 Good afternoon, and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and I'm pleased you could join us this afternoon for this program, whether you're here in the theater or joining us on YouTube or Facebook. Before we hear from H.W. Brands about his new book Dreams of El Dorado, A History of the American West, I'd like to tell you about two other programs coming up next week. On Thursday, November 7th, at 7, we'll show the documentary film Just Like Me, Vietnam War Stories from All Sides, Vietnam Veteran Ron Osgood collected stories from veterans and noncombatants from all sides of the Vietnam War. Osgood and historian Mark Leapson will discuss the film after the screening. On Friday, November 8th, at 7 p.m., Morocco will be here with his new book, Mobituaries, Great Lives Worth Reliving. He will be CBS News correspondent Rita Braver. To keep informed about these and all of our upcoming events, check our website, archives.gov. You can sign up at the table outside the theater to receive email updates, new find of other information about National Archives programs and activities. Another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports our education and outreach programs. And you can find more information about them at archivesfoundation.org. In a recent review of Dreams of El Dorado in the Wall Street Journal, Gerard Helfrich wrote, Mr. Brand's economical, controversial, conversational prose serves him well. And he knows how to write in a popular style that draws us in and holds our interest. One way Brand engages in the reader's interest is by using a subject's own words to help tell the story. Reading on historical figures, own writing, and hear the voice in your mind brings a sense of immediacy to events that happened long ago. Archives large and small preserve original words of historical figures, whether they are famous names or ordinary people whose lives temporarily intersected with recorded history. Here at the National Archives, we preserve an immense volume of records relating to the lands that are now the western United States. Stories of people from all walks of life can be found in homestead applications, court testimony, geological survey reports, bureau of Indian affairs, correspondence, and much more. It's our mission to preserve the records of our past, making them available to all those who search for the stories of our nation and sharing them with future generations. So now let's turn to our guest author and learn more about the stories he records in dreams of El Dorado. H.W. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Senior Chair in History at the University of Texas, where he has taught since 2005. He's a member of the honorary societies, many honorary societies, including the Society of American Historians and the Philosophical Society of Texas. Brands has written 25 books, co-authored or edited five others, and published dozens of articles and scores of reviews. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Journal of American History, and many other newspapers, magazines, and journals. His writings have received critical and popular acclaim. The first American and trader to his class were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize. And several of his books have been bestsellers. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Professor Brands. Thank you for that very kind introduction. Thank you all for coming. Every time I speak to the archives, I say the same thing at the beginning, but it's worth repeating. And that is that I and other historians could not do the work that we do without the work that the archivists do, the National Archives, but other archives around the country. And I often explain to my students and other people who are interested, I and other historians, we are basically prisoners of our sources. And if we don't have sources, if we don't have voices from the past, if we don't have eyewitnesses from the past, we can't tell the story. Other people tell the story. That's the realm of novelists, and that's fine. But if you want to know what it was like to be there, what it was like to experience that whatever moment in history you're writing about, you have to have the sources. And the archivists are the ones who preserve this record for future generations. So thank you to the National Archives and to every other archive that I've worked with. Thank you again, once again for coming. I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I came to write a book on the history of the American West. And this is one that I have been preparing to write for longer than I've prepared to write any other book. And this really goes way back to, I'm not kidding, my earliest memory. And in this early memory, all I have left of this memory is one visual image. And in this image, I know that I am about two and a half years old, because I was able to date it from other reasons asking questions. But in this image, I am with my grandmother. And I remember it stands out in my mind, because my grandmother was a woman who favored very brightly colored scarves. And maybe in my toddler's eye, the bright purple scarf that she was wearing stuck out. And better, I can still see it. And we are in a white painted cabin in a dark forest. Now, I have to reconstruct the rest. We're in a dark forest, and rain is dripping off the trees outside. So here, just juxtapose, I can see the white painted walls, and my grandmother's bright scarf. And outside, everything is dark and drippy. Now, I didn't know it at the time, but I relatively quickly found out that this cabin was located in the Mount Hood National Forest. And quite literally, it was a short stone's throw from one of the westernmost reaches of the Oregon Trail. And in fact, it was located, the cabin's still there. And it's still located about a quarter of a mile, slightly downhill, down Highway 26, which was the route, which was the route of that part of the Oregon Trail, from a place called Tollgate Park. Now, I only knew Tollgate Park from later running around and playing in this particular park. And I heard of Tollgate Cookies. And it didn't really occur to me that a Tollgate was anything that actually was a gate that took tolls. But this Tollgate was, in fact, a gate on this Toll Road. This was a branch of the Oregon Trail that was built privately with his own funds at his own risk by a guy named Sam Barlow. And he built this road because the last stretch of the Oregon Trail was by far the most dangerous stretch. The Oregon Trail started at the Missouri River, in their very starting point, St. Joseph Independence on the Missouri River. And it crossed the Great Plains and went into the Rocky Mountains through South Pass, and across the desert in between the Rockies and the Cascade Mountains, and then crossed the Cascade Mountains, except when it got to the Cascades, it also came to the Columbia River. And the Columbia River was the easy way through the Cascade Mountains, because the Columbia River, over the eons of its existence, has been carving its way through the Cascade Mountains and created the Columbia Gorge. But the Columbia Gorge in those days didn't look, well, the Gorge looks pretty much the same, but the river looks entirely different. The river, starting in the 1930s, has been dammed. And so the Columbia River is a series of lakes. But before the lakes, before the dams, it was a series of rapids and waterfalls. And the immigrants who came from the Midwest, who came from the American East, they had survived the plains, had survived the mountains, had survived the desert, and they found that the last 100 miles was most treacherous, because most of them would want wood and did, would take the wheels off their wagons, and they would put the wagon beds on rafts. And the rafts would be floated down the river. But it was a dangerous river. The rapids were very high. There were waterfalls. They had to go over, portage around. And it was surprising to me, the number of people who drowned, in fact, drowning, was the most likely cause of death on the Oregon Trail. And many of them drowned almost, well, if they were going down the river within half a day of their destination. Anyway, so to get around to avoid the Columbia Gorge in its rapids, Sam Barlow built his road. And the road goes down over, it goes around the south side of Mount Hood. And people would take the trail in, rather than go down the river. But he'd spent a lot of money on this. In order to make them pay for it, he put a toll gate. And he put it at this critical place on the trail, because naturally people would try to avoid the toll gate. They'd take the road, and then if they could figure out how to get around the gate, then they'd sneak back in on the other side. But he put it at the strategic location, where the road passes between a steep mountain ridge and a river, the zigzag river. And there's only about 100 feet between the two. And so there's no way to get by. You have to pay the toll. Anyway, so that's my memory. My grandmother did not buy that cabin. It turns out, as I learned later, she was there because she was looking for a summer cabin that she and her husband, my grandfather, would buy. Where I and my siblings and my cousins would spend summers with our parents. So they'd be able to gather their grandkids around. They didn't buy that house. They bought another house. And they bought another house that was much brighter. For my grandmother, having this cabin in the dark woods, and I can tell you that the woods of Western Oregon can be very dark. And so she wanted some place that was bright and open. She found a place. And I spent most of my summers from about three years old until 15 years old. And I and my siblings and my cousins, we would run around the forests of Western Oregon. And we would hike on a number of trails. And there were some trails that I liked. There were trails my siblings liked. But there was a trail that my grandmother liked, more than any other. And it was a trail. It wasn't a particularly long trail. Now, I could do the arithmetic. And I could tell you how old my grandmother was at a time. But I was a kid. So she seemed ancient, as grandmothers always do, to young children. Besides coming here to speak to you, I get to visit my grandkids who live in Bethesda. And I'm sure they think I'm just as ancient as can be. Anyway, so my grandmother liked a particular hike that went down a trail that wasn't your typical kind of rocky trail, the hiking trail you see in the mountains. It looked as though it was an old dirt road that had been abandoned. Turned out it was an old dirt road that had been abandoned. It turned out that it was part of the original Barlow Road. When the highway, modern highway, was built, they didn't use exactly the same route. But this was an old stretch of the original Barlow Road. And I thought my grandmother liked it partly because it was relatively flat. And it was relatively short. But in fact, the thing that she liked most about it was that you'd walk about half a mile from the highway. And at the end of the trail, it seemed to end. But it ended at a pile of rocks. And when I was just a little kid, a pile of rocks was a pile of rocks. There were rocks all over the place. But I remember that one time I was running down there and I started taking a rock off the pile. And she reprimanded me very sharply. This is really odd. I mean, rocks are rocks, right? Well, if you're eight years old, they might just be rocks. But in fact, maybe you've guessed what the rocks were. They were a cairn over a grave. And it was a grave as various historians and, I guess, forensic scientists, maybe an archaeologist, figured out. It was a grave of a woman. Because they were able to tell that the skeleton was of a woman. Perhaps 19, 20, 21 years old, who had died apparently of illness. She didn't die of injury. There was no obvious blunt force trauma or anything like that. But she died. And she was buried in a shallow grave. Now, when I'm eight or 10 years old, this really doesn't mean much to me. But as I got older, I was trying to figure out, OK, why was she buried there? Why in a shallow grave covered with rocks rather than a nice deep grave? And what does this mean that it's on the Oregon Trail? So that thought is kind of sticking in my mind. My grandmother remained sort of something of, well, she was kind of an inspiration to me regarding history. But she was also a co-consumer of history. When I was 22 years old, I was just out of college. And I had taken a job as a traveling salesman. And I had a territory. I was selling cutlery, knives, and scissors. And I had a territory that spanned from Portland, Oregon. I grew up in Portland and went as far east as Denver. And I would drive that distance. And I would visit hardware stores and pawn shops in small towns all along the way. But before I would go, now remember, so this was 1976. The year is important. First of all, it's before cable TV. So in small towns, you're lucky to get any television reception at all. And there's not a whole lot to amuse yourself if you're staying in Caldwell, Idaho. The stores close at 5 o'clock. So before I would go, I would pack along with my cutlery samples, I would pack piles of books in the back of my car. And I would read. And they were typically history books because I'd had an interest in history. And there was one book that I remember reading simultaneously with my grandmother. By this time, my grandmother lived in an apartment in Portland. And she was an avid reader. But her eyesight was failing a little bit, so she couldn't read too fast. But we were reading the same book. And she was reading in Portland. I was reading it on the road, driving across the west. 1976. Have any of you or any of you readers of works by James Michener? If you read James Michener in 1976, you were reading, do you remember the novel? Centennial. Centennial is a book about the history of Colorado. And it's called Centennial because Colorado is the Centennial State. It was admitted to the Union in 1876. And so this was on the Colorado by Centennial. So I was reading the book, and my grandmother was reading the book. And every evening, I would phone her and say, well, what did you read? And what did you like about what you read? And so we would compare notes. And we were reading more or less at the same pace. But I was interested in her comments. What she wanted me to be was her eyes on the ground. Because there were, how many have you read the book? Centennial, OK? And it's probably a while back. So your memory perhaps needs refreshing. But like all of Michener's works, he has a present day story, and then he has the historical backstory. And what my grandmother wanted to know was, were the geographical descriptions that Michener was writing in the book, were they actually true? And could you still see evidence of this? And there were certain moments and certain geographical traits. So there was one where there was an image that recurs in the book. And trappers see this. And Indians see this. And it seems to be an image of a beaver crawling up the ridge line of a mountain. And as Michener explained it, you could see this from the plains west of the front range, east of the front range. And so if you're looking into the mountains, if you know where to look, you'll see this beaver crawling up the ridge. And it was very appropriate because much of the story was about the fur trade. And the trappers would go out and hunt beaver. So while I was driving along Interstate 25 north of Denver, I kept craning my neck and looking on to the mountains to see if I could see the beaver climbing up. Well, I'll confess to you, and I confess to my grandmother, I never quite saw the beaver, although I have to tell you, that I was talking about this just about a month ago in Denver. And somebody came up out there and said, you were just looking in the wrong spot. There really is a beaver if you know where to look. So then there was another moment, there was another part of the story, where there's mention of the chalk cliffs. Now, the present day part of the story included paleontologists who were digging up dinosaurs. And if you are a fan of Michener, and I haven't read all of them, I've read several of them, he likes to go really deep into history. If you read his book, Hawaii, then you'll know he starts the book with lava bubbling up off the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. And so the Hawaiian island chain is being created. And with the book on Colorado, he has dinosaurs roaming along. And they fall into the prehistoric seas and the bones are preserved. And then they're dug up at this place called the chalk cliffs. And the chalk is limestone. And so I had my eye out for, am I going to run across the chalk cliffs? And I can recall, I was driving along. It was just a dusk. And it was on a highway, again, outside of Denver in the direction of Fort Collins. And I saw the sign on the side of the road. And I could just barely make it out as I went past at highway speed. And it said chalk cliffs off to the right. So I slammed on the brakes, turned around, and followed this gravel road down. By the time I got there, it was really too dark to see much of anything. But I was able to report home to my grandmother that, yes, mission accomplished. I had found the chalk cliffs. They really are the chalk cliffs. So we kept talking about this. There was a character in the book that very much intrigued my grandmother. And it was a character that was modeled, as it turns out, on one of the individuals that I include in my book. But it was fictionalized. And he was a trapper. And like all of the fur trappers, he would spend most of the year, nearly all of the year, more or less by himself out in the wilderness. And through winter was the best time because that's when the beaver had their thickest fur. So that's when they would do all their work. But they would risk hypothermia and falling through ice and risk encounters with grizzly bears and hostile Indians and all of the trials that the mountain men, as they were often called, had to put up with. And this guy was as hard-bitten as any other, except that he had one thing that he insisted on his way of clinging to civilization. And that is, well, every summer, the fur traders would get together. The fur traders and the trappers would come together. And the trappers would bring in their, the pelts. And the fur traders would buy the pelts and then sell the trappers the stuff that they would need for the rest of the year. And they would sell them things like gunpowder and lead and salt and various other stuff that you can't get out in the wilderness. But the one thing that this particular trapper insisted on was his tea. And at the end of every day, he would, however hard it was, however cold it was, he would make a fire and he would brew himself a cup of tea. And it was, it had to be a particular kind of tea. Now I was no tea aficionado. And my grandmother, my grandmother liked tea, but she was kind of Earl Grey sort of tea. And this particular type of tea was lapsang suchong tea. And my grandmother said, you got to get some of that tea. We got to try this and see what it tastes like. So nowadays, today, if you're really easy, go online and find lapsang suchong tea and order some and be at your house the next day. But in those days, the 1970s, Amazon didn't exist, so I had to hunt around for a while to find this tea. And so I found the tea and I took it to my grandmother's apartment. And it was an appropriately gray cold day. We were trying to recreate the spirit of doing this out in the woods. And my grandmother brewed it up and she was very ritualistic about this and she was quite refined. So she got out her best China and brewed the tea and we both took the cup, put the steaming cup up right next to our lips and we would take a sip to see what it tasted like. Now my grandmother, as I say, was the essence of sort of politeness and refinement. And what she did when she took this sip of tea was something that was stuck in my mind. She took a sip of the tea and I did it at the same time. And I was thinking of doing what she did and she went, this is the worst stuff I've ever tasted. Anyway, so this is what got me interested in the history of the West. Oh, wait, there's one other thing. And so I've kind of cataloged these sort of stories, these questions, these puzzles. So who was this pioneer woman? What was her story and why did she die when she did and why was she buried the way she was? A second had to do with, well, what was life really like for trappers and was it really imaginable that this guy would, he would fight with the Grizzlies and then at the end of the day, have his lap sang su chong tea? But then there was another question and this occurred to me after I got to Texas. So I've lived my whole life west of the Mississippi River except for I spent one year as a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. But for the rest I've been a man, boy, man of the West. My first 30 years on the West Coast and then more or less since then in Texas. When I got to Texas, when I got to Texas, I had occasion to ask myself in a more pointed way a question that I'd always had when I had heard about the story of modern Texas and the story goes roughly like this. So in the early 1800s, after Spain has been unsuccessful in colonizing Texas, it has claimed Texas for 200 years at this point, 300 years at this point, but they never can get any colonists to go there because it's so far away. So along comes this guy from the United States and his name is Moses Austin and Moses Austin has this scheme that he presents to the Spanish governor of Texas. Moses Austin travels to modern San Antonio called Bayer in those days and he has this idea. I'm gonna bring in 300 American families and they're gonna settle in Texas and you're gonna give them free land. That's what's going to entice them to come. And so I thought about this. Oh and the Spanish governor said yes. Now in fact, Moses Austin died before this could be carried out but his son picked up the project and by the time Stephen Austin got there, Spain no longer controlled Texas. Mexico's independence, war of independence had succeeded and Mexico is now in charge. But Stephen Austin puts the same question to the Mexican government that his father put to the Spanish government and the Mexican government says, yeah. Now I'm scratching my head when I read this. Now I'm not a Texan and so I sort of didn't know how it looked from inside Texas but from the outside. The question is this. Well, didn't the government of New Spain, didn't the government of Mexico know who these Americans were? Didn't they know how grasping, how aggressively expansionistic these Americans were because you invite the Americans in and of course, fast forward 15 years and the Americans steal Texas away from Mexico. And so the question that I had to ask myself is what was the government of Mexico thinking inviting the Americans in? I teach history, I've been teaching history for a long time and one of the questions that I pose to my students is that it's an appropriate question for anybody looking at something in the past with curiosity is what were those people thinking? And it's a serious question. Sometimes it can sound flippant but in this case it's not flippant at all. What was the government of Mexico thinking inviting these Americans in? Didn't they know what was going to happen? And the short answer is no, nobody ever knows what's going to happen. And as I like to say, we historians are no better at predicting the future than anybody else. I can't tell you who's gonna win the election of 2020 but if you ask me in 2020, if you ask me in 2025 I will tell you why whatever result it was was inevitable. And so this is, we historians explained the past but we're as much at sea as anybody else in predicting the future. So these are all questions that are sticking in my head regarding, well it turns out they're all regarding different parts of the West. So I decided to write a book on the West. Actually I decided to write three books on the West and I wrote two of them. One was a book on the Texas Revolution so the founding of modern Texas and it covers the period from really, from the 1700s, it goes back to the 1500s the first Europeans to get to Texas but it carries it up to the middle of the 19th century and it deals with this issue of these Americans coming to Texas and then coming to Mexican Texas and stealing it away and then eventually making it part of the United States. I wrote a book on the California Gold Rush and this is that moment in California history that makes, well it's the birth of modern California and I was going to write a third volume in what I imagine would be my Western trilogy but before I did I was approached by a publisher actually an editor at Basic Books who asked me if I would be interested in writing a history of the American West and I thought you know what, I think I'll do that because that'll allow me, I'll be able to tell the Oregon story but in addition I'll be able to put it all together in a way that the three volumes were gonna do it sort of separately now I can add them up. And that was the genesis for this book, Dreams of Eldorado. And in writing the book I can tell you that I figured out the answers to some of these questions that have been spinning around in my head for the years that I've described. I can tell you, in fact I'll see if you can figure this out. Maybe some of you will know. So going backwards, what was the government of Mexico thinking in inviting Americans to colonize Texas? Did they not know that Americans were these aggressive expansionists and by letting them get sort of one foot in the tent sooner or later they're gonna take the whole thing away? Now it is often tempting to imagine that well they were just, it's very easy for anybody from our generation to look back people who came before us and if what they do doesn't make sense to us imagine that they were ignorant or benighted in some way. And I have to caution my students against this all the time. The people who lived in the past were just as smart as you and in fact they knew, they knew a lot more about the past than you do. So if you can't figure out what they were thinking it's probably your problem not theirs. So do any of you, any of you like to know or has her to guess? As to what the government of Mexico was thinking they did it with their eyes open they understood exactly who they were dealing with. Okay so oh yes, not a bad guess but not exactly right. They were worried, the government of Mexico was worried that it was going to lose Texas to somebody else before they would lose it to the Americans. And the somebody else was the Comanche Indians. The Comanches invaded Texas from the region around New Mexico from the southern Rockies in the 1700s. And the Mexican government, first the Spanish government well first the Apache Indians who had been the scourge of Spanish Texas they came into San Antonio one day waving the equivalent of the flag of truce saying you know we've been fighting you for the last hundred years well now we want to ally with you because there is this group of people behind us that is beating the daylights out of us and we need all the help we can get. So when the Apaches came in and said they wanted to make peace with the Spanish because of this new bunch of people the Comanches then the Spanish knew something was up. The Spanish eventually lost control of Texas and the Mexican government came in and this is one where each party of the deal thought they'd got the better of the other they thought they'd pulled a fast one on. So the Americans thought that they had gotten a really good deal from the Mexican government and they had at a time when a farm of 160 acres was a nice sized farm in the American east the Spanish government and the Mexican government was giving away farms of 4,000 acres but there was a condition there was a bit of a catch and the condition was that the Americans had to agree to fight on behalf of Mexico against Indians and most of the Americans had never heard of the Comanches Indians and in fact it might even sound in retrospect as though, well okay it made sense at the time but they got it wrong. In fact though, the Comanches remained a threat to whoever purported to control Texas until long after the war between the United States and Mexico in fact Texans were fighting Comanches into the 1860s and uniquely among the states that seceded from the Union in the early 1860s a complaint of Texas was the federal government was not protecting Texas against the Comanches Indians which were still a grave danger on the frontier. Okay, so I did figure out what the government of Mexico was thinking. It made sense, it turned out that Texas couldn't be saved for Mexico but they did the best they could on the circumstances. So backing up a little bit, the question of tea and the fur trapper. Well, this particular fur trapper was modeled on a guy named Joseph Meek. Joseph Meek was born in Virginia and he probably would have grown up to be a Virginia farmer but at the age of about 17 or 18 he decided he didn't want to be a farmer. He wanted his life to be more adventuresome and so he did what generations of Americans had done already would continue to do. He went west and he went west and found himself at St. Louis during the annual recruitment drive of some of the fur companies and the fur companies were looking for strong, hail, naive young men to go out and hunt beaver in the mountains and they had to be naive because if they had known really what they were getting into they would have been appalled and turned around and run the other way but Joe Meek went off to do this and the story of Joe Meek is I say, now, so I said that we historians are prisoners of our sources. The reason that I can tell the story of Joe Meek is that Joe Meek told his own story. I will say this, that Joe Meek told his own story. He told stories. Is every word that Joseph Meek said literally true? It's true in spirit I've concluded but he's a storyteller. He's a good storyteller and he tells his story and so the story of the trapper and his teen Joe Meek as far as I know did not favor tea but he did go to the summer rendezvous and he did acquire particular stuff each one to his own devices but there was another question that I had in all of this. I'm a thrifty sword and so if I make a certain amount of money in a year I'm tempted to, I do, I save a substantial part of it for another time when I might need it more. The fur trappers, they would work for 52 weeks out of the year to gather the beaver pelts. They would bring them to the rendezvous. A rendezvous was the fur trades version of a trade association meeting where they would all gather and so they have meetings at the convention center here in every other city. The convention center was Jackson Hole or a comparable, they called them holes, sheltered valleys in the Rocky Mountains and they would come and they would take 50 weeks worth of labor and risks run and they would sell them and they would take the cash and they would probably spend it on, they would gamble on horse races, they would buy liquor, they would get in fights and after two weeks of the rendezvous they would be as broke as they were going in and I thought, why did they do this? Why don't they put something away for the future? Do you know the answer to this question? No banks, where would they put it? There weren't any banks out there and actually there weren't many banks anywhere and so the alternative was to spend the next year carrying gold coins around with them. They were already targeted enough for highwaymen, for Indians, for anybody hostile who thought that they could get something out of them. If they were known to carry money on them they were certainly to be waylaid. But anyway, but one of the things that I learned about this, one of the things that intrigued me was, well I'll tell you this and I'll ask if you can come up with the answer to this. So, Joe Meek spent 10 years in the mountains and he survived. Most people didn't survive 10 years in the mountains but he did. He was finally persuaded to give up for trapping, for farming. And it wasn't that he had lost his taste for the adventure, it wasn't that, it wasn't even that all the beaver had been trapped out. A lot of them had been trapped out but you just had to go deeper into the mountains. There was something that happened and it happened 5,000 miles away. Something that forced Joe Meek to find a new way of making a living. And it is the slightest thing. It's not some big deal. It was, well, and if you know what it was, yes. Still cash. Exactly, a change in fashion. Fashionable gents had been wearing these beaver hats. They were, so the fur hats, you take the soft under fur of the beavers and it would be pounded to be felted and made into these hats. And they're nearly waterproof and they were the style. In the 1820s and 1830s. But then along come silk hats. And now the fashionable gents don't want those old hats. They want the new ones. And nobody wants beaver hats anymore. And so one of the lessons of this is that from its earliest moments, the American West, the American frontier, and there was no frontier more frontier like than the Rocky Mountains in the fur country. It was tied up in this global economic network. And simply a change in fashion tastes in London could mean the end of an industry. So there he was. He had to come down out of the mountains and he moved to Oregon. And he liked to say in his old age that he was born in Washington County, Virginia and he died in Washington County, Oregon. And I used to live in Washington County, Oregon. I've seen this grave and there it is. But as to the question of who the pioneer woman was. Well, I don't know who exactly she was, but I was able to reconstruct some of her story. Some of her story. Because another woman, in fact the first woman who made the trek from the American East to the Oregon country kept a diary. As I say, we are prisoners of our sources. Her name was Narcissa Whitman. And she went out for a reason different than most of the people went out to the West. My book is called Dreams of El Dorado. And the dreams of El Dorado were the dreams of economic opportunity that existed in the West. And sometimes they were as, call it El Dorado-ish, as gold in the West. But sometimes they were dreams of land in Texas or farms in the Lamont Valley of Oregon. Or they could be dreams of a cattle kingdom. The young theater Roosevelt. Imagine that he would be a cattle baron in Dakota territory. So there were all of these natural resources out there that seemed to be simply for the taking. Narcissa Whitman went out for a different reason. She went out to save souls. She was a Methodist missionary. And she, in fact, she married her husband, Marcus Whitman. It was kind of an arranged marriage. The mission board said that they would not, they definitely would not send out single women. And they frowned on sending out single men. And so the two of them wanted to go out and be missionaries and they, somebody mentioned, hey, she's looking for somebody to marry and he's looking for somebody to marry and they got together and they got married. And off they went and she kept this journal. She kept a diary and she told of the journey along the Oregon Trail. And I'm able to recreate because she recorded for me what it was like and the challenges, just the day-to-day stuff of getting up every day and walking or driving the cattle team or when the road got rough, sometimes you would have to build a road before you could travel any further. This is what Sam Barlow did, he built his own road. And so, and she also being one of the first women to travel from the east, she was able to record sort of what it was like for women. Now, the pioneer woman, I mean, she's called, in Oregon, she's called the pioneer woman. That's the pioneer woman's great because nobody knows what her name is. But almost certainly she encountered many of the same things. And this is the thing that as I, the more I thought about it, the more poignant it became, that she had made it past all the hard stuff. And it was only easy, gentle downhill from where her grave was to the destination. She was almost within smell of the Willamette Valley when she died. So almost certainly she had contracted some sort of disease, although this was a bit unusual because the disease-ridden part of the journey was at the very beginning. People got cholera a lot crossing the Missouri River. Cholera was a new disease in the United States starting in the 1830s. And in the 1840s when the big immigration to, immigration to Oregon began, it was particularly plagued these river towns that had been built for populations of 400. And now all of a sudden they have 30,000 people there. And the 30,000 people overwhelmed the sanitary and plumbing facilities and people get these water-borne diseases. But this woman had managed apparently to avoid getting cholera and she made it across the plain, she made it across the mountains. She was on the home stretch and something maybe she had been to worn out by the journey. It typically took five months, six months. Maybe she had actually been ill before in some lingering effects. Still finally claimed her. It's quite likely she had children. And the reason, I can't tell you exactly the reason she died, but I can tell you the reason she was buried in such a shallow grave and the grave wasn't marked. And that was by this time, by this time winter was approaching. And for those immigrants, and I can't tell you, well I can tell you that it was after 1846 because the Barlow Road wasn't built till 1847 I believe, but it was after this. And the reason 1846 is important is that by this time every immigrant to the West had heard the story of the Donner party. The Donner party, the infamous story of the immigrants to the West who get trapped in the snows of the Sierra Nevada. They were heading to California. But the lesson that you could get caught by the winter had been really etched into the brains of all of them. And so although they were very close to the Lamont Valley, they had to hurry. They couldn't even take time to give her a decent burial, to dig the grave any deeper. So that's part of the story. There's lots more to tell. I could tell you the big themes that I draw up. I could tell you other episodic incidents. I will tell you that this book allowed me to indulge my pension for writing history. Well, as I explained to my students, I distinguished two kinds of history, big history and little history. And big history is the history of the Westward movement. It's the history of war and peace. It's the history of the Industrial Revolution. That's big history, the big stuff. The stuff you read about in textbooks. And then there's little history. It's the lives of individuals. It's, well, it's your life and your life and your life and your life. And the part of history that intrigues me is the intersection of little history and big history. In fact, you could say that big history is nothing more than little history writ large. I think there's a bit more to it than that. But if I can find individuals like Joe Meek and Narcissus Whitman and Stephen Austin started to tell the story, then I can bring these two together. And so that's why I wrote a book on the history of the West. And I'd be delighted to answer any questions that any of you might have. Yes, sir. And yes, please come for the microphone so it can be recorded on the tape. Hi. You're a great storyteller. I'd like to know, tell us a little about the immigrants from Europe who sort of landed in the East and then got on a stagecoach or a train and went West and reinvented themselves. I'm talking about some of the more sort of unusual people that you might not think about like Jews, for example, or other groups. OK, so a very good question about the immigrants from Europe who come to the United States having heard about the opportunity in the West and the fact that they can get land for ridiculously small amounts of money compared to prices in Europe and off they come. The first thing I have to say is that most immigrants from Europe who intended to go West never did. They landed in the cities of the East and they either encountered enough troubles getting their feet on the ground or they discovered that there were jobs in the East and they could take those and those jobs were better than they thought of before. Furthermore, they would find people from their home country who had made it in the East. So the dreams of El Dorado that I mentioned in the title are very often dreams by people who never actually go West but of those who do go West. Yes, there were people who went West for particular reasons and of those who came from America, from Europe, from England especially in this case, to America intending to go West, one of the largest and most coherent groups were Mormons. And so the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, when it decided to move its headquarters from the Mississippi Valley under decades of persecution, they decided to head West and they go to Utah and what they need are settlers, they need people and so they send out missionaries as the Mormons still do and they organized and they paid for the passage of people from Europe to come to America and then to continue on to Utah. And in fact, one of the chapters in the book is all about the Mormon Trek, which is one of the great stories, it has large elements of tragedy in it and it's a very human story. So that's part of it. But I'm gonna get even more specific. So one of the things that attracted people, immigrants from, for example, to the West was, it was a place where you could go and fall off the face of the earth. If you did not want to be found, that was where you would go. Now, in fact, immigration from the United States to Texas was driven very much by this because at least in the time when Texas still belonged to Mexico and there were people who would go to Texas, who did go to Texas and we'd become heroes in the Texas Pantheon, who came to Mexican Texas precisely because it was foreign territory and American law did not extend across the Sabine River. James Bowie was an infamous example of this. He was wanted for land fraud, for illegal slave trading and possibly murder in three or four states in the United States. He goes to Texas and he knows he's home free because Mexico does not have an extradition treaty with the United States. And that was one of the big appeals of Texas. But the individual that I'm thinking of right now is the guy who'd become famous in California history because it was, well, it wasn't quite on his property but it was near his property and at his behest that gold was discovered. The man was, the Americanized version of his name is John Sutter. He was Swiss. And in the 1830s, John Sutter had discovered that he was no longer enamored of his wife. He had debts that he didn't seem to be able to get out from under. So he told his wife he was going to go to America and make some money and pay off his debts and come back. Well, he went to America and he never came back, never looked back. And he finally made his way to California. Now, one of the appeals of coming to America, especially in those days, is you could make up your own history. So he created this story that he had been a rather high-ranking officer in the Swiss army. And so he presented himself as, well, he was often called, he was sometimes called himself General Sutter but he made up this military background. He went to California at the time when California was Mexican, California. And he told this story and he managed to talk himself into this empire on the frontier. And so he was kind of at the extreme east edge in the Sacramento Valley of Spanish slash Mexican settlement. And he put together this big range. And he built a fort, a trading fort, and Sutter's fort was an entree pope in that part of California. And then he decided that he needed to do some building. He wanted to build fences, he wanted to build buildings. And so he hired an itinerant American who happened to find his way into California, same as James Marshall. And he said, Marshall, go up in the mountains and cut down some trees and saw them into boards. But before you do that, you're gonna have to actually build the sawmill. So before you build the sawmill, you're gonna have to dig the mill race. So we're up there and dig a mill race. And he did. And in fact, he hired his laborers a bunch of Mormons who couldn't make a living in Utah. They needed some cash. And so they had come to California. He hired a bunch of Mormons and they're digging his mill race and they discover gold. And so it takes a while, it takes a long while. So gold was discovered in January 1848. Now I put this question to my students. So there is a national football league franchise based in San Francisco. And it's well known, it's the San Francisco 48ers. Wait, that's not right. It's the 49ers. I asked him, why 49ers? Because it took that long for the news to get from California to Washington and for the people to head out to California. So anyway, when the news finally makes it to the East, to American papers, then from there to European papers, all splashed in the news accounts is that gold has been discovered on the property of, they exaggerate a little bit, of Sutter's Ford. And the newspapers finally make it back to Switzerland and Sutter is outed. And his wife reads the paper. And she's struggling under the debt he has left behind. So she says to her son, you go out there and get some of your dad's gold. And so it takes three or four months, or actually six months for this to happen. And one day, knock, knock, knock on the door of John Sutter in California is his son. Even then, you couldn't get away with it. But actually, one of the points that I make out of this is when I made the point earlier that the fur trade was part of this global trade. An argument that I make, and I'll admit that it's arguable, but I'll just put it to you. I contend, I'll put for the sake of the argument that the California Golders was the first event in modern world history. And that sounds like a breathtakingly audacious statement. But here's what I mean. The first event to have almost instantaneous consequences around the world. Now, almost instantaneous. As soon as the news arrives, people headed off to California. And San Francisco in 1850 was most cosmopolitan, probably the most cosmopolitan city on earth, certainly the most cosmopolitan city in the United States. Because people had come from all over the United States. They'd come from South America. They'd come from Canada. They'd come from the Hawaiian Islands. They'd come from Australia. They'd come from China. They came from Europe. They all come to get the gold. So, California, the California Gold Rush is one of these events that demonstrates that as of the 1850s, we had this global economic network. In this case, I imagine that there are these sort of golden threads that reach out. And the thread sort of has a hook at the end of it. And it hooks people who are susceptible to this idea that I can make some money. And I can earn more in a season in the gold fields than I could earn in a decade at home. And it snags and it reels them in. And these people come from all over the world to congregate on the gold fields. Another question, yes? I was just wondering, as a person who's very interested in early Oregon history, did you, have you read the recent book, Astoria? And if you have, could you explain briefly the demise of Astoria, how it didn't really pan out as the big, huge community, lasting community that, well, I mean, it's still there. And then also, could you explain why why Oregon developed laws very exclusive against African-Americans entering their state? And I think after the fur trade, I think trade with China really started to take off on the West and East coast. Yeah, well, in fact, the fur trade was, to answer your question backward, that the fur trade was part of this global China trade. And so John Jacob Astor, for whom Astoria was named, was an immigrant to America from Southern Germany. And he comes to America and he's looking for a way to make a living. And he, somebody tells him that if you go to Canada, you can buy furs, they're cheap and come back to New York and sell them deer and you make some money, so he did. And he was a big thinker. He thought, okay, well, they're furs out West and I'll do that. Now he also realized that there was a market not only in America for furs, but in China. And so there had already been an incipient China trade in the 1780s and 90s. But Astor decided to normalize this and he was going to create a trade where trade goods would be sent from Boston and New York. He was, by this time, was living in New York. Go around South America and go up to the mouth of the Columbia River. And the trade goods would be traded with the Native Americans there who would be, it would be explained to them if you can bring in beaver pelts or otter pelts initially, then you'll get these trade goods. And the trade goods are things like, and this, by the way, is this is a useful thing to keep in mind. For the most part, the native tribes of the Western United States, like Aboriginal peoples in a lot of parts of the world, they were delighted to see these newcomers. They weren't saying no, no, go back where you came from. For the most part, this was fantastic because they brought things that made life a lot easier. So things like steel knives. Until they arrived, they were making knives out of flint or obsidian and steel pots. If you wanna boil water, it's a lot easier than a steel pot than a pot made out of woven grass. Oh, but the revolutionary thing was horses. And it was the horses that the Spanish brought that made the Comanches what the Comanches became, that made the Sioux, the Lakota, what they became. And they absolutely transformed the lives and for the better for, I mean, at least, at least for the first 150 years or so. Anyway, so Aster has this idea that it's gonna trade around South America, trade manufactured goods from the US to the Indians for the furs. The furs would then be shipped across the Pacific to China where they would be traded for tea and silk and jade and stuff like that. And they finish off by going all the way around the world. So you have this global network. Now, it was an ambitious undertaking. It didn't pan out and it didn't pan out primarily because the ship, the supply ship that he sent out, well, I don't wanna scoop myself, but it met a sad end. And so John Jacob Aster decided to get out of the fur business and he got into real estate, which actually worked out pretty well for him. And in fact, when he died in 1848, he was the wealthiest man in the United States. Wealthiest man in American history at that point. Asked on his deathbed what he would do differently. Could he live his life again? He said, yep, I would buy every square foot of Manhattan Island. And so I'm sure I left out other parts of your question, but do we have time for? We're actually out of time. Okay, well, thank you very much. You've been a wonderful audience and I'd be delighted to sign books if you care to buy them.