Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1397 - S.C. Gwynne
Uploaded: 2019-12-10T20:00:03.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1397 - S.C. Gwynne' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-12-10. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1397 - S.C. Gwynne' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-12-10. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1397 - S.C. Gwynne

three two okay so uh very nice to meet you and very your book is fantastic i
really really loved
it and it's kind of hilarious how this conversation came about you said you got
a call from your
publicist because your audiobook spiked it spiked like crazy it was like what
what cosmic dust in
the outer bands of jupiter just did that because we didn't figure out what it
was it just spiked
like crazy went nuts uh i think it went to number one uh briefly so what did
that anyway and it was
from an instagram post it was and uh you were see my friend steve ranella wrote
a book um called
american buffalo and i had put on instagram how great the book was and he did
the audio version of
it and a friend of mine on instagram he goes by the name of the jackalope he's
a fellow hunter s thompson
enthusiast he said you got to read this book and so he he tells me to read your
book and uh empire of
the summer moon yeah yeah um and uh it was amazing i mean he was absolutely
right and it was so good
and i i made an instagram post about that there it is oh we got a copy of it
look at that ladies and
gentlemen um it's it's a fantastic book there's so much good stuff in there and
i i just it was
it was so sad and so gripping and so riveting and you we all know that a lot of
horrific things
happened in the time where the settlers started making their way across the
plains and right headed west
but god you just did such a fantastic job of uh of sort of bringing it to life
it's all those things
it's brutal it's sad it's incredibly dramatic it's it's i mean i just think
people forget about what
the frontier was uh it's kind of a nice idea that you get on on tv or something
but it was it was a
savage place um anyway i was i was trying to convey it with this with the
minimum possible of people
being stanked out on ant hills with their eyelids cut off and things like that
there was a lot of that
though right yeah i mean the the horrors of it all it's like whew you know um
and i'd never see
i had no i knew that that kind of stuff had taken place but i'd really never
read it so graphically
depicted before before this book what what motivated you to write about all
this so what what this is
a book about me i'm a connecticut yankee massachusetts connecticut guy i moved
to texas
25 years ago and uh and i've been there ever since and i didn't know anything
about texas history um
nothing uh beyond whatever you might know about the alamo or something or sam
houston or somebody like
that and uh uh i got there and i just started to you know i started to hear
about what one the great
plains and what they were which was an alien concept to me i wasn't sure what
the plains were or why they
were different than some other part of the country the high plains um and i
came into this idea i came
upon this idea that the last frontier was there that this is where it all went
down this is where
like the end of freedom and limitlessness it was it didn't happen the frontier
didn't push forward until
it got to california and then hit the ocean california settled the east settled
and then there was this one last
place that did not and it went on for and there were reasons for that one of
which was the most hostile
indian tribes in the country another was that it was there was no water water
you know uh uh there was
basically only land no water or timber but so i got into this and then you know
lo and behold there's
this i find out because i live in texas that there's this principle that lives
on this that lived on this
land the comanches that determined everything that happened in the american
west around them and that's
not an exaggeration they were they were because until you know the west wasn't
won until they lost it
and that was for sure and so there were two things one this arc of the rise and
fall of the most powerful
tribe most influential tribe in american history the comanches which was very
cool from the spanish and the
horse and all sorts of big stuff that goes on and then in the middle of that
story was this little
story of this little nine-year-old girl with you know blonde hair and cornflower
blue eyes who gets
taken in a comanche raid in 1836 who ends up becoming the you know mother of
the last and greatest chief
of the comanches and in fact her kidnapping and his surrender at the very end
of the comanche's
you know sort of bookend a 40-year war we never fought a 40-year war against
anybody except them
so i ran into this story and i'm just a kid from connecticut and it just seemed
like the most
obvious book in the world it was just the coolest history it's a crazy story
and i'd never heard of
cynthia ann parker before now she's we have on your wall we have a giant metal
picture of her on the
wall it was because it was so powerful uh your depiction of it too i wanted to
uh i wanted to find
you know what she looks like and what is his name again quant quanta quanta
quanta was his
the name is on the cover of the book right he because his mother was cynthia
ann parker which was
not that didn't become that didn't come out and no one found out that until he
was much older
so he was born quanta as a comanche later in the reservation period when people
found out who he was
he identified as part of the parker family also oh wow yeah so he he as a
famous comanche war chief and
he was one of the most famous and and feared he was quanta that's such a crazy
story that they killed
so many people but occasionally they would keep people and bring them into the
tribe
right so there were rules of the frontier at the time and we're talking about
how savage it was and
the rules of the at least of the plains indians of which comanches were one
that if you were captured
as an adult male you were killed tortured to death either quickly or slowly
depending on how much time
they had um if you were a baby you were killed um they couldn't deal with a
baby baby was they were
nomads and they were on their horse and they were probably escaping from
whatever raid they had just
done they couldn't deal with babies um a teenage uh girl or a young woman would
possibly be killed but likely turned into a sort of a slave um the ones who had
a chance of being
adopted into the tribe were the you know eight nine ten eleven twelve year olds
um because comanches
had trouble keeping their numbers up and so they instinctively kind of they
would take these
captives and not just from uh you know white people from the apaches and the utes
and the navajos and
whoever they might take them from um and so what was interesting about the
frontier though is that those
rules applied so long forget forget about white people arriving in the early 18th
century for the
moment those rules had applied to indian tribes since forever you know that was
the assumption of a
raid they all had it was it was almost like the golden rule in reverse or the
golden rule do unto others
they all expected that kind of treatment none of them were shocked when a baby
was killed or a
pregnant woman was killed it took the kind of the you know the anglo-european
civilization of you know
newton and leibnitz and the biblical tradition to arrive on the texas frontier
in 1830 and be shocked
at what they saw very interesting very savage very brutal uh it was a it was a
culture of raiding
essentially and this is the comanche culture in particular or the comanche americans
in general
well native americans in general plains indians in general um and uh you know
so plains indians we
could kind of start you know you you would know the names of the law of a lot
of them which arapaho
and cheyenne and sue and these were people who operated out in the great wide
open they were all masters
of the horse what made the comanche special was that they um they became the
preeminent horse tribe
now people forget that there weren't any horses in this in in the continent
until the spanish brought
them in the 16th century and so the the uh the tribes that got the horse and
mastered the horse basically
altered the entire balance of power on the plains and the tribe that got the
horse better than anybody
else in terms of breaking and breeding and saddling and riding and stealing and
hunting on the back of
and fighting with were the comanches and nobody was their peer and so this was
a this was not just a
plains tribe it was the preeminent power on the southern plains did you know
that horses originally
evolved here in north america no and then they went extinct here but then they
reintroduced them really the
europeans did yeah there's a a guy named dan flores he's got a bunch of great
books and one of them is
called coyote america he's got another one what what is his other book about
the the various large land
animals that went extinct here in north america but that the wolf and a lot of
the other ones what is it
in serengetti that's it the natural west also yeah um yeah he he's fantastic
and essentially
they all went extinct all the horses went extinct here and then they were reintroduced
by europeans
but they had originally evolved here in north america i didn't know so there's
no but there's
no evidence that any of the native people here really used them until europeans
came whether it was
cortez or whoever you know what cortez with the aztecs or whoever else came
across
horses a horse is so much a part of the story um the you know but so they come
over with the spanish
the spanish are acutely aware of what is going to happen if the horse
technology gets out and they take
great pains to not let it get out they don't want to teach the indians in mexico
or the indians in
north america um how to use them but inevitably the technology does get out and
then there's a few
moments there's a great moment in time in 1680 in santa fe when there's a great
pueblo revolt and they
kick the spanish out and like tens of thousands of horses get out it's the
great horse dispersal and
and these are the horses that come into the hands of the these plains tribes um
so in the 1600s that
their power and their dominance started to assert itself begins so how did the
comanches figure out
how to have all these horses and how how valuable that was or some of the other
tribes just hadn't
kind of caught on no one knows and and it's it's interesting no one knows that
because it was only
seen in flashes by the spanish through their kind of northern outpost no one
exactly knows what it was
you know in the heart and soul of a comanche that could do that better than
anybody else but and in
fact comanches but by all descriptions of the time were not i don't know a pre-horse
anyway graceful
people they were kind of short and kind of you know uh bow-legged and they they
weren't especially
graceful and and they didn't they didn't look like perhaps you were to think of
the uh the northern sioux
indians of the nick on the nickel i mean that kind of tall and you know with
the bone structure that
that wasn't the comanches and then they got on a horse and then everything
changed and um and and
even though the apaches were the first ones to actually get that technology
from the spanish and
they crazed they raised havoc with it but the tribe that got it the best and
the most um were the
comanches they were the tribe that actually ended up supplying horses to a lot
of the northern plains
tribes that we just talked about um and what they did with once they had this
incredible mastery of
the horse and this ability to hunt like they never had and fight like they
never had they did what
you would i guess expect the great new power in the plains the plains are a big
place by the i mean
the great new power in the plains is going to challenge for the greatest food
source out in
mid-america and that was the buffalo herds and they were in the southern plains
so the comanches
over a period of 150 years of sustained combat moved south from the wind river
mountains of wyoming
essentially into this 250 000 square mile empire think of kind of headquartered
in the texas pa