Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West

morning thank you all for coming thank you for supporting the best writers festival in America I'm delighted to be back it is it's really a thrill to see friends from the past to meet new friends and to get a chance to speak to people who are really interested in books in history in stories I teach at the University of Texas at Austin and I think and the student the evaluations at the end suggest that I'm a reasonably interesting lecturer but I know I know perfectly well that if the students weren't required to be in my class some of them would have slept past this 8:30 starting time I start at 10 o'clock in the morning and they get in but they have an enticement if I take attendance essentially I'm not taking attendance today I give daily quizzes you're not gonna be quizzed I'm gonna tell you about a book that I wrote on the history of the American West and it's called dreams of El Dorado I'll tell you why it has that title but I'll tell you a little bit about the genesis of the book and I'm gonna tell you this in part because if you should be so good as to buy and read the book actually really buy the book and then once you buy it if you read it that's fine pass it along but the reason I'm telling you this is that I gave up writing preface 'as a long time ago so the preface is where the author tells you why he or she wrote the book and and what the takeaways are and all this what it all means and I gave up on those because as a reader I got really annoyed at having to read that throat-clearing stuff I wanted to just get right to the story so what I'm gonna tell you is a little bit of what would be a preface if there were a preface in the book I've been a writer for a while and people ask me every now and then often often aspiring writers themselves but sometimes just readers they'll ask me so so how long were you working on this book and I often have to fudge the answer because since I teach American history I teach in general at least pretty much about every subject that I write a book about long before I start writing the book so I wrote a biography of Ulysses Grant and it was my principal project for maybe two years but I had a whole lot of head start on it because I'd been teaching the civil war and reconstruction for 25 years so I knew all the contacts I have author friends who aren't teachers and when they take up a new project they have to educate themselves from the ground up and it's a it's a big it's a big task and so I have an advantage there but this is probably the only book that I can really pin down how long I was working on the book and I can tell you that I was working on this book for 62 years do you not believe me listen and I think I will convince you how many of you have in your head your earliest memory the image perhaps is maybe it's a typically a visual image and you know that that is the earliest thing that you can remember and you have that okay my very earliest memory is a memory of well I'll tell you so here's what I can still see in my mind's eye I am in a cabin it's a white painted cabin but it's dark outside it's not dark like the middle of the night it's dark like this cabin is in a deep forest and I can hear the rain on the roof and the rain is dripping down the windowpanes but the other thing that I can see in my mind's eye is the brilliantly colored scarf that my grandmother is wearing my grandmother loved scarves but especially the brighter the better purple-red you name the colors and I can still see her and I can still see this cabin this is all I can see and of course and I have been able to date when that was because I know when we were in that cabin and that was in the spring of spring or early summer of 1956 and I know this because I was told by my grandmother and my mother this is my mother's mother that the reason that I was in the cab and the reason that my grandmother was in the cabin was that she was house hunting for a summer home for her and her husband my grandfather that was going to be a place where their grandchildren could spend summers and they bought the house in the summer of 1956 so I have a date for this particular memory now this actually so the cabin that they bought was not the one in the deep forest my grandmother did not like cabins in deep forests she wanted a place where the Sun would Shine in and so this cabin and in fact I was able subsidy to go back and locate the cabin and I don't know if the cabins are still there but they were located literally a short stone's throw from the Oregon Trail this was a cabin just inside the Mount Hood National Forest near the village of rhododendron and highway US Highway 26 that goes through rhododendron is the last part of the old Barlow Road the Barlow Road was a stump off of the Oregon Trail which had come all the way across the Great Plains the Rockies the Snake River Valley and when the emigrants to Oregon got to the Columbia River they faced the greatest challenge in the greatest danger that they'd had for the whole trail and that was the danger of going down the Columbia River the Columbia River in those days was not dammed and it was a series the last well there's a stretch of about four miles there were waterfalls Rapids cascades counteraction so on and it was often heartbreaking that the immigrants would who have made it across the plains across the mountains would drown in the Columbia River and so an enterprising immigrant named Sam Barlow decided that he would build a road that would allow the immigrants to circumvent to avoid the Columbia River and so he built this road around the south side of Mount Hood and the road then subsequently became Oregon Highway 35 and then it hooked up with US highway 26 and it's 26 when it came past nor this cabin was and just above the village of rhododendron is a campground called the tollgate campground now before toll gate became a label for a brand of cookies it was actually a gate where a toll was collected and it was the toll gate on the Barlow Road and it was located in this very strategic spot the Barlow Road was probably a 50 miles long so where would you push the gate on it and you had to put it in a way so that people couldn't get around the gate and it'd be very tempting for okay if the gate is here will you just sneak into the woods half a mile on one side and go around and get back on the road afterwards so with Sam Barlow did was to locate the toll gate at this place where there was a steep mountain ridge and this was hunchback mountain that would come down right next to the zigzag river and there's only about forty or fifty feet between the two and this is the route of the trail so there's you simply cannot get around and so we used to have picnics at the tollgate campground so anyway I did indeed spend summers on the Oregon Trail so that the cabin cabin in fact it was it was much more a chalet in my mind's eye of course it was much larger than its subsequent proved to be but it was this wonderful house that was actually much bigger and it was in a sunny spot now I didn't realize it when I was a child but the reason that it could be in a sunny spot was that it was just outside the National Forest it was on private land and the previous owners had cut down all the trees around the house so the Sun would come in this plate this house was located directly across highway 26 from a restaurant called the Barlow trail in and the Barlow trail in was a structure of very large Douglas fir logs that looked like and they probably did date to the time of the great emigration to Oregon in the 1840s and I and my brother and two sisters we would hide in the woods and we would watch the cars come along and we would sneak across to the Barlow trail and would try to talk my grandmother into letting us buy hamburgers and bring him back and so this was the way I spent my summers at about well so by the time I was probably 6 or 7 part of spending time at the mountains we called it the mountains by grandmother who named everything and the more I love my grandmother dearly but the more pretentious the name the better so this house was called porta caeli for the non the few non-latin scholars in the room that means gates of heaven and so another name my when I was about 10 my family got a little dog a Lhasa Apso and my grandmother studied up on these and de Sian and learned that these were the temple dogs in Nepal Tibet and they would guard the temple and they rarely went outside but if anybody approached the doors they would Yap like crazy in our dog did exactly that but my grandmother decided that the name of the dog should be Tobias darling he called him Dobie but she always call him Tobias darling anyway so at porta caeli I would spend summers and in the evenings we would gather around a very large fireplace and when I was pretty young we would be read stories and so we read or my grandmother read or my mother read twists Swiss Family Robinson perhaps you remember that and it's in fact so we we built a tree house that was modeled on the Swiss Family Robinson but my favorite stories were of the emigration to Oregon and there was a book a historical novel by an Oregon author Mary Jane Carr was her name and the title of the book was children of the covered wagon and it was a story I don't remember the the plot exactly but it's pretty much like this actually I know that it was modeled on an actual family that suffered a certain tragedy as I will explain and in fact that family is that stories in my book so the it was a family of seven children and both parents died of disease in route to Oregon and so the kids were taken in by other members of the the wagon train company and they were dropped off at a mission that was operated in what's now Eastern Washington by Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and these these children the Sager children they became sort of the model of the children the covered wagon and the reason I say this is because in all these kids stories it seems like in most cases the kids are orphans because that makes them it get they get to act more like adults and if it's aimed at children well children always dream of being independent and doing stuff on your own which you can't do if their parents hanging around but I and my siblings would play as the children of the covered wagon and my grandparents were great sports and they spoil this so they actually bought us a covered wagon on the they had two or three acres they were on the the grounds of this house and we would play in the covered wagon and we would imagine that they were these kids at the covered wagon we used to hike during summers and we'd hike all over the Mount Hood National Forest there was one trail there was the favorite of my grandmother and I at first I thought it was because it was short and she she liked to get out but she didn't really like to go on long hikes and this this trail was only about half a mile in length and I remember the first time that I'm we hiked on the trail and and I was probably eight maybe nine and doing what young boys do I've raced on ahead and I ran down to the end of the trail the trail was different then most of the hiking trails in the National Forest that clearly were carved out of the hillside with pic and ax this looked like an old abandoned dirt road with the shrubbery growing up around the edge isn't okay but I wasn't thinking too much about it I got down to the end of the road some distance ahead of my grandmother and mother and there was a pile of rocks sort of where the roads seemed to more or less end and the forest crept behind it and again doing what kids do boys do I picked up the rocks and started throwing the rocks and my grandmother who rarely spoke sharply reprimanded me said do not throw those rocks don't disturb that pile and you know there were rock piles all over them the mountainside I had no idea what was special about this but she explained that this was not simply a pile of rocks this was a cairn over a grave and the grave which had only recently been discovered so this would have been about 19 xD two or three the grave had only recently been discovered because there was a realignment of the highway and when the highway was realigned the highway crews maybe they I can't don't know they parked some equipment along this road or something and they discovered this and it turned out when the forensic historians and archaeologists a milonga this was in the grave in a very rough and rotted really makeshift coffin was a skeleton of a young woman she seemed to be maybe twenty years old or there abouts and as best anyone could determine she was someone who had died in the final stages of the immigration to Oregon and when I say final stages so this really was the last leg of the Oregon Trail and all the difficulties of the Oregon Trail really had been surpassed the the first and actually one of the most dangerous parts of the Oregon Trail was simply getting across the Missouri River the Oregon Trail basically started at the Missouri River and getting across the river it wasn't you're like you're gonna fall in the river exactly the problem was that in the 1840s when immigration to Oregon was popular the river towns along in Missouri were overwhelmed by the number of people who would show up every spring and the numbers overwhelmed well especially the sanitary facilities of the village and this was shortly after cholera had appeared in the United States and so the biggest single killer of immigrants to Oregon would be Amherst Orion was cholera and you would contract cholera from the tainted water around these villages and if you could get across the river you get a hundred miles or so out on the plains then you're okay so this woman had survived the crossing the Missouri River she survived the crossing of the plains which usually encountered which usually involved encounters with some of the Plains Indian tribes they weren't particularly dangerous in part because the various Indians the Sioux the Cheyenne the crow they knew that the immigrants were just passing through in fact the immigrants were an opportunity rather than a danger and in fairly standard practice was for a representative of one of the tribes to ride up to the wagon train coming and ask for what amounted to a fee so that they would travel across the Indian lands and the immigrants who were doing it for the first time most were doing it for the first time but they were usually led by a scout or a guy who have done it many times the ones going the first time said we're not gonna pay him this isn't you know they don't own the land where's the title and we're just gonna go on through and the the captain the guide would usually say no no it's it's actually smarter simply to pay them but don't frame those cases where they weren't paid what would happen mysteriously is that in the middle of the night the the livestock the horses the oxen that we're pulling the wagons they would stampede and they would be scattered and then the next morning the Indians would show up and say would you like some help you know regather in your stock and it turned out that they'd have to pay more to do it that way and so there was this tall a cinch that was essentially that was charged the immigrants would cross the Rocky Mountains at South Pass and this was something there was a great surprise to many of them because the Rocky Mountains are the highest mountain range in the United States it's the Continental Divide but South Pass is the easiest pass around in fact people had to be told that they had just crossed the Continental Divide now if you've been across the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming where interstate 84 I guess at that point it's 80 again okay interstate 80 crosses you don't go exactly through south pass you go fairly near South Pass but it's really just this open plane between a couple of mountain ranges that are fairly far apart it's not like a pass across the Sierra is it's not like you know passes most people think of but they get across that and they'd have to deal with thirst sometimes they'd run out of provisions so this young woman who by the way almost certainly was traveling with her family it was almost unheard of for a young woman to travel in a unaccompanied to Oregon and I mean it was a different time and they were all going to claim farms and to start a farm herself wasn't very likely so she's almost certainly had a husband conceivably she was an almost adult maybe adult daughter of somebody traveling there it's also quite possible she had children one or more children by 20 women could have had she could have had one or two kids so she had done all the hard stuff and she had come around the south side of Mount Hood so there were parts of the Oregon Trail parts of the Barlow row that there part of the Oregon Trail that go around the south side of Mount Hood and in the 1960s when I was a kid you could see certain parts of the trail there were particularly steep so Laurel Hill was a notorious steep descent on the Barlow Road and for the wagons to get down they would tie ropes around the wagons and so one end of the rope is around the wagon the other end was looped around a very large tree and looping around a couple of times so one person could hold the end of the rope and with the added friction with the tree could lower the wagon down and I do remember that in the 1960s you could still see the grooves in the tree that the ropes had made so I was told that I wasn't supposed to disturb the grave of this this woman and I okay I it didn't really sink in to me at the time you know I'm 10 years old what do you know when at that age but the more I get to thinking about then the more I was intrigued by this woman's story so who was she and and I could sort of piece together what must have happened almost certainly she fell ill conceivably she was injured people broke legs and wagon wheels rolled over them something perhaps she had a wound that got infected and she died now one of the intriguing parts of the story is that okay I've assumed that she was a loved one of somebody and if you lose let's say your wife or it could have been a daughter mother you want to give them a proper burial but the grave was very shallow and the coffin was just slapped together in the region the reason the rocks were there was to keep wolves and other animals out but they didn't well basically they felt they didn't have time to dig a deep grave so this allowed me to eventually as I was starting to piece this story together to date it a little bit more accurately how many of you are California residents okay then you all know the story of the Donner Party so the donners met they're very unfortunate fate in the late fall in the migration season of 1846 and after that everybody heading to Oregon everybody heading to California understood what the consequences were of getting caught out on the trail when winter hit now in the case of the Pioneer Woman's grave which is how it's still labeled in the Mount Hood National Forest nobody ever figured out exactly who she was but there she was Pioneer Woman they weren't going to get caught in snowdrifts they weren't going to be eventually reduced to cannibalism the way the Donner Party was but they were a couple of days yet maybe maybe four days if it was raining and it probably was raining so this probably late in the migration season that was the reason for the hurry they had to get to Oregon City which is about 15 miles above Portland because that's where they were all going that was basically the Gateway to the bimah Valley they had to stake their claim they had to build their house before the winter rains set in they were almost always really short of provisions by this time so hunger was the biggest the biggest challenge and so they were in a hurry and it was clearly evidenced by this so I grew up you know sort of with this in the back of my head summers I spent mostly in the mountains winters I lived in Portland I grew up in Portland and one of the places we used to go my father would often take me and my siblings out on Sunday afternoons and we would drive around the Portland area and go on tours around my father was in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War two and so he still had connections in the Corps of Engineers so we could go into the bowels of Bonneville Dam and we could see all the really cool electrical works and waterworks and everything he thought that was great but one of the places we liked to go was to Fort Vancouver Vancouver Washington not to be confused at Vancouver British Columbia Vancouver Washington is directly across the Columbia River from Portland and it's so called because it was the original Fort Vancouver and Fort Vancouver was eventually abandoned by the Hudson Bay Company which operated Fort Vancouver Hudson's Bay Company a large fur trading company still in existence and they had their headquarters the Northwest headquarters was at Fort Vancouver and they had a very active and thriving fort the fort eventually burned down after it was abandoned but it was reconstructed I think during the 1960s and so we used to go over to Fort Vancouver and I used to imagine that I was a fur trader or somebody coming into Fort Vancouver and just about this time I came across another book by Mary Jane Carr who actually was a resident of Portland and it was called young Mac of Fort Vancouver and young Mac is this kid who was in the book about the age I was at the time and of course another orphan and the deal is his parents died and John McLaughlin who was the chief factor the the director of the Hudson Bay Company was effectively the Czar of the Pacific Northwest during the 1830s and 1840s and he was a distant cousin or uncle or something so Matt gets sent out and he becomes a surrogate son of John McLaughlin who is this very imposing figure and I still can remember that the cover of the book because John McLaughlin a real figure and I've seen this in fact I've got a photograph of him in the book he had this long flowing white hair in fact he was called the white heritage eagle by the Native Americans of the region so I could imagine that I was this kid I was his apprentice fur trader and the book described the annual trip of the the annual resupply trip from that originated in Hudson's Bay in Canada and it would go overland across in fact they'd wait till the winter when the rivers were frozen and they could easier travel and they'd go overland until he got to the headwaters at the Columbia River and then they'd put there that get boats that build boats boats and they'd put them in the Columbia River and they'd come down the river and every well to be late winter early spring by the time they arrived and the people at Fort Vancouver I waited in great anticipation of the arrival of the flotilla and the the voyagers the the french-canadian canoeist the people who ran the boats they would put on their finest hats and you know brightly colored shirts and everything and they would sing their boatman songs as they came down the river and young Mac would be waiting for them and in fact so for Vancouver's still there the reconstruction and you can run down and look up the river and are they coming so anyway so this is this is what I spent my trial doing I went to college I went to I drove in Portland I went to college at Stanford and I arrived in the autumn of 1971 and I if a few of you look like you are old enough to remember that time I want to take you back to that time in the history of California in the history of the United States in the history of modern technology and in 1971 no one had ever heard the term Silicon Valley so that part of the San Francisco Bay Area was called the South Bay or the Santa Clara Valley there was just a hint that something might be going on there it was the beginning so the transistor had been invented about 10 or 15 years before and it was starting to be put into electronics and there was an electronics firm that had been established some years before there was doing okay Hewlett Packard and so something was coming along but it hadn't yet happened now I'm gonna jump ahead a little bit and say that at that time I didn't know you didn't know nobody knew that the epicenter of the modern tech revolution was going to be in California it was going to be in what would become Silicon Valley in fact if you had been betting on the matter if you had been trying to guess if you were an investor and you wanted to place your investing bets as to where this high-tech revolution if somehow you knew that this tech revolution was coming you might very well have said no not here it's gonna be in Boston because what do you need from for the tech revolution as it developed well in the first place you need some electronics companies that are already there that are already doing some of this stuff and there were more of them doing it in Boston then we're doing it around Palo Alto or a mountain view or Santa Clara you probably ought to have some top rate research universities so there's that school what do they call its it's the Stanford of the East you know Harvard and the Caltech of the East MIT and so you know and so if you were gonna make a bet on which of these two where the was gonna be the epicenter of the tech revolution you might very well said it's going to be Massachusetts gonna be bossing Route 28 in Boston that's not what happened and one of the things that I was able to see just the beginning of his Wow I've in four years I was in Palo Alto has watched this start to begin but I didn't appreciate exactly what was happening I didn't understand why it was happening there and I didn't well actually I did get an inkling because when I was in college in California on several occasions I'd go to Yosemite and go through the Sierras and go through the the gold country and it was really all and in fact so at the Stanford Museum on the campus there is the the famous Golden Spike that United the two wings of the Transcontinental Railroad and of course it's made out of California gold and so I was aware that there had been this thing that had happened I mean I knew it from school but I became more aware sort of feeling and watching where it took place this gold rush to California in the late 1840s in the 1850s and one of the striking things and I didn't put all of this together until you'd actually don't have to believe this I'm I'm gonna propose a theory of why Silicon Valley and not Boston okay and here's how it goes and I sort of put this together in observing it in kind of looking around me in California when I was there and then just paying attention to this over the subsequent 40 years so I told you I've been working on this book for a long time and it's this that so two of the ingredients two of the ingredients that we're necessary for tech revolution I've already identified one is you have to have the startup companies that you have to have a few companies there they're already doing this so other people want to go there to do more the same thing you also have to have the research base you have to have the universities and so you know it's you got well in California it's Berkeley and Stanford primarily but there's a third element a third element you can't quantify so easy eventually you could quantify it but before you could quantify it before it even became an industry it was a mindset and the mindset that was required was a mindset that risk is the natural setting of success in business you have to be willing to take risk furthermore and accompanying this is call it a normalization of failure now yeah again you can decide whether you agree with me or not but here's why California not Massachusetts in Massachusetts there was still enough of the Puritan mindset sometimes what I've called the first version of the American Dream associated with Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin was this poor kid who made it I mean I'm not gonna say huge but he was well enough off by his mid-1940s the David he was were able to retire from business and to devote his time to his hobbies playing with electricity and overthrowing the British Empire but but his model was the one that was basically summarized by his alter ego poor Richard early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise a penny saved is a penny earned all of this stuff so you need to have these good habits of character of soul in order to achieve success there was enough of that Calvinist predestination ISM there's leftover from the Puritan days you know the the Puritans the the predestined Aryans didn't really think that they could kind of peek behind you know God's poker hand to see if you were saved or not but there were signs and if you worked hard and you had good virtues and your business succeeded your farm thrived your business exceeded that was a good indication you were gonna be saved but if your business failed uh-oh you're in trouble so the response to failure in Boston I'm zeroing in on Boston the sponsor failure in Boston was you hang your head you beat your breast you examined your soul and said what's wrong with me jump to California jump to California in middle of the Gold verse and early phases the Gold Rush where gold mining actually took place in rushing streams that are pouring off the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and imagine that there are two miners who are standing there in water that's up to their thighs it's the water's freezing coal is coming off the mountains and the Sun is beating down on their heads and they've been working for weeks and they've been moving tons of rocks and SAP gravel and sand and so one of the miners and these these miners are within spitting distance of each other because the claims are so small and one miner reaches down into the water and he pulls up a hunk of gold and he says I'm rich and the guy 20 feet away reaches down and pulls up a rock okay so the guy who pulls up a rock and he looks at his neighbor who pulled up the gold nugget the guy who pulled up the rock does not say oh what's wrong with me what's wrong with me now he says oh I didn't get lucky and what is his response he goes finds a new claim and he tries again and a California is heard of the story of the California Gold Rush was you failed and you fail and you fail and you fail and then finally you succeed and you succeed grandly enough that you pay for all the previous failures and make a ton of money besides now that wasn't the norm exactly but that was certainly the dream and it happened often enough there's a very plausible dream okay so which of those two is the mindset that is necessary for the cultivation of what's going to become Silicon Valley and what industry is it that is based on that model the venture capital industry where you make 10 bets knowing that nine of them we're gonna go bust but the tenth one's gonna make us all so much money that we're gonna become rich and that's why California that's why Silicon Valley is where it is and that's the lesson of my book actually that's not the whole lesson book there's lots more if I had time okay so I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about my grandmother after I got out of college I went to work for a family business and I went to work with family that's not because I really thought it was gonna be my career but because I have the same name as my father who had the same name as his father who founded the business back in the 1910s and I grew up working in the business it was a cutlery business we sold we are importers and wholesalers of anything that cuts with an edge knives scissors and alike and so I felt a certain familial obligation to the business to my father to my grandfather to give it a try I didn't really think I was gonna want to do it but I gave it a try and well I well so my job was I was a traveling salesman and my territory spanned the American West from Portland all the way east to Denver and the year was 1976 now for those of you who can wind it back 1976 was the year of the American bicentennial but are there any residents or former residents of Colorado in the room do you know what the yes so what is the nickname of Colorado it's the Centennial state because 1976 was the centennial of the admission of Colorado to the Union if you're from Colorado and if you remember that time you might very well have read James Michener's the historical novelist bestseller of the year and it was called Centennial and Centennial is the story of the emergence of Colorado it's also the story of the fur trade in Colorado and one of the characters in Michener's book is based on a real-life individual whose whom I write about in my book the name is Joseph meek Joe meek and he was born in Virginia and he died in Oregon in fact he used to say as he as he was about to die in Oregon he said I was born in Washington County Virginia and I'm gonna die in Washington County Oregon but the story centers on his life as he has a fictional name and part of the fur trade so it just so 1976 you perhaps will remember was before the age of cable television and my territory as I say was this these wide-open spaces between Portland and Denver and so I spent many nights in places like Shoshone Shoshone Idaho and Winnemucca Nevada and where when the hardware store closes closed at 5 o'clock in the afternoon there was nothing going on until they opened at 7 o'clock the next morning so before I would head out I would put books in the trunk of the car along with my cutlery samples and one of the books that I took along was James Michener's book centennial my grandmother who is now living in an apartment and the Park Blocks in Portland she loved to read books too so we read the book simultaneously and I was her scout on the ground because if you've read the book if you read anything by Michener you'll know that he notes a great deal of time to these specific descriptions of the place and so he wrote about well there was this there was this mountain in Colorado in the Front Range that Wow where the snow in the springtime would form a cross and the Spanish had called it in Spanish the mountain of the Holy Cross and my grandmother wanted to know if it actually existed and so I was able to say yeah I saw it there it is and there was another instance where there was one of the ridge lines of one of the mountains apparently at least in the eyes of the the characters in the book looked like a beaver which was the object of the hunting crawling up the ridge line so was the stone beaver going up the mountain and I spent more time trying to find that anagram II couldn't find it now in fact when I was in Colorado just last fall I was talking to a group sort of like this and a couple of people said oh yeah hey you just work in the right place it's over its long speak and if you look at it from s's Park you can see it but one of the most intriguing parts of the book for my grandmother my grandmother was a very fastidious woman and she had her ways of doing things and she loved to have tea tea in the afternoon tea in the morning but tea in the afternoon especially she had a very nice tea service and so whenever I came over to visit she would make tea and we would sit and we sipped tea and we would talk about the book and when I was on the road I would call her each evening I said grandma this is what I saw and I have been able to find that or so but one of the intriguing parts the book very intriguing to my grandmother was the fact that this character based on Joe meek who spent 11 and a half months out of the year pretty much on his own out in the wilds in the mountains dealing with grizzly bears and sometimes hostile Indians and the cold and the risk of drowning in a stream or breaking your leg or you know all this all these dangers and he was reduced to if you remember that movie from a couple of years ago the revenant or the Leo DiCaprio character basically gets mauled by the bear and it has to cover himself with a bear really gets reduced to the most savage part of existence so this is this guy except for this one thing this one ritual that kept him in touch with civilization and that was at the end of the roughest day the coldest day when he nearly suffered frostbite he would come back to his camp and he would build small fire and he would make his tea and the tea the one that he liked he would get it at the annual rendezvous and so he'd get it and the tea was lapsang souchong tea so my grandmother said bill we gotta try it we got to get some of this lapsang souchong tea so these days you just buy it on the Internet in those days before they entered a little bit harder and but I found it for and so I said okay we're gonna have the tea and so when I took the teeth to her apartment and it was a suitably cold rainy rod a really cold and so she brewed up the tea and she poured it into the cups and we were sitting there and we were both gonna take a sip together so the tea cup went to our lips and my grandmother I said was very fastidious she never did anything like this she took a cup a sip of the tea she went oh that is the worst thing I've ever tasted she was absolutely right anyway that's the reason I wrote the book I've run out of time so thank you very much [Applause] you

Channel: Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

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Length: 45min 32sec (2732 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2020