Going to be dragged along the bottom of the river, and you better prepare your family for this because you arek going to come back up and you are only going to have your underwear on. [laughing] so that was the big thing, fear, we had a lot of fears. There were deputy sheriffs in southern ohio. O. Southern ohio, southern indiana, Southern Illinois as deep south as you can get really, and they come over, we talk about it, come down to the boat. We talked for a while, maybe have a beer or two and they go all right, now what kind of weapons do you guys carry . We go weve been off three weeks now, everybody slept without guns. The look of consternation on these guys faces, you know. You mean yall are coming down this river and you dont have any weapons . And the reason they thought we needed weapons was the kids, we parked in cincinnati and paducah in places like that and kids were going to come out of the inner cities and they said, kids will come storming out of the ghettos, kill you and burn your boat. You need to be armed. And nothing could be further from the truth all the way down the river. What we did was, we met wonderful innercity kids b who came down to the boat and we got to baton rouge, and these africanamerican kids from that part of town, they spend a lot of time onbe the river because they catch fish. Of course they so some fish and we said why dont you stay, well make dinner together. After dinner one kid says, well, what kind of heater do you guys carry . Unit, im just this northern guy. We find it pretty hot down here on the Mississippi River during the summer, we dont have come we dont need any heaters. And the kid goes, man, thats the dumbest white guy ive ever met. 50 miles down the river from here you are going to be in cajun country, and then cajuns is going to come storming out of the swaps, kill you guys and burn your boat. You need heaters. Anyway, the world number of the things that is learn that i will keep this brief. I sailed from pennsylvania all the way to new orleans to rediscover a period of American History that is completely forgotten, but was actually probably the most influential. Mac which was thela flatboat era from between the revolution and the civil war when millions of tons of cargo and 39 americans traveled down the river and creatively the first frontier. Conquering fear, anything, the fear that people had along the river for us, you know. Do youou guys and how to tie a knot . You are going to die. E. [laughing] so editing out the fear was really what the book was about. We learn how to get down the river and get around the tags in a beating like that. Im not sure how to follow that. [laughing] i did write a book for this one about taking a canoe t trip down the river in the far north. Kennard that goes into the arctic ocean. I got some strange looks. And there were some [inaudible] no one told i was going to die the on that trip until the very end. But something that we were talking about before this, he forgot adhere, the kind of history that isor taught in school, the history that is not taught in school which theyre so much history are not taught in school that is what drew me to the story of the klondike gold rush. K. Host really at the beginning of the. Pack, in 1893 and the p tenant of 1893 at the time and worst depression the United States had ever suffered through, and some of the things that were wrong sounds familiar. It was one of the means of communication, like the. Com bubble were far ever built, too overbuilt, too many telegraphs and raid roads and businesses fail and people lose y their jobs, cant pay their mortgages, all their mortgages go under water, housing values drop, banks go out of business, one thingr after another. On top of all those, there was a fight over cold and silver. Should dollars be backed by gold or backed by silver . This was Williams Jennings brian and thehe start of populism. Im not an economist or populous professor and if i was id bore you to death. Gold backed dollars and worth more than silver backed dollars. So rich people kept the gold back and rich people with the silver backed. In the long depression of 1893, you have these headlines and the at the same time that people are on strike and cole miners coal miners getting in fights and young men shot in the streets and nobody can pay for their mortgage. There on the newspaper is the solution to everybodys problems. At as the gold has been discovered in the klondike. Not only wasik there gold, there was so much gold, it was like 70 million in plain sight like easter eggs on the ground is what the newspaper said. You could go up there. End up there and anyone could find this and so this starts the stampede of 1897. Guest nobody wants to move to alaska and they went for the gold and it was really packed in. Gold was discovered between 1896 and not to give away the end of the book, there was a cataclysm in 199 like a thousand days and the wholend story happens within that time. About 100,000 people went on the gold rush. To put it in perspective, thats about the combined population of los angeles and seattle. Huge number of people. The thing that i that made ma little bitt and wanted to write it was if i had learned anything about the klondike, it waswi smiling prospectors with long beards and dancing girls thatng are happy and just this bonanza of everybody got rich andha everything else. Thats not what happened at all of course. Hundred thousand people went up about 30 to 40,000 made it to dawson city, which means 60 or 70,000 did not make it. And a lot of them turned around, sure. But thaws and thousands of them died. We have now idea how many of them died. If you add up the number of people in ship wrecks and there were reportings in the papers and you get over 10,000 quickly. Its a horrific blood bath in a way and thats what i think my, you know, the way i wanted to write the story and kind of what i saw and may be different than a historian because im not a historian is just that it was a disaster. People died in ship wrecks and in famine and murdered and scurvy, and there was an expedition out of brooklyn where they all wore identical costumes and sombreros, which youll hear about in a minute perhaps. They wore sombreros and 19 went and only 4 lived through it and died one by one on a glacer and decided to cross between the mouth of a glacer. Trying to tell that as a narrative it remains for the story. As far as how to tell it, not everyone saw the whole gold rush and so i try to pull out, i ive got about 12 main characters and its ann ensemble cast and the prospector and the head of the northwest mounted police and gambler and newspaper man and some of these people you heard of was jack london. He was a nobody and worked in a pickle factory and made 10cents putting pickles in the jar and desperate to get out of it so he went up as a very young man on the stapedius muscle paid and mostly people learned and i benefited from the fact theres been lot of scholarship in the last 50 years where a lot of these a smaller stories have coe out and i was able to combine them. So i think, i dont know, hopefully something we can talk more about here but the thing that i did and iraq and what about this Kansas City Chiefs trip to the arctic canoe trip to the arctic. And the things that connects the work for me is that i have this allergy to glorification. Like to just getting the meth version of thebo story and my books about iraq and afghanistan, theres no glorification in those for sure. I wanted to write the rawest story that i could. Host you know, its kind of hard when you go and the first guy i talk about will come and burn your boat. The second guy, blood bath on the glacer. Obviously glacier. Obviously i wrote the kid friendly book. And American History and i try to write about subjects i can learn about and cant think anything worse than writing a book where you think you know everything and all youre doing is trying to prove youre right and everybody that disagrees is wrong. I always try to pick subjects that i know very little about and since i know very little about a lot of things, i imagine ill write another 25 books before im done at least. I lived in texas most of my life and were talking about border walls and floods and immigration and all of these things. I realize i didnt have the history and youre going to make sure that sex, drugs, and rock and roll. If you can get those three things, people will read your book. But there is sex. General pernt issuing is trying pershing is trying to court general pattons sister and makes general patton be their chaperon around beautiful el paso. Thats a romance thats going to work. In the same place, pancho vida and all of us can sort of hum. We dont know most of it is the real version. I hope we talk about in our books we try to look at maybe the portions of history that arent Common Knowledge and i started to write this book because i wondered about the invasion. We tried to keep out and then in 1910 the government said we needed this time. Were going to build that border wall. We leave the wall and the wall would just crumble. Afterr 1910, they decide that idea is not going to work. I wonder how come in this big 2016 Campaign Nobody is saying shouldnt we try this three times already . And heres what i think happened, i dont think the government was trying to fool americans. I think nobody just wanted to check and find out whether maybe somebody had h tried this befor. A little element of history, but its there if you wanted to look. I found lots of other things, sometimes it reflected badly on the American Government, sometimes it reflected badly on the Mexican Government. Lot of people died on the border that didntus have to because yu had two governments that didnt talk to each other. Finally we get 1916 poncho via attacking a columbus town in mexico. Their purpose was to enrage the American Military and have the armye chase them back into mexico. Baa arkansas because the mexican people would be so appalled that the gringos are coming to invade them again. In 1914 we came into mexico and captured the sea city of versusa cruznt and held for months. All these things. The problems that claim us today and obsess us have been problems that have been going on for centuries. Everything from gun control to the proper limited role of government, refugees coming in to take american jobs. This is all happened before and if there is one lesson in history that all of us write about, is if we dont face problems and try to solve them in a common sense way with everybodyy working together, were going to keep on facing them. Thats why books these guys write are important and the fact that people read them is also important. I thank all of you too. That followed the economic gression there were several but 1887 was severe too. So the book fit for me into an agenda and you study history and history is issued from on high by a few influencer protections and in america at that time, wealth was in your lamp post and George Washington died the wealthiest man in america, w80,000 acres and instead we we very, very effective during the revolution and the constitution and there were business members that wanted to get and started through all of American History and examining through that perspective and i thought i had a fairgrounding and the grounding nature of the grounding and with mexico and america werepr approximately the same size and how do we bring democracy and going to mexico for another four years because they didnt think the country was probably going to last. In 1825 they brought repress from the president and say sell us all your land that were in west and northwest into the country and new mexico extends up into wyoming at this time. The tornado government of mexico and reported to the mexican president that mexico plans to overrun us. Within 75 years, almost twothirds of what was mexico becomes part of the United States. People are off their land in a series of land courts were formed in the United States because investors would claim they had thexe title to the land that mexican families and what was america might have lived on for generations. Obviously improved much from there. By the time we have poncho vias raid. All of mexico, 95 of the arable land for farming or hunting or fishing, and working the land. Peak spl san antonios make up 8f the land working the land. If n all of mexico, the people owned 2 of the land. Things were going to bust and they did eventually. When i wrote this book, i was worry that i had would just see the American Government doing terrible things, and i didnt want to seeee that. And the American Government did do some terrible things, folks. The negotiators agreed the American People would pay 15 million for those little portions of arizona and new mexico. Everybody shook hands on it. Then it went to the senate to be ratified and the u. S. Senate said were only giving them 10 million. They may not like it but theyll have to take it anyways. 5 million is a lot of money. Crucial to mexico and it was arbitrarily taken away. Its also true that it was a fund in san diego and mexican militants had a plan to cross the border and people that were 16 and over in america would be murdered. They trieded to do it and the Mexican Government was actually supporting a lot of this. There was bad intention on both sides, and this has gone on all these years. Whats happened just as youre talking about the mississippi and these things take shape and form and were all part of our history as much as the present. We cant just say were going to lose history and the stuff we like will be true. Wrong speech, sorry. Talk about the thousands of deaths in addition to all the human death, there was slaughter of animals along the way. Well, and you tied the need to try to better themselves directly to the failure of the guilded age and the excesses of that time. The influence of the frontier is like a crew economic thing and as a philosophical thing and how america saw itself and the gold rush happened 30 years afteriv the civil war and of course of violence in the civil war dealt with the civil war with the area and line and we have a name for it at the time and there is like a huge influence on it and i mentioned that because a lot of people went to alaska at the time saw it as the end of that frontier push. And the characters in my book and bopped around the american best and kicking scammed for people going to the next one and he moved to alaska because he called it the last west. The last place without a telegraph line and the last place without a railroad, and it was going to be like the culmination of a lot of things these gym are talk about. Another one of the samuel steel is commander of the northwest mounted police and they have cannons and mortars and they wereou fighting indigenous peope across canada and he gets sent there to do two things and one is to stop the stampeders from killing themselves and save them from themselves but the other thing speaking of the Mexican Border was to establish the Canadian Border between alaska and canada there it was surveillance vied and wasnt guarded inda canada and trusts that the United States wasnt going to try to claim more territory and sam steel supported putting maximum machine guns on the border to keep the gangsters on the american side and only let the perspective prospectors or the people coming into dawson city through if they had enough food. The economic aspect of this and just the overall cost. You mentioned the cost of animals is one last little tidbit to wrap up on that. There were two halfs of alaska into the yukon and one was the chillton pass and traditional walking root with people for thousands of years. They call it had the white compass it was going to be where a railroad was supposed to go. They didnt know how to hitch horses and these were city folk and leaving the homestead in nebraska with frontier skills and moving to alaska, they were leaving new york and chicago and seattle and they wore slip on shoes and suits and road in trolly cars and a lot had electricity and a lot of People Like Us and they get up to alaska, and do you know how to hitch a saddle on a horse or put a load on. Do you know how to build a boat if you had to, which is what they had touchdown pass go down the river. They dont know how to do any of these things and dont know how to treat horses and the white pass ends up being called the Dead Horse Pass because tens of thousands of animals died as theyre specially whipped up the a horse was 10 or 15 or 20 at the bottom and 10cents at the top to purchase one because theyre absolutely worthless and they killed them at the top and piled the bodies. This is the cost of doing business, i guess is the theme that youre hearing. Rinker and you had a big old boat and went down into the Mississippi Riveras and tell usa bit about the flat boats and how it compared to the tugs and barges you wrote amongst. My vote was by 14 feet and that was loaded two back. You had to get use to do the idea that he cant turn, he cant move. You absolutely cannot occupy his space and the challenge and challenging the fun of it and thats why its a page for her. Then only 50 miles or so. The folks had no idea what they were getting into or what it was like. E. I did go to alaska and i did a couple stopped a couple other places to get taught how to pan for gold, which was great because then give the experiences to the miners and how it worked. And all these terms and pea dirt that come from the klondike gold rush and you cant dig in perm frost and its frozen muck, you cant put space in it and every night theyd build a fire and burn their way down and every morning theyd get in with the slush thats like 33 degrees, dig it out and put it in a bucket. Winch it out and dump it in a bucket ande then theyd do that all winter. At the end of winter, theres a holee that goes down and then theyd try to find a pay streak till yous have these galleries underneath. They kind of burn their way through youre underneath the perm frost there and in the pay streak theres 200 a pan and five feet over their 5cent as pan and theyre hunting this streak everywhere they go. In the spring, youd have cleanup, which is where the creek was finally flowing and then the creeks flowing and then pulling the gold out and thats w