2006. i spent that amount in helena at the historical society to work on the cypress hill massacre. has anybody heard of this massacre? excellent. it was at that even as a sort of a notorious but obscure 1873 slaughter in which a group of montana who wolf trap first slipped across into canada and held to a dozen indians. but i thought i would use this event and this is why i had gone in the first place, to explain the hardening of the u.s.-canada border ever after, the so-called wild west of the united states and the mild west of canada north and 49th. this is why i was in montana that summer. the problem was i became very bored with the story which is a bad sign in the new project. adding to my displeasure is the fact i was living in on the glamorous life that is the typical of an academic eating tv dinners and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch every day and allowing myself only one diet coke in an effort to stretch my grant from the historical society as far as i could. what i wanted to make certain that i could get by in my month in helena entirely on the stipend from the historical society and was also a way for my wife and my daughter at that time. i felt i needed something to show for my month in helena. one day through my stay i decided to abandon the cypress hills massacre to see what else was in the historical society from the friends that worked in western history of the great repository and the west. it is a really beautiful building that is located in the shadow of the capitol. but i thought i will see what else i can find in the historical society archived in the cypress hill's business isn't turning out quite as i had hoped. so deciding where to look that afternoon, i thought immediately of a novel called fools crow's. anybody know it? i'm shocked to hear it in the west. maybe you can go and find a copy of that after you've bought a few copies of my book to tecum to take for holiday presents. it was a novel written in the 1980's by welch and it's a piece of historical fiction set in the late 1860's and early 70's and it's a wonderful novel that is beautifully written but it's really powerful i think in getting their readers a chance to get a sense of what the invasion of montana and the west looked like after the civil war from that perspective and it's a wonderful teaching tool use all the time and i just talk it as a matter of fact and the university of nebraska. and i loved it all over again as have my undergraduate students. so the book was fresh in my mind and so deciding where i might spend a little more time that day i thought of a novel and connected it to my time in montana and one incident on which it hinges is the murder of a character named malcolm clarke who was married to the pecan indian woman and an awful, clark is killed by his wife's cousin named pete on his ranch north of helena in august of 1869. this murder set in motion the series of defense that culminates tragically in the last massacre of to and read 1870, which is the darkest day of the history and that was that even to that i knew had indeed taken place. so that afternoon at the montana historical society, i decided to find out if this malcolm clarke was indeed a real person or whether james welch had invented him as a literary device simply to move the story along. so some help from a library and i located pretty quickly microphone real and biographical information and you can probably see where this is heading. so, malcolm clarke was indeed a real person and his murder was a watershed event that james welch described. it's actually a lot more than that. he was one of the most important pioneers in the territory from the 1840's until the 1860's and he was a patriarch of a really fascinating and extremely accomplished family of mixed ancestry. in my discovery it was rather ironic because i had been looking for them or rather a blended family like them for more than a couple of years. that's because i had become fascinated by the industry since writing my first book which is a comparative study of the texas rangers and the research in that book came across who were recognized by the canadian federal government as the people that are not only need it to norway but the people in between that had a separate aboriginal indigenous status from the government but nice to have such as an independent people and i think that of course it was in the united states as well that they were hard to track i found because of the formulation in the u.s. that people were either indiana or white and there wasn't much room for people in between at least not legally in the census records of the 19th century. so i had been interested in such people but i had given up the chase until i found the clarks that day and pretty quickly i fell down by a family of radical and ever after inside the cyprus massacre. i might quickly fell put in a plug for the wonder is novel about the cypress hills massacre called the englishman's boy written by a novelist so if you are interested in that event, he is the way to go. however, the clarks were not quite what i expected perhaps because of my familiarity with the george bent. does that name rang a bell? i see a couple of nods. so, george was sort of tied up in colorado history in some painful ways. he was the mixed blood sign of an english man and her husband named william dent and george grew up in eastern colorado and in northern new mexico during the 19th century and was somebody that walked in both white and native wiltz but after the massacre which his family was incidently involved in victims' i'm not sure that its 100 or so miles on the eastern colorado plains he was particularly alienated and split again between the two worlds, the wide world of his father and in the world of his mother and he had the deep antipathy towards many white people for what had happened to his family. he gave lots of interviews and was rather regarded as the leading expert on the shy iain of the spanish flu pandemic at the end of the first world war so a little bit about george bent i think i would have expected the later generations would have the same sort of social pathologies that what i found is that especially in the leader generations the issue that had been for george or especially for his younger brother charles who formally renounced his own heritage and plundered whites after san creek before he was killed by indian scouts working for the u.s. government when charles was just 22. so the clarkson fact raced with the attributes that got one of them a job at the indian service and was the source of creative inspiration that helped another one when fame and now internationally as an artist. moreover at different moments there were other variables, gender, class status, disability that were important in shaping the possibilities of later generations of the clarks. so it is on to what i think of the shifting grounds of racial identity in the west from roughly 18521950 and specifically what i track in the book is what happens to people of the ancestry after it is incorporated and observed in the period after the civil war. at last let me spend a couple minutes talking about the book and hopefully -- i would love to answer some questions if you've got any. i build it around five fais members of this remarkable family and i began with the 1844 wedding of malcolm clarke and the teenage daughter of the prominent war year and his wife black mayor. the marriage seems pretty unusual given what was between them in terms of race and custom, language and experience and also age. malcolm clarke was about a decade older than his wife. but there is actually a comments head up at this time for economic reasons which isn't to say that glove didn't play a role in the marriages. it certainly did, but the driving motivated factor was economics for a white fur trader by marrying an indian woman, he got access or which place access to his father-in-law so he could then sell at a profit for whom malcolm clarke worked. the indians on the other hand are very resistant to all varieties, anglos and other indians were very jealous regarding their territory but the reason why they've relented and married their daughters to white fur traders is because the same economic benefits. an indian man who married his daughter to a white fur trader got access to his son-in-law's kettles, i year and could, knives and salon and of course alcohol and otsalon and of coure alcohol and other goods and this is important to the consumption and use but also for patronage, being able to distribute to other members of the tribe or his particular band which could be useful in winning positions in power in that try volatility. so economics underpins a lot of these relationships. malcolm clarke can upriver to misery are now 1840. he'd been born in the midwest at fort wayne indiana which is a military outpost and his father was a military man raised primarily at fort snelling in what is downtown minneapolis st. paul and he became quite an outdoorsman and was also very fond of defending his personal honor and i will come back to that in just a moment. but he had a pension for violence from a very early age and that is what got him into hot water at the academy when he enrolled in the fall of 1834. the father moved heaven and earth to get malcolm and it was all done then as is now if we buy a certain number of slots for each individual state as i understand the emissions system at west point and certainly then there were only a few for the young men for each of the states of the union sunni tim clark worked hard to get him to west point and menachem manages to enroll in the class of 1838 but in his very first year, the end of his first year he had expelled and felt that his honor had been in salted so malcolm is called up as a court-martial and it is expelled and however shortly thereafter he is reinstated by none other than andrew jackson who is a personal family friend because najaf and clark was stationed with his family in the 18 twenties just before andrew jackson goes to washington to assume the presidency said jackson intercedes. unfortunately malcolm clarke couldn't accept his good fortune, so and the fall of the map and to become next academic year he's expelled for good if with no one left to speak for him for beating and threatening him with a knife for reasons i can't really get to the bottom of. again, an affront to his personal honor. he leaves west point in the fall or excuse me, the spring of 1836 and arrives in texas at the end of the texas revolution so he misses out on the fortunes and the glory with a lot of young men at the time and then ultimately does what and number of those young men do which is he goes into fur trade in the upper missouri and he arrives with the help of probably a family connection. the trail is hard to track but he ends up on the upper missouri in the fall of 1840 and he becomes one of the most successful traders working in a number of the most import imposts and fort union, fort mackenzie and fort benton especially. but he never masters his temper and his patience for violence as a told you he's murdered at 52 for reasons that still the date on the reservation. was it because a long festering family dispute over some horses and a spyglass is one story that was told or is it because he might have insulted his wife that is a story that was told on the reservation was more compelling to me. at any rate is murdered and in the first two chapters of the book are the relationships which i explained the history particularly in terms of their contact with the expanding american nation and the second chapter listed malcolm clarke and concludes with the death on his ranch in august of 1869. chapter three, the eldest son of malcolm and on the night his father is murdered in august of 1869, the horse is traveling in a clever ruse will buy another one of their indian wootan and here is his companion sitting across what pretty hot enemies so he becomes suspicious in terms and places his companion horse in the shot at point-blank range with the bullet entering below the skin along his cheek bellmon and accepting just below his year and he falls out of the saddle and is a drag several yards before he slips loose and plays dead were and because of the can ship to the assailant his left for dead which turns out to save his life because if they turned his body over the would have found that he still lived. at any rate, horris survives this miraculously and makes a full recovery so much that four months later he is able to ride with his younger brother and even with the second u.s. calvary which goes out to chastise the military parliament of the day with and this incidently tragic event at the big bank in the river of 1870 at which horris and maysan, who were in their early 20s and their late teens respectively principate in the slaughter of their own -- relatives and in the massacre it gets me totally obscure which i'm sure folks in colorado and a lot of doubt that other people do or wounded knee in 1890 and the book to the indian war were the mayor ryan takes place in the middle but it belongs in the conversation with any discussion of the atrocities of the military forces on the plants in the post civil war period. the second u.s. calgary assembled on having trapped which is so often the case in the massacres of the period of the sort of a ray of the troops overlooking the big bend in the marias river and the extreme central montana in the wetter and that is pretty robust standards that are 40 degrees below zero and the troops made a march overland to find this camp and they do on the eskridge line about 400 men in total and every man assaulting a horse and summer retreat hundred 50 tons on the village. just as the sun comes up the indian eugene baker and his men see this and it's precisely the camp the troops have been ordered to avoid because it was the camp of heavy runner who was eight peace chief like black kettle and even though he realizes at the last moment but still a moment in time the disaster that ensues the commanding officer orders to troops under his command to open fire so they annihilate this camp that involves shooting up all of the lodge's but also shooting at the accords that are binding so the indian launch collapse and there's fire within, cooking fire coming heating fires in summary or suffocate the women, children and old men, primarily, who are inside because most of the able-bodied men were off on buffalo trying desperately to find some provision for their families can get and of course as the trips find out later the most tragic part of all this is a small pox can and most of the people are dying from the so-called disease which erupts on the great plains. so 173 women, children and old men, many of them suffered from smallpox died in this horrific event to which the were clarkes our ties and that is in january of 1870. some come back to horris. in spite of his antipathy towards the piegan because the murder of his father, he mary is a piegan woman in the late 1890's and he lives among them on the black p. preservation and effectively becomes one of them which is an interesting twist in the story. eventually, he sells a portion of his land. anybody into glacier park by chance? and a big beautiful lodge on property that once belonged to the clarke family, that is a piece of his allotted. he applies for and receives an allotment from the government and owns a piece of property and lives among five piegan to the great northern railway that built the glacier park lodge that is still in existence today. horris's story, his sister is the subject of chapter number four and has an extraordinary life. frankly there is one story that probably compelled me to write this book more than any other. she has a really fascinating career. after her father's murder, she heads east for a time and as the career on the broadway stage from the period describes her and i love best as 5 feet and 10 inches of magnificent womanhood and she's really striking. there are pictures of her in the book. restriking with a shock of black running through her hair country tall and had a deep with police that made her especially effective as a theatrical actress. she returns in 1875 for reasons i can't quite track. i think it has something to do with bankruptcy that she ends up as the schoolteacher in the montana public schools in the 1870's and then has a sort of second installment in a fascinating career. she becomes the first woman elected to office in the history of montana territory in '82 and becomes the superintendent of schools in clark county which is the wealthiest and most sizable county in montana at that time and it's where alana is located. an old friend of her father's help her win the election that she's the first woman to run and she serves in that position throughout the 18 eighties and then has what i consider to be the most fascinating installment of her career which comes in the 1890's when she travels to oklahoma which is then indian territory to serve as an alloting agent breaking up the indian reservations and other groups that had been targeted for the allotment by the federal government because of the act passed in 1887 wichita indians needed to live as the historians called the plots of land and so on and the idea was to sort of break up the great tribal masks that theodore roosevelt said some years afterwards and so she was sent out in the field to do this job expressly because of her indian heritage in the group she was sent to a lot more particularly reluctant to accept and so the commissioner of the indian affairs who knew of them because they were a prominent family suggested and as many words that maybe she would have more luck given the fact she had indian ancestry. so the fact of her race wins her this job as far as i can tell it is a generous individual in this regard and there is only one other woman that serves as the agent and no one of indian or mixed ancestry said there are many in the service but none in such high ranking positions of power and authority so she has a fascinating creature and returns to montana in their early 20th century and finds herself ostracized by the so-called 400. i'm not sure if montana had 400 residents of the time but it is a sort of shorthand for the social elite in the social setting and so supposedly she felt ostracized by the folks. she denied it rather vigorously saying she was proud of her indian heritage but the whispers apparently bogged her and so she seeks her own allotment and lives on a reservation with her brother, the sort of drastic literary salon right inside of the national park until her death in 1923. i finished the book with the most famous family member of all, john lewis clark who is helen's nephew and malcolm clarke and grandson. john was born in 1841. they're rendered deaf and mute by scarlett, an epidemic fever that burns through the reservation. but john became a world renowned sculptor of wild life, largely self-taught. takes one large class at a pivotal moment in his youth i believe that basically taught himself how to carve by molding things out of mud that he got out of the missouri river. his career takes off in 19 teams and in the late 30's and 40's his friends are charlie russell, the famous artists and patrons included john rockefeller, jr., warren g. harding. and what live is interesting to discover is that he was a very famous carver of western wildlife, lions, grizzly bears and so on. he turns not exclusively but quite intensively to the native themes leader in his career and there's a beautiful piece in the book that gives you a sense of what he's been up to that there are some gorgeous tableau was that are mostly meant to capture with the lifetime during the buffalo days in the time he was born in the 19th century. the reservation accomplishment certainly to become wealthy i think the disability has made travel difficult but i think also that the very heartening racial boundaries if that it is a boundary between that reservation and montana. it was much less so towards him in the early to mid-20th century. john was inducted into the gallery of outstanding montana hall of fame and 2003. so we've really neat thing that they do with a photograph and sheet i should say in the rotunda and the gorgeous capitol building. there are two or three dozen individuals. john clark is one of them and helen would join in 2015. the only family members that are in this rotunda and the others i've sure names you will know, charlie russell himself, grand stewart, and so the clarkes, two of them, two out of thirtysomething cell 115 come mcmath evin i can do are commemorated in the fi gallery of outstanding montana. so today the clarkes are associated in piegan history in the massacre but their names are also etched into the landscape of northern montana and if you have been to the glacier national park, you have seen mount helena which is in the upper valley or the upper reaches of the park in the valley or lake isabel which is in the southwest corner of the park and is named for helen and the younger brother said they describe the landscape of this beautiful place with which they are deeply associated. so the story at least as italic is the story for the complex landscape of race in america with the attention of what they gained and also what they lost irretrievably along the way. thanks so much. [applause] >> i would love to answer some questions. >> i have an unrelated question now. what do you think about the controversy of the washington redskins' name? >> actually i am not unhappy you asked that. we rarely talk about current events that anybody bothers to listen. so, i've made this point to some friends that have asked me the same question. i understand the argument daniel snyder and others who would defend the use of the name. i understand the arguments they have made and insist it is sort of rooted in the team legacy, the team's history and it's meant to be the most important argument sort of in their favor it is meant to be to honor the native peoples. but what i would say is there is no way that particular monicker can be used to honor native people bound up in the language of indian slaughters. you see it throughout the historical records. redskins never applied in the 19th century currently or benignly. it was a racial epithet right at dhaka risk that we could imagine today so i don't think there is any difference and i do think it is simply a matter of when and not if and the redskins would be wise to change the team name to do it sooner because there is only one way this can end up and i think this is a conversation we will probably engulf other teams as well rather offensive, cartoonish. the conversation has already been done, so i think this is probably it may be on the way out as it were. >> her husband and weight control over his wife or wives. and so he actually took a second wife. it was not uncommon at that time particularly because the more wives that you had come in the more animals in phuket process. so polygamy, it was very common with that society. among the indians and also among others as well who relied upon their wives as of the labor force to dress up loose ends. so that having been said, my sense of this is that there really was a love relationship between them. you stayed with them until the time of his death. many, many, most in fact, when they returned to the east, the united states after their time. and they would leave their children behind as well and i find that unfathomable as the father of young children. but almost alone among his contemporaries, there is a reason that he had lived more than half his life there. i think that he liked it and the so-called vigorous life. there is no doubt about that. there's no doubt that he also loves his family, his wives and his children. they all lived together on the ranch at the time that he was killed and most of them where they are and witnessed his murder firsthand. only his son was absent who is off looking for some cattle in the bear tooth mountains out of time. and so economics definitely. there was a lot of love between them as well. and i think the record supports that. [inaudible question] >> no, the people had resisted particularly americans in the early 19th century. they supported the whole 2.5 years of expedition and there was one fatal encounter between the indians and the discovery. it was called the key medicine fight in july of 1886. and the horses were involved as well. and so even before but certainly ever after they became very suspicious of the british operating individuals by contact. northern white men. he gives you the idea of the different ways that we look at these two different groups. and there were other reasons as well while they hated the americans particularly and you know, like the americans went right into the heart of black the country to separate the tracks. and this drove the indians to distraction. so there was a big history of conflict between the groups during the 1820s and 30s and 40s and sort of a relative period of racial accommodation when they showed up in droves because of the strikes as one person who i interviewed had talked about. and he described it is like water over a rock in terms of the influx in the 1860s. and so they had a history of these encroachments. but then the curtain comes down and i would say in a final act, just like that. because they are just so horrified that the americans would annihilate them with the smallpox camp. and of course the numbers were dwindling because of starvation and disease and it was hard to mount much of a defense. so it is definitive. even 10 years afterwards people who are involved explained and recognized that they had a completely before and after effects in this way pretty much ever after. so are there any other questions? >> okay. thank you very much. we appreciate it. [applause] >> he will be happy to sign your book. >> most happy to sign your book. >> for more information, visit the author's website at andrew graybill.com. >> during booktv's recent trip to chattanooga, tennessee, we took a tour of the papers of john t. wilder, who relocated to the south after killing an officer in the civil war. >> we are on the second floor of the library. this is a collection we acquired around 1960. she donated his military documents that her father wrote to their mother in the water. after the war there were a lot of union officers who moved from chattanooga to t