Song Exploder
The Memory Palace: The Thundering Herd, The Vanishing American
April 15, 202624 min · 4,737 words
Show notes
Today, we're sharing an episode of Nate DiMeo's wonderful podcast, The Memory Palace, which helped inspire both Song Exploder, and a song on my upcoming album. So today, I want to present a kind of two-part story. The first part: "The Thundering Herd, The Vanishing American," from The Memory Palace. And in the second half of the episode, I’ll tell you how it ended up unexpectedly unlocking a song that I’d been trying to figure out.
Highlighted moments
someone at the Catalina Historical Society tracked down a crumbling print of The Vanishing American, threaded it carefully through the sprockets, and soon on the screen were flickering cowboys and wagon trains and 10-gallon hats and everything you'd expect from Western, except buffalo.
“Buffalo skin is more elastic than cattle skin, and made for better belts. Made strong straps on the saddles of U.S. cavalrymen, who spent much of the 19th century waging war on the people who lived alongside the buffalo”
“While the military leaders in Washington didn't eliminate the buffalo to starve and subjugate the native peoples who relied upon their herds, not explicitly, not directly, but were surely complicit, because it was happening anyway, and they did nothing to stop it, because it was making their goals of conquest in the west easier to achieve, and they just had to sit back.”
“his interest in their cause came primarily from his fear that the 500-odd buffalo still around were interbreeding with cattle. Just like the white race was interbreeding with non-white people.”
Transcript
Transcript not available for this episode yet.