Thank you guys so much for being here. Im niki coffman, director of events and marketing at parnassus books. Where delighted to have you here. If youre not already please join us, like us on facebook. With so many exciting things coming down the pike. I just let this one out of the bag last night. Roxanne day is coming. I know. In july. Its very exciting and shes one of many, many, many brilliant basically to events a day between now and the indigent. Make sure youre on our email list or follow us on facebook. Tonight author has been a friend to us for the whole time he has been we watched his kids go from really small guys to birdie awesome guys who are deeply, deeply interested in star wars and mine craft, and this is her second event with him. Its always a pleasure to host summit in your community. So it gives me great pleasure to give you guys daniel sharfstein. [applause] thank you, niki. Its so wonderful to be here at parnassus books. These kind of places, i think of parnassus books as a cultural institution. These kinds of places we cant take them for granted. We remember, i remember very well, i think we all do, the dark days of 2011 when there was no bookstore in town. And fastforward to today and right now the National Endowment for the humanas is under existential threat, and im taking a page from holly tucker who was he a couple of weeks ag. And she was talking, and i agree, that so many public conversations about history and American Culture are supported by the neh, including the seven festival of books. And it wouldnt be an author. My books would not exist without the neh fellowship i received as an independent scholar back in 2004, which took which took me out of the practice of law and gave me the time and the space to begin work on my first book. And ultimately gave me a career as a professor here in nashville. Without the neh there would be one more lawyer in the world. [laughing] and thats probably something we dont need. So its great to see so many dear friends here tonight. I spent five full years working on thunder in the mountains. And a project like that is like a marathon and a sprint. Every day you just have to go back to it and just give it your all. And for so much of that time, the friendship, the conversation and the excitement that i found from so many people here in nashville just gave me the energy and the inspiration that i needed to get this done. So i owe so much to the community that we found here in nashville, and so in some ways i think of this book as a nashville book. But the book actually takes place about as far away as you can get from nashville, and still be in the continental United States. It takes place in the most remote areas of the Mountain West. If you ever look at those mesmerizing maps of cellular coverage, theres this sliver of nothingness right where this book takes place. Something i learned the hard way when i was traveling. [laughing] its so remote that when i first knew that this was going to be a project that i really would be spending my time on, my first call was to the vanderbilt allergy clinic to see if they could inject me with something so i could ride a horse without having a horrible reaction. So thunder in the mountains takes place far away, but the history it explores hits close to home. The decades after civil war and reconstruction are a crucial moment for america. Its when the foundation was laid for the battles that were still fighting over the college was a liberty and equality, the relationship between race and citizenship, and the proper size, scope and purpose of government. Lets think about it. In 1865 the United States was aa beacon of liberty and equality to the world. The nation that has fought a long and bloody struggle to abolish slavery, and the government was devoting itself to turning millions of people who had been held as slaves into citizens. The congress created a new agency, the freedmans of bureau, to redistribute confiscated rebel land and help freed people get paying jobs if the bureau built schools and hospitals, orphanages, asylums, and tire court systems. It was the first big federal social Welfare Agency in american history. About 1865. But by 1900, america was following a very different course. Instead of working to integrate all people into the body politic, the entire purpose of the government had shifted. All that policymaking energy that had been devoted to making our nation free and equal was now redirected to project of sifting and sorting, keeping the races separate. Segregation and disenfranchisement, jim crow was the rule of the south and the informal role for much of the rest of the country. Every two or three days and africanamerican was lynched somewhere in the south. That basically happens every two or three days for decades. 1900, chinese immigrants were banned from the u. S. , and places like ellis island where less places of entry than places of exclusion. Places that guarded and secured and maintained the integrity, you know, often explicitly defined as the racial purity of our borders. The u. S. Was, 1900, an imperial power with territories that stretched from san juan to manila. A person with dark skin was as likely to be a colonial subject as a citizen. So from 1865 to 1900, from emancipation to empire. This is a quick and stunning turn of our sense of america and the purpose and direction of its government. In our current pivot from one administration to another, i think there are lots of lessons that we can draw from these decades after reconstruction. Because a lot of the struggles, a lot of the ideas in conflict are the same. So my book considers the broad transformations that the u. S. Was making in these years following reconstruction, but to the eyes of individual americans, i wanted to show how real people saw and experienced these ethical transformations. And in particular, i focus on two important but underappreciated americans. An army general named Oliver Otis Howard, and a native american chief named joseph who is a leader of a small band of nez perce indians and far northeastern oregon. So who was Oliver Otis Howard . He was a maine yankee and a west point graduate. He had piercing blue eyes and a beard that basically would put zz top duchenne. [laughing] one of the challenges to shame. One of the towns about writing about late 19th century soldiers and settlers is there are only so many ways you can describe a huge beard. I once saw an envelope that walt whitman filled out while he was writing when lilacs laughed, just a list of the saddest words he could think of. But for me it was like a list, bushy, riffling, big beard, Oliver Otis Howard. A turning point in his life occurred in the late spring of 1857 when god started speaking to him. He was 26 years old. He was desperately lonely and depressed while battling clouds of mosquitoes and flies in the worst most remote posting imaginable, campo florida. [laughing] he called it a field for selfdenial, tampa. Could be on welcome to tampa. [laughing] the civil war broke out right as howard was about to resign from the army, go to seminary and pursue the ministry. But he stayed and he thought from bull run onward. He lost his right arm during the Peninsula Campaign in 1862, almost to the shoulder. Makes actually reading his letters a real challenge. He had a very nice hand before he lost his right arm. Not so nice afterwards. But within a few months he healed and he went right back to the front, and he wound up ending the war as one of shermans commanders in the march to the sea and then the final push to the carolinas. Fighting for the union became his way of serving god, of creating gods kingdom on earth. As the civil war was ending, howard was tasked to head the Freedmens Bureau, this bold new experiment in governing. And at root the agencies tasked, howards task was to give concrete meaning to liberty and equality. Of liberty and equality, these values that were boldly pronounced but never precisely defined in the emancipation proclamation and the 13th and 14th amendments. A historian once described the central question of this moment aas a moment right after the civil war as how free is free . And the bureaus role, howards role, was undeniable crucial to answering that. Now, history of reconstructionist cast otis howard as a flawed hero. In many ways he embodied the limitations that the federal governments efforts to remake the rebel south. The historian william mcfeely, he gave howard almost 50 years ago he gave howard the ominous epithet, the yankee stepfather. And im sure that theres some very nice yankee stepfather, but doesnt sound that great. Still, howard was a true champion of africanamerican civil rights. During the civil war he was constantly meeting men and women with cross union army line searching for freedom. And every encounter convinced him all the more of the crucial fact of africanamerican equality. And after the war, there were plenty of abolitionists who would all kinds of racist white supremacist views, but not howard. Plenty of people who would parse the meaning of the quality. They would say political equality is one thing, but sold equality is a totally different thing. Howard saw equality as a unitary concept. Equality meant equality. So after the war he integrated his church in washington at some considerable political cost, and he channeled a tremendous amount of Freedmens Bureau resources to education. And when a new university for black men and women was established in washington, d. C. , in 1867, initial is going to be a Theological School but howard said no. It has to be a university, a medical school, a law school. And it was only natural that it would be named for howard, howard university. Now, howard thought his role in reconstruction was gods providence, that he was convinced that this would be the cause of the rest of his life, the civil war ended, he was 34, wondering are my best days passed me. Then this happened. And this is why itd been put on earth, it was what he was meant to do. But then it all fell apart. The reconstruction collapsed. The bureaus mission was compressed and then snuff out, and by the 1870s the politics of the nation had fundamentally shifted. Otis howard, he found himself a lightning rod for attacks on reconstruction. He personally was humiliated. The bureau lost all kinds of credibility in public opinion. The stress caused his wife to miscarry their eighth child. And howard nearly went broke defending himself from corruption charges. So what do you do when your lice work is a thing life everything which gave it meaning is destroyed . Howard went searching for redemption and he thought he could find it not by leaving government and protesting what it was turning into, but by staying and serving. Some ways if you read the papers, this is a familiar dilemma for people who were serving one administration, now it is a new administration. And after being exonerated by one last investigation, howard was able to rejoin the activeduty military in the summer of 1874. 1874. Andy was given command of the armies department of the columbia based in portland, oregon. It seemed to him and do seem to his friends to be a merciful exile. Just a clean break from his life in washington. He saw his time in the west as his great second chance, just as it was for so many other americans. And in his drive for personal redemption, i think he may have struggled to make sense of the new american order, but he was determined to succeed in it. And what did he do out west . A big part of his job involved forcing native americans onto reservations. And in a way reservation policies enacted a fantasy of reconstruction, of giving people small plots of land, connecting them with all kinds of social services. And howard thought could be done peacefully, and that held true for a few years, but in the summer of 1877, howard led a military campaign against a group of nez perce families who refused to leave their ancestral territory. About 900 or so men, women, and children fled from oregon through idaho and montana down into wyoming, across the newly created Yellowstone National park. They took the first, some of the first towards their hostage. Then they cut Straight North to montana to the buffalo planes trying to reach canada. For nearly four months, close to 114 miles of some of the roughet terrain in the country, they outran howard and his troops. And then in early october 1877 soldiers trapped the families just one day away from the border. They were starving. They were freezing. They were devastated by months of vicious battle. And their surviving leader was chief joseph. The title of my book, thunder in the mountains, comes from chief justice. His nez perce name is translated as thunder rolling in the mountains or fund arising to ever loftier heights. And as much as this book is about howard, chief joseph is its heart. For a time when theres all kinds of discussion about the nature of protests, how to move our politicians, i see josephs story as an important touchstone. Who is chief joseph . Howard had met and negotiated with him before the war. He was someone who had emerged as a nez perce spokesman in the early 1870s. He was a pretty young man, abot 30 years old. Outranked by many other chiefs who had long experienced hunting buffalo and fighting rival tribes to the east. But joseph made an immediate impression on howard and on many other officials. For one thing he was tall. He was over six feet. He towered over howard. Howard, i like to think a little shorter than me. [laughing] and you know, he was strikingly handsome, and people who negotiated with him described mesmerizing encounters. He didnt just shake hands. He would clutch i hand and gazed deep into peoples eyes. That was a practice that projected strength and immense confidence, but also communicated a certain vulnerability. When howard first met in the spring of 1875, he wrote that joseph had looked into his soul while revealing his motives in terms. Joseph inspired incredible trust, and a flood of all manner of romantic descriptions. Even from people who professed to doubt the very humanity of native americans. Now, when joseph argued that his band should be allowed to keep their ancestral territory, he forcefully engaged the language of universal liberty and equality in his attempt to reserve his tribes place in changing america. We only ask and even chance to live as other men live, joseph famously said. Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where i choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself, and i will obey every law or submit to the penalty. We recognize this as a very modern expression of american right. And howard would have immediately recognized josephs ideas in this rhetoric, his vision of what it means to be an american citizen. He was engaging many of the same ideas, the same values that howard had pioneered as commission of the Freedmens Bureau. By the time he first met howard, joseph was a seasoned advocate. One thing that surprised me as a begin my research is how often joseph had argued his case in the five years leading up to the war. When ranchers started encroaching on nez perce lands in oregons valley, 1872, they told joseph rightly that the valley have been put in the Public Domain and that the General Land Office had divide it up into homesteads. So that presented joseph with a real challenge. In many ways we would look at that and just think, thats the end of the story. For joseph it was just the beginning. He had to figure out how to move the federal government, how to find and connect with american power, change official policy. At all of this from incredibly isolated Mountain Valley 2500 miles from washington. And when i sit and isolated Mountain Valley, what does that mean . I get a sense of that which i drove into the valley, and it is a real white knuckler of a drive. Hairpin turns and get to one stretch of hairpin turns, you think, survived that, and then you see a sign that is hairpin turns next 14 miles. And when the settlers first tried to move into the valley, they had the wagons. They were rolling along and then they just looked up at these mountains and what they had to do was take apart the wagons, climb to the top of the mountain and then at a certain point they would put the wagons back together. They would cut down the biggest tree they could find, tie it as an anchor to the wagons and then like roller coaster that way down into the valley. So this is a very remote place, very far from washington, d. C. . To make matters even more difficult, joseph didnt speak english. He only spoke nez perce, and a regional trade language. So what did he do . Other nez perce leaders laid row are retreated into the mountains. Adjusted decided to plead his case to every federal official he could possibly find. He went to the local indian agents, the regional supervisor, congressman home for reset and he pressed his claim and tell the report of washington that joseph was right. He met with settlers and convinced many of them, too. Whats amazing is almost immediately josephs efforts bore fruit. Everything a meeting he had people would say im just one guy 2500 miles from washington. What can i do . But just a year after he began advocating in 1873, president grant signed an executive order reserving a substantial portion of the valley to the nomadic nez perce band. And didnt land yanked out of the Public Domain and given back to an indian tribe was no small achievement. But india in that order resolved nothing. Oregons governor and congressional delegation immediately appealed to the secretary of the interior. And ultimately by 1875 that led to a second executive order open up the valley settlement once again. One here we are another moment which couldve been the end of this where it gets interesting. You think an order from the president , a reversal of an earlier order with just be a a final statement of what was going to be. But joseph didnt see the second executive order as resolving his claims with any finality, as he kept pressing and he convinced multiple Army Officers sent to investigate the situation that the nez perce or the rightful owners of the valley. He also asked repeatedly to be allowed to go to washington and meet with president grant facetoface. Joseph intuitively understood he was finding out how the american state worked. It had many faces and had many competing authorities. The power in america was split and it remains split in so many different ways. Among federal, state and local governments, among legislative executive and judicial branches, between civilian and military authorities, and among overlapping agencies that compete with each other all the time. So the courts, they follow elaborate procedures, at the legislative process was similarly protracted and highly choreographed. But america, after the civil war, was increasingly governed by administrative and executive branch. In many ways its the way we live now. And while the government was getting more adept at limiting policies come in essence the technology of governing was improving, policymaking at the executive level is wideopen. Farflung bureaucrats were reved with a commence amount of discretionary authority. And this created a fluid core of government power that almost begged its subjects to contest every decision. Theres always some else to turn to and often it seemed that persistent in this process could be leveraged into rights. Joseph saw this. He figured it out. But howard never understood this even though he had lived through this kind of governing as head of the Freedmens Bureau doing reconstruction. He saw chief joseph not a someone who is participating in a new american process, but rather someone who is shown disrespect for it. Someone who could only be governed by brute force. Howard had a great deal of say and how he would work with the tribe, but he refused to take a conciliatory path. In may 1877, he gave josephs band 30 days to move with herds of thousands of horses and cattle from oregon to idaho at a time when the many rivers that were to be crossed, including the snake river, hells canyon, deeper than the grand canyon, and the salmon. These were at flood stage. These were rivers, multiple rivers to be crossed that howard himself described as torrance with mountain banks. And howards ultimatum all but sparked the war. Once hostilities began how the single mind as he pursued the nez perce to the mountains. But military victory did not mean redemption for howard, as much as he was looking for it. And almost immediately he recognized this, that the moment of josephs surrender, it was as if howard was no longer the hero of his own story. Ultimately, howard wound up playing a key role in making a place for joseph in American Culture. He publicize josephs words and discussed the cheap at length in the three books. Largely because of howard, joseph surrendered statement in which he declared i will fight no more forever, became one of those recited speeches in american schools after the gettysburg address. And in the end it was chief joseph and not general howard who became an inspiration to generations of civil rights activists. In my book i carry josephs legacy into the 20th century by exploring how howards aid to camp met joseph at the surrender and was changed and radicalized by him pick out also josephs nephew, yellow wolf, kept josephs story alive. In effect, howard enabled his enemy celebrity, his enemies legend to outlive his own. Josephs expansive sense of liberty and equality made him a leading figure of the said at the end of the 19th century. Howard arguably betrayed the old values of abolition and union and reconstruction when he played his part in conquering the west and building a new regime. But also in a way joseph recharged some of the old values of liberty and equality with a new power to speak to a changing nation. His rhetoric is so poignant, so moving that its easy to overlook that joseph was not simply making a plea for a full package of rights as an american. What we might call citizenship. More specifically, he was trying to define citizenship in an age of big government. If he was claiming the right to participate in the pretentious struggles built into our new modern way of governing, the right to speak to the state until you are heard. He represents a set of ideas, as set of methods that arguably we need more than ever. Thank you. [applause] so im happy to take questions. This is being taped, so theres a man with a mic, a boom. Theres a key grip. [laughing] so you can raise your hands and they will just wait for the mic to reach you. Can you talk a little bit more about the research you did this for the book and where you found materials and primary sources, especially on the chief joseph side . Thats a great question. There are actually just tremendous wealth of manuscripts relating to the nez perce war. And in large part its because chief joseph became such a celebrity. Right around when chief joseph died there were lots of people who were just, chief josephs loss. And the most prominent is someone i discussed in the book boss sheep rancher in yakima washington with a wonderful name of mcwherter. His son was overlaid. Mcwherter was someone who sold his farm in ohio, moved to the Yakima Valley so we could be near native americans. Chief josephs band, they bound up in exile on and union reservation in kind of northcentral washington. And there is a longstanding practice of being migrant hops pickers during the summer season. One year, hops, stealing Yakima Valley is the place to be, and when i was, realize i would be writing about hops picking, i went to a home brew store here in nashville. They opened up the fridge and gave me some Yakima Valley hops to kind of huff. [laughing] in 1970 chief josephs nephew yellow wolf came to an bond of camping on mcwherter land. And mcwherter was dying to talk to them. And yellow book was someone who joined the decades after the war, 30 years after the war, yet been a young warrior to the conflict, never spoke a word about it really afterwards, but he decided it was time to tell his story picky found an interpreter, i nez perce manhood fought for the army in the philippines, and started telling this story, and mcwherter realized that what america needed was a history of the nez perce war from the nez perce point of view. And if he gain the cause of the rest of his life. So he, over the next 35 years, tracked down and interviewed as many nez perce survivors of the war as he could possibly find. And then as many settlers as he could find and as many Army Veterans as he could find. He started putting on wild west shows all around in the northwest, stopping them exclusively with nez perce survivors of the war so we could interview them in their off hours. And he was very specific in his questioning and kind of obsessive and really wanted to corroborate everything. He would interview people in person and then you would write people letters where, there some lawyers in the crowd i know, and it looked like interrogatories, whether would be a question and things would be a blank space for people to write their answer. And the questions were so detailed. They were along the lines of during this battle, somebody, this person mentioned that he had a dog. Do you know what happened to the dog . [laughing] and when he died in the 1940s, they made and ask to Washington State university, you want the quarters papers . And they figured sure, you know, there will be a few native american artifacts that we can throw into our treasure room. And instead they got 26 linear feet of firsthand accounts of the nez perce war, of nez perce, all kinds of discussions of nez perce life. Its just amazing archive there are other archives like that, and then on the other side, Oliver Otis Howard never saw a sheet of paper that he didnt want to fill front and back with his own handwriting, and his aid was someone who wrote constantly and he met joseph entered afterwards washed up of the arm and he hung out a shingle and became a lawyer in oregon. But he always wanted to be a writer. When he was at west point he wrote his dad and said i dont know about this soldiering. Maybe it would be fun to join the French Foreign legion or write novels. And his father wrote back and said, ive never been more ashamed then when i received that letter from you. He came from a very strict presbyterian family. They were not allowed to whistle on the sabbath. But he wrote, he wanted to be a writer, and we debate enough money to retire from the practice of law, he went fulltime into being a bohemian poet. So he had letters. He had diaries and journals, and theres just a level of specificity that you get in all of these manuscripts. It really was just incredible to read. People preserve their letters because the nez perce war was significant. In part because of joseph, theres so much to write about. Mike . You talked about [inaudible] that howard had and it sounds like he exercise it in a very harsh way. I wonder, that seems inconsistent with his past back rent and a wonder if you have an explanation you can offer for the . Thats a good question. Howard was someone who not only had a long experience with working with African Americans in the south and really working with them to try and allow them to flourish, but there was a moment in the early 1870s before he was sent to the west where he was sent as an envoy to try negotiate peace. They had been at war with the u. S. For years and years and years and years, and howard actually, much to the chagrin of the Army Commanders in the area, just went to the stronghold without much of a guard at all. Basically unarmed. Very conciliatory, very open, very warm way, sort of convinced him to put down his weapon. And so he had experienced data with native americans in a very conciliatory way. In a way he saw the reservation as really important alternative to war and genocide basically. So it is puzzling, and theres this moment when howard said that the wallowa valley should be retained by the nez perce, and then a year later right after the battle of little big horn he went to washington and he convinced the government to reopen the nez perce issue so they could be another set of negotiations to really settle it finally. And he made this pitch, after testers last stand, that the wallowa valley was the most important flashpoint that could potentially become another big indian war, and he goes washington and says, i can prevent this. And for the first time in years and years, action on a bipartisan basis, the newspapers hailed him as a potential hero, someone who could prevent a ruinous war, and then he was hazed so much during reconstruction for financial impropriety, newspaper said that only will he give us peace, but he will save the as millions and millions and millions of dollars. So it is just redemption tied up in a boat. And then he went out to meet with joseph. He was empowered to do this final negotiation, and he had set himself up as this hero. And joseph said, im not doing that. And when joseph said no, and when joseph then actually refused to think that the commission was the final word on this, because his experience was nothing was the final word on this, you always keep fighting, that our transcript of the meeting and the transcript of this meeting, its really something to read. Because you see howard lose his temper. And so this is something that, you know, howard saw. He was so close to getting what he was hoping to get in the west, and then joseph stood in the way. And i think his reaction after that, i mean, in many ways seems reflexive to that point. Judge . To the front. So dan, you say it took you five years to work on this book. In my mind when you say that i see you scrambling around the country trying, looking for resources when, in fact, it sounds like there mightve been too much material. I mean, is it possible, 26 linear feet is a lot of material. Can you find yourself in a position where you just have more than you really need or want . Oh, yeah. Mcwherter was trying to write a history of the nez perce war, and he wrote a lot, and still died before he could do it, you know, took him decades. This certainly, this book would not have worked without some very Good Research assistants who were helping me manage this tremendous amount of paper. I guess i couldve put it through e discovery and could have been sorted in the way lawyers do it now, you know, whenever hundreds of thousands of pages. It took a long time and it was a lot of work. For me, the manuscripts were not the hardest challenge. The thing where i dealt, i felt i needed to put the most Mental Energy into was really figure out the terrain. You can read lots of manuscripts and get a really good sense of what kind of a blowbyblow was, but i had never really been, never spent much time in the Mountain West at all. So going there, just in the allotted time outside, you know, theres actually an wonderful travel guide called following the nez perce trail and to give you three courses. They kind of route you can take in a winnebago, a route you can take any four by four, and then a route you can take if, you know, i dont know, youre a bolder person than i am. And traveling that, you know, it was amazing to see the wallowa valley, just to get a sense of the mountains. There are these moments where nez perce lawyers we describe a battle and they would say, on the battlefield we recognize some of the people shooting at us who were settlers who promised as safe passage and werwill submit. And i thought to myself, really . How can actually detect the face of someone who shooting at you through the smoke, dodging bullets. And then you go to the battlefields and the battlefields are basically the size of this room, where people are sitting on different elevations. And you realize oh, you know, you can see everyone who shooting at you. Or getting a sense of hells canyon, this canyon deeper than the grand canyon. The wallowa valley, when you are there, and it looks like gentle Rolling Prairie in every direction. But then you take like two steps to the right and its like the earth falls away. Its like a scene out of, i dont know, dated reference, a scene out of the gods must be crazy, at the end of the earth. And you think, well, this must be the boundary. Nez perce people, they cant get past this. No one can get past this. Whats amazing is, nez perce territory extended another one of miles to the east, and these families lived their lives going up and down canyons and up and over mountains. And in a way it taught me something. We tend, well stay at a hotel and we will see a mountain, and it is sublime, its a miracle, right . Flatland, thats kind of every day, but you get a sense of what was at stake in this war when you realize that, for these nez perce families, it was almost the reverse. In the mountains every day. Every day youre going up and down. And the real miracle was flatland, the places where you could be safe, places where you could prosper, places where you can relax, where you can come together with other bands and other families. And so i think the manuscript work was daunting, but the traveling just walking where they walked and eventually, you know, for a little portion riding horses were people rode was equally important. You have mentioned it now twice kind of in passing about you learning to ride a horse and writing through yellowstone. So what exactly was out like . Well, i should sit at the beginning i should say at the beginning i had a very wonderful teacher, national is a great place to learn how to ride a horse. And i went to the allergy clinic and they tested and they said, you know, what your mother has been telling all your life is wrong. You are not allergic to horses. [laughing] very convenient to keep off a horse, but its really just the dust from the horses, euro, getting in your eyes, irritate your eyes. So you just need to take claritin and you have to wear the most horrible pair of goggles anyone has ever seen. And you will be fine. So i was led to a really wonderful writing instructor, edges of these beautiful farms south of the city. And learn how to ride. It was me and then there were like 1511yearold girls who were all just fabulous horse women here i was so impressed with their writing skills, and then theres me just holding on for dear life thinking keep your heels down, keep your heels down. By the end of the summer at least i was able to ditch the goggles and what i will say is, it was really amazing. Thinking i wanted to ride somewhere along the wallowa valley trail and i would need a guide. This wasnt going to be just me on a horse, and i figured yellowstone, it would be easier to find an excellent guide their man many other places along the trail. So i asked the Yellowstone National park historian if you could suggest the guide and suggest a wonderful guide. What i will say is my writing technique, i sort of ride like a new york cab driver drive, one hand on the horn, but it worked. It worked. What was the sequence of topics or interests that brought you to this particular topic . Thats a great question. So my first book was a history of the color line, and really it was a history of our progression from slavery to freedom to jim crow. And its told through a few, three multigenerational family stories. And one of the families, the main figure really, one of the main characters in the book, was a man who was born a slave, moved to ohio, had an unusual father who was his master who freed him and send it to be raised by radical abolitionists, and went into the union army and then wound up after the war working in the Freedmens Bureau in washington, d. C. So researching his story i looked in the Oliver Otis Howard papers, because howard was his boss come to see if there was correspondence, at the were a bunch of great letters. Most of the letters were clustered during the heyday of the Freedmens Bureau, 1867, 1868. And then theres this tenyear gap. As a letter in 1878 that was addressed to Oliver Otis Howard in portland, oregon. The letter says dear general howard, hope youre doing well. I am raising money for Political Movement called the negro exodus, which raising money to help relocate africanamericans from the south to points north and west. And do you think washington territory would be a good place to resettle africanamericans . And i thought to myself, howard, he was from maine. He was a washington insider, you know, what was he doing in portland, oregon . At that point i just started wondering, you know, chief joseph in the nez perce war was somewhat i was aware of. What are the first books i ever read was a childrens biography of chief joseph. It came out when i was six, called chief joseph, guardian of his people. [inaudible] exactly, yes. So i thought what is howard doing in the northwest . And could he have been the one who chased the nez perce families to the mountains . And when i researched it, it ws amazing. Howard is this hero, this flawed hero of southern history, and then you look in western histories and he is not a hero. Flawed or otherwise. And the notion that would be to howards, you know, how one howard became the other howard. I knew that this was, was going to take up a lot of my weekends. [laughing] thank you. [applause] when you get up, stack your chairs to the outside. Dan would be so happy to sign your book. If you like him too. Just we will be writer at the desk and come on up. One more big round of applause. [applause] [inaudible conversations] booktv is on twitter and facebook, and we want to hear from you. Tweet us, twitter. Com booktv or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook. Com booktv. This is booktv on cspan2, television for serious readers. Heres our primetime lineup. At 7 30 p. M. Eastern, David Davenport provides a history of american individualism and questions where they can survive in the country today. On timeline up. That all happens tonight on cspan2s booktv. [inaudible conversations] welcome, everyone, hello. Who is that up there with me . My name is pattie sellers. I asked Leigh Gallagher how long we have known each other. Leigh gallagher just celebrated her 10th anniversary at fortune zi