 Good evening. Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library and to the beginning of the fall season of Friends of the LBJ Library. We have a great slate of programs this fall, beginning with our evening tonight with S.C. Gwynn and Stephen Harrigan, whose excellent new books, Hymn of the Republic, Hymns of the Republic, and Big Wonderful Things, will continue to be sold outside after the program. We also have a couple of great programs in store for you ahead. On November 6th, we will feature an evening with Gloria Steinem, for which we currently have a capacity crowd, but we will be using overflow space across the hall to accommodate additional folks, and you can visit our website for information about that. Additionally, on November 20th, we will feature an evening with former UN Ambassador and National Security Advisor Susan Rice. Invitations for that event will be sent out next week. If you're not a Friends of the LBJ Library member, please join us for what so many people tell me is the best bargain in town. There will be folks outside of the auditorium who will either sell you books or will sell you memberships, and you could talk to them about signing up. Many thanks to our Friends sponsors, St. David Healthcare, and the Moody Foundation. Now it's my pleasure to introduce tonight's special guests. Stephen Harrigan is the author of 10 books, including his latest epic, Big Wonderful Thing, which does nothing less than tell the history of Texas in 830 pages. And each one of them is as compelling as the next. Kirkus Reviews wrote of the book, It's as good a state history as has ever been written and a must read for Texas aficionados. Steve is a fixture of Texas literature. NPR recently said of him, It's hard to think of another writer with as much Lone Star credibility as Stephen Harrigan. He essentially is to Texas literature, what Willie Nelson is to Texas music. Now you know you're doing well in Texas. If somebody compares you favorably to Willie Nelson. Might be the ultimate compliment. S.E. Gwen was a long time writer for Time Magazine and then Texas Monthly and is the author of six books, including Empire of the Summer Moon, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times wrote of that book that it was nothing short of a revelation. It will leave dust and blood on your jeans. His new book, Hymns of the Republic, which chronicles the last year of the American Civil War will be published officially later this month and it's just as revelatory and just as evocative. Lawrence Wright, who is in our audience tonight, wrote that Hymns of the Republic is a brilliantly rendered masterwork of history. Moderating the conversation with these renowned award-winning authors is another renowned award-winning author. Elizabeth Crook is the author of five novels and has won the Spur Award for the Best Novel of the West, the Willa Literary Award, and the Jesse H. Jones Award for Fiction. Her latest book, The Which Way Tree, is currently under option for film by legendary actor Robert Duvall and the screenplay of the book has been written by Elizabeth and Steve Harrigan. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to this stage Steve Harrigan, Sam Gwynne, and Elizabeth Crook. So much admiration for these men as writers and appreciation for them as friends and the same could be said for Mark Up to Grove. So thank you for having me and inviting me, Mark. And I love these new books and I have a lot of questions. So I'm going to start with, you know, just how you came to write these particular books. And for Sam, the subtitle of your book is the story of the final year of the American Civil War. So I would like to know why the final year. And then for Steve, I'm going to ask, why would you take on writing the entire history of Texas? So... Or you could say, who would be crazy? Yeah, who would be right, right, right. Okay. I'll go first. The... I mean, you're always... When you write history, you're always looking to, or I am anyway, to narrow the aperture somehow to particularly looking at something like the Civil War, to sort of narrow the aperture through which you're looking at it into some way that would make sense out of it. And so I had written this biography of Stonewall Jackson called Rebel Yell a couple of years ago. And that book really dealt with the first two years of the Civil War until his death in May of 1863 at the Battle of Chancellorsville. And when I started to... And so I got very deeply into that part of the Civil War. When I was researching the kind of this part of the war, the latter part of the war, thinking about a new book, I couldn't help but notice just how absolutely hard and desperate and brutal and bitter the war had become in its final year compared to the first two years that I had written about. I mean, some people have written about the first year of the war anyway as a band box war. It's everybody just marched off to war gloriously with bands playing in their town squares and wasn't it going to be great? And of course they all ended up dead and dismembered and disillusioned eventually, but it took a while for that to happen. But the last year of the war with the anti-Civilian warfare of Sheridan and Sherman and the guerrilla wars and just everything, the advent of 180,000 black soldiers which tore the Confederacy into knots and also caused great, caused great violence. And so my feeling was that I was just so struck by the difference by how it had changed and I felt in some way that the legacy left by the war was that legacy. It was the really hard, bitter, terrible legacy of the war. And I thought that was worth writing about. And also as I said, it was just a way I thought, okay, it's with Stonewall Jackson, you narrow the aperture by saying, I'm going to write about one guy, right? There you go, follow him around. And your narrative structural problems are solved. And with a year, it becomes a little more difficult to do that but because of the sequencing, but basically it's the year. So we're going to start with Grant arriving in Washington to take over the Union armies and kind of ending around or in the vicinity of Appomattox. That's a great idea for a book. I'm trying to write it. And it's by the way, it's a, you would agree, it's a brilliant book. I mean, we both wrote it and it's really, it was a great idea and a great execution. Since for myself, I never, it never occurred to me to write the entire history of Texas. I, Dave Hamrick is the director of the University of Texas Press came to me and asked if I would be interested as a reasonably sane person. I said, no, you know, that's a lot of history. And so he, but he came back to me for some reason and kept, kept sort of, you know, querying me if I had any, any interest somewhere in my mind. And the more I thought about the more I thought, well, why not even though I'm not really an historian? I mean, we're not really historians, are we? We're journalists, we're journalists. And so, but it did feel like it was something I could do and that I wanted to do partly because I had, I've lived in Texas for most of my life since I was five years old and I've lived through a lot of Texas history. I mean, I'd seen, you know, I'd met LBJ. He signed an autograph for me when I was 12 years old with the first felt tip pen I had ever seen which led me to have a lifelong fascination with office supplies. And so I'd seen things, you know, I'd seen Janice Joplin sing. I saw her sing, she was at a concert once, right like two months before she died and she was singing the song called Me and Bobby McGee by this guy named Chris Christofferson. And I kept thinking about just those, those are not events in Texas history really but there were moments when I felt connected with Texas history. And I'd written a lot about Texas history for Texas Monthly. I'd written two historical novels set in Texas. So I thought, so I finally said to Dave, yes, I will do that and then I had to do it. Well, and you mentioned Sam about the fact that you're both journalists and so you were bringing that to these books. So how did that influence the way you approached these books, the fact that you're both journalists? Well, okay, I guess I'll take away at that first. Swing away. We are journalists and so we come out of a different world. So let's just say what would be the other world that we might come out of? It would probably be somewhere in the academic world. I mean, I would be a professor of something at Oklahoma State or Texas A&M or something and I would have been there for maybe by this point 35 years. And if I was lucky enough, I might be a professor and I would have been in this field for a long time. As opposed to journalists who, well for one thing, we kind of have the attention span of a nat, you know, that it's like you do the story and then it's at the bottom of someone's bird cage on Monday night and you know, you kind of move on. But it's a much faster kind of world, I guess. It is a very heavily kind of fact oriented world because as we both work for Texas Monthly and you're going to be fact check on every quote you use and everything you use. So it's very, you are trained to be very accurate. And I think as much as anything else, my work at Time in Texas Monthly taught me the value of clear writing because both of those places were, I mean, Time has allegedly 25 million readers when I worked for it and Texas Monthly had allegedly two and a half or three million readers when I worked for it, but they were general interest people. They were not specific interests, you know, so whatever you were writing about, whether it was George W. Bush or it was a, you know, a teacher's strike in Peoria or whatever it may have been, you had to be really clear. I mean, really clear and your lead had to be interesting and pointed when pointing right at the heart of what we call the nut graph, the thesis paragraph, right, and then you had to march very clearly with your transitions through the story so that all those issues of structure, I guess, and so that I think when you read Steve, when we write history anyway, you are reading trained journalists who know how to write for a general audience and I think when we're at our best, it's very clear and it's very well laid out and it is not too overly dense, I guess. So there's a big upside, I guess, to me, to my journalistic training, I guess. You know, it's interesting because I was telling Steve that one of the things I loved about your book is why you, you know, the way you make things crystal clear. You lay them out in such a way and I was just looking at my notes because I had made a note of one specific place. You know, they were all the way through the book and, you know, like when you talk about the last paragraph that Lincoln added to the Emancipation Proclamation and just before it went into effect and you say that former slaves, you know, could then, it said that former slaves could then join the armed service of the United States and carry weapons and you say thus with a stroke of the pen, Lincoln had it transformed the war from a morally unanchored attempt to reunite a divided nation into a war for the freedom of the nation's four million slaves, a war of black liberation. So time and again, you just boil it down, put it in front of us and that's, I mean, I loved that. Thank you. Yes, yes, yes. Thank you. That is an example of what, I think that's a successful example. I like that one too. I mean, all of mine aren't that good, but I mean, it's a successful example of that. But what, I mean, to my way of thinking, we're certainly in the subject of the Civil War, we are swimming in a sea of data. It is this room full of books and just stuff and I mean, and online now too. I mean, the Sherman archive at Library of Congress is three football fields long. Well, now it's all online, every bit of it's online. So you can get everything all the time. So the problem with, say, the Civil War, but other things too, is not that we don't have enough data, we're swimming in it, there's too much of it. And so the goal is to somehow cut through, I mean, try to cut through it, reduce it down to something that is interesting and fun to read, a story. And then to push the next little bit toward meaning. So what you just read was me giving the meaning, or me trying to. So to say not just because I think there's, and certainly in the Civil War, there's an obsession with the trees at the expense of the forest. You see all these books, it's tree, tree, tree, tree, and no one ever backs up and looks at what all those trees constitute. And this is a frustrating thing for me as a reader about the Civil War. So simplicity, clarity of narrative, and pushing forward into meaning. And it's something that, I don't know, I think it's a service you can provide readers for sure. Yeah, and that was another thing I had noticed and actually made a note of. I'm not finding it in my pages of questions, but it had to do with the fact that you not only give us the events, but you tell us what they mean. And that is so important to readers because of what you say. It's so much information that you can't really pull it down to meeting with that and being put in front of you sometimes. And so as a reader, we appreciate that. Thank you. And Steve, you were gonna talk about the fact of being a journalist and how that would... Yeah, I mean, yeah. Well, Sam's talked a little bit about that and I echo everything he says. When I finally said yes to Dave Hamrick about doing this book, I wrote him a little memo and I said, I don't wanna just research this book, I wanna report it because that's the way I understand how to write. And so it was extremely important to me and to, like if I'm writing about, say, the pictographs along the Rio Grande, the three or 4,000 years old, I had to see that, all these amazing murals that were painted by people whose names we don't know and whose cosmology we don't really know, although there are people who speculate about it. And I would get in my car, I was telling somebody in an interview, my most important tool in writing this book was my car because I would just think of a place, or I think of something that I needed to write about and my first instinct, and I imagine this is true with you too, just go there. You could go, like one day I drove 400 miles over by Nacodotius and back to see the Caddo Mounds which looked like a hazard in a golf course. It's just little, little green hill, but used to be this giant ceremonial temple of this Caddo city. And you stand there and you see the traces of it, you see the vestiges of it. There's something about seeing what's left of something that really sort of stirs my soul. You know, I mean, I just, I can't, I see that and I think about the passage of time and my mind, my imagination sort of tries to fill in the gaps and to see this city and to see these people there. And that was, that's a kind of a reporter's instinct, I think. I think there's possible to write a work of history without, you know, without, I mean, going in an archive every day but not going out to see the actual things. When you end the book with seeing the cross and the tree. Yeah. And it's the same thing. I mean, that sense of the passage of time and where it is right now. Yeah. And when you see, and those are the things that give you, when you see something, it's not just you're seeing it, you're seeing the story and you're seeing, oh, I could write about this or I could pivot to this from this chapter and it makes it real to me and that's a way I hope that it makes it real to the reader. And one of the amazing things to me is that it seems to me that a lot of times when there's a big history written, there are these parts that just feel very obligatory or dutiful where you can tell the author is just trying to cover this ground because he feels he's got to cover this ground to get from point A to point B. But both of you seem to arrive at point A and point B without ever going through any boring parts. And so. Steve, there is the master of the transition. Yeah. The master. The living master. It really is. We're frogging over the boring point. Yeah. So how did you pick the events? And well, and I also want to ask, how did you pick the people? Because both of you have focused the book, you know, not just on what happened, but who made it happen. And for instance, Sam, with your book, every chapter begins with a picture, usually of a general, a person, and a description, very visual. And then, you know, sort of the background of how that person got to where they are, who they are. And so these are very sort of character-driven books in a way. Well, you know, it's, you're always looking, you're always looking for character. Because that's the only way I can understand history is through characters. And so for instance, when I'm writing, I know it's time to write about the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, you know, in the 1920s. And I'm reading about it. And I, you know, I need to find somebody who embodies that. And there was this guy named Hiram Wesley Evans, who called himself the most average man in America. And he was, you know, the grand wizard from the Ku Klux Klan. And, you know, that's worth examining. You know, it's worth thinking about who this guy was, what was motivating him. He was, he was, as I say in the book, he was derided for being a small-town dentist. And I asked myself the first question I asked myself, well, I was a small-time dentist. What's wrong with being a small-time dentist? I mean, that's a noble profession. But you sort of think about this guy who was so toxic and embodied, you know, a horrible chapter in Texas history. And yet, in his own mind, he was just this friendly neighborhood dentist. And when I, when I encounter somebody like that, I encounter that person, it just makes it alive for me. It makes me feel confident that I can write about that, that person, and through that person, I can understand the history I'm talking about. I totally agree. I mean, it's all character-driven. And so in my book, we have some sort of usual suspects. There's Lincoln as a usual suspect. But there are people who, as we march through the book, we're going to march from, you know, there's going to be Lincoln, of course, and Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, and there's going to be others, too. There's going to be Sam and P. Chase, Lincoln's treacherous Treasury Secretary who tried to unseat him. There's going to be Clara Barton, this absolutely astounding woman who reinvented battlefield medicine and became one of the war's greatest heroes, I think. And it was, for me, it was a way to, she could carry this narrative, right, to use the Lawrence Wright construction. She could carry the narrative of this great medical disaster of the war. And so you could somehow build it in and out around Clara Barton as this nurse. But one of the, an example, I guess, of just, and Steve has got so many of these in his book, but I, so there was this black war correspondent for the Philadelphia Weekly named Thomas Morris Chester, T.M. Chester. And T.M. Chester was this really interesting character and he was before the war, he was all about sending black people back to Africa because that was people, many people thought that was a good idea. He's black. Anyway, he gives up on that idea. He ends up becoming a correspondent for this Philadelphia newspaper and he's the first big-time black war correspondent. So right at the end of the war, this is such a great story, right at the end of the war, there's this, the Union troops break through on the east side of Richmond. Richmond is fallen, Richmond is burning. It's the end of the Civil War and the end of, well, that part of the war anyway. And so Chester, so what happens is is these black soldiers actually make it first to this intersection about three miles in front of the city and everybody sort of knows what this means or what it's gonna mean to be the first infantry into Richmond. I mean, you can just rehearse the stories right now. You're gonna tell your great-grandchildren about that. You're gonna be the first one in. They get there first and they have to pause for a moment while Richmond surrenders but some white units come up now and the white units come up and now we have a decision to make and the decision to make is who's gonna go first into Richmond, the white soldiers or the black soldiers? Well, guess who wins that argument? The white soldiers win that argument. So it's decided that the white soldiers are gonna go in first and they know exactly what this means, the first infantry into Richmond, the fallen capital of the Confederacy doesn't get any bigger. So they take off, there's one road, one main road into downtown Richmond we're about three miles out, right? So one main road and they take off gloriously with the regimental banners waving and singing a song in their hearts and everything and they go down. Well, the black soldiers, these are like three regiments from the all-black 25th Corps in which there were all sorts of crazy people. There were tenant farmers from Maryland and newly escaped slaves and teachers from Massachusetts and four medals of honor winners. And so they take off down these cow paths and over this, you know, jumping over fences and they're going the back way and they're really motivated and they get there 15 minutes ahead of the white soldier. And so they're sitting there like playing Yankee Doodle and the white soldiers get there. This does not go over well. In fact, there's a campaign that starts right that moment to rewrite history right there and get it over with except for TM Chester. The black correspondent is there. He's positioned himself there to see it. So he's seen it, which is great. So it goes down so we know for all history that the first soldiers into Richmond were the black ones, many of whom were newly freed slaves. This is a radical idea. The story ends with Chester. So Chester is going to, now he's going to file that story for the Philadelphia Weekly. And so he's sitting, when he files that story, he's sitting in the chair of the Confederate Speaker of the House. He's in the Confederate House of Representatives and he's in the Speaker's chair. And he's filing. He's filing. And a Confederate officer now who has surrendered and been paroled, walks by or somehow into the room, sees it, flies into a rage, demands that he stand down and get out of that chair. Chester calmly continues writing his dispatch. The Confederate officer rushes him. Chester stands very calmly up. Decks him with a roundhouse right. And at which point now the guy's really upset. He goes over to a, he goes over to a white, to a white union officer, presumably white gentlemen to white gentlemen. He says, may I have your sword, sir? So I may, you know, thrash, whatever. And the guy says, not giving you my sword, but tell you what, we'll clear out the floor of the Confederate House. So y'all can have a fist fight. And the guy stands down. The Confederate doesn't want anything to do with this guy. It was just leveled in. And when asked about it later, Chester said, he said, well, he said, I thought I would exercise, when he asked why he did it, he said, well, I thought I would exercise my rights as a belligerent. Anyway, that's okay. That's okay. I just told you a story. That's character. We just got into the fall of Richmond that way with a character, right? And that's right. That's character. That's right. So how did you pick the characters that you chose to write about? Because some of them are not people that had been in the history books previously. Some of them are not people. So, I mean... Well, for instance... Oh, Old Rip. Old Rip. Old Rip. He was a very important Texan in his way. You know, you can't write. I mean, the reason I wrote... The way I picked the people to write about or the things to write about was because they were fun to write about. And, you know, I was... I felt dutiful about, you know, writing about the people I needed to write about, but I felt really excited about the semi-unknown things. Old Rip, just in case somebody's wondering, was a horny toad. Or as they say in some parts of the state, horned toad, horned frog, horned lizard. But in Abilene, where I grew up, partly it was a horny toad. And in the Eastland County Courthouse was being torn down in 1896. And there was just... People were speculating, is it really true that a horny toad can live without food and water? And this guy went home while they were building the new courthouse and his son was playing with this pet horny toad. And he said, can I borrow that? So he took this horny toad and put it in the cornerstone of the new courthouse they were building. It was sealed up. This is 1896. In 1928, they tore down that courthouse and the crowd gathered because they remembered that they had put this horny toad in the cornerstone. So the courthouse was demolished, crowd gathered. They were unsealing the hollow cornerstone. A guy reached in and pulled out what looked like a dry leaf and it started to twitch. And historians disagree over whether somebody... That was really the original horny toad or somebody just did it with a sleight of hand. But anyway, as the Methodist minister there said, nothing is impossible with God. So the horny toad survived 28 years. Without food and water, supposedly. They called him Old Rip because Rip Van Winkle. He became this instant national celebrity. There was a lawsuit over custody of Old Rip. He was sent to Washington, D.C. to meet President Coolidge. And finally, the guy, the now-grown man who has a kid, his father had taken the horny toad away from him. One custody of Old Rip. But his daughter left him out on the porch one night when a norther came. And they believe, I don't know if they did an autopsy or not, but he died of pneumonia, Old Rip. But the story did not end there because a casket maker in Abilene built a special miniature casket. And Old Rip was embalmed. And if you go to the Eastland County Courthouse today, which I highly recommend this trip. I mean, just, if you do nothing else this weekend, drive to Eastland and go to the Eastland County Courthouse. And there's a little viewing window and you can see Old Rip lying in state in his special coffin. Well, not to diminish the importance of Old Rip or to disparage Old Rip. I'd like to move on to your Lassice S. Grant. And so here's how you start your description of Grant, which I thought was great. Grant is the most famous success story of the war. The man who failed and failed and failed again then suddenly succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations. What is missing in the conventional view is the man's extraordinary resilience through the bad times, his stubborn ability to weather harrowing and relentless adversity. What stands out in his life are less the defeats than his ability to endure them, less his perpetually declining prospects, than his refusal to allow his losses to become shattering moral defeats. That actually could apply to Old Rip too now that I think about it. But let's apply it to Grant and hear about Grant. Yeah. Okay, so, I'm sorry, was there a question? I got signed track by Old Rip. What was the question? Just talk about Grant. Oh, Grant. Yeah, and where he, I mean, how he ended up in the situation he ended up in, in the position that he ended up in. Right, so as I say, I mean, people focus on Grant's drinking problems and Grant's this and that, and I focus on the fact that he somehow overcame this stuff. And there's this incredible moment in the war. It's one of the most important moments in the war. So after the Battle of the Wilderness, which has been an absolute disaster for the Union, I mean disaster, numbers. So Chancellorsville was the worst Union defeat in the Civil War. Well, if you look straight at the numbers of Wilderness, it was as bad or worse than Chancellorsville. Wilderness is a battle in the final year of the war. It's the first time Lee and it's the great solo combat as people thought it, Lee against Grant. You know, we're finally the two Titans of the war are, you know, are going to see each other or fight each other. And so after this, really, what should have been a demoralizing defeat for Grant? It would have been for anybody except for this man who would somehow weather all of this crap in his life and going bankrupt and bankrupt and bankrupt again and selling firewood when he was 40, you know, on the corners of St. Louis. So what happened was is the lesson of the Wilderness was not so much that the Union had just been thrashed and had suffered enormously more casualties than the Confederacy had. The lesson that Grant took from this was entirely different. And so what always happened before with Union defeats of that scale is the Union Army did what they called a skedaddle. They just, they retreated. They got out. We saw this, you know, Second Manassas and First Manassas and Chancellorsville and wherever you might want to see it. This is what happened. And so at this moment where of great despondency in the Union forces, the Union soldiers were sitting there at this camp at night at the end of the day with the moans still coming up from the battlefield. And they saw this group of riders riding toward them and they recognized that one of the riders was this kind of rumpled little guy with a beard and a little hat who was a great rider but didn't look like much. Grant. And they realized that, and he went by them and everybody said, wait a second. That's the road to Richmond. Petersburg. That's, we're going that way. And the effect on the soldiers, I mean across, it just went like out like a wave through 80,000, 100,000 soldiers. It was just electric. And it was this idea. Grant didn't see that as a defeat. Grant saw that as the first battle in a battle in a war that he was going to win and he happened to be right. But he was, he did this, I'll tell you one other great story about Grant that I love is, so Grant had washed out of the army for drinking which was very embarrassing. And the thing about Grant was, I mean, the army that Grant was in was a culture of drinking. All these guys did was drink. I mean, you couldn't tell the difference between the alcoholics and the guys who just drank all the time. I mean, it was very difficult to figure out who those guys were, right? So here we have little US Grant, you know, 58135 who couldn't hold his liquor. So Grant would have a couple drinks and he would just be a classic kind of sloppy, you know, who was that guy that Red Skeleton used to play, whatever. And a sloppy drunk slurring his speech and it was sort of unfortunate. He did have a little drinking problem too, but he had, he had been, he had washed out for that and he had had these business ideas. He was one, he had terrible ideas. He chose his partners just horribly. They were all half of them were crooks. And the third thing, he was credulous to the point of just ridiculousness. I mean, he was just, he was, he was a mark is what he was. And so he had ideas. So at some point he said, you know, they have the Northwest or San Francisco needs ice. There's ice in the Northwest. This is brilliant. We'll put it on a boat and bring it down. Well, there's, there's, the boat gets be calmed or something and then the ice melts. He had another one where he's going to get chickens and put them on a boat and put them somewhere else, but the chickens all died. And then he was going to sell firewood and that all died. And then everything, I mean, he, you know, and you see this guy who just keeps failing and there he is months before the Civil War starts at his father's leather shop in Galena, Illinois. He's now the junior clerk to his two older brothers. He swore he would never work for his father. So he gets this crummy clerical job for his father. And there's this incredible photograph of him with leaning on a broom in the leather shop in Galena, Illinois just a few months before the war started. He's just this, he's a failed, he's a failed clerk is what he is. But anyway, the story that I'll leave you with and I'll shut up about Grant, but the, the, so he's in, he's, he's done so badly. And so he's in St. Louis because his wife's family has stuff going on in St. Louis and he's selling firewood on the corner. This is a West Point graduate. He West Point big deal school. Grant had done pretty well in the Mexican war. He wasn't, he wasn't, I mean, he was somebody by education anyway. West Point being the, you know, the finest engineering school. And so there he is on the corner selling firewood and his, some of his fellow officers walk by and they go, geez, Grant, gosh, what happened to you, pal? I mean, it was, it was so sad to see their fellow guy brought so low and, and one of them decided to invite him to play a game of brag, which was a officer's game in a hotel. And so he accepted, in spite of the shame he felt. I guess he went over and he sat down and he played a game of brag with him and one of the guys, one of the four was a guy named James Longstreet who at the wilderness was Lee's top general at the wilderness who actually was a cousin of Grant was in Grant's wedding. They knew each other and they played the game of brag and then afterward Grant was alone with Longstreet and he pressed a $5 gold piece into his hand and Longstreet says, what are you doing here? And Grant says, this is a debt that I've owed you for 15 years and Longstreet said you can't do this and Grant said I cannot live with myself if I don't pay you this back. But it was, it was a great story in a lot of ways and it's Grant, it's honest just to an absolute fault, the most integrity. And a man who was trying to hold it together, he was a man with no money who was paying off a debt was what he was and there was an interesting moment and after the Lee had surrendered to Grant and everybody thought that might be good to get some of the officers together who had known each other at West Point kind of a sad poignant kind of moment and Longstreet rides up and he and Grant agreed each other and Grant goes up to Longstreet and says, you know Pete, they called him Pete, you know Pete let's get together again someday and play a game of brag. And it was just this wonderful moment. I admire Grant's so much and I was so happy to see when the historians finally started to rehabilitate him because he had been trashed for a very long time. Anyway, that was a really long-winded answer but that's... And one of the things that... I could go on for Grant. I was thinking about, you know, all the moments that would be interesting to really have been privy to, you know, if you could be out of danger and you could be there and there's so many, of course, in Texas history. One of the ones in your book that I would have loved to have been privy to is when the night before Lincoln was assassinated, Grant and Mary Todd Lincoln went for a ride in the carriage because Lincoln had a headache and couldn't go. Is this correct? He claimed that. He claimed he had a headache, right. So Grant went and then Grant was getting more cheering from the crowds than she felt Lincoln had been getting and so she threatened to get out of the carriage and he talked her into staying in the carriage. I would just love to have heard the conversation, you know, how he... It was such a great moment. Got her to stay. It has everything to do with what happened when Lincoln was assassinated too because... So Grant... So let's see, Mary Todd Lincoln, let's see how we would describe her. Nine miles of hard road, maybe. I don't know, what would come to mind there? She was no bargain. She was tough. She was just hard to deal with. I mean, just impossible, pretty much. And so Grant had been... So Lincoln had, whether he actually had a headache or he was just trying to get away from Mary for the night, I don't know. But anyway, Grant gets nominated to go out in the carriage. And yes, she gets madly jealous because she's getting the role, the cheers that belong to her husband. And she's getting out of the car and she's gonna leave the carriage because she can't stand this anymore and Grant is talking about Mary. One would love to have heard it. Yes, what did he say? He talks her down off whatever emotional ledge she was on and they end up going back and it was... So a few nights later, the Lincolns invite the Grants to go to Ford's Theater where they're gonna see a little play. And Mary had done this to Julia Grant before earlier, in a worse way, actually. And so Julia is saying, I'm not gonna be there with that woman. And Grant says, Grant who had just been subject to it says, well, okay, what can we come up with that will get us out of this? And so they came up with whether they're gonna visit their kids up north somewhere and that was that they were... And then they did. They actually, they went north because they had to make good on the Audi excuse. And it's funny because Grant always believed... Grant was not there when Lincoln got shot. And Grant always believed for the rest of his life that he could have, or he might have been able to protect Lincoln if he had been there, but that has everything to do with that... That moment. That moment, yeah. So there's the meaning. Yeah, there's the meaning. So if you had... I mean, I know there must be so many moments that you wish you could have seen. And I won't say just name the one, but off the top of your head, what is a moment in Texas history that you wrote about that you wish you could have been privy to? Well, there are all sorts of obvious ones, like Travis either drawing or not drawing the line in the sand at the Alamo. I mean, I wrote a whole book about that and I was... If I could only be there. You know, it's like historical novels. It's just like I could... Sometimes you dream yourself there when you're writing these things. But I don't know. I think a couple of things. I would like to... I would very much like to meet, have met Isabel Talone, who was one of the colonists with LaSalle, the French explorer, who tried to create a French colony in what was then Spanish, Texas. And it was a total disaster. And long story short, he was murdered by his own men. His colony, what was left of it, was overrun by Carranco Indians and everybody was killed. The Spanish were desperate to find this colony, this fort called Fort St. Louis and they finally found the remains of it. And I went to the site of Fort St. Louis and I had spent a summer many years ago underneath Madagorda Bay, searching for one of LaSalle's sunken ships, which is now in the Bullock Museum. They found it finally. But there was a woman named Isabel Talone who was a mother of five and the wife of one of the colonists. And her husband died, wandered off one day, never came back. Two of her children were killed in the final assault by the Carrancos. Two were taken captive. One was taken with LaSalle up to the Catoes. But when the Spanish expedition found the remains of the fort, they found three skeletons, two of whom were male presumably and one had a tattered blue dress and that was probably Isabel Talone. And the guy who, one of the guys who was with the expedition, the De Leon expedition, was named Juan Bautista Chapa and he was in his 60s and he had literary aspirations and he looked at this skeleton with the blue dress or the ripped dress and wrote what, as far as I can tell, is the first poem ever written in Texas and it's about Isabel Talone. And I came close to meeting her because I was in the Museum of the Coastal Bend in Victoria and they were showing me some of the artifacts of the Fort St. Louis and I said, do you have anything here that belongs to Isabel Talone? And they said, well, come in the back and I went in the back of the museum and they took down a box, an archival box that looked like a hat box and they opened it up and I didn't know what I was looking at and it was like a rock and the guy said, that's the skull of Isabel Talone and if you look closely, there's a dent from a Caranquilla War Club and those were the kind of moments that, you know, you just, you know, you write these books and you just, you know, you just feel that there's not that much distance between you and what you're writing about between you and history and every once in a while you just, you come very, very close to it and that happened again and again with this book. You know, when I would look at pictographs from 4,000 years ago and think about how, you know, the Egyptians were building tombs at the same time. These people, these unknown people to us were painting these murals and you see that, you know, this unbelievable sweep of Texas history and all the known and unknown people who made it happen. It was just really always exciting and always inspiring, you know, to kind of explore it and see it for real. So I'm gonna open up for questions in just a second but I was gonna ask a more personal question of both of you if that's okay. One of the things, Steve, to start with you is just how you did this. I mean, this is a lot of information that you went through and I know, you know, you say seven years. Six years. Six years. I don't know, I can't remember. Yeah, it was a lot of years but at the same time you were writing, you know, journalism pieces, you were writing a screenplay, you were writing, you know, the column for Texas Monthly on movies, you were writing a novel. There were all these other things that you were doing at the same time and I just think that it's extraordinary just the variety and, you know, sure volume of really quality writing that you do. So how did you take all this history and synthesize it while you were so distra- you must have been, you know, sort of distracted by all these, plus all the babysitting. Yeah, there's just a lot of things you were doing at the same time. You know, the honest answer is I just don't remember. I, you know, apparently I went to my office in the backyard every day and wrote this book but, you know, it's just like you're sitting day after day and you're writing sentence after sentence and everything you write sort of, yeah, I don't know what you're like, you guys are like, but I write a sentence and then I forget it. Anyways, it's like I sort of consume my memory as I'm writing the book and so I don't have to go read the book again to find out what I wrote. But it's like it's, you know, it's a job and you go, you know, like if you said, you know, you were a shoe salesman and somebody asked you, you've been selling shoes for six years and somebody said, how did you do that? You just, you know, you don't remember every pair of shoes you sold but you don't remember every sentence you wrote but that was your job. That was your daily routine and so it just sort of absorbs your life, you know, folds into your life and it's nothing special, you know. There's also Steve though but there's a difference between, like with you, between writing and researching because researching, you're out there at the Alibaba space, Flint quarries and you're down with, you know, LaSalle's like, you know what I mean? There's a difference, but you know what I mean? Yeah, those are the parts I remember. That's what I'm saying. Thank you for reminding me. But writing, going in is... Yeah, writing is, it consumes itself. I mean, it's not evanescent because it's on a page but in your mind it's done as soon as it's written, I think. I mean, you have to edit it and everything but you cut out all the boring parts. I like that. And then for Sam, you had mentioned this story to me a couple of weekends ago about how Katie, Marata, your wife, jump-started your journalism career so I wondered if you would share that. Okay, this is maybe a little bit unusual so I said, Katie, Marata, my wife is an artist. She's in the audience tonight. Okay, so we're in Los Angeles. I work for a bank. We're young. I don't know how old we are, 28 or 29 years old and I'm working for a bank and I don't really want to be working for a bank and we're not really sure what we're doing and Katie's trying to do some art and cartooning and we're living in a very kind of a modest little place in East Hollywood, California and it occurs to Katie and I do not know why I cannot remember. You'll have to ask Katie why it would occur to her to do this but we're living in East Hollywood. A lot of the game shows are filmed just right down the street, literally. A lot of the big whatever, the game shows you would recognize are there. So Katie figures out that she can apply for this. She applies for and becomes a contestant on tic-tac-do with Wink Martindale. Okay, what does this have to do with my writing career? Okay, wait. Okay, so Katie, so I go, and what happens with these game shows is you go in and you bring a change of clothes in case you win. Tic-tac-do, by the way, wasn't like, it was like Jeopardy. It was a general knowledge show. You know, as Katie figured out later, it was like a ninth grade level of history. You know, like if you read ninth grade level textbooks you could answer the questions. But tic-tac-do was a general knowledge show and you could win money. And if you won like Jeopardy, you continued on as the winner. So I went to the bank in the morning one day and I came back at the end of the day and I saw Katie was there and I said, well, how'd you do? And she said, well, she said I've won two cars and a trip to Haiti and a sailboat. And she said, and I'm still the winner. So she had taken changes of clothes and she had changed clothes five or six times and won five or six games during that day. And then, so the next day, I go to the bank again and I come home. I go, how are you doing? She says, well, I lost. She says, but we got like another sailboat and a whirl of surrogate trips in the morning and a giant pile of cash and stuff. And so we won all this money. And Katie was one of the, one of the, I think, all-time winners at that point. Two days of work. And so what that, so then came the phone call to her parents, which just was to, I just, and my parents too, which is like, well, we're gonna tell them is, okay, yes, we moved to Hollywood and Katie won a game show and Sam is gonna leave the bank in order to be a novelist. Phone call went over really well. But which is exactly what happened. So we did, so we took that money and we invested it in ourselves. Meaning for two years, I tried to write screenplays and journalism and short stories and one of those stuck to the wall. That was the journalism. So I became a journalist. Katie was trying to do serious art and cartooning and screenplays too and other things and became successful at cartoons. So she became a cartoonist and that was where that money went in addition to, we had a lot of fun that year also. You know, we can't let this topic go without mentioning there's another game show contestant on this stage. Oh, yeah. Seriously? Yeah. I was on to tell the truth. Oh my God. Yeah. I was the real Elizabeth Crook because if anybody really would have known who the real Elizabeth Crook was, but it was, so, yeah, this was, the last time I told the story was actually on this stage because Mark Upton Grove asked me to tell the story. So I had published my first novel and Mrs. Onassis, Jacqueline Onassis was my editor at Double Day and so I was invited to be on to tell the truth and I said, you know, I said no because I said it's all going to be about her and I would feel uncomfortable speaking about her and so I'm not going to do that and but, you know, her assistant had heard that I had been invited to do this and so he talked to her and she called and said, you know, you need to do this and it's not a problem and so I checked with them. I said, is this all going to be about Mrs. Onassis? And they said, no, there may be one line about her in the affidavit that you're supposed to, you know, that will be read about you and that's it. I thought, why else am I on to invite to be, you know, like a real person on a game show because I've written one novel that sold marginally well and so, but I went and they had a practice run and so when the curtain came up and the imposters, you know, pretended to be me or whatever and they read this affidavit, it said all this stuff about how I had been rejected with all, I mean, it was, it was all true. I'd gotten a lot of rejections on the novel and it went up through all these things, you know, that just made me sound like a total loser and then it said that, you know, and then she, you know, her book was accepted by and of course the one line about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is the punchline, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. So I panicked and I said, I need to use the pay phone. So I went down the hall, I used the pay phone, I called her and said, this is all about you and I'm embarrassed and I don't want to do this but they've slotted me into it. What do I do? And she said very sweetly, Elizabeth, nobody we know watches to tell the truth. She said, she said, go back out there. Anyway, are there questions from the audience about either of these books? So I can't see if there are anybody, if there are questions, if there's anybody and if there's not, I have about five more pages worth or maybe you all have questions to each other about that. I have, I do have a question about how as kids, I mean, were you, was there something in your education or in your upbringing or just in your general makeup that led you to become right? I mean, I've seen the pictures of you in the kinskin cap. I kind of don't think that's what led you to be. There's no picture of me in a kinskin cap. They would look like a toupee for one foot. Well, no, when you were very small. No, when I was very small, yeah. Yeah, that's what I mean. When you were very small. So was there something that you think ended up or do you think it was just some kind of innate? I think it was, I don't know about you, but it was certainly in our youth either. I think it was just innate. I mean, like you say, I mean, I just, my whole life felt like, when I look back on it felt like I was just living in my head and I used to play with like little toy soldiers and stuff and there were novels. I would have these elaborate stories that nobody but me had any idea about. And when I learned, when I finally started reading when I was on my own, when I was probably fifth grade, sixth grade, I realized what reading was and I began to realize there were writers who wrote these books. That very early on became what I wanted to do even though I had no I'd never met a writer and wouldn't meet a writer for many years. But that was, I knew that about myself was that was what I wanted to be. Well, I mean, I think I started out by making the classic mistake that every would-be writer makes which is that you think of yourself as a very sensitive and intelligent reader and therefore you think that you can write. Which is not true, of course. But it, so for me, I mean, I read a, I was forced to read a collection of short stories by this writer named F. Scott Fitzgerald when I was in high school. And I didn't want, I had, it was always the summer reading list, which invariably provoked the fight with the parents sometime around August 14th when you had not read any of the summer reading, right? He's going, well, you know, there's perfectly good Ring Lardner here. Why haven't you read it? You know, and anyway, one of the things on the list was a collection of short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, someone that I had never heard of before. And one of the stories was called Diamond as Big as the Writs. And I read that story. And it was just, I was just, this is what I wanted to do. And at any rate, I think I sort of, I thought that and then I remember thinking it in college some more. But it took me so many years, one, to figure out that I wasn't a fiction writer. And I mean, I'm not, I can write fiction, but it's like, it's like, if you know how to play the trumpet and you're pretty good at it in the clarinet and you're not good at it, then you should play the trumpet. That's sort of my version of fiction and nonfiction. So it was like, Harrigan can do both. But I can't play either clarinet or the trumpet. But I think, but it was, it really, and I felt, I continuously felt that I could do that, not that I could be right like F. Scott Fitzgerald, but like somehow that I could do that. And the funny thing was, and maybe this is, I mean, I don't know why, but it, I should have been discouraged. I should have just quit. Because there was no evidence, including going to graduate school in fiction, where I was the dumb guy in the class. There was a lot of, you know, points where I should have been discouraged and stopped and done something that I was better at, you know. But I eventually, I think, became good at it. And it was, for me, it was discovering journalism. The journalism was, I mean, the question as a writer, right, that you always, I mean, a lot of writers, I think, are like me, it's like, you desperately want to write and you really want to be a writer and you want to write, want to write, but you can't, what are you going to write about? Like what, fishing with your dad? I mean, what are you going to write about? What is the, you know, when you ask, when I asked my college students, when I taught at UT, you know, it was always like, you know, fishing with my grand, or whatever it was. You know, it was, it was the cliche kind of emotional moment that you had in the family, but I mean, I, it took me a long time to be put in a position where I knew what I was going to write about. In this case, it was going to becoming a journalist when somebody assigned you and told you, okay, you're going to Jackson, Mississippi to cover the governor scandal. What am I going to write about? Well, that's what I'm going to write about. And that solved the problem for me. And eventually, I figured out what I actually wanted to write about, so. Okay. And we have a question here. Yes. What do you have on your schedule for your next books? Go ahead. I'm about halfway through a new novel that, it's kind of hard to explain. It's about an escaped leopard in the Oklahoma City Zoo in 1952, which was actually a real event. I'm moving it up to 1952. It happened in 1950, a leopard escaped from the zoo and the whole, all of Oklahoma City went insane. And, you know, all at once, everybody was in the streets with hunting dogs and rifles and the whole, there was a, there was an instant singing group that popped up called the Leopard Heirs that had leopard skin shirts. And the reason I'm writing this, I think, is because I was born in Oklahoma City and we lived there until I was five. And one of my earliest memories is going to the zoo and seeing this stuffed leopard. And what happened to the poor leopard was after three days, he circled back to the zoo because he was hungry and they'd left out some horse meat that had been tranquilized, doctored with tranquilizer, and they overdosed him and he died and they stuffed him. And, but this, I can't tell you why I'm writing this. But I can tell you that I am writing it and I'm halfway through. And I think it's kind of interesting. It's good. Yeah, what I've seen is really good. Okay, one more question. What Sam has to. I guess I have to answer. Okay, go for it. Okay, so I don't, I haven't necessarily settled on it yet, but the, so my Stonewall Jackson book was about the first two years of the war. This book was about the last year of the war and I've become very invested emotionally and intellectually in the war. And, you know, I, it occurred to me that, you know, we're talking about clarity and everybody drowning in a sea of data and everything. Is that, you know, people toss around the world reconstruction or whatever redemption or whatever which was supposed to be the end of reconstruction. And I don't think anyone has any idea what happened after the Civil War really because reconstruction is actually about six different things, all of many of which are contradictory. They're not what you think they are. And, and, and, you know, you can, I think Eric Foner is a historian. I am, I admire immensely. He wrote this massive book about reconstruction which is the definitive work on the subject. But it's very dense and I don't think, I don't think people know really what happened. Not just in the decade after the war, but really the next few decades because it really defined what America was going to be in a lot of ways. Certainly in the South. And so I thought maybe that I would write a book entitled How the South Won the Civil War. So we'll see if, because they took a lot, they lost the fighting part, that's for sure. But there was a lot of, there was the rest that was, that was taken back in effect, including slavery, a de facto slavery. So it was an interesting time period. And there's some great characters running around in it. The greatest of which is Ida B. Wells, the crusading black anti-lynching journalist. Truly one of the great historical characters of the 19th century. So I'm working on that. I haven't completely decided on it yet, but I think that's where I might go. So it'll be first two years of the war, last year of the war, and then what the heck happened after it ended. Okay, one more question, yes. Yes, I had heard a while back that Empire of the August Moon was supposed to have been made into a movie, but obviously it wasn't. Are any of your books going to make it to the silver screen? Yeah, so Empire has kind of a tortured history. I was sitting, I happened to be working at the Dallas Morning News at this particular moment in time, and my book had just come out, and my phone rang, and there was this guy on the other end of the line who said he was Larry McMurtry, and he was moving to acquire the book, and they were going to make a movie out of it. I thought somebody was joking at first, and then I realized it was Larry McMurtry, and it was like, yes, yes, Mr. McMurtry, I'm a big admirer of your books, too. And so we, so thus starts the deal with Warner Brothers, and this is now, we're in year nine of it now, I guess, or eight of it now, and Steve's been a successful screenwriter in Hollywood, and done all sorts of things. I haven't, but this McMurtry and his partner, Diana Sanat, wrote a screenplay for it. Warner Brothers didn't like it for some reason, then kind of the deal lapsed, and now we have a new screenplay that was last year, apparently, everybody's favorite Warner Brothers, and it's in fact a brilliant screenplay. It essentially is about two men, Mackenzie and Quana, and it works brilliantly in two hours, which I never thought was possible, and they got to the point. They said, all systems are go. Let's budget this thing, let's roll, and they budgeted the thing, and it came in at $170 million. At which point, people were asking now, if it didn't have Batman or Green Lantern in it, someone, how is it ever going to make money if it costs that much money? So it almost was a victim of its success. So we're still, the thing about Hollywood, as you all know, is that they pay option money every year, so it's like the mailbox money keeps coming in, but they don't do it. I have a deal to make an 18-part series with MGM History Channel on Rebel Yell. Again, they keep re-upping, so that's good, but I don't have anything to do it. So interestingly, and those are my two film projects, so to speak, which are in development, as I think. So if I were to run my life the way Hollywood runs, okay, and let's say I wanted to talk to Steve or Elizabeth about some project, I would call them up and I'd say, can we have a meeting like in August of next year? And that's how they work. And you go, it's either hair on fire, hair on fire. The hair on fire moment earlier last year was, Ryan Gosling has attached himself to the project. Oh my God, was the hair on fire? Everybody's hair was on fire. And then it goes completely cold. And then like, I don't know, nothing happens for a year. So anyway, I have no idea. But those are, both of those, I think Empire of the Summer Moon has a chance of getting made. The old dead Confederate white guy MGM History Channel series. Well see, I'm curious that they persist on being interested in even though old dead Confederate white generals are not necessarily the most hip current thing at the moment. And I was going to ask what both of you thought about removal of statues and all that. We don't have time to go into that. We've already gone over time. Thank you all for coming. And thank y'all for making it.