 to bring authors at all in defense. Today, we're hosting a conversation with author Dr. Marius Stockwell, talking about her book, Interrupted Odyssey, Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians. Dr. Stockwell will be in conversation with Dr. Brian Shane, Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department, and James Richard Hamilton, Baker and Huss Deppler, Professor of Humanities. Dr. Stockwell received a BA in history from Maryman's College and an MA and a PhD in history from the University of Toledo. Schumacher became a professor, a history professor, and department chair at Lawrence University in Sylvania, Ohio. And after going into Earhart Foundation Fellowship Awards, Dr. Stockwell left teaching to become a full-time writer. Some of her prominent books for young people include The Ohio Adventure, A Journey for Maine, and Massachusetts Our Home, which was awarded the 2005 Golden Lamble Board from the Association of Educational Publishers. Additionally, Dr. Stockwell has authored historical books that include The Other Trail of Tears, the removal of the Ohio Indians, which is a 2016 finalist for the Ohio Library Association. Woodrow Wilson, The Last Romantic, a 2018 Dartmouth Medal nominee. The American story perspectives and encounters in 1865. And unlike the general, Mad Anthony Wayne and The Battle for America, published in 2018 by Yale University Press, has written multiple scholarly essays on American presidents, such as George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as many other scholarly works. So in addition to our author's golden event today, Dr. Stockwell will also deliver the Central Region Humanities Center's annual lecture based on her book, Unlikely General, at Anthony Wayne, The Battle for America. That will be at 4 PM this afternoon at Baker Center, it was 2.42.42. And tomorrow she'll be speaking at the Athens branch of the Athens County Public Libraries, where she will be discussing the book, The Other Trail of Tears, the story of Ohio's deportation of indigenous peoples. So we're really thrilled to have Dr. Stockwell and Dr. Shane here with us this afternoon for our great conversation with you. Thank you for inviting me. I'm so happy to be here. I love Ohio. I know so many people are trying to get out of Ohio, but it's wonderful to see so many people here and so many people and students here. As I call it, with the French to call it, the beautiful country. I want to tell you how I became to write a book about the illicit span. And it started when I wrote The Other Trail of Tears. When I wrote The Other Trail of Tears, which is the story of the tribes in Ohio leaving and going west, I saw something. And if you're history majors or you're historians or no matter what you are, sometimes when you're looking at the past, you just can hear the same thing. And one thing everybody told me when I was writing the removal of the Ohio Indians, Andrew Jackson was equal. Andrew Jackson was equal. It was just relentless. Why are you bothering? It's just Andrew Jackson raises people's standard and move on to the next thing. And I think that limits us then when we're trying to figure out why did our country do what it did. One thing I realized when I wrote The Other Trail of Tears, I suddenly saw Jackson and why he didn't. I said, Jackson did to the Indian service what he did to the banking industry. He literally took a national program that had been running since the days of George Washington and he simply threw it away. And he allowed local authorities from that point forward to handle things. And I said, that's the exact same thing he did to the bank. Remember the bank? Hamilton sets it up. They get the second bank going and Andrew Jackson simply comes along and says the bank is worthless, dangerous, corrupt. Out it goes. He just matters. And he turns the banking of this country over to local people, local institutions. I suddenly saw his impact. And I said, he overturned what everybody had been doing since Washington. George Washington had come up with an Indian policy where he said, we're gonna go west. I'm gonna open it for sale and settlement. We are gonna have wonderful things out there, including Ohio University, which is in the Northwest Ordinance. So I'm gonna respect the Indians. I'm gonna send my representatives out first. We're gonna write treaties and we're gonna buy this land and we're gonna pay the Indians not just once but every year from then on in the colonial years. I've been set up for trading posts every now and then. All those tribes that we've been fighting for so long are gonna become our islands. They're gonna turn their back on the British at last, push the British hopefully back into Canada. What this means is that before any settler goes out west, starting in Ohio up to the Mississippi River, the US government used to go first. The US government goes first. People like Benjamin Lincoln, I've sent out to write treaties with the Indians with the annuity payments are set up, the trading posts are set up. Here come the settlers, here come the farmers and the economy. That works up to the Mississippi River. It doesn't work perfectly. Anthony Wayne's story is gonna be the story of one of the tribes that we don't like to stay back behind. We're over about 20 years down the road after him. Here comes the council. The council says, I don't care how you're doing your Indian policy, this is our country, stay out of it. That causes the War of 1812 on the western frontier. Despite those two big flips, I don't need to discredit them in any way. There's an orderly way with who he was. Jackson watches his hands up his. When he says, everybody on this side of the Mississippi River, if you go out to the west side of the Mississippi River, without really laying out a plan of how they're gonna do that, he watches his hands of anybody going out across the Mississippi River from the US government and having an orderly system out in the western country. I sometimes think Jackson was just too much of an old colonial fellow. He could see up to the Mississippi, could see past them. Well, what does that mean? It means that from 1830, 1840, 1845 onward, there's chaos almost. There's no one government official. The president's not out there trying to straighten things out. Here come the people racing west. There come miners and trappers. There come gold miners. There come settlers. Here come my ancestors who are gonna come from a tiny little town of Sozoma in the, which is now, it's about 16, three miles south, you're surprised. Everybody's racing out west. No president steps in after Jackson and says, what to do? Nobody does. The very first order that you try to see out west comes in 1851, when one lone Indian agent, a guy by the name of Thomas Fitzpatrick, at Fort Lyramid says, I think things are really getting bad in the west. I think it's terrible. I got an idea. How about we push the Indians in the northern plains up towards Canada and we'll push the ones down, or maybe around the Cananges, down around Texas, not to destroy them in any way, not to harm them. We'll even pay them to move them. But we gotta get around the way, so these trains of people that can go to Oregon can come all the way down to California. He's the first person, not president of film work, just an Indian agent who said, we gotta fix this camps out in the west. And the chaos continues. When I learned about Thomas Fitzpatrick, I'm going, why would this nobody out in the west be setting Indian policy across the Mississippi road? That's what I got, I saw Jackson. My God, we need to see him as destroying Indian policy, going back to Washington, the way you can see him overturning the bank. He didn't think anything of it. He thought the west was so huge, so big, one big reservation. It'll be fine, the tracks will all be out there. Who in the right mind will want to settle on the great ones? That's kind of the attitude of Andrew Jackson. Just think of what we know about what's gonna happen to the west in the 1840s, the Golden Age, the war in Mexico. Think of what happens in the 1850s, bloody cancels, think of the race to Oregon, think of the trains coming back and forth, no federal authority is out there. That's when I realized U.S. Grant, U.S. Grant, he becomes president. I suddenly saw him coming into view. And again, I don't know how you learn things, how you write, how you teach, but I have to wait for this, it kind of is haze and suddenly I see something that was happening. You stand back and you watch it. I suddenly realized U.S. Grant wanted to put the president back in charge of Indian Affairs. U.S. Grant wanted to be the guy who goes up, writes the treaties against everything under control. And I said, someday, if I ever get a chance after I got the other trail of tears, then I go, oh, I'm looking to go back and write about U.S. Grant. You know, you put something up on the shelf. It's back in the back of your mind. Had no intention of writing a book proposal, trying to write it. I just said, if the chance comes up, I think I got a story. I go a lot to the south for some reason, to the elections. I give a lot of lectures to teachers in Louisiana. I was hired to come down there. And that's where I met the directors of the Grant Library. U.S. Grant's Library is in Mississippi. So we met. They said, it's not going to look semi-intelligent. We are looking for people who can bring to life the grant papers. We've got a grant library, no one visits in Mississippi State. We've got grant papers published in libraries, nobody reads them. We've got grant papers are online and nobody access them. And they started working with Southern Illinois University Press. They said, how about we put together books that bring grant to life and get people interested in it? That's a person, not just a general. Said Stockholm. Got any ideas? Oh, if I got an idea. I think U.S. Grant is going to be second George Washington. I think U.S. Grant came to coal in the Indian service. And then I said, I don't know what he did with it. In school I was taught that he put missionaries out of the Indian reservations. I said, well, maybe he just used them because he could control them. But that was enough to get a book deal. I said, I'm going to figure this out. So I began to study who U.S. Grant was. What did he do out of us? How did he come up with a New Indian policy? And I can tell you right away, I realized I was completely correct. He did try to take control. He did see the cast in the West. He did come up with an Indian policy putting the president, the executive branch in charge. But he had no intention of missionaries. How, in God's name, would U.S. Grant send missionaries West? Everything I had read, everything I had been taught, Grant sent missionaries West. I discovered no. U.S. Grant worked for about four years of developing an Indian policy using those pictures. He worked with his best friend. His name was Eileen S. Parker, the Seneca Indian. And the Seneca Indian had been his military secretary. That's his drawing. You get this in the Library of Congress. See the second man from the left? This is Appomattox. It was Eileen S. Parker who sat down and wrote the agreement between Grant and Lee. Grant and Parker had known each other since Comedia, Illinois. And one reason, the Seneca brilliant scholar, engineer, loved Grant. He said, when I met him, please don't be offended by this because it's very politically incorrect to say and he said, I like you as grant because you know what? He does not remind me of a white man. He's so quiet. Whites talk constantly and are always bragging. I'm white, I talk constantly. And he said, Grant's more like an Indian. He's quiet. He's standoffish. It takes a long time to get to know him but once you know him, you're friends forever. And he became friends forever. And again, he's the military secretary with the United States. Together, these two men between 1865 and 1869 developed an Indian policy all in their own. They asked people for advice out west. They asked Grant, I've asked Sherman, Hope, everybody, what can we do? But by the time he becomes president, he's got a fully formed Indian policy. Grant was the general of the armies. He didn't just go home and grab the medics. He ran the armies of the United States for the next four or five years. When he becomes president, he makes his friend, Elias Parker, a commissioner of Indian affairs. And down the road they go, and this is what they do. They say, we're going to take command. The president makes the decisions. The executive branch makes the decisions. We are going to fire everybody working in the Indian service. And we're gonna replace them with soldiers. And their duty will be to protect the Indians, to protect the tribes from the settlers racing their way. We're gonna give them a generation or two to realize the world's changing. Hopefully they will find new livelihoods for themselves. Grant thought that most of the tribes would eventually become ranchers. They realized the buffalo were not going. They have to transform. But a point would come when the tribes had educated themselves on the new way to live out of the plains in the Rogers and then they would be welcomed into the United States as citizens in the United States. That's his point. And when I discovered that, I thought I was just, I said, how could this have been missed? How could people do this Quaker stuff, this missionary stuff? Well, I discovered that as this policy is being implemented, the outrage and the rebellion and the hatred toward this policy of Congress from reformers who didn't like the fact that Grant might say let's Christianize and civilize the Indians. But he never did that. It's just, stay there, we'll protect you. You just like what you want to do. How do you want to live and we'll help you. But down the road, we're gonna be citizens. Many of the tribes hated what he was doing. And one group who absolutely despised him and also didn't even see him. I don't know if you've ever heard of this. If he made one serious mistake at the policy, he set up a thing called the Board of Indian Commissioners. He envisioned that it would be educated whites, educated Native Americans, and that they would advise the president. Instead, by the time he's president, a lot of rich men who have helped the Northland and the Civil War want on this Board of Indian Commissioners. They're led by a man I had never heard of, William Welsh. I had to dig through books to find him. And William Welsh vows to destroy Grant's Indian policy. He said, I'm gonna stop it. I'm gonna topple the savage, who's now one of the Indian Affairs Department, and we will overturn it. Congress does work to overturn it. It's a long, internal story. And maybe I, let me end here. I'm not gonna tell you how it's destroyed. But I started to see something else. I loved that name, it was this. And it's like, oh my God, this is like the Odyssey. This is like the Odyssey. Grant had this vision, it's like I'm all gonna live together. His ancestors, who came from Boston, is a Puritan. The three men in the south that he's protecting. My ancestors, in the 1870s, the most highly stricken people on the planet are coming from Ireland, Poland, and again, the Austrian Empire, looking for opportunity because if you come in, it brings another group in. And that's all the tribes that we have been fighting for 250 years decided to watch you in as citizens of the United States. And that was his dream. But that's why I called the book Interrupted Odyssey because this dream is going to be completely destroyed. And I found the book, as I wrote it, to be absolutely perfect. I'm breaking it. That's why I started. If you read the beginning, I'll stop. But I'm excited for my bonus. I, you know, because I go, well, I go and I'm gonna read it like the Odyssey. Where I'm gonna talk with the other things about me. I think you're, you know, oh, I can slide these out into this book. We'll see what I'm doing. Let me see if I can get those. I said, I'm gonna have to go to the prayer room. All right. I kept thinking of the Odyssey. You know how Odysseus is trying to get home. He's got this vision that he want to get home. And I said, I need a quote that describes who Grant was, this famous, famous guy. He had just walked away from politics. You know, he'd be up on the brushwork probably right now. We would worship him. But he decides to get into politics. And of course, he, he, I'm gonna save the Indians. I am gonna protect them. And it's gonna be wonderful. I'm all gonna be one happy nation. Maybe he should have heeded the warning that the nymph, nymph Calypso, gave to his name, saying that Eurydice, who had also ended the terrible war one before. This is what Calypso said to Eurydice. But if you only knew down deep when pains are fated to fully come before you reach that shore, you'd stay right here, preside, preside in our house with me and be the one. I said, that matches this man who I think could have, you know, it could have, it not got involved in politics, not tried so hard. But it's all gonna crash down around him. And I'll leave you with one thing. The thing that begins to undo as a policy about a year and a half in him, Congress says no more soldiers out in the reservation. No soldiers running any reservation. Let the Congress then themselves pick who runs the reservation, whether they care about the Indian tonight. And it's only then when Grant said, I really have missionaries run in the reservations, then happy with you guys. And that's when he begins to put the missionaries in. But I'll leave you with one or both. I talk a lot, I don't like that. Oh my God, I was supposed to talk 10 minutes, here we go. And I've never, if you write a book, I've never put the appendices first, I wrote the appendices first. And I did, here are all the soldiers he put in charge of all the reservations in 1869. And then I do the second appendices. Down the road when he's forced to take out the soldiers, here are all the missionaries who puts them in place. And this is just, it's an unraveling of the tragic story, stuff. The white crew? Thank you so much Dr. Stockwell for this book, Rich. And I encourage everybody in the audience to purchase a copy right over there. Yeah, I think the library for organizing this is wonderful, so that a lot of the physicists in. I don't know if I thanked everybody. I thanked the history department and thanked everyone. And of course, like the library, I think the Athens Public Library, you guys are too gracious to me. So you're just very kind to me, I'm so honored to be here, so thank you. So our plan is to probably talk here conversationally on the class. Dr. Stockwell, some questions, then we'll open up the audience for any questions that you might have about what you've heard, or if you had a chance to read any questions in the courage front. So you mentioned the title, and the Odyssey part. I wonder if you might push out a little bit more of the interrupted part of the title. It wasn't that you think this story, that you bring to life, what's the interactive part? Well, the Odyssey part, one thing I noticed when you read Grant's speeches, especially his first and second inaugural address, he's got a very clear vision. He wants us in a world without water. His second inaugural address is study. If you go back and read that, he talks about we're gonna get rid of our music names. We're never gonna fight again, we're gonna be one world order. I always think I'd like to go on Fox News and read that, and say, who is writing this? And then say, Karl Marx, I don't know, you as Grant, you could really believe in this kind of world order. That somebody, I guess I didn't realize, that somebody was walking with my ancestors in it, I didn't realize how many came during U.S. Grant. And he knows, it's going to be Europe, the Irish, you can't go on any of them, we come to America. But he's helping the free men, and he's helping the Indians, and he's helping everyone, and he's talking about his heritage. It reminded me of Walt Whitman's gorgeous poem, Song of Democracy. Or Walt Whitman talks about how we're all in this boat together. And if you haven't heard of Howard Hanson's beautiful Song of Democracy, you can go listen to it's gorgeous. But I've got that such a sense of, he is Odysseus, he's got that gorgeous name, he envisions this tremendous shift of democracy, all of us are on it together. And somehow we're citizens, and we're protected by the Constitution. I see him starting on his path with his friend, Parker. But putting the soldiers in charge, they are telling traders and anybody who's been out there torturing the Indians, maybe getting great stuff from the government, some of the chief and giving them rags. You're gone. Grant says, I'm putting these soldiers in charge too, because I can get rid of them. They do something that I don't like, and I court-martial them how they go. It's so bizarre to hear this, because when you think of the army out the west, it's every western revolution. It's every movie revolution. The army is evil, and he doesn't see things that way. He sees these as people will tell them. When I watch the Congress starting in 1870, they're not seeing this movie, the Odyssey and the Grand Parasite. They're not. Maybe they're not happy that my ancestors are sneaking into the country. I'm a Catholic, a Jewish ancestry, so we are, you can't get any scale here. Here we come, polluting the northeast. And here he wants us in the northeast, left or in the south, Indians in the west, and Congress just revolts. And I guess I watched it when you kind of arc the book up. And then from the point of this hauling within a year and a half of his presidency as one by one, Congress dismantles it. We're going to stop him. And then I watched this map, the board of committee commissioners head. He goes in and he stops it. And he decides, I'm going to wreck this policy. I'm going to make sure that that's established. And I'm going to make sure that, I'm in there helping to appoint all these missionaries. Congress then will also get rid of the treaty system. And when you get rid of the treaty system, that means that the US government doesn't go out and talk to, assume the way you would talk to them, to the French or to the British. You're not going to sign a treaty that the Secretary of State signs. They misbehave. You know, you round them up, sign them on a reservation and you execute the leaders, or you imprison them. It's so terrible, it's so terrible that eventually this man will put, literally, put Parker on trial. Accused Korea and him of running a corrupt Indian saying what fear is feeling. It's going to be a horrible, horrible trial in Congress, but we have some terrible policy. And it's destroyed, it's destroyed. Parker quits and says, I have it, everybody knows. The Board of Indian Commissioners takes over and it's pretty much going to run Indian policy. So, frankly, to Roosevelt wakes up and says, hey, I think the President should be in charge. And just so it's like, we're arching to this great vision, I love this vision. So I have to, I'm on Grant's side. I agree. I think he's trying to do the right thing. I think we all should be working citizens and live together in some way. And then it's just those final chapters. I have to go chapter by chapter by chapter, how people's expectations destroy this vision. And then Grant himself says, I don't care about what goes on in the West. And he loses hope for himself and now he washes his hands off the Botox in a suit, but I can imagine the same way that Jackson had done. It's like a Shakespearean tradition period. There's a lot buried in this book that you can kind of piece out. You mentioned this vision and key for Grant's vision is this belief that Indian peoples can and should become American citizens. And I wonder, do you see that vision as part of a larger rethinking in the post-Soviet war period? It's not what it means to be a citizen. I know you're familiar with the reconstruction era that's the biggest legacy, the thing that we know most of the slavery is ended and there's a pathway towards birthright citizens. Yeah, that's what it is for people of African descent. And is Grant's view of what's taking place during the Civil War fighting the role of African-Americans, the role of Indian peoples? The instrument by which he opens up is view of American citizenship in the occupation? He sees the Constitution and he looks at that 14th Amendment and he said, this is the key. The key is somehow if we are citizens we're protected and we have all the rights of the Constitution. We have all the rights that come to us through the laws of the United States. As long as we all say that's who we are because he didn't want you to come here like my crazy Irish ancestors can't come here and still think they're in Iowa. No, maintain some of your traditions but you have to admit that we are now in this thing called the Constitutional Government where you get your citizenship and then you participate in this democracy and you live and you help this country grow. This was one big problem. When you look back at how did we deal with the tribes nobody ever said, nobody ever offered American citizenship. Nobody offered state citizenship. This is gonna come up in the other trails. Jackson says to me, nobody in the state of Ohio comes forward and says, would you why not like to stay here and be citizens of Ohio and then you'll be protected by the laws of Ohio? Nobody did that. There's really only one person in American history for a grant who thinks constitutionally and that's James Barber, the Secretary of War of Jack Quincy Act. He's the first one who says, we keep fighting each other like we're different nations. We can't live together. Their solution is let's live together under the constitution become citizens. And Greg used to say, then you gotta protect your hand. Then you gotta protect your children because you'll be protected under it. It's gonna take Franklin D. Roosevelt to figure out, hey, maybe there's a third way. Why couldn't you keep land? Say you're Shawnee, you got a Shawnee reservation. Why can't you be a citizen of the Shawnee region? Why can't you have a constitution, celebrate your heritage, we'll help you, the US government will help you and you're a citizen of the United States. So give me FDR to figure out dual citizenship. And sometimes when I study FDR, the great criminal director of Washington, thought of it, offered it. I'm not saying to come, so what's going for it? He was, no, when Grant is trying to build the, he's got this wreckage of this Indian policy, it's all ruined. Then he concentrates on the Indian territory. That's her question. And it's like, oh, why can't we invite everybody to move towards an alcoholic home? Oh, and like, why can't it ever, the Indian might go higher up there? Remember the Northwest Jordans? He had three stages of territorial government. And he said, why can't we do that? And then eventually you become citizens in the US. You have an Indian state, which would be America's. Everybody in Oklahoma wants to go for that, except the charity. Charity is saying you, you don't need your grant. So it's, I think that's the neat thing to me about studying so much in our history. It's never black and white. It's like, I was there at any of these times trying to figure out what to do. I couldn't go be a sound bite, you know, on MSNBC or whatever it is. People are trying to make these massively difficult decisions. I think that's why I like history, teaching it and writing it, and I've done speaking about it, because to me it's like American historians. We're showing the lessons of democracy. Don't let the sample be you. If you could figure out a better way than when granted, Washington in the rep yard did or what to come so did, you know, apply it today and all the miserable problems you have, and it's starting to be real cruel. Yeah, your book does a great job of showing the complexity of the dynamics within different Indian groups, but also within different groups, reporting to represent the United States and the United States government. There really isn't a clear homogenous perspective on any of these. It does raise the question, I mean, one of the striking moments in the book is Ely Parker trying to help negotiate this constitution that should lead Oklahoma, and what would become of Oklahoma towards David. Parker's an interesting person, as you show. He's a Seneca Indian, but he is a Douglas Democrat. He's a board of American expansion, and I'm trying to square that with somebody like Sitting Bull, who's another major character, to see the tension that would exist between us. And what led Parker to have this considerable faith in the American army to be the promoter of peace in the idea of US expansion? And, you know, that isn't exactly the way that Sitting Bull was. No, it doesn't fit. I see this right now enough. This is how you see the world. I see the world as people want the past to be so simple, and they pick their side, good and evil. I'm good, those people are good, and everybody else is evil. And that's not at all. When you're standing back from the midst of this, people are making decisions every day. Ely Parker is raised on the town of Monday Indian Reservation. He is, he's at the Wokeland, I don't know if you still need to say sure if it's for one Seneca. He becomes the leader of this tribe when he's 18 years old. But he also realizes who else is who. We can't just sit on this reservation and keep constantly saying, remember the days when we ran the Ohio country and we were training and we pushed the drives up? Oh, we hated the French. It's like, that world is gone. What world can this people have? And he goes, education. He's obsessed, he was. Everything he can, he's a great leader, he's brilliant. When he can become a lawyer, because they would not want to take the bar exam in New York, he goes into studies engineering. And he ends up in an engineer and he's in charge of all the lighthouses on the Great Lakes. And he's out in Galena. He's gonna build some institutions for New York's government. He sees the West as, this is great. I have an opportunity here. He loves Douglas. We forget that about Stephen Douglas. Stephen Douglas was, don't play about slavery. Let's open Kansas, let's open Nebraska. Slavery will die on its own. Let's build cities and railroads. And he saw the world that was coming. He just, as Lincoln said, could take a pour unless we fix this big, horrible problem that we're not living up to in our ideals. But he loved the West. His attitude was he had to other majority of people who are Native Americans today, which is our civilization. We are part of it. Most Native Americans don't live on reservations. They have been re-granted to them, really, by FDR. They are citizens of the U.S., if you don't believe that. Go see how the Navajo voted in Arizona in the 2020 election. One reason they won, they won Arizona because they had the Navajo in the polls. And they are American citizens in this day. So I think we have to be careful that we don't just idolize Cubs and city bulls and all that. They had one viewer face. Then there were people who said, maybe we can be in the middle, like the Cherokee. And then you had people like Emily Parker who was, I embrace the United States of America. And here's a bunch of stockholders, goonie Irish ancestors that they saw it that way. And that has been one thing in Native American history that's when the wars are done, it's one together. And it's, I'm a blender. I say I'm mixed race, I'm Irish and English. So it's like, I'm maybe because of my heritage, especially Ohio. We kind of went together, the world was warm. I like that, I used to say grail potatoes, people are moving in there. Even though I've moved to Wisconsin, part of me wishes to go to Ohio. Part of me is like, oh, come on, destroy Ohio. It's a better story with a movie, right? And I do think too, maybe you see this, Westerns, we can't, it's very hard to see the West. That's hard to see Native Americans. I need COVID, I must have seen every black and white Western. Just that I know everything that happened on Gunsmoke and everything. And I go like, do I know the West because of Gunsmoke? Do I know U.S. Grant and Custer because I've watched your off-limit movies? And he was Custer, who lead this legend to be told of good and evil. It's very hard to write out of it and say, oh, talk about the movie. Billions of middle-grounds were almost fighting it, I guess. Matters, you can't do Hollywood on this kind of, I don't know, maybe this could be Hollywood for this kind of tragedy. Well, I wanna make sure I leave five for questions, but I think there are a couple of others that might be interesting to think a little bit about. You raised this question of writing about Indian history and I'm curious about what sort of challenge is that does present, and I'm just trying to discuss that a little bit. It's a very sensitive subject and it does involve a lot of narratives, a lot of sort of myths that have been handed down to us and what we read and the way that it's portrayed in Hollywood. How do you navigate this as a writer and as a writer? I swear, there's something rubbing a cap on me. I go back to my Catholic college lives. The Catholic vision of reality is that we're in this mess together and we can be saints and we can be sinners, but there really isn't a puritan, there's no puritanical street in it and that's what I avoid. Don't be a puritan. Don't think I'm perfect, he's perfect, she's perfect and that's all I'm gonna talk about, that's all I'm gonna write about. U.S. Army State so I'm not gonna write about it. This, a compromiser like, well, I wouldn't compromise. I would have been on my own, fighting them, chasing buffalo. Don't be that way. And as I like to use to tell my students, crazy horse and custer, both of these murder your ancestors. To come to the William & Mary Harrison are your ancestors. U.S. Grant, who's trying so hard to figure out what to do out in the West, isn't much your ancestor, as Sharon or Sidney Boe or anything like that. And maybe that's the perspective I write from. Okay, we got a widening forward. They were going into a new millennial way of writing them out of America. We have to write them out. Every day. We gotta write from every day's perspective. And it's funny, the model would be a really good movie. Sometimes novelists and movie makers, they want to show the real drama movie. They'll show everybody's perspective. Documentary doesn't have to. Both of us get a little surprised because it proves one thing. It doesn't have to do that. But try to be more cinematic. And I did that in the Wayne book, write a more like some movie, Stand Back. You know, you got the camera. When I taught writing to my students, I used to tell them, when you pretend you have a camera, we don't want to hear about you. I don't want to know what you feel on the current or later political situation. Get the camera, and try to show everyone's point of view. And your book should give a kind of collision. But we know we do this as professors. This is what historians do. We, the way we are taught to talk, show everybody's opinion, and everybody to discuss it right about it. And that's, I think we don't give ourselves a cut. I don't think historians are out there fighting to teach this wonderful method we have, which is imaginatively try to put yourself in a situation that everybody had in the past. Why does they do what they did? Would you, could you have done otherwise? Will you think of that, Steve? You let those awful sociologists get out from there. We're always on the other side of the energy list. Well, that's lost. Yeah, it does. It does. It reminds me of something that we can say. Like in some ways, history is all practice. How do you practice empathy towards people today, right? Different than sympathy, right? Different than sort of saying what it is that they did was right. But at least how is it you can get in the eyes of people who have different perspectives on your own. You also, your explanation is an earlier question. Help me understand more of what I took to be the sympathy you show for Father Pierre John Dismet. Why would he be a statue? One of the characters. He was a, you can speak a desert missionary who genuinely seems to try to navigate in the interest of the community. All he does, can I say, when I was sending us to, I do think that like pulling some stuff and help us. The greatest writer to me is Shakespeare. Because remember, you can't find Shakespeare and it's where it just stands back. Joe's your everything. We're still trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with Campbell. He shows you this and there's gotta be almost that kind of perspective I think of the story. And yet, not like everything in the past is great. You can show the mistakes that somebody's making. A Parker and a Grant, they make terrible mistakes. Whereas they're implementing the policy. There are massacres throughout the West. They're soldiers, massacre people. And instead of stepping in and saying like Grant said, okay, you're out. He just sets back, okay, don't be mean to the soldiers they've been in. That's like, oh, Grant, you blew it for this. You made a step. There is a bit of a gap between the vision and the rhetoric of that vision and the reality of the policy. And once he doesn't care about the motor, and he doesn't care about, can I imagine you, he hands the wars over to Sharon. And then he went, he was helped to sue. I don't care, I don't care anymore. And he lets again Sharon put the war together. It's like, this guy who had this vision, he ends up the greatest Hollywood movie and president of Indian War. It's, you want to take it, slap them around, I'd say after about 1873 or four. And that's why Parker says they may break up and not friends. And Parker says in a very biblical tone, he said, oh, he sold his soul to the well. He turned his back on his ideals. He's tragic. Yeah, there are a lot of tragic IRDs in the book. I'm like, that's the fact that the grant of you, Sharon, has an instrument in this policy. And Sharon comes up at the front of the book when Grant's trying to figure out what to do. He asks, Sharon, what should we do at West? Well, you kill him, you know? You do to them, and we do to the Confederates. You destroy them. Sherman tries to tell them the same thing. It's like, Sherman, I didn't do better from you. And Sherman is, we'll just separate them. Well, that was the treaty for clarity 20 years before. He clarifies a gang of cult member general cult who lost the second bull run. He gets shipped out West to put down this anti-sury vote. He ends up liking this anti-suit and not liking his own country. And he's the one, he writes letters to Grant. I get buried in the grant papers. This is before Grant is president. And he says, I did some hundred minutes though, and it really works. I have forts everywhere. And guess what? Protecting Indians. Protecting them from the settlers. The settlers and the traitors are the creeps. And Grant uses that. One thing that drives me, that's about Grant, you want to say, when he faces opposition polls. Not on the battlefield. You know, we've got 100,000 guys with you. But politically, when he runs into opposition, well, it's like, oh, yes, dad, okay. I know that people have psychological studies of him, but he doesn't fight for this position. You know, he's the opposite of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln fights. Washington fought. Jackson fought. Grant backs away. You just watched this vision that, again, FDR would kind of Grant hold up and make a lot of Indian policy. But Grant disappears from the story, which is tragic. I'm going to hand it over to the audience for your questions. But your last comment is another question. It's a 200-year anniversary of Grant's, Grant's birth, he did this year, last year. There's sort of been a resurgence of Grant's fellowship that you mentioned earlier. A lot of it bringing his presidency and his life, the traditional narrative we had in Grant is that he was inept, that he wasn't really inclusive, he wasn't really committed to any degree of racial equality. But the last 20 years, he's been a real rethinking of that and most of it positive and suggesting that he did contribute in tangible ways and was willing to fight and preserve the rights and free that in the South. And I'm wondering whether you see this book as that contributing to that larger rethinking of a more positive view of Grant and if so, you know. I hope so. I hope so. Before everybody was here, we were talking about Grant, the general, and that there are a whole group of people. He's got groupies today. I mean, they come to the conferences together and they worship him, get the big books on Grant, Grant the general, Grant the general. When Grant writes his own number, I'm a general, I'm a general. But when you stand back and you have to get rid of the historiography of the late 19th and early 20th century where people were extremely racist. So they didn't like Grant because he appeared to be not as racist as they were. He actually cared about the ignorance of blacks. And again, nobody considered my ancestors whites coming here under the Klan. Various brides were waiting to stop them. He's not perfect, but my God, I can go, my God, he's a couple of steps forward. He's a couple of steps forward. We gotta give credit, I believe, in history. Give people credit who took us a little bit forward even if we failed. And that's how I said, I hope people who, again, don't start with a little big horn. Well, don't start there. Don't start with one of Parker or Ken's and Jack. Go back and watch this man when he's a student and the only surviving drawing we have that he did are Indians talking to a trader. What his wife told him, you know, watch out for the Indians, the communities are gonna kill you. He said, there's no fear for the Indians otherwise this was in the Mexican war later. He said, what civilization have we brought on any of these tribes, except for smallpox and whiskey? So he had an innate sympathy for the Native Americans. He had it for the people of Mexico. He gotta find his little, like, gorgeous loom, you know, it was buried in his letters and buried in his grave. He's the opposite that we have in a way who never shut up, who wrote his every emotion down, up and down, very quiet, very keeping it close to the brush. But you see these letters in his reports as he's trying to put this video policy together. You know, I never thought of where, I thought 1865, Appomattox, I went to Appomattox, good work, 1869, he's president. Then he had four years in between where he has to run the army's campaign. Thanks, thanks, thanks. How can we save people, how can we protect them? Where people like Sheridan are telling them to kill me. Once he gets mad at me and says, how practically would you do that, Phil? We have about 300,000 people out there. We just went through a blaze of war. Where are we gonna go and fight him? And how are we gonna execute him? He actually loses his temper. He said, to even say this is manifest, it's not possible, we're gonna save them. And then he says, I lock them in, the doors are open, the door's open. The door that I would fight, I want you and the citizens. And he often said that, he's the eighth generation down of the Puritans of Massachusetts. He goes, I want everybody here. That's how I'm sitting here. He opened the door unto me. One more thing, I was just gonna say, how do you, that question was so interesting. How do you tell a great story? When I was a kid, I had poetry. Remember the beautiful poem by John Dunn, No Man is an Island? I was a very idealist, he was 15, 16 year old. I wrote it down on a index card and I put it above my bed so I could read it every morning. Every man's death diminishes me because I've been modeled a man kind of. Therefore, never sons build, we need to build a total set, we've got to have that innate realization that we're on this planet together in this mess together. It's a great point that it kind of reminds us that it's not your history and my history, it's our history and we all kind of look at it. And with that, let's turn to your questions and give them to the audience and I'll try to repeat the question for those who are joining us virtually. Yes, please. So you talked a lot about Congress's opposition to this. What was like the American public opinion on Grant's policy this time? So the question is, sorry, I'm gonna try to repeat that, the question is, are you gonna read it in a good light? That I talk a lot about Congress and I go through about Congress as opposed to, what did the American people think? It was split. East Coast attended to being very positive towards him. His great champion was the New York Times. The New York Times was on his side. He was criticizing the New York Times. But they said, he's trying his best. Out West, once you're heading to the 100th Marine, people who are still fighting, like in the Southwest, they think he's out of his mind. They think he's completely out of his mind. Many of the soldiers, I think, we're not guaranteeing, kind of the idiots, this isn't madness, we're here to protect the Southerners and only that. There tended to be, I get a split. Northeast, positive, the far West, a negative. You have to watch it in the newspapers. The Western newspapers just thought he was out of his mind. And they were kind of happy, I think, when the Western newspapers were happy when the MOTOC finally revolted in 1873. And then Grant turns on his policy because the MOTOC's murder is for East Convention or so. But there's definitely a split East and West. I, your comments reminded me what a complex person Grant was. And I wonder if one reason why historians till recently largely ignored his papers and his library, as you were saying, is because of that complexity. It just seemed, you know, we're all aware, we're all just looking for the black and white and the good and the evil. And who's the bad guy and who's the good guy? He's a typical person-dependent whole. And that's why you are one of the few people who has really tackled him and, as you were saying, his vision as president. Maybe, and there's an element of, you can't, we rely on the word, don't we? We gotta have a written record. I was trained when I was a kid in graduate school. History begins when somebody takes up a pen, better than historic Indians than the historic Colombians or whatever. He doesn't open up and pour out a soul. Again, like a man, Anthony Wayne, pour everything out. He plays a close to the best. You have to not so much look at what he's saying specifically about these, what's the correspondence? What are the debates that's gonna get much more complex to pull this out? The one that measures papers. And he's talking to Parker. He's opening up all of them. But when he's talking to Pope, but he's talking to Sharon and he's talking to Sherman. There's a person at work, though. That's saying you need to change the lines. But you have to think more profoundly. Why is he asking questions? What's the conclusion that you're gonna come to? So I think, hey, it's very complex. And I left writing about his history. He was aware that his appearance, he was aware that his family had come eight generations. He's the first one who never has any dealing with the Native American. Doesn't have any dealings with them. Even though they're having chaos in the state of Ohio. Even at the take-as-let, just forget the Civil War for three minutes. What is the youth against what is given to his president instead of always the Civil War? I find that, too. That Civil War is like a blazing light that you can't see around him. So that's true. It was in all the papers. Yeah, I heard that. I heard that. My first ancestor, Irish ancestor, was Michael Daley. He came here from the Daley family. He bought and took him on in places like that. I also think, to your question, that there's very few presidents who are so wrapped up in the way of destroying the youth period and reconstruction is such a, what, historically, such a charged topic that's granted to be seen by all different types of opponents to the construction of this. And I think, and he makes big mistakes. I mean, it's very hard. You know, we're trying to see not as just corrupt, but he, you know, wake up. Look what's going on around you. I'm at a young historian at a conference. This was at one point, I was there for something else. And he started to talk to my grant. He was writing a biography of, I don't know if you ever got it done, but he said, I see him in the first term, it's really good. And once he crosses into the second term, he just, he's gone. He wants money. His wife wants money. And I didn't think of that until I heard what Parker said about the corrupt influence that made me surrounded by a powerful man. I don't know. I can't say that for sure, but that's the next place I'd go to study. And maybe that's another thing we don't do. We don't look at transformations. We don't look at progress. We don't, I need to quote Bill Monor, which you give me. But Bill Monor always says, the problem with us progressives, we don't look at progress. We don't realize that somebody can make a mistake here and slowly they can get better. And if somebody makes mistakes throughout the end of this presidency, he's compelled it for a time that's like, look at everything that was done and what would you have done in that situation? That's what I used to torture my students with. Okay, I'm giving you a whole power. In 1791, that's 1865, you cite for us that I sit down and tell us what you're gonna do. I don't know if I could know. But luckily, I teach yourself. They kind of push me in that direction. This is one thing in history. I'll ask you another one here. I'd just like to talk a little bit about the sources that you used to look. What did you find that was sort of helpful and useful and you alluded to it to you? And which ones had to be handled with care? Oh, oh, oh, so he struck a chord. Oh boy. The grant papers, the grant letters, I can say I was a star when I actually had to sit down in the university or to the library and I had to read the hard copy. I said, sometimes my mind is too much to be reading online. So I sit there and I read it and I'm going, I'm astounding at scores points. I'm astounded, always deeply spoken to. I'm astounded at telegraphs, astounding about the West. That astounded me. But then when I went online and I tried to track this policy down, oh my God, the records of the Department of the Indian Affairs, the records of the Commissioner of the Indian Affairs, the records of the Department of War, the records of all superintendents, the records of all the people who are West. It's all online. You can read it. I was literally sitting at my bed on a weird night when I discovered, oh my God, he was appointing me on. He was not appointing missionaries and I started to open up all the names of these guys which is now the epithesis. That astounded me. Then you gotta go to the National Archives. The greatest repository of Native American history on the planet is spectacular. It's all on microphone. But I wasn't looking for anything specifically on the Indians. I said, I'm gonna find the records of the Board of the Indian Commissioners. Who are these town-rich guys who are appointed to run our Indian policy who tabled Grant? I had never heard of them. I knew they were there and I'd go to the library, I went to the archives. You know, they take you down to the basement and you have to talk to a librarian. You can't just go in and look for things. You have to say, I know it's here. I'm talking to one of the top archivists that you said. I go, I want to get the papers on the Board of Indian Commissioners. So there's no such thing as the Board of Indian Commissioners. Do you mean the Commissioner of Indian Affairs? I would love the Board of Indian Commissioners. There were rich guys who ran our Indian policy from Grant to FDM. They're here. Well, if they're here, they must be in Maryland. I literally have to sit there for hours and they found them. They found the records of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and I got to go up into the reading room. You know, I told you so. There they were and it's a gorgeous room. It's a wooden room. If you look out to Washington and I'm opening it up and I'm going, oh, where are these guys? Why isn't there a book on these guys? They are, we're going to scrub the Indian aside of them. We're going to turn everybody into good Christians. We're going to make good Episcopalians of everybody. They then take over the whole Indian Affairs Department and I'm sitting there. They got your question on newspapers. They would get the newspapers of the U.S. and they would cut everything out through the scrapbooks of what they thought and they were horrified at, I don't know, the modic one, like Captain Jack Rebels. I try to be quiet in historic places. But I'm literally going, oh my God. And to finish your question, the guy next to me, he goes, he goes, you're looking at the records of the Board of Commissioners, right? The Board of Indian Commissioners. I go, yeah. He goes, hey, you've been dead man because I was looking at Morgan and he goes, you should see what the Episcopalians were doing down in Texas. He was there studying the same thing and we start having this conversation. The Board of Indian Commissioners. The FDR, frankly, gets rid of. I go, nobody knows about these guys. That an extra government by a rich guy is an important charge of Indian Affairs. I go, I'm just trying to talk to you guys in a voice. They didn't know this. Well, we had to stop talking to each other, but that's my source story. It's like, it's good. Good. And again, to have a guy who was studying them in where we're hysterical. Well, that's just how the library is the place we do. I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to search archivists, but they can be very arrogant. They start to think they own that stuff. So it's like, I thought, can I get a quick story? When I did Anthony Wayne's book and I was in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, that's more like, they're like, Jared Hoover, you sit down here and they sit up, the librarians are up here, looking down on you. And I did my best to be quiet, to be pain, but one thing that people always worry about, Washington worried that Wayne drank too much. And Wayne always said, I don't drink that much. Okay, so my dear one and all that, I knew exactly what he drank. I found a bartender, he had to pay before he comes out to be a general, I'm going, my God, the man is a drunk. Sometimes you think that those places in the world would be an archive of primary sources and then you run into something like that that just goes everything out of the way. Yeah, I get over, not only my sister, my younger sister is a math thinker. She's a cartographer, she does online. There's some wonderful apps in the book. She does, she's fromers and forward is travel books, but she also, history major, my God, she like helped me, you know, she will help me figure out where exactly was, where were the commands she was fighting in. She did Anthony Wayne's plantation in Georgia, just like, it's stunning. She's the only person who will travel to historic sites, because I embarrassed her, I did so excited. That and whatever, Congress Spaniel, I won every time. My current one, James II, King of England, and I won. So it was very arrogant. We found out we're stewards too, not only are you a poverty-stricken Irish, seems to be crazy. Descend to the stewards and they can have a coordination and then you circuit to the throne. I love democracy. I could go be so easily back up to the throne. All right, well, please join me in thanking Dr. Stockwell and after this time. Thanks for inviting me. Thank you. Thank you.