#1683 Writing the American West in a Time of Disillusionment

Listening to America

History, Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Clay welcomes eminent western historian Paul Hutton for a discussion of his new book, The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the American West. Hutton is a distinguished emeritus professor of history at the University of New Mexico and also the Interim Curator of the Buffalo Bill Cody Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming. Hutton's latest book attempts to strike a balance between the old, unreconstructed triumphalist view of America's westward movement and the more recent, guilt-ridden academic condemnation of the American experiment. We attempted to unpack the concepts of discovery, manifest destiny, the "Indian Wars," and the mythology of the West, including in Hollywood Westerns. How should America think about its westward movement as the 250th birthday of the United States approaches? This podcast was recorded on October 30, 2025.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, everyone. It's Clay Jenkinson. I had the great joy of spending the last hour with Paul Hutton, who is an emeritus professor of history at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. He has a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University in Bloomington. He's the author of a number of books most
0:22.9	recently, and the one we especially talked about, the undiscovered country, triumphed tragedy and the
0:27.9	shaping of the American West, but also in 2016, the Apache War is the hunt for Geronimo, the Apache
0:32.6	kid, and the captive boy who started the longest war in American history.
0:42.0	He's now as a capstone position in his great career,
0:47.5	the executive director of the Buffalo Bill Cody Museum in Cody, Wyoming. An extraordinary man still trying to figure out how to assimilate the new perspectives that were brought on by the cultural revolution in the United States since the 1960s, and yet not to succumb to the current academic craze of cringing and gildongering and guilt-mongering and condemning in disillusionment the entire
1:14.5	westward experience.
1:16.9	How does that happen?
1:18.7	So we talked about a range of things.
1:20.5	Lewis and Clark, to a certain degree.
1:23.0	We talked about Buffalo Bill Cody, of course.
1:26.8	We talked about Kit Carson, who has an incredibly
1:31.2	interesting and colorful story in the West. We talked about the Sitting Bowl, in particular
1:38.5	the assassination of Sitting Bull on December 15, 1890 on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation just inside South
1:45.7	Dakota on the North Dakota, South Dakota border, the ghost dance phenomenon. Paul Hutton has
1:50.9	been the president of the Western History Association. He is one of the fixtures of Western
1:56.8	history in the United States, and it was just an honor and a pleasure to speak with him.
2:03.2	I don't agree with everything that he says, but that's neither here nor there, of course.
2:06.4	And I have the deepest regard and respect for his important historical work.
2:12.1	So that's this program. And again, I'm trying to figure out American narrative. It used to be a triumphalist
2:20.0	narrative of Conestoga Wagons and the Gold Rush and the Oregon Trail and the Whitmans in Oregon
2:26.6	and the Indian Wars and the creation of American civilization that culminates in Los Angeles
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 8 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Listening to America, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Listening to America and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.