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