 So now it's my privilege to introduce Patricia Limerick, and let me just say that I have the luckiest life in the world I could travel and meet all sorts of people. But one of the handful of most interesting people that I have ever met is Cedric right next to me, Patricia Limerick. She is, if you haven't had a chance to hear her, you are about to. And her book, The Legacy of Conquest, was a revolutionary book. I mean, literally, you can examine American Western studies before and after Patricia Limerick's book. It caused a stir. It caused great comfort. She had changed the nature of the way we see the American West. It's still talked about, even though it was published a couple of decades ago now. It's an amazing piece of work, and I know we're going to be Russian today, but if you have a chance, I know that Maddie would love to sign it for you. She is that most unusual of being a MacArthur fellow. She's on the genius trial, on many other things. Genius in quotation marks. Patricia Limerick is a faculty director and chair of the Board of the Conquestigious Center of the American West of the University of Colorado, where she is also a professor of history. She's written a number of books. She's one of the most widely-sawn African speakers in the United States. A wrote about scholar. That's exactly why I want you to come here. And I'll tell you why. What was the writer? He was the writingest president. Jimmy Carter and he lived long enough to make a distance. What was the writer of books? But so far, what was the writingest of all of our books? Find numbers of books. Not by sales. No, by quality. You can then use it. But the reason I wanted to come and talk to you is that I wanted someone who was like Uncle West, and I wanted someone to talk about what goes on considered the Magnum Opus. There's four volumes, winning of the West. He bought his reputation as the scholar, intellectual author and historian for the rest on that massive study of the early West, the Ohio West. And most of us have never read this book. But you all, I think, are aware of the notorious passing. So let me just get it on the table. We'll probably have another nomination. But this is, I think, the passage that's reproduced in almost every biographer, theater grosser of the books of this book. Who says in volume three, the most ultimately righteous of all war is a war with savages. So it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Thor and Zulu, Kasek and Tartar, New Zealander, and Muriel. In each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of many people. The consequences of struggles for territory between civilized nations, each small by comparison. Looked at from the standpoint of the ages, it was a full moment, whether the rain is part of Germany or France, whether the northern Adriatic cities pay homage to the Austrian Kaiser or the Italian king. But it is of incredible importance. The America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners. And become the heritage of the dominant, rural races. That's a tough one. But, Dr. Eli West set the table for this on Thursday night. Now I want the great Patricia Lindbergh to give us insight. Actually, that is thematically where we are headed. So, though with the pinch that I don't know that I would ever expect to know this, I do want to apologize for my late arrival at this conference. I had the great privilege of having the extraordinary writer John McPhee come to the University of Colorado at Boulder and come Thursday night. So, I stayed there with him and got in yesterday. So, I do apologize for getting you later on because I've been here. I've had the enviable experience of the last three or four weeks of having the only mind in the United States that had two principal occupants, Theodore Roosevelt and John McPhee. And that, I'd recommend it to you as an experience. John McPhee is an astonishing writer. He's written about many, many parts of the planet. But much of this writing has been about the American West. When I asked John McPhee, I guess this is my point, there may be more in common with Theodore Roosevelt and John McPhee than anyone might think. On Thursday night I asked John McPhee at the audience if he thought there was any special about writing about the American West. And now, it seems great to me, he sounded very gross and oaky. He said, if I had to choose one place, or one region, and I don't want to make that choice, he said, this part of the region is Roosevelt's interest, but he said, if I had to choose one region to write about, to experience the focus, he said, I would choose the American West. Well, that sounds kind of like Mr. Roosevelt saying, Mr. Roosevelt saying if I had to choose one place to hold in my memory, it would be the West. So that is the last to say about John McPhee today, but I hope on the Oakhorn tour anyone else wants to talk about, you might as well do that. It is humbling to have such a collection of Theodore Roosevelt experts in the room. I go, I had a moment of empathy with Perfektor and gave me on the back of that horse. That's how I felt for the last few weeks of just going into a room with so many people who are seeking this. I'm intimidated, but I'm still grateful to Clay because this assignment was extremely interesting to talk about. He gave me a chance to repeat myself for bad behavior. An opportunity that we don't get every day. The bad behavior are the bad behaviors. So we have enough of that so we couldn't be reading every day, but that doesn't work out in the future. So the bad behavior that I refer to is widespread in the field of professional history. We are preoccupied as professional historians in keeping up with the field. So we do our best to read the most recent works and interpretations by historians, which means that we rarely have ever go back to read the works of hope and disturbance of our predecessors. Isn't that true? Really, if you're at the back there, that's a failure. Failure is not a failure, because yet, I resigned and sat down on this one. Now that, of course, we're all thinking that's pretty ironic. People who study the past who also dismiss or ignore our predecessors that is ironic and I think we just have to say that's ironic. It's not great because there are reasons to read our professional ancestors and I before you today is that a demonstration of that, of that truth. First, we avoid re-invading the field. We steer clear of claiming discoveries or insights that are not actually particularly original. I would say just one is a minor I think is always a very big point and others. My book, The Legacy of Conquest of 1987 made a very big deal about using the word conquest openly, honestly. I did not think the word frontier was this technical word because of course we knew that South Africa, that South Africa, Australia, Syria, Spain and Concord, Latin America, we knew those were conquest and then we chose an exceptionalist and appeared to say that while those conquest occurred, we had an expanding frontier of opportunity and democracy and so on, which seemed not the group of self-knowledge. So here I am in 1987 a big deal, we must say the word conquest. Well, yes, frankly, honestly, and forthrightly in all of the winning of the West. The inner growth of growth of wealth is my predecessor and that and it is just a mark of embarrassment I will carry that I have been running The Legacy of Conquest and never opened winning of the West so I have no idea because in fact it is good steps and a little bit late to apologize to you, I realize, but I would accept the apology but I think that apology it also allows us to re-examine and monitor our own expectations and assumptions and even stereotypes about the past and continuing some of that a lot of that today and then it is what I truly did not see coming it gives the opportunity for unexpected inspiration and a repossessing of neglected and forgotten legacies and a parentless it's an even a forging alliance that I had no clue that I had so I'm speaking today of two pieces of historical work by Theodore Roosevelt the one that I was assigned putting it in the West published from 1889 1896 four volumes one reason I think I've never tried to beat it was that I was under the impression that it was 10 volumes and maybe in retirement there would be an opportunity for that and I have no idea that he actually had planned it much more since I guess I assume it was Robert Peter Roosevelt tended to complete what he had tended to do and so it's a no wonder I thought it was ten volumes it was twenty of his general level of energy so that's given the amount of time we have in a day I was happy to start with only four volumes and then I'm also speaking because I'm the vice president of the American Historical Association at this moment and Mr. Roosevelt was president of the American Historical Association which is so the head spins and thinking about that I is there anyone who can name a recent president of the American Historical Association here but that's because I'm in those circles so we have a little drop in visibility and so I assume that whatever this is when I'm still back in the assumption of preconception it's very time I thought well I will look to see what Mr. Roosevelt in double the census there sent to the American Historical Association in his presidential address in 1912 and I came to look at that I approached that with many distorted expectations of what I would see so his presidential address from 1912 which I will point out next year is the centennial of that and if the field of history with your help can take advantage of that because I hope we'll see in a moment that could be so excellent for our sometimes benign profession so plenty of if we don't do that whatever it is through to your friendship so again this is well this is a remarkable address and it's on the American Historical Association website and I urge everybody to go look at very really just to drop my speech and read his now what made this so interesting he makes an extraordinary forceful case for writing history in a way that people will want to read he is there's an element of this that is timeless and sad and it's timelessness that so much of what he says about the way that professional academic university-based historians write history so he's very kind more kind than I would be in saying people who write so that in a matter that no one on the planet would want to read they do good work they do research that brings to our attention it brings it to our backshelves in the library but somebody who goes to see that could really talk from that and make something of it so he is generous pros have also served some use on the planet but he is really you know I'm doing it I was going to say don't do this kind I'm using the present tense Theodore Roosevelt because I cannot I have to just make a conscious effort to put was in front of me to keep for saying it so Theodore Roosevelt makes in the present tense because in the words say that it is still very present an extraordinary case for better writing of professional historians in 1993 on the front page of the New York Times Sunday overview I had an article called dancing with professors the trouble with academic pros and that article has been pre-credited everywhere when it first came out I heard touching stories of graduate students making photo copies and creeping in to department offices and denying them the security of that around it still is used I think University of Toronto History Department requires every graduate student to read that that essay so read the essay if you can I'm better to do it with your time but notice and lament and join me and sign over the fact that there is no statement in that essay about how much I was joining forces with Theodore Roosevelt there's not a cross-century alliance we had because of course I've never read his presentation because I was keeping up with the newest literature so that is where I want to just quickly start with some of some of the AHA or the Circle Association address and why that seems so great I sometimes tell the story the anecdote of the little boy who was taken to the Supreme Court to see the Supreme Court session and he sat there for a spell that justices were listening to a oral argument and then a fly came into the chamber and circled around the room and landed on the head of one of the Supreme Court justices and the justice looked at his hand and rushed to fly away the little boy was very excited grabbed his father's arms and said look look Dan did you see that one of them is alive and so we have the justice of Conrad see you and I know how totally alive she is that is a story that I think everyone has been able to cast response to because we have all had that experience we feel very much engaged with people to cast if you're at the wrong many cocktail parties and people say oh what do you do and you say oh I'm in the room I'm in the room in the room and you say oh I'm in the room and I say oh I didn't really like history so much in school oh I see a friend over there so then terrible terrible but understandable or I'm thinking by which people in the present people in the past were never fully alive they were in some state of half life or making just very aware that they're going to be dead so So give that sense of how much the people of the past were as alive as we are today. That's not an easy thing with people who have not had that vision. Everyone in the group here has had that vision, so there's nothing to do but feel sad for our brothers and sisters on the planet who haven't had it. The other thing to do though is to quote from the interview about St. James Presidential Invest. Here's a few of those. I'm going to keep you going a little bit. Just to make this point, the hard-working dredges to just do research without writing in a manner that people can respond to. Those people, Roosevelt said, feel that complete truthfulness must never be sacrificed to color in this narrow writing. They also feel that complete truthfulness is incompatible with color. In this, they are wrong. Then he's speaking of people writing about ordinary people. Really, social history is what he was speaking in favor of here that not just historians are writing about famous people. Anyway, in saying that, he says, it is important that people writing about ordinary people remember to write in this more engaging way. For writings are useless unless they are read, and they cannot be read unless they are readable. Now, do you think this is universally respected and admired in the academic profession? And then, and something I'm very much appreciated when he recaptures his interests in naturalist writing, he is saying that, in fact, historians think that they are following in the path of scientists by moving away from literature and not thinking of quality of writing. Because history, science, and literature have all become specialized, the theory now is that science is definitely severed from literature and that history must follow suit. Not only do I refuse to accept this as true for history, but I do not even accept it as true for science, which is really the case for scientists. What? To join us. So we'll have some scientists at our commemoration in 2012 on the speech. So we'll have one. OK. So now, I will shift. I want to come back at the end to some more of those very political remarks from this 1912 address. So any of the West, when I realized it was not 10 volumes in the library. Read it. I discovered what anyone who wanted to open it over the years could have seen, that there is great color, great readability in very high levels of abundance there. My finding, which I am not going to explain to you originally in the cover of the making, is that Theodore Roosevelt was a gift writer. I said to say, I wasted the phrase I got to use on another writer. I did a review for another writer a possible over a few years ago and used this phrase. I should never have used it. I should have saved it for this occasion. And I should now pretend that I intended to use it for Theodore Roosevelt, because it fits him so better than the person I used it on. I quote myself with a more accurate phrasing than I had 20 years ago. Words, sentences, and paragraphs. Trust is Theodore Roosevelt to treat them right. There, plenty of West is full of brisk and lively stories. The people of the past are indeed brought back to life. There's no question about their full vitality. In 1912, as President Brackley's Board of Associations, Roosevelt could make his case for historians lending their vitality to restore life to those people of the past. He could make that case and he could make it credibly because he had performed that Brackley's act in many of the West many times. When your quest is not past its shelf life, it is not past its inspiration. It's exploration, it's not past its expiration date. It's still capable of not having us to inspire that to be inspiring. So that is the big framework. And now I want to shift to the top of the discomfort that Clay brought up. There are remarkable statements, generalized statements in this book about the imperialism, and we support imperialism, but the reasons why the savages of North America deserve to be beaten. And no one can be, I'm not going to have to paraphrase because he does make these big statements about how this is a story of the destined expansion of the English race merged into the American race of white folks and that they very rightly displaced Indians. So I expected to find that, I'm going to tell you that quotation, and I did find large generalized statements saying that. So that wasn't a surprise. And yet I will now begin to add what I did not expect and some of which actually did not mean for a little bit. First of all, there is a basic recognition that you cannot understand or write the history of Western expansion without a lot of attention to Indian people. And those are made very precise statements about how the Indians did not rule the outcome, but they could determine the pacing, the direction, the places involved in Western expansion. So there's a very forceful set of statements about how Indian people are indeed absolutely necessary. Now I say that just because there are other people who've written, like Ray Allen Millington's Western expansion, the chapter on Indians confined to one chapter, it was called that part of the chapter was the Indian barrier to white expansion. That was it for Indians, that was their only role, it was kind of a police kick line or something set up and then compromised on that. There's so much more attention on Theodore Roosevelt's part to the significant role of Indian people than you can see in those later dismissals of Indians. Plus I was surprised to see quite a bit of curiosity and interest in their customs. Rather than trying to race them on to the battlefield and get rid of them, Roosevelt would linger over the various green corn customs that the Greek people pursued and talked about the different housing that the different tribes of the Southeast had. And so it was really, you can see the extraordinary curiosity, just the anthropologists wanting to break free and just own up those wars. These are interesting people, I just want to write. But you seem to see that at moments that he's really just so interested in people just how they've led them on different that way. So that was those two points, that he recognized the necessity of having them in a central place in the history of Western expansion and he was interested in their culture, those are two things. What I never saw coming, I didn't see those two things coming, what I didn't see coming. Well again my expectation was that he would see Western expansion simply as the path of progress and he would write in a spirit of full-hearted unambivalent triumphalism over the progress of the English and American race. His stance, I thought would be we won and the difference to the tribes and injuries to Indian people would be part of that. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. That's probably, I've made some dumb predictions in the past, but that goes to the top of my achievements in ill-based prediction. Putting in the West, in quite a number of passages makes a full admission of the brutality and cruelty of white Americans. There is no pulling of his punches when he gets those passages over a few seconds. He struggled, theore Roosevelt in these four volumes, you can see him struggling to find a stance and position that would allow him to face up to the violence of Western expansion as committed book by whites and Indians and not simply Indians against whites and whites against Indians, but also Indians against Indians and whites against, it's what these whites can test with each other sometimes actually getting very violent with each other. He made many earnest efforts in those four volumes to deal with this discomfort over the history of white conduct towards Indian people. It was, use that metaphor, I guess, a burn under the saddle. By one ends with an appendix in which she expresses the hope that someone will write a full history of Indian white relations and he asks for it to be broader and more balanced than anything you've seen to that point. It's a very striking thing. Now, okay, so I've described these remarks generally, but let me give you some examples. Here he's just writing of the Greek, the people that went white contest with the Greeks. The record of our dealings with the Greeks must in many places be unpleasant reading to us for it shows great wrongdoing on our part. As for the whites themselves, they too have many and grievous sins against their red neighbors for which to answer. This is not about the Greeks in particular, but about the broader picture. Whites cannot be severely blamed for trespass on the problems called the Indian's land, or let sentimentalists say what they will, the man who puts the soil to use must have right dispossessed the man who does not, or the world comes to a standstill. But then here's what goes next. But for many of their other deeds, whites might set their seeds, for many of their other deeds, there could be no pardon. You never told me that. It was really, well there's many of these castes. I'll just read one more. The men of wildless spiritual spirit who were founded every community into flocked places where the reign of order is lax, were able to follow the bent of their inclinations unchecked. They utterly despised the red man. They called it no crime but ever to cheat him and trade to rob him of his peltries or horses to murder him if the fit sees them. Primimals who generally preyed on their neighbors found it easier and perhaps hardly as dangerous to pursue their policy at the expense of the Redskins for later when they were discovered, when it was discovered the day had been wrong, when Indians discovered that they had been wrong, they were as apt to vent their wrath on some outsiders on the original offenders. If they injured a wife of the criminals, the white criminals injured a wife, all the whites might make common cause against them, but if these criminals injured a red man, though there were sure to be plenty of whites who disapproved of it, they were at the very good age whose disapproval took an active shape. So there is a very, very unclenching direct ways of talking about the sorrows, that just the actual question of cruelty and brutality on the part of white people and the tolerance of that by white folks who do not take a stand against it. So, I'll just, in the return for a second here to the American Historical Association speech where he says very explicitly, years after I went into the West, those who tell the Americans of the future what the Americans of today and yesterday have done will, per force, tell much that is unpleasant. Now, to get back to the wrestling and the struggling of the undertook. This unmistakably made him uncomfortable. I know, and I'm making generalizations, and again, my community was so many people in the room who could say, that's not what he was doing, and Wallace Bailey says, we're heroes. The person in the tears of the audience. Although I might have to speak to the actors, I'm not going to put my hands up. Okay, here are some of the ways in which he justified the record, just by the acts of white cruelty and brutality. To some degree, he made some very solid observations that we are now, I think, working our way through as historians of the West. He spoke of the, and wrote of the shifting tribal identities and loyalties, so it was difficult to see who wasn't combatant, who wasn't to see which tribe had declared war against the whites, and which tribe had simply been caught in the crossfire, that there were factions within tribes that took different positions on wars, young men would not necessarily submit to the orders of their chiefs. So he explains white brutality in part by saying it was too confusing for the white settlers. They could not, if they killed non-combatants, they didn't know, in some cases who wasn't, and they couldn't stand around waiting to say, hi, are you on our side or not? Because that would have been an inventing error. And the same he says with uncertain tribal values, you could not tell if anyone crossed into, any people's territory because they certainly don't, no, they're marked to tell you that. Then he enters some territory that is promising for historical study, historical research that goes, I think, out of crap and shows how intense and uncomfortable this subject was for him. In some passages, he uses a word that I don't think our people, in terms of what we're using now, he talks about the blame, uses the word blame for episodes of extreme violence. He doesn't say responsibility, origins, causes. He says, yes, how will we ascertain the blame? We don't have to think, try to avoid that. And his answer on the blame question is to say that Indian people had a higher level of cruelty and that exercise of their cruelty, but I'll get back to this in a moment, but that provoked wives to revenge. So he raises a most interesting and valuable idea of the degree to which white Indian conflict was powered by one group injuring the other and then a cycle of vengeance and retaliation starting from that. But this, well, I'll show you in a moment here how that goes a little bit. The trance. Or I'd like that one other way, but a very important form of justification that is for a school, for the Burr and the Saddle thing. This is the best example. He comes back to this over and over and over again, asserting that Indian people had no real ownership of the land. And this, I think you have to see this passage, you don't have to see this. I'd like you to see this passage as a person really attempting to convince himself, addressing his readers, but in many ways addressing himself. The Indians, he said, had no ownership of the land in the way of which we understood the terms. The land no more belonged to the Indians that belonged to Boone and the white hunters who first visited it. How does he get there? It cannot be too often insisted that the Indians did not own the land, but at least that their ownership was merely such as that it was claimed by our own white hunters. Well, this is getting a little curious. I think these people have been here for centuries and the white hunters have just arrived. Things of the same, if the Indians really owned Kentucky in 1775, then in 1776 it was the property of Boone and his associates and to dispossess one party was this great wrong as to dispossess the other. To recognize the Indian ownership of the limitless prairies and forests of this continent, that is to consider the dozens, wild and savages who hunted at long intervals over a territory of a thousand square miles to consider them as owning the outright, necessarily implies a similar recognition of the claims of every white hunter, swatter, horse feed, or watering cattleman. The premise, then, is that Indians were mobile, hunters are mobile, hence equal and substantial claims to the land. Now this is curious because in other passages, when someone who's been in their culture in their life goes about the script about Indians as farmers. Not, not wandering hunters. So if there's a person in the room who's not prior to that kind of conversation with yourself or you've taken a public stand and then you're starting to think, I don't know if that makes sense. And you're trying to explain to yourself how you've reached a stand that's actually making you win. So if you are a person in this room who's never had that experience, I don't want to get you to go like that. I don't want to get you to go like that. I don't want to get you to organize your thoughts. I guess I'd rather I just want to give one more example of his argument about Indians as intensively cruel. Such a war is the war between Indians and whites is inevitably, and I'm gonna ask you to notice that word, inevitably bloody and cruel, but the inhuman love of cruelty for cruelty's sake marks the red Indian above all other savages. And that made the war more terrible. So trying to find out, making this case for the insubstantiality of Indian title, claiming for cruelty, but that then he feels, I think I can understand his impulse here, is that he thought he had better make the case for the extraordinary cruelty of Indians. And so this is the only passage I've found in winning of the West where the rhetoric just goes, man, where the purifier of language starts up here, because it's not here. There's vivid widely language. There is not luring, open-rock language, I think really, except in this, maybe one or two other passages. So here is, it was about making the case for Indian cruelty and justifying the desire for revenge on the part of whites. The excesses so often committed by the whites, when after many checks and failures, they at last grasp victory are cause for shame and regret. Yet it is only fair to keep in mind the terrible provocations they endured. Mercy, pity, thank the community, to the fond could not be expected when the frontiersmen gathered together to war against an Indian tribe. Almost every man of such a band had bitter personal wrongs to evict. Okay, prepared for rhetoric. I'm playing this next for takeoff here. I'm sorry, rhetoric. The average, the regular settler, his friends had been treacherously slain while on messages of peace. His house had been burned, his cattle driven off, but all he had in the world destroyed before he knew that war existed in him and he felt quite guiltless of all offense. His sweetheart, her wife, had been carried off, ravaged and was at the moment the slave and the concubine of some dirty and brutal Indian warrior. His son, the state of his house, had been burned to the stake with charmants to mortal dimension. His sister, when ransomed and returned to him, had told him of the weary journey through the woods when she carried around in her net as horrible a necklace, as a horrible necklace, the bloody scouts of her husband and children. Seren into his eyeballs, into his very brain before ever with him, waiting or sleeping, the sight of the skin, mutilated, hideous body of the baby who had just grown old enough to recognize him and to probe and laugh when taken in his arms. Such incidents as these were not exceptional. That passage, it's one of those things where I think if you just took that out of context, you could get back to saying, well, that was a pretty brutal man, but if you put it in the context, I'm urging you to think of it, this is a man who's really wrestling with a very difficult challenge to the human soul. How to put the fact that we live in a state of well-being in this nation and behind us is this biggie of possible breastfeeding or these reciprocal acts of cruelty and brutality. I think that gives us a better feeling for what we're being. And then I just played out a few passages where, well, I'm doing more on the revision, but I think I made that clear. It's a passage here where he actually says, here's a passage where I think he shows the balance that he was aiming for and not always achieving in this. Okay, every quiet, peaceful settler had either been previously wrong or had been an eyewitness to wrongs done to his friends. Well, we've got that already. But he says, and while these were viewed in his mind, these were vivid in his mind, the corresponding wrongs done to the Indians were never brought home to the settler at all. If his son was scouted or his cattle driven off, he could not be expected to remember that perhaps the Indians who did the deed had themselves been cheated by a white traitor or he'd lost a relative in the hands of some quarter of a king or a felt agreed because a hundred miles off, a settler had built a cabin on lands they didn't consider their own. So there he is, I think that his best moment was saying they could not keep that in their minds, both sides of this, we will keep that in our minds. We will hold that together. What was going on with him at this issue? Why did he not just go into full speed and head triumph with other people at the time of the event? Why would he not have joined them? The answer I think in his American Historical Association speech in 1912, why did he not just cheer for the victory? Why did he go to all the trouble for wrestle this issue? In the speech in 1912 he writes, the greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness on the same level. So that's an unusual thing to see. Somebody, let me know, to the challenge of his own words there. Other people have written high ground things like that but they're not trying to practice it themselves. So, the strangest effect I think of his discomfort with the violence of the quest for expansion, by the way, audiences are just in a state of joy. You see people doing what I'm doing now, which is that I'm moving pages over that I'm not going to use. That's a sad question. They are in a state of joy. But the strangest aspect of this I think is that he uses the word inevitable when he's really in a pinch trying to figure out what happened, why did the Americans behave so clearly? People use the word inevitable. People write in the story using the adjective inevitable, the adverb inevitable and the noun inevitability. Is there any word that is less likely to run out? Was there any action he took as president where he, and he actually did not think as president because he said the forces against me are inevitable. So, I think that is the measure of a person trying everything you can to deal with that discomfort because inevitable was not his way of thinking. And every time you see that on a page and putting it in the West, you think, who's here now? Can I see some ideas? What's going on here? How did Theodore Roosevelt use that word? Because Theodore Roosevelt was really working hard to deal with the conundrum and trying to use what he could. So, there are generalizations in this book that are not comfortable, that have been trying to put different English phrases in English phrases and so on. But the really good news of reading the book with the poor boys is that the big ideas are not particularly fundamental. The stories trump the thesis. Roosevelt was such a narrator, so gifted as a storyteller that he could not remember to get his damn stories in reply to this big thesis. It's a matter of great honor that he let the complicated, troubled, messed up, dishonorably mixed people of the past. He let them back in for the stories and the stories drive the book and it makes you think. Well, I guess we're all told to do that. I don't know what they're talking to Harvard in his time and I'm sure somebody must have said he must have a general idea of his idea. He did that and then he paid almost no attention to it once he got it right. So, that is an excellent response on this part. So, I will now speak of one particular example, very tempting to tell more. Okay, so we've got big statements there over and over again. Inevitable triumph of the English and American race over the continent. And we have a story and I'm just gonna tell so many ones that this is also important because it gives an example of the effectiveness of the story playing in the writing. This is a description. The whole long passage is remarkable. The Battle of the Wabash, 1791, St. Clairs, St. Clairs defeat by the Northwest Indians and that's the general context and I will just read the passage and you just try to put this story in some relationship to the inevitable triumph of the English race. And again, it is remarkable that he had not been in a military situation himself and he wrote this with other people kind of. I suppose these books are remarkable. So, the subsection is called panic ceases the army. This is a very heated contest between Indians who are much more familiar with the terrain than white soldiers and their officers are. As the officers fell, the soldiers who at first had stood bravely enough, gradually grew disheartened. No words can paint the hopelessness and horror of such a struggle as that in which they were engaged. They were handed in by poets who showed no mercy and whose blows they could in no way return. If they charged, they could not overtake the Indians and the instant their charge stopped, the Indians came back. If they stood, they were shot down by an unseen enemy and there was no stronghold, no refuge to which to flee. For two hours or so, the troops kept up the slow, lessening resistance, but by degree their hearts failed. The women had been brought toward the middle of the lines where the baggage and tents were and an ever-growing population of unwounded men joined them. In vain, the officers tried by encouragement, by jeers, by blows to drive the men back to the fight, but the men were unnerved. As in all cases where a large number of men were put in imminent peril, whether by shipwreck, plague, fire or violence, numbers were swayed by a mad panic of utterly selfish fear and others became numb and callous or snatched at any animal gratification during their last moments. Many soldiers crowded around the fires and stood stunned and befounded by the awful calamity. Many broke into the officers' tents and sought for training or devoured the food which the rifle owners had left when the drums had beaten them. Inevitable conquest of the continent? No. It seems the story, as it's over and over and over the case, the story carries so much more power than any of the generalizations. In the AHA speech, the section that, of course that means the most to me, and I'll close with, are statements that I don't think I have ever heard in a story's convention and maybe I was an attentive, I've said it, I'm sure you get a little tired after some of those AHA comments. Is this how you... What? The moment when an historian has said, and I've said this to my classes, which I think because they're mostly young people, this may or may not be effective, I just said some of these things to the students and they put, now I'm going to say them myself, but quote an important, very intellectual and theater, see if that fits better with them. So here are statements which I believe go to the exact core of the mission of the historians and yet the core of this mission is so seldom spoken of in these direct terms. I will tell you as a widow myself, I think his, it's just my guess that his wording here has to come out of the tragic pay of his mother's death and his wife's death in his own communication with the reality of death. He's speaking of the project of great historians who can now draw on all the research of the dredges who broke in ways that I don't want to read. So he's speaking of the kind of historian who can come along and make something of that. Yet even with these instruments, all this prior work, the historian cannot do as good work as the best of the elder historians unless he has vision and imagination, the power to embody ghosts, to put flesh and blood on dry bones, to make dead men living before our eyes. But the historian brings from the charnel house he must use with such potent wizardry that we should see the life that was and not the death that is. I wonder if historians don't say this, because they could face a pride. For remember that the past was life, just as much as the present is life. Whether it be Egypt or Mesopotamia or Scandinavia with which he deals, the great historian of the facts committee will put before us the men and women as they actually lived so that they shall recognize them for what they were living beings. The greatest literary historian must have necessity be a master of the science of history, a man who has at his fingertips all the accumulated facts from the treasure house of the dead past, but he must also possess the power to marshal what is dead so that it live before our eyes and let it begin. Theodore Roosevelt in death is the embodiment of the principle he put forward there as in the present an astonishingly forceful personality. Thanks to his astonishingly forceful personality and his extreme quotability, and thanks to the work of so many people in this room, Roosevelt has on many moments returned to life. His bravery and taking on the deep moral questions of the Indian war is one of the finest features of what he was in life and what he is as a present still very much with us today.