(uplifting instrumental music) - In the past 25 years, thousands of books on the American West had been published.

From the 1980s on a movement called New Western History opened the way for fiction, academic study, movie and television scripts, and popular histories that presented the Western story as a complex mix of conflict, cooperation, and contradictions.

The new writing included people and stories that had been left out of the traditional themes and myth of the American West.

Now two of Western history's leading writers have new books that blend the excitement and adventure of the Old West with surprising realities that are often cold and hard.

Both books are climbing the best seller lists, and both authors are here from the Center of the West.

(uplifting instrumental music) Hi, my name is Tim White, and welcome to the Center of the West.

I've been an advisor here for a long time, and I think you'll enjoy today's discussion with two of the most eminent historians of the American West who are with us here in Cody today.

And big thanks to Wyoming PBS for making all of this possible.

So, stick around for a few minutes.

I think you'll both learn something and find it really deeply rewarding.

The two men with us here today may already be well known to you.

Dr.

Paul Hutton, he retired not long ago from the University of New Mexico, as distinguished professor of History.

His writings are widely read, his television appearances are widely seen.

And his new book, "The Undiscovered Country," tracks the Western Movement of America from the days, believe it or not, of George Washington, all the way through Buffalo Bill, with a lot of known and less known characters along the way to create a sweeping panoply of Western history.

Peter Cozzens is the author of over 20 books on American history, many of them on the Civil War.

Peter's book on the Plains Indian Wars called the "Earth is Weeping," was a bestseller.

It was one that moved a lot of people.

And his new book focuses on a small town in the West that had more tall tales, myths, lies and truths than it did residents, (audience chuckling) "Deadwood."

Dr.

Hutton, let's begin with you.

A lot of people who will look at your book, and since it's climbing the bestseller list, a lot of people are, a lot of people are gonna be surprised that you begin with George Washington.

When does the West begin and where?

- Well, of course, people were in the North American continent for thousands of years before the Westward Movement began.

But it really begins at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock in terms of the European invasion of the new world, and of course also down in Mexico, and then moving north as well with the Spanish Entrada.

And I start early for several reasons.

One is to tie the American West in with the American Revolution.

And secondly, to make it clear from the very beginning of my book that this isn't just the story of the West, the West is the story of America.

- Peter, Paul Hutton writes across 150 years and seven generations of people, you choose one place in one particular period of time in the middle, 1870s, Deadwood.

Why did you make that choice?

- Well, Deadwood epitomized the Wild West town.

It was, in many ways, typical of Wild West towns, in terms of the raucousness, lawlessness, gambling, prostitution, gunfights.

But it was also unique, in that it was the only town in the West that was built on land that had been guaranteed the Indians by treaty.

So, the town was inherently lawless, subject to no federal or territorial laws.

And people had to create their own laws in Deadwood, create their own sense of community because they had nothing else to rely on.

- Well, and you're right, that there was a surprising amount of order and cooperation even without the laws, and without people to enforce the laws, in the early days of Deadwood.

- People were there to make money.

To either make money gold mining or by mining the miners, like the saloon keepers (audience chuckling) and gambling den keepers and whatnot.

And for the most part, they wanted guarantees that the money they made and the gold that they prospected would be theirs and would be safe in their hands.

And that, of course, was a motivation to bring law and order to the town, but it was always bifurcated.

There was one half of Deadwood.

How many have seen "Deadwood" the series here?

- A lot of people.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Well, there was one part of Deadwood that was featured in the show called the Badlands.

That's where all the vice was located.

And the other half of Deadwood was relatively stayed, and became well ordered early on.

They were only, you know, a couple 100 yards apart, but they could have been on opposite sides of the globe.

- Paul, how do you weave a 150-year story of Western movement, and include the stories of Indians, Native Americans?

How do you include them?

Where does the scholarship come from?

How do you tell that story?

- Well, "The Undiscovered Country," my title actually is from Hamlet's soliloquy.

And to Hamlet, the undiscovered country was death.

And the story of the American West and its conquest is a story of violence and of death.

And even for many of my main protagonists, it ends unhappily, to say the least, but it's also the undiscovered country is starting over and beginning again, and recreating both yourself and a community.

What Peter's writing about is the creation of a community out of nothing.

And that's what the story of the American West was all about.

The ability to recreate and reinvent yourself.

And Frederick Jackson Turner, the greatest historian that our country's ever known, proposed that America recreated itself time and time again on successive frontiers.

Thus, it shaped a unique and exceptional character for our people.

We're, an amalgam of people from everywhere, and yet we all identify with certain values, and we all have a dream.

And it's the West that shaped that dream.

- That particular dream carried the traditional European civilization all the way across the West and through it.

When you were melding together these different people, you had Daniel Boone, and I learned a lot about Daniel Boone I didn't know, and I learned about Davy Crockett stuff I didn't know.

I mean, I thought Walt Disney invented Davy Crockett, (audience laughing) but Davy Crockett was a remarkable, larger than life character in his own time.

Now, when you're dealing with characters like that that we watched in the 50s and 60s on television programs, how do you separate the myth from the fact of some of these early Western expansion people?

- These characters are names that we recognize, but that we don't know.

And I use seven protagonists in the book, Boone, Crockett, Carson, Cody, very famous frontiersmen.

I do William Weatherford or Red Eagle, as he was known, the leader of the Creek Nation, Mangas Coloradas of the Apaches in Sitting Bowl.

And so I picked them because they worked both geographically and in terms of chronology to tell my story.

And I particularly picked the native leaders because they managed to unite their people, and were forceful figures to face the American advance.

And while I talked about the American dream and how the West represented that, you know, for Native peoples, it's a nightmare.

And so, my book is a story of triumph and wondrous inventions and great achievement, but it's also a story - Interviews.

- of deep tragedy, environmental spoilation, and I don't sugarcoat the story, but it's the birth of a nation, and birth is often painful, and sometimes tragic.

And that's the story I'm trying to tell, or the real story of America.

As Oliver Cromwell famously told an artist who was painting his portrait, "Warts and all."

And that's our story.

(audience laughing) And we have to recognize the negative with the positive, and then we have to make a judgment.

I make a judgment in the book that there's a greater good here, and it creates a nation that I have deep belief in, and believe is a force for good in the world.

And that may be a Pollyanna attitude, but it infuses the book and it infused that pioneer spirit.

- That comes through on every page.

Peter, your beautifully written book on Deadwood starts with a pretty ugly incident, the killing a Wild Bill Hickok.

The Murder of Wild Bill Hickok, while he was playing cards.

Why did you begin with that?

- Partly because it's one of the best known episodes in Deadwood, and one of the key aspects of Deadwood lore and legend.

And I didn't have Wild Bill actually killed in the prologue.

I had related the moment when the assassin pulled the trigger.

But I noted before that that he was using a pistol that was notorious for misfiring.

So, if you're reading the prologue, you'll get to the point where the assassin comes up and pulls the trigger.

But if you can suspend belief, you don't know if Hickok was killed or not.

- Spoiler alert, - Yeah.

- Hickok doesn't - Yeah.

make it through.

(audience laughing) - Well, in fact, interestingly, his assassin after Hickok was killed, tried to fire five more rounds into the crowd, every other chamber misfired.

(audience chuckling) - So, here you've got Deadwood, this place built in a gulch where gold is being found.

And within the course of 18 months, 24 months, it goes from being a pristine area to being filled with 5,000 people in clapboard houses and false front buildings and stores and so forth.

It was extraordinary.

How did people find out what was going on there?

Why did they make it to Deadwood, and what kind of people went to Deadwood?

- Well, Deadwood actually grew up even faster than that.

The first gold was discovered in Deadwood in November, 1875.

The first group of prospectors came in January, 1876, and by April, within four months, the town had begun to spring up.

- Illegally, - And- Illegally, illegally.

And you had nearly 200 businesses within four months of the first three or four miners settling there.

People who came, there were a variety of characters.

I mean, it's a veritable wild bunch of people who settled Deadwood.

You had the miners.

Many were people who were unemployed by the Panic of 1873, which still hung over the nation.

You had these kind of maybe call 'em professional miners who drifted from claim to claim, hoping to finally make a real strike.

And then you had the people who, like I said, you came to mine the miners.

You had the saloon keepers, the soiled doves, which was the acronym for, - Prostitutes.

- prostitutes.

- And there were - And there was- - a lot of 'em, - And there were a lot.

Deadwood had more than its share.

And then you had businessmen who came trying, hoping to establish law and order, hoping to establish businesses that would make a long-term go of it.

And it was a wild mix of people.

- Paul, what was your role of greed and financial gain to the movement of the West?

Even among the big names, it seemed like there were always business deals going on, on the side.

There was the trading in Indian deer skins, and so on and so forth, that made some people pretty wealthy, certainly once they got to trapping beavers and so forth.

What was the role of greed in settling?

- Well, greed's a very strong word.

Let us just say that everyone was on the make in the West.

- Yeah?

- And, um- - Much kinder.

- Last time I checked, that's what America's all about.

And there's nothing wrong with being wealthy, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to be wealthy, but mostly it was people just trying to make a better life for their families, for their children, for their grandchildren.

They weren't reaching for the main chance, like the folks in Deadwood were.

They were hoping for something better.

Often though the great fortune that they saw it, you know, never happened.

Certainly not for Boone who lost two sons, a brother, a brother-in-law in settling Kentucky.

And then of course, once peace had finally come with the end of the revolution, a hoard of settlers came in, and he found himself displaced.

Moved to Missouri to start over, "Elbow room," he said.

And coming to Cody, I kind of understand what he's talking about there.

Same with Crockett.

Crockett was, you know, born in a log cabin under very poor circumstances, could barely read and write, and yet went to Congress.

Of course, we don't know today even if many congressmen can and women can read and write, but, (everyone laughing) at least Crockett had a sense of humor, which is more than most of them have.

And he became a national sensation.

He became a national sensation 'cause he represented the West.

And this was the new America that Andrew Jackson was bringing to the country.

Kit Carson died impoverished.

Buffalo Bill Cody, another story altogether, of course.

He reinvented himself from a frontier scout and buffalo hunter into the greatest showman in American history, perhaps world history, and certainly the best known American of his time.

- Easily.

- [Paul] And he won the war for the popular mind.

And he is the one that brought the idea of the West that we still live with to America and to the rest of the world.

- And since we're at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, we're gonna deal more with Cody in just a moment.

But I wanted to ask Peter about some of the mythical characters that grew out of Deadwood, other than Wild Bill Hickok.

Calamity Jane is a character that I knew very little about except the name.

And I think I'd seen one photograph.

Most people have seen a picture of Calamity Jane, what was she really like?

She was also tenderhearted and popular, and- - She was an enigma.

She became a legend while still living - What was her real name?

- in Deadwood.

Her real name was Martha Canary.

And she was orphaned as a young girl.

She was a prostitute by age 12.

And she was discovered, so to speak, by Wild Bill Hickok, and Charlie Utter, one of his pars, who were on the way to the Black Hills going through Fort Laramie.

And the post commander asked them if they would take along one more soiled dove?

They found her lying half naked in the guardhouse, having been on an alcoholic stupor.

She went to Deadwood.

She was only 20 years old.

She was not much different than most of the other soiled doves, except she had a real gift for self-promotion.

And it's fascinating to watch her legend grow within just a year of her arriving in Deadwood.

First a man who was writing a book trying to boost the Black Hills for a Chicago publisher, interviewed her, I don't know whether that was horizontally, (audience member indistinct) or not.

(audience laughing) But came out with his book, and here was Calamity Jane, this frontier heroine with buck skin and six guns in each hand, army scouts, Indian fighter, so on and so forth.

And then a newspaperman who definitely was horizontal with her, carried the story further.

And then a dime novelist who created the Deadwood Dick character.

- Yeah, - Probably the most popular dime novel character after Jesse James.

And as the heroine, he picked up Calamity Jane.

And people in Deadwood were mystified by this.

They said, "You know, why Calamity Jane?

She's just a common alcoholic prostitute."

In fact, one paper said the reporter had encountered Calamity Jane walking through Chinatown in Deadwood, and asked her where she was going.

And she said, "God only knows, I sure don't."

(everyone laughing) And that paper said, "And this is the kind of heroin Calamity Jane is."

But she had a good heart.

She treated smallpox victims.

- Yeah, she took care, - She- - of people who were sick.

She did all sorts of things.

- She was.

She was real enigma - Paul, there are a couple of characters in your book that I think history may have overlooked because they were significant.

And one would be John C. Frémont, and the other would be Mangas Coloradas.

And people don't hear those names very much.

And yet, they were really important in the West, for different reasons.

- Frémont was incredibly important to the story of the West.

He was nicknamed the Pathfinder, kind of borrowed from a James Fenimore Cooper novel.

Kit Carson was his scout, the pathfinder for the Pathfinder.

And Carson led Frémont's expeditions across the West, assisted Frémont in the Conquest of California.

They sort of just started it on their own.

They didn't wait for orders.

And then Frémont, of course, was the first Republican candidate for president of the United States.

And the American people in their wisdom chose the worst president we have ever had in American history, James Buchanan, - Buchanan - over Frémont.

And thus we got the Civil War.

Good work.

(audience chuckling) So, Frémont has been overlooked, and oftentimes when he is portrayed, he's portrayed negatively.

I turned that around.

I see him as a very forceful and positive, kind of character.

- A very different kind of character comes through in your book, I'm sure.

- Right, and Mangas Coloradas, of course united all the Apache tribes against the American invasion, something no one else can do, and was a victim of the worst kind of betrayal on the part of the American Army.

And it's a very tragic story.

And I felt that that was central to the history of the American Southwest, and what happened to the Apaches, and his murder set off, of course 25 years of warfare for the American Southwest.

- Peter wanted to talk about how civilization, such as it was came to Deadwood.

It came in the form of smallpox and fire.

How did those two elements make Deadwood in the short history in the middle 1870s recognized the importance of law and order?

- Well, a smallpox epidemic hit Deadwood very early on in 1876.

And in fact, it was Calamity Jane, who was the only person beside a doctor who stepped forward and treat the smallpox victims.

It was a pretty virulent strain that went through the town.

And after the smallpox had passed, the town leaders such as they were decided, you know, we gotta get together here, we've gotta have some kind of town government to prevent something like this from occurring again.

And also by extension, just to bring basic law and order to the town.

Fire was, that was a problematic issue in all mining camps.

And Deadwood, Deadwood never quite got it right, despite the fact that the editors of the two leading newspapers in Deadwood we're constantly haranguing business leaders to, "We need to buy fire prevention equipment.

We need to buy a hook and ladders.

We need to be ready for the fire fiend, which can strike our false front pine buildings at any moment."

They never quite got that right.

I mean, it was a limit to how much of a sense of community that there was in Deadwood.

And merchants and businessmen were really more interested in making money for themselves while they could, while the mines were rich and producing then in coming together to prevent fire.

And that's what ultimately destroyed Deadwood, was a fire.

- Both of you do a really remarkable job of sort of threading the needle between myth and fact.

And Paul, as you point out, there's no greater confluence of myth and fact than William F. Cody and the Buffalo Bill character.

How in writing about Buffalo Bill, do you separate them?

Or is it important to separate them at the end of Liberty Valance, they say, "When the myth becomes fact, print the myth."

How do you separate those two?

- Well, it's almost impossible to separate them.

And certainly with someone like Cody.

So, famous, did he become, and so powerful was the Western myth that surrounded him, that people don't really realize what an important frontier figure he was early on.

His father was a martyr in the fight to keep slavery out of Kansas.

- Stabbed after a speech.

- He- Yeah, murdered.

And he went on to fight for the Union Army.

He was a Pony Express rider.

He was of course a buffalo hunter for the railroads to feed railroad workers.

And he rode horseback on his horse, Brigham, with his rifle, Lucretia Borgia.

I love that.

I don't think he was that literary a character.

I don't know how he got that name.

And he rode on horseback, firing a single shot rifle, just like the Indians did.

So, he wasn't part of that horrible slaughter of the buffalo that came in the 1870s and 1880s because by then, after a very successful career as an Indian scout in the wars, he had gone on the stage.

And 10 years he applied the boards and then he created, of course, in 1883, his "Wild West" show, which he never called a show.

And that extravaganza became the greatest arena entertainment of all time, not only in the United States, but around the world.

So, it was Cody that actually invented our modern image of the Wild West.

All the conventions in the movies and television shows and novels that followed came out of Cody's show.

And the Cowboy, once a pejorative term in the American language, became the icon representing the best of America, and all that's because of Buffalo Bill.

- And there's that great scene in your book where Cody, who's been on the stage in the East, and has these elaborate costumes that he wears, goes back to scout for the US Cavalry, and gets into a battle with Indians.

And he's wearing his stage silk shirt.

- It's an incredible moment.

July 17th, 1876 Warbonnet Creek, Nebraska.

And Cody was wearing a foppish Mexican vaquero costume of black velvet trimmed in red with silver medallions all the way down it, (audience laughing) and a huge sombrero because he had hurried west to be part of the Indian War, just at the time of Custer's last stand.

And his regiment, the Fifth is sent to block the Indians from leaving the reservation, and joining Sitting Bull's people.

He gets into a skirmish, he's challenged to a dual by Yellow Hair, a bold, Cheyenne brave who had dressed for the part himself, had a huge feathered war bonnet.

And he wore a Swallowtail American flag as a breech clout.

So, here we go.

And they rode at each other like knights in Ivanhoe, each fired, Cody triumphed, jumped off his pony, scalped Yellow Hair, and proclaimed it the first scalp for Custer.

As he held it off- - And later said, he much regretted it.

- Irving Bacon, who is the artist who did the wonderful dust jacket on my book, "The Undiscovered Country," Irving Bacon and Cody had a correspondence, and Cody wanted him to do the fight at Warbonnet Creek.

And he described in excruciating detail the fight and told exactly how he was dressed.

And then he says, "But put me in my buck skins.

That's what everyone expects."

But it's interesting, there is a poster for the "Wild West" show, and in it, he's in the Mexican vaquero outfit, and he paid very close attention to those posters.

So, I think he was conflicted.

- Conflicted.

- Between the artistic bent of Buffalo Bill and the frontiers.

No but it's such a crucial moment.

Is art imitating life or his life imitating art at Warbonnet Creek?

It's almost as if the West was even then providing living, breathing entertainment for the East.

- Do you two read each other?

Do you read other Western history?

Do you learn from each other?

- Oh, most definitely.

I both read Paul's book and reviewed it for "The Wall Street Journal" when it came out.

II try to keep up with all the better Western writing, and certainly read everything I could on Deadwood.

And interestingly, there have been dozens and dozens of books written on various aspects of Deadwood.

Gunfighters, the stage coach robberies, prostitution.

In fact, my wife finally got tired of me getting all these books on prostitution in Deadwood, and she said, "Not another book on prostitutes in Deadwood."

And I said, "You can never have too many prostitutes, I mean.

(everyone laughing) - Okay.

- And I just have to point out how annoying it is to read Peter's work, (audience laughing) And when you- - I hope there's a positive spin coming outta this.

- I'm trying, lemme get there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(Tim and audience laughing) But you know, if you're a professional writer, which is what we are, you of course read other people's writings, and you just go, oh, damn!

You know, how does he do that?

That's just not, that's not right, you know?

And I tried to break his leg, so that, (audience laughing) he couldn't continue - Well, you succeeded.

- to be so productive.

Yeah.

- But did, - Yeah.

- Did Hutton do that to you, or?

- No, I just, actually, I was prospecting for gold, and the pickax came down (audience laughing) on my foot.

- He was playing pickleball.

- Playing pickleball.

(everyone laughing) - Okay.

(panelist laughs) Two of America's great authors of the American West.

Two great new books, "The Undiscovered Country" and "Deadwood."

We'd recommend them to your attention.

Thank you for being here.

Thanks again to Wyoming PBS.

(uplifting instrumental music) (audience applauding)