A Very OK Podcast
Episode 25: “1883: Fact vs. Fiction”
May 16, 2023
Episode Transcript
(upbeat music playing)
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson. I’m the executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society. And here with me, as always, is Dr. Bob Blackburn. Bob, great to see you again. How you been?
Dr. Bob Blackburn: I’ve been doing great. In fact, yesterday was a great day. I had an eagle on hole 18. So that doesn’t happen often. So I’m really in a good mood today.
Thompson: Fantastic. Did anybody buy you a beer in the clubhouse afterwards, or were you by yourself?
Blackburn: No, I was with a group. But yeah, we all had things to do. But it was a good way to end the day.
Thompson: Fantastic. And the weather’s been great around here. A lot of rain last week from the time we’re recording this podcast, things are starting to get green again. I’ve had a great few days as well. One of the fun things that I got to do recently was go to the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Awards, and you were there, Bob. And we got to see Bob Wills inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers, and that was a pretty special night.
Blackburn: Well, and it was extra special for me because I got to see my longtime friend Carolyn Wills. Carolyn is Bob Wills’ oldest daughter, and Carolyn is one that we worked with over about 12, 13 years ago on Bob Wills’ collections. And she and the family decided to entrust the Oklahoma Historical Society with really keeping his legacy alive, of using his artifacts to tell his story not just about his music, but about his life, his contributions. And so to be with Carolyn and Andrea, his granddaughter, is always a special night. So, I really enjoyed that.
Thompson: Well, and I have to say that I fanboyed or geeked out a little bit because after the award show was over, I saw Patrick Wayne kind of standing by himself over at his table, and I kind of made a beeline for him because my dad introduced me to John Wayne movies growing up, and we’ve talked about this before on this podcast, but Patrick was in nine of his dad’s films and some of my favorites. I think one of my favorites was Big Jake. And so I kind of made a beeline over and introduced myself and told him I’d grown up watching his films, and he was a really nice man and got to get my photo with him. So it was, I was a real big hero. I texted it to my mom, and she was really excited about that, and so I was a real big hero at home.
But speaking of Westerns, we’re going to talk about a Western today, and it’s a Western that got a lot of attention. We’re going to talk about the television series 1883. And this was a really exciting television series that came out a year or so ago, and we have some incredible guests with us today. On my left is Jason Harris, Dr. Jason Harris, from the Chisholm Trail Museum in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, and he is the director of that museum there, which is one of our OHS museums. And Jason does living history. You can find him, if there’s a chuck wagon fire anywhere in the state, most likely you can find Jason out there. So, Jason, it’s good to have you here with us today.
Dr. Jason Harris: It’s great to be here. I’m really looking forward to our conversation today.
Thompson: And Kathy Dickson; Kathy is the director of museums and sites here at the Oklahoma Historical Society, and Kathy has been here 44 years, Kathy?
Kathy Dickson: That’s right.
Thompson: At the Oklahoma Historical Society, and she is just a joy to work with. She has helped me out so much since I’ve come on board at the OHS, a little over two years ago. And one of Kathy’s bit of expertise is living history, and you do a lot of living history around clothing and cloth and wool and all of those kinds of things, and so we’ll be really interested to dive into some of those topics as we’re looking at 1883 fact versus fiction, what was true in the series, what was not true, and the reason we’re talking about this series is because part of it takes place in Oklahoma, and so we can dive into that section in Oklahoma. A little synopsis about the show: soi if you’ve watched the television show Yellowstone, you’re familiar with the Dutton family, and that’s John Dutton is played by Kevin Costner and one of the most popular TV shows on. It’s written by Taylor Sheridan, who I think writes about every third television show on TV right right now. And so they decided to go make a prequel to where did the Duttons come from? And this follows the post–Civil War generation of the Dutton family as they leave Tennessee, they go to Fort Worth, Texas, and they join a wagon train that’s going up north to Oregon before they decide to settle in Montana and establish what would become the Yellowstone Ranch. So that’s a little synopsis there.
I do want to say a couple of things. First of all, spoiler alert: we’re going to talk about some of the aspects of the television show. If you haven’t watched it yet, and you don’t want to have anything given away for you, maybe you just need to put this podcast on pause for now and come back and listen to it after you’ve had a chance to watch the series, which I would recommend that you do watch. I would also say that for kids that might be listening to the podcast, and I know we have some kids and students, this is more of an adult show. So, if you’re going to watch this show, you need to get your parent’s permission. So, Bob, what was your impression of the television show?
Blackburn: Well, the first impression was it cost me money, because in December, when you told me you were going to do this sometime this year, I had to subscribe to Paramount, which I had not done.
Thompson: Yes. (laughter)
Blackburn: So I don’t know what it’s costing me, but something. But in retirement, we have to watch our pennies, of course. But I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed that series. I was surprised by the acting ability. The writing is superb. Overall, I was, I enjoyed the show. If you just kind of quit looking at it as a historian and looked at it like a fan, it was okay. The drama was there.
And as I always say, and I’ve been a consultant on a couple of movies. Far and Away with Ron Howard. I was the historical consultant on that. Recently, a new series on Bass Reeves that will soon be coming out, I was a consultant. And I realized those writers have to create dramatic tension, so they’re going to twist and turn and they’re going to exaggerate. Well, that’s art. And, I always go back to Grapes of Wrath when people think that, you know, they want to just demonize John Steinbeck and Grapes of Wrath. I said, wait a minute. He’s not a historian. He’s a writer. He had never come to Oklahoma. I says he was writing art. That’s not history. Don’t take it personal. John Ford created a different vision cinematically, but I said they need that dramatic tension to make good art. In 1883, if you look at it as art, it’s a very high-quality drama. The acting was surprisingly good. When I heard about two country music stars, what can we expect? But they far surpassed my expectations. And of course, the contributing characters around them were all good. And any time you can draw the public’s attention to our frontier heritage, to me, that’s important, whether, and then let’s deal with the fact and fiction. But if we draw people’s attention to our roots in Oklahoma, understanding that this was the Indian Territory, that we began with Indian culture that is so different, the difference between the Cherokees and the Chickasaws to the Comanches and Kiowas and Cheyenne and even Osage. You have to understand the differences of Indian Country. You have to understand that’s the roots of our representational constitutional government. This is where a lot of our people come from—that heritage, that worldview. And if we can get people to look back and understand that, then we’re going to have better leaders in our community who understand that they need to respect Indian culture, that they need to understand it and deal with it and to go forward and build a community together. So, I think it’s good that we understand it.
The ranching heritage that I think is portrayed in a different way in this particular show. But if we can draw attention to the fact that there were cattlemen, and in a minute I’ll talk more about that. But these cattlemen created an ethics of the West that was pretty true, and Sheridan violated most of the cowboy ethics that you would think really came out of the frontier. But again, dramatic tension, color. But I think it’s important we understand our ranching heritage and our farming heritage. And even though just a few percent of Oklahomans are still engaged in that full time, more part time “hobby farmers,” as I call them, you have to understand that ethics comes out. You see it in our politics. You see it in the way we view neighborhoods and zoning and constitutional government and our fear of centralized authority and anti-business attitudes. This all comes out of that frontier heritage. So, the general view is that I think it’s good to draw attention to it, but look at it as art, not as history.
Thompson: Yeah. Kathy, what were your impressions?
Dickson: Well, like, Bob, I enjoyed the show, and I think, as he said, people have to remember it’s not history. So they’re trying to evoke an era, but they’re not trying to give you all of the facts that you’re going to get in history class. But I enjoyed it, and I think they did a good job of getting the feelings out there that they wanted and a representation of the era so that people could understand it.
Thompson: Jason, we’ve talked about how, you know, we know that this isn’t history. It is entertainment. But if the history, if what’s portrayed there can lead people to more curiosity and looking up some of these subjects, this can be a good thing, right?
Harris: Well, that’s true. You know, without shows like this, you don’t get to have the conversations about what life was really like in the 1870s, ’80s, ’90s in the West. And I think this movie, this series did a really good job sort of bringing some of those stories that you’re not used to hearing, what life was like for migrants on the Plains, some of the diseases, some of the things that they had to face and overcome, and you don’t see that with a lot of Westerns. So it was a good series for me. I really enjoyed it.
Thompson: Let’s talk a little bit about the things that we feel like that the show got right. You know, what were those things that, maybe they weren’t 100% right, but what were those feelings or those ideas or those attitudes that they got right about that time period? And I’ll let anybody jump in on that one.
Harris: Sure. You know, I think one of the things that come across really well in the movie or in the series was the attitudes of the individuals. You have, the attitudes of the Duttons, those that are traveling from east to west. You have the attitudes of the migrants. They’re basing everything they have ever done in life on this journey to a new home. And then you get some of the reality with casting with Sam Elliott and others, just to kind of get all those different perspectives of what life is in the West, and you don’t get to see that in a lot of shows.
Thompson: Yeah, and Bob, I’m going to agree with you. I thought that the show was well-acted, and, you know, if you saw Tim McGraw on Friday Night Lights, you knew, you know that he’s got the chops, like he’s done some of these more meaty roles. And so, but seeing him put on the act of being James Dutton, I feel like they really pulled it off pretty well. I didn’t know how Faith Hill would be as an actor, but boy, color me impressed. I thought she did a great job too.
Blackburn: Well, and I think they contributed to this, the atmospheric draw of this series. As Kathy said, it looked right, and Jason is more of a reenactor than I am. Kathy has done a lot of reenacting as well, but I love the atmosphere of it. I thought they were dressed appropriately. I thought that the actors, carried their roles very well, that individualism. And I like what Jason said too, this essence of hope. You saw that in the European migrants who are willing to leave their homeland, you know, probably forced out by repression, whether it was Ukraine or somewhere else in Europe. They’re leaving an intolerant society and looking for hope. And the American West is this image of hope, whether it’s Route 66 in the 1920s, or it’s the 1880s with people coming west, and we certainly would see that with the Land Run of 1889 and other land openings is that these people were coming for hope. That was one of the main things that comes out of this entire era, is that there’s this hope for a better life. Our kids will do better.
And you can see that with McGraw’s character. He is really doing all this for his daughter and his son and their children. He is trying to set up something and willing to sacrifice to face those hardships, and the frontier was hard. Nothing was easy about establishing a new home in the West. There was some violence. Not near as much as we see in this series. But then the drought, the weather conditions, the fact that they survived a tornado, I thought showed the importance of the climate on these pioneers out in the West, the lack of a support community. They’re basically on their own. They left their church. They left their home and their extended families, and here they are out of here on this ocean of grass. I thought that was very realistic. And I think the actors—and anything Sam Elliott’s in, to me, is going to work. I don’t know if he could, maybe that’s him every day, but whatever it is, I like it.
Thompson: Oh, I’d watch Sam Elliott read the phone book. He’s that good. Yeah. Go ahead, Kathy.
Dickson: With some notable exceptions that we’ll talk about here in a little bit I’m sure, I thought the costuming was really good, and so I did a little research on that. And the costume designer was Jane Bryant, who actually won an Emmy for her work on Deadwood.
Thompson: Okay.
Dickson: And from there, she went on to work on Mad Men. So she’s had quite a range there from the early 1800s on through in the 1960s. So, and she did her research for the most part on these, and I was very impressed that the actresses were actually corseted up, and they were wearing their corsets while they were riding horseback and driving their wagon, which you don’t see in TV shows very often.
Thompson: Can you talk about female fashion of the era? What would have been common, even in the cities versus on the on the Plains? What would we have seen?
Dickson: So, the women who were traveling, very much like Faith Hill was dressed, would have worn plain skirts and simple shirts. They were known as Garibaldi shirts, from the Italian rebel who wore the red shirts, and that became popular with the women in the 1850s. And that kind of carried on, for the most part if they’re dressed up, they’re wearing dresses, not skirts and a shirt or a blouse. But if they were out working, very much like Faith Hill was dressed, it would be common to have that skirt and that blouse. The sleeves were not tight, but they were close-fitted. So if you’re wearing them today, because we dress much more loosely, you’d be thinking it’s too tight and restrictive, but that was normal for them. That’s the way they dressed. And they would have worn corsets every single day as they were shown wearing corsets in the series.
Thompson: We might have some folks who are listening. Can you tell, can you describe what a corset is.
Dickson: Well, it basically was kind of, the earlier version of a bra. (laughter)
Dickson: It’s for support. And it’s not like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, where, you know, she’s trying to get cinched into that 18-inch waist. Women out working did not try and tight lace. They had the corsets on for support, and a properly fitted corset is actually very comfortable. When I’m wearing one, my back gets tired. But that’s because I don’t wear one every day, and it makes you sit up straight, it makes you stand up straight, and you just move differently if you’re wearing a corset.
Thompson: Jason, how about the men about the clothing that they were wearing in the show? Accurate? Not accurate?
Harris: No, no, for the most part, it was pretty accurate. You’ll see some things, like there were a lot about batwing chaps that they were wearing. But for most of the individuals, you see a lot of fabrics that would be very popular or seen all the time, such as wools. I thought the clothing selection for the men did really well, really good job sort of representing the era. It helped you as the viewer kind of buy into the series and suspend your beliefs so that you would also see it in your own mind.
Dickson: And when Jason says wool, modern-day people are thinking a very hot, heavy fabric. They had access to wool that is amazing.
Harris: Amazing.
Dickson: Yes. It’s much better than any wool you can buy anywhere today. They had tropical-weight wools, which were wonderful. They’re very, they breathe, they’re very cool. And you don’t have to launder wool like you do cotton or linen. You just air it out and brush it off. So it was a very popular fabric.
Blackburn: Trait, I have one memory of ladies’ fashion from that time area that comes first hand from my grandmother. Born 1893, in Arkansas, migrants who had come out from South Carolina after the Civil War, and Granny was the youngest of two families. So she had a bunch of older sisters and half sisters. And I remember in the 19, probably ’60s, Granny never went outside without having on a long dress with sleeves all the way down, a lot of times gloves, and always a bonnet. She never went out without a bonnet on to protect herself from the sun. That was fairly common. And I remember when my mother bought her her first pantsuit. Grandma had never worn pants, and her older sister condemned her for coming to Decoration in Arkansas. We went back every first Sunday in May to Decoration. There the Confederates would not recognize that Yankee holiday called Memorial Day. So we went back for Decoration. And her aunt, my aunt Lilly, just was just amazed that Granny would wear a pantsuit. That was not to be worn by a woman in the American West.
Dickson: I’m sorry, that does bring up one of my criticisms of the show, where you see all of the immigrants and Elsa, one of the lead characters, cutting the sleeves out of their dresses. That would not have happened. They would have been—for one thing, you just didn’t do that. You didn’t want to be tanned, and you would have been fried to a crisp if you were trying to cross the Plains without sleeves in your clothing.
Thompson: Right. You can imagine you’re walking out there. Most of them would have walked, and you’re out there walking, and you’ve got that heat blazing down on you for, you know, 10, 12 hours a day. You probably—and this is pre-sunscreen— so you probably wouldn’t have wanted to expose any more skin than possible.
Blackburn: And the swarms of flies that would have been following those animals. You never would have been free from the flies and then mosquitoes, of course, depending on the season. But those flies would have driven you crazy if you didn’t have on the long clothes and the gloves and covering as much of your head as possible.
Thompson: Now the show is told from the point of view of a young woman. Her name is Elsa. She’s the daughter of Margaret and James, and she narrates the whole show, and she’s kind of this character who I think at first kind of starts out, is this kind of sweet, young, innocent girl. And as the show goes on, she gets a little bit more wise to the world. And she, you know, very quickly in has to become one of the quote- unquote, cowboys who’s out there managing the herd of cattle that’s going along on the drive. And one of the main points that she does is she ditches her dress for a pair of pants. How common would that have been back in that era?
Dickson: Not at all. Now, can I say that there were women who didn’t wear pants? No, because there were a few outliers who would wear pants, but it was not common for the typical woman to even consider wearing pants.
Thompson: Now, Jason. Sidesaddle, would that have been, would she have been expected to ride sidesaddle in this era, or would that have been something that would have been previously done away with?
Harris: Oh no, she would still be expected to ride sidesaddle. And even being mounted on the horse and doing some of the activities with the cowboys would have been unheard of. But I think that’s kind of one of the things that’s really important about Elsa’s role, is she really is appealing to an audience that’s looking for a different perspective of the West, right? And I think the show’s creators did a really good job of trying to connect a main character to a new audience, because, you know, when I watch my daughter and others like her watch this show, they’re just infatuated with the fact that there’s this leading role for someone like them, and so I think that that was really a remarkable feat on the writer’s part. But the other thing is, you talked about watching her mature throughout the series, and I think it’s that moment right after they’ve crossed the Brazos, which is way off geographically. I mean, way off.
Thompson: Yeah, Kathy and I were talking about that. You would have had to go way out of your way to cross the Brazos and then end up at Doan’s Crossing.
Harris: Right, but you know, up until that point, she’s really excited to be there. She sees it as an adventure. She’s looking at these landscapes and thinking how great this is, and it’s that river crossing that really changes her mind. And it’s at that moment she realizes that it’s an environment, and it’s out to get you.
Blackburn: And, Trait, one thing I like about Elsa’s character as well as Faith Hill’s character—strong women. And we’ve always had strong women. Now in history a lot of times, and a lot of our movies in the past, television series women are the sidekicks, are passive, the victims. In this particular movie, she’s got all the emotions of any person on the frontier. She’s got curiosity. She’s got a little bit of a wild streak in her. She’s got imagination. She’s willing to take the lead, to step into danger just like any other person. I like the fact that the women were treated as real people, with all the range of emotions that anyone would have had on the frontier. So I especially like that particular part of the series.
Thompson: Let’s talk about their journey a little bit, because they start out in Fort Worth and, you know, they’re in that Hell’s Half Acre part of Fort Worth, which is portrayed as just being this really terrible place where you better be prepared to kill anybody at any minute. I suspect that it was probably a pretty rough place, but maybe not. You know, I think Tim McGraw kills four or five people within the first, you know, first day of being there. I suspect it probably wasn’t that bad, but the immigrants, and they’re German immigrants, and I think that’s pretty accurate, too, because this was an era when many, many Germans immigrated to the United States and many of them came up through that Galveston area. In fact, my stepdad’s family, their last name is Kiesling, and they came from Germany, and they came up through Galveston. And that’s how they got into Texas and that central Texas area around San Angelo and Miles and that sort of thing. But they go to enlist the help of these two Pinkerton detective agents. One of them is played by Sam Elliott, who we’ve talked about. He plays Shea Brennan, and the other one’s played by LaMonica Garrett, who’s a Black actor, and he portrays Thomas.
And these Germans essentially hire Shea and Thomas to guide them up on their journey, which would have been, as I was looking into the Pinkertons, they did provide security for trips like this. So, this might not have been common, but it wasn’t unheard of either. But one of the first things that they do, Sam Elliott’s character Shea says you need to sell your oxen and get horses. This was a bad idea. Oxen were frequently used on long drives because of their hearty nature. They could go a long, long way. They weren’t as picky in their diets as horses. They were able to endure duress. They were more surefooted. So this was not getting the trip started off right, Jason?
Harris: No, no, it wasn’t, and really out of the three—oxen, mules, and horses— if you were going to pick anything other than oxen, you would definitely go with mules rather than horses for a trip like this.
Thompson: So, that’s probably getting off on not the best start, as we said. But then we can talk about travel. Now, one of the things they wanted to take all their stuff. For immigrants who had come to the United States, they had acquired a lot of stuff, and I don’t know how they explained that quite as easily. But by 1883, they would have been able to buy railroad tickets to be able to get up to Oregon and maybe not right up there, pretty close up to the northwestern part of the United States.
The Yellowstone National Park was 1872, and they had completed a railroad car, a railroad line to Yellowstone by this time in 1883. Travel by train would have been cheaper. It would have been quicker. It would have been safer. It would have cost about $40 a person, which is about $1,300 in today’s dollars. So not a cheap trip, but considering all the hardship and all the loss and all the people that died, I think, you know, it would have been certainly more economical and more healthy to take the train. By 1870, there were already 52,900 miles of railroad lines in the United States. And, Bob, by 1872 that MK&T, the Katy Railroad, had been completed down to Denison, Texas, through Indian Territory, which was the first line through Indian Territory as well. And so, the trip could have been done by train.
Blackburn: Yes, and of course, Oklahoma would be transformed by railroad. A lot of people don’t realize in Oklahoma there were more miles of track laid from 1900 to 1910, than all the other decades combined. So we were a bit of a desert because of the Indian Territory. The Five Civilized Tribes, who kept the railroads out of the territory before the Civil War. Federal government, and one of the stipulations coming out of the Civil War is that you have to allow the railroads to build through. And so they lost that political battle. And the Katy— Missouri, Kansas, Texas—was the first to get to the border and to build south on the Old Texas Road, which had been around since 1821, connecting settled Missouri, settled American West with settled Texas, going through the Indian Territory. That’s when we date the founding of towns like Wagoner, Vinita, Muskogee, Eufaula, Durant, all of these towns picked up.
So, by the time 1883 comes around, you’ve got this non-Indian culture along this artery of commerce in eastern Oklahoma. Now, they would not build railroads in western Oklahoma till later, after 1885, but it had already been set in precedent that the railroads were coming. And so the railroads to the north and south of us had already gone west, and we were filling in the gaps and would continue to fill in the gaps after 1900. So, yeah, railroad transportation would have been very common. It would have been the first choice of anybody going long distances at the time, and especially if those immigrants had been able to afford passage on a liner coming from Europe to carry their piano, or their big goods, they could have afforded a railroad as well. But again, not very dramatic.
Thompson: Right.
Blackburn: Taking that trip on the railroad.
Thompson: The TV series about the railroad trip probably wouldn’t have been as compelling. (laughter)
Thompson: And really, what this is, it’s a cattle drive. You know, and we’ve seen these great cattle drive movies like Red River and Lonesome Dove and all of those kinds of things. That’s where a lot of this drama comes in is that hardship of driving cattle across the Plains and the cowboys and all of the things that come in there. Any other thoughts about the railroad? Jason?
Harris: Well, I was going to say you mentioned a little bit about Germans and Texas, but at the same time, you have big German communities in Kansas, Nebraska, starting up in the Dakotas. And I did go back and look and try and figure out why they picked Germans going to Oregon in 1883, and there was a set of Volga Germans that did settle in Oregon in 1883, and in the show they made a reference to them being Mountain Germans. And that’s why they’re on the way to Oregon. And so I thought that was interesting, but no, it would have made a whole lot more sense for them to travel by rail.
Blackburn: And, Trait, one last thing on what Jason just said. In modern terms, we call them Germans from Russia, because during Catherine the Great’s rule in Russia, she recruited Germans to come in and be the farmers because they were good farmers, very well organized. Many of them were pacifists. Many of them were Mennonites. So today, even in Oklahoma, you go down around Colony and Corn or Fairview, you run into these Germans from Russia who created their Mennonite communities in western Oklahoma. And that would have been the same across the Northern Plains, as Jason said. And they brought a very distinct culture; very productive, very well-organized. And today you go to Colony and Corn, you still see these very prosperous farmers. And in western Oklahoma, if you don’t have 2,000 acres anymore, you’re hobby farming. You can’t make it. But those Germans from Russia were just so efficient. First thing they would build was not a house. They’d build a barn, take care of the animals, take care of the produce, to take care of the seed crops. Looking ahead, planning, able to survive the problems of the frontier, and the German from Russian culture is so strong, and it’s been maintained. There’s still societies in Oklahoma we’ve worked with here. We’ve done exhibits on the Germans from Russia, very distinct, very strong, very community-minded. And so the fact that they seemed almost disorganized in 1883, like who’s the leader? And they’re all looking around, that would not have been the case. There would have been an elder in charge. He would have had, you know, the characters. He would have had the women who would have helped organize the families, and it would have been much more unified in reality because of that German from Russia community spirit.
Thompson: Well, and that’s fascinating. And Kathy, you went down a rabbit hole because there was one of the immigrants who mentioned that they weren’t allowed to swim. And you went down this rabbit hole to figure out what was behind that.
Dickson: Yes, I did. Josef, when they’re getting ready to cross the Brazos, says that they can’t swim, that back in their home country, that it was against the law to swim, and that people were whipped for swimming, which struck me as a little odd. So I went down a little rabbit hole on that, and I couldn’t find any evidence of that being the case. I did find one town in the 16th century where people, it was against the law to swim. And if people drowned, their bodies were whipped when they pulled them out of the canal. But I guess they thought they needed some way, reason to explain why the immigrants couldn’t swim. Although swimming was not necessarily something that most people knew how to do at the time period.
Thompson: Yeah, speaking of those river crossings, I think that they portrayed, I think today we don’t really have a good idea about how hard that was. And especially, you’re starting these drives in the springtime. The rivers are going to be up. There’s even an account when the land run happens on April 22, 1889, that one of the major hindrances is the rivers are up, and they have to at one point, they even have to use a railroad bridge here in Oklahoma to get across one of the rivers. And I think they did a good job in a series of portraying just exactly how harrowing it was to do a river crossing, and it was not the safest thing in the world.
Blackburn: Well, one, for the cattle drives, and they never mention in this series, but the Cimarron was considered one of the most dangerous river crossings. You know, they were talking about the Brazos and even the Red. But the Cimarron was such a wild river, and people need to understand if they’re listening to this podcast and not from Oklahoma. These are prairie rivers. Most of the water is underground. And you’ll have the river banks that might be a mile across, but the channel might be only 200 feet across. But there’s water underlaying, and when water is up, then it becomes basically mud. A lot of quicksand and the raging water, if there are rains upstream in a drainage basin, and the drainage basin could be hundreds of square miles. And all that water is flowing into these rivers. And if it can’t be saturated into the soil, here it comes down the river, and the currents are bad, with the quicksand and other dangers, the cowboys always really feared getting across that Cimarron on their way to Kansas in the early days of the land of the cattle drives.
Thompson: I have a great quote here from Andy Adams, who wrote The Log of a Cowboy. And this is his account of being a cowboy on a Western trail drive. And he’s talking about the Red River, and he says “That she was merciless was evident. For although this crossing had been in use for only a year or two when we forded, yet five graves, one of which was less than ten days made, attested her disregard for human life. It can safely be asserted that at this and lower trail crossings on the Red River, the lives of more trail men were lost by drowning than on all the other rivers together.” It gives you a sense of just how big of an obstacle these things were. So, let’s talk a little bit about Doan’s Crossing, because this is where they come to to cross the Red River and to get into Indian Territory.
And I will note, that there was a, that the letters that came across or the wording that came across the scene that introduced Doan’s Crossing, said, “Doan’s Crossing at the border between Texas and Oklahoma Territories.” And I had to note that it wasn’t Oklahoma Territory at that time. It was Indian Territory at that time. But Doan’s Crossing was, let me turn my page and get to my notes here. Doan’s Crossing in 1878 was founded by Jonathan Doan, who established a trading post on the river about 10 miles north of Vernon, Texas. And then he was later joined by his nephew, Corwin, who became the postmaster at Doan in 1879. The first store was literally a dirt adobe building with a dirt roof, and they had a buffalo hide for the door. But this was one of the last chances that they could supply up before heading into Indian Territory. In the 1880s, there was a store, a hotel, a saloon and a school, and in 1881 they said 301,000 cattle were driven into Indian Territory, crossing at Doan. So that gives you a sense of what our pioneers and what our immigrants would have encountered as they came on to Doan’s. Any other information or thoughts about Doan’s Crossing?
Harris: Well, you just have to remember when you’re thinking about places like Doan’s Crossing, they’re really the gateways to the edge of civilization. And so, you know, you get to a place like this, and it’s well represented, I think, in the film, because you really get that sense that it’s on the outer edges and fringes of civilization.
Thompson: Anybody want to have a whiskey punch with Rita Hanks?
Dickson: I will. (laughter)
Thompson: On the back porch there?
Blackburn: Well, one thing I think did not come out in this movie, but part of the reality is Old Greer County has a very unique history in southwestern Oklahoma. The early surveyors thought that the north fork of the Red was really the main fork of the Red. And so, Old Greer County was literally part of Texas.
Thompson: Yeah.
Blackburn: And most of the early pioneers were the same people coming to west Texas. So as the Comanches are defeated in battle in 1874, largely confined to the reservation, Greer County was being settled. And so Doan’s Crossing comes out of that culture. These pioneers were willing to go out until the edge of the frontier. And I always like to talk about commerce. Jason and I still want to do a major exhibit on commerce in Oklahoma. You have to start with the pioneer story of commerce, is that people are always looking to make a living. And how do you do that? Some do it by farming. In fact, most people at the time would have said the soil is our product. We’re going to add value with the seeds and the water and the sun, and produce and harvest. Well, there were also traders who were used to this culture of buying something cheap and selling it for more. Well, the pioneers in that area knew that there would be customers, and so adding value through the hard work, taking the chance of establishing a store, bringing their products up, being able to give people credit on their frontier because it was a lack of currency. That would have been this culture of commerce right there on the edge of Indian Territory, because the federal government and the tribes were not allowing non-Indians to come and established their businesses, other than those affiliated with the tribes. Now nearby would have been Fort Sill by this time. So you have a major military outpost, and there would have been traders around Fort Sill doing business with,
Thompson: Yeah, Fort Sill established in 1869.
Blackburn: Exactly. So it had been around for quite a while. And the people at Doan’s Crossing would have known about those people at Fort Sill. The frontiersmen, especially if you’re a Pinkerton, you know, familiar with the West, you would have known about Fort Sill. Then, farther north you get to Darlington and the Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation. You go farther, and there would have been Indian settlements all up and down the Washita River at that time. Many of the most conservative Cheyennes would have been as far west as what is now Roger Mills County. And living up there in Hammon is one of those old traditional communities that had been established by this time. So there would have been Indian people, with their own civilization. It may not have been western European or or east coast-type of civilization, but they had their culture. They were farming. They were trading. And so, there would have been opportunities to trade even after he left Doan’s. Now it might have been more expensive, and Doan would have had a better selection. But I thought that was interesting. That’s right there on this edge of all these things that are happening at the time.
Thompson: Yeah. Kathy, they say that this is going to be the last chance to supply until they get to Oregon, which is definitely not the case.
Dickson: I think Denver might have a few things to say about that.
Harris: Well, and even Colorado Springs is 1872 and had a significant population by the ’80s, and they’d have passed by Fort Supply and the others.
Thompson: Yeah. Andy Adams in The Log of a Cowboy mentions going and resupplying at Fort Supply, or he called it Camp Supply because it wasn’t an official fort yet at the time that that his adventure took place.
Blackburn: And then too, the trade area. When you talk about the American West, you know, the old traditional thing of the American West on this wave of going east or west, really culture, and business culture especially, was growing out of these little seeds planted. Well, Dodge City was the big market town. So if you get to Doan’s Crossing and you go across, well, Dodge City would have had a trade territory that would have gone into the Texas Panhandle, all of western Kansas, even eastern Colorado. Dodge City was the place. That’s where businessmen would have been, whereas earlier it would have been Wichita, where Jesse Chisholm was trading in the 1850s and bringing his supplies south to the North Canadian River at Council Grove. By this time, those traders would have been coming south out of the rail connections going to Dodge because it’s cheaper to ship things by rail out to the west, and then these traders move where the railroads aren’t yet. So Dodge City probably would have been their destination if they had missed buying anything after they start north.
Thompson: It appears that our drivers and our immigrants really hit upon Doan’s Crossing at its heyday, because by 1885, the construction of the railroads in north Texas really ended the need for these long cattle drives that were going far up north. And so the population of Doan’s Crossing in 1885—300 people—which back in those days was a good population of people in one place. But by 1896, only 75 people were left at Doan’s Crossing, and the last large herd to cross was in 1893, when John Blocker was driving his herd to South Dakota. So scholars estimate there were probably three to five million head of cattle that crossed at the Doan’s Crossing area. But if you were there in 1883, you were probably there in its heyday.
Blackburn: Well, and too, Trait, one thing that really did not come out in the series, but there would have been cattlemen, not just driving through the Indian Territory at the time, but leasing land. By this time, the Cherokee Strip Livestock Association was going well. They had leased most of the Cherokee Outlet. So you get as far west as today’s Woodward, and you would have had ranchers who would have been fencing the range by ’83. It wasn’t totally fenced in, but it was getting to that point. And then even in the Comanche Nation, there would have been ranchers who were leasing land from the Comanches. At one point, the federal, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was so schizophrenic at the time, and presidents were schizophrenic, and they would change policies. Yeah, the tribes can lease their land and get a little stream of revenue. Other times, no, got to kick the ranchers out, so here comes the Army. But there would have been ranchers throughout the Cheyenne-Arapaho Nation, the Comanche Nation, the Cherokee Outlet. This would have been, there would have been open range operations as well as cattle drives. This would have been all kind of happening at the same time.
Harris: Well, and they were leaving in the spring, so they’d have been mirroring some of the drives that were heading north too.
Blackburn: And you could trade with those people. So you if you saw, the cowboys were trading with each other, and so there might be a cattle drive that had extra supplies, you could buy. So it’s not as if you’re out on this desert in the Mojave Desert with nothing around. But there would have been a lot of people in a lot of other cultures and systems to tap into.
Dickson: So, Jason, one thing I’m curious about, how common would it have been for a group of immigrants to hire a cook? I know that trail drives did, but a group of immigrants, I would have thought they would be doing their own cooking.
Harris: No, they would have done their own cooking. I think one of the reasons they mentioned it in the film was just to kind of get across that sense of they’re going to run out of food if they don’t have someone do it for them. But no, not at all. There wouldn’t have been any cooks on the immigrant trains. The other thing that was, really when they talk about the food and the water and having to make sure that they keep their supplies is, they talk a lot about winter coming, even though it’s spring. And so, I don’t know if you want to talk a little bit about that, but that threat of finding your destination as the seasons progress on the prairie, because seasons bring with them many different things, and I think 1883 kind of hints at that throughout.
Blackburn: Before we leave the subject of food though, and everyone likes food. Jason, you’ve done a lot of demonstrations of campfire cookery. For example, in the morning, we see a couple of scenes where they’re cooking biscuits. What’s the process of getting the fire ready, making the biscuits, putting it in the fire?
Thompson: Yeah, that’s a great question. I suspect it’s a lot harder than we think. They didn’t have the Pillsbury can to pop open, right?
Harris: No, they didn’t, and it’s a long process. They made, they would have been making drop biscuits probably, if they weren’t making their own German foods. I think that’s something we don’t give them enough credit for in the film, is that they would have had things that they were making for themselves, that they were used to making from home, rather than Americanized foods. But they overdo the meals. You know, when you look at some of the camp scenes and you look at how much stuff they take out of the wagons and set up every night and then put back into the wagons every day. I’d have done that for one or two or three days before my wife and I would have been like, we’re not going to take quite so much stuff out. But overall, the camp scenes were good. Just a lot of stuff. But you know, preparing and setting up to cook food on the prairie is a time-consuming process. Even if you have plenty of wood resources available, you have to cook the wood long enough that you can get the wood burnt down to a point that you can cook with it. You’re using small fires, and it’s not always the easiest to cook for small groups like that. I think they’d have probably cooked larger batches and shared amongst themselves.
Blackburn: Jason, this is a tradition in my family. My granny would make what she called sour biscuits, and you make it the night before, and she’d put it on top of what we call the icebox, the refrigerator, and it basically would ferment overnight. I don’t know that it would rise, Kathy. You probably know better but because I know you’ve done a lot of reenacting, but those sour biscuits. A lot of my older uncles, born 1910, 1911 or 12, preferred sour biscuits their entire life, and I’m sure that they would have been doing that on the trail. Whatever you can produce the night before, after it got dark and you’re sitting there, you know, cook, prepare the biscuits the next morning once a fire is done. And I’ve been in deer camp before where the fire lasts all night long. You build it up, and then you got the embers. Then you dig down and put that Dutch oven in there with those sour biscuits. Probably pretty tasty.
Harris: You know, I imagine it would. And the other thing is a lot of times, if you were going to take the time to cook big batches of biscuits, that was your bread for the day. It wasn’t your bread for that meal. They weren’t repeating the process every time they stopped.
Thompson: Now, Jason, what would have been the optimal travel time? So what time would they have gotten up? What time would they have gotten started on the journey? And then about when would they make camp for the day?
Harris: So, you know, if you look at cattle drives versus migrant trains, you want to be ready to start moving both as soon as the sun is up and you’re able to move. And on a good day, you know, a cattle drive is going to go eight to 10 miles across the prairie. I imagine a migrant train would be a little bit slower. So, you know, you’re hoping to hit maybe six, seven, eight miles on a good day. But, yeah, up and ready to go before the sun’s up, and you’re going to drive all day long, as long as you can until you can’t see, and then you’re going to make sure you find a good place to set camp before you hit dark.
Thompson: That train would have been a much better choice. (laughter)
Blackburn: And Trait, a lot of people don’t realize, you know, they see these movies where these horses are at a full gallop, you know, as if you could ride at full gallop all day long. Horses typically could go about 20 miles a day. So that’s just with a rider on a horse not pulling anything, and not, you know, encumbered by a lot of people. So, just even troopers on the American West, if you could go “20 miles a day on beans and hay,” which is the old saying, that was about the limit. And one reason the American troopers had such difficulty fighting American Indians on the Western Plains and in the southwestern desert is that Apaches could run more than 20 miles in a day, whereas the troopers on a horse could not go 20 miles a day, especially in those arid conditions. And so, western travel was difficult over land with all the obstacles and the horse itself, even if he had extra mounts.
Harris: And they showed it a little bit in the movie because, at one point Sam Elliott is telling all the migrants, don’t let your children ride on the buckboards. Make everyone walk. One, you didn’t want the extra weight in the wagon. You wanted it to be a slow process, so you didn’t break the animals down over time. But there was a lot of danger there to falling off wagons or off of buckboards while you’re traveling because you’re on the open prairie. There’s all sorts of holes and ruts and things that you’re not expecting, especially when you’re out in the grasslands, and you’re not going to see it until you hit it.
Thompson: I do have to mention that when Thomas goes to hire the cook, the cook says that he’s going to need $600 for food and supplies, and Thomas just hands it over like he’s handing over yesterday’s allowance. I did the time value of money there and the inflation calculator. $600 in 1883 equates to a little over $19,000 in today’s money. So I suspect that it was not going to cost $600 to get outfitted for this drive.
Dickson: They were eating really well.
(laughter)
Thompson: Yeah, they had their maître d’ out there with them and white tablecloth. Along those same lines, Thomas goes to purchase a hand mirror. It’s nice. Looks like a silver hand mirror for a woman that he likes on the drive, and the price is $50. And I thought that that sounded high, too. And as it turns out, that’s over $1,600 in today’s money. So I think they didn’t quite do their calculations right, as to what things might have really cost back in those days.
I do want to get into Indian Territory because they cross, they cross, the Red River at Doan’s Crossing, and then they get into Indian Territory, and they’re in Comanche lands, in the Comanche reservation and so, a little bit of history on the Comanche reservation. We have the 1867, the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek, and that is agreed to. Now, the Comanches weren’t a unified tribe, so not all of the Comanches were there to be able to agree to that treaty. But the long and the short of it is, is the Indian wars had come to this area. The federal government had put a real priority on rounding up the Plains tribes and bringing them to reservations. And so the Comanches and Kiowas were assigned to share 2.9 million acres in southwestern Oklahoma, basically north and east of the Red River and its north fork, south of the Washita River and west of the 98th Meridian, and then the Cheyenne and Arapaho agreed to live on a reservation that was immediately to the north of the Comanche Reservation as well. And so that’s what sets the scene as they’re as they’re making their way north into Indian Territory.
We have a couple of Comanches. One is the character Sam, who you’ll see in several episodes, and they come out and basically they engage in this bartering process, and they decide to give them a few beefs, and this was common for back in those days. And the Comanches basically, they were saying, you’re crossing our land, and we’re essentially going to charge you a tax. And the main character, Elsa, says, well, they can charge a tax? And one of the cowboys says, well, it’s their land. Of course they can charge us. And there’s a quote from Quanah Parker that I found about this practice. He said, “Your government gave this land to the Indian to be his hunting ground, but you go through and scare the game, and your cattle eat the grass. So the buffalo leaves, and the Indians starve.” So this was their way of trying to feed their people. And then there was a rancher who said, “we kind of had to stand in with those scoundrels,” referring to the Indians, “if you didn’t, they come in at night, and they run your horses off and stampede your cattle, and most any man would rather give them a beef than have them run his cattle off.” So this was a common practice in those days.
Blackburn: It would have been, Trait, and a lot of people don’t realize just watching this movie thinking these Indians were Stone Age culture. They had been traders for over 200 years. Once they acquired the horse from the Spanish, who came to Oklahoma in 1541, but once these horses got loose, the Indians learned how to ride and to capture, and once they became, you know, these lords of the Southern Plains, they were trading all the way down into Old Mexico. They were trading all the way north. And by 1803 in Oklahoma, the Wichita and their allies, the Comanches, were controlling much of southern Oklahoma. The Osages were pushing down out of their haunts on the Mississippi River. But the Comanche, these were veteran traders. That would not have been new to them at all. If they couldn’t trade for it, try to steal it if they could, and they would look up to those who could lead a raid and steal. But they would have been dealing in slaves. They would have been dealing in horses, and they would have been dealing in pelts and furs. So that would have been very common for them to approach a group. If it was a bigger group, they wouldn’t try to steal because they were smart. And they said well, let’s trade, and let’s sit down and work out a trade. And the Comanches, you know, even Jesse Chisholm was so successful as a frontier trader because he could speak Comanche language. Sign language was really common at the time. That was a universal language on the Plains. And so even if they couldn’t translate each other’s, they could do sign language and trade, and so that was very common at this time.
Thompson: Jason, what I liked about that scene was, I think in a lot of Westerns, it’s pretty typical like okay, let’s set up the trope of the cowboys and the Indians, and let’s have a big battle. And what I like about this scene is it shows the very collegial nature of these two groups of people getting together. The Comanches knew, you know, it’s futile to refuse them passage. Right? There’s too many people coming. So they decide that, you know, they’re almost good capitalists, right? They’re going to get something out of this. And so after they make their deal, the Comanches are invited to sit at the campfire and to spend the night for the night. And so it shows that there could be some sort of collegial nature between these two groups here and that both could find mutual benefit in each other, and I don’t think that’s portrayed very often.
Harris: No, I don’t think it is either. That was one of the aspects of the series that I really enjoyed. But it also starts to show something that was going to happen in the Indian Territory over the next few years, and that’s the Bureau of Indian Affairs was really going to start to look at those southwestern tribes, and particularly those around Fort Sill— the Comanches when they brought in the Apaches in 1890— and look at, well, maybe farming’s not the best drought. Let’s talk about ranching with the tribes. And so I know that they made some pretty significant efforts to try and transition some of the Comanches and Apaches that ended up around Fort Sill into ranchers rather than farmers.
Thompson: Yeah, a lot of the cattle associations, they actually hired Quanah Parker to be their— what we would call today—a lobbyist. And Quanah Parker went to Washington, DC, to lobby on behalf of the tribe. Now not all of the tribesmen wanted to agree to this to have, but he said, listen, they’re here. It’s in the best interest for us to make some money off of this. So he was advocating in Washington, DC, for leasing those grasslands to ranchers, and then they could get some of the benefit off of it. And so in 1884, the Indians on the reservations agreed to approve the leasing. They were paid six cents an acre on a six-year lease, and the cattlemen also agreed to hire 54 of them as cowboys. And so it’s exactly like you said. They’re transitioning to a different way of living, just really a couple of decades after their defeat on the Plains and being, you know, being moved to the reservations. And then, of course, in 1901, this is when, the reservation goes away, and they go more into the allotment process and their reservation is dissolved.
Blackburn: Trait, one thing too that I liked is that, you know, why are these Comanches out on the Plains by themselves? Well, they’re hunting, the federal government would allow them to keep some arms. After the Red River War of 1874, the big wars were over. And so as individuals who would get allotment of ammunition, of weapons to go out and hunt. And one of our colleagues in the past, Bill Lees, Dr. Bill Lees, who was our archaeologist for many years, had proven that as late as the 1880s, there were buffalo still being hunted on the Southern Plains. The traditional view is that the buffalo were gone by 1875, and that just disappears. Well, Bill Lees proved with some archaeology in Oklahoma Panhandle. By the 1880s, they were still hunting and consuming buffalo meat. And so these Comanches would have been looking for any, you know—there wouldn’t been a lot of them— we would not have the giant herds of thousands as you would. But there would have been buffalo, especially a lot of old bulls, individuals in these valleys. They would have been hunting deer, antelope, even elk at the time. A lot of the travelers coming through the Indian Territory at that time would talk about the game. But of course, that would have been seasonal. And so the Comanches would have relied on their allotment, or their provisions given them by the government. So there would be a time when they bring the cattle in, they would issue, they would call it the issue. You’d come in to get your goods and your beef. But hunting was a very important part of their diet as late as 1883. So that would have been very common.
Thompson: Kathy, you did some research, and there’s a love interest between the main character Elsa and Sam, the Comanche warrior. And can you talk about? Was that common? Would that have happened at all? What would have been the attitudes of the family members during that era, if that had had been a thing?
Dickson: Well, with the racism of the era, that would not have been accepted by her parents the way it is in the TV series. But Elsa’s character herself is, I mean, she’s way outside the fringe of society, much more so than any teenage girl would have would have been at the time. But I think the director probably did that to emphasize to modern audiences how much she didn’t fit in, but she seemed to fall in love at the drop of a hat and sleep with everybody she fell in love with. Which, you know, we’re almost 100 years away from the sexual revolution. So she would have been treated as a prostitute, if she’s out there openly sleeping with men that she is not married to, and that doesn’t happen in the series. Her behavior seems to be accepted as oh, well, that’s just Elsa. So yeah, that relationship would not have happened to the way it did.
Blackburn: Well, and one little aspect there is that, well into the 20th century, American culture in general treated the Indians as a subspecies, that their story should be in natural history museums. It’s still that way today. You go to natural history museums, and you see something about American Indians, as if these are relics of the past, just like dinosaur bones in natural history, that it’s not part of the mainstream of American history, it’s a subset. So it’s natural history. That would have been the attitude at the time, and the height of racism in America really goes from the 1890s, starting in the in the ’80s. But, you know, Plessy v. Ferguson, separate but equal, that it’s okay to treat people with a different pigment of skin differently than main culture.
Thompson: And that case was 1896,
Blackburn: 1896 to the 1920s, Ku Klux Klans at a height of power in Oklahoma in 1921. So we’re talking about this period of racism that’s some of the worst in American history, and that attitude would have been there about the Indians, even the reformers, by the 1880s. And this would be Senator Dawes and others were saying, we have got to do something about this Indian problem, and our solution is to make them good little farmers. Let’s do away with the reservations. Let’s make them go to their own allotments. And I’ll never forget one great quote that I’ve used in a couple of books. He said, the Cherokees and the other Indians seem so happy, and there’s no poverty, you know, they’re taking care of each other, he said. But they’re missing one main thing that would make them great Americans. That’s greed. That they need this idea of greed and property and building up wealth and using it as capital. And to do that, we’ve got to destroy their reservations, destroy their faith and their way of life and make them good little Americans. That’s the attitude at the time that these are not real people.
Thompson: Yeah, Jason, transitioning. I want to talk about some of the medical issues we see in the show, and you’ve told me that you studied up on some of this in your studies. But, we see snake bites. We see an amputation. Can you talk about some of the accuracy of how they dealt with some of those medical maladies that you might encounter on the trail?
Harris: Sure. So that was another one of the things I really enjoyed is how much this series kind of brought to life some of those medical conditions and ailments that could, you know, really cause you problems in the West. Talking about cholera and the consumption of water without boiling it in the West. You know, a lot of people have said for a long time, when you look at Texas, if it doesn’t sting you, bite you, it will kill you.
Thompson: I’m from Texas. That’s accurate. (laughter)
Harris: Yeah. And so, but it’s something you had to deal with on a regular basis. Not necessarily the cholera or the smallpox, but just there’s so many things in the natural environment that are out to get you if you run into them, And western Oklahoma is full of rattlesnakes. I mean, we still have huge roundups every year. And not always is a bite from a rattlesnake deadly, but in most cases, without treatment, it’s going to be a deadly condition. If you had survived through the Civil War and you had worked in the Medical Corps, you would have seen countless amputations at Civil War battlefields. A good Civil War surgeon, by the end of the war, could amputate an arm or a leg in about three minutes.
Thompson: What a skill to have, right?
Harris: But it’s a skill that they developed over time, and it’s not a skill that translates well into just common knowledge. And so the idea of performing an amputation in the West, you know, I wouldn’t want to be someone that had it done on me, but I thought it was a good representation of some of those ideals and some of the medical advancements that we have made kind of in the contemporary period.
Thompson: Well, there’s one other subject I want to tackle before we start to wrap up here, and that’s the language that was used in the show. And I remember, so when my kids were young, you know, you hear those back seat squabbles, and then you’d hear somebody holler out, “That’s not fair.” And my wife would say, we don’t use the f-word in this family. (laughter)
Well, they used the f-word in this show quite liberally and quite frequently. And so I wanted to look into how, was this common usage. Did this occur back in those days? And I suspected I already knew the answer to the question. But I did look into a little bit, and I used my work computer, so hopefully I don’t get flagged on this for anything, but The University of Keele was sorting through parchment records in the 1300s, and he came across the name of, Roger...Yeah. I’m not going to say his last name, but it alludes to the f-word, in three separate court documents from the 1310s. So some element of the word goes all the way back into the 1300s, and then historians generally agree that the f-word kind of hit its stride in the 15th and 16th century, and it would just be used as a term for sexual intercourse, if you will. And so it didn’t evolve really.
Now it’s adjective, verb, adverb, any one of a number of uses, depending on context. And so back in the late 1800s, it would have been used in a sexual connotation, but it would not have been used as the way that they used a sort of a spice into all of their typical language. In fact, they said that the word damn was one of the worst epithets you could say, because when you were damning somebody, you were essentially saying, you know, sending them to hell. And so that was one of the—today damn is a fairly light cuss word— but back in those days, it was a really bad word to say. And so, most of the ways that we use the f-word today, I say we because Bob cusses is like a sailor, guys. (laughter)
You guys got to realize like, when the microphone’s not on, we just have to endure it here. (laughter)
Blackburn: My carpenter heritage comes out occasionally, but not often.
Thompson: That’s not true. I’m just giving you all a hard time. Bob has a great vocabulary, but the f-word, as we kind of, as it’s iterated in modern times, didn’t really come into usage until World War I era. So when you watch shows like Deadwood and some of these Westerns like 1883, there wouldn’t have been used in this way, and it would have, it certainly would have been foreign to the ears, I think, of most people back in those days. In fact, if you want to, you can Google a list of common cuss words that were used, and I decided not to read them off for this podcast. (laughter) But they’re pretty fun and interesting to read. Today, if someone said them to you, you’d kind of laugh. But back in those days, they were pretty rough. Any other thoughts on the language usage in the show?
Harris: Well, I think that’s one of the things when Deadwood first came out, because you mentioned it. They really tried to ramp up the use of language just so they could get the sense of, this is what this town was like, and we’ve had to use language like this so that it’s appalling to you now as a modern viewer. And so I think you have to give films a little bit of liberty because if they can’t get that perception across to you, then you just lose something.
Thompson: A little bit of that artistic license that Bob was talking about earlier. The other thing, Kathy, you’ve talked about this, the teeth are too white and too straight, and there’s some hair extensions. So did you notice anything else along those lines?
Dickson: Well, the hair extensions drove me a little bit nuts. And I’m really bad about sitting there watching shows like this and giving running commentary, which my husband really does not like, about the problems with the show. And I made it through two or three episodes before I finally said, good grief, woman, couldn’t you have packed a comb? (laughter)
Because Faith Hill’s hair is all over the place, and they would have kept their hair up instead of had it hanging down like that, and it’s obviously very bad hair extensions, so they could have done a better job with that, definitely.
Thompson: Maybe the costumer who won the Emmy wasn’t in charge of the hair.
Dickson: Maybe not.
Thompson: The other thing that I noticed in the show that I do, because of my work on the Capitol restoration project, there was one line that, or a couple of lines of dialog that referenced concrete that really perked my interest because I’ve done a little bit of research on concrete because the Capitol is structurally, it’s a concrete building. And I knew that in the early part of the 20th century, structural concrete, at least, was not very common. And I didn’t know when because the character Thomas, the Pinkerton agent, when he’s trading for the mirror, he says, well, why is the mirror so expensive? And he says, well, because when I go back to the concrete, I can sell it for $50, and that’s why it cost that. And that piqued my interest, because I said, I don’t know that there was concrete as use in the way that he mentions it in 1883.
I don’t think a lot of it, so I went and did a little bit more research on this. So I’m going to tell you, the first concrete pavement in the world was built in Scotland in 1865. So it was a thing back then, but it wasn’t a thing in America yet. In 1889, George W. Bartholomew, a former hardware store owner and part-time druggist in Bellefontaine, Ohio, began experimenting with limestone and clay found in local deposits And so he started kind of experimenting with this cement making, and he purchased the local marl pits. He started the Buckeye Portland Cement Company. And in 1891, he convinced officials to let him pave an eight-foot-wide strip of Main Street with a mixture of sandstone and cement, and two years later, city officials agreed to let Bartholomew pave an entire block, which is actually still there today. It was a very dense and strong concrete, and they’re still using it today. So the writers of the show were off. They weren’t off by much, but it certainly wouldn’t have been common for concrete cities and concrete streets in 1883. In fact, it was non-existent. So there’s a little bit of useless trivia for you for the day.
Blackburn: Well, in Oklahoma history, the first poured in place concrete building was not until 1909, and that was the Colcord Building that is still standing today.
Thompson: Yeah, still there today, right next to the Devon Tower. So Oklahoma’s oldest skyscraper, Oklahoma City’s oldest skyscraper, right next to one of its newest, which is kind of a neat juxtaposition in downtown Oklahoma City. Well, are there any parting thoughts about our 1883 series? Anything that we wanted to, you wanted to talk about or mention that we didn’t get in as we’re closing out here?
Harris: I think maybe my one biggest pet peeve, because I’m a shooter and a gun guy, is that the most iconic gun that they have that James Dutton is using in multiple scenes is an 1885 Winchester High Wall, and the show was 1883. (laughter)
And so if you’re going to go out of the way to give a main character something that symbolic, that’s repetitive, that’s one you should not miss.
Thompson: At least get the year right.
Harris: Right.
Thompson: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great point. Kathy? Anything from your perspective?
Dickson: Just one other thing to note. At one point, Elsa comments that she’s turned 18 so that now she’s legal, and that concept didn’t really exist at the time that at 18, you were now suddenly an adult. That came about during the New Deal when you had to be 18 to work on a WPA project. So they’re quite a bit ahead of their time on that one. You were an adult when pretty much you decided you were an adult and you could support yourself.
Thompson: Right, yeah. I mean, you might have been married at 15, and that’s when you would have been an adult.
Dickson: Right.
Blackburn: And the only probably my pet peeve is just how much violence there is, as if cowboys would attack a migrant group or cowboys would be chasing this pioneer in a wagon, trying to get his stuff in his wagon. You know why put your life at risk? The amount of violence, I think, was way over. But in terms of dramatic tension and driving the plot and, you know, it might have been boring to write a television series about a bunch of migrants just making biscuits every day. Here, they were risking this. But that was not even close to the reality of the cowboy ethic at the time.
Thompson: Yeah. Once again, it was more exciting than showing that train trip. Right? Well, I want to thank each of you, Kathy and Jason, for being here with us today and for talking about this. I’ve found this conversation to be fascinating. I’ve learned a lot. And so I would recommend, if you’re of the appropriate age, go check out the series, and then maybe you’ll find some stuff that we missed, and then you can talk about that as well. But, thank you all for being here.
Harris: My pleasure.
Dickson: It was fun.
Blackburn: Thanks, Trait.
Thompson: All right, well, we’re going to wrap this one up for you, and happy watching, and we will see you down the road.
(upbeat music plays)
Thompson: You’ve been listening to A Very OK Podcast, hosted by Trait Thompson and Dr. Bob Blackburn. The podcast is produced by the Oklahoma Historical Society. Visit us at okhistory.org, and find us on social media by searching for @okhistory. I encourage you to purchase a membership to OHS to help us continue our mission to collect, preserve, and share Oklahoma’s unique and fascinating history.
