The speaking portion is almost always e. And open to the public and we are able to do that because you come here and buy your books and your stocks and greeting cards and we appreciate you keeping it local. Its about our guest will be speaking tonight. The event will be recorded by cspan, so an extra special reminder to silence your cell phones. After the guest is done speaking there will be an opportunity to ask questions, and we will have microphones available so your questions can be picked up as well. If you would like to stick around afterwards to get it signed, we can accommodate that we just ask that you first purchased the book downstairs. They are available right when you walk in at the information desk. Tonight we are excited to welcome back to the store h. W. Brands. He is a professor here at u. Of t. And he holds five senior chair in history. He is a New York Times bestselling author of 30 books on u. S. History. If you can keep history that interesting that you can write 30 books, that tells you something about how fantastic this work is. Two of the books were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize biography and tonight hes here to talk about dreams of el dorado and the history of the American West. Please join me in welcoming back to the people. [applause] thank you all for coming out. Im delighted to be back and see some friends and faces. Im going to tell you how it is i came to write this book and i can tell you that i have been preparing to write this book and researching this book for as long as i can remember and i mean that quite literally because the earliest memory i have from childhood i have a visual image in my head as my grandmother and i can still see her because she especially favored a very bright purple and blue scarves that she would wear and shes wearing one of these scarves and we are in a small cabin in the forest on the western slopes and i can date this because i know what she was doing. She was looking for a summer house tonight so that she and her husband could host me and my siblings and her cousins and we could spend summers there. This occurred when i was two and a halfyearsold. And i can remember. I can run under the cabin, i can remember the dark shadows and the trees are just dripping wet. Thats not unusual because this is oregon and these are the forests of the mountains so it rains a lot. Now, she and my grandfather didnt buy that particular cabin. She didnt like houses deep in the forest. She had to look for a while to find one in a clearing. The only reason is that it was out, the place they bought was just outside of the National Forest and it had been logged over some years previous so there was an opening in the forest and they bought this house. It seemed like the largest house. It sort of looked at least in my young eyes like a swiss chalet or Something Like that. It seemed that way to me. It didnt have much to compare with. Sso i and my siblings would sped most summers there. I didnt know it when i was two and a halfyearsold with my grandmother but i discovered soon enough that the cabin she was looking at then end of the one they bought were literally right on the last western stretch of the oregon trail and it was a part called the barlow trail or the barlow road and in order for the immigrants of oregon to avoid the fall of the lower Columbia River, they would turn south from river and go up over the cascades and around the south side of mount hood. They would come down along the exact river and there is still a state park called toll gate park i didnt know what it was. I associated it with cookies or Something Like that, but in fact it was a gate on the toll road. Sam dont did with his own and he charged the immigrants to go pass through the gates and it was strategically located where one of the mountain ridges came down right next to the zigzag river so you couldnt get around. You have to go right through there and of course i didnt have any idea the significance of all of this that i was aware there was something historical going on because right across the highway that ran in front of the property right across highway 26 for something called the barlow trail and it was filled with what looked like had probably been growing at the time of the western bound wagon trains were coming. There were still places on the oregon trail and the steepest part of that where the road was so steep that in order to keep the wagons from running away out of control they would hitch a rope to the rear axle of the wagon and they would twist it a couple of times around a big tree and they would slowly let out the rope as the wagon went down. This in the late 1950s you can still see the bridge into the bark of the trees from where the rope had gone. So, i and my siblings would spend summers there. We would hike through the forest and there was one that my grandmother was especially partial to. It wasnt a long hike. She was happy to walk a mile or two. We would walk a mile or so off the highway down this road, and it looked like it really could have been the actual barlow road itself because much of it was. Under the highway so you couldnt tell exactly. But on this stretch you could see what looked like might have been the wagon tracks. But at the end of the trail where it disappeared into the old forest, there was a pile of rocks. The pile of rocks didnt mean anything to me at first. If it didnt mean anything to anybody for a while while i was young but somebody, i dont know who it was maybe somebody associated with the highway crew where they were widening the road or changing it a little bit supposed and then confirmed that this was actually a grave and it was a pile of rocks but over the shallow grave and they exhumed a skeleton. At the time they were not able to identify this person was. Who this person was. They could tell it was a woman, a relatively young woman perhaps in her early 20s, late teens or early 20s and so a sign was put up this was the pioneer womans grave and at the time, when youre eight or 9yearsold, what does that mean to you . But gradually i was able to put a couple things together to realize that for this woman to die at that point if the trail was especially heartbreaking because the hardest part of the journey from the Missouri River was over. It was literally downhill from there and an easy stretch. She was almost within sight of the valley if she had stayed healthy just another two days ride and she would have been a. A. She died and what did she die of . Who knows, probably some illness, and it was a measure of i think the hurry the immigrants were in rather than their lack of concern for her final resting place at the grave wa that the o shallow because by this time quite likely they were getting near the autumnal rain and they have to put up cabins to spend the winter, they have to figure out a way to get through the winter. Getting across the great plains and the Rocky Mountains and international desert, down the snake river and Columbia River it took them all summer. They had to wait in the spring until the grass got green on the prairies. But if they waited too long than they would gethenthey would gete snow going over the mountains. Now, i dont know, and nobody knows exactly what year this woman died. If she died after the donner party that its disastrous end in california, they would have had that in front of them. But even if they didnt, they knew time was of the essence. So there she was and remains. And i always sort of wondered what her story was. When i started writing this book i thought i wonder if i can figure out what her story was. I dont know her precise story that i can sort of reconstruct her general story which was probably like the story of just about everybody else coming out. Most of the immigrants to didnt die but those that did they typically didnt die violent deaths. The idea that an immigrant traveling to oregon or california were much threatened by native americans, by indian it was vastly overblown and if only they knew they could tell that they were simply passing through. The indians were troublesome in the sense that they would scatter the cattle and hopefully regather it for a price as a way of making their living. So, the most common cause of death was illness of one form or another. There were accidents like that almost certainly this woman became ill and it was unusual for her to die at that stage of the journey. When people got sick on their way to oregon or california for that matter, they typically get in ondidin one of the towns on e Missouri River because these were towns that were built for small populations and they had a rudimentary facility for small populations, and all of a sudden they were inundated by tens of thousands of people and so they would come down with cholera which has landed in america about ten years before and it was the scourge of the travelers. They knew they could get past the missouri and out of the planes, they would probably be okay. So, anyway that was part of the story into something in the background i was thinking about for years and years. Somewhat later, in fact in my first year out of college i grew up in Portland Oregon and went to college in california in the bay area and i moved back to portland and worked for a year for a family business. I was a traveling salesman and i had a territory that spanned from portland to denver and this was my first chance to travel across the west. I was kind of curious and ive enjoyed the geography. They hear this 1976. For those of you who are fans or features of james, you might remember that in 1976, he published a historical novel called centennial and it was about the Centennial State which is colorado and it was about sort of the history of colorado and it so happened that my grandmother who was a great reader and the one who found the house, she by this time wasnt in particularly good health. She still read and so she and i simultaneously read the centennial. I was on the road traveling across the west to colorado i would call her every evening and say what have you read and she would say i read this part, and the thing that really interested her was to know how true to historical geographic wife the novel was. I couldnt help it that much with the history. Certainly by eyewitness observation in traveling that i could help the geography. Have any of you read the book centennial . Anything by him he has a really deep history. His book starts with the bubbling up off the pacific and it kind of goes from there. This one of course includes the rise of the Rocky Mountains and the dinosaurs tracing around. Theres one particular side in the book that is identified as the chalk cliffs at this place where paleontologists discovered dinosaur bones. As the basithe basis for these l novels was always to have a historical story ended in the presentday story and they sort of go back and forth and at this time theres paleontologists digging up the bones then we go back to the dinosaurs and their bones are going to be there. So i was wondering how much of this is actually true to life and how much did he pick up. I was driving north of denver on interstate 25 and it was getting dark. I had been thinking about this and talking with my grandmother about this when all of a sudden at the side of the road i saw a sign. So i turned off and by the time i got there it was too dark to see much of anything but there was this place. Centennial focuses on some mountain men as they were called who would spend their days, weeks, months out in the mountains and most of the time they were out there alone by themselves. Every summer they would gather for the annual rendezvous and this was the trade show for the first trade. The purchasers would come from st. Louis and they all agree this summer we are meeting in some other valley. The trappers would buy gunpowder and lead and salt and the other necessary items. One protagonist of the novel is this trapper who needs all this stuff and does the usual stuff, but he has this one particular weakness that he has to indulge, and he must have at the end of these difficult, challenging, hard gripping days he has to have his tee. The only place he can get tickets at the summer rendezvo rendezvous. At the rendezvous, word is out that he pulled it. My grandmother was very intrigued by this because she was a teen mother herself. This guy at the end of the day would have almost a ritual where he would make the fire and he has to be careful not to spill this because it will last him the whole here. My grandmother was very much like that also. She could of course write the t. She would grew up everything and have the whole team service. So she identified with this trapper and she was fascinated. She read that it was a tea that she had never tried before a. B. Is fishy about those will know about this but we are in a time you can get anything any time. She said to me weve got to get some of this stuff and try it. I will find it. It took a while for her to go around but i got something. I said im coming up. And it was a cold rainy day. Her apartment was on the third floor, Apartment Building that overlooked those in Portland Oregon. If you look at the treetops, brains into pores i can imagine, we can imagine we were in the mountains have had a strong day so she brews up the t. And im sitting there and we are waiting and its coming. So she poured some for me and herself a. We take a sip, im looking at her and shes looking at me. My grand father was very refined, she never did anything. One thing she expected that i never thought she would do [applause] [laughter] ive never tasted anything this bad. And i agree with her. The factor is i was asked to rate this book by an editor at basic books. I had a relationship back in 1990 but the relationship ended badly because i think i drove them into bankruptcy. I wrote a book on Theodore Roosevelt and it was essentially the last book published by basic books. They went out of business for a while and were resurrected so they were purchased and resold. They are part of the group. If an editor wakes up, deja vu. There is an anger there who said he was thinking of commissioning regional history of the United States and he has i asked what do you think about. He said the history of the american south. History of the American West. Then the list ran out after that. We are going to get history of the upper midwest. The id seemed like a good idea at the time except he left. This had happened to me at basic books before, they had to reassure me that this wasnt going to happen again but nonetheless, i was asked to write this book and i was pleased to be asked because we had already delved into western history with a book on the Texas Revolution problem in biblical in california. I had been thinking of writing a third volume. Ive been thinking about it. So this book is that i came up with and i can tell you what ive learned about when you do a history of something that is concrete but theres no kind of hook to hang onto. When you want to write a history, cant win. There is your story. First how are you going to down that chronologically. My first notion was and my editors first motion and i thought i was going to start with the Rocky Mountains rising up to and wandering around tex texas. The first time a theres a section on lewis and clarke and then it goes into a section on the first trade. The story picks up when you get to lewis and clark. I said i want to write this as an adventure story because i think that this is a. Just coming out of a book that was anything but action. They are politicians and they dont do stuff. They talk and they talk. After that i thought i want action, i wont notion. Here i will share there can be great stuff happening that if we dont have sources we cant do anything with it. I could talk in general about things that happened but if i dont have any good sources or eyewitness this was the problem of the spanish southwest. They are second hand and not particularly compelling. Lets look at the time. Co. If you look from the perspective of the first on the atlantic coast. I didnt want to write about the daniel boone in kentucky everything except jamestown was part of the list. By containing it, logically it looks like they claimed legal title and that also gave me the key with which side i was going to deal with. 1803 i decided to ended well before the president. To have a Historical Perspective you have to show how things turn out. The other thing is i end up at the beginning of the 20th century and a convenient momentt moment is when Theodore Roosevelt becomes president because he was the First Western president. It was essential to the persona that you took on a and his connectionist with took the order to the people of america and that was the result of his connection to the west. The west of the Mississippi River to the 18 or 19 hundreds. After that it becomes the rest of the country. New york in the 1850s doesnt give any useful guidance but houston and california in the 1950s are all sort of peace. In the career of Theodore Roosevelt you can see the west faded into memory and i called my book on roosevelt long ago the subtitle was the last romantic because he benefited from the fact that the west was fading into a kind of romantic memory and he arrived for the first time a in time to kill the last buffalo in the vicinity of the dakota territory. It made him into a conservationist. The reason he did that was the west was disappearing so thats my story. I want you to read this book and you dont have to read it, just buy it. Laughter i was a salesman of my fathers business and my mother was before me. My dad could sell anything to anybody. Dont talk past the sale. I have a tendency to talk long or ive got books to sell. Im going to see and what kind of questions you might have or do you think we will shortchan shortchange. Dreams of older auto, where did the title come from. The title is a remnant that opening up the book that didnt survive into the final version because when heading up to new mexico and all the way to kansas, he was looking for el dorado. It was originally the golden ones there was thionce there wat there was a man of gold. It might seem odd to think you are looking for a golde golden n kansas of all places but think about it this is in the 1540s it was only 20 years earlier gold had been discovered in the city. Why not in new mexico or texas or kansas. The other thing was the locals had figured out how you get this army. You have to take your provisions with you so the army marches through. How do they get the spanish to move on . Soldiers went out with him and expected shares in all this so thats how you get people to do all this. Now that we know there isnt any goal but there it seems like a quest. It turns out they just looked in the wrong places, there was gold and was later discovered in california and elsewhere. Can you talk about the french continental around the . Yes. It was designed to solve a couple of problems into the first how do you get from the Mississippi Valley to the pacific coast. People have been talking about this for a while. But nobody had any occasion to go to california except people with richard dana until january 23, et 48 intact until january 24, california was as far as you could get from the populated parts of the United States, new york, boston, philadelphia as far as you could get a still be on the surface of the earth by the means required to get there. You typically have to go all the way around south america and up the coast to california and it could take six months in fact the famous civil war general midst of war because he was en route to get there and then all the stuff is over. One of the things that took people to california is one of the same things that people to texas in todays texas was spanish. The attraction is that it was far away and under foreign control. Mexico didnt have an extradition treaty in the United States so if you were wanted for any number of things, murder, death, illegal slave trading, you come to texas and you are home free and nobody can bother you. California was a great place to disappear so one of the stars of the story john sutter had run up the dead an debt and his marriat going very well so he decided he would tell his wife he was going to make a fortune and he would be back and he just disappeared. He went as far as he could get from switzerland. You could claim you were a decorated hero in the wars of the swiss army and no one could check it out back then so he did and he became a great figure in california precisely because nobody knew anything about his background and he could pass himself off as more than he was. He was pretty sure his creditors would ever find him in california and his wife would assume he was dead so any searching for him would stop but then wouldnt you know gold was discovered in California Run by the swiss guy named sutter and its in all the papers and his wife finds out where he is and sends their son after him, shows up on the doorstep and doesnt want anything to do with an. Now it was taken as evidence that god smiled upon the United States because gold is formed in california. Technically it was discovered in california while the treaty was being finalized in mexico city but it took a month for the news to get from the foothills so they signed the treaty before anybody knew the transfer of california included the transfer of the new gold strike. While from the standpoint perhaps more so in the 19th century of them now but maybe not it also came with an idea of god particularly smiled on the United States and it was easy to craft a narrative around this because gold has been lying in g in the streambeds of california for millennia and the native americans never founded and gold was still lying there for hundreds of years while california was under control of the spanish. Then it was still in the streambeds in the 25 years california was under the control of mexico. Then within weeks of its transfer gold was discovered. I make the claim and it might be a stretch the gold rush was the first event in modern history and the way i mean it is an event that happens in one place that has almost immediate reverberations all over the world because within weeks the news got to hawaii, australia, china and people came from all of those places, it got to england, germany, russia, people came from every continent to california which have been a hiding place and all of a sudden the most cosmopolitan place in the United States if not in the world at that moment. Ten years later and there is a causal effect i wont go into but its in the book. It took the balance between slaves and free state into this self incest on the fugitive slave act as the quid pro quo and when the civil war began while the civil war was between the north and south of us all over in the west, the western territories and states. What are they going to become, slave states were free state and once the union breaks, the question is which way is california going to go for whatever gets gold has a big leg up and california happened to be populated not overwhelmingly that there were a whole lot of southerners in southern sympathizers who had gone to california. Once the south demonstrated you could think of breaking off from the union, california begins thinking we could do that to we dont have to join the confederacy. Because it was so far from the rest of the country it took a month for the news to get back and forth and thats why the Transcontinental Railroad was built. Until the republicans in Congress Passed the bill they were thinking maybe we will take that data with us because it had been discovered so they could spin off but once they were promised a railroad, then the people that took four months to get up to california could imagine getting back and forth in ten days and that changes everything. Another question perhaps [laughter] i dont know quite how to phrase this question, but to me the American West as a gift with the most open land. In the open lands held we keep the depreciation or with a unique place this is . On the premise of the question the west have always been the region of americas future and from the very beginning when farmers had kids and they didnt have befor a cad they would move west. Horace greeley said go west. They turned within africa to the east but went west. There was always a new opportunity. It was fairly steady and predictable until the edge of settlement reached the Mississippi River then it ran 100 miles or so of the mississippi and then Something Weird happened. It leaked all the way to the pacific with the discovery in california and the migration to oregon and in between is that great plains and rocky mountai mountains. Its important to keep in mind how people viewed the west and the scenery and i had to figure out how to appreciate this because im a child of the 20th century and in oregon every other household has one of those books on the coffee table the rocky oregon coast or crater lake or Something Like that so Natural Beauty is this stuff to look at it in the 19th century it was what the land could do for you. When Stephen Austin arrives he comes across a river into texas indigos through the region all the way to san antonio. What struck me is how often he used the word beautiful to describe the land that he was seeing in this puzzled me because as i said i grew up with Natural Beauty is a Rocky Mountain or snowcovered mountain or this very deep volcanic lake or Something Like that. It was on pretty much the same route and what you see is nothing like that. What you see is rolling countryside thats very fertile and he saw land from the perspective of somebody thats a farmer growing stuff out of this ground so that was the promise of the west. I dont go into much for the counterfactual historical tales that if the United States hadnt acquired until 1900 then the history would have been very different and i do this exercise with students from 1776 the land of domain doubles in size and 1803 the Louisiana Purchase and leftparen then from mexico 1846 so its constantly increasing because there was a rapidly growing population and they were nearly all farmers and a growing population of farmers needs more land. And then the expansion comes to a screeching halt. The last acquired with alaska and et 57 and that was a sort of wild card. Why did it stop if it had been going relentlessly for the previous years and now its stopped and never really picked up. So add in hawaii and puerto rico and the philippines. Why did it stop and i should point out there was a time in the age of the socalled manifest destiny which is vastly overblown they were thinking would become a continental republic and from panel to the arctic ocean. Why did the territory expansion stop because people stopped being farmers but then you dont need them anymore so the question was how does it hurt the west. One of the principal characters in my book was one of the first generations of people that looked not as a thing to exploit, everybody else wants to exploit the best and if there is a single story if they did was to see the Natural Resources of the west whether it is land, cattle grazing, silver, water, whatever that might be but its the first generation to say we need to preserve it just as it is. You cannot preserve on yosemite and he talked to people who came to have the same idea in this question what is the future of the west going to be. It remained contested and they should be simply left as they are. Whether some encroachments can be made it if the old battle we there still is this idea as a resource to be exploited so if you are a cattle rancher in wyoming you might decide they need to continue on this public land. They also developed in a way you dont see in the east very much committed to see it in texas, this idea that if you live on the land you develop squatters rights because one of the stories is most originate as public land and in the 19th century the thought was the basic philosophy was within the Public Domain we need to privatize as quickly as possible and some of this stuff we need to hold onto and its still the case that the west is part of the country that is still. Collectivism has been their starting with the acquisition. The land was acquired by the United States collectively than individuals go out and create these ideologies that its us against the land. Anyway, i think we have run out of time and i certainly dont want to talk past to the sale. [laughter] one thing i do need to remind you that there are not very many shopping days until christmas and books make wonderful gifts. [laughter] they flatter the intelligence of the recipient as well as the giver so dont just take one, think of half a dozen people who need this book. Thank you very much. [applause] if im going to be a successful capitalist and i sell something, im not caring about my desires but i have to care about what you want. Everything you want if you are thwerethe consumer, everything s focused outwards towards trying to get you to accept my services or product but if i am a socialist, i am not
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