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Understanding 9/11tv American Frontier Book Collection CSPAN February 4, 2017 12:38pm-12:48pm EST
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what gets lost in that's an extractions is the humanity. the human face. feel like this book really provide the opportunity for us to look through that rhetoric to cut through it, and to just look at one situation, one isolated situation, 28 mexicans, four american citizens, all crashed and all -- regardless of race or social status, regardless of spiritual beliefs or background, they all met the same fate together. none spared. none. in the end, they were one vehicle transported or deported to that great other place in the sky. and that's what hope people take from it. we're all in this together.
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♪ note ♪ ♪ ♪ >> during booktv's recent visit to fresno, california, we explored the thomas j. ebert frontier collection, which includes over 2,000 books on the american frontier, at fresno state university. >> well, when i was kid, the public library -- the only knock fiction books were books on the american wes in the children's
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library and since i've been a nonfiction person, i got -- i read everything that i could there on the american west, primarily a on native americans. over the years -- the '50s when i was growing up was a time when you had all the movies the theater, most of them cowboy movies and cowboys, programs on tv so you were sort of dish was a kid you were saturated with the american west. just fell in love with it. then in 1993, i began traveling through the west, and i just fell in love with it. and i quickly became -- came to understand that there was more than cowboy and indian fights. just the artist triof the landscape. the culture, the history and the really deep history, the history that involved so many different groups that it was a quite different west than what i had
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learned from hollywood all those years. and i learned that there were not only native americans and ang -- angelo americans but there were asian americans, african-americans, hispanic americans, contributing to the culture and the west was far more diverse in many ways than the lands -- pleases east over in mississippi river. i'll talk about the book is had purchased on african-americans in the west. and then i'll talk about the hispanic west, and then finally talk about some of the books on native american culture. we forget that african-americans who were in the west, they were brought to the west as slaves, first in texas, and into the indian territory, that the five civilized tribes when the left the southeast and were moved to oklahoma, took their slaves with them.
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and so african-americans have always been in the west. they didn't just show up suddenly. after the civil war, more african-americans left the south to form communities in the west. they're referred to as x dusters or x exodoes from the bible. bought a book from the university of oklahoma press on a teen in kansas, and this is -- a town in kansas and this is knew state park in kansas. one of the many all-black communities that were formed as they tried to find a new life of freedom, and a place in the american west. if you watch the cowboy movies or watch the cowboy programs, 100% -- almost 100% of the
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cowboys are anglos. in fact, over 30% of the cowboys in the west were either african-american, hispanic-american, and even native-american, and in fact out here east of fresno, east -- the adjoining community of clovis, the ranch, they hired many native-americans to run the sheep and cattle. so, this is something that you don't see in the cowboy movies. but there were black cowboys, and this book, cowboys -- black cowboys of the old west, covers that period, and when you see these cowboys, they look just like -- dressed like, worked like, everything that their white counterparts did. but not only were they cowboys,
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they were marshals marshals and. for example is this a biography of bass reeves, who was a very famous marshal in the indian territory, under the famous judge parker at fort smith, arkansas, and bass is noted as an outstanding lawman of his time. this is a picture of bass reeves. bass was tough. bass didn't worry about sparing himself in catching outlaws and he caught many an outlaw that was brought to justice at judge parker riz infamous court. now, when we talk about the native americans, even though i have purchased material on the indian wars, i thought it was very important to buy books on
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native american culture. this book, called "hecker narratives" you can see -- "ledger narratives" you can see the various parts of the native peoples. this is ledger art. this is basically them sketching on pieces of paper they would find. they were describing -- because they did not have a written language, they were actually describing battle scenes. there were these set symbols for what actually was going on. even before the reservation period, if native americans were defined of other note book or something they could write on they would do ledger art. and for moisture of native-american history we had this art either in their winter
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counts or in these notebooks and for the battle of little big horn there are quite a few -- we have quite few ledger books which actually describe the battle, and what happened, especially after the battle. these are two of my favorite books. a native american culture. this book i entitled "american indian horse mask" and it talks -- you can see they're very decorative masks on the horses. in here's an example of a much more modern horse mask, but in here -- in this book you can find more traditional horse masks from the native-american period before the reservation, each horse was a warrior pores. they specifically painted each horse in a specific way given their medicine.
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this book, the last thing i'll show you -- called bridles of the americans and this covers indian silver. and this is just an example of the various types of native-american silver that was used. and the native-americans had quite extensive trade routes between each other. you could find items made on the washington coast a thousand miles inlan in montana or the great plains. so thats want extensive trading route nor native-americans which we sort of dismiss because we sort of reduced native-americans to warring indians, which unfortunately was not always the case. the history of the east tends to be mwh
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