#2058 - Elliott West

Elliott West (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

Hello, sir. Thanks for doing this, I really appreciate it.

Elliott West (0:15)

You're quite welcome.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

I really enjoyed you on the Meat Eater Podcast, and that's why I reached out, and I started reading the book on the Nez Perce, and then I picked this up as well, Continental Reckoning. That is, that's a hell of a book.

That's a big book. That's a big book. How long did it take you to write this?

Elliott West (0:35)

The writing probably eight to ten years, the research and so forth, more than 20 years, yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:41)

Wow.

Elliott West (0:42)

Yeah, a long time.

Joe Rogan (0:43)

So this is a lifetime of work.

Continental Reckoning, The American West in the Age of Expansion, one of the most fascinating subjects, I think, in the history of the human race. I mean, it is just such an amazing story and such a tragic story and such a crazy story of the amount of change that took place over a relatively short period of time.

Elliott West (1:06)

Yeah, 30 years.

Joe Rogan (1:07)

Yeah, and how little most people really understand about the actual history of the Native Americans and that. One of the things that was most fascinating about the Meteor podcast was that at the time that Lewis and Clark had come to America a hundred years before that, there had been Native Americans that had traveled to France.

Elliott West (1:31)

That's right.

Joe Rogan (1:32)

And met with the King.

Elliott West (1:33)

Yep, yep, yep. That's right. 1720s, there was a group of Native people from Kansas, Missouri area, and they had been accorded by the French because the French wanted to expand their fur trade into that area of the Missouri River.

The Spanish had recently suffered a terrible military defeat there in sort of western day Eastern Nebraska. So the French sent this guy named Etienne Bourgmont to make contact. He already had contact there. In fact, he had a son by one of the women in the Missouria tribe.

Made contact, made some friends, made some allies, accorded them, and then to sort of seal the deal, he took back a delegation of about six Indians. Now this is from eastern Nebraska.

Joe Rogan (2:25)

Which tribe was this?

Elliott West (2:26)

There were several tribes. The Missouria tribe, the Illinois tribe, I think some Osage. And they were, he then took them back from there down to Mississippi, down to New Orleans, and then over across the Atlantic to Le Havre. And then they went by coach from there to Paris. And they spent several months there in Paris, being fitted by King Louis XV, visiting the Paris Opera, which they said was a great place full of sorcerers.

Sorcerers, sorcerers.

Joe Rogan (2:59)

Why did they describe it as sorcerers?

Elliott West (3:01)

I think they figured these people were just sort of transformed for their eyes. They just became somebody else, a great actress, of course. I think that was it. They saw this famous puppet show on the Pont Neuf Bridge, and they said this place was inhabited by small dwarfs.

They loved it. They were taken to the Courte de Fontainebleau. They showed their expertise at hunting by riding bareback in the Bois de Boulogne, the Royal Woods, naked and bareback, shooting pheasants. They had a great time. A woman who was in fact the woman who had born Bourgman's child, she married a sergeant in Notre Dame.

They had a wonderful time, and the men liked just about everything except the men, the other men, the French men. They said they were sort of effeminate and sissy, and they said they smelled like alligators. Alligators.

Joe Rogan (4:04)

Interesting.

Elliott West (4:05)

But this was the 1720s, so that's what, 80 years or something, before Lewis and Clark even made it out to that area.

Joe Rogan (4:13)

That is so fascinating. Now, what was the language barrier? How did they communicate?

Elliott West (4:19)

Well, Bourbon himself had lived for years among the Indians, and was an expert on the Missouri River. So he was a Frenchman who came over, enlisted in the army, deserted, sort of went native, became a coure d'oeuvres, a French mountain man, took up with the Indians, had this child by this woman. So he knew the language just quite well. And there were other, remember these Indians, as you can tell in this story, were very cosmopolitan, very sophisticated. They knew English, or some of them did. So I think the point to remember is that this, long before our image of Americans coming into this area, there was all sorts of contact between native peoples and Europeans, all sorts of exchanges.