And welcome to the introduction to today's podcast.

I'm Clay Jenkinson.

I'm actually sitting in the sanctum sanctorum of Russ Eagle's house in Salisbury, North Carolina.

Very few people are ever admitted into this place.

And it's an honor to be part of this.

And the subject of today's podcast was the coming Doris Kearns-Goodwin eight-part Kevin Costner's

series on the American West.

And I don't know yet because I haven't seen it, but I was interviewed for it twice, and I'm

told that I'm a major talking head in the series. We'll see topics of

this series. John Coulter is one of them, the first mountain man. He was on the Lewis and Clark

Expedition. John Brown in the Bleeding Kansas is another, the famous Johnson County Range Wars is part of it.

The Fetterman Massacre that occurred on the Bozeman Trail in 1866 and so on, all fascinating.

And so we talked about that for the first two segments.

And then we had a special guest, Meredith, a granddaughter, who's 12.

And she is a, you know, a very passionate defender of her grandmother, Elizabeth Eagle.

And she saw a video post that I did on Facebook when we were eating gumbo in New Orleans.

And I accused Liz of being a little haughty on the question of gumbo, which she admits to, by the way.

Meredith saw it, and she was a little miffed that I could be critical of her grandmother in that way.

And so she challenged me to have her on the program and to be able to defend, Liz.

And she did a wonderful job today.

She's a really extraordinary, a truly remarkable young woman. She's 12 years old. She's a dancer.

She's a singer. She writes.

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