Secrets of Scarlet Meadows ft. Tore Olsson

Welcome to The Outlaw Haven podcast! In this episode we have the opportunity to chat with Tore Olsson, a History professor at University of Knoxville. And Author of Red Dead's History!

Buy Red Dead History here- https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250287700/reddeadshistory/

Listen to Red Dead’s History here- https://www.audible.com/pd/Red-Deads-History-Audiobook/B0CKM6FB83

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

The year is 1899. The frontier is dying, and nowhere in Red Dead Redemption 2 feels more alive or more dangerous than the blood-red soil of Scarlet Meadows. Today, we're pulling back the curtain on one of the most historically rich regions in the entire game. We're talking about the real deep stuff that inspired Lemoy. The echoes of the Civil War still rattling around and the feuding families that feel ripped straight from the headlines of the 1880s in a world cut between what it used to be and what it was terrified to become. To help us do that, we've brought in someone who doesn't just play this game, he teaches with it. Victoria Olsen is a professor at the University of Tennessee and the author of Red Dead's History. He uses Red Dead Redemption 2 in actual history classrooms to bring the dining west back to life. I'm Sam. I'm Zach. And this is the Alpha Haven classes and session. Let's start with you telling us about how you got into this, first of all. Like how you started using Red Dead Redemption to teach history classes.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Sure. Well, first off, Sam, Zai, thank you guys so much for hosting me. It is very exciting to be on the Outlaw Haven podcast. And I love the idea that two friends who've really enjoyed this game so much have devoted an entire podcast to it because, as you know, there's a lot to talk about. I'm a firm believer that there is you need, you know, this game and the world that it tries to represent. Uh, it needs a lot of time and space and attention. And it's just so crazy to think of how many millions and millions of folks have engaged, you know, implicitly with American history through this video game. And especially Red Dead 2. You know, like I'm imagining most of our conversation will be about the second game rather than the first game. The first game's cool, to be sure, but I have a soft spot for the second game, just because it's more recent and it's so much bigger and so much richer as well. Yeah, so um I am a history professor, uh, right, as you mentioned, at the University of Tennessee. And I'm a specialist on modern American history, really American history since the Civil War, um, last 150 years or so. And um I've been teaching here for 13 years at this point. I did my PhD at the University of Georgia. So I have been a Southerner for a long time, though I'm not a native-born Southerner. I'm actually from the south of Sweden, believe it or not. I'm an immigrant who came to the U.S. when I was a lot younger. But um, this combination of teaching history, academic serious history through video games is something that I really came upon in the midst of the pandemic. And the pandemic, you know, turned all of our lives upside down, and it led to many, many horrific things, and in some senses, some good things, because you know, some of us were confined at home and just our we had had to change up our entire routine. And that was very much the case for me. So when the pandemic hit in March of 2020, I was, I'd just gotten tenure, I'd published a previous academic book, I was fairly, you know, sort of comfortable in my career. I was able to take undertake some experiments. And in the midst of the dark days of the pandemic, I decided to return to a hobby of mine that I had not taken part in for a very, very long time, which was video gaming. So just for background context here, I grew up as a hardcore video gamer. Like I was so obsessed, especially with PC gaming, in the 1990s when I was going to high school, um, in the late 90s, especially. And I had just been, you know, I lived and breathed video games for very long. You know, huge part of my uh adolescence was spent behind a screen and, you know, with a controller or mouse and keyboard in hand. But when I went to college, I quit. I quit video gaming pretty much full, completely. Um, I did not assume I'd ever go back. And I literally took 20 years off from gaming from the 2000 uh when I graduated high school to uh 2020 when the pandemic hit. And in that time, you know, like I got more serious. I went to school, earned a graduate degree, and became a professor. But I'd throughout all those years, I'd always was been curious about kind of going back to my old hobby. Because, you know, once you're a gamer, you're kind of always a gamer. Let's be honest. You can't really give it up. I mean, you can take breaks with it, but if it's part of your soul, you really can't extract it. It's just there. Um, so for me in March of 2020, the pandemic was really the incentive for me to like dip my toes back into gaming. Um, and I was able to buy one of the very last gaming PCs before they all sold out in that spring and summer. And um, I just, you know, rich wanted to get back to my old hobby um in, you know, as an adult, as a professional. Um, but of course, one of the first games that I picked up in the pandemic was Red Dead Redemption 2. And ironically enough, I picked it up because it was recommended to me by one of my colleagues, another historian here who does the history of the Civil War era. He said, Hey, Tori, you know, like if you're getting back into gaming, check out Red Dead Redemption 2. It's basically like a 90-hour HBO show. You know, it's very well written, it's got great graphics. Um, and you know, from one historian to another, he gave it very high praise, which is that he said, it's not stupid. That might sound like damning praise in some ways, but like among historians, when we talk about pop culture, that's actually a really good thing. Like, it's not stupid. That means like this is worth it, this is worth taking taking part in. So uh this must have been like, you know, April or May of 2020, uh, that I start playing Red Dead 2 just for a hobby, right? Just for fun, uh, just as a way to pass the time in isolation. And but it soon becomes much more than that. Because, of course, you know, when I'm playing this game in 2020, I'm not just a high school video game nerd anymore. I'm a professional historian who's trained in exactly the same uh time period that this game is trying to represent. And what's really interesting for our conversation today on Scarlet Meadows is that I'm really trained as a Southern historian. Um, historians tend to have regional expertise. And while I had read a lot of Western and Midwestern and Northeastern history, you know, I got my PhD in Georgia and I teach in Tennessee. And a lot of the work that I had focused on was Southern history. So for for me, what really clicked, like what really convinced me to teach a class and then write a book on the game, really came in, I guess it is chapter three, right? Like when you go to the south, when you go into Le Moine, when you enter Scarlet Meadows, when you walk into Saint-Denis, that was the moment that convinced me that, like, hey, I could write about this, you know, because I I you know I'm okay with Western history, but like I'm really a Southern historian. And I had no idea that this game was gonna go into the deep south. Like I just thought it was gonna be a quote unquote Western, you know, maybe to go to Mexico like the first game, but that they was not gonna go to like New Orleans or Mississippi or places like that. And that's to me, that was the game's decision to move into the South was so unexpected, in part because you know, the first game really doesn't do that at all. And secondly, because you know, there is an overabundance of books and movies and TV shows and games that are about the American West, but there's really not that many about the American South. Um, it's just uh less, you know, it's so much more. I mean, the West is complicated too, but the South is really complicated in this time period, and it doesn't lend itself well to, you know, mythology and romanticization and this sort of thing. So um, I was super impressed at how the game tried to cover southern history and geography and landscape and all that, and also that it did, you know, a fairly good job at it. I mean, of course, I have critiques and you know, um, there's particular things that it falls short on, but on the whole, this was like a the game presents a really interesting portrayal of the South in the 1890s. So I don't know, I got lots more to talk about. And as you as you guys know from if you've read the book, uh Red Dead's history, uh, I spend a lot of time on the South, and probably more time in the book than you know the game actually spends in the South. Um, partially because I'm just so interested in this in this region.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Right. Yeah. Um you mentioned with Red Dead One, how you how there's more to kind of touch on with that. And when I was doing research, um I came across a Reddit thread that you did a few years back talking about um how at the beginning of your course you talked talked about uh Red Dead One and the Me Mexican Revolution and how you were kind of disappointed on how there wasn't space in the book to really do that. So if you could do like a second edition of Red Dead History, would that be something you would touch on more?

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, so it's so funny. So I wrote my first book, which has nothing to do with video games whatsoever, about the US and Mexico, particularly in the early 20th century, when the Mexican Revolution was fundamentally transforming uh that country and really the world, because this was like a worldwide event. People across the world were paying attention to what was happening in Mexico. And in many ways, I would argue that the Mexican Revolution, which takes place between 1911 and about 1920, uh, was really the first kind of grassroots social revolution of the 20th century. And there were many others to follow, right? Most importantly, the Soviet revolution, um the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution. And in many ways, the Mexican Revolution is the sort of blueprint that, you know, kind of uh is the dress rehearsal, the forerunner to many of those other sweeping social revolutions. So I'm like totally obsessed with Mexico and like the tremendous drama and bloodshed uh of those years and how meaningful they were to shaping the future, not just of Mexico, but really all of North America and beyond. Um, and I was so surprised to see a video game, you know, take this on with with Red Dead One when John Marston goes down into Mexico in 1911 and encounters, you know, this country in the midst of a revolution. And the game, you know, tries to depict some of the big personalities within that revolution, right? Like this dictator Porfirio Diaz, who had been running Mexico for many years at that point, and some of the revolutionaries like Emiliano Zapata and um Pancho Villa and and others, you know, and uh does Red Dead One do a marvelous job in capturing the dynamics of the Mexican Revolution? Not really, you know, it has some interesting moments, but it it kind of flattens and you know romanticizes it a good bit. But still, like the fact that a video game would go there, that's kind of interesting, it's pretty cool. So, yes, I would love to have an expanded version of the book that would spend more time on Red Dead 1 and on particularly the Mexican chapters, because of course that's one thing that Red Dead 2 does not have. There's uh lots of West in Red Dead 2, but there is no Mexico uh within it. As far as I know, I've never been able to go south of the border yet.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

No, not without glitching. Not without glitching. So getting back to uh the deep south. How is the game similar and different from reality? I want to say real life and reality at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

Yeah. Well, so what's really interesting is the timing of this, right? So the game is set in 1899, and most folks probably don't think of the 1890s as that important of a decade in southern history, but it really, really was. I think like when most folks think of like turning points in Southern history, they think about the 1860s with the Civil War or the 1960s with the civil rights movement, you know, the black freedom struggle, overturning of Jim Crow and all this. But the 1890s, I would argue, like deserves the bronze medal, like the third most important decade in Southern history, mainly because it's at this very moment that the institutional regime of Jim Crow is put into place. Like all of the segregation laws, or at least the majority of them, um uh the uh disfranchisement that is, you know, black men being removed from the voter rolls, being eliminated from democracy in the South. That's an 1890s project. And then also this real intensification of the mythology of the lost cause, this idea of you know airbrushing the history of the Confederacy and making it not about slavery and putting up statues and putting up Confederate battle flags, all of that stuff goes down in the 1890s. Like it's this huge turning point when the South, especially the white South, remakes itself uh in this whole new different image. And it's at that very moment that you know Arthur Morgan rides into Lemoyne, and the game captures some of this. It captures some of the sort of transitional um moments within Southern society at the point. Like, for example, with the um uh the main rival gang in Lemoyne, which are the Lemoyne Raiders, who are these embittered ex-Confederates that still wear the gray uniforms of the Confederate States Army, who clearly have it out for anyone who's an outsider who's in this region, you know. And I I don't know if you guys know, but like I don't I don't get the sense, I don't really know where Arthur Morgan is from. Like I imagine maybe he's from the West. He kind of has a southern accent. We do know that Dutch Vanderlyn isn't like a northerner, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:06

Right?

SPEAKER_00 14:06

That his dad had died in the Confederate War, uh, in in the in the in the Civil War. Um so I don't but I don't know if where Arthur is really from. Do you guys have theories about that?

SPEAKER_01 14:16

I think Arthur, well, kind of going from what like Roger has said in interviews and panels, um he mostly I think tried to take from of course uh Hollywood movies. But uh a lot of it was South and a little a little bit of the South and like more of like the West and stuff as well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:42

Yeah, maybe uh the real life Arthur is maybe he's from like Missouri or something, someplace that's both southern and western.

SPEAKER_02 14:49

Well, because I've we know that Dutch and Hosea meet up in Kettering, Ohio, and then they pick up Arthur soon after, and then they pick up John in Chicago, so they have to go, I'm assuming, from Ohio to Chicago over a span of like 10 years. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

Right. Yeah. But so anyhow, you know, the Lemoyne Raiders, they they're not buddies with the Vanderlynd gang. These are not your friends in this chapter. And the Lemoyne Raiders are portrayed in this very you know negative light, to be sure. But they're they're one element of this lost cause mythology in that they you know frequently speak about the war in these very nostalgic terms. It seems like these guys actually believe that the South had won the war. And in fact, there's this line, a little line of conversation where Lenny Summers, you know, your black gang mate, he's like, Yeah, these guys think that the South's won, that the South that they're still fighting the war. Which, you know, it's not, yeah, this is 35 years after the Civil War ends. But um, in the minds of many white Southerners, this, you know, not that the war was still going, but like the debate over what the war meant was still very much going on in 1899, to be sure. In fact, it's maybe at the high tide at that moment. You know, so many of the Confederate memorials that have been debated and torn down, some of them in the last 10, 15 years, so many of them were put up in the 1890s, right? And uh directly afterward in the 1900s. Um, so these statues, you know, if we'd if the game was being fully realistic, those statues that you see in Rhodes in Saint-Denis, they would be really new. And the game makes them look kind of old. You know, if you study the textures of what those, you know, it looks in the game as if those statues had been standing since, let's say, 1865, 1866, that would not have been true. Um, there were very few public memorials uh that were put up it directly after the war. Really comes like at the turn of the century in the 1890s and 1900s.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

Um Yeah, so I kind of wish that you know the developers and art designers had done a slightly better job by making the statues look really new, but I bet it would have confused some players, you know. They're like, wait, the Civil War is like really old at this point. Why are these statues new? Well, that's what requires the context of like explaining why are these statues being put up. It's not an accident that they're coming up in the 1890s, there's reasons why.

SPEAKER_01 17:15

Yeah, that would have been kind of interesting to see, like, especially in Saint-Denis with um like the statues of uh Quincy Harris in uh the like town center and then the coward scrawled on the side of it.

SPEAKER_00 17:35

Super interesting. Now there's another, you know, another because I talked about the 1890s as being like this crucial pivotal moment when a lot is changing in the South. One of the most important things that's changing is that tons of cities, states are adding these uh laws that formally segregate public space that say, you know, put up signs that say for white, for colored, right? For these, you know, racial divisions for waiting rooms and for bathrooms and for train cars and all of that kind of stuff. And I was really curious to see whether Red Dead 2 would include that. Um, and especially in the epilogue, right? Because when you, you know, after Arthur dies, um when you play as John, then um it's 1907, right? Or 1906. Um it's you know, a good bit afterward. And I was curious because the games do depict certain changes taking place in that six or seven year time span, but they say nothing about the system of racial segregation. Because as I as I know it as a historian, in 1899, when you know Arthur's riding around, that system is beginning to come into place and but it's still incomplete, it's still kind of like a patchwork system where you'd have some things segregated and some things not. Like the streetcars in New Orleans, for example, are not segregated in 1899, but by 1907, they definitely are. So if the game was being much more realistic, it would have um showed that these you know visual markers of segregation would have been visible across the city of Saint-Denis or this the town of Rhodes. That that would very much have been the case, certainly by 1907. Yeah. Why why do you guys think that Rockstar didn't do that?

SPEAKER_01 19:16

I think, I mean, like you said with the trolley, I think part of that is just simply um coding. It just makes it easier to code when like pedestrians are like sitting in the trolley and whatnot. Um and then a lot of it is people don't look. But at the same time, it's like especially Sand and A, there's so many just little details and stuff. Like there's even the um old school fire hydrants around there, and that lead to nowhere, but it's still they pay attention to detail, we know that, you know.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

I I think they were just worried about controversy, about upsetting gamers.

SPEAKER_03 20:02

I mean that's all games, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:05

I mean, the games do allude to racism, you know, like they showcase the Klan. Lenny often talks about, I mean, uh, you know, Charles, they talk about the realities of living in a society where you know ideologies of white supremacy were very powerful. But I just I think that Rockstar was anxious about, you know, people taking screenshots of this and trying to say, oh, look, you know, Rockstar's made a racist game that's segregated.

SPEAKER_02 20:30

Well, yep, you know, the reality is that there's that uh mission, it's like a side mission that you find in Rhodes where there's a doctor. A doctor where they stole his medicine wagon.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Right, and they threaten him with lynching. That's a really fascinating scene. You know, I don't think the game depicts a lynching, but it shows a threat of this, like a veiled threat. And actually, I use that moment in the book um to open the chapter on lynching because Dr. I think Renault was his name. Um, he's you know, he's talks about these horrific threats of violence that these white men who stole his wagon um um you know, uh kind of intimidate him with. And it's a pretty dark scene. I mean, it's really pretty like the the music changes, like it's supposed to be very serious, but for good reason.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Yeah. That's like that's just it. And on I guess on the topic of lynching in Saint-Denis, when we get to like meet Bronte, and I noticed there's actually kind of a few similarities between um him and then the Montrega family, I think is how you pronounce that. Um but because in the newspapers there's an article that's talking about how the police chief of Saint Denis, or one of the officers, is supposedly Like he was killed after like holding evidence for like Bronte type of a thing. And he never nothing happened with Bronte, of course, but um it's similar in real life with the um Davis Hennessy he was killed, and that led to one of the largest massed mass lynchings, I think.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

Right, not of African Americans, but of Sicilian immigrants. And that's what's so interesting about the games, you know, because the games Red Dead 2 does reference the fact that there's a large Sicilian, Italian American, you know, immigrant uh presence in New Orleans, which is very true in the 1890s as well. It's just that the game depicts them as being like the kingpins who run the town. Like they're the ones, you know, controlling the they got the mayor in their pocket, they got the police in their pocket, they got the Pinkertons in their pocket. But the reality is, you know, most Sicilian Americans in New Orleans at the turn of the century are um, you know, really humble working class people, and they're more likely to be victims rather than victimizers, right? Because of this 1891 mass lynching. I don't know if you guys knew this, but in in writing my book, I discovered that that mass lynching of Italian immigrants in New Orleans is the reason we have Columbus Day in the United States. Because when this happened, I mean, look, the Italian embassy, like the Italian, you know, diplomats in the US are absolutely infuriated. This is like, they're like, this is an attack on Italy, this is an attack on Italians. This is incredibly discriminatory and awful. And the American president at the time, I think it was Benjamin Harrison, I can't quite remember some of these Gilded Age presidents, but he was he felt so awkward about it that very soon thereafter he instituted Columbus Day, which was meant to celebrate the contributions of Italians to American history. So it was like meant to be like an olive branch after this horrific violence had erupted in New Orleans previously, and this was their way of kind of atoning for the sins of these white mobs, of these native-born white mobs in New Orleans. So, you know, every time you celebrate Columbus Day, think about oh, maybe Angelo Bronte is somehow involved.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

I mean, not really, but in Santani, there's a bunch of random encounters you could have with uh women's suffrage, and the other one that stands out is of course the uh one lady on the corner asking for donations for like the salvation army, basically. Along with, of course, there's multiple others, but it's just interesting how the encounters change specifically in the city versus out even in Scarlet Meadows, where we don't really get that many other than like chain gangs or the Ku Klux Klan, that's a big moment to be sure.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

I mean, that's the one that it seems like all gamers remember. This is like an unforgettable moment when they're riding through the woods in Scarlet Meadows, and they you know, at night, it has to be at night, and you see, you know, torches in the in the in the trees, and you're like, what's going on here? And I would always sneak up and listen in and see what they're talking about. And so this is, you know, I use that in the book as well as a way to explore the history of the Ku Klux Klan. Because on in one sense, the game is completely wrong in that in 1899, the Klan basically didn't exist in the South. Um, it had previously existed and it would later exist, but you really catch them in 1899, like in the eye of the storm, like at a real lull point, because there's the clan that's tremendously powerful and influential during Reconstruction, like from 1865 to 1872 or so. And then there's the second clan that gets reborn um in 1915, 1916. Um, so you know, 20 years after Red Dead 2 uh-ish is set. Um, and that's a, I mean, yes, it's an anti-black clan, but it's also more than that. It's an anti-immigrant clan, it's an anti-Catholic clan in the 19 teens and 20s. So the game is like, you know, they do stretch the truth because of like the timing of it. Uh, you know, 1899 wouldn't make such sense, but they're right that like, you know, paramilitary groups that wore these kinds of robes and costumes, they were a important part of southern history, just not so much at that particular moment.

SPEAKER_01 26:21

Right, yeah. And I love the little detail where if you kill any of the members, you gain honor for it.

SPEAKER_00 26:29

Yeah. Right. There's like basically no other civilians that you can kill and receive that sort of thing. There's one another.

SPEAKER_02 26:37

The the pamphlet guy in Saint-Denis, if you kill him, yeah. Um right in front of a lawn. There's a there's a officer that's standing right next to him. If you kill him right in front of that cop, he doesn't do anything.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

Yeah, there's him and then I have to say that is actually unrealistic because the cops would the cops would probably eugenicist themselves, unfortunately, in 1899. Yeah, sad to say.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

Because I think there's only three moments that happens. Like we said, the Kluklex clan and uh the eugenists, but there's also a homestead that's owned by a previous slave owner that you meet in Rhodes who's sleeping on the Jeremiah. And if you kill him, you also get honor for it.

unknown 27:20

Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

I remember, oh man. You know, I remember did you guys watch when Roger Clark's uh live streamed uh himself playing uh Red Dead 2? I didn't know some of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I I I was thrilled to go appear on as a guest on one of the episodes, which is fun. But I was watching a few previous ones when he was playing, so I remember that pivotal moment when you have to, you know, make a decision about Jeremiah Thompson and how to how to do it. And as Roger was replaying, he's like, I really hate this guy. I'm gonna toss like a flame, you know, a Maltov cocktail, basically, like a flame cocktail. But but he does so, but he he it lights himself on fire too and dies while trying to you know take out Jeremiah Compson's. It was a very embarrassing moment that Roger was like, Oh, what am I doing here?

SPEAKER_02 28:06

Um since this is more so about roads, because we're kind of using this as like our segue into the chapter three with the Clemens Point chapters, which we will get into in the next couple episodes. Yeah, pretty much all in this.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

Let me share what are what's what one of my favorite parts about Scarlet Meadows is that it is the most intensely agricultural region in the entire game. Um, you see farms in the West, right? There's like a couple wheat farms, but I really love how the game captures Scarlet Meadows and kind of Lemoyne as a whole, not as this wild space where you can set up camp wherever you want, but as a really you know domesticated, uh cultivated agricultural space where you have cotton fields, you have tobacco fields, and you also have sugarcane as well, outside, you know, north of Saint-Denis. So you had these three crops that were, in fact, totally important to the South in the 1890s, and especially cotton. In fact, if the game was being fully realistic, there would have been more cotton than any of the other crops because it was by far the biggest cash crop in the region, uh, even more so than before the Civil War. And that's something a lot of people find surprising that in fact the South is producing way more cotton in 1900 than it was in 1860, uh, even after slavery had been uh abolished. And so it's kind of a big paradox of of Southern history. Cotton did no favors to most people. I mean, it was like a curse in so many ways.

SPEAKER_01 29:43

Interesting. Did you find it?

SPEAKER_00 29:46

I used to be an agricultural historian. I used to be obsessed with all of this stuff. My first book is totally in that world, too.

SPEAKER_02 29:52

I want to talk about Boulder Glade. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 29:55

This is the battlefield, right?

SPEAKER_02 29:56

Yep, yes.

SPEAKER_00 29:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:59

That's technically a Civil War battlefield, and there's the dead soldier that you can find.

SPEAKER_01 30:04

That's yeah, Garfield. That's been to the tree.

SPEAKER_02 30:09

Yeah. So how realistic is like Boulder Glade as far as like the Civil War?

SPEAKER_00 30:17

Well, certainly there were hundreds and hundreds of battles within the South during the war. I mean, most of the war plays out on southern soil, uh, most of the fighting does. Um so the idea that you would have rusting cannons and sort of, you know, um battlements and trenches with uh moss growing over them, you know, it's not entirely unrealistic. Um, they probably would have been in the 34 years since the war ended, they probably would have been scavenged and people would have picked up, you know, some of the kind of uh medals and things that they could to reclaim. So I doubt that there would be, you know, it it probably looks the game makes it seem as if the civil war was like pretty recently. And you know, 34, 35 years is not that recently. Um it's surprising that I don't remember any memorials of any sort near the battlefield. It's just kind of like yeah. By the eight by 1899, there probably would have been more of that. Um, I don't know. I don't think it's yeah, I I don't have a strong opinion that it's bizarrely unrealistic. You probably wouldn't have seen many of those sites across the south that long afterward. Um, but it's not totally crazy.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

Yeah, because I've seen online that um the Battle of Scarlet Meadows is like loosely based off of the Red River campaign. That happened, of course, in Louisiana. Um Right. I guess I don't know how yeah, correct that would be, because obviously we don't see the battle itself.

SPEAKER_00 31:56

Sure. Yeah, well the game does imply that the leadership of the Confederate armies was less than valiant in the sense that, you know, um what's his name? The the guy who has the statue uh to him in Saint Denis, you know.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

Quincy Harris.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

Quincy Harris, right? That he's kind of a coward, that he abandoned his his troops and all this. And it seems likely that the the people who scrawled that coward thing was were former soldiers from his regiment who you know saw him as abandoning them. I think that was the storyline. It's kind of it's left kind of a mystery, to be sure.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Yeah, because I think we end up getting a uh encounter with like the Lil Moyen writers. I think they end up like actually TPing it and destroying it and whatnot.

SPEAKER_03 32:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:38

There's a hidden detail in Boulder Glade that a lot of people miss. It's that there's all this stuff about the drought, how it like does not rain the entirety of chapter three. It doesn't rain in Scarlet Meadows until after you've burned the tobacco fields. But if you go to Boulder Glade after it rains, if you go to Boulder Glade when there's a thunderstorm, you can hear like the ghost, right? Yeah, the voices. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 33:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:07

That's interesting. Yeah, I didn't re I didn't realize the rain part. I mean, I guess that they need to have the absence of rain to make the tobacco flammable when he goes to burn it down. Um but yeah, that's interesting. Thank you for illuminating that for me. Yeah, I have not I I will confess I have not played Red Dead Redemption 2 in like two years because I've finished this project and moved on to other things. Um, but I still, of course, have a very soft spot for the game and probably need to replay it at some point.

SPEAKER_03 33:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:35

I mean, I've got like 55 hours into it, and I'm still finding stuff I never knew.

SPEAKER_00 33:40

Yeah. How many hours do you have in the game, Sai?

SPEAKER_01 33:43

Probably close to like 2,000.

SPEAKER_00 33:46

Oh, wow. See, you know, here's my full full disclosure. I've only played for about 200 hours, which is you know a lot for me for a video game.

SPEAKER_01 33:55

It's pretty solid.

SPEAKER_00 33:56

But uh, I feel like uh an imposter in because there's there's many fans of the game and readers of my book who've played it a lot more than me, um, to be sure. But that's why I can learn from you guys too.

SPEAKER_01 34:07

I guess continuing with kind of the deep south and like family feuds and whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 34:14

Uh yes, the Brays and Braithwaites. Yeah, what a fascinating part of that story. You know, it's certainly a lot of it's very Romeo and Juliet. The uh uh yeah, the feuding families of what is it, medieval Italy or whatnot. Um but so I I was really interested in how this meshed with a bigger kind of mythologized moment in southern history, which is the Hatfields and McCoys.

SPEAKER_03 34:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 34:41

Because I do think that that is another inspiration behind this. But interestingly enough, the Hatfields and McCoys is very much an Appalachian South story. It's really a mountain south story, not a plantation belt uh story, you know, because the hat the Grayson Braithways are very much portrayed as you know, cotton plantation families in the kind of flat uh areas of the South. And of course, there were some quote-unquote feuds uh taking place in that context too, but none are more famous than the Hatfields and McCoys. So in in my book, um, I decided to put that sort of feuding families stuff in my section on Appalachia rather than my section on the deep south, because I think it fits better there, even though the Greys and Braithways are not, you know, in the mountains. Though I will say, despite the fact that that area is pretty flat, Dutch still calls all of them quote unquote hillbillies, you know, this despite the fact that this is not a mountain region. So the game does seem a little torn about whether this is an Appalachian thing or if it's just like a deep south thing. Um, but I think it's you know, the the history of the the um the uh uh Hadfields and McCoys is really surprising if all you know is the kind of Disney cartoon version of that feud, like, oh, you know, family A hates the other one and they always have. And well, no, that's actually not what happens. Like, yes, these two families did exchange fire and did employ people who went to war with one another in the 1880s and 1890s, but it's all about money, it's all about business, it's all about capitalism, it's really not about you know blood feuds in the terms of if you're born into one family, you will always fight against the other family. That's not what it's about. It's really just about money and um business uh rivalries more than anything. So I tell that whole story in my uh Hatfields and McCoy chapters, and I hope I hope it's surprising for folks who just have a sort of very flattened uh understanding of that of that uh rivalry.

SPEAKER_01 36:42

Yeah, because I feel like between the Hatfields and McCoys and then the Jones Liddell uh feud as well, both are very influential on the Braithwaits and the Greys. And of course, the Braithwaits, their uh manner is taken directly from real life with the Oak Alley plantation down in Louisiana.

SPEAKER_00 37:04

Right, with that yeah, with like the tree-lined uh ride up. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, that's the thing, you know, Rockstar, they are what you'd call culture vultures in that they borrow and you know adapt and imitate from all these other forms of uh pop culture, whether it's movies or whether it's literature. Um, I actually had the chance to chat with uh Dan Hauser uh a few months ago, who read my book and said he really enjoyed it, which is pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_01 37:30

Ultimate Dragon Rights.

SPEAKER_00 37:32

I know, right? Uh so we had a long Zoom call to talk about the book and all that. And he talked, he he mentioned to me that, you know, in writing Red Dead 2, um, of course he's doing it with a large team, but you know, he has a very important uh role here. He was talking about how 19th century British literature was such an influence on him, you know, Dickens especially, writing about kind of urban inequality uh and all that uh in you know the the middle of the 18th century of the 19th century is is super interesting. You know, I I I knew that they were pulling from Hollywood and they're pulling from you know kind of TV shows and pop culture, but uh I didn't think of Dickens.

SPEAKER_01 38:09

Over in, well, still technically in Lemoyen, but it's kind of like right on the border between New Hanover and Lemoyen. There's a that Aberdeen pig farm. Um of course iconic within the series itself. Um but that's kind of noted to be with the uh Bender family from uh in the 70s, 71 and 72, where of course they would go ahead and take everyone and invite them into their home and then kill them off. And it's interesting with like uh the pig detail specifically, because if you go ahead and I didn't know this for a few years, if you take a body and put it in the pig pen and come back like a few days later, the entire corpse will just be gone.

SPEAKER_00 39:04

I definitely did not pick up on that. That's really interesting. Yeah, it reminds me of that television show Deadwood. You guys seen that? There's a lot of feeding of uh corpses to pigs in that one. Pretty uh, pretty gruesome stuff, let's be honest. Yeah, yeah, you know, so like there's so many possibilities in thinking through, you know, what history inspired various parts of the games, like the you know, the Aberdeen pink farm that you mentioned. And generally what I tried to do in writing my book was to pick moments that could shed light on like big picture stuff. Because, you know, as a historian, I'm really interested in teaching and and you know, sharing with with readers the sort of broader contours of life about society and politics and culture and economics. So I tended to stay away from kind of small inspirations, like, oh, there was this one murder, you know, that inspired this one moment, in part because it was hard for me to tell bigger stories from those. Um, but I am really intrigued to learn. And and again, fans of the game, you guys and many others know many of these references sometimes better than I do, because you know, I just I haven't thought about every every angle within it.

SPEAKER_01 40:14

There's a uh series on YouTube by RealPixels.

SPEAKER_00 40:19

Yeah, I've seen some of them, the their videos. Yeah, they're cool.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

He went through and did the entire history of Red Dead 2, and I think it ended up being like a eight-hour video all put together.

SPEAKER_00 40:32

Yeah. Yeah, maybe I should have been making videos instead of writing a book, but I know how to I know how to write and I don't know how to make videos.

unknown 40:40

Right.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

And also I get rewarded for writing books as part of my jobs, and I get rewarded less for making videos.

SPEAKER_03 40:46

There you go. And I also, you know, we haven't mentioned this, right?

SPEAKER_00 40:50

But like, of course, the um probably the coolest thing about my book is that Roger Clark does the narration of the audiobook. So that was a a pretty amazing uh, you know, joining of forces that I could not have expected at the beginning of my project. But I was uh enormously thankful to him and and to my publisher for arranging that.

SPEAKER_01 41:10

Yeah, that was I remember when that first got announced, even with the class, I was still in high school and I was like, oh, that's cool. Why can't I be in Tennessee? Right.

SPEAKER_00 41:21

Well, it was really fun because I surprised my students too by bringing both uh Roger and Rob Weedoff, uh, you know, uh John Marson's actor to my class physically. They both came and surprised the students, which was pretty awesome. So believe it or not, I did I did a similar thing this semester. So I just got through teaching a class on US history since 1980, so more much more recent history through the lens of Grand Theft Auto. So the class is called the class is called Grand Theft America. And uh just a few weeks ago, I surprised my students by bringing to class in person Sean Fontino, who's the actor who plays Franklin Clinton in GTA 5, uh, which the students really appreciated. And then I sat down and did a really interesting interview, like a 90-minute interview with Fontino about growing up in Los Angeles in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, which was, you know, he all experienced firsthand some pretty tumultuous moments in Los Angeles history, you know, from the crack cocaine crisis to the uh L the LA riots in '92 and so much more. So it was really interesting. I haven't stopped doing history in video games, I've just switched topics. Right. That's that's why I haven't played Red Dead 2 in the last two years, because I've been too busy playing Grand Theft Auto like every single game, basically.

SPEAKER_01 42:43

Yeah, plus with well, six coming out here.

SPEAKER_00 42:47

I know. I'm I'm waiting on it just along with everyone else.

SPEAKER_01 42:50

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 42:52

Well, we can't really do an episode about Secrets of Scarlet Meadows without talking about the women's suffrage.

SPEAKER_00 42:59

Yeah. That's one of the most fascinating parts of this chapter, you know. Not only the fact that the game decides to foreground the women's suffrage movement, but that it places it in the south, you know, because of course it's a national movement. And what's interesting is that the women's suffrage movement had won its biggest victories already by 1899 in the West. Like in many states in the West, women could already vote in in just about all elections. But in the Deep South, definitely not. You know, the Deep South was one of the kind of real holdouts, one of the real stalwart uh opponents of women's suffrage, uh, which is quite interesting. They're not the only ones. The Northeast is also pretty, pretty um uh aligned again, men, since the men are the only ones voting. Northeastern men were quite opposed to a lot of um the suffrage movement as well.

SPEAKER_02 43:48

Why is it only prevalent in Rhodes and Sandin, but not really anywhere else?

SPEAKER_00 43:56

They'd already won. They'd already won in like the far west. Um, it it always surprises me that the first part of the US to allow women to vote is Wyoming, in part because there were so few women in Wyoming in the 1870s, and they just want to attract women to move out there, like, hey, come out to Wyoming, you can vote here, you know, because the ratio is like 95 to 5, you know, because this is total, like, you know, settler colony that it's a bunch of ragtag men who came out there to work in mines and ranching and all those sorts of things. Um, but what you know, one of the one of the reasons that most people don't realize why Southern men were so resistant, you know, to women's suffrage. And you see it in the games, you know, you have Bo Gray's like what's cousins or something, you know, that look kind of drunk and they're very red-faced and they're yelling at the women and all this. One of the key reasons why white Southerners, white Southern men, again, that's the only people who are voting by this time, is that they had just pushed through the removal of black men from voting. Remember, this is the very moment when uh uh disfranchisement is being being uh undertaken. And um, this is entirely what they're doing to remove black men from voting is entirely unconstitutional. I mean, it's completely illegal. You know, it really defies uh the Reconstruction amendments, especially the 15th Amendment that was passed after the Civil War. So they're flagrantly breaking the law, and they really worried that if people begin start talking about women voting, it would also raise this inevitable question about, well, what about black women? In fact, what about black men? You know, why can't they vote? That white Southern men did not want anyone talking about who could vote in at the turn of the century because they just eliminated black men and they didn't want to bring too much attention to that fact nationally because then they worried about, you know, maybe there's gonna be a second reconstruction, maybe the federal government's gonna send troops down again and you know, uh completely uh uh change up Southern society. So you know, race if we think about women's suffrage being all about gender, but it's also about race because you know you can't separate the e each of those factors from each other.

SPEAKER_02 46:04

Yeah, and then I mean, just because women could vote didn't mean that it was just like, oh, all right, women get all the same rights as men, and everything's all fine and normal now for everyone. But it it really wasn't like that, even when when when women could start voting.

SPEAKER_00 46:21

No, it's true, right? A lot of things have to wait until the 1960s and 70s to be to be changed. Yeah, the vote did not uh solve everything, to be sure. But yeah, Bo Gray is such a fascinating character. I really enjoy his presence. He I use him a lot in my classroom to try to teach uh you know interesting topics because he's like this like local voice of descent, you know. He's a white southerner from you know this regime, but he's critical of it. You know, he sees that it's really broken, really flawed. I mean he's kind of a doofus too. He's not he's not a complete vision visionary. He's kind of got his his head in the clouds a lot of the time.

SPEAKER_01 46:58

But yeah, it it's also like really interesting too, just within even the gangs um when they're staying at Clements Point, the encounters that even you'll get with like uh Tilly Jackson when you're playing, I think, dominoes with her at camp. She'll just talk about Foreman brothers being so close to Clements Point and right outside of Rhodes and that being a tremendous uh uh point within her backstory. It's very interesting between her and of course Lenny. And like you mentioned in the book, even uh Javier, it's very interesting to like see their dynamic shift between chapter two and then three.

SPEAKER_00 47:45

Yeah. Well, I I find it really interesting that Rockstar made the Vanderlyn gang really multicultural. Yes. I mean, yes, there's more white men than there's any other group, to be sure, but it is a real sort of rainbow coalition of criminals, you know. And I'm not sure that actually would have been all that realistic. It it depends. I mean, there was there were undoubtedly gangs of outlaws that were, you know, multiracial and multigender. But I know that like the single gang that inspired the Vanderlyn gang more than any other is the Hole in the Wall gang being Rich Cassidy's group. Yep, they were all English-speaking white men. Like they were not between they were not a rainbow coalition by any means.

SPEAKER_01 48:28

Yeah, because it's between Hole in the Wall and then uh James Younger, of course.

SPEAKER_00 48:33

Exactly. The two most. It's like okay, but they're also a bunch of white racist dudes. Let's be honest.

SPEAKER_01 48:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:40

And that's aside from Micah, Micah is like, you know, the only obvious racist that I could find in the bunch.

SPEAKER_01 48:45

Yeah. Um I mean they Bill a little bit, but he's more on the fence than Micah is.

SPEAKER_00 48:53

Right, right. Yeah, they really did their best to paint Micah in every possible negative light.

SPEAKER_01 48:58

Yep. I mean, hey, Peter did a great job with what he got handed, so yeah, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 49:05

I want to talk about fashion in 1899. Yes. More so to like set the scene for all of our conversations.

SPEAKER_00 49:16

Yeah, I don't think so. I will confess I'm not I'm not a fashion historian, and I haven't thought that hard through what people were wearing. Um certainly I know that the games developers looked at photographs from the period. I know they did so when it came to architecture and then when they came to you know newspaper fonts and uh um uh catalog fonts and all this, but I will not pretend that I'm an expert at Gilded Age fashions. So I'm I'm worried, Sam, that I won't be able to authoritatively answer your questions on that point.

SPEAKER_03 49:51

That's okay.

SPEAKER_00 49:51

Yeah, and there's such a range of fashion, too. I mean, you can dress Arthur in like you know 50 different costumes. I mean, there's just such a wide range of possibilities.

SPEAKER_02 50:01

So yeah, Walter White.

SPEAKER_00 50:06

Yeah, there's there's two things that a lot of um fans want to hear about and that I always disappoint on, which one is fashion, the other is like ways of speech and the ways that people talk. Because, you know, we don't have uh audio recordings from that period, right? So there's a lot of guesswork that goes into um how you know historians understand speech and things like that because it's you know, we have we work with textual documents to make sense out of this period, and that just doesn't capture speech. I do think that the gang does not swear enough, like they should be cursing more, and we know that Rockstar has no problem with cursing because I played lots of GTA games that prove to the contrary, it's just that they're a very PG-rated bunch of outlaws, you know, they really don't drop F-bombs and things like that when those words were in very common usage, especially among kind of more salt of the earth, working class, humble individuals. I mean, I think the Victorian-style middle class tended to prefer, you know, they they tended to avoid profanities. Um, and there's, you know, religious profanities were even more powerful then than they were today. But, you know, the van the real life Vanderlyn gang would have dropped some some F bombs here and there. And they just they don't really do much of that.

SPEAKER_02 51:26

No, yeah, like interesting robbing and killing's okay, but swearing is not okay.

SPEAKER_03 51:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:32

Some of them have like very middle class aspirations. Like I think Dutch Vanderlynd, he's kind of like a closeted Victorian in a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_02 51:41

I love that term.

SPEAKER_00 51:46

Yeah, and then certain what's what's the name of that uh that very groomed, well groomed um Josiah Trelawani. Trelawney, exactly, right? Like you you know, he's he's um you know trying to style himself as uh as an up-and-coming uh you know dandy, if you will.

SPEAKER_01 52:02

Yeah, I feel like um between them two, and then a lot of the women, of course, minus really Sadie. All of them try to be somewhat upper class, especially Mary Beth, as we see her actually become an author after 1907.

SPEAKER_02 52:19

Also, wouldn't drug use be a little more prevalent among a gang of outlaws in 1899? Maybe not necessarily like smoking weed or anything, but like wasn't like cocaine and like opium and stuff more common?

SPEAKER_00 52:33

Absolutely. So, yeah, I mean the the big drug, so cocaine tended to be a working class African American drug in the South, uh, in at this time period. And so we don't see cocaine at all, as far as I can remember. We've it would have been available in like medicinal um, you know, you could buy cocaine, you know, drops and cocaine gum. Yeah, exactly. So you there is that in the game, isn't there?

SPEAKER_02 52:59

Yeah, yeah, there is.

SPEAKER_00 53:00

Yeah, that's right. Okay, so you can buy it as a medicinal substance because it's definitely not outlawed yet. That comes in the 1920s. Um, so opiates, especially um laudanum, right, which is basically a distilled, it's like a milder form of heroin that people would take in these beverages, was really a middle class female undertaking in in this period. So it's a surprise that like Molly or I don't know, uh Mary Beth is not like sipping laudanum once in a while. But I don't know if they have enough money. Like you have to have some money, you know, they're kind of down and out. The the gang, they don't have a lot. Um at least in most of the story, they don't have a lot of money. So, yeah, there's certainly drugs. Um, marijuana would have been very hard to find outside of the southwest that was more of a Mexican-American um pursuit by at that point in time. Not that they're not that other groups didn't partake, but it was just not a cultural phenomenon. Yeah, no, there's certainly plenty of alcohol, of course, in the game, which there was no sh no shortage of at the time either. No. Though many, to be honest, many parts of the south and some in the west by the 1890s were actually dry. Like they they would have enacted prohibition. Yeah, and we think of prohibition coming at the end of the 19 teens, but many parts of the country had already voted themselves dry long in advance of that. Uh Georgia, for example, was completely dry by the 1880s, I believe. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_02 54:26

So, would it make more sense since strawberry's the dry town? Wouldn't it make more sense that like roads be the dry town?

SPEAKER_00 54:33

Yeah, it probably would have. Well, it's so interesting that Rockstar made this decision to fictionalize the names of almost everything, right? Of course, there was no place called Scarlet Meadows, there was no Saint-Denis. I mean, everything is fictionalized except for the Pinkertons. The Pinkertons were real. Yeah, and they got mad by that name. Yeah, they got mad. They sued Rockstar as a result. And they didn't get anything out of it, of course, but they tried.

SPEAKER_01 55:01

Yeah, it's interesting too, talking about how like they fictionalized everything. And of course, there's little like tidbits of these towns and like all these different like areas, but the only one that is kind of a carbon copy is Saint Denis with New Orleans.

SPEAKER_00 55:21

Right, right. I mean, in many ways, they're following the kind of GTA 5, Los Santos, Los Angeles uh, you know, formula that they've put in place. And it's actually been really interesting to play so much GTA in the past few years after playing a lot of Red Dead previously, because there's so many parallels, you know, that they're also trying to uh satirize and you know create sort of like a fun house mirror version of American society, though they go a lot further in GTA. They you know the biz the bizarrness and the parody go a lot further in that game than in Red Dead. Red Dead's a just a lot more serious and thoughtful of a game. It's just you know the tone of the two games was so different. Yeah, like it's funny, like on my on my can on my campus here, you know, there were students who were like, yeah, okay, a history class through Red Dead, that makes sense. But then when I tell them I'm doing a history class through Grand Theft Auto, they're like, no way, that's not possible. How could you ever do that?

SPEAKER_01 56:18

It was interesting too, because I didn't even know you did the GTA course. I see in your post about it, and that was it. But of course, when you did the Red Dead course, I was seeing it all over.

SPEAKER_00 56:33

And it's because you're probably subscribed to a bunch of Red Dead stuff and not a bunch of GTA stuff.

SPEAKER_01 56:38

I mean, even GTA, most of like the pages I cover like do share both, especially well right now.

SPEAKER_00 56:45

Well, I'll say this though. When when I announced when in last fall, when I announced my Grand Theft America class, it made much bigger waves on social media than anything I'd done on Red Dead Redemption, you know, in part because GTA is just so much bigger of a game, ultimately.

SPEAKER_03 57:01

That's true.

SPEAKER_00 57:01

Um and and and also the the level of shock and uh surprise that a college professor would actually try to use that game. Um that was just kind of like, what? How is that even possible? You know, it became a punchline for jokes among many people, which I understand, but like, and there is a you know, it it was a challenge to do this class, don't get me wrong. And there were lots, there were huge parts of GTA that I just did not bring into my classroom because it's just too offensive or tongue-in-cheek or whatever. But you know, there's a lot of smart satire in that game as well. It's not just uh, you know, it's not all just uh potty humor, even though there's a lot of that.

SPEAKER_03 57:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:41

Anyhow, this is a this isn't a Red Dead podcast, not a GTA podcast. So I will shut up about this.

SPEAKER_01 57:46

It's all rock star.

SPEAKER_00 57:49

It's true. Same writers, you know, same developers. There's a lot of commonalities.

SPEAKER_01 57:54

That that there is.

SPEAKER_00 57:55

And and you know, that's what that's what like when I was thinking of a follow-up to the Red Dead book and Red Dead class, I was thinking like, well, what other video games are there that can help me teach big topics in American history? And the reality is that there's not not that many that include so much kind of granular satire and and references to social and cultural issues. I mean, most games are very flat, like they're about shooting, they're about guns, they're about tanks, and like, yeah, there's that in all the Red Dead game or GTA games too, but like there's a whole lot more. You know, there's a much more eagerness to like to say something about American life and society, and most games steer clear of that.

SPEAKER_02 58:38

Do you think you'll write a uh GTA's history book?

SPEAKER_00 58:42

Oh, I'm very much thinking about it. Yeah, I'm I am very much planning to do so. I'm hoping to do so. So stay tuned.

SPEAKER_01 58:52

Awesome. Can't wait for it. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 58:54

Gotta get the right uh audiobook narrator though, right?

SPEAKER_01 58:57

Yeah. You gotta quite a few to choose from.

SPEAKER_00 59:01

There are there are indeed.

SPEAKER_02 59:04

Um, getting back into Scarlet Meadows, I think we need to go back to your New Orleans 1899 chapter, even though that's not technically Rhodes, but you talk a lot about Jim Crow and Robert Charles. And I'm I keep like going back to that in the book, but like I'm also trying to pay attention to what you're saying. So I'm like, can we touch on this a little bit more?

SPEAKER_00 59:28

Yeah. Right. So in researching the real history of New Orleans, I was really intrigued to learn that just a few months after when the fictional Red Dead 2 game is set, there was also a huge firefight between the police and an outlaw on the run that included crowds even bigger than those in Red Dead Redemption 2, like crowds numbering in the thousands that are all like crowds of thousands shooting at a single guy. Um, that sounds like completely bizarre. Uh, it sounds even more extreme than Red Dead 2, but it happened because this guy, Robert Charles, um, was uh pursued by the New Orleans police for himself for shooting several police officers. So, on one hand, it sounds like, oh, it's Arthur Morgan all over again. Except it's actually much more complicated because Robert Charles is a black man and every member of the NOPD at the time was white. And Robert Charles was essentially rebelling against the Jim Crow system as it was coming about, and he's doing so violently. Um, they in this is in 1900, in the summer of 1900, so not all that long after Arthur is riding through Lam, uh through Saint-Denis, uh, that that a bunch of police just kind of accost Robert Charles and his friend as they're sitting on a porch in in New Orleans and uh try to, you know, knock him around and arrest them. And he's like, mm-mm, I'm not taking this shit. And he pulls out a weapon of his own and starts shooting at the police. And uh he know this guy knows a lot about guns. He can craft his own ammunition, he has Winchesters, he has revolvers, he's armed to the teeth, as you know, some people were at the time. And uh there's this massive manhunt that ultimately grows into what folks have called a race riot, where mobs are you know just going all over the city looking for any black people to beat up, to, you know, to kill. They do kill several people. Uh just this enormous convulsion of violence that has everything to do with race and about this new system of of Jim Crow, which is coming into being. Um, so it's you know, it's a very telling moment that can shed a lot of light on the bigger social dilemmas of the time period. But at face value, it very closely resembles, you know, what the Vanderlyn gang is doing, except, you know, the police are pursuing the Vanderlyns because they robbed a bank, you know, not because they're, you know, critiquing the racial, you know, systems of the day. That's not really what's going on. So the game kind of flattens this out, of course, and removes the complexities from it, but uh it is an interesting parallel, I found very much so.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:12

And looking at the Lost Cause chapter now, I'm kind of going backwards, I guess. I don't know how much.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:16

Thanks for reading my book so closely. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun to write, I gotta say.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:23

I can imagine. Um talk about the St. Andrew's Cross design on the Confederate flag.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:33

Um, that's where I'm at right now. Not like I I've read the book, but that's what I'm looking at right now. Like what's grabbing my attention.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:42

Yeah. You know, it's really, it's really intriguing that Rockstar does not include that symbolism of the Confederate battle flag within the game. Because by 1899, the state flag of Mississippi included that symbol. It was fresh, it had just recently been put on there that decade, but um, it was there and it was being revived, that flag, it was being brought out, it was being introduced into public life all the time. And again, you know, I think Rockstar just wanted to avoid controversy, in part because, you know, when you when you create an open world game where there's such an element of player choice, players can do whatever vile thing they want, capture it on YouTube, and then you know, the the online world is shocked by oh, how awful Rockstar is. You know, like the classic example here is with the women's suffrage um activists who, you know, very soon after this game came out, some jerk on the internet, you know, decide like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna go, you know, kill, you know, kill one of these suffragists and say, oh, I'm beating up a feminist or whatever, this is fun. And literally, you know, millions of people were like, wow, Rockstar made a game about beating up feminists, and it's total bullshit. It's not at all what the game is about. This plot line does not at all lean you toward that outcome. It's very sympathetic to women's suffragists. But because the game gives you freedom to do what you want, you know, to shoot or attack who you want, it allows for the possibility of you know the kind of lowest common denominator um doing the worst thing possible. And then the company has to deal with the backlash of that. So I can imagine that's also why you know they did not include the Confederate battle flag, even though it was realistic in that that symbol was being reintroduced into Southern society, they just probably had nightmare visions of what some really gross gamers were gonna do with it, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:40

Right, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that that woman's suffrage video, that was unfortunately my introduction to Red Dead Redemption 2.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:48

Yeah, and it's it's probably did not leave a good taste in your mouth. But you know, what most people don't realize is like that's not the game. Right someone did with its sandbox, but it's not what I did with it. You know, it's not how I play the game, it's not how the game, the designers want you to play the game. But well, I use the James Younger gang as the the opening anecdote for the book because they in some senses they sound so much like the Vanderlyn gang in that they have this rivalry with the Pinkertons. Uh the Pinkertons try to eliminate them. However, this is in the 1870s, the early 1870s.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:31

I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:32

Yeah. Um, which is just a lot earlier than the Red Dead game is set, you know. And this is one of my bigger theories about Red Dead 2, is that like they really wanted to make a game about the 1870s, like especially the early 1870s. The problem is if they did, it wouldn't work with Red Dead 1 because that's set in 1911. Red Dead 1. And if you're gonna have the same well, yeah, that's right. I was hoping Rockstar, they just want to make an 1870s game in part because the 1870s are even more tumultuous and violent and uncertain than the 18, especially 1899. Um, but they just couldn't do it and keep Dutch as a character because he would have been, you know, not even born in 1871 or whatever. So um yeah, the the James Younger gang is, you know, but they're so often remembered as these Western outlaws, and which yeah, maybe they are. Missouri is their home base. Uh but they're so Southern, you know, there's so much about the Civil War. There's so much sort of um holdouts from the Civil War who is still fighting some of the same battles even into the the 1870s, which we, you know, we tend to think, oh, the Civil War ends in 1865. That's all over at that point. Well no, it's definitely not there's guerrilla warfare that continues, there's violence that continues. And um I think they encapsulate the sort of long civil war that does not really end at all. I mean violence continues for quite some time.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:03

So did your like knowledge and education on all of this change the way that you played the game the first time? Like did it were you sitting there like that's not accurate. Were you getting like mad about it?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:18

Well I think I was because remember I picked the I picked up the game just for fun just as a hobby. I was not planning to do anything professional with it whatsoever. So I think coming in I was just expecting to be disappointed. I was expecting like Hollywood nostalgia and mythology and of course there is some of that in the games there's no doubt but I was not expecting as much reference to major historical topics and as much nuance that they would they would provide. So I was really quite you know pleasantly surprised. If I was completely disappointed with this game, I don't think I would have taught a class on it or written a book about it. It's the fact that the games they get a lot right and even when they get things wrong it allows me to kind of teach why it's wrong. Like for example back to those statues you know like why do the statues all look old well that can get us to understand how does the lost cause work why does it resurface so aggressively in the 1890s those are all you know big dilemmas that are not easily explained but you know with a little bit of time and effort you can you can make sense out of them. So yeah it was a weird experience playing it as a historian there's no doubt about it you know and it's so funny like when I when I picked up those a game in the summer of 2020 I was really worried that it would impact my career in some way like mainly like I'd become addicted to video games again and I wouldn't do the rest of my work. I could never have predicted that it would impact my career in a positive way like in a beneficial way that it would in improve my teaching that it would you know allow me as a writer to find audiences that I had not found previously all of that was completely unthinkable. In part because like there's so much taboo about video games still I mean I don't know I'm a little older than you guys so maybe I feel it differently but like there's still a lot of people my age who are like oh video games are childish they're a waste of time they're unserious no one no one of significance plays video games and like that's totally not true. It's just total BS what was what were some of your favorite classics your 90s video games oh wow uh well so as I mean so I I definitely had my Super Nintendo phase and I played a lot of Japanese RPGs especially like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy and things like that. But um most of my time in high school was spent on the PC and you know it was mainly first person shooters to be honest. It was like Quake and Doom Half-Life especially like Half-Life was a real turning point for me. I love the Blizzard games so I played a lot of Warcraft and StarCraft when those came out um Deus X was a really cool um like immersive uh first person shooter um but then like you know right when I started college I quit and I like I so I did play GTA one and two that's important to note like when those games the top down 2D GTA games came out I really enjoyed those but by the time the GTA 3 came out and it went to 3D I I had quit video games. I wasn't playing them anymore. So I played all those classics like very recently to prepare for this class.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:27

I was not playing them in the early 2000s when they came out are you guys lifelong gamers have you done it your entire entire careers yeah I mean Red Dead's been basically my entire life my dad got me into it when I was eight and I never stopped that's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:44

Yeah the game is Red Dead 2 has been out for almost eight years at this point.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:47

It's crazy my brother was a big gamer he I grew up in the 90s playing like Sega in Nintendo 64 I had like the DS I was big on my DS but yeah I loved my Game Boy Advance Yeah well you know I still play a lot of video games for fun.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:08

It is um it's still my hobby. I have not quit I've been now playing for six years. And of course you know playing Rockstar games has started to feel like work because it's you know what I'm gonna be teaching and writing about but I do love many other video games that have come out since then.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:25

What are some of your current favorites besides Red Dead and GTA?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:29

Yeah uh well so the I'd say my favorite game that I've played since getting back into gaming in the pandemic is The Witcher 3 which is just awesome. Uh such an epic open world RPG and I played Cyberpunk 2077 which is made by that same studio which is also really good. I really enjoyed um let's see I was playing a lot of Hollow Night recently which is a totally different kind of game with like a 2D side scroller. Spent a lot of time with that one. Last year's um Claire Obscure Expedition 33 love that game that was uh both new and nostalgic for me it felt very much like the Japanese RPGs that I was playing back in the 1990s. So yeah there's a whole lot you know I mean I guess right right now I'm most like most looking forward to GTA 6 but I know I'm gonna have to like teach and write about it. So it's like half work half play. Right. Yeah right yeah right on y'all well unfortunately I gotta hop off I gotta go grade some papers it is still final exam season here. Oh I've got all my students in uh as you can see here Grand Theft America this is the syllabus for the class okay they all they all took their final exams last week so so there's no there's no questions about uh Michael and Trevor or it's actually just all American history you know well very cool where can people get your book people can buy Red Dead's history at any major book retailer uh Amazon is certainly uh one of them uh the audiobook narrated by Roger Clark is available on Audible on Google Books um on Apple podcast music whatnot so you can find it pretty much anywhere and I hope you give it a chance if you are curious about the deeper historical significance of the Red Dead games or just curious about Western history or southern history or whatever then I hope it uh scratches an itch it was certainly fun to write and I'm deeply thankful to you two for reading it so closely.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:36

Of course well thank you for joining us thank you for writing for inviting me yeah sounds good all right thanks again for having me all right best of luck with the rest of the podcast thanks for joining us bye that's it for us today outlaws thank you so much for spending time with us here at the Outlaw Haven it really means a lot to us we upload every Thursday at 3 a.m eastern time so if you like what you heard make sure you follow or subscribe wherever you're listening so you don't miss what's coming next. Also please take a moment to leave us five stars because it's the best way to support what we do.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:10

I'm Sam I'm Zy and this is the Outlaw Haven this world has a lot of ugly in it but it sure as hell has a lot of beauty you eat babies