Understand the history of mississippi and share the history of mississippi. Thank you so much. Im chris. Good luck with the Mississippi Department of archives and history. Our session is titled uniquely American History. And in one way or another, these three books touch on nearly every state in the union, as well as our neighbors to the north and the south. Well hear from each of our authors about the stories that they tell in your books. And then ill ask a few questions before opening it up for questions and comments from you all. Please remember. That since we are on cspan and the viewers wont be able to hear your question unless you go to the microphone and ask it. There. So all comments and questions take it to the podium. Jeff lynne has chronicled the Southwestern United States in such american undesirable roles as bonnie and clyde. Charles manson and jim jones. Lives in fort worth, texas, and is a member of the texas literary hall of fame for such bestselling books as go down together the last gunfight, manson the road, the jonestown town and waco. Today, hell tell us about his new book, war on the border, via pershing, the Texas Rangers and an american invasion. Brian castner is a former explosive Ordnance Disposal officer who received a bronze star for his service in the iraq war. He and his family live in buffalo, new york, and hes the author of the books the long walk and all the ways we kill and die and the coeditor of the 2017 anthology, the road ahead. His journalism and essays have appeared in esquire wire, vice, the new york times, the washington post, the atlantic and other publications. Hell talk to us about his most recent book, stampede, gold, fever and disaster in the klondike. And read your book began his career in journalism at the Berkshire Eagle and was a longtime staff writer for the hartford courant. Hes written for vanity fair, new york life and many other publications, and his work has won the pen new england award. The eugene as pulliam National Journalism writing award and the society of professional journalists, sigma delta car. Buck is the bestselling author of the oregon trail flight passage. And first, joe. Hes traveled from his home in tennessee. Be with us today and talk about his book, life on the mississippi an epic american adventure. Although incorrect. Regret to inform you that you did not survive this fools errand of a safari traveling down the Mississippi River. Or at least thats what everyone said as a team down the river. My technique is used in the last couple of books. If i want to tell about your betrayal, i look at a team of mules to a genuine 1883 wagon, and i ride the trail. Took us four months and for this book ive built this lifeboat up in tennessee seven all the way from pittsburgh to new orleans to see the conditions of it. Im not a reenactor, but see the conditions of 3 million americans who cant go at that original frontier pass how they saw the country from the water. And hes referring to the fact that in all these river states, people are terrified of river, of lost family homes on the river. And they have brothers, nephews, whatever, who work on the tugboats pushing the largest. And there are accidents. And there are deaths. So the big scene was, you know, the pull of somewhere really nice tipped anvil matches or whatever, at least a we used to come down. You guys die. You know, and theyre just below here. Theres a whirlpools in this river. And when you get that boat stuck in that pool, youll pass out. Because as it started going round and round, like i said, your future, you passed out and thats looking. Then youre going to capsize and a boat in you is going to be dragged along the bottom of the river and youd better prepare your family for this cause. Youre going to come back up here, youre going to have your underwear on. So that was the big thing. We cant fear. We had a lot of fear. There were deputy sheriffs of southern of southern southern indiana. Southern illinoiss as deep south as you can get, really. And they come over, we talk about it for come down to the bow. We talk for a while. Maybe they have a beer or two more and then they go, all right, now what kind of weapons you guys carry . But we didnt know. Weve been off three weeks now. Everybody slept all their guns. And its good to look at constant motion on this, these guys faces, you know, it even yells, come coming down this river and you dont have it. Let you know. And the reason they thought we needed weapons was. The kids park in cincinnati and paducah and places like that. And the kids were going to come out of the inner cities and they said, did physical storming out of the ghettos kill you and burn your boat you need to be armed and nothing could be further the truth all the way down the road. But what we did was we, you know wonderful inner city kids who came on a boat. But then we got to baton rouge and this africanamerican kids from that part of town, they spent a lot of time on a river because they catch fish. And, of course, the highway and sell it. So they saw some fish and we said, well, why dont you stay . Well make dinner together. And then after dinner, the one kids will look hysterical. And you know, this northern guy you know about that we find a pretty, pretty hot down here on Mississippi River during the summer. We dont have any we dont need any heaters, you know, and the kids go land adults, white man. Oh, 50 miles downriver from here, youre going to change your country. And then cajuns is going to come storming out of the swamps, kill us and burn your boat. You need heaters. Anyway, there do a number of other things that i learned, but im going to keep this brief. I go to sleep in tennessee. So from a pennsylvanian, by the way, that your wants to rediscover a period of American History that is completely forgotten but was actually probably the most influential period which was the flat stone era from between the revolution and the civil war, when millions and tons of cargo and 3 million americans traveled down the river and created really the first frontier here and conquering fear, anything else fears the fears that people along the river had for us. You know. Do you know how to time us . Im not picking licenses. Youre going to die. So editing out the fear was really what the book was about. What we learned, how to get down the river and get around all the tugs and everything like that. So. Im not sure. Oh, thats god. Oh, i do. I did write a blog for, this one about taking a commuter, the mackenzie river, on the far north of canada goes into the arctic ocean. I got some strange looks. I did not. And there were some reports. No one told me i was going to die on that trip until the very end. But something that we were talking about before this, before we got out here is to the kind of history of time, school and the history youre not taught in school, which think all of time to talk about. You know, some of this material history that youre not told from school thats what drew me to the story of the klondike gold rush in the klondike. It was a word i knew of, but it was not a story that i knew. And so and once started once i started researching it, i thought, you know, this is really you know, this story is one of those thats like, you know you cant make it up stranger than fiction. And so i went to write a book about it, just a little bit of the background for you as well. Klondike is just a word, not a sort of a story. The you know, the story really begins with the panic of 1893. Also probably not over the panic of 1893. At the time it was the worst depression that the United States had ever had never suffered through. And some of the things that went wrong are going to sound familiar. It was the means of communication, kind of like the dark calm bubble were far overbuilt, too many telegraphs, too many businesses start to fail. People lose their jobs they cant pay their mortgages. All their mortgages go under water. Housing values drop the banks go out of business. One thing after another. And on top of all of those normal hardships you had in additional one, which was there was a big fight over gold, a gold and silver was this should dollars be backed by by or should it be backed by silver . And this was William Jennings bryan and the cross of gold speech. And the start of populism and all sorts of stuff like that, without im not an economist economics professor, and if i went into it, i would be sorry to death. But ill just say that the way that the money worked was if you had gold backed dollars, they were worth more than silver back dollars. And so rich people, the gold backed dollars, everybody else, the silver backed. And so, you know, in this long depression in 1897, you have these at the same time that people are on strike and the coal miners are getting into fights with police and men are being shot in the streets and nobody pay for their mortgage. Theyre on the newspapers is like the saloon and everybodys problem. And thats the gold has been discovered in the klondike. And not only was there gold there was so much gold. Its like 70 million in plain sight, like easter eggs on the ground is what the newspaper said. And you could just go up there if you just anyone who went up there would just find all this gold laying about. And so the dust starts of the stampede of 1897, it was very different than the california rush. The California Gold rush in the late forties. You know, everybody just kind of wanted to move to california. It was a nice place to. Be there was lots of reasons to settle in san francisco, to start a farm, to do lots of other things. And when they were getting gold out of the ground and spraying it with these big hoses and it would kind of melt down and they would pan it out, a real good pan in the California Gold rush was 0. 40 of gold in a pan when the klondike gold rush started, an average pan was not 0. 40. It was more like 4, and it could be 40 or 400. There was just an incredible amount of gold. Nobody wanted to move to alaska in, the yukon to, you know start a farm or anything like that. They just went for the gold and it was really packed in between when gold was discovered with between. 1896 and not to give away the end of the book, but theres a cataclysm that ends the gold rush. In 1899. Its like a thousand days and all in the whole story happens within time. So about hundred thousand people went on the gold rush that, to put it in perspective, thats about the combined population of los angeles and seattle at the time. That huge number of people. And i think the thing that i you know, that made me want once i started to read a little bit about and make me want to write, it is if i had learned anything about the klondike, it was like smiling prospectors with long beards and dancing girls that are happy and like, you know, just this, you know, bonanza of and everybody got rich and everything and thats not what happened at all. Of course, 100,000 people went up about. 30 to 40000 made it to dawson city, which means 60 or 70,000 did not make it. And a lot of them turned around. Sure. But thousands and thousands of them died. And we have no idea how many. If you just add up the number of people in shipwrecks and you know that, were reported in the papers, you get over 10,000 pretty quickly. And so its just its a horrific bloodbath in a way. And and thats what i think my you know, the way i wanted to write the and kind of what i saw in it may be different than a historian. So im not a historian is just that it it was a disaster movie people died in shipwrecks and famine and murder and you know scurvy. And there was an expedition out of brooklyn where they all identical costumes and some railroads which youll hear about in that it perhaps they were sombrero. And 19 of them went and only four of them lived through it and they died. One by one on a glacier because they decided to cross instead of doing the normal route they tried to cross the malaspina glacier. So, so seeing it as a disaster movie and trying to just tell, you know, tell that is a narrative, is is really what drew me to the story. You know, as far as like how to tell it, like everyone saw the whole gold rush. And so i try to pull out. Ive got about 12 main characters. I know its an ensemble cast, but its the archetypes, right . Its its the the prospector and the head of the northwest police and the gambler and the newspaper man and some of these people youve heard of, like jack london. Jack london was a nobody he was he worked in a pickle factory where he made 0. 10 putting pickles in a jar and he was desperate to get out of it. And so he went up as a very young on the stampede, but mostly its people that youve never heard of. And really benefited from the fact that theres been a lot of scholarship in the last 50 years where, a lot of these smaller stories have come out and i was able to combine them. And so i think that i dont know hopefully something we can talk more about here, but the thing that links the work that done, i was in the military wrote a number of books about afghanistan and iraq. I, i wrote about this, you know, canoe trip to the arctic. The thing that i think connects the work for me is that i have this, this allergy glorification. I like to just getting like the myth version of the story. And i my books about iraq and afghanistan are not theres no glorification in those, for sure. And so i wanted to write the kind of the raw story that i could speaking which has to offer for another one of these you know, its kind of hard when you go through and the first guy talks about theyre going to come and theyre going to kill you and burn your bone. The second guy bloodbath on the glacier. Obviously, i wrote child friendly book. This boy in the border is my 21st book. I come from texas. And in texas, we say, if you cant write, write a lot. So thats what ive always tried do i write about American History and i try to write about subjects where i can learn a lot. I cant think anything worse than writing a book where you think you already know everything, and all youre doing is just trying to prove youre and anybody who disagrees is wrong. So i always to pick subjects that i very little about and since i know very little about a lot of things, i imagine ill write another 25 books before im done least. But the inspiration for war in the border came because i realized ive lived in texas most of my adult life, and all of a sudden were talking about border walls and floods of immigrants, invasions and things and i realized i didnt. The history of the usMexican Border and i thought it be useful for me to try to find out what that history was and get it in the book. So if anyone else was interested, could they could learn it to. Theres an editor, simon and schuster, who always says if youre going to write a book, make sure its got 60 drugs and rock and roll. If you can get those three things, people will read your book. I thought this might be a challenge with this subject, but there is six general pershing is trying to court lieutenant patton whose sister and he makes patton be the chaperon on their car date around beautiful el paso. Yeah. A romance thats going to work. Um, drugs and rock and roll in the same place pancho villa is the yeast wrote a song called la cucaracha, which all of us can sort of hum. But we dont know. Most of us. The real version, which is all about the cockroach eating some marijuana. I was surprised that. But i was surprised by a lot of things in this book. And again, i hope we talk about how in our we try to look at maybe the portions of history that are coming knowledge. We try to push back a little bit further. I started to write this book because wondered about wall and the border invasion by hordes dangerous mexicans and i found out that the first time the United States decided to build a wall along the border to keep out the mexicans we didnt want was in 1903 and then it was announced again in 1909. We were going to build that border wall. And then in 1910, the government said, we it this time were going to build that border wall. And they tried and it didnt work. People would go over it or under it and in a lot of places, the soil couldnt take the weight of the wall. The wall would just crumble. After 1910, it was pretty much decided all that idea is not going to work and all of a sudden its big campaign issue. And i wondered how come in this big 2016 campaign, nobody is saying, but didnt 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 somebody had tried this before or a little element of history. But its there if you want to do the work that i found lots of other things, some times it reflected badly on the American Government. Sometimes it reflected badly on the Mexican Government. A lot of people died on the border who didnt have because you had to countries and to governments that distrust each other and wouldnt talk to each other much. Finally, we get in 1916, pancho. And about 400 of his followers crossing the border and attacking an american town in new mexico. Columbus, new mexico. Their purpose was to enrage the American Military and have army chase them back into mexico because the mexican people would be so appalled at the gringos that they dont trust way or coming to invade them again. Did you know that in 1914 we actually went into mexico and captured the sea city of santa cruz . Derek cruz, and held it for months. Went in and took it because we thought the Mexican Government was getting arms it shouldnt get from germany. All these things. And when i turned my book in to my publisher i got a lot of are you sure all this. Well, yes. Im so today to be up here with these gentlemen who do the same thing. And its exciting to be able to talk to some people who might really want to know history, the facts not the alternative facts. This is an odd time, america, to be writing nonfiction, but will tell you this. The one lesson ive learned from all my books writing about American History is the problems that claim us today, that obsessives have been problems that have been going on for centuries. Everything from gun control to taxes, the proper limited role of government refugees coming in, 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 everybody working together, were going to keep on facing them. The