Épisodes

  • S2: Ep8- One Penny, Fourteen Dialects, and Zero Chill: The Real Kit Carson

    S2: Ep8- One Penny, Fourteen Dialects, and Zero Chill: The Real Kit Carson
    Oct 29 2026
    If your mental image of Kit Carson comes from Victorian fanfiction, prepare for a sharp slap of reality. The real Carson was a five-foot-four runaway saddle-maker whose former boss literally valued his return at one copper cent—the 19th-century equivalent of leaving him on "read." Yet through sheer dumb luck and frightening competence, this pint-sized illiterate managed to become the ultimate Swiss Army knife of American expansion: the guy who dragged "The Pathfinder" John C. Frémont across the continent, married into two tribal nations, mastered more languages than a UN translator, and still couldn’t read a restaurant menu.

    In todays' class, we peel off the dime-novel chrome to inspect the terrifyingly conflicted gears underneath. We follow Carson from dodging angry grizzlies in Wyoming saplings to the moral abyss of Canyon de Chelly, where he traded in his diplomatic credentials to starve eight thousand Dine onto the Long Walk. He was an honest man who despised federal corruption, a loving father who spoke fourteen Native dialects, and the exact guy Uncle Sam pointed at a village when it was time to burn everything to the dirt. Hold onto your butts—it’s time to find out why the frontier’s most complicated weapon was worth way more than a penny, and infinitely more dangerous than his pulp covers let on.

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    1 h et 4 min
  • S2: Ep7- Pens, Promises, and Moving Borders: The Art of the Fraudulent Indian Treaty

    S2: Ep7- Pens, Promises, and Moving Borders: The Art of the Fraudulent Indian Treaty
    Oct 22 2026
    If you thought modern terms-of-service agreements were sketchy, welcome to the 19th-century Treaty Era, where Uncle Sam treated sovereign Indigenous land like a temporary sublease. In this session, we dissect the diplomatic gaslighting and creative cartography that defined the treaty-making process on the Colorado plains. Armed with ink, grandiose promises, and heavily armed escorts, Federal negotiators mastered the art of signing "perpetual" peace pacts that barely lasted until the ink dried. We’ll follow the tragicomic pattern: find a handpicked "chief" who doesn't speak the language, throw a feast, promise "annuities" (which usually meant rancid flour and moth-eaten blankets), sign away millions of acres, and then act shocked when the rest of the tribe refuses to packs up and leave.

    We will take a hard, forensic look at the disastrous Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851), which recognized vast Cheyenne and Arapaho territories, only for the federal government to completely walk it back a decade later during the gold rush. We’ll watch "permanent" reservation borders shrink faster than cheap wool in the wash as land-hungry pioneers and railroad lobbyists redefined the law on the fly. It is a story of legal double-dealing, forged signatures, and the incredibly dark humor of trying to negotiate "lasting friendship" with an empire that already had its eyes on your backyard. Put on your reading glasses and look at the fine print—it’s time to study the paper trails that paved the way for conquest.

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    46 min
  • S2: Ep6- Wrong Mountain, Wrong Empire: The Spectacular Blunders of Zebulon Pike

    S2: Ep6- Wrong Mountain, Wrong Empire: The Spectacular Blunders of Zebulon Pike
    Oct 14 2026
    If Lewis and Clark were the gold standard of American exploration, Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike was the clearance-rack version sent out without a jacket. Dispatched into the high plains by General James Wilkinson—a man actively drawing a traitor's paycheck from the Spanish crown—Pike marched a freezing platoon of soldiers into a brutal Colorado winter wearing thin summer cottons and essentially zero survival instincts. Upon spotting the massive monolith later named in his honor, Pike decided it looked like a breezy afternoon stroll, got bogged down in waist-deep blizzard drifts on a completely different mountain, and declared to the civilized world that no human being could ever conquer its summit. (Fourteen years later, people were literally hiking up it for fun.)

    Refusing to let frostbite kill the vibe, Pike stumbled across the Sangre de Cristo range, erected a heavily fortified wooden stockade right on the Conejos River, hoisted the American flag, and played totally dumb when a squadron of armed Spanish dragoons showed up to ask why he was squatting on Spanish territory. Was it breathtaking navigational incompetence, or an elaborate undercover espionage run disguised as an all-expenses-paid arrest and escort across New Spain? Lace up your inadequate footwear as we dissect the forensic absurdity of early American expansion, diplomatic gaslighting, and the man who failed upward so hard they permanently etched his name onto a 14,000-foot rock.

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    32 min
  • S2: Ep5 - Steel, Maps, and Utter Confusion: The GPS-Less Invasion of Colorado

    S2: Ep5 - Steel, Maps, and Utter Confusion: The GPS-Less Invasion of Colorado
    Oct 7 2026
    You know what’s great about Google Maps? Not getting lost in an entirely different mountain range while clad in heavy steel, suffering from heatstroke, and trying to steal gold that doesn’t actually exist. In this class, we follow the heavily armored, deeply confused Spanish conquistadors and mapmakers who first stumbled into Colorado, turning the 16th and 17th centuries into one long, high-altitude navigation fail. Leading with the infamously brutal Don Juan de Oñate—who claimed the entire Rio Grande watershed for Spain in 1598 on sheer audacity—we analyze what happened when Old World imperialism met the colossal, unyielding topography of the Rockies

    We’ll track Diego de Vargas, the Territorial Governor of New Mexico who led a group into the San Luis Valley in 1694 to avoid being ambushed, ended up chasing bison, and mapmakers like those on the 1779 Anza expedition who tried to figure out where "New Spain" actually ended. Expect bad maps, massive cultural misunderstandings, and the sheer hilarity of cartographers trying to write "I have no idea where we are" in formal 17th-century Spanish. It’s an hour of bad directions, iron suits, and imperial hubris picking a fight with the Continental Divide.

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    42 min
  • S2: Ep4 - Equine Gasoline: The Four-Legged Arms Race That Broke the Plains

    S2: Ep4 - Equine Gasoline: The Four-Legged Arms Race That Broke the Plains
    Oct 1 2026
    Before the Spanish dropped their horses into North America, life on the Colorado plains was essentially an endless, grueling walking tour. You carried your own gear on dog travois, chased bison on foot while praying your knees held up, and kept your territorial squabbles strictly local. Then came the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, when Indigenous rebels kicked the Spanish out of New Mexico and liberated thousands of Iberian horses straight into the wild. What followed wasn’t a gentle nature documentary—it was the biological equivalent of dropping supersonic fighter jets into a foot-soldier world, triggering a chaotic, high-altitude arms race that weaponized the high plains overnight.

    In this episode, we trace how equines completely dismantled the pedestrian reality of the Comanche, Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapaho, supercharging their hunting capacity, expanding their raiding radiuses by hundreds of miles, and turning nomadic hunting bands into apex military empires. We tear apart the romantic myth of the tranquil prairie nomad to examine the cutthroat economy of horse theft, the brutal reality of equestrian war parties, and how this sudden four-legged horsepower locked the Plains nations into an unsustainable collision course with their neighbors—and eventually the U.S. Army. Grab a saddle and hold on as we inspect the biological detonator that turned Colorado into a high-speed, horse-fueled battleground.

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    45 min
  • S2: Ep3-The Seven Great Tribes: Dog Soliders and Turf Wars

    S2: Ep3-The Seven Great Tribes: Dog Soliders and Turf Wars
    Sep 24 2026
    Forget the Hollywood hallucination of a monolithic "Indian Country" where everyone shared one big campfire and communed with nature. In this session, we map the actual geopolitical chessboard of pre-contact and early-historic Colorado, introducing the real power players: the Ute, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, and Shoshone. This wasn't an empty wilderness waiting for white discovery; it was a contested landscape of sovereign nations engaged in high-stakes diplomacy, long-distance trade, and vicious border warfare. From the mountain-fortress domain of the Utes—who treated the Continental Divide like their private balcony—to the ferocious cavalry vanguard of the Comanche and the elite warrior societies of the Cheyenne, we break down who held the deeds, who controlled the buffalo corridors, and how these groups ran the region long before anyone in Washington drew a straight line across the plains.

    We also tear into the cultural mechanics that kept these empires alive: nomadic logistics, seasonal resource tracking, and complex inter-tribal treaties that made modern congressional politics look like child’s play. These weren’t passive victims standing around waiting for manifest destiny to steamroll them; they were adaptive, lethal, and politically shrewd nations running the center of the continent on their own terms. Pack away the generic textbooks as we conduct a forensic territorial breakdown of Colorado's original landlords and the brutal survival strategies that dictated life between the Great Basin and the High Plains.

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    37 min
  • S2: Ep2--Corn, Turkeys, and Megadroughts: The Ancestral Puebloans

    S2: Ep2--Corn, Turkeys, and Megadroughts: The Ancestral Puebloans
    Sep 17 2026
    Throw out the romantic, sci-fi garbage about ancient civilizations "vanishing into thin air." In our first deep-dive into the Colorado dirt, we head down to the Four Corners to examine the brilliant engineering, cosmological precision, and ultimate real estate blunders of the Ancestral Puebloans. From subterranean pit houses to the multi-story cliffside bunkers of Mesa Verde, we break down how an agrarian society thrived in an arid canyon landscape for generations—before a vicious cocktail of ecological overreach, deforestation, and a catastrophic twenty-four-year megadrought turned paradise into an unlivable oven.

    Instead of treating Mesa Verde like an eerie, empty museum, we dissect the forensic reality of what happened when the water ran out: intense resource competition, fortified stone architecture built out of pure paranoia, and the calculated decision to pack up and migrate south into the Rio Grande basin. The people didn't disappear—they adapted, relocated, and became the ancestors of modern Pueblo nations who are still here today. Strap in as we look past the postcard arches to see what happens when human hubris picks a fight with the Colorado climate.

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    34 min
  • S2: Ep1--ITS SYLLABUS DAY Y'ALL!!!!! WELCOME BACK!!!!

    S2: Ep1--ITS SYLLABUS DAY Y'ALL!!!!! WELCOME BACK!!!!
    Sep 10 2026
    Leave the tourism brochures, majestic mountain postcards, and sanitized pioneer folklore at the door. In this opening session, we lay out the full 36-week forensic roadmap of Colorado and U.S. history, treating our past not as a polite, inevitable march toward statehood, but as a crime scene of resource extraction, imperial border gambles, and calculated erasure. From the deep-time cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Puebloans through the explosive gold-rush invasion and the fraudulent treaties that carved up native ground, this first hour charts the entire arc of the Fall Term and establishes our core operating philosophy: history is not dead, buried parchment, but the active, living architecture of the modern American West.

    We will also preview the turbulence waiting in the Spring Term, following the transition from frontier skirmishes into the machine-age brutality of the Colorado Labor Wars, the 1920s Ku Klux Klan takeover of the state government, and landmark civil rights battles along the Front Range. Capping it off with a tour through the high-country eccentricities of our final "Freak Show" finale, this lecture establishes the house rules, expectations, and critical lens required for the year ahead. Prepare to trace the lineage of the ground beneath your feet, follow the paper trails of power, and confront the unvarnished realities of the Centennial State.

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    Visit the class at Spreaker.com and follow! Link to the page HERE! It would mean a lot and go a long way in helping grow class! Thank you for your support!
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    20 min