Elliott West on the American West: Disease, Gold, Horse Empires and the Making of Modern America

High-Level Overview

Joe Rogan talks with historian Elliott West, a retired professor specializing in the American West and author of Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion, a book that took him eight to ten years to write and more than 20 years to research, as well as The Last Indian War about the Nez Perce. Their conversation traces the long, complicated contact between Native peoples and Europeans, the catastrophic role of disease, the ecological transformation that doomed the bison and Native ways of life, the California Gold Rush and its genocide, the rise and fall of Native horse empires like the Comanche and Lakota, Little Bighorn and the Nez Perce war, boarding schools, corporate ranching, and why Americans cling to a romanticized myth of the West.

The tone is thoughtful, fascinated and at times sobering. West is a gentle, precise storyteller who repeatedly complicates simple narratives, while Rogan brings enthusiasm and connections to earlier guests such as Dan Flores, Steve Rinella and Randall Carlson. The conversation moves between vivid historical anecdotes, big-picture arguments about how America became modern, and reflections on how history is remembered.

The Discussion Explores:

• Centuries of Native-European contact long before Lewis and Clark, including Native visitors to 1720s Paris
• Disease, especially smallpox, and its devastating effects on Native populations
• How the bison trade and industrial leather demand nearly wiped out the herds
• Horses' North American origins, Ice Age extinctions and the rise of Native horse cultures
• The California Gold Rush and one of the clearest cases of genocide in US history
• Little Bighorn, the Nez Perce war and boarding schools that unintentionally created a shared Indian identity
• West's argument that Western expansion was as important as the Civil War in creating modern America
• The mythology of the Western, and the corporate reality behind cowboys and cattle drives

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

A Mixed World Long Before Lewis and Clark

Rogan opens with a story he loved from West's appearance on Steve Rinella's MeatEater podcast: in the 1720s, a delegation of about six Native people from the Missouri River region traveled to France. The French, eager to expand the fur trade, sent a deserter-turned-trader named Bourgmont, who had a child with a Missouri woman, to make allies. He brought a delegation down the Mississippi to New Orleans, across the Atlantic and by coach to Paris, where they spent months being feted by King Louis XV. They described the Paris Opera as full of sorcerers, called a puppet show a place inhabited by small dwarfs, hunted pheasants naked on horseback in the royal woods at Fontainebleau, and one woman married a French sergeant in Notre Dame. They liked almost everything except French men, whom they found effeminate and said smelled like alligators.

West's point is that these Native peoples were cosmopolitan and sophisticated, and that the popular image of Lewis and Clark opening the West is a myth. Lewis compared himself to Columbus, but Europeans had been arriving since the late 1400s, the Spanish had come up from the south since the 1520s with explorers like Cabeza de Vaca, and there had been centuries of contact, trade and exchange. The world was far more complex and interesting than we usually remember. Information was also closely guarded; as today, information was power, and imperial rivals kept their knowledge secret.

Disease and the Collapse of Native Populations

They discuss how disease shaped the conquest. West says syphilis likely came from the Americas to Europe, with the first documented cases in Spain in 1493 and a virulence suggesting a new disease, and Rogan shares the story of syphilis-driven wig fashion in 17th-century France giving us the term "big wig." The far greater catastrophe ran the other way: Native populations declined by as much as 90 to 94 percent, with disease an important factor.

West adds nuance to the idea that Native people simply lacked immunity. Most Europeans had survived smallpox as children, when diseases like smallpox and measles tend to be less deadly and confer lifelong immunity, whereas Native adults were meeting it for the first time. Poverty and poor conditions later worsened mortality, much as the poorest were most vulnerable during COVID. Smallpox kills all ages, including hunters and nursing mothers, so the secondary effects were devastating: if a city lost 40 percent of its people, he says, the whole system would collapse. Apart from the Black Death, he calls it the most horrific event in recorded human history, and unlike the plague, it unfolded across 400 years.

Why People Came, and What It Cost

European colonization was driven by imperial and business ambition: Jamestown, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were corporations, which West likens to Walmart establishing a colony on the moon. Ordinary migrants came because land was scarce in Europe and a peasant's chance of owning any was remote, so the promise of land and a new start, backed by plenty of promoters' lies about instant prosperity and healthy climates, was very seductive. Rogan marvels at the risk-taking spirit this required, and West asks listeners to imagine the news that there was another universe and that you could actually go there.

But from the Native perspective, it was a horrific invasion. West stresses it was also catastrophic for wildlife. Citing Dan Flores's book Wild New World, he notes that at no point in modern history have so many species been eradicated so quickly. Between 1850 and 1880, he argues, the western third of North America was remade ecologically, not just culturally, into a world that Native peoples, whose lives relied on centuries of intricate knowledge, could no longer live in. That transformation, more than the military, is what defeated them.

The Bison: Caught From Both Sides

West complicates the story of the bison's near extinction. Starting in the 1820s, buffalo robes became a fashionable commodity in the eastern US and Europe, and Native hunters, now in an international market, sent hundreds of thousands of robes down the Missouri and Mississippi. By the 1850s herds were noticeably declining, and West estimates something close to half of the population loss came from this trade and other environmental changes. Then, in 1872, someone discovered bison hides could be made into industrial leather for factory belts and gaskets, just as Argentina's supply was tapping out. The white hide hunters who followed finished the job.

Rogan raises Dan Flores's theory that the enormous herds early observers saw were themselves unnatural, an explosion caused by the disease-driven collapse of Native hunters. West thinks there may be something to it though it is hard to prove, comparing it to elk booming in Yellowstone after wolves were removed. Everything in an ecosystem is connected, and humans love to mess with things they do not understand.

Horses, Ice Age Extinctions and the Other American Revolution

West explains that horses evolved over 50 million years on the southern plains from a collie-sized ancestor, then crossed the Bering land bridge to Asia two or three million years ago, becoming zebras and asses along the way, while bison came the other direction from Central Asia. At the end of the last ice age, about 65 percent of North American megafauna vanished, including the American lion, saber-toothed cats, the American cheetah, armadillos the size of Volkswagen Beetles and giant bison whose horns were so wide LeBron James could lie between the tips. The pronghorn's extraordinary speed is a leftover adaptation to the extinct American cheetah. Scholars debate climate change, human hunters and, as Rogan notes from Randall Carlson, the Younger Dryas impact theory.

The Spanish reintroduced horses, beginning with Coronado in the 1540s, and after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt horses spread rapidly. By 1780, peoples across the plains, Southwest and Rockies had built horse cultures, which West calls the grass revolution, or "the other American revolution." Putting a human on a horse created what he calls a "horse man," fusing a grazing animal's speed and power with human imagination, and making Native peoples formidable military and economic powers. The Comanche and Lakota effectively formed a Native empire stretching from southern Canada into Mexico, and they dominated the Spanish. West notes it was the last horse culture to arise on Earth, capping a 5,000-year epic that began with horse domestication in Ukraine, spread through the Mongols, Arabs and Iberians, and ended where horses first evolved.

The Comanche Empire

West credits Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire as the best account. The Comanche were in the perfect place, the southern plains where horses evolved (the subject of Dan Flores's Horizontal Yellow), and ran a genuine empire with its own foreign policy and trade networks: they let Americans raise horse herds on their grass and then stole them, and traded horses north to peoples whose harsh winters killed many animals. Rogan describes Comanche arrowheads still found by the hundreds on Texas ranches, their meat-based diet that let them go days without eating, and their ability to hold multiple arrows between their fingers and fire short bows powerful enough to pass through a bison while riding. He recommends Empire of the Summer Moon and notes that revolvers adopted by the Texas Rangers, and later repeating rifles, finally shifted the balance. West describes the mutual hatred between Texans and Comanches as nearly irreconcilable, ending in ethnic cleansing that left Texas with only a couple of reservations.

Gold Rush Genocide in California

Gold was discovered on the American River on January 24, 1848, but easterners did not believe it until President Polk confirmed it in December 1848, so the famous 49ers arrived to find "48ers" already mining: Oregonians, Australians, Tasmanians, the first Chinese immigrants, Mexicans from Sonora, Peruvians, Chileans and hundreds of Native miners. The Americans drove them out or to the margins in what West calls the second conquest of California. For Native Californians it was genocide, one of the few cases in American history West says is absolutely clear: the California legislature funded bond issues to pay militias to kill Indians, and Congress reimbursed the state, as documented in Benjamin Madley's research. The Native population fell from an estimated 150,000 in 1848 to about 16,000, roughly 90 percent, which West says would be like every Native person across the Great Plains and Southwest vanishing.

The gold was staggering: more was mined in California in 1852 than in the entire world during the 18th century, and the San Francisco Mint once had to sweep gold dust off rooftops within a quarter mile because it blew out of the smokestacks. California skipped territorial status and went straight to statehood, removing the federal protection Native people might otherwise have had.

Little Bighorn, the Nez Perce and the Invention of "the Indian"

West explains that by the 1870s the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne, organized in bands rather than unified tribes, developed a new, almost nationalist sense of common identity to resist. They crushed Custer at Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, but the news reached the East on July 4, 1876, the nation's centennial, and the military would not let that stand. Within a year they were defeated. The next year came the Nez Perce war, subject of West's The Last Indian War. The Nez Perce had saved a starving Lewis and Clark and kept a pledge of alliance with the Americans for decades, becoming prosperous cattle raisers who threatened no one. Yet in 1877 they were ordered onto a reservation within a month under a fraudulent treaty, forced to cross the Snake River at flood stage. On the eve of removal, young men killed several whites they had grudges against, triggering war. West believes the only explanation for the crackdown was the humiliation of Little Bighorn.

The reservation system, West says, was generally meant to control and transform Native people rather than exterminate them, even by self-described Friends of the Indians, through farming, Christianity and education. Boarding schools like Carlisle, founded by Colonel Pratt with the motto "kill the Indian to save the man," forbade Native languages and forced assimilation, with abuses now coming to light in the US and Canada. The irony, West argues, is that boarding schools created "the Indian": children from dozens of tribes, speaking a common language, realized they shared common circumstances and identity.

Expansion as the Birth of Modern America

West's central argument in Continental Reckoning is that between 1850 and 1880, expansion, the gold discoveries and the transformation of the West were as important as the Civil War in creating modern America. They expanded citizenship to Native Americans, Hispanics and Chinese as well as freed people, strengthened the federal government through new responsibilities like national parks and the Department of the Interior, and turned the nation into a Pacific-facing power. He asks Rogan to imagine a change of that magnitude between 1993 and 2023. The hardest part of writing, he says, was making the vast, simultaneous story into a single book; when asked about deadlines he told his editors, "It's done when it's done."

The Myth of the West

West taught a course for over 40 years called "The West of the Imagination." He argues that the direction West has always invited people to imagine new worlds, and that Americans project what they need onto it, like a movie projected from behind the audience. After the Civil War, a divided nation needed a shared, heroic, masculine story of suffering and conquest, which is why Westerns rarely acknowledged that Native people were defending their own land. It is not about guilt, he says, but about knowing what actually happened. At the same time, he warns against painting it all as simple tragedy: in hundreds of settlers' letters and diaries, he never found one who went West intending to kill Indians; they wanted better farms, yet they took part in a transformation that destroyed Native life.

He also honors the real fascination of cowboys, cattle drives and wagon trains, while revealing surprises: the great plains ranching empires were largely corporate, with stock sold in New York, Boston and Edinburgh, cattle driven on free public grass to railheads like Abilene and Dodge City, fattened in Iowa and slaughtered in Chicago and Kansas City, all coordinated by telegraph and railroad. The romantic cowboy, in other words, was part of a modern international business.

Conclusion

Elliott West offers a sweeping but humane view of the American West: a place of centuries-old contact and exchange, of disease and ecological upheaval that doomed Native worlds more surely than soldiers, of gold-fueled genocide, of powerful horse empires that capped a 5,000-year story, and of a 30-year transformation that did as much as the Civil War to create modern America. He resists both the heroic myth and a flat morality tale, insisting on a complicated, human story with no simple lessons. For anyone who grew up on Westerns or wants to understand how the United States became what it is, this conversation, and West's Continental Reckoning, are well worth the time.

This is a summary of "#2058 - Elliott West" from The Joe Rogan Experience, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.