Cspan2 as a public service. Im Chris Goodwin with Mississippi Department of history. Our session is titled uniquely American History and in one way or another these three books touch on every state of the union aswell as our neighbors to the north and south. We will hear from each of our authors about the story they tell you in thebooks and ill ask a few questions before opening it up to questions and comments from you all. Remember since we are on cspan the viewers will be able to hear your questions. All comments and questions take it to the podium. Jeff nguyen has chronicled the Southwestern United States such american undesirables as bonnie and clyde, charlesmanson and jim jones. He lives in Fort Worth Texas and was a member of the texas literary hall of fame with such bestselling books as go down together, the last gunfight, manson the road to jonestown and waco. Today he tells us about his war on the border, the Texas Rangers and an american invasion. Brian casper is received a bronze star for his service in the iraqi warthhe and his family lived in new york , he is the author of books the long walk in all the ways you kill and die and the 2017 anthology of the road ahead. His journalism essays have appeared in esquire, wired, vice, new york times, washington post, atlantic and other publications. Hell talk to us about his illustrious book stampede, gold fever and the klondike. Richard rook began his career at the brookshire and was a longtime staffer or the harvard current. Hes written for vanity fair, new york and many other publications. Although, i regret to inform you did not survive this fools errand of a safari traveling down the Mississippi River, at least thats what everyone said as we went down the river. My technique in the last couple books, ecologically but the oregon trail im going to tell you about a team of mules hitched up to a genuine 1882 black and aright the trail. It took us four months and for this book i built a slight boot up in tennessee, sale all the to newm pittsburgh orleans to see the conditions of it. Im not a reenactor, see the conditions of 3 million americans who cant take that original frontier pass somehow they saw the country from the water. And hes referring to the fact that in all these river states people are terrified of the river. They all lost family and homes on the river, and they have brothers and nephews, whateve, the work on the tugboats pushing the largest, and there are accidents and there are deaths. So the big scene was, you know, pull some really nice, eatonville or whatever. These okies come down, you guys will die. [laughing] there are just below his theres a whirlpool in this river and when you get that vote stuck in that whirlpool, youll pass out because it will suck, go round and round like a like a d youll pass out and then youre going to capsize. And then thehe boat and you is going to be dragged along the bottom of the river, and youd better prepare your family for this, because you are going to come back up and you are not even going to have your underwear on. [laughing] so thats the big thing you can call, a lot of fear. There were deputy sheriffs in southern ohio,an southern ohio, southern indiana, southern illinois, as deep south as you can get really and they come over, come down to the boat. We talked for a while. Maybe they have a beer or two. All right, what kind of weapons you guys carry . We didnt know. We had been off for three weeks now. The look of consternation on these guys faces, you know. You mean, yall coming down this river and you dont have any weapons . And the reason they thought weug need weapons was, the kids, we would park in cincinnati and go to places like that and the kids are going to come out of the inner cities, and they said, the kids will come storming out of the ghettos, kill you and burn your boat. You need to be armed. And nothing could beal further than the truth all the way down the river. What we did was we, wonderful innercity kids who came on the boat at a at the baton rouge, and these africanamerican kids from that part of town, they spent a lot of time on the river because they catch fish and because of thean highway, they sellll it. We said we will make dinner together. After dinner the one o kid says, what kind of heaters do you carry . You know, i am this northern guy, you know. We find it pretty hot down here along the Mississippi River during the summer. Wewe dont have, we dont need y heaters, you know. And the kids just go man, thats the dullest white guy ive ever met. 50 miles down the river from here you are going to be in cajun country, and them cajuns is going tost come storming outf the swamps [laughing] kill you guys and burn your boat. You need heaters. Anyway, the were a number of other things to learn but am going to keep this brief. I built my flatboat in tennessee. I went from pennsylvania only to new orleans to rediscover a period of American History that is completely forgotten but was actually probably the most influential period which was the flatboat era from between the revolution and the civil war and billions of tons of cargo and 3 million americans traveled down the river and created really the first frontier, and conquering fear,r, editing out fear, the fears the people along the river had for us, you know. Do you guys know how to tie a knot . You are going to die. Self editing out the fear was really what the book was about here we learn how to get down the river and get around all the tugs intervening like that. Im not sure how to follow that, quite honestly. [laughing] i did write a book about before this one taking a canoe trip down the Mackenzie River on the far north of canada coast into the arctic ocean. I got some strange looks. I did not, there were some whirlpools, no one told i was going to die on the trip until the veryy end. But something that were talking about before we got here was the kind history are taught in school and history youre not taught in school, which is what we have time to talk about. Some of this material history that youre not taught in school, thats what drew me to this story of the klondike gold rush. The klondike is a word i knew but its not just a story that i knew. And so, and once i started researching it i thought this is really, this story is one of those thats like you cant make it up, stranger than fiction so i want to write a book about it. Just a little bit of the background. For you as well if klondike is just weird and not the sort of story, the story really begins with the panic of 1893, also probably not over the panic of 1893 at the time of the worst depression that the United States has ever suffered through. Some of things that went wrong are going to sound familiar. It was the means of communication, kind of like the dot com bubble were far overbuilt, too many telegraphs, too many railroads, this is a 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 economic hardships you had an additional one which was there was a big fight over gold, gold and silver, should dollars be backed by gold or should it be backed by silver . 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 a wood for you to death. I will just say the way that the money work was if he would gold backed dollars they were worth more than silverback dollars. And so rich people kept the gold backed dollars, anybody else have the silverback, and so in this long depression in 1897 you have these headlines at the same time that people are on strike and the coal miners are getting into fights with police and young men are being shot in the streets and nobody can pay for the mortgage. They are on the newspapers, like the solution to everybodys problems. That is that gold has been discovered and klondike. Not only was there gold, there was so much gold, its like 70 million in plain sight come like easter eggs on the ground, is what the newspapers said. You could just go out there. Anyone who went up there but just find all those gold laying about, and so thus starts the stampede of 1897. It was very different than the California Gold rush. The California Gold rush in the late 40s, 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 his big hoses and it would kind of meltdown and the with pan et al. , a good pan in the California Gold rush was 40 cents of gold in in a pan. When the klondike gold rush started, and average fan was not . 40, it was more like four dollars 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 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, that theres a cataclysm that ends the contact gold rush in 1899. Its like a thousand days and the whole story happens within that time. So about 100,000 people went on the gold rush. That to put into perspective, thats about the combined population of los angeles and seattle at the time. A huge number of people. And i think the thing that i, that made me want him once asserted to read a little bit about it and make you want to write it, as 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 bonanza of, and everybody got rich and everything else. And thats not what happened at all, of course. 100,000 people went up. About 3040,000 made it to dawson city, which means 60 or 70,000 did not make it, and a lot of them turned around, sure, but thousands and thousands of them died. And we have no idea how many died. If you add up the number of people in shipwrecks and that were reported in the papers, you get over 10,000 pretty quickly. And so its just, its a horrific one bath in a way, and thats what i think mine, the way i wanted to write the story and kind of what i saw in it may be different than a historian, im not a historian. It was a disaster movie. People died in shipwrecks and famine and murder and, you know, scurvy. There was an expedition out of brooklyn where they all wore identical costumes and sombreros, which you will hear about perhaps if they wore sombreros, 19 19 of them wend only four of them lived through it and ended that one by ona closure as they decided to cross instead of doing the normal route, they tried to cross the glacier. So seeing it as the disaster movie and trying to just tell that as a narrative is really what drew me to the story. As far as like how to tell it, like not 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 as its the archetypes, right . Its the prospector and ahead of the northwest mounted police, and the gambler and the newspaperman, some of these people youve heard of, like jack london. Jack london was a nobody. He worked in a pickle factory where he made . 10 putting pickles in a jar, and he was desperate to get out of it and so he went up as a very young man on the stampede here but mostly it is people youve never heard of, and i 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 ive done, i was in the military. I would a number of books about afghanistan and iraq. I wrote about this canoe trip to the arctic. The thing that i think connects the work for me is that i have this allergy to glorification. 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. So i wanted to write kind of the raw story that i could. Speaking of which, offer another one of these. Its kind of hard when you go third and a first that talks about theyre going to come and theyre going to kill you and burn your boat. The second guy, bloodbath on the glacier. [laughing] obviously, i wrote the child friendly book. [laughing] this boy, this is my 25th book. I come from texas and in texas was it if you cant write good, write a lot, so thats what ive always tried to do. I bite about American History, and i try to write about subjects were 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 right anybody who disagrees is wrong. So i always try to pick subjects that i know very little about, and since i know very little bit about a lot of things, i imagine i will write another 25 books before im done at 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 and i realized i didnt know the history of the u. S. Mexican border. And i thought it would be useful for me, maybe, to try to find out what that history was and get it in a book so if anyone else was interested they could learn it, too. Theres an editor at Simon Schuster who always says if youre going to write a book, make sure its got sex, drugs and rock n roll. If you can get those three things, people will read your book. I thought this might be a challenge with the subject, but there is sex. General pershing is trying to court colonel patons sister and he makes patent be the chaperone on their car dates around beautiful el paso. Yeah, thats a romance thats going to work. Drugs and rock n roll, in the same place. Pancho villa wrote a song called la cucaracha, which all of us can sort of. [laughing] but we dont know most of this, the real version, which all about the cockroach needing some marijuana. I was surprised. But i was surprised by a lot of things in this book. And again i hope we talk about how in our books we try to look at maybe the portions of history that are not common knowledge. We try to push back a little further. I started to write this but because i wondered about wall and the border and invasion by hordes of dangerous mexicans, and i found out that the first time the United States decided to build a wall along the border to keep up the mexicans we did what 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 mean it this time, we are going to build that border wall. And they tried, and it didnt work. People would go over or under it, and 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, well, that idea is not going to work. And all of a sudden its a big campaign issue. And i wondered, how come, in this big 2016 campaign, nobody is saying, but didnt we tried 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 tried this before. A little element of history, but its there if you wanted to look. Look. That i found lots of other things, sometimes it reflected badly on the American Government, sometimes the reflected badly on the Mexican Government. A lot of people died on the border who didnt have to, because you had to make countries and two governments that distrust each other and wouldnt talk to each other much. Finally we get in 1916 poncho villa and about 400 of his followers crossing the border and attacking and a content in new mexico, columbus, new mexico. Their purpose was to enrage the American Military and have the army chased them back into mexico because the mexican people would be so appalled at the gringos that they dont trust anywhere are coming to invade them again. Did you know that 1914 we actually went into mexico and captured the key city of veracruz, and held it for months . Went in and took it because without the Mexican Government was getting arms it shouldnt get from germany. All these things. And when i i turned my book io my publisher i got a lot of, are you sure all this happened . Well, yes. Im so thrilled today to be appear 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 in america to be writing nonfiction, but i will tell you this year the one lesson ive learned from all my books writing about American History is the problems that claim us today, that obsess us, have been problems that have been going on for centuries. Everything from gun control to taxes, the proper limited role of government, refugees, and to take american jobs. This has 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 commonsense way with everybody working together, we are going to keep on facing them. Thats why books these guys right are important, and the fact that people read them is also important here so thank all of you, too. Rinker, lets come back to something you said. Something that we talked about sort of addressing the areas of history that have been overlooked. For you it comes early in the book and you just amazed at the significance of a flatboat era and how little discussed it is in history books. Critical. 50, six years before the covered wagons crossing the dusty plains, it was the ohio river basin and the Mississippi River aggregated modern america, the economy and the multicultural entity that we became because of masses of immigrants coming down the river. They also filed an economic depression of, well, there were several but the panic of 1937 was pretty severe, too. So the book fit for me into an agenda because what happens is you study history and history is issued from on high by a few influential professors and then trickles down