Mad Hatters and Centaurs (CONCLUSION!)

Legacies of Conquest and All the Implications for Right Now

New to this series? Check out Part I here, and jump on the story of the horseback empire of the Lakotas and their lessons for us today.

We’re picking up the tale after the Lakota turned Spanish horses and prairie grasses into an equestrian empire, dominated all enemies foreign and indigenous, and awoke the sleeping giant of American industry and lethality.

Unable to defeat their Lakota enemies on the battlefield, the U.S. Cavalry sought to eliminate their lifeblood—horseback mobility and bison.

***

As early as the 1830’s fur traders had spread through the Rocky Mountains and exterminated the beaver of the Rocky Mountains, just as they had across the Northeast a century before.

To survive, trappers quickly switched over to trading in buffalo robes and tongues.

Revenue from those hunts helped finance the railroads and feed its workers.

By 1870, the annual number of bison killed had climbed into the millions. A bull hide sold for $3.50. A round of ammunition, on the other hand, cost about a quarter.

One buffalo hunter quipped, “every time I fired one I got my investment back twelve times over.”

“Buffalo were slow-grazing, four-legged bank rolls. And for a while, there were plenty,” one scholar writes.

“Then in 1873 an economic depression hit the country, and what easier way was there to make money than to chase down these ungainly beasts? Thousands of buffalo hunters sliced their humps, skinned off the hides, tore out their tongues, and left the rest on the prairies to rot. They slaughtered so many buffalo that it flooded the market and the price dropped, which meant they had to kill more.”

But these bison were more than four-legged bankrolls. They were the Indians’ primary food supply.

“These [buffalo hunters] have done more in the last two years to settle the vexed Indian question,” General Sheridan observed, “than the entire regular army has done in the last forty years.”

One Army officer comforted a buffalo hunting tourist shocked by the endless carnage of the railroad buffalo hunts.

“Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”

By the end of the century, less than three hundred wild bison remained. The Lakotas’ ability to feed, clothe and shelter themselves and trade vanished with those herds.

Oxford historian Pekka Hamalainen sums up the inevitable conclusion.

“The U.S. Army, now supercharged by capitalism, railroads, and the telegram, launched a series of winter attacks…to force the horse nations into reservations, eliminating their most important asset, mobility.

Mobility on the continent now belonged to the Americans, whose railroads had ushered in a modern corporate world centered on Wall Street, where Indians had no place.

By annihilating space with rail lines, the United States could shrink the West to a manageable size, while the railroad tracts and trains disturbed the all-important migrations of the bison herds.”

Time and space had shrunk, and with it, the Lakotas’ hopes to maintain their empire.

Golden spikes–linking east and west, golden hills–digging up the Black Hills and Rocky Mountains, and golden haired generals of the 7th U.S. Cavalry, had all conspired to turn the Lakotas’ advantages into vulnerabilities.

And the thing is, they almost pulled it off anyway!

They gave an industrial age, hyper militarized, dynamic and aggressive opponent who’d been at war for the better part of its century of existence, more than a run for its money.

Were it not for the twin mineral discoveries of gold and fossil fuel, there’s little indication the U.S. Cavalry would ever have avenged Little Big Horn.

The Massacre at Wounded Knee was a tragic coda, an almost inevitable footnote to this broader victory of calories over courage.

(which makes Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth’s current valorization of this event upholding medals of honor for the perpetrators, all the more strange).

***

Lessons for Today

So what light does this North American story shed on our broader inquiry into the human condition?

For starters, the analogy between Then and Now gets wobbly quickly.

In this story, the First Nations were both conquerors and conquered. Perpetrators and victims. They conquered the beaver nation, enemy tribes, and for a time, both the Spanish and American empires.

Despite all that winning, they got slowly decimated by the relentless energy and materials advantage of the United States’ industrial machine.

But as we transpose these lessons to our current moment, who are the “good guys” and “bad guys,” heroes and villains?

Strictly speaking, the current MAGA Drill Baby Drill isolationists are our stand-ins for the Lakota.

Not so much Native Americans as Nativist Americans.

Less Noble Savage and more Savage Tweeters.

Not the victims of the Wounded Knee Massacre.

But the decorated heroes of “the Battle” of Wounded Knee.

#dutysineyeofthebeholder

And who are our contemporary replacements for that relentlessly advancing 19th century U.S. Empire?

Probably the Chinese.

Ford’s CEO Jim Farley just came back from touring their factories (fully automated and don’t even need lighting since there’s no humans with eyes to need them) and reported “it’s the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen.”

“We are in a global competition with China, and it’s not just EVs,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told The Verge last month. “And if we lose this, we do not have a future.”

Add in AI automation, massive renewable energy production, leading fusion energy breakthroughs and (checks notes) a recent discovery of perhaps the largest gold deposit in the world and you can see the parallels to 19th century U.S. railroads (transport), telegraphs (communications) mining (gold rush, coal boom) and manufacturing (steel, weapons).

They’re making the leap.

We’re drilling our own graves.

Here are six points worth thinking about.

One, it shows the nature of complex systems and how they develop and collapse.

Hat fashions in Paris propelled the Iroquois westward to the Great Lakes in search of pelts, and eventually pushed the Lakota onto the Plains.

Franciscan cruelty sparked a revolt in New Mexico, freeing Spanish Mustangs that empowered nomadic empires.

Gold hiding in Sierra and Dakotan mountain veins triggered a worldwide financial contagion and a boom in Western migration.

Rich Appalachian coal seams and the invention of cheap steel manufacturing fueled everything from railroads, telegraphs and riverboats to the Winchester rifles that “won the West.”

You could not predict these causes and effects in advance. You could not replicate them with hindsight. That’s the working definition of emergent complexity.

Complex systems require steadily increasing inputs of energy to sustain them, though.

The moment you stop pumping energy into them, they collapse.

When the buffalo–one of the key outputs of the solar energy of the Great Plains–were eliminated, the Lakota Empire could not sustain itself, despite its abundant cultural strengths and ecological adaptations.

As the United States tapped into what were seemingly unlimited fossil energy reserves, they were able to increase their complexity at a rate that outpaced their First Nation adversaries.

(think of China’s massive push into fusion and renewables right now)

Two, it shows, in a compressed timeframe the relative merits of competing energy strategies:

• The pre-contact Iroquois and Lakota relied solely on the localized photosynthesis and metabolism from the closed-loop energy system of their homelands.

• The larger transatlantic energy exchanges and material goods that the Iroquois gained from the French and English–provided an asymmetric advantage against their neighbors and put unprecedented stress on their traditional hunting grounds.

• The horseback strategy of buffalo hunting, raiding and trading allowed the Lakota to unlock vast solar reserves via mounted life on the plains and outcompete their farming neighbors.

• The denser carbon (near-surface coal deposits), hotter fire (steel blast furnaces), and more valuable starstuff (gold, copper, and iron) deployed by the United States, its citizens and soldiers fueled their expansionist Manifest Destiny.

Each time a civilization can climb a step on the energy pyramid, the more complicated material culture they’re able to create, and the more power they can deploy to meet their goals.

If your group does not make that step, it will be at a structural disadvantage to those who do.

Even (and especially) if you are optimally adapted to your current energy strategy.

#drillbabydrill

Three, it shows that those least entrenched in one era are often most adaptive to the next one.

The Lakota had less to lose and more to gain than their farming neighbors like the Mandan to the east, or the Pueblo and Apache to the south. Those tribes adapted to the impact of the horse more cautiously and paid a price for their hesitance.

Too much of a good thing (i.e. the successful niche adaptation of the farmers), can ultimately become a bad thing (i.e. disruption by agile competitors like the horse tribes).

Bursts of novelty mandate an attitude of “adapt or die.”

As we find ourselves firmly entrenched in current Late Stage Capitalism, with seemingly no way to disrupt entrenched political and market dynamics, we’d do well to learn from these examples.

It’s rarely the incumbent that leads the next revolution.

Four. Paradoxically, the more cultural knowledge increasingly complicated tools require (like the ability to forge steel, fabricate guns, and create steamships) the less individual skill users need to benefit from them.

The Iroquois hunter required more skill than the trapper at the trading post bundling furs for sale.

The New Yorker lighting an oil lamp required less skill than the Native American starting a fire with a bow drill.

The Lakota galloping bareback in the middle of a buffalo herd required more skill than a tourist taking pot shots from a train.

As we offload the fruits of increasing complexity into what we might call “material culture” i.e.–the tools and stuff we use–we often trade the knowledge of creation for the convenience of consumption.

That simultaneously democratizes use (think of how many more tourists could shoot a buffalo from a train than a horse) and it infantilizes users (think of how utterly clueless most of those tourists would be if their train had broken down in the “wilderness” the Lakota called home).

It’s worth remembering this democratization/infantilization paradox as we plan for the possible breakdown of our own train of progress.

If we ever lose satellite wifi and GPS navigation on our smartphones (or global supply chains, or instant electricity), we may find ourselves in terrain that few of us are still prepared to navigate.

Five, the story of the Lakota underlies the stark and unforgiving difference between absolute and relative growth.

On an absolute scale, the horseback Lakota had unlocked a phase change in energy that had eluded inhabitants of North America for ten thousand years. (the five hundred atom bombs of annual energy from the biomass of the tall grass prairies).

For a brief century, they were able to capitalize on that advantage and dominate all challengers, including Europeans and Americans exploiting competing strategies.

But their relative growth was soon eclipsed by the United States who bent time and space to their agenda. Despite the horse empire’s astonishing achievement, over time, they were losing ground to an adversary moving even faster.

By mining fossil fuels, the U.S. broke the annual cycle of photosynthesis and were able to loot a vault of solar energy that had instead taken millions of years to accumulate.

By mining industrial metals like iron and copper they were able to add superior tools and weaponry to their arsenal.

By mining precious metals like gold and silver, they broke open “the Commons”–those vast collective stores of plant and animal life unique to a specific bioregion–and plugged pelts, hides, and people into an extractive global marketplace.

By overwhelming human and horsebound metabolism with steam powered rails and riverboats, they were able to compress the geography of the West into a territory they could control.

Steel horses, fueled by coal, beat the finest horses fueled by grass.

Paddle-wheel steamboats beat the Mighty Mississippi

Long bore rifles beat short-draw bows.

Mined mountains beat Sacred Hills.

***

And that, perhaps, is the most haunting and far-reaching implication of this entire story.

Obligate adaptation.

Obligate adaptations are those changes that are not explicitly required by evolution or civilization, but if you don’t make them you risk getting out-competed by those who do.

Two billion years ago, for instance, cyanobacteria didn’t have to leave the thermal vents of the ocean, crawl onto land and learn to lick sunlight.

But today, we have towering redwoods who did make that leap. And weird little colonies of anoxic creatures huddled around deep sea vents that are all that’s left of a strategy that had dominated the first two billion years of life on earth.

Apes didn’t have to come down from the trees and learn to walk upright. But those who didn’t are now confined to tiny nature preserves, presided over by their cousins who did.

That’s obligate adaptation at the biological level.

But it happens at the cultural level too.

At the end of the last ice age, bands of hunter-gatherers didn’t have to become sedentary farmers and give up their varied diet, more egalitarian society and free time to toil behind a plow.

But they consistently got overrun by agrarian empires whose farming and food storage supported higher population densities, standing armies and militarized expansion.

The Lakota didn’t have to cut their hair, abandon their ceremonies, and take up farming to become “civilized,” either.

But they simply could not continue their migratory lifeways in a world where barbed wire fenced the plains into parcels, and prairie sod was busted up to make way for wheat fields.

Despite their insight and adaptability, the Lakota might not have had the perspective to perceive the type of change they were facing.

The elective adaptations they’d considered, like trading with Europeans, moving territories, and even adopting the horse, were all manageable within their own cultural frames and reference points. They negotiated those changes skillfully and often to their advantage.

The obligate adaptation to the Industrial Age was an order of magnitude more disorienting and consequential.

Bravery, wisdom, community, ingenuity, persistence–once the markers of a culture’s strengths–were overwhelmed by the brute force of concentrated starlight, dug up, and set on fire.

***

This dilemma of obligate adaptation hasn’t gone away.

If anything it’s seeping into every decision we face today from the deeply personal to the starkly existential.

Many of us, for example, might recoil at the notion of gene-editing for super smart, beautiful, athletic children. But within a generation, those Uber-Kiddos^TM will be out there in the marketplace, outcompeting your stock baby for kindergarten waitlists, Ivy league scholarships and Olympic podiums.

To resist the urge to perform a little genetic pruning or neural implanting will go from principled to negligent in less than a generation.

Obligate adaptations have larger consequences too.

As we grapple with the potential of AI to doom the world or save it, we realize we probably should pump the brakes on the AI arms race before something irrecoverably bad happens.

But we also realize we’ll lose to those companies and countries willing to plow ahead and reap the rewards ahead of us.

This extends to more thoughtful approaches to our current overconsumption.

We could transition to a “drawn-down” economy that more closely matches globally sustainable levels of consumption.

On a planet of finite resources, there’s a strong ethical argument to be made, after all, for wealthy nations to consume slightly less so poor ones can enjoy a little bit more.

But not unlike those hunter-gatherers eclipsed by Bronze-Age empires, if we cooled our own jets first, we’d lose to those nations still firing their economies (and armies and arsenals) at the full burn rate.

As we zoom all the way back to consider our own transition from a civilization wholly dependent on fossilized carbon, to one based on more renewable forms of energy, we should consider the role of obligate adaptation as it applies to the biggest questions for our future.

We should consider the history of those who’ve resisted these types of energy transitions with more initiative and skill than we currently possess, like the First Nations peoples of the Americas.

And we’d do well to think all of this through, before another round of creation and destruction finds us.

After all, evolution really is amoral. It doesn’t care how it generates new stuff! It doesn’t care what becomes grist for the mill. It only protects what persists.

As anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer in Residence Wade Davis notes, “it’s a mistake to think of other cultures as failed attempts to imitate our own. Each holds a unique answer to the question of what it means to be human and alive upon this Earth.”

It’s only us, in all of our humanity, that sees and celebrates those high water marks of culture and Complexity. It’s only us who mourn their loss when the cycle of Creation tips over into the wood chipper of Destruction.

The Good, True and Beautiful, as ethical, wise and noble as they may seem, are fragile.

They will only persist if we feel deep down, an obligation to defend them, in the face of the relentless ratchets of change.

That is perhaps the only obligate adaptation that might save us, rather than doom us.

Twentieth century pundit and editor of the National Review, William F. Buckley once remarked, “a conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

(Bill Buckley telling a young Jesse Jackson to just stop it with the dashiki)

#Shafted

When it comes to the Obligate Adaptations we face today, we should all reflect on that statement writ large. Not at the level of party politics, but at the level of civilization itself.

After racing relentlessly forward for ten thousand years we have come to a cliff.

Whether we hit the gas and hope we stick the landing on the other side, or slam on the brakes and look for another way across, will determine what this next century looks like for humanity on this earth.

For us. For everyone.

For this generation.

And for all the generations to come.

***

Thanks for reading this winding tale of energy, culture, courage and change. If you liked it, drop a comment, as it’s potentially a part of new book and wanted to see how interested folks are to geek out on stories like this!