 Good day everyone and welcome to another event hosted by the National Archives. I'm delighted to be back virtually at the archives having been a very satisfied customer of what the archives does for the oh my gosh for nearly four years I can remember my first research visit to the archives was back in the 1980s and I remember prowling through the bowels of the downtown building and going among all the stacks and requesting the materials to be brought out to me and it was it was such a mystery and was also a this sort of great great puzzle box where I knew that the answers that I was looking for in the project I was searching were in there somewhere if I could simply find them so I have to give so congratulations to the archive for everything they do and for making such a seamless transition to our post or continuing COVID world and this way to to make these lectures possible and available to more people than ever before so I get to talk about my new book and today is the day the book is published it's the official publication day the title of the book is The Last Campaign and the subtitle is Sherman Geronimo and the War for America. I was speaking yesterday to a group of writers who are mostly creative writers writers of novels and screenwriters and I pointed out to them one of the advantages of writing nonfiction especially historical nonfiction is we basically get to have two titles we get to have a title and a subtitle and the title can be as evocative as we want it to be as as punchy as we want it to be but because presumably the readers especially of nonfiction want to know what they're getting into what kind of book they're buying a subtitle helps spell that out so but I'm gonna say a little bit about the the title and the subtitle so the last campaign is well it's a military campaign and you know it's a military campaign once you get to Sherman and Geronimo William Sherman or the Civil War general who was promoted to becoming commander general and chief of the army upon the presidential election of the U.S. he's granted and so William Sherman was the one who directed the last campaign against the Native American peoples of the territory that by this time had become the United States so that's that's the last campaign part and then the subtitle Sherman Geronimo and the war for America I'll start with the war for America so the the premise of the book call it my sort of historical conceit is and I lay this out in the prologue and that is that and you will have your own opinions of how valid this assertion is but it's one of those things that you you put in the prologue and and just to get people thinking so the way I can see that is that the war for America began almost as soon as humans arrived in America and in fact when I first started writing well for when I first conceived the book I was thinking in terms of okay this war for America has been going on for 10,000 years or so and the way I put it is that you know the people who came from Asia from Siberia to America they were not sightseers they were not explorers they were people who probably were driven from their homelands by something or other it could have been it could have been hostile people's living nearby it could have been hunger and the reason I say this is that at least it's my observation of history but people I mean there are exceptions you know they're the James Cook types and that the real explorer types but when people move as people they do it under duress and so the first people to came to America almost certainly came under duress and they were followed by other people and it's you know the way that kind of stuff works there was competition there was competition for the resources in this new land and competition among people's you invariably gives rise eventually most cases to to hostility so one search to violence so again it's a little bit my historical conceit that this war for America began almost as soon as the first people arrived in America and so when I was conceiving book years five years ago perhaps and beginning to work in the research I was the state of historical and anthropological knowledge was that okay the first humans probably arrived between 15,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago and then they made their way down along from Alaska and so on through Canada and cetera further down eventually all the way to South America but just in the last few years they've been these new discoveries of them pretty recently of human footprints in white sands New Mexico that are 22,000 years old so in some ways the prologue was the hardest part of the book to write but as I explained to my students in writing the the last thing you should write in a book is the first words that readers are going to encounter because essentially it's an introduction it's this is what this is about in one form or another and until you've written the book you don't really know what it is that needs to be introduced so anyway that's where my my phrase the war for America in the subtitle comes from and it's it's my assertion and I think this is I put note this kind of thing but but indeed competition among peoples living in America goes back thousands of years and you know different indigenous nations peoples tribes they were fighting for this that and the other like there were always some places that were better blessed in resources than other places and furthermore and we know this on the base of basis of anthropology oral histories and the like that among the native peoples among the Indian tribes they were moving around all the time and so when the Europeans arrived coming from the other direction coming from across the Atlantic rather than across the Pacific they were essentially another tribe another tribe and they were doing the same thing that all the other ones did and they were gonna basically see what they could get what they could grab in the way of resources and I it's worth noting that they came under duress as well it's always the case that people who who are satisfied where they are don't pick up stakes and move so anyway that's the way I introduce and that's why I've got the last campaign and then in the the subtitle the war for America and all this is a bit of a spoiler alert but my contention is maybe you figured it out from the last campaign I say I come like I claim the war for America ends when Geronimo surrenders and more on this in a little bit but so the big story here is this war for America that has been going on for thousands of years but then I'm focusing on the last campaign and the way I bracket this chronologically is between the end of the American Civil War 1865 and Geronimo surrendered in the mid 1880s he actually surrendered two or three times but in 1885 1886 so in that 20 year period this is this is what I'm looking at this is the big picture and then the smaller picture is well I have to I have to figure out people to hang my story on I realized early on when I started writing in fact my very first writing I I discovered that I cannot write history without writing biography or at least writing biographical approaches to people I can't I cannot write history that is devoid of identifiable people and more importantly for me as a writer I can't write history without people who have voices because this is the way I engage with history one of the things that really hooked me booked me on history long before I ever thought about writing history was my grandfather had the complete works of Hubert Howe Bancroft Hubert Bancroft was a famous historian back in the 19th century of California the Bancroft library the University of California Berkeley is named for Hubert Bancroft and he did this grand history of the west of California the Pacific Northwest of the West and it expanded to multiple volumes and it really it doesn't stand the test of time much these days as history no no academic historian for sure would pick up Bancroft and say this is what we ought to look at and not because it takes a particular interpretation in fact probably for its lack of interpretation but the thing that really grabbed me was that Bancroft and his assistants and this was one of the wraps on Bancroft said nobody could write all the stuff himself and he didn't he had these research assistants but what they would do is they would quote long passages from the diaries letters journals logs of various travelers explorers people who were in the West and to me that was that was history that was engaging because it was eyewitness history I was getting it from people who were there who were telling me what they saw what they did not not what they heard from somebody else they know that's that's sort of the hearsay evidence and you know you watch enough TV trial shows and you know hearsay you know sorry you got to throw that out it's the eyewitness history we want so I became engaged in history because I liked hearing the voices I obviously I wasn't hearing the voices I was reading the words but when I read maybe I kind of read sub vocal or something but it was as though I heard the words and it was as though I got to know these people so when I'm writing a work of history I've written several standard biographies which are just about this one person and in that case you find the letters you find the diaries you find the recollections in other people's memoirs and so on because this is you know this is the person I can hear this person's voice in the case of the story that I wanted to tell of what I've already described as the last campaign in this war for America I knew and I know and I will still certainly acknowledge that this is a broad canvas and no individual can do justice for the whole thing so there's no one individual who's everywhere but I wanted to come up with something like this in part I mean in part for my purposes because if I can frame the story with these individuals it just works better for me as the person trying to convey to tell the story but I suspect and I have reason to believe it also works better for readers because I think most readers leave aside professional historians they have a different take on these things but the general reader we read history for the same reason or for one of the same reasons we read novels and go watch movies we want to we want to meet other people we want to see what the world looks like to other people the way I sometimes put it to lecture audiences and to my students is that history operates at two levels so there's the level of big history you know the big history of these are war and peace and presidential elections and and all that big stuff going on and there's in in the kind of history that I've done nothing's bigger than the war for America this 10,000 year conflict to see who is going to control the natural resources of the territory that became the United States of America so that's that's really big history but then there's the second level at which history operates at least the way I can see it and that is little history this is the history of individuals of private lives it's what somebody did on this particular day or that particular day it's it's somebody did something because of something that happened in their private life their personal life that really doesn't show up in big history and to me to me the fascinating aspect of history is where these two intersect I I am there's part of me that's kind of a structuralist I want to know how the big pieces fit together maybe this reflects the fact that there was a time in my life when I was a mathematician and a math teacher and I was trying to explain these kind of structures to people but but then there's also the personalism of the little history so I needed to find characters individuals historical subjects that could help me tell the story in some ways that could carry the story and I lit upon William Sherman the Civil War general and Geronimo the Apache war chief and I used these two people I've cited to use these two people because well they do frame my story pretty well so they both had backstories before this campaign begins but by the time the campaign begins they are the leaders of their people I'll call them their tribes and Sherman German was he had gone to West Point he had actually fought in the Seminole War and the war with Mexico before the Civil War and he was one who who's a fascinating figure in in his own right and I I keep coming back to Sherman because I find him so fascinating he's an example of somebody who didn't do well in civilian life he was some it was maybe too smart to candid outspoken to edgy to do well as a private citizen he was he was smart enough I mean he was he went into banking he did various things but he really he really grew into himself he became the person that we know through war war was something he really did well and throughout history you know this is a particular type of person Ulysses Grant you know his friend and immediate superior was another one who's like this Grant just floundered between the war with Mexico and the Civil War and then he blossomed during that war so Sherman is this is fascinating character and he also he's also useful for me for another couple of reasons one is he brackets when I'm calling the last campaign perfectly well so he is this he's the commanding officer for the the army's western department from the end of the Civil War so when my story starts or when I say the campaign begins this is 1865 and he's the commander so he's in command of the campaign now later he becomes commanding general the entire army which distracts him a little bit he has to deal with reconstruction in the south in fact he spends a lot of time dealing with that but he still is the one who is an overall charge of the campaign in the west and and well two other things actually so one is that he is constantly exasperated with politics he abhors politics he cannot stand politicians he thinks they are conniving and backbiting and all the other things that all the stereotypes that are trotted out against politicians and all he wants is to be left alone to do his business but he understands even as he feels that way he understands that he is a general in the army of the united states which by this time is a democracy and he has to take orders he he doesn't like the orders that he gets from congress the orders that he gets from ulysses grant is present they fall into somewhat different category but interestingly he becomes exasperated with grant because grant to a greater extent the chairman is attuned to the demands of politics but anyway so and the reason this is important for my story is that the politics of the indian wars is crucial to understanding the way they develop and the way they turn out now i'm a firm believer i i'm with claus witz on this one that war is politics by other means this is always the case but but never more than in the indian wars of the west expect this this late stage of the indian wars because well sherman found himself basically bracketed between politically active people in the west these are the settlers these are the miners these are the folks who want for example to invade the black hills even against american law american treaty against the wishes of the president of the united states and then who do an end run around him to the other group that he's bracketed with members of congress so sherman has to deal with this and he he never questions the authority of the people giving him these orders he very often questions the wisdom and prudence of the orders but he's he's in this situation where he is in charge of all this stuff but he's also sort of the good soldier so so what do you do and and then he retires he finally retires from the army just as this campaign is ending so the timing is perfect then geronimo now geronimo oh whoa sorry one more thing about sherman so i said earlier that i need to find people who have voices who can tell me the story and then through me tell my readers the story and sherman is a wonderful writer his civil war memoir is perhaps second only to that of ulysses grant in some ways it's better in that sherman is a little bit more candid in his opinion of various people grant was a bit too generous in that well he was he wrote a when he was on his deathbed he'd been president of the united states and so he's writing sort of presidentially it's very good it's and but but both of them are wonderful works of literature except for the it just in terms of the writing but for the the historian for the person writing their story sherman is better be in sherman is better in some ways because there's less of the barks still on so he he lets you know what he's really thinking i should add of course he says even more in the letters that he writes okay so that's sherman and that's that's why he is one of my characters the reason that geronimo is one of my characters and there are two primary reasons here and one is that he is the last one and he's basically the last one standing after all of the other war chiefs all of the others have surrendered and finally come to the reservation uh geronimo is still out now geronimo came on to the reservations three times and broke out three times but finally finally he comes back and so from the standpoint of me telling the story i can when geronimo surrendered i can say now the war for america is over and i mean that in a specific sense in a general sense and as specific as by might as well say what i mean by the end of the war for america and that is from that period 10 000 years ago or maybe it's 20 000 years ago now that we learn more that history goes further back there had never been a time when authority over the territory the region that's going to become the united states was not contestant contested by somebody or other but once when geronimo finally surrenders that's it there is now one government that is sovereign over the entire region and there is no group or even sizable number of individuals that is contesting that authority and i would point out that that has been true ever since that day in 1886 when geronimo surrendered there have been you know uh riots in places and there have been sometimes they even rise the level of urban insurrections during the 1960s but it was never organized it was never in the service of we want out of here we we are not going to be governed by you and you know i can say that fingers crossed that's going to remain this way for a long time but it's if you think about it in terms of this big history for 10 000 years who controlled north america i'll call it america but i you know what i mean the part of the united it's going to become the united states um it was up for grabs and there were people constantly contesting it very often at the level of military violence and then that ends so 10 000 years history until 1886 and from there we're in a different period and again we hope that the period we stay in that period of peace now i will be the first to acknowledge that this is not a piece of honey and roses entirely this is a military piece and the peace has been imposed on those people who resisted and geronimo being the last of the resistors yes that's exactly true but nonetheless you know wars end when one side wins and the other side loses now it's sometimes thought and it's uh this again is just broad shorthand that um the indians uh were destroyed but in fact they weren't um there were there still are lots of there are a lot more indians alive in the united states today than there were in say 1865 and so the the basic question that indian tribes the the peoples the indigenous peoples had to answer was a question that actually is something that every group that is engaged in some kind of military contest any any group that goes to war is how long do you keep fighting after it becomes clear you're not going to win so at any stage of this if you if it looks like you're going to be on the losing end of a war you can keep resisting or you can say okay we're not going to get what we wanted we stop fighting and this happens to superpowers the united states eventually decided in the korean war that nope we're not going to be able to reclaim north korea and take it away from the communists the united states came to the same conclusion in vietnam and in afghanistan just the lower year ago so this question of how long do you resist then when you when you finally say we're not going to win and now i have to accommodate this new reality so this is the question that all of the indian peoples had to deal with by the way i once again the same question that the confederacy had to deal with and by the way um this uh i i walk William Sherman quickly through the civil war but one of the points that i draw out of this because that's not really my story but i do look upon the civil war as a fundamental part of the education of William Sherman and what Sherman learned from that war is you win the war when the other side finally loses the ability to continue to fight and that's what his march through georgia was all about this is he gives a old stern lecture to the people of atlanta who you know complain that he's being too harsh and he says no the whole point of war is to be harsh so you people referring to the confederates you stop fighting you know i don't want you to think that you can keep fighting forever you know war Sherman was not a fan of war he was famously said war is hell but he said if war comes you fight it and you you make it so bad that the other side will stop fighting anyway so Geronimo he's the last one standing he's the last one to make that decision okay i find we finally have to give in and i'll point out that every other war chief every other leader of a resistance force eventually came to that conclusion if they weren't killed now i want i should mention this it's not parenthetical but it's certainly number of indians who were killed in battle in this long war for america at least in the the 400 year part that started when europeans arrived in america oh no sorry when we're talking about only the united states so not talking about what went on in central and south america the Caribbean but in the united states the number killed in battle was quite modest when you think about all the conflicts all of the the engagements that were involved in fact there were fewer casualties among the native american peoples in battle then there were in the single civil war battle of antietam so they're about maybe 12 to 15 000 indians who died in battle now the as most of the audience will know the big decimator of the indigenous peoples was introduced disease to which the native peoples had no or very little resistance and that's why the numbers plummeted the way they did anyway so geronimo i use geronimo because he is kind of the the other book end to sherman he's the last one still out when he comes in the war ends but the other criterion that i mentioned with respect to sherman and my necessity for writing their story is that he told his story geronimo in his captivity so he surrendered and he was taken to florida where he was prisoned for a while then he was returned to fort still in oklahoma and where he lived the rest of his life and he wrote he dictated um an autobiography where he told his story and the reason that i find this useful if in my terms i find it necessary is because precisely because i have kind of arranged history as i say into these two levels big history and little history and the big history big history is something you can access through you know the the usual newspapers um just sort of history books it's the stuff that's happening in public and that's important that's the way i frame the story that's the structure of the whole thing but it's the little history that sort of drives the story forward and brings the personal side out of it and geronimo did tell his story now various people have pointed out that geronimo had a reason for telling his story where when he did and here i'll point out that one of the things that geronimo did in his captivity um was he converted to christianity and not any old branch of christianity but to the dutch reformed church now anybody reading this in his autobiography say dutch reformed church where did that one come from well the fact is that the president of the united states at the time was of the dutch reformed church it was theater Roosevelt and geronimo had been petitioning for permission to return to arizona to his homeland and so far the war department and uh president had said no and geronimo thinks presumably that okay if i speak as a fellow member of the dutch reformed church i might have a better chance then so he did uh he made his petition again he met and spoke to theater Roosevelt that Roosevelt said no sorry can't do it uh and at which point geronimo seems to have sort of lost his devotion to the dutch reformed church it's you know far bit for me to say i'll devout anybody is in any of their beliefs but he's he was less obviously observant than he'd been before but anyway but anyway so i'm able to tell the story of geronimo because geronimo tells the story and again as with every memoir yeah you read it carefully you don't take it at face value what's the point the author is trying to make is the author trying to make himself look good most authors of memoirs do and uh but still but still this is his story so in fact i begin the book after the prologue with geronimo explaining what it was like to grow up as an apache in arizona and so he tells the story and there's a in all of this i'm trying to figure out and i think readers of history want to know what makes these people tick so what is it that is going through geronimo's head what's going through sherman's head and because they're engaged in this conflict and what motivates them and then i mean why was geronimo the person he was why did he do what he did and geronimo is pretty candid in this autobiography where he explains that the the crucial day in his life the most formative day in his emotional life was when he and his family and other apaches of his band had gone into mexico and the apaches they hardly acknowledged that there was such a thing as an international border between the united states and mexico because long before there was a mexico and long before there was a united states um they had been going back and forth and so they continued to do so and they they often played it to their benefit because they would raid into mexico and the mexican army would come after them and then hustle back across the border into the united states and for a time the border would deter mexican troops from coming chasing into arizona and then they would raid in arizona and then across the border into mexico and the us troops would stay behind but after then doing this for a while the commanders on the american side and mexican side got together and say look you know let's just agree that if you're in hot pursuit you can follow them across the border and so they did and it made life a lot harder for geronimo um but anyway so he tells the story about how when his group i mean they're sort of their bands of apaches within the various bands of apaches and they had gone into mexico and they did their usual raiding thing but then they had negotiated what appeared to be a truce in the fighting so geronimo and the other warriors of the band they left their women and children back in the camp when mexican soldiers fell upon the camp and massacred all of the the non-combatants there all the women and children and geronimo came back and his wife his mother and his children had been brutally murdered and the way he tells the story sort of like you know this switch went off in his head and well in fact he said he for a time he didn't even know what he was thinking he was so stunned by all of this but he himself admitted that he devoted the rest of his life to revenge for the death of his loved ones and so anyway so that that's the story that carries the story forward and i i rely on these two individuals but of course they don't tell the full story so with german and geronimo as the anchors of the story i also broaden out to various other individuals various other engagements and i cover i cover most of the ground of this last phase of the indian wars one thing about geronimo's memoir that is quite unusual is that well it is a memoir told from the indian side of this conflict for fairly obvious reasons most indians didn't write memoirs they didn't write certainly most of them didn't speak english many of them didn't read or write in any language they they could tell their stories i mean occasionally they did tell their stories to other people and there's another very well known memoir not of an apache but of lakota and that is black elk and black elk in fact i've used black elk and telling other aspects of this broader story but but those voices are pretty rare and so it's hard to it's hard to know what the indians were thinking when i'm talking about these wars between the u.s military and the various indian tribes and so you basically take advantage of what you have uh yesterday i was speaking to this group of writers and a lot of them were creative writers and i i point out that we historians when we write as historians we are prisoners of our sources and unlike novelists even historical novelists um you know we don't get to make stuff up historical novelists they can use their imagination to fill in those blanks to get deeper inside the head of the individual to make up characters who personify or collect various aspects of the story well no we don't get to do that when you write history we if if we don't have somebody saying if geronimo doesn't say it we can't put words in his mouth and so i spent a lot of time trying to find the people who would carry my story forward and geronimo and sherman they're there too that's why they're featured in the subtitle of the book but there various others phil sherry was another civil war soldier who becomes a soldier of the west in fact like sherman like grant um he was a soldier before in the west before there was before the civil war and like sherman he remains in the army and he becomes one of the commanders in what i call this last campaign and sherman had a memoir this this campaign this series of small wars so they're sometimes they were called the war there was red clouds war for example in the 1860s with a band of Lakota's led by red cloud and then there were various other wars there was the war against the modak indians and so i you know i looked for people who could tell the story one one of my informants was a cousin of geronimo a a young man at the time his name is jason betzenez who's a cousin of geronimo and he was just a kid at the time and he was his story reveals a really important aspect of his little history illustrates an important aspect of the big history of all of this so again it's not a i'm not giving anything away to say that the indians eventually lose what they lose is they lose much of the land that they had controlled not all of it they wound up on reservation so they had some of the land they didn't lose their identity they still existed as tribes except except where they chose to lose their identity and i'll maybe speak of the aftermath of this a little bit but so another figure in my story is a man named elie parker and elie parker was a senica indian from the east now my story this last campaign takes place entirely in the west so west of the mississippi river but of course the senicas they had been engaged in the war for america at an earlier time and elie parker was the the son of two senica indians and and who assimilated in fact he assimilated so well that he became the right-hand man of ulysses grant during the civil war elie parker was the one who wrote down the terms of the surrender agreement at apomattox courthouse he eventually became head of the bureau of indian affairs so this was one option where the indians they could say all right the old way is gone that's what was lost in the war the traditional way of living of the tribes in the indian peoples they had the option of becoming assimilating just say okay the old ways gone now what's the new way so elie parker is one who succeeds very well another who eventually succeeded very well and who's a a character of modest importance in my story but very important to the history of texas the south plains oglahoma is quana parker who was the last war chief last great war chief of the comanches who when it became apparent that resistance was no longer viable surrenders goes on to the reservation and then which is indian territory which will become oglahoma and he became a leading figure in oglahoma politics and business life he became a very wealthy man in oglahoma and he managed the transition so this was always an option the the reason i'm emphasizing this is that different groups within the indians came to this conclusion at different times and so one of the striking things and i i make a point of bringing this out is that in all the wars between us soldiers and indians it was never just us soldiers against indians it was always us soldiers and indians against indians and in fact in some of the earlier wars it was us soldiers and indians against indians and other european types for example in the french and indian war it was not us soldiers but british and american soldiers and their indian allies against the french and their indian allies and in the american civil war the indian tribes especially of the indian territory they had to make a choice so are you going to join the confederacy or are you going to join the union whose side are you going to be boiled to and this is this is part of the story and a lot of the tribes were split down the middle so the cherrikes they actually john ross who was their principal chief first allied with the confederacy in part because the cherrikes on slaves and they didn't want to have to give up the slaves and then when it became apparent that the confederates were not going to be able to protect them or weren't going to protect their land then he flips sides and joins the union so the thing and this is this part becomes particularly true and obvious in the case of geronimo geronimo was not captured by american troops geronimo was captured by apache indians these were the apache scouts of george crook who is the first u.s army officer who chased geronimo into mexico and then finally nelson miles who after crook was reassigned he had his apache scouts his apache allies and so this question of when do you acknowledge we're not going to win and that resistance is futile when do we make that decision and how is that decision made so i jump from arizona in this part to northern california to what was called the modak war the war between u.s army troops and the modak indians of northern california and southern oregon and i do it for a particularly reason one is it's a it's a good story it's a very gripping story it's one of those sort of valiant moments of resistance in this long story but it all but also because i can tell it from the inside out because again in this case a member of the modak tribe was there and she a woman her she went by the name toby riddle she married this white guy named frank riddle and she sometimes went by wanima which was her modak name but anyway so she had concluded we cannot continue to hang on to our traditional life and so we have to make this accommodation and so she was able to tell her story actually her son jeff riddle is the one who tells the story because he's this kid who's dragged along and there's a critical moment in all of this where the leader of the modaks uh who was called by the white people um captain jack so captain jack is trying to decide whether continue to hold out and he has concluded that we can't do it anymore and the reason we can't do it he was willing to fight to the bitter end but he realized that if he did then the women and children who had followed the band into this campaign they would starve and this was really what broke the back of resistance again and again it wasn't that the the warriors said we're not going to fight anymore it's because they decided if we do our women and kids are going to die or freeze in the snow or something like that and so captain jack is trying to explain to these other members of his basically his group of advisors that okay we have to come to terms and they are engaged in negotiations with the the soldiers that are including a us general named Edward can be and general can be is he has he's basically said you know you you can trust me and you know we'll trust you and so on and so captain jack is going to negotiate the return to reservation and the younger called the real bitter enders among captain jack's entourage they say no no you can't do this and in fact if you agree to this we're going to kill you and so basically put a gun to his head and say if you agree to a surrender you're a dead man and furthermore we want you to show that you are really on our side when you go into the meeting with general can be you're going to murder him you're going to pull out a pistol and you're going to shoot him and so jack didn't want to do it captain jack didn't want to do it but he felt you know his life was on the line and that's exactly what he did all of this all of this is I say sort of in the service of what I've generally concluded that my life's task is in writing history and that is to show that it's always more complicated than you think and this story is as complicated as you know I've I've ever seen and there are all of these loyalties passions pulling this way and that and in order to figure out why something happened you know the way it did when it did well I'll just say you got to read the book and so I'll leave it there and I hope this interested you which had some light on the subject and thanks again to the National Archives for hosting this event and thank you all for tuning in