The Earth is all That Lasts by Mark Lee Gardner (Introduction) w/Jesan Sorrells

0:01 Because understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand yet another business book on the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books Podcast, we commit to reading, dissecting, and analyzing the great books of the Western canon. You know, those books from Jane Austen to Shakespeare and everything else in between that you might have fallen asleep trying to read in high school. We do this for our listeners, the owner, the entrepreneur, the manager, or the civic leader who doesn't have the time to read, dissect, analyze, and leverage insights from literature to execute leadership best practices in the confusing and chaotic postmodern world.

0:40 We all now inhabit. Welcome to the rescuing of Western Civilization at the intersection of literature and leadership. Welcome to the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books Podcast. Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 172.

1:08 From the poet Nancy Wood comes this poem, Many winters, published in 1974 and I the earth is all that lasts. The earth is what I speak to when I do not understand my life, nor why I am not heard. The earth answers me with the same song that it sang from my fathers when their tears covered up the sun. The earth sings a song of gladness, the earth sings a song of praise. The earth rises up and laughs at me each time that I forget how Spring begins with winter and death begins with birth.

1:54 The themes of birth, death, tears, praise, gladness, life, and being heard or not being heard buried within this poem from Nancy Wood lie directly below, around and cut through the history of the book that we are going to introduce today.

2:22 History as we have covered it on this podcast is the long human story of beginnings and, inevitably, endings. And there are no more bitter endings in the history of the settling of the North American continent than the ending of the great Sioux nation that once ruled the Great Plains of the United States until the early part of the 20th century. This history has been documented more extensively over the last 50 years than in the previous 100 years. As a result, we can learn some. Important lessons from studying this history about leadership and unveiling the challenges that can arise as the inevitable close of a civilization

3:10 today. On this episode of the podcast, this introductory episode of the podcast, we will be introducing and discussing multiple themes from the Earth Is all that Lasts by Mark Lee Gardner, Leaders the earth indeed is all that lasts. You and I and every great civilization you know will one day pass into. The halls of history.

3:58 Foreign.

4:02 So, as usual, when we introduce a book and its themes, I want to talk about the Earth Is all that Lasts by Mark Lee Gardner, and then I'm going to discuss. We're going to get into the literary life of Mark Lee Garner in our second section, and we will go into some dominant themes that I see in the third and fourth section of our podcast today, and then we'll talk about some conclusions towards the back end of the show. So when you open up and I have the paperback version of the Earth is All that Lasts, it was published in.

4:44 In 2022 and was. The version that I have was published by Harper Collins Books. So of course it's. It is a. It is a copyrighted work. So we won't be reading directly from. From the book, but Mark Lee Gardner has a long publishing history, writing about the history of the American West. Now, when you open the book, you see a map that shows all of the homeland of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. By the way, the subtitle of this book, the Earth is All that Lasts. The subtitle is Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull in the Last Stand of the Great Sioux Nation.

5:31 When you open up the book, you do see a map of the territories that are covered in this book and the battles that extend from Montana and down into Kansas and then of course, east into. Into Minnesota, um, and even as far as far southeast as Missouri at Fort Leavenworth. This was the contested territory, the Dakota Territory, the Montana Territory, the Wyoming Territory, particularly the Montana Tour Territory, where massive battles occurred that Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and the Lakota and the Sioux were involved in the.

6:11 The Battle of, of the Yellowstone in 1872, the Battle of the Tongue river in 1873, the Battle of the Powder river in 1876. Let's see the. The Grattan fight in 1854. Massacre. Massacre Canyon that occurred in 1818. And of course, probably the most famous battle that the Lakota and the Sioux were involved in in the Montana Territory against General George Armstrong Custer. The Battle of the Bighorn. I'm sorry, not the Battle of Horn, but. Well, yes, the Battle of the Bighorn, but then also the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.

6:55 The forts are also noted on this map. Fort Abraham Lincoln, Fort Rice, Fort Yates, Fort Randall, Fort Leavenworth, as I already mentioned, Fort Laramie, Fort Phil Kearny Fort Fort Reno. And of course, a lot of the battles focused around the. The area in the western Montana Territory and going into the Dakota Territory of the Black Hills, which were considered to be a sacred area by the Lakota. The table of contents is organized into 14 chapters with an extensive epilogue as well as an extensive set of acknowledgments around the American Indian informants, the folks that he talked to in the history that he gathered, Notes, resources, and an extensive index.

7:47 Matter of fact, the supporting information for this book numbers at probably 200 pages. Each chapter covers different. Covers different aspects of the interactions between the Lakota, the Sioux and other native American tribes, including the Oglalas, the hunk papas, and so on and so on. The Pawnee, the Cherokee, the Cheyenne, though, all those folks are all covered in this. In this book. And, and like I said, There's 14 chapters, each one starting with a particular quote that frames the chapter.

8:29 And we open with the idea of who Sitting bull was, how he led the. The Lakota. And the lakota consisted of seven western Sioux tribes. So I already mentioned the ogalalas and the Hunkpapas. There were the. The mini conjos, the siya sapas, the two kettle, sans arc and brulee. There were also yanktonais and Santees who were a middle and eastern sioux, and then there were the northern and southern cheyennes who were the friends and the allies of the Lakotas.

9:12 The war chief of the oglala was, of course, crazy horse. And the way that the leadership was set up, and we'll talk a little bit more about this later on today, but. But the way that the leadership was set up was. It was basically sitting bull was sort of the. The. The chief or the, the head general, such as it were, of the lakota. And crazy horse was a trusted lieutenant. Of course, the immigrants, the white settlers coming west in search of gold or just a new place to live that wasn't in the east.

9:50 The newspapers that report reported on these two men and their tribes and even the u. S. Cavalry and the u. S. Government didn't really recognize or acknowledge the distinction between these two men until much too late. And that would, of course, set the table or. Or continue. If you look at the long history of native tribes and their interactions with the United States government, that would either continue or set the table for future interactions, particularly after the war drums had stopped beating.

10:47 So let's move on and talk about the literary life of Mark Lee Gardner, the author of the Earth is all that lasts. A native of Missouri, Mark Lee gardner has researched and written about the American west since he was in high school. During his college years, he spent summers as a seasonal park ranger at bentz old fort national historic site, Colorado, and Harpers ferry national historical park, west Virginia. He also spent one summer as a Mary moody northern graduate fellow at the stonewall Jackson House in Lexington, Virginia.

11:22 Mark has written a number of critically acclaimed and award winning books from material culture studies such as Wagons for the Santa Fe Trade, from the University of New Mexico Press in the year 2000 to his best selling nonfiction titles for HarperCollins including as are listed in the Earth Is all that Lasts to Hell on a Fast Horse the Untold Story of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett Rough Riders, Theodore Roosevelt, His Cowboy Regiment and the Immortal Charge Up San Juan Hill Wagons for the Santa Fe Trade, which we already talked about the Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliot which he co wrote with Mark Simons and brothers on the Santa Fe and Chihuahua Trails, Edward James Glasgow and William Henry Glasgow, 1846-1840.

12:08 So clearly he's written a lot about again the American west and has a passion for writing what fundamentally are journalistic takes on the history of the American West. As an authority on the American West, Mark has frequently been an on air expert for national broadcasts and cable networks, public radio and of course for numerous podcasts. No, we did not get him on the podcast for this episode today. We just didn't have the time. Mark's books and articles have earned him multiple awards and recognition not only nationally but increasingly internationally.

12:55 And in addition to his research and writing, Mark is an award winning musician and performer specializing in the historic music of the American West. And there's going to be more books coming from from this man. If the Earth Is all that Lasts is any indication of where he is going in the future and his passion for writing, I would strongly recommend that you pick up this book if you want to if you want to understand and you want to get a deeper appreciation for the history of the American west, particularly the history of the battles between the Native American tribes and the tribal peoples of the American west and the US Cavalry.

13:36 And if you want to get a rounder sense of exactly what was going on during this time historically from from a journalistic perspective. By the way, Mark Lee Gardner's writing follows on from the writing that we covered in a previous episode around Sebastian Younger and his reportage in his book War. But he's not quite a historian. He's not quite full John Keegan First World War, who we also covered. Nor is he an individual who directly experienced obviously the wars and battles and fights about which he is passionate about writing about and I said about a lot there in the in the late 19th century.

14:24 He's not an Ernest Hemingway who's writing A Farewell to Arms as a veteran, you know, of the the war that he is that he is writing about. So he, he is a journalist in the. In the realm of that, or he writes in a journalistic style in the realm of that. That Sebastian Younger space. But he's chasing a deeper truth, I believe. And that is reflected reflected in some of the themes that are in. In this book.

15:08 So the, the major chapter themes in the Earth is All that Lasts really focus around three sort of central areas. So the first area is the ways in which the Lakota were organized, right? The. The Western Sioux tribes, how they organized, how they fought, how they engaged with the 7th Cavalry, the ways in which they learned from battling not only the 7th Cavalry, but battling the other cavalry that were sent against them, how they perceived their American their American counterparts, and also how they perceived the flow of immigrants westward.

15:55 The various tribes perceive this very differently. There's an idea in one of the themes inside of the Earth is All that Lasts that Gardner explores beautifully, is this idea that even among the tribes, there were those who wanted to create treaties with the government, the United States government, and there were those who did not. And Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse represented those who did not want to, who were anti treaty. And folks like Red Cloud and others were folks who were pro treaty who believed, as Red Cloud says deep into the book, that the white men were going to be coming anyway, so it would be a good idea to do some kind of deal with them.

16:45 The other kind of theme that jumps out from, from the Earth is All that Lasts is the theme of a warrior culture among the. The Lakota particular, particularly among young male Lakotas. And many young male Lakotas desired yes to. To trade with. With the. The forts that were placed on the frontier in the west by the US Government to protect immigrant trades and westward settlement and westward movement. Gold prospectors, miners, eventually later on, folks who were surveying for. For the railroads that were going to be going through the Dakota, Montana and Wyoming territories.

17:35 But also there were, among the young men, there were Lakotas who sought the prestige and the status of engaging in warfare. And this is a major theme throughout all of the Earth is All that Lasts. And there's a quote at the start of chapter seven, too Many Tongues, that sort of exemplifies this right. That was delivered from an interpreter named Mitch Boyer, who was a mixed blood. Santee, July 27, 1867. And I quote, he said this. There are a number of chiefs who I believe would make peace, but the young men won't let them.

18:21 In place of chiefs controlling the young men, the young men control them. And this is, this is the thing that you begin to see and this is one of the major themes, like I said, that Garner focuses on in his, in his book and it dominates. Oh gosh. A good, a good two thirds of the. Of the narrative. Then the back end of the book talks about what happens after the war is over, right? What happened to Sitting Bull, what happened to Crazy Horse, what, what happened to not only the Lakota but the Cheyenne, the Arapaho and of course as the white soldiers were referred to, the, the blue coats, right.

19:08 And the turn of events that occurred in order at the end of the tribal wars that, that encouraged or not encouraged, but that motivated Sitting Bull to go over the border into Canada, right, And then to come back across the border that, that caused Crazy Horse to, to lose his life, Right. These sort of events were precipitated by the nature of the close of the American west and the nature of the acts that were created by the, the government that created reservations and then how those acts were gone back on and were reneged on by the US Government.

20:02 So the Earth is All that last. Contains a lot of history about not only the native tribes and how they interacted with each other, but, but also how they were perceived by others, including the general public as well as the U.S. government. And then of course the demands that were made on them to move from being free roaming Plains Indians to being, to being individuals who were bound by civilization and being threatened, thrust into becoming part of this newly expanding and confident country.

20:57 So in thinking about the Earth is All that lasts, one of the early dominant themes that penetrates the entire book is this idea that can be encapsulated by a line from, interestingly enough,

21:19 Patrick Stewart playing playing Captain Picard in Star Trek the Next Generation. Everything good must come to an end. The line that separates tragedy from triumph runs throughout human history. And I talked a little bit about this in my opening Civilizational end is. Is always a terrible thing. And the native tribes in the. On the North American continent and on the South American continent had been for better or worse tribal civilizations at one height or another. From the Aztecs, the Mayas and the Incas in Mexico, Central America and South America all the way to the Cherokee and even the well name of the Cherokee sorry, the.

22:13 All the way to the, the tribes that were in north eastern, the northeastern part of the United States when the, the, the Pilgrims and the, the Puritans showed up at Plymouth Rock or and Virginia way back in the early part of the 17th century. Up until that point, native peoples had been on the North American and South American continents for about a thousand years. And they had built civilizations such as where they had built societies, they had built cultures with their own customs, their own languages, and of course their own differences, which of course led to warfare between them and led to other types of problems.

23:06 But when civilizations collide, and we've talked about this before on this podcast, one civilization is going to inevitably triumph over the other for a whole variety of different reasons. And you see the final triumph of European civilization over the native tribes in the Earth is all that lasts. And that is the line that separates tragedy from triumph. The fact is, the adaptations that make some societies, cultures and peoples leap forward and the adaptations that make some societies and cultures and peoples fail to leap, this is all part of the tragic nature of humanity and the tragic nature, the tragic reading of history.

23:56 This fact of history, of course, reads as deeply unfair to our wealthy post modern middle class ears listening as they do from a place of post industrial material abundance and yet deep spiritual hollowness. As the character Alejandro portrayed by Benicio del Toro intoned in the movie Sicario, another movie about apocalyptic cultural endings and their knock on effects. And I quote, nothing will make sense to your American ears and you will doubt everything that we do, but in the end you will understand, close quote.

24:37 Nothing about the removal of the native tribes, nothing about the battles between the cavalry and the native tribes, nothing about the reneging of Washington on, on treaties, nothing about the treatment of those tribes from the 17th century all the way for 300 years, all the way to the beginning of the 20th century, nothing about that rings as fair or reasonable or makes any sense to our ears now. And we doubt everything that our predecessors did. And even with all that doubt and lack of understanding, we still feel guilty.

25:31 And that guilt in and of itself is tragic. It's all tragedy at the bottom of it. And this is something that is reflected in the Earth is all that lasts. The warrior culture of the tribal peoples of the North American Great Plains came to a warrior's end. And a warrior's end always involves violence. And this is something else that we struggle to wrap our arms around because we struggle to wrap our arms around the mere fact of violence and how that is a tool that is used in order to, well, quite frankly make people do things that they don't want to do.

26:17 As leaders, we can little afford to to wallow in guilt or wallow in lack of understanding, or even turn our eyes away from the things that we need to see in history. Instead, we must embrace those Things embrace the tragic view of human nature and the tragic view of human history and figure out how to integrate that tragic view into the realities we see in front of us, in our families, in our communities, and even in our workplaces today.

27:11 One of the things that you see in the Earth is All that Lasts by Mark Lee Gardner is the a couple of different ideas that run parallel to each other and actually inform each other. So Sitting Bull as a leader, was a careful and judicious person who, while he did act when he was motivated to act, actually thought about his actions and seemed to have put. Seemed to have placed a lot of consideration and deliberation behind his actions. Whereas Crazy Horse was much more impulsive, much more freewheeling, and much more likely to inspire people, particularly young Lakota warriors, to action through his impulsivity.

28:03 These two different types of leadership obviously combined together and made the Western Sioux a nightmare for folks like Phil Sheridan, William Tecumseh Sherman, and, of course, George Armstrong Custer. Now, in warfare, there is an idea, and it is an idea that does matter. And we saw this idea reflected also in. In Sebastian Junger's book War, also in John Keegan's book the First World War, and any other book that we've read about War. I mean, even about Face. We see this reflected when writing about war and when writing about the quote, unquote, sides in a war, there's always more information, right?

28:57 More documentation of the motives, the thought process and the results of those motives and thought processes on the battlefield from one side than from another. So if we are writing about, or if we're thinking about what happened in the Corn Valley, Coringal Valley In Afghanistan between 2007 and 2009, the first person reporting that Sebastian Younger did on that is going to be reflective of him being embedded with the US Military there, right? Is not going to be reflective of him being embedded with the Taliban or Taliban fighters.

29:36 Thus, we will not know or we will have very little information on the ground about what the Taliban fighters are thinking, what their motives are, or any of that kind of information. Same thing with the Earth is all the last same thing. When we talk about the battles between the tribal peoples of the American west and the U.S. government, the representatives and the military of the U.S. government, except in this case in the Earth is all that lasts, one of the major themes that comes out is Gardner's attempt to gather both sides, right?

30:06 To gather as much data and information as he can and to present it in as orderly a fashion as he can about what both sides were thinking during the course of this war. The deeper idea that he is seeking to expound upon, the deeper idea that he is seeking to expound, explore, is an idea I think, that we don't talk too much about on this show, but it is a theme that definitely jumps out. And the theme is that the enemy gets a vote. Too often in warfare, when we only look at one side, we look at the side of those that won the war and we forget that there are people on the other side, whatever that side may be, who also have their own perspective on winning and losing.

30:58 And in the Earth is all that Lasts. From the invasion of Good Horse Grass country, the chapter focused on that all the way to the chapter focused on the acts of Thieves, Land of Uncertainty, Soldiers coming with their heads down, which tells about the battle of Little Bighorn and the absolute decimation of the arrogant George Armstrong Custer, A Winter War all the way to the end of Freedom and Ghosts. Gardner attempts, as a main theme in his book to weave in multiple perspectives. That way we get a more global understanding of exactly what was happening during this period of time in American history.

31:56 So what are we to take as leaders from the Earth is all that Lasts, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the last stand of the Great Sioux Nation? What are we to take from this book that is extensively researched, lovingly written, with, with a high attention to detail, and a fidelity to not only the facts, but also a fidelity to getting all the facts correct? What are we to take if we read this book, from that we can apply to challenges that we may be having in our own present time? What can history teach us?

32:35 Well, I think one of the major pieces from this book goes back to this idea that I explored a little bit previously about taking a tragic view of history. Right. Everything good must come to an end. But there also is an idea in here that as leaders, we must not make the mistake that a lot of leaders make in reading the correct books, reading the right books, but learning the wrong lessons. So for instance, we kind of explored this a little bit when we were reading our science fiction books. Everything from Robert Heinlein to Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury to Isaac Asimov, and one of the things that we realized, one of the things that we explored with our co hosts when reading those books, was that

33:33 these books, the science fiction books that I mentioned in the science fiction authors, had influenced a lot of the thinking, the current thinking of our tech elite in Silicon Valley, the ways in which tech bros, quote unquote, think about artificial intelligence, or the simulacra of social media, the ways in which they are building our cyber driven future and the ways in which robotics and algorithms may show up, are currently showing up and may show up in the future to impact our lives. The tech bros are reading these books.

34:12 They are inspired by these ideas of the future, shiny, metallic and clean future. But they are learning, or they have learned the wrong lessons. From Sam Altman to Mark Andreessen, from Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk.

34:35 And when they learn these wrong lessons and head out into the world to bring to fruition, to bring to reality the technological wizardry they read about when they were powerless and perhaps even potentially picked upon teenagers, they incorporate all of that emotional nonsense into their reading of these books and miss the larger lessons. And so, as leaders, we don't want to fall into that same trap when we read history.

35:11 We must learn all the correct, hard, and even deeply unpleasant lessons that violate our deeply held shibboleths about how things should be or how they ought to be. And then we must decide to accept or reject those lessons, knowing, of course, realizing as mature leaders, as adult leaders, as serious leaders, that there will always be consequences for such acceptance or rejection. And of course, understanding that as leaders we cannot, we should not, and we will not be able to avoid accountability.

35:54 The facts of history. And this is why we read historical books on this podcast. The facts of history are hard taskmasters indeed, which is why many people avoid reading history. Not because they don't want to know information about the past that may disrupt a myth that they may have in their head that's too easy and too dismissive a a prescription. I think the reason people don't read history and the reason people struggle with historical understanding is because it's really, really hard to deal with the facts of history as they were.

36:36 Because you can't go back and change them, right? You can't go back and get a redo. For all of our human power, for all of our technological wizardry, we still can't travel back to the past and remake it into our vision of the current world, which of course in the past would be a vision of the future. We merely have to live with the idea that people in the past made different decisions than we made with the limited information which they thought was maximal at the time that they had. And those decisions had consequences.

37:11 And there was accountability.

37:15 And this, this is what makes the facts of history hard. And we can't dismiss it. We can't refuse to incorporate the lessons from history. Instead, we have to learn, we have to ignore. We have to. We have to harden our minds to embrace those hard lessons and embrace those hard facts. That way we can continue to make mature decisions into a future where other people will judge us.

38:01 Finally, as we wrap up our podcast here today, our episode here today, our introductory episode to to the Earth is all that Lasts by Mark Lee Gardner. By the way, I would encourage you to check out the next episode, episode number 173, where we talk with my co host Tom Libby about one of the dominant themes that is in this book, the dominant theme of young men and what you do with their energies in a warrior culture, particularly when that warrior culture is on the decline, and then how that translates into our current postmodern era where we have trouble incorporating the energies of young men into modern world, where glory, particularly martial glory, is hard to come by.

38:59 So check out episode number 173 after you listen to this episode. So my final thought today is on this idea of the Apocalypse, the apocalypse which many of us who still carry around the residue of the Christian worldview that used to permeate the west through and through. Many of us associate the word apocalypse with the book of Revelation in that horry old book that I always talk about on this show, the Bible, that last wild book with the visions of John in it. Apocalypse, though that word that sometimes that last book of the Bible is entitled comes from the ancient Greek word apocalypsis.

39:52 And the ancient Greek word means revelation or a revealing. The idea that no one really tells people is that revelations or disclosures or revealings are always happening. New information is always coming to the forefront. Either new information about a historical past or new information about a current era, or new information that will influence decisions that are to be made made in the future. So here's some new information. The lessons that leaders can glean, or one of the lessons that leaders can glean from the end of the Sioux Nation are lessons that reveal or disclose just how majestic and doomed the Sioux Nation was as a people.

40:48 On this show. I have asked the question previously with our conversation that we also had with Tom Levy around Ernie Lapointe's book that was basically a biography, a sourced biography of Sitting Bull. I asked this question in this episode, in that episode, and you should go listen. I believe it's episode number 157 about not only the Sioux Nation, but about all the tribal peoples of the Great Plains, the upper Great Plains Plains in America. I asked this question, could the United States have become what it is now without the destruction of the various Native American nations and peoples in the Midwest, and we battered.

41:28 Tom and I batted that question around in episode number 157, and we never really got to an answer to that question. And I think that the answer to that question is, of course, a revealing one, a a disclosing one, a dare I say, apocalyptic answer

41:55 from the arrival of the first European in the early six. Or not the early this, the later, well, the middle part of the 16th century, all the way to the bitter end of the tribal wars in the 1890s, the final depositing of the remnants of Native American peoples onto reservations.

42:23 The bitter end of civilization to make space for the next civilization was probably almost fait accompli. That apocalypse, that ending is one that should give us pause, because leaders understand that there are wise. Leaders understand that there are always three parts to every life, just like there are three parts to a story. And civilizations follow along with these three parts as well. There's a beginning, a birth, a middle, and an end. And we struggle in our society and culture with a fear of death.

43:11 We fear endings, both secular and Christian. We fear a climate change apocalypse in the same way that we fear an apocalypse of Jesus returning. And maybe this is not unique to the West. Matter of fact, I don't think it probably is. I think that all civilizations on the planet, all peoples at the individual level, to some degree or another, fear death, which is what drives us to maximize our lives in various socially normed and culturally bounded ways. And leaders, leaders have to understand that everything comes to an end.

44:02 But the end can be a revealing for a new beginning, an apocalypse, such as it were, that will open up new doors and create new opportunities for the next people who follow on when we are gone.

44:24 And well, that's it for me for. Listening to the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast today. And now that you've made it this far, you should subscribe to the audio version of this show on all the major podcast players, including Apple, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube Music and everywhere else where podcasts are available. There's also a video version of our podcast on our YouTube channel like and subscribe to the video version of this podcast on the Leadership toolbox channel on YouTube. Just search for Leadership Toolbox and hit the subscribe button there on YouTube.

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