple of other Western historians at the Tucson Festival of Books a couple weeks ago, and we were joking that you know it's a Western history book when Frederick Jackson Turner shows up either in the prologue or the epilogue or both, because he was responsible in 1893 for formulating the what has become known as the frontier thesis of American history, which is that his whole idea was that American institutions and our kind of exceptional nature as a nation did not come from European antecedents, but instead came from this uniquely American experience, which he located on this ever-moving frontier line, that white Americans would move west along this line, and they would face Native Americans, they would face challenges from nature, they would conquer both of those things, and then they would build towns, farms, ranches, schools, and then ultimately governments. And this is how the nation creates itself. So this is a whole theory of nation building that is located in this frontier experience, usually of white pioneers taking over the landscape. So he gave this paper in 1893, but it really was not, it was not an idea out of nowhere. And even he admitted this later. He said, you know, these ideas were in the zeitgeist. What I discovered in researching the book is that these ideas had been in the zeitgeist since the Lewis and Clark expedition in the early 19th century. And the idea of the white pioneer in this ever kind of moving line westward from east to west and conquering nature and indigenous peoples and creating the empire that is the United States. As a historian, I wanted to start with him in the book because not only because his idea is so important, but also to say historians have been part of this process. It's not just filmmakers and novelists and artists, it's also historians who do this cultural work of creating the stories that we tell about ourselves as a nation. And his thesis is just one of those really great examples of how a historian's theory can kind of take hold and really shape an understanding of the past, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. And his frontier thesis shaped the course of US Western history for more than a hundred years. And it really wasn't until the 1980s that historians really started to push against it in the context of multiculturalism and the rise of African-American departments and Native American history departments and a sort of shift in academia toward a more diverse reckoning with American history. But yeah, Turner is one of those foundational people. And I wanted to make sure that readers knew who he was and knew kind of the important role that he played in articulating the frontier myth for Americans.

When National Myths Become Identity

Michele McAloon 6:08

You know, it's so funny, Megan, because I live here in Germany. And if you talk to a European who really has maybe been to New York City and Las Vegas, right? I mean, right, at that point. We are a myth upon a myth. We really are. And we I mean from the very beginning, and we're so new, and we're still not contextualized in history the way a French historian would look at things or a German historian, or we just we are we're so new and we are mythical in many different ways in the world imagination. But you know, one thing, didn't George Washington he was speculating on land in the West in Ohio? This was from the get-go. We we understood that we had land and we were heading west. Go west, young man, right? And that was really part of our imagination, our our energy and motivation, even as we began.

Megan Kate Nelson 7:04

Yes, absolutely. That idea has also taken hold. And so it it sometimes can lead us to marginalize or ignore the people who were already there, right? I mean, the French and the Spanish also had these kinds of designs on the North American continent. You know, they were just moving in other directions. They were going from north to south and south to north. And then, of course, tribal nations across the continent who had been there for thousands of years, don't even kind of meet up with Americans sometimes until the the middle of the 19th century. And from their perspective, theirs is an indigenous world. And these Americans are interlopers, right? And interesting. Yeah. So it's interesting to see that from the perspective. I mean, I think every community creates stories about themselves and about where they came from and where they're going. And it just so happens that the American West is one of those places where a lot of those myths and narratives collide because people are always struggling for control of that landscape.

Michele McAloon 8:09

Very interesting. And I tell you, I that one of the best things I think about the American story is that you have so many different stories. There is not a single narrative, right? There is an indigenous narrative, there's an African-American narrative, and we don't have the structure to keep those narratives out. We really don't. Over the last, I would say, 60 or 70 years, they've really burgeoned for it. And we're so lucky to be able to have this, and I hate the word diversity because as human beings, we're diverse anyway, but to have our individual stories and how you weave these seven stories in, and you show that they're not perfect people. Even the Native Americans were not perfect. They were fighting against it. Yeah, none of these people are perfect people, but in their energy and their motivation, they created stories that created our country. And that I think is ultimately our story. And hopefully it's still our story, right?

Megan Kate Nelson 9:10

Yes, absolutely. And and so that was part of what I wanted to do with the book was really show that and say, here are all these people who are moving in all directions, not just east to west, but also west to east. All of the people in the book, all seven people, are pretty much in constant movement throughout their lives. And even when they settle down, like Maria Hertrudis Barcelo kind of settles down in Santa Fe and lives there for kind of 25 years of her life, but she is benefiting from and engaging with huge networks of mobility, people moving, goods moving back and forth, governments moving back and forth. And this was the case for all of these people. And I was just fascinated by all of them and the kind of paths that they took. And yet, if you only pay attention to the frontier myth, to the pioneer story, the stories we see in westerns or in a lot of Western literature, none of those people really exist. Been, they've been kind of erased in favor of that kind of white pioneer family and the Conestoga wagon or the cowboy figure, the sort of lone, rugged individual. These stories either get lost along the way or they're deliberately erased in favor of that frontier image.

Michele McAloon 10:33

That's interesting. And I think what you just said is like our motion and our movement. And there's no other society in the world like it. We are frenetic. And we always have been, we've been frenetic, we've been frantic, we love to talk. I mean, and that is 250 years we have been doing that. That is truly foreign from to the rest of the world. Let's talk about okay.

Sakagawea And The Fight Over Heroes

Michele McAloon 10:57

I'm gonna say this wrong. Sakajawea or Sakakawa, right?

Megan Kate Nelson 11:03

So so there are three different potential pronunciations of her name, depending on kind of what version of her history you embrace. So the the Northern Shoshone says Sakagaway with a J, the Hidatsa, say Sakakaweya with two Ks. And then there's another version which is Sakagawea with a G instead of a J. There are a lot of potential pronunciations, and this is what fascinated me most about writing and researching Sakagawea's story here. And you could tell by my pronunciation that I'm going with the northern Shoshone version of her history. She was not particularly well known in American history until the 1890s, until a new edited version of the Lewis and Clark Journals came out and sort of emphasized her work more. And then Suffragettes took her up as a feminist icon because one of the things that she did when they got to the Pacific is that she scouted out a winter camp, she lobbied for its placement, and then she voted in the core's vote, right? That vote, feminist in the 1890s, kind of took that up as the first woman to vote in American history. And from that point on, the very first sculpture of her was created and shown in 1904. And from that point on, she became one of the most kind of visible and recognizable women in American history. But before that, nobody really knew much about her. But then she has been taken up. And because her life, what we know about her life is so extraordinary. And because of what she did, many, many, many different communities claim her. So the Northern Shoshone claim her, the Wind River Shoshone claim her, the Hidatza and Mandan and Erika claim her. And then also the state, she appears in state biographies in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas.

Speaker 1 13:11

She was, she was mobile.

Megan Kate Nelson 13:13

Yes. Yes. And I think that what that goes to show, you know, whether you, what kind of version of her life you take up and you kind of find the most convincing and compelling, the very fact that we are sort of fighting over her shows us kind of how extraordinary of a person she was and how much we want to tell her story and we want to remember all the amazing things that she did as part of the core of Discovery.

Michele McAloon 13:40

Okay. So I've got one little comment. So I just did an interview about Christopher Columbus. He's got the same thing. He's got the same story. You know, they took him up in during the Italian immigration in the late 1800s, and everybody's got a Columbus story. So it's funny how we, as human beings, kind of gravitate to we need heroes, and we gravitate towards heroes. Tell us a little bit about her and give us a little context with her so my listeners can understand.

Megan Kate Nelson 14:10

Yeah, absolutely. So what we know about her life, we know mostly from the Lewis and Clark journals. Not only the records that Lewis and Clark kept, but also other members of the Corps of Discovery who kept their own records. What was fascinating to me was they mentioned her more than 150 times in those journals. And she was always doing something or saying something. And a lot of the things that she told them were the story of her early life. So she tells them that when she was a young girl, she was only 12 years old. She was with her family in the fall of 1800, doing what they usually did, which was to gather all sorts of resources to get them through the winter. And the men went off bison hunting south of Yellowstone. And she was taken by the Hadatz in a raid and taken as a captive with several other young men and women, taken to the Knife River villages on the Missouri River, which is where four years later she met Lewis and Clark. This is kind of the first part of her story. She's moving from west to east, right? And by the time Lewis and Clark meet her, she's been married off to a French-Canadian trader named Tucson Charbonneau, who is a pretty despicable character. He's not, he is a terrible person. And Charbonneau was a hunter and a scout, and he hired on with the Lewis and Clark expedition, and he told them that his wife knew how to speak Shoshone. Actually, both of his wives. He had married two Shoshone captives. And Lewis and Clark knew that they had to get over the Bitterroot Mountains in order to move past them and get to the other side of that ridge and make it to the Pacific. So they could take a boat all the way up the Missouri River to that point, but they then needed to negotiate with the Shoshone for horses. So they needed someone to be able to translate, or they weren't going to make it. So they took her on just a couple months after she had given birth to Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, her baby. So this is the iconic image of her with Jean-Baptiste on her back and she's walking or riding a horse with the core of discovery. You know, from that moment on, she served such a huge variety of purposes. She was a translator for them with a Shoshone. She was also a guide. She was also a botanist. She picked a lot of plants and showed them to Lewis and Clark and explained what they were. And they wrote them down and took the specimens and sent them back to Thomas Jefferson. So I sort of love that idea that something that she picked from the ground in the in the mountains is now in the possession of Thomas Jefferson, like in Virginia. And she also, I think, because she was pulling all of these roots from the ground and cooking them, she was saving those guys from scurvy a lot of the time. Oh, because of yeah. And she also was a kind of topographer. She was a diplomat because they had no idea, but by taking her on, whenever an indigenous party showed up with women, other indigenous groups knew that wasn't a war party. So they knew it was a trading party or some sort of kinship-related uh group. And so they did not attack them. So her presence in that group also saved their lives many times because Indigenous peoples did not attack them along the way because they saw her and they said, Oh, okay, they're not a war party. So, you know, she, and I think by the end of that journey, not only was she one of the most well-traveled women in North America at the time, and probably through the course of the whole early 19th century, but I think she thought of herself, given what they kind of said about her in their journals and what she, the kinds of ideas she was expressing and desires, she thought of herself as an explorer in her own right, like as a part of the core of discovery. Right, she was.

Michele McAloon 18:10

She was for all surface, right? She really was. So, no, I love what you do in the book.

Jim Beckwourth And The Power Of Networks

Michele McAloon 18:15

You kind of network and wheel this to another great story of Jim Beckworth, who is not really her contemporary, but you show how their lives sort of slide together. And I I love that story of how we our lives do slide together. We don't live isolated, we live in shit.

Megan Kate Nelson 18:33

No, no. And that's one of those like really strong elements of the frontier myth that I really wanted to combat. I mean, everyone thinks like, oh, everyone's a rugged individual, they do it themselves, right? And their success in the West is based on character traits, on grit and perseverance and their own sort of ambition. And that was true to some extent, but they were always part of communities and they were always part of networks. You know, they were not, no one did it by themselves. And no, no one ever does. And so you take someone like Jim Beckworth, who is very frenetic. Someone described him to me, which I think is totally true as the forest gump of the like early 19th century American West. Like he seemed to be everywhere. He was brought forcibly to St. Louis in the early 19th century by his enslaver father. His father was his enslaver, and his mother was one of the enslaved women who belonged to his father. And ultimately, his father kind of recognized in Jim this kind of adventurous spirit and also recognized that he was quite smart and savvy. And so he sent him to school. He gave him his free papers. And ultimately, Jim Beckworth, he ends up in the fur trade in the Rocky Mountains in the 1820s and 30s. He lives with the Ipsalaki peoples, the Crow peoples, for 10 years. He is a fur trader and he kind of witnesses and enacts the shift from beaver to bison, which is a huge kind of shift in the American West. He sets up four trading forts in three different territories. He ends up, you know, being part of the Mexican-American War in New Mexico. He's one of the first people in the gold mines in California in the 49 and 50. And then he ends up in Colorado during that gold rush 10 years later and actively participates in one of the most egregious actions of the Civil War in the Southwest, which is the Sand Creek Massacre. And he testifies about it to a military tribunal. Like, I mean, he is just everywhere. Now, after he died, one of his friends had said his reputation was as wide as the West itself, but his life was as wide as the West itself, also, right? Like he was everywhere. And if you look at the map of his movements, it's kind of insane. And he crosses paths not only with Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau as an adult, but also Ovando Hollister, who's another one of the protagonists in the book, who's a newspaper editor in Colorado. He's in the same space as Maria Hertrudis Barcelow for a time in Santa Fe in the 1840s. I have no doubt that he had been to her gambling saloon or at least knew about it. You know, so he has relationships with half of the people in the book. And he really is this, I guess what we would call now, sociologists, I think, call social nodes, like individuals who know everybody, the sort of six degrees of separation people. He is a tremendous figure. And I when I read his autobiography, I couldn't believe that I hadn't known about him before.

Michele McAloon 21:46

That one to me, I'm so kind of surprised that we don't know more about this man because he really was an amazing human being. He was an Indian chief for a while.

Megan Kate Nelson 21:57

Was he well, yeah. He like he had been. Taken captive by the Absalaki, the Crow peoples, who now have a reservation in Montana. And he kind of worked his way up to become a chief. And he fought in battles. He married into uh the band with multiple wives. Reports were that he had children, never took them with him, and he never took his wives with him either, his indigenous wives at least. You know, among the Crow people today, there is some, some people are like, yes, he was definitely kind of with us, because a lot of his observations and all of the details of their lives that he includes in his autobiography are accurate. And there's no way he could have known that unless he had lived with them or had been a very long-term observer of their lives. And then the other half are sort of like, whatever, he was, you know, a liar, like we can't, there's no real proof that he did any of this. So again, sort of like Saka Jawea, we have another person who's he's a little bit slippery, but he also people are kind of claiming him or not, or parts of his history are disputed. And this is one of the arguments of the book, also. All seven of the people in the book, after they die, their lives kind of become part of this larger conversation about who belongs to the West, to the United States of America, and to different communities that make them up.

Michele McAloon 23:29

Sure. And you know what? The story's messy. It just is so messy. Yeah. And it's just uh, I think of the human experience, it really is. Nothing is cut and dry. When I was reading about this guy, I was thinking, you know, this is this is probably, and I hate to say this, this is like a musk character, you know, kind of larger than life in like guy who's gonna be Columbus one day or somebody. You know what I mean? Whether you like the man or not, and there's not a lot, you know, whatever about him, but that just kind of that reputation that larger than life, even in life he was living, right? Oh yes. And but you boy, you bring up another one that is just wow, and that's Maria Barcelow.

Maria Gertrudis Barcelo Builds A Fortune

Michele McAloon 24:08

Yes. Oh my goodness. Tell us about Maria Barcelona because I mean, she was the original kick-ass woman. I mean, she take no prisoners. Wow.

Megan Kate Nelson 24:18

100%. Yeah. I had I had run into her and her story when I was researching a previous book, The Three Cornered War, because she was this legendary figure in New Mexico. And so for a time, although she had the sort of opposite trajectory as Sacawea, which is that she was one of the well most well-known women in the Southwest in the in the early 19th century. And then everyone forgot about her. But she was incredible. She is one of the Westerners who moved north. So she was born in Sonora in New Spain, and then she became Mexican after the Mexican Revolution kind of established independence from Spain. And she moved, yeah. So she moved north to just south of Albuquerque and then ultimately to Santa Fe. And she had discovered early on, and I think her family had discovered it also, she had a very quick mathematical mind. She had an incredible memory. She could read people and their intentions. She was a very good kind of, I guess we would call them now. She had emotional intelligence. She was sort of outward facing. And her husband, who she married in the early 1820s, taught her how to play the game of Spanish Monty, which is a card game where you bet on two different turns of cards on whether the suits that were turned over were going to show, were going to show up as the fifth card turned over. So it seems that sounds complicated when I explain it, but basically the dealer puts two cards down and maybe one is a club and one is a sword. And you're like, okay, if I think a club or a sword is going to show up in the fifth card, then I'm going to bet on that. This is basically just a betting game of chance. And it's very hard to count cards, actually, with it, which is very strange. It's it's a Spanish deck with four suits, 10 cards each. And I was trying to figure out she was a player and then she made enough money to buy her own table and become a dealer. And then she made enough money being a dealer, just in the alleys of various towns, to actually buy property in Santa Fe and establish this gambling saloon that, of course, to get to the gambling part of the establishment, you had to go through the bar. Right. Of course. Of course. That's where you make your money. Exactly. And so I was trying to figure out how she made so much money on this. So I taught myself to deal Spanish Monty.

Michele McAloon 26:47

Okay.

Megan Kate Nelson 26:48

I got a Spanish deck and I taught myself to deal it. And then I gave my husband 20 poker chips to bet with, and I took all of his chips in six hands. Huh. And I was like, that's how she did it. Because even when, you know, somebody might win if they guessed right on the suit for the fifth card, but everybody else would lose. Right. So this is a betting game where the the number of people betting is unlimited. So more often than not, she was gonna win. Okay. Unless she was playing one-on-one with someone, which often happened.

Michele McAloon 27:26

Okay, the house was gonna win, right?

Megan Kate Nelson 27:28

The house was gonna win. So she built this enormous fortune. She made so much money that she bought other properties around Santa Fe. She speculated in currency, she speculated in mules. She loaned Anglo businessmen money. And when they did not pay her back, she took them to court, which is partly how we have the records that we have about her, because she did not hesitate to do that. And Mexican women were allowed to sue and be sued in court in this time period. So she was this legendary figure. A lot of American travelers wrote about her because she seemed so extraordinary to them. Because here's this woman, this businesswoman who is dealing cards in this saloon and just making a boatload of money off of all of these people, all these travelers and traders, and ultimately soldiers, American soldiers who came into Santa Fe in 1846. And when they did, they found her and she was the wealthiest woman in New Mexico territory. And just an extraordinary story of a woman who kind of made her way through the world, yes, based on her own talents, but then also kind of reading geopolitics and picking sides based on kind of what she knew would likely happen. And she bet right most of the time.

Michele McAloon 28:50

One of the things about your book that I think is very uplifting, America has so much room. And it still does. I still absolutely believe this. If you've got the smarts, if you've got the intelligence, if you've got the drive, if you've got the motivation, it doesn't really matter what color you are. It doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter where you come from. And that really is the phenomenon of America. And I think our challenge today is keep that, uh preserve that as wide as possible. So that the underdog that is smart, that is motivated, that can have success because it raises all boats when we have success. Right. Right. And your story really, I think really encapsulates that American just that American drive. And I have to tell you, that's also we are different from the rest of the world in that that way. Being able, I'm gonna say transgress, I think that's like a DEI word, but being able to, you know what, to elevate ourselves, it's based on capitalism, I think.

Megan Kate Nelson 29:48

And yeah, you know, and yeah, and again, again, even with that, like nobody does it by themselves, right? So we have to make sure that people, people who have the kind of qualities that Saka Jawea had, that Jim Beckworth had, that that Maria Hertugius Barcelow had, they can succeed because they have access to the to everything that they would need and that other people maybe already have in order to do that. But yeah, I mean, I agree. I think that many of the histories that I have written have been fairly dark. And in the end, the story in this book is that the frontier myth kind of erases or marginalizes or manipulates the histories of these people to shore up kind of white power and federal power in the American West. But these people and their stories and their communities remain. And I think we can actually we benefit from knowing their stories. And I think they are uplifting in many ways.

Michele McAloon 30:47

Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know what? You were, I mean, you had Ella Watson and you had Ovander, Ovanda Hollister, who they were white people that were sort of on the outs or on the weird margins of I tell you who I like is Little Wolf and Dole Knife. So I love that. Yeah. I love that name, Doll Knife. No, I know. Little Wolf, I mean, he was phenomenal too. Him and Jim Beckworth were kind of uh two peas in a pod in a lot of ways. Because Little Wolf was, I mean, he understood, really understood leadership and how to protect his people and what to do for his people. Tell us a little bit about him, because he's a super interesting.

Little Wolf And Northern Cheyenne Survival

Megan Kate Nelson 31:26

Oh, he is, definitely. I mean, we don't we don't know a ton about his early life, but we do know that he was born sometime in the the 18, late 1820s, early 1830s, probably in southeastern Montana, because his parents were northern Cheyenne. But he was born into a world that was really changing. And by that point, the Northern Cheyenne and the Southern Cheyenne had already split kind of into two tribal nations. But the northern Cheyenne, they their territory was kind of in that same region as the Lakota, with Sittingbull, and they made a lot of allies. They were constantly allied with the Northern Arapaho. And the Oregon Trail and then later the Bozeman Trail went directly through their territory. And so he came of age in a time when the Northern Cheyenne were kind of experiencing a lot of pressure from white settlers. Okay, and especially the U.S. Army. So he kind of grew into leadership knowing that he would need to be a diplomat. There was a lot of treaty making going on until the early 1870s. So you had to be able to talk to U.S. officials and federal agents and get what you wanted out of those treaty talks. He was an incredible military strategist. The he and Dole Knife are sort of the two major chiefs of Northern China bands during this time. And Little Wolf is pretty much widely acknowledged to be the kind of war chief in charge because he understood strategy. He understood how the Northern Chaiyan people, who were a horse, kind of dominated a culture, how they could succeed in attacks against military installations, in attacks against the Transcontinental Railroad, which came right through their territory in the late 1860s, and how to actually actively combat those forces. And again, his priority was always the perseverance of his people, the survival of his people, ideally in their homelands. He did not fight and his band did not fight in Little Bighorn.

Michele McAloon 33:34

Yeah.

Megan Kate Nelson 33:35

But uh they fought in some adjacent fights and then they also suffered as a result of the US military's revenge for that, their loss in that battle. And they ultimately were forced to surrender to kind of save themselves in the long term. And the U.S. military and the federal government sent them to Indian territory to live with their southern Cheyenne kin because the federal government, of course, did not understand that the Northern and Southern Cheyenne were two different peoples by this point. Yeah, sure. And so they sent them more than a thousand miles south to Indian Territory, which is a completely different, this is Oklahoma, completely different ecosystem, right? And they just hated it. And within a year, Little Wolf had decided if his people were going to survive, they were going to have to leave. So he worked with Dole Knife, and the two of them planned for months. They started stealing horses from the Southern Cheyenne. My favorite moment from that kind of period was that the Southern Cheyenne were complaining to the Indian agents on the reservation and saying, the Northern Cheyenne are stealing our horses. Like something is going on. And the federal agents were like, How do you know it's them? How do you know it's not white bandits coming onto the reservation and stealing your horses? And they said, because white bandits would just steal all the horses. The northern Cheyennes steal the best horses. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, they're smart. Yeah. Yeah, they're smart. They're taking all the good stuff. And so in 1878, 79, they left in the dead of night. They made it kind of 60 miles before the US government figured out that they had left. And what ensued was for several months and over 1,500 miles, a kind of running battle with the U.S. Army. But they always outpaced them. They were always one step ahead of them and ultimately evaded them until they made it back into the kind of area of the Black Hills, when ultimately Little Wolf kind of said, okay, we're back in our homeland. So he led his people and they negotiated to surrender. And then he shifted back into diplomatic mode. And he successfully negotiated for his people to be able to stay in their homeland, which was a very rare thing in this moment in the 1870s and 80s, with the between the indigenous peoples and the federal government.

A Different Path For US Indian Policy

Michele McAloon 35:58

Right. One of the things your box does, and it it documents how government policies really did, it really did not do favor towards the indigenous population. I kind of wondered when I was reading, how would this have been different? How could we have done this differently? Because I did a book with uh Sophia Pinkham on the oak and larch, and it's about how the Soviets did their it did bad to their indigenous people. I mean, even here in Germany, Celts overran the indigenous people, the Franks. And I mean, it is this is our human sort of what we do as human beings, and we don't seem to learn to do better. And I mean, I kept thinking, what how could they have negotiated this differently? But there wouldn't have been a winner and a loser, that there could have been a compromise between the two groups. And I I'm not sure how you would have done that. I I mean, I don't know. Yeah, I'm not sure what you did was right, but I'm not sure the what the historical alternative could have been at that point.

Megan Kate Nelson 36:59

Yeah. Well, one of the things that I think is interesting, Ulysses S. Grant actually appointed the first indigenous person to be the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It was Ely Parker, who had been his uh second in command during the Civil War, his kind of aide, not his second in command because he wasn't military, but he was an aide on his staff. And Ely Parker was indigenous, he's Seneca, and he came up with this very interesting proposal. He said, okay, since 1830, Indigenous people had been removed to what is now Oklahoma, Indian Territory. And he said, I think the best thing that we could do, and of course the goal was always, you know, quote unquote, civilizing the Indian to save the man, right? Ah, that that was their kind of line. He said, why don't we make Indian Territory an actual territory and then a state? And indigenous people then would have senators and congressmen, and they would have a say in the government. And I think if they had, if the US government had said, okay, look, these wars are really expensive, they are very destructive, and instead Dakota Territory became an indigenous an indigenous state, perhaps Montana as well, Arizona, then we would have kind of four to five states that are indigenous. Right. And that is enough to swing votes, right? They would have landowning, they would have all kinda everything that they they would want to have. And those states could establish state laws like tribal nations do today. But I think that was, I mean, that is, I think, where it could have gone. And it would it would not have, you know, resulted, I think, in the continuation of an indigenous way of life that was highly mobile and hunting-based and and things like that. But what it would have done is to give indigenous peoples a voice that the federal government had to respect.

Michele McAloon 39:08

Right.

Megan Kate Nelson 39:08

Yeah. It would have gotten rid of, I mean, the Indian Wars would have been over, right? Right. And, you know, leaders like Sitting Bull and Little Wolf could have been governors of their states and could have gone on to instead of being Sitting Bull was murdered on his own reservation, and Little Wolf ended up kind of descending into a little bit of despair and then murdered a fellow Northern Cheyenne, which kind of put him on the outs. He had to give up all of his leadership positions because that was a very serious violation of Northern Cheyenne law. Things could have been different for them. They could have found maybe a way to persevere and lead in a different sort of way. But I was always, I'm I'm super interested in that proposal. It didn't go anywhere. Ulysses S. Grant kind of thought it was interesting, but Congress was not going to let that happen. But I I wonder what would have happened and where we would be today if that had been the case.

Michele McAloon 40:03

Yeah, Congress was as worthless then as never mind. They ain't got any smarter. Don't even get me started, Michelle. Don't get me started. I haven't even got any smarter.

Why The Book Is A Page Turner

Michele McAloon 40:13

Uh well, I tell you, folks, I mean, uh you have what seven people that you profile. Get this book. It is such a good book. I mean, and you just do a fabulous way of storytelling. And that's what uh and you just you want to find out what happened to Ella Watson. You want to find out how did Polly Bemis, you know, how did she end her life and amazing? Yeah, so it's actually historical page turner. I would recommend it for high school and above from, and it really, I tell you, it's just it's really good. I hope, and it's actually inspired me to do some more reading. I'd love to read more about like Maria Barcello or to out there. So is there a way people can get a hold of you? Or do you you have a website, right?

Megan Kate Nelson 41:02

Yes, yes, absolutely. I have a website, which is pretty easy. It's www.megankate nelson.com. And all my contact information is there. And you could there are also many links to buy the book. And the book is coming out in hardcover and in audiobook and an ebook. So however you like to read your history, you can you can read the Westerners that way.

Michele McAloon 41:25

All right, very good. Now I always ask, and people, I'm sure, are annoyed about this. Uh future projects, any thoughts?

Next Project And Final Recommendations

Megan Kate Nelson 41:31

Yeah, so I I already have signed up to do this project with Scribner again, my current publisher. The new book will tell the story of a Kiowa and Comanche raid on a northern Texas biracial ranching community where they took both black and white captives. And this happened in October of 1864. So it is a Civil War Texas story that involves kind of three different communities that are in, you know, working in Texas to achieve their own dream of freedom. It's black Americans, white Americans, and indigenous peoples.

Michele McAloon 42:10

What a great pocket of history. And sign me up. Okay. Sign me up. All right, Megan. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule. And I wish you the best of luck with this book. Guys, run to the Amazon store and get this book. So all right.

Megan Kate Nelson 42:25

Thank you so much, Michelle. Have a good day.