tonight on american history tv . a special look at the american west . we will explore the settlement, growth, people and wildlife of the west. each program is from a conference this summer hosted by the aspen institute held in aspen colorado. we start with a panel on the history of wildlife preservation and conservation in the west . including the creation of yosemite national park. 128 years ago. this is about 50 minutes. we are really excited about

when we put this program together we were looking at the 19th century. we were looking about what came before it and so we open that panel. how does a still reflected make a difference in our world today. we are talking about 20th and 21st century. we will look at some of those issues and how what we learned in and reflects and still influences. >> welcome to our final day and it has been really quite exciting and enlightening. our job today is to bring it all home. tie everything neatly together. wrap up everything perfectly, probably not. that is not the way historians typically work. so we will get some version of it is more complicated than

that. yet i do hope that in these sessions you can see the different threads in the conference, that have been following through each of the days. we have had panels on environmental questions of which this one will take up. questions about american indians, native peoples. a threat that will be in the next session. and also that very broad issues about the meaning of the west. the code of the west, westerns, the myths, history . those of also paid -- played out across and we will bring that together in the final session today . a very exciting morning i am delighted to be joined. you already know all these people having heard from them at several panels already. for those out in c-span3 land . i am joined by dan florence marty sam way and. as you well know from the biographies their eminent historians of the american west and also in cases of the american -- environment in

particular ways such as a cultural . i think we will start with reminding us where we were a little bit including sessions we are restarted yesterday. also set the scene for the end of the 19th century and how changes in american society, the american west in particular were reshaping american attitudes and views towards nature and the natural world. and the way that was impacted, thinking about or the beginning of conservation the title of this discussion as well as some of the legislation that came out of it the continues to have a profound impact on the world on the west that we live on today. let me start marty with you. let's set the scene and provide some cultural context. that is shaping the air in terms of what is going on in

the last decades of the 19 century. >> thank you stephen. i want to talk a little bit about yesterday. when we made our field trip yesterday out to bill coax bear ranch . we saw a version of a particular slice of western history. we saw a town that was meant to suggest a small world western town in the rockies, the great basin. between the 1860s and the 1880s. what i want to argue today is that kind of fascination with the particular moment of western history, is not new. in 1890s which is where our conversation is starting this morning, it is where we see that fascination with a particular moment of what seemed to be vanished western history really take root. so let's mention a few key people here to keep in mind as we start a conversation today. the first is historian

frederick jackson turner. in 1893 he published an essay called the frontier in american culture. turner was a kind of anxious man. he looked at the 18 90 census which said there was no longer a continuous line of sparsely settled land, a frontier. and that line he said have marked all of previous american history. as a frontier he argued people were stripped of their familiar conventions, forced to and -- confront the environment from the interaction emerge a particular vigorous kind of american democracy. he worried now that the frontier was technically gone, how would americans renew that democratic spirit? so he had the sense that a key moment had just passed. but let me throw out a few other figures that are circling around american culture at the same time. the first is teddy roosevelt. in 1884 he has a breakdown after the simultaneous death of

his mother and his wife. he goes out to dakota territory for a west -- rest. this delete easterner have the sense that in the wilderness, he could recover a kind of vitality and in fact is you probably know for the rest of his life he is a spokesperson for what people call the camp cure. return to the wilderness to recover one's manly vigor. yesterday at the ranch we saw a number of copies of frederick remington paintings and frederick remington sculptures. the great western artist i regret we don't have one of his pictures right behind us, right now . is out west in the 1890s and he too is in easterner. he two senses that something really vital has just disappeared. he wrote this, right before his death in 1909. the west is no longer the west of picturesque's and stirring

events. romance and adventure have been beaten down and the rest of civilization. the country west of mississippi has become hopelessly commercialized, shackled and chained of business to us other most limits. the cowboy, the ring thing mark you disappeared with the advent of the wire fence. as for the indians, there are so few of them he doesn't count. so when he is painting these paintings? from new rochelle new york. he too is regretting the west this seems to have disappeared. we can throw into this makes the philadelphia office -- novelist who wrote the virginian in 1902. that novel evokes so much of what we saw yesterday. at the wild west town. the virginian has a code of the west. if he gives his word he keeps it and he has never written women. the virginian events the scene of the shoot out in the street between the good guy and the bad guy. you can almost visualize that happening last night at bear

ranch. so there is an intense anxiety at this particular moment in the 1890s that the west has somehow profoundly changed. and just to prop up, i think it is no coincidence this is the moment in 1891, we see the birth of the sierra club to help preserve some of that western that we see yosemite which has been a state park since the 1860s, in 1890 become a national park or as you will hear in a moment a number of federal acts passed to preserve the wilderness. there is intense anxiety in 1890s and americans are worrying how to preserve what seem to have just slip through their grasp. >> let's pick up on that, dan and and sarah to weigh in on the ways in which this cultural anxiety about the changes on the west and changes in american society more broadly. increasing americans have been

living in cities and working in industrial occupations. the jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer seems to be slipping further and further in the american past. the frontier spirit, that has been so crucial to invigorating the american character, it seems to be also fading into the past. how that translates into actual thinking and anxiety but also real concrete action in the beginning of what we see as an environmental movement and the tensions within that. so picking up on the themes, provided -- divided in the previous panel. i'm going to make you mr. fonda. i didn't want to turn you into a florist. so mr., dr. florez will be our

fonda person. dr. laura will be our floral person . >> thanks marty thanks steve for that wonderful contextual explanation for what is going on. what we historians refer to this. as looking back on the culture of it is the period of the nostalgic west which is what remington and russell also per tray in their art or post frontier anxiety. and post frontier anxiety took a lot of forms. the one of the forms it tended to take was a feeling that the civilized 20th century was closing in on people. suddenly, this intoxicating, untrammeled freedom we have had in the 19 century was being curtailed. one of the ways it was being curtailed, particularly as

sarah is about to explain, is through the beginnings of a conservation movement that attempts to apply that regulatory corrective to the story of the petri dish that i was offering up as a metaphor a couple days ago . if you remember, i said that e college is often use this aphorism of putting a food source and bacteria in a petri dish and without some sort of correction, without another species of bacteria that prevents the original bacteria from simply running wild, what the original bacteria will do is eat everything available and then basically destroy themselves. and if you look at the 19th century west is a kind of prelude to this.

of post frontier anxiety, what you realize about it is part of the reason we are so fascinated with it still today, is that it offered up this kind of activity -- opportunity for the untrammeled and intoxicating freedom that we simply wouldn't get again from 1900 or so, on. in some ways that is the demarcation of the end of the frontier as well. i just want to point out to you, though, the rational for the regulation that came in the early 20th century that we call the conservation movement was built on pretty sound visible's. -- principles. if you look at the intoxicating freedom of the 19 century in terms of the american west, what in effect it produced was the largest single destruction of wildlife

that is discoverable in modern history. i mean we lost some species entirely. the most numerous bird in the entire world, the passenger pigeon became extinct. the most brightly colored large bird of north america, the carolina parakeet became extinct. we nearly lost bison, as i mentioned the only day down to only 8000 animals. we nearly lost elk, we lost pronghorn down to 13,000. we drew 50,000 grizzly bears down to a few hundred. we don't know how many. one species after another, gray walls which are extirpated in the lower 48 by the 1920s we business -- basically loose. 3 million wild horses we send off to dog food plants in

illinois. when the company starts making dog food and basing it on wild horses in the west. so it's this amazing, mind- boggling destruction of animals. the other day i told you i would read you two quotes which were only 26 years apart in the west. i read you the first when from john james audubon. he is absolutely gob smacked by this tremendous abundance of animals. he says no one can imagine the diversity and the abundance of the wildlife along the missouri river. 26 years later the earl of dunn raven would buy up estes park prior to creation of rocky mount national park. he was one of a host of elite

europeans who went on safari in the american west in the 19 century. the earl along with the duke of lecture -- russia. where the last two to do so. on the hunt out of the great plains east of denver, northeast of denver actually. finished up a run through a herd of elk out on the plains from which he and his partner shot down more than 60 animals. they shot pronghorn's as they were fleeing, they shot it buffalo. they were surrounded by animals. it was this wild adventure for about five or six minutes. that's all it lasted. and then he went to the camp lot -- that night and sat down to his journal and this is what he

wrote. and i think what he was conveying to us, he was a sensitive sort of safari hunter who spent a lot of time in europe with painters and poets and actors and so he was more sensitive than a lot of these westerners i think. he wrote this. and a second it was all gone. there was not a living creature to be seen. the oppressive silence was unbroken by the faintest sounds. i looked all around the horizon, not one sign of life. everything then became dull, dead, quiet, and utterly sad and melancholy. with the earl was conveying

through his journal, into the world, was really what this untrammeled freedom on the frontier had wrought. we had basically destroyed the world like those bacteria in the petri dish. and without any kind of regulation that is a sort of world we were creating. that is the world we longed for looking back on the 1870s and 1880s. wouldn't it be wonderful to go back? but of course you can't go back unless you come up with some way of creating a future that provides some sort of curb to the instincts of her -- human nature. what the earl experiences what we humans have pretty much done for 40,000 euros, leaving

africa and spreading around the world. we have done this over and over and over again. and this was the last time we got to do it. now we confronted a world that was going to provide some sort of curb on the appetites of human nature. and we call that curb conservation. >> let me turn from florez to fluoro. pick up the theme how this gets translated into legislation, policy, new ideas about how to curb that human appetite for killing all in front of it. or for destroying or as terry anderson said, i think in his session, invoking the idea of the tragedy of the commons is a thing we might want to come back to . >> i would like to thank my colleagues for that really great set up. the tragedy of the commons is exactly the idea was going to

pick up on. this is an idea any colleges came up with in the 1960s. he used the idea of an english commons, if you have a village surrounded by grazing comments that all have access and everyone could put a single cow on the commons that it is a sustainable system. because there is not too much destruction visited on the commons. as long as everyone operates in the common good then it works very well. it is very stable and sustainable. but the trouble comes, the tragedy as he called it, comes when an individual says if i add just one more cow to the commons that will degrade the commons but it will substantially increase my own wealth and success. and that is true.

as long as he is the only one that does that there is no discernible difference. but when everyone acts in their own interests, everyone puts another cow on then you get overgrazing and the destruction of the commons. there lies the tragedy. in some ways what we are seeing here is the tragedy of the commons by the late 19 in early 20th century. we have water sources that have been radically degraded by overgrazing. extensive timber harvests. we have lost massive numbers of animals. there is nostalgia for how to we recapture that? in the early have -- early 20th century, the federal government as a solution to the problem . i know you can laugh. but the federal government is the solution to the problem.

these are progressive reformers who believed in the idea that the federal government was the best steward of the nation's national -- natural resources. so what we see is a creation of the public lan system. the sense we are wanting to protect our watersheds was the genesis for the national forests. the national forest system doesn't really come out of a desire to protect trees as it does to protect water. which we talked about a couple days ago which is the essential resource that you need to survive and be successful in the west. the idea that we need national parks as marnie suggested again. these protections were all about creating a federal commons , a way for all of us have access to the kinds of resources that would make a truly great nation. so in the beginning of the 20th

century we had the three, conservation, preservation and reclamation. i will briefly talk about what those are. we are all coming out of this concern of loss. the first of these was conservation. this is the idea of theater roosevelt and his chief forrester. the idea was we needed to conserve resources for future use. it is a utilitarian idea. the idea is we need to have protected forests so that we always have a forest for the homebuilder first of all so that we can always create homes and cities that would make a thriving economy. at the same time there is also a different way of valuing nature. that is probably most commonly associated with john muir.

and this is idea preservation. preservation values nature for its aesthetic value. it is not about board feet of timber or irrigation, it is about the sublime. it is about the beauty of nature and -- in its restorative power. these two could work very closely together and what we get are places like yosemite and the early national park. but the utilitarian idea behind conservation was probably the winter -- winter of this first plan. in order to succeed in the west which is less than 20 inches of rainfall a year you're going to have to irrigate in order to successfully farm. in irrigating, it was acosta

was simply not bearable by individuals, corporations or even by the states. by -- believe me we tried all those things. so once again, the federal government to the rescue. 1902, the newlands reclamation act. the act created the bureau of reclamation within the federal government with the idea that the federal government would build the kind of hydraulic water system that would make the desert bloom. we will bill dams, irrigation, canals. this would be the way to reclaim the west from the desert and to make our settlement dreams a success. that's one of the reasons i think molly talked about in our panel the other day. there actually more homesteads claim to the 20th century than there were in the 19th century. it is what makes all of her western states possible today . a kind of flies in the face of john wesley powell and it brings

water to where the people were. we are going to settle where we want to and by gosh we're just going to engineer our way to the water. in many ways than what we try to do was create a federal commons. the commons of public lands and resources whether it was water in the reclamation program, public lands, forests, national parks. these are going to be the resources that all americans could have access to that would hopefully restore the promise that the west had been, perhaps on the 19th century. >> we will spring forward on the environment. now with the legislation a new thinking that comes into place. there dramatic changes that it brings to the way that 19th century americans can typically see these ideas and issues. i want to ask all of you, in your view, went -- what went

right or what went wrong? what worked well and what did not work well? then we will go back to you marnie. this change in thinking, how deep it went, were americans reassured a new by, how did they come to terms with the post frontier world? we start with dan and sarah. there is a snicker about the federal government as a solution here. so what went right before we one -- before what went wrong. >> that's a good question. since we are talking about the federal government and we snickered as a common do -- commonly do these days about the federal government. let me convey to you. about that story i have been telling you about the destruction, planetary wide

level discussion of wildlife that we executed in the american west in the 19th century. our instinct, initially in history was to blame not, who else but on the federal government. the story of how the federal government participated in the destruction of western wildlife was first obligated -- this is a fairly new explanation for this. it is first put out by former buffalo hunters during the conservation., who found themselves, aspersions were casted what they had done. they had killed all these animals, millions of these iconic animals.

the former symbol of the united states. a particular buffalo hunter wrote a book, a memoir called on the border with the buffalo. he came up with this explanation for why they had done it. what he essentially argued in his book with that we were the heroes of the advance of civilization and not only that, we were actually the agents of the federal government and destroying all this wildlife. because the federal government wanted these animals destroyed. they engaged in a secret conspiracy between policymakers in washington and the western army to kill all these animals for several reasons, one of which were to force indians onto reservations. another of which was to open the landscape for homesteading. and so the government had secretly done this, he argued.

he even went to invent a famous very famous speech. you can go online and buy a t- shirt with lines from this speech on it. it is almost like the george patton speech you saw, george c scott deliver in that famous movie about george patton. you can almost see the american flag rebelling behind and it is a credit, attributed to philip sheridan who supposedly is going to appear before the texas legislature in the 1870s to prevent the texas legislature from passing a bill to outlaw buffalo hunting. and it turns out that philip sheridan as i discovered in working on this book and never even gone to austin to testify before the legislature there. the texas legislature, has always struck me as suspicious which is why i looked . the

texas legislature had never considered such a bill. but that explanation that appeared in this memoir by buffalo hunter became the explanation that historians and journalists used for the next century really to explain what had happened to all these animals in the west. what actually happened is we just let the market work. the federal government had never passed a law to inhibit any kind of wildlife hunting in the united states. and we didn't do so until 1900 . and so, sort of like the south, deciding after the civil war, that the civil war was not caused by slavery was caused, a lost cause to preserve states rights that made everybody feel better about the civil war. blaming the government made everybody feel better for what we actually had done. individually. through selfish means to all these animals in the 19

century. so we ended up doing in the early 20th century. was having some success by protecting game animals that we wanted to hunt and deciding that predators were the animals we needed to exterminate. and we would substitute human hunters for predators like mountain lions, wolves, and bears. that gave us the 20th century regulation so we preserve some of these animals, not buffalo, which we did save. but we didn't allow them to be wild animals in the west in the 20th century. we did allow elka and some of these other animals to be wild. those of animals we will save and we will kill all the predators as rapidly as we can and we will substitute human hunters for the predators. thus producing our 20 and 21st century strategy of wildlife management.

>> i am aware of the time is short here . i want to make sure we have time for questions . images very quickly, let's talk about water. as we all know, you mentioned, in 1902 the national reclamation act is passed. the federal government becomes the agent, engineer of this massive hydraulic project, bring water where is -- where it is needed. all the problems in the west are solved, right? >> indeed, i would say that in many ways at the same time one of the great successes and one of the failures of the federal reclamation project. as you all know, living in the west now, the federal government's pursuit of conservation, preservation and reclamation has made it a dominant present in the west. you don't live in the west and not be quite aware of the federal government . but you don't turn on the tap or

sprinkler pretty much anywhere in the west without being the beneficiary of federal water management. certainly that made the desert bloom in many ways. often at the expense of the eastern folks who ended up funding it. your tax payer dollars at work in the west were funded by those farmers who are getting put out of business by western agriculture, in some ways. but the challenge, as we come into the present with this massive hydraulic theme that we have in place, how do we continue to sustain it. as i was talking yesterday in answer to a question, about utah trying to stillwater. everybody is trying to steal water . climate changes water change. we have been so dependent, we live in places like phoenix, las vegas and los angeles at the blessing of water management. and now we are going to have to confront the reality that there is just not going to be the

kind of water to go around that there has been in the past and that is going to have some serious consequences. >> the reclamation ask is passed with the promise that it is going to restore the jeffersonian ideal. it is going to turn the american west in the land of yeoman farmer. if you could talk a little bit about how americans and westerners in particular adjust to the post frontier world. which is not the jeffersonian west . >> let me answer the question going to the original question what worked and what didn't. where do we seem successes on where do we see mistakes? just look no farther than the national parks. ken burns as he said in his documentary they are america's best idea . and anybody who have been to yellowstone, glacier, yosemite are going to agree with that. but those national parks were of -- invented and created and

nostalgia that we are talking about in mine. they were not empty wilderness areas when they were created. people worked, hunted, fish, etc. the national park service or the federal government before the park service was created. created those parks and removed indian people. now we go yes preserving that land brilliant idea but removed indian people to use a, not such a good idea. right now you can google and look around, see that the national park service is trying very hard to develop new ways to work with native people as comanagers, partners, providers of traditional ecological knowledge that will allow for better park management. there we see the federal government reckoning very directly with the mistake they

made when these parks were invented over a century ago . >> let's open it up, we have a few minutes. i see terry has questions. >> thanks. i hesitate to throw water on this wonderful nostalgia tour but i'm going to. it is easy to look back and you know the bison is the passenger pigeon. although the passenger pigeon went extinct but the bison didn't . i guess maybe because we still see them. in point of those as examples of the tragedy of the commons at large. destruction the comes. but two things have to be kept in mind through all that. one is that the tragedy that occurred there was a tragedy out the lack of ownership and lack of ownership of ricin and

wildlife, generally. human beings have tried to deal with those kinds of problems. native americans understood how to control the tragedy of the commons through kinds of property institutions if you will, salmon streams in the pacific northwest that were owned by clans and families. clam gardens in the pacific northwest that were cultivators. these were examples of where human ingenuity really allowed people to overcome the tragedy. so we are not like a petri dish. yes we did destroy much of the bison population because we didn't come up with those other alternatives. ownership alternatives. yes, ted turner fences and a lot of bison on his ranches. but that is not what we think of as wildlife . but the other

point i think it is important to make, yes we have lost some buffalo and we have lost this nostalgic view but we got something else. we are rich people today in part because we cultivated the land. we are rich people today because we can produce a lot of food in the west. largely in many cases due to sarah said beneficiaries of federal water management. i put subsidies. yes federal government subsidies that allow a lot of this. but even have those not come about, we were irrigating part of the west. i think that it more sensibly without the reclamation project myself but that is another story. the bottom line here is i think we ought to be careful of not coming into this nostalgic view without recognizing, we got some of the things that were pretty darn good.

and finally just one quick point, with regard to national parks, u.s. people who created yellowstone? everybody says teddy roosevelt. he was 14 years old when we created yellowstone. who created, the railroads. they did it for totally profit reasons. they wanted to control, the northern pacific controlled yellowstone. all the major parks have a . >> quickly there are a lot of questions. i realize there was a hard one to answer quickly. >> a lot of points. from terry who has headed up an organization and bozeman content and to develop free enterprise solutions to environmental problems. so, well said. i would say this, terry. very good point about native peoples going for 10,000 years at least 1000 years and not even up the contents of the petri dish in the american west. they did that in the aftermath,

however, an extraordinary collapse that was even larger than the one we confronted in the 19th century. which we call the plasticine extension. with -- which whether you believe native people participated in they probably did release a species or two, they did witness it. and so, it is something like the way the pueblo indians in the southwest responded to the chuckle and collapse in the 12th and 13th century. they came up with a whole new strategies after suffering this tremendous disaster that were far more regulatory, far more careful, in some respects, in the case, because i have studied bison a lot and the 8000 year interaction. one of the arguments about that he colleges make that i tended to believe is bison actually were better adapted to life on the great plains then native people

were. that's one of the reasons bison survived after the plasticine extension. but i think it is a recognition of how the world has to be reshaped after you suffer a disaster. i think that is what native people did. i think that it is what conservation really amounted to at the end of the 19th century. we recognize, we had to reshape the way we were using the world and we had to come up with some sort of regulatory mechanism. i see a commonality between those two things that you pointed out. >> i don't think you'll ever be at another conference again where the pleistocene extinction and conservation policies of the 20th century have ever been linked together. do you want to add anything sarah? >> one of the questions i like to ask in my book and in class and with people in general, is, at what cost.

at what cost do we make the choices that we do? and i don't ask that as an economic question i ask that as a human question. and you are right, there are economic and if it's derived from the slaughter of all these animals. for a very small group of people and for a very significant group of people, native people in particular, that is an economic devastation that comes in. we market environmentalism and i know you are a major advocate of it and i think they're really good of ideas that come out of it. but sometimes it fails to consider the human cost of things in favor of an economic concern. and my frustration with the losses of animals with open lands and things like that. we don't just want to talk about how that comes out on an accounting ledger. we need to talk about what that means to people and their lives.

for those of us living now, we count as part of the calculus of our good life. we value access to public lands, open spaces, clean air, clean water. and being able to see really spectacular animals. everybody i think took a selfie with the bison when you came in, didn't you? and yet it is a stuffed one. i don't want a stuffed one i want a real one and i want to be able to see them . >> i see lots of hands, very limited time. i'm going to ask the people, very quick questions and we will do it as a lightning round. so very quick questions, don't answer them keep them in mind that we will do them as a set answer at the end . so quickly. >> 30 million bison, how come they did not cause overgrazing

was there enough grass for 30 million bison? >> don't answer that. >> hard to make this quick, do you see the country like a kid who is running amok, we are a very young country and the addiction through the killing and kid running amok versus growing up and then being quite adolescent do you see in developmental terms growing up how are we going to grow up with responsibility and thinking of others? >> marty you're going to do the bison. we have one more over there for -- from molly. >> sarah i think is the one talk about the creation of the public lands system said this is something we are very fond of. so i would like you to talk about the bundy experience sovereign citizen movement

which is now saying the public lands system is terrible we should all return it to the people who live there. >> okay we are going to start with bison, children and then bundy. okay. >> the reason we think there were between 20 and 30 million bison on the original great plains now, rather than 60 million which you have often heard and you will still see that figure. the 20 to 30 million is based on the carrying capacity of the grasslands. the fluctuation between 20 and 30 million is also based on the fact that the climate was constantly changing. it was, for example something called the little ice age which produce a lot of rain and a lot of grass and groovy bison populations large and is starting in the middle of the 19th century there is about a 12 year drought in the west that reduced the carrying capacity down to about 20 million animals, just about the time the market started taking

amanda guillen appeared -- and killing them. it's a natural equilibrium between grass, climate and animals. >> children. >> that is a good question i would simply say that america is not like a parent taking care of a child for a few children. we are a democracy where evolving democracy we are an imperfect democracy. i think we see right now, we see evolving debates about the epa, climate change, current political climate. the government still comes from the people. the government reflects the idea of its multiples constituencies. so i don't think this is quite the top-down model that your interesting analogy suggests . i think it is a two-way street. >> and the bundy's.

>> bundy occupation of the bird refuge in refusing to pay grazing fees in southern utah is a modern manifestation of the sagebrush rebellion which first appeared in the 1970s. six that is a very ahistorical understanding of the creation particularly in the west. unless you're one of the original 13 states. you did not own the land first and then the government took a. the federal government boss the west, acquired the west and then created the states. and those federal lands have been federal lands, they are at once is somehow got robbed from the people. they have always been federal lands. quite frankly there of the lancet in many cases nobody wanted . like nevada.

>> do we have any nevadans out here, do have one more quick question? any other questions? okay let me give you all a chance for one final remark then. to sum it all up, tie it all together. to send everyone home happy. >> i think we are still trying to figure out how to live happily in the world. it has taken us a long time. we have been on this planet as a species for more than 200,000 years, sapiens i am talking about. we have been trying to figure out ever since we have been here and we are still struggling to do it. as we look at the future, that's how i think we have to confront the future. we have been trying to figure out how to make this planet work for us for a long time. and we haven't quite gotten it

right yet. we are closer. >> can't disagree with the word of that, dan. i would like to add as we go outside and look at the surrounding environment. i think we have to agree that for all the mistakes, the federal government has made. we are very fortunate people to live with the benefits that are conferred upon us in terms of western land in western resources. >> it's always good to end with quote and sometimes there is no one better to hard to be it is hard to be pessimistic about the west. it is the native calm of hope. >> how about that? are we breaking or are we going to the next session right away? sit tight. we are going to follow another thread, following right away. thank you all very much.

we will have more in just a moment. this weekend on american history tv on c-span 3, saturday at 10 pm, the 1968 broadcast, the nixon answer. southern town hall. >> i do not believe that if we are bond, nuclear weapons should be used in vietnam. they are not necessary for vietnam. i think nuclear weapons should be reserved for only what we hope will never come. i think greatest -- great diplomacy. a sunday at 6 pm on american artifacts, we will tour the baseball americana exhibit at the library of congress. and, at 8 pm, on the

presidency, former president george w. bush, cokie roberts and friends, reflect on the life of former first lady barbara bush. she had this motto that you are going to be judged about the success of your life by your relationships. your family, your friends, your coworkers and people you meet along the way. >> watch on american history to be. -- tv. we go back now to the aspen institute for the history and legacy of the native americans who inhabited the west during the 20th century. okay, welcome back a, everyone. welcome back myself is going -- myself! as everyone knows, this is the third of three panels that has explored issues surrounding the native american presence in the west.