somehow that terms steve is corrupted and refers to budget cuts, firing guidance counselors or teachers or closing public schools turning the dollars over to private management and of japan were sam pretending it is the most important an outcome of schooling and all for reform in many teachers and principals today feel that somehow in ways that they understand that they are disrespect did. sometimes it seems public education is the goal of the movement. so what i describe in the book having a debate with the editor faking of the

raid because people cannot spell. [laughter] . . and it's a job and folks. then we have the next hoax called race to the top. race to the top was just recently criticized in a report by a group of d.c. called a

broader approach and the american association school superintendents. what they concluded is it's not working. i said three years ago wasn't going to work because it's an blb 2.0. it's more teaching to the test. it's demoralizing teachers. it's leading to more school closures and the bottom line is why are we racing to the top? what is the top? i don't know what the top is. do you know what the top as? we are talking about her children. do you want your family to race to the top of the neighborhood? where's the top of the neighborhood? the promise of american public education is educational opportunity. it's a system of winners and losers. [applause] and then comes the narrative bond which these hoaxes are built and the narrative is

another hoax. it's the narrative that says our public schools are declining and failing. achievement is flat. our schools are broken. our schools are obsolete. the test scores are declining. the graduation rates are a scandal. we have a dropout crisis. what i show in my book in a series of chapters called facts about test scores, all of this is wrong. test scores today and i'm looking only at the federal exam which is called the national assessment of educational progress. i was seven years on the board of nabe as it's called. the test scores today are the highest they have ever been in history. for white students black students hispanic students and

asian students. graduatiograduatio n rates, high school graduation rates are the highest they have ever been in history. for white students black students hispanic students and asian students. you won't hear that either but i have the grass in my book. the u.s. department of education web site. why can i read it and nobody else can? i can't figure this part out. then you know we have the dropout crisis. the dropout rates today are the lowest they have ever been in american history. that's another big surprise. it's a surprise to me and then comes the story about the international test scores. you hear these numbers. we are 14th, we are 12, we 12, we are 26th whatever the numbers are. it's all nonsense. the first tests were given in 1964 and we came in last and 50 years and then we have surpassed all the other 11 nations because

the test scores really were not a predictor of our economy our military supremacy are technological innovation. they were just test scores. i'm not saying that test scores don't matter but they don't predict anything. they don't predict the future. and in fact when people tell you about the terrible test scores they are talking about the test that was given in 2009 but they don't tell you about the even more recent international test in which our students tried with with -- in mathematics. black students in massachusetts got the same scores as the students in finland in fourth and eighth grade mathematics. of course it should have been that you didn't hear about that. the only student that wrote about it actually was -- there was a blog poll the daily howler by bob salafi and he writes about the media. he said look at these headlines.

they say we are we are falling behind again. nonsense. we did just as well as all the other european countries where the tests cultures like singapore japan hong kong where there ministers of education are trying to figure out how can we back away from this tests up session because we don't have the creativity? what has made this a great country is not our test scores but our creativity are risk-taking come to our innovation. [applause] and then comes the hoax that says the are does it better. wrong. here's what the private sector does. with the private sector does very well conquered they engage in risk management. get rid of the losers and to keep the winners. it's like the strategy that many school districts have been sold called the portfolio strategy trading or schools as if you had a stock portfolio. you close the low-performing

schools and to keep the high-performing schools. were talking about children's lives. we are not talking about stocks. and what the charter schools do is the same strategy of risk management and that is to say the way to get high scores is to keep up the kids with severe disabilities. [applause] keep out the children who are english-language learners. kick out the kids to get low test scores and then say a miracle. sorry. a couple of years ago i debated jeffrey cavanaugh on national television asked them the question, why did you pick out the entire entering grade in the third year? he denied it on tv but he did. he kicked out the entire first-class because for three years he was unable to match the scores of some other charter school and so one day he comes

in and he said to the president's board told them they were very embarrassed by the test scores and he said to the kids you're out of here. you can do that in a public school. that is risk management. then we hear that technology is going to bring about amazing progress. i'm not opposed to technology. i use it about 24/7 and we'll do and we all well and their kids need to learn technology that we are being sold a bill of goods. pennsylvania is a state that has more cybercharters than any state in the country. they are a sham. they are a scam. they rip off every state. they recruit and recruit and recruit. they bring in the kids in the kids drop out. they have a high dropout rate. the kids to stay have low test scores and there's a low graduation rate. there is a real problem with motivation but the biggest of these cybercharters is k-12

which is on the new york stock exchange. the ceo -- his educational background is mckenzie and goldman sachs and he is not based on the performance of the schools all over the country but rather on enrollment because the nature of these companies is they have to keep the enrollment up. there are many teachers who are monitoring anywhere from 100 to 150 children. that is not education. it's also a way of transferring public dollars into a corporation to give a computer to homeschoolers. and so the state is paying $10,000 in the parents get nothing from it except for a computer whatever that may cost, but it's a rip off to the state and i can't tell you how many hundreds of millions of dollars your state has wasted on the cybercharters nor can i tell you because i haven't calculated how many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars the cybercharter operators have

donated to politicians in the state of pennsylvania. i have a chapter in the book, i think it's chapter 17 called trouble -- where i focus on pennsylvania and ohio. they happen to be the two states that are most overrun with cybercharters to get terrible results and never get close down. there are some areas in which accountability doesn't matter and when does accountability not matter? it's when you give a contribution to the right politicians. so another of the great ideas which we have to give ill credit to race to the top is this idea that you can find teachers who are bad based on the test scores of their students. this is a very stupid idea. [laughter] [applause] the reason i call it a stupid idea is that there's there is a mountain of research that shows

that you don't identify teacher quality by looking at test scores. what you are identifying is who are the students in the class and this teacher who has let us say a class of gifted children has kids who come in who are already at the ceiling in the computer says she is supposed to get them higher and she can get them past the ceiling so she gets a very low rating because she didn't give a test score bump. the teacher who is teaching english language learners her kids may not go up as much as the computer thing she said that she gets a low rating. the teacher is teaching the severely disabled, the same thing happened so that teachers who are taking on the most challenging tasks are the likeliest to get the lowest ratings. this is what the research says. the research also says that the measures, the ratings that the teachers get are so unstable that a teacher will be created highly effective and then the next year in effect if. then when teachers are asked

what happened and what change they say i have no idea. i don't know why. i was doing the same things i was doing last year. there are studies coming out now about this and in houston they fired the teacher of the year. [laughter] and there were teachers who got a bonus one year and for fired the next year. nobody knows why. one of the scholars at a teachers college recently wrote the truth of the matter is no one understands this very complicated formulas. no one, not even the people who designed them understand them. so behind this desire to evaluate teachers is to find the bad teachers and fire them. there is an economist at the hoover institution eric hanushek who has argued we have tried to help teachers but didn't produce two or performance of the best way to seat test scores go up is

to fire the bottom 10% of teachers each year. what does that do for moralock? you don't know if it's going to be you. the hatchet is over everybody's head but the bottom line is there is no other country in a world that's doing this. if it's such a good idea wire the all -- we the only ones who thought of that? the chief of the matter is as linda darling hammond at stanford once said in a court case where she was testifying against eric hanushek, you cannot fire your way to finland. [laughter] another way to put it is you cannot fire your way to excellence. the truth is that the threat of firing, the insecurity that it introduces, the knowledge that teachers have that these measures are so unstable and so invalid and so unfair to moralize as teachers. we have had on the last few years report after report, one

coming from the metlife survey and another that was funded by gates scholastic. massive demoralization among teachers and principals. why? because they were in such an insecure environment. they feel the public disrespect and it's coming from all the so-called reformers who hold them accountable for who blame them for low performance. and the insecurity has been introduced into their lives. the sense that they are supposed to compete with one another for higher test scores. this is so unprofessional and they want -- teachers want to be treated as professionals. it's not an odd idea. then comes an idea that has been popularized by some of the so-called reformers that one of the ways to improve performance is to abolish teacher tenure. now the reason i oppose this is because teacher tenure in k-12 does not mean the same thing a

dozen higher education. in higher education when you have tenure you do have a job for life and lets you do something outrageous greedy 33 become a mass murder you probably would lose your job but if you are a k-12 teacher what it means is you have to process. you have to understand the teaching profession in the first five years after people enter at about 40% of them leave because teaching is such a difficult job the new teachers feel they are not getting the support they need and they don't have the leadership they want. they don't have the family support they want. 40% of people who wanted to be teachers are gone. so those who survive and do get tenure have a right to adhering adhering -- a hearing if someone wants to fire them. i don't think that such a terrible thing. i think it's basic fairness. the reason that tenure matters is because absent tenure there will not be academic freedom. absent academic freedom there will be parts of the country

where the word evolution will never be heard again. [applause] absent academic freedom students will learn nothing about climate change and global warming. this is controvercontrover sial. there will be books that will be banned in the classroom because someone in the community objects to it. that is why teachers once they have proven themselves, once their administrators say they are worthy of due process after three or four years or whatever the state law is, should have tenure. those rabble-rousers who go around the country saying take their tenure a way are wrong because they are not considering the consequences. [applause] now part of the critique of teachers is based on another hoax. maybe it's not a hoax. maybe it's just ignorance.

that is the belief that the teacher is the main determinant of whether students get higher or lower test scores great in fact this is not true. study after study, social science over many decades has demonstrated the single most important for dichter of test scores is family income. [applause] family income is related to family education. it's related to opportunities. it's related to children's chances to hear a rich vocabulary, to go to the museum to go to the library to go to summer camp to have family activities and it's related to children at the other extreme not having those opportunities, not having good medical care, and not living in a safe neighborhood. kids start off in some cases heavily burdened by the circumstances of life and of course i'm not saying that teachers don't make a difference.

i think teachers are light changers. teachers to make a difference but we cannot shift the burden of society's failures onto the backs of teachers. [applause] now one of the other hoaxes of our day that is very baffling is the notion that has become very popular recently and that is that young college graduates, young people who graduate in june get five weeks of training and they are excellent teachers by september. [applause] and what is more they will get higher test scores than someone who has been in the classroom for five, 10 or 15 years. they will be gone in two years. we should turn over teaching to these young people knowing that they will be gone and three years and we won't have to replenish them with other young people. this is not what any good

high-performing country in the world does whether we are talking about singapore japan finland canada australia. we are talking about countries that have built the teaching profession, not a revolving door. [applause] now i'm not saying this to criticize america because i think there are really wonderful young people who join. i think they are well-qualified to be teaching assistants. [applause] i think that we should consider them to be -- no one who joins the peace corps is deemed to be a foreign service officer. they go to the community and they do whatever work needs to be done which they are capable of doing and they do not become overnight ambassadors or foreign service officers. so another hoax, which my book thoroughly debunks is this

notion that kids will get higher test scores if their teachers are offered merit pay. now you may have read an article the other day in one of the local papers by michelle rhee saying the solution to all of philadelphia's problems is that you don't have performance pay. gosh i wish she would read my book. [applause] because if she did what she would learn is america has tried again and again for 100 years and it has never worked here you have to ask yourself when it fails so consistently no matter what the reward is, why? first of all teachers are already doing the best they know how offering them a reward doesn't mean they are suddenly going to say i'm at the height of my good lessons. it's time to bring them out. so if you want to get better teaching maybe you had better do some investment in human

resources and professional development and hope people will become better teachers but simply dangling after ward in front of them is actually demoralizing. the reason is demoralizing is because it causes people to compete for the dollars and then they stopped collaborating. the way is school succeeds is through collaboration. [applause] you don't want teachers to sit at the table and say i'm going to hold that and not tell them what i know. it's my secret. no, you want wanted to share what they know so the staff can work out issues that children have and they are not going to do that when money is the reward. it has just never worked. they had an experiment over three years in and the price was $15,000 for teachers who could raise scores at the end of the

three-year experiment. both control group and experimental group got the same results. it's been tried in chicago. it was tried in new york with a somewhat different plan and get people just can't give up this belief that performance in america is going to make kids work harder. it's not the teachers that need to work harder. it's the kids. remember al schenker with one saying years ago but me get this straight. the kids are going to work harder because you are offering the teacher a prize. [laughter] no, i don't get it. another of the hoaxes that is really frustrating is when you hear the reformers say don't talk about poverty. poverty is an excuse. let's ignore the fact that the top 10% in this country are now accumulating more than 50% of the income. that doesn't matter. let's keep that out of the discussion. let's not talk about the income

inequality in this country that now is larger than at any point in the past century. let's not discuss that. the fact is poverty really hurts kids. when kids don't get medical treatment, when they don't have an eye check-up or they have vision problems come up when they don't see a dentist when they don't get their hearing checked, when they have asthma for some other illness that is totally preventative but they haven't seen it doctor that hurts. when they don't have a meal at home or they don't know if they're going to have a home all these things get in the way of concentrating on school work. when they tell you that poverty is an excuse for bad teachers, it's a hoax. what they don't want to talk about is what really matters which is why do we tolerate the facts that almost a quarter of our children are living in poverty? and we lead the world in the advanced nations of the world in child poverty. [applause]

and the hoax that has been articulate popular and in recent years is charters and vouchers will save poor kids from failing public schools. i could go into this issue of failing public schools. this actually was a term that almost didn't exist until about 12 years ago shortly before "no child left behind" and a former graduate student that did a lexisnexis on the term. we talk about children with needs. what do we do to help his? and said we are closing their schools because this schools are failing. what do we know about charters? what we know is when they serve the same children they don't get different results. some get high scores, some get low scores. on average there's no difference except for the charters that hive high rates in meeting the needs of children. we do know quite a bit about vouchers and their good charter schools. i'm not knocking all charter

schools. vouchers take money directly from public education. there are now 17 states that have some form of voucher program that but they're three districts that now have a track record with vouchers. milwaukee had a factor of program in 1990, cleveland when the voucher program started in 95 in d.c. in 2003. three. there have been evaluations repeatedly of these three cities. there has yet to be one who says the poor kids in voucher schools do better than their peers to regular public schools. to create competition that benefits. another one of these hoaxes that have schools compete they will get better. we know them now but that is not true. milwaukee is the perfect case of that. milwaukee as i said has had vouchers since 1990 and it's

also had charter school since 1990 so there are three set year's the charter set your the voucher chapter in a shrinking public sector. when we look at the national assessment of educational progress and compare how cities are doing the walk is one of the lowest-performing cities in the united states. the rising tide lifted no boats in milwaukee and competition did nothing. then the reformers want to say but privatization will be a dramatic game. look at new orleans. schools are so much better now than they were before the hurricane. the hurricane wiped out the unions and that was a great thing they say and it also wiped out public education. now more than 80% of the concerned charters and they are making gains every year. what they don't tell you is that the new orleans district the recovering school district, is out of 70 districts in the state of louisiana depending on how you count them. they are either 60 or 70 in the

entire state. they're one of the worst districts in the entire state of louisiana that they are better than they were last year. they are just all low-performing schools. now there is also this idea that the way to really fix schools is to close them. [laughter] this is called a turnaround. i find the term turnaround so objectional because it sounds like it's such a nice word. it sounds like dance around the maypole doesn't it? we are going to close your school fire the staff and send the kids someplace else. this does nothing to help the children. it doesn't help children learn to read. it doesn't help children learn to speak english if they don't speak english. it decimates communities. and it deprives the communities of what was the anchor and the heart of their community. it's a terrible thing to close a school. the only reason to close the school is if everyone moves away

another hoax that is popular in some states is that if kids can't pass a test the way to fix the problem is to make the test harder. [laughter] what we need is rigor. i have spent several years blocking my dear friend deborah meier. she said to me whenever you hear the word rigor think of rigor mortis. [laughter] but here's the thing with making the test harder. if a child can't jump over the bar bar when it said that force-feed you really won't help if you raise it to 6 feet. you will just have more kids falling and not making over the bar. it is help that is needed, not higher standards in higher tests. and then we have what i consider consider -- i don't know which of these is the greatest hoax but the hoaxes

anyone can teach, anyone can be a principal and anyone can be a superintendent. this is such forward-thinking that takes us right back to the 19th century. there's also the hoax that testf school quality. that is wrong. testing especially standardizedy income and education and as i said before it is a measure of opportunity to learn not capacity to learn. the problem that we have had in new york just recently when we introduce common core tests is that the tests were given in april. the results came back in august and no one is allowed to see the questions or the answers or how it is performed. they just get scores. now you have to step back and say what's the purpose of testi? the purpose of testing testing a diagnostic. it's supposed to say to you

quickly, not six months later johnny is having trouble with addition subtraction fractions whatever. maria needs help with something else. the standardized test they won't let you see the questions are the answers that you have no diagnostic purpose. it's as if he went to the doctor and he says you do have a problem, could come back in six months. i'm not going to tell you what it is but i have got some medicine for you. so what i consider the biggest hoax of all is the claim that is frequently made that privatization in charters and vouchers is the civil rights issue of our time. someone just sent me an article from a north carolina newspaper where someone made the claim if dr. king were alive today he would be fighting for choice. get kids out of public schools which is an outrage.

this is a siren song whose purpose is to turn parents into consumers instead of citizens. [applause] citizens recognize that they have a responsibility for the common good. consumers look out only what's best for themselves and their own children. we all have an obligation to support public schools. it's in the interest of our society. it's in the interest of the common will and the commonwealth. you cannot just say this is good for my child and if you live in philadelphia that's your problem. no, it's our problem. [applause] so into this discussion i would like to inject a few realities. one is that children start off life with different advantages and different disadvantages and

that society has an obligation to try to level the playing field. schools are part of that. schools can't help but they cannot do it alone. there is an achievement gap on the first day of school. it starts at home when children are exposed to different opportunities and vocabularies and experiences. so when i finish my last book that critics said you don't have solutions. here are the solutions. i had to write this book because i have solutions. the first is, we should provide as a society for prenatal care for all women who cannot afford prenatal care. [applause] i am saying this because it's a practical matter because the research is again overwhelming and documented in my book that women who do not get prenatal

care are apt to have children with developmental delays or cognitive deficiencies. these children will then go into special education and we will pay as a society hundreds of thousands of dollars when we might have helped those women to have healthy babies with a very small investment in the beginning. and there was a survey done last year by the march of dimes and the united nations and when we talk about rankings some say we are 30-second or 12th or whatever the number. think about this. we were number 130 in the world ranking alongside somalia in the provision of prenatal care for women. that is a disgrace. let's talk about that instead of kids test scores. we should have early childhood education for all children. [applause]

again the research on this is indisputable and get the economist magazine last year ranked the european nations and north american nations, became and 24th in the provision of high-quality early childhood education. we are not doing a good job on that one. we need to help children achieve and do well in school and be ready for school. we need smaller classes. [applause] the research is very clear that especially in the early grades and especially for children who are having learning problems smaller classes allow them to have more time with their teacher and this is very important. what else do we need? we need at every school a full and rich curriculum including arts and physical education, history and literature. [applause]

science, mathematics, foreign languages. this is what we expect is a matter of course. i was in the public schools in houston texas. we had all of those things that i wasn't in a private school. it wasn't a well-funded school. why were we able to do it so many decades ago and we can afford to do anymore? is it because we are diverting all that money to testing testig consultants and corporations? we have our priorities messed up. here is another thing that would raise achievement across-the-board and that would be to attach a health clinic to every school. [applause] at the very least school should have school nurses to refer children to the health clinic they need. [applause] schools need wrap around services. they need care and education in, adult education, school psychologist social workers librarians after-school program

summer programs. but they don't have it. if we care about the achievement gap the opportunity gap, those are the things we did the doing and we are not doing it. this is a somewhat controversial statement. we need democratic control of our schools. [applause] having lived in a city where we have not had democratic control in our schools for the past dozen years i can tell you that parents are itching to be able to have something to say about what the decisions made about their children. every community should be able to float in the people who care about their schools and vote out the people who make bad decisions. [applause] now i mentioned before that i'm not despite the things i have said i'm not opposed to all charters altogether.

i think that charter schools were initially supposed to work as collaborators with public schools around the needs of children. i think there should be charters for children who are not making it in the public schools, where they can try new ways of doing things and help the public schools do a better job. there should be charter schools for dropouts. there should be charter schools for children who are autistic. they should be charter schools who meet the needs of children and not charter schools who skim off the best kids and leave the rest to the public schools. [applause] and then i want to mention what i consider to be the biggest problem in this society and that is that we tolerate the most important causes of low academic achievement which are poverty and racial segregation. [applause] we have become indifferent as a society. we now live with the philosophy

that the poor will always be with us and we don't care. we live with the belief that they -- never happened and we applaud schools that are all black or all all hispanic or all white. we should integrate our society with governmental incentives. [applause] just think of that $5 billion wasted on race to the top were used to instead of by communities to have more integration in their schools. we might look like a different society today. just in a few short years. another thing we can do which is one of my solutions and i have a chapter devoted to it is the importance of strengthening the education profession. teachers must have at least a full year of professional education and practice teaching. [applause] those who are principals should

be master teachers. [applause] it is the principals who will evaluate the teachers. they cannot evaluate them and they cannot help them and thus they themselves are master teachers. superintendents should be experienced educators who understand teaching and learning not generals and not admirals. not as this man and not lawyers. tests should be used appropriately. they should not be used as carrots or sticks. standardized tests should be used sparingly and right before we came in here i showed randy something better to experts said. they said there's no other country that tests every child every year. we are the only one. in other countries children are tested twice a few times at most in the course of a year --

of their education and plus end-of-course exams. year-to-year testing is a huge waste of money. standardized test the use preferably on a sampling basis and used sparingly and as i said before the standardized tests come in too late to meet diagnostic needs. to have this much emphasis aristocrat you let him only to what is tested and personally i believe that most testing testid be created by teachers. [applause] on the things i have said about teacher evaluations i do not mean to it imply that it's unimportant. i think all teachers should be evaluated but i don't think they should be evaluated by test scores. they should be evaluated by the professional judgment that their peers and their master teachers who are their principals. the system that i'm familiar with that seems to me to be the best in the country and less race to the top kills that is in montgomery county and is called

peer assistance and review. peer assistance and review works like this. a new teacher comes into the system. he or she is assigned a mentor teacher who works with a teacher and helps them become better and who then reports to a committee of teachers and principals about the progress of that teacher. if an experienced teacher burns out or the principal says this teachers not doing a good job i think that teacher is incompetent, that teacher shouldn't be fired on the spot. a master teacher who is a mentor reports to the same committee and i think mr. jones has made great progress and i think mr. jones has had it in its time to let them go. under peer assistance and review montgomery county has fired 200 teachers but done in a professional way not based on test scores but by the judgment of qualified peers. this is something that is considered a very popular both

with teachers and principals because it's done collaboratively. schools that are struggling should get the timely help and should not be closed. maybe they need strong classes for children who cannot read. maybe they need extra social work. maybe they need more bilingual instructors. we must treasure public education and make it stronger. we must make it better. it belongs to all of us. we are all responsible whether we have children in public schools or not, whether we are childless and whether we send our children to private or religious school public education is a public responsibility. the purpose of education is not to raise to higher test scores but to prepare children for the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. what matters most is that we have schools where the students learn to think about the consequences of their actions, where they learn to treat others with respect, where they learn how to live in a world of rapid

change with unpredictability about what the jobs of the future be and where they gain the knowledge and the skills they need to make our society more just, more civil and to bring us to that day when there is in fact liberty and justice for all. i should mention that i'm actually very optimistic. i see resistance building all of these hoaxes across the country. i see the state of texas rolling back testing of all places. i've seen teachers in seattle saying no we want not that tests. [applause] i see parents and community saying we will not allow our children to take that test. it's unnecessary. we won't do it. we will stop this machine because it's not working for our kids. so i feel very optimistic about the future. let me conclude now by quoting

in my book and it goes like this. this is a reading. yes we must improve our schools. we must start here, start now by building bonds of trust in schools and communities. the essential mission of the public schools is not merely to prepare workers in the opal workforce but to prepare citizens with the mines harting characters to sustain a democracy in the future. genuine school reform must be built on hope not fear, on encouragement not threats, on inspiration dockable shin, on trust not carrots and sticks and the belief in the dignity of the person not a devotion to data, on supporting mutual respect not a regime of punishment and blame. school reform must rely on collaboration of students teachers parents principals administrators and the local communities. the american system of

democratically-controlled schools has been the mainstay of our communities and the foundation for her nation's success. we must work together to improve our public schools. we must extend the promise of equal educational opportunity to all the children of our nation protecting our public schools against privatization and saving them for future generations of american children is a civil rights issue of our time. thank you very much. [applause] thank you. [applause]

>> the booktv recently visited the links montana with the help of our local partner charter communications to bring you some of the area of the areas lit or a cultural history. next hear stories from some of the first visitors to yellowstone national park. >> yellowstone was named a park in 1972. it was actually first discovered in 1807 by a man named john coulter. coulter was a member of the lewis and clarke expedition and he mustered out of the expedition on the way home. he went back with some trappers in the 1870. he went looking for indians to trade with in the park. the park was relatively calm for about 20 years after coulter and then the trappers came through

in the 1820s to about 1840. then prospectors in the 1860s and people really began to wonder what was up there. so it was more formally explored in the early 1870. and they convince the government to set it aside as a pleasuring ground for the people in 1872. what my book is a collection of first-person accounts in its first 100 years. the early story in there is one of the mountain man, a guy named osborne russell who killed an elaborate journal so it's one of few documents where we really understand what people who visited the park early did. i tried to collect stories that represented the range of experiences of people in the park. osborne russell is in the park with a trapping expedition and

these then are taking the day off. he has a friend who is going to show him some of the natural wonders in the park because they are seeing things. russell wasn't surprised when he sees the guys there but this is what he says about it. after surveying these natural wonders for some time by comrade conducted me to what he called howard spring. at the spring the first thing attracts attention was a hole about 15 inches in diameter in which water was boiling slowly about 4 inches below the surface. at length it began to boil and opal violently. the water commenced rising and shooting upwards until the calm rose to a height of 60 feet from whence it fell into the ground in drops into a circle 30 feet in diameter. perfectly cold when it hit the ground. so that is one of the very early descriptions of geysers.

it's about 1839. it's remarkable i think that russell doesn't have the word geyser. he doesn't know how to name this oiling fountain that he is a great writer and he knows how to describe it. we can picture a geyser. nobody knows exactly where russell was but apparently he was added geyser basin like old faithful went off every hour. three things made the yellowstone park visit. watching the geysers come to watching the falls and then going to the dash when the hotels were built in the 1880s they just dump their garbage out in the woods and the bears discovered it pretty fast. at twilight the bears would come out and rummage around in the garbage and the tourists would

come out to watch the bears. the early encounters with the bears were people hunting bears. jack bean was a very colorful guy. he came to montana and worked as a trapper for a wild. he was in meet hunter for the army. when the custer battle occurred he was among the people who went to recover koster's body and later became a yellowstone park guide. he was the guy you would go to if you wanted to go hunting in the park and in fact he stated a hunting guide after the park outlawed hunting in taking people into the surrounding areas to hunt. here's a story from 1877 when he guided a confederate colonel and to the park and they are crossing the mountains. the colonel wants to be a bear

hunter. in fact colonel pickett does become a famous bear hunter. here is what jack bean said about colonel pickett getting his first bear. now our trail left the ridge and dissented down into the head of tower creek. we saw another big bear on the trail coming toward us. so i told the colonel, there comes a bear. where he answered so i showed him. he got on his horse and walked quickly up the trail. i watched mr. bear and saw him leave the trail in start up a grassy hillside. i was afraid that the colonel would shoot at him when the bear was right above him. and that there would come down and use the colonel roughly. the colonel saw him when he was on the hillside about 30 yards away so i just nodded and stepped behind the colonel. when the colonel shot the bear it made it a growl and came down

the hill on the run and passed within 30 feet. the colonel didn't know i was close behind him until i spoke. i told him to hold his fire until the bear jumped the creek but he wouldn't do it. as the bear passed the colonel shot and missed it did when the bear crossed the creek i opened fire with my winchester. by the time the colonel could load and was ready to shoot again i put five winchester into the bear. the colonel gave him one last shot through the rest while the bear was falling. it rolled into the creek bed. hunting was legal and yellowstone park from 1872 to 1886. when the park was established it was felt that people would need to hunt for sustenance. that is as i said it was a roadless wilderness so when they set up the park they wanted to

allow hunting. the idea was sustenance hunting for trophy hunters soon came into the park looking for elk moves, players. they were pretty much decimating all the game in the park. it's one of the reasons the army took over administration of the park in 1886, was to get some people in there to police the park and take care of the wildlife. so there was was an error of was an air of bear when hunting was out of control in the park. elenor korth l. was a woman who went to the park in 1903. the park is becoming it pretty civilized place by 1903. there are good roads and hotels but eleanor decides that she wants to camp. she is not going to stay in the hotels. it's one of my favorite stories. at eleanor clift in laramie wyoming and she came home one day and told her husband to

expect a bill, that she bought a team and wagon and she was taking their seven children to yellowstone park. she tells all sorts of marvelous stories about driving the wagon across wyoming corner to corner across wyoming. it was quite a trip with the seven kids and how they learned to camp and hunt and fish and feed themselves and have adventures. and then one evening she decided to baked beans. here's her encounter with the bears. the beans were not done at that time so i put on more wood thinking they would be just right for breakfast. it was so hot and the stove was outside. about midnight there was a great clatter from the falling stove. sure enough the bear had tipped over -- tipped it over trying to get to my beans. he was trying so hard to work

the combination of the oven door that he failed to notice us in his excitement. not until a three things at him would he go away. on the whole i present them it would have been disappointing if only one they are at least had not paid us a visit. we never thought about being afraid. i used all my ingenuity to hide the bacon in the sugar from prowling bears every night. if you travel the park now and camp you will notice that there there saves where you can put your groceries away but the park will admonish very strongly to keep your food lock up in your car or in one of the bear saves. but in this era, the bears wander to the camps and got into the garbage cans, good god into people's camps and encounters with bears were very common. the earliest travelers were very

cautious about indians. indians passed through the park. jack bean tells about one of his encounters with a band of blackfeet so that was common. by the time the park was settled the indians were rare. they named the park the one band of indians that live there pretty regularly, the shoshone's moved out of the reservation but there is that great adventure in 1877 when the dash passed through the park and that led to what i think was one of the most traumatic and best hold stories in the park. that is mx how one. emmett cowan came to montana as the little girl in the 1860s. her father was a gold rush are and she said she kept hearing

stories about the park from the time she was a girl and wanted to visit. her father took her to mammoth hot springs in the early 1870 and there she heard about going to see the geysers. when she married she extracted a promise from her husband that he would take her to the geysers. in 1877 he did but that is the summer that nez per se left their reservation in eastern idaho trying to make their way to them buffalo country in montana. their plan was to live with the crow. they were giving up their homeland to do this. one of the things that happened was that they found emmett cowan and her tourist party -- he was there with her husband her sister and her brother and several friends. the indians came into the campground early in the morning and the tourists decided they

would just leave so they packed up their wagons and headed out. the indians headed with them. they just kind of surrounded them escorting them along as they made their way out and as they came along they encountered another band of indians and here is what emma says happened then. suddenly without warning shots rang out. to indians came dashing down the trail in front of us. my husband was getting off his horse. i wondered the reason. i soon knew as soon as he reached the ground he fell down the hill. shots followed and all was confusion. in less time that it takes to tell if i was off my horse and by my husband site where he lay against a fallen pine tree. a pressure on my shoulder was drawing me away from my husband looking back over my shoulder i saw an indian with a navy pistol

trying to shoot at my husband's head. wrenching my arm from his grasp but leaned over my husband only to be roughly thrown aside. another indian stepped up. a pistol shot rang out. my husband's head fell back and a red stream trickled down beneath his hat. emma colin's account i think is one of the gems of montana history. she wrote it 25 years after the events so obviously these memories were really fitted to her. one of the things that you need to know is that george cao one survived this. in another book that i am working on -- i'm working on a whole book in these encounters in yellowstone park in 1877 and george's story of coming to discovering he had been shot three times and was

unable to walk and his first thought was for ammo. it's a touching story and it's also a pretty dramatic story as he crawls 12 miles trying to find help before he was picked out by soldiers who are pursuing the indians. when i put together the proposal for dentures and -- "adventures in yellowstone" i had 250 stories collected at that time. i have closer to 400 now. i put the book together with a dozen best stories. i took the notion of the adventures very seriously. i collected stories that where people really and countered some difficulty and had some thing interesting happening to them. a lot of the diaries you see of yellowstone park are nice descriptions of what happened and what they saw but the