The Memory Palace: The Thundering Herd, The Vanishing American

Introduction

0:00You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirwe.

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Discovering Memory Palace

1:24When I first heard The Memory Palace, podcasts were still pretty new to me. It was 2012, and I'd only listened to a handful of shows, but The Memory Palace was so different from anything I'd heard before. The show, which is made by Nate DeMeo, features short stories about people or events that mainstream history has maybe overlooked. Sometimes the stories were just a few minutes long, and they were so beautifully told that they felt more like poems than some kind of documentary. And when I first started daydreaming about Song Exploder around the start of 2013, I took some inspiration from The Memory Palace and the dreamlike feeling that I got when listening to Nate speak.

2:05And I felt like it gave me permission to make very short episodes if that was what felt right for the story. And I think it just overall raised my ambition for the creativity behind the show. Nowadays, I feel very lucky to count Nate as a friend. But most of all, I'm still just a fan. And recently, an episode of The Memory Palace had a different kind of influence on me. One of the songs on my new album owes a lot to an episode of The Memory Palace.

2:35And, you know, a lot of times on Song Exploder, artists will talk about their influences. But in this case, I didn't just want to talk about it. Nate said I could actually share the entire episode with you. So today, I want to present a kind of two-part story. The first is to play you this gorgeous episode from The Memory Palace called The Thundering Herd, The Vanishing American. And in the second half of the episode, I'll tell you how it ended up unexpectedly unlocking this song that I'd been trying to figure out.

3:06I always love telling people about The Memory Palace because they always fall in love with it. And I get to take responsibility for introducing them to something special and beautiful. So here it is.

The Thundering Herd

3:20This is The Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMeo. A postcard from Catalina Island, 23 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. Summer 2023.

3:32The buffalo aren't here anymore. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt and sandals tells us down by the good bathrooms that are worth the walk down the hill from the campground. He is happy to tell us that he has been coming to Catalina for years. But he is sad to tell us he has never seen its famous buffalo herd in the area toward which we are planning to hike. Not at this hour. Just as the morning ferry from San Pedro unloads and Boy Scouts pull on their packs and frat guys seal cases of third-tier beer with duct tape to keep them safe in the back of the truck and the ride out to the cabins.

4:05And so before we even begin our hike, we abandon our hopes of seeing the buffalo. Or bison. I read on my phone on the boat ride over that they are the same thing. Until we make our way to another trail, cutting through the tiny seaside resort town of Two Harbors, past its cabanas and rustic pavilions in mid-century beige, as the ice cream shop prepares to open up. As a bachelorette party, freshly disembarked, discovers that their weekend in the island coincides with Winefest, with its unlimited pours, and a DJ spinning till midnight.

4:37That will echo among the hillsides that cradle the harbor, and the boats within it flying flags that signal their allegiance to America, California, the life of the pirate or the parrothead or no-shoes nation. And the bachelorette and her girls are super stoked. There will be ocean views on this hike along the cliff's edge, waves in white sails, a whale sighting if we're lucky. But the closest we will come on this day to spotting a bison are two signs we will encounter on the trail. One warning us to keep our distance in the unlikely event that we bump into one.

5:07And another telling the story of how they came to live on this island off which you can see Los Angeles, when there isn't too much smog. The sign keeps the details vague. And in line with recent scholarship that has called into question the old story that still makes its way into the tourist brochures.

5:25That story goes that a small group of bison were brought over in 1925 by Paramount Pictures to appear in a cowboy movie called The Vanishing American. But production costs ran over, and one of the line items that was cut from the budget was the one that would have paid for the bison to be brought back to the mainland. And so they were set free to roam in their new home so far from the range. But there is a newer story that I enjoy about how 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.

6:06Similar situation happened with another theory. This one about the buffalo being brought over to film a picture called The Thundering Herd, and then leaving the titular herd on the island for future productions, making the conveniently located Catalina, with its rolling hills and parched grass valleys, a veritable one-stop shop for people in the business of making Westerns. But as with The Vanishing American, someone tracked down The Thundering Herd, and the story fell apart. That movie does indeed have a herd, but it is doing its thundering, silently, in a place that is clearly not Catalina.

6:40That is most likely Montana. And so we do not know exactly how Catalina's famous bison got here. Though the truth is probably somewhere in there. Some other movie or some enterprising producer importing them on spec, hoping the herd would entice filmmakers to cross the water. Or it's possible the island's owners, the Wrigley Chewing Gum family, who bought the island in 1919, just wanted some buffalo. Hoarding exotic animals is run-of-the-mill rich guy behavior. But in 1925, there was nothing run-of-the-mill about buffalo.

7:16You, like me, have probably heard about the incredible rain and tragic decline of the American buffalo. We know the story. And the story you have heard is probably pretty close to the truth. At the beginning of the 1800s, there were somewhere between 30 and 60 million buffalo in North America, the majority of which were in the Great Plains at the edge of the American West. And that 30 to 60, that vast range, speaks to the unknowability of the number, as no one was counting, and how would they if they were.

7:49It also speaks of the way that number would fluctuate dramatically decade to decade. Bison are the Western Hemisphere's largest land mammal, and they had their predators, wolves and humans. But with some herds as large as 100,000 animals, the threats to their population were planetary. Droughts and disease, harsh winters, the earth and its cycles, with which the population would rise and fall in some unheard harmony. But then in the early decades of the 19th century,

8:19there were suddenly rifles and wagon trains, and then trains of steel and smoke, and men within them shooting buffalo for sport. You've heard this. And the trains and the towns that built up along the tracks changed where and how the herds could move and migrate, limited their range, their access to food. Meanwhile, hunting buffalo was becoming an industry, and men were making fortunes selling meat to the growing population in the east, and in all those new places along the new train tracks. Selling bones for fertilizer,

8:50turning hides into clothing, as they had been forever, but this was new, and this was too much, much too fast. And making money, making the belts that ran the machines that made the Industrial Revolution go. 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 in their unknown millions for centuries before. While the military leaders in Washington

9:20didn'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. Will the numbers mean anything? What is 30 to 60 million? Can we picture 30 to 60 million buffalo? Were the 2 million said to have been slaughtered in the single year of 1870? Were the 5.4 million killed in three years

9:52between 1872 and 1875? I can't wrap my arms around numbers that large. Or hold in my head that 5.4 million. Individual animals. 1,000, 2,000 pounds each. Five or six feet tall at their woolly shoulders. They could run 30 miles per hour. That care for their young. That can smell and hear predators up to two miles away. 5.4 million killed in just three years' time. But I can picture 300 buffalo and 500. I can wrap my arms around those numbers

10:23if not quite get my head around the thought that in 1884, a single human lifetime from the start of the 19th century when some 30 to 60 million bison roam North America as they had an equally unimaginable number since they first crossed the land bridge from Asia an unimaginably long time ago. In 1884, there were between 300 and 500 buffalo left alive. Somewhere around 150 bison

10:54or somewhere around here on Catalina Island. And though we don't know precisely how the ancestors of this herd first arrived in the island in 1925, we can say that they would not be here now without 15 buffalo, juddering down 5th Avenue in Manhattan and horse-drawn wagons in 1907. They had been guided up wooden ramps by cattlemen with long sticks under the supervision of William Hornaday, the elegant director of the Bronx Zoo and a friend of President Teddy Roosevelt and a man named Madison Grant.

11:25The three men bonded at the tail end of the 19th century over their love of nature and animals and hunting them and being in wide open spaces and drawing big manly breaths of mountain air scented with pine and lavender and over the sadness they felt about what had been lost to progress. For all their pride in railroads and westward expansion and the triumph of American capitalism and cities growing at the foot of the Rockies like wildflowers and white Christian families tilling land once controlled by heathens and savages,

11:56those achievements didn't come without costs. Where was the romance? There was something grand about that time, not long ago at all, just a blink of an eye when brave men set out to tame that land, vast and unknowable and wild. It was a shame to see it go.

12:15It was a shame about the buffalo. Remember the buffalo? How they thundered across the plains. A mighty animal. Strong and noble. An American animal. And they set out to save it. They founded the American Bison Society, one of the first organizations dedicated to the preservation of what we now call endangered species. They did what those organizations still do. They raised money. They got writers to take up their cause in the press. They lobbied Congress.

12:46It helped a lot to have the President of the United States in their corner. And I need to say here, as this story that has grown so dark begins to climb up again toward the light that, if you are looking for inspiration in the American Bison Society, look at their model, look at their achievements, but don't go looking for heroes. It is so often a sucker's game when you are dealing with the giants of the early environmental movement in the United States. So often so wrapped up in bogus race science. And this is the case here.

13:17If you read about the American Bison Society, you will read about its prime mover, Madison Grant, who loved the bison and didn't want them to disappear. But 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. He was a racist. He was a eugenicist. He came up with the concept of a Nordic or master race that needed to be preserved at all costs. And while he was saving the bison,

13:49he was writing a book that was so foundational to Nazi ideology and to the Holocaust that it was the first non-German book to be reprinted by Hitler's government that Hitler himself wrote to Grant to tell the founder of the American Bison Society that, quote, The book is my Bible. And that book was entered into evidence to support the case of the Nazi defendants during the Nuremberg trials.

14:18Fifteen bison in horse-drawn carts in Manhattan in 1907. Crowds cheering from the street. More, hundreds, at the train station to watch the animals moved onto boxcars, outfitted with hay and water in blankets to keep them warm as the train raced on through the night. These fifteen bison were on their way to Oklahoma, where a preserve had been established by federal law and where dozens of their kind awaited them and did every stop and along the tracks were people,

14:49native people, and one-time pioneers, now resettled on reservations, or in new cities, in old lands, now lost to conquest, in the new world created by railroads and machines run by belts of buffalo skin. People waited for hours to watch the trains go by. They never thought they'd see a buffalo again.

15:12I will not see a buffalo today, but it's fine. I'll be back at some point. Try to time my hike better next time. Maybe sign up for this bison observation tour for $89.95 that I just found on a website listing the top things to do in Catalina. You just scroll down the page for a while. It's listed there between paddleboarding and mini-golf. I saw some buffalo last spring. My daughter and I took a quick southwestern road trip and wound up staying in cabins on a bison preserve. A herd of about 50 animals

15:43left to roam free on 600 acres of grassland and through stands of pinions and junipers and sturdy oaks. They were beautiful and so strange and were fast. It was incredible to see them spring up and run and chase. Then there was another larger herd a bit down the road at a ranch selling farm-to-table bison steaks.

16:08There are about 450,000 buffalo today. Some are there for admiring from afar, to restore balance to western ecosystems, to try to right a terrible wrong, to repair, to atone. Most are for eating. About 20,000 live in what they call conservation herds. The other 430,000 are raised as livestock.

16:37And about 150 are here on this island because someone wanted to make cowboy pictures. Or not.

16:45They're here somewhere.

16:47Cared for by the good people of the Catalina Island Conservancy.

16:52Safe on this island without predators to smell. Just the sea air and California poppies. Diesel from the ferry. And hear the rumble of its engine. Bachelorettes singing along to Mr. Brightside and Don't Stop Believing as the Winefest DJ goes on till midnight and the waves rolling and rolling in.

Break and Sponsor

17:11Coming up after the break, I'll tell you the story of how this episode of The Memory Palace ended up transforming my song, Rollercoaster.

17:32Song Exploder is sponsored by the game Mixtape. And to learn more, I talked to one of the creators. My name is Johnny Galvatron. I'm the writer and director of Mixtape. It's about three teenagers on their last day of high school going to their final party together listening to the greatest mixtape of all time. And where did the idea for this game originally come from? Just wanting to make a game based around That's Good by Devo which is the greatest song of all time. There's just something alive in that song that speaks to me. And it's very much a game about

18:03being a music lover and someone who appreciates music and knows where to place it in their life. And then game-wise there are different kinds of mechanics there's different kinds of music there's different kind of art style so the game as a whole should be viewed as a mixtape and kind of this artistry of arrangement. And so how is the game itself like a mixtape? So usually in a video game you will have a standard set of mechanics which might be fighting but in a mixtape there's different people

18:33saying different things with different vibes and you want each song to be given its own experience its own life and you want to use the medium that's what's kind of important about making video games you want to use the medium to show what the music is showing. We have this song BJ Thomas most of all where a friend gets betrayed and she floats back through town and just kind of knocks everything out of her way as she floats through town and you control her and like what a beautiful way to kind of use that song and to use a mechanic and input to show

19:03the betrayal and the despondency and the sadness and when you can get all those things mixed together and hit those crescendos where you hit between video game music narrative that's the gold that's the diamond that you aim for I think you would really dig it. Mixtape comes out May 7th on console and PC check it out at mixtape.game You know why I love summer? All those plans we made they finally make it out of the group chat Seems like there's more time to fit everyone in

19:34Whatever you've got in store this summer capturing those memories is a must That's why you'll love the iPhone 17 Pro available through AT&T Its center stage front camera auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies You don't even have to turn your phone No awkward cropping or asking strangers to take it Just the perfect group selfie every time And AT&T makes sharing those moments with everyone easy Because you gotta share the pic or it didn't happen right? Right now at AT&T ask how you can get the iPhone 17 Pro

20:06on them with eligible iPhone trade-in any condition Requires trade-in of iPhone 15 Plus or higher excluding iPhone 16e and 17e Requires eligible plan Terms and restrictions apply Subject to change Visit att.com slash iPhone or visit an AT&T store for details Song Exploder is brought to you by Shopify They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce

20:36in the US from household names like Heinz and Allbirds to brands that are just getting started I just sold for the first time some of my pottery and if I ever get to the point where I can do that seriously then I'm going to be setting up shop with Shopify because they can accelerate your efficiency whether you're uploading new products or trying to improve existing ones and you can get the word out about your business as if you have a big marketing team behind you you can create email and social media campaigns so you can find your customers so start your business today with the industry's

21:07best business partner Shopify and start seeing new sales sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at shopify.com slash song exploder go to shopify.com slash song exploder again that's shopify.com slash song exploder when I started

Songwriting Inspiration

21:30working on this album a few years ago I decided I was going to try writing in a new way instead of white knuckling my way through every idea for every song on my own I wanted to collaborate I decided I was going to be like a satellite dish trying to pick up signals from anywhere and anyone in September of 2023 I went to New York to co-write some songs with my friend Fen Lily I had had this image of riding a roller coaster alone I was thinking about all the different times

22:01when I know I'm supposed to be having some kind of profound or beautiful or exciting adventure but internally I'm having a completely different experience something that doesn't feel like it fits at all and I brought that little idea in as a possible starting place for the song and Fen and I ended up sketching out something that felt promising it wasn't totally there yet but there was a line that we came up with that stuck with me what if this goes on and on and on but then when I

22:36got back home to LA I couldn't quite crack the song something about the verses and the way that I was trying to tell the story just wasn't totally landing for me but I held on to just that one line and then a couple months later I brought that line into a different writing session with my friend and she and I wrote a whole new verse with new melody and new lyrics and that line what if this goes on and on and on kind of became the chorus but the song

23:29still wasn't done and then a couple weeks later I went for a walk I live exactly one and a half miles away from the Griffith Observatory it's pretty much exactly one hour to hike up there and back from my house so I do that a lot especially when I want to clear my head this was a Sunday afternoon and I had a couple of Memory Palace episodes saved up waiting for me so I put in my earbuds and I started making my way up through Griffith Park and I put on episode 206

24:00The Thundering Herd The Vanishing American and a funny thing happens when I listen to the Memory Palace I've been listening to Nate DiMeo's voice since 2012 almost 15 years I know the sound and the cadence and the delivery it feels like music to me it feels like the sound of a band that I know and love and it's not just that it sounds like music it has the feeling of the kind of music that I want to make there's a combination of nostalgia

24:30and melancholy but not in a detached way there's a curiosity that makes you want to lean in and listen more closely and when I hear a new episode for the first time it's both exciting and comforting and I was hit with all of that as I made my way up the path to the observatory and I started listening to Nate tell the story of the displaced buffalo who ended up on Catalina Island and something clicked I felt like this story that I was hearing was lining up with something

25:00that I was trying to reach with the song that I was writing the buffalo who are on the island now are generations removed from the original herd that was brought there so they don't know anything else but I was wondering if they could feel that displacement if they could feel that something was wrong as they looked out at the expanse of the ocean and I made my way up to the observatory and on a clear day like it was that day the view goes all the way across Los Angeles and to the Pacific Ocean

25:31and far in the distance you can see the silhouette of Catalina I went home and I immediately wrote a whole new verse for the song about the buffalo on Catalina and I felt like this idea that I'd been carrying around finally found its home Out on Catalina There's a hundred buffalo penned in by the ocean the only home they'll know Did they dream

26:03the great plains as they breathe in the salt air Can you miss the place you're meant to be if you were never there Does it go on and on and on and on What if this goes on and on and on and on Caught myself staring into nothing much at all

26:34past the fairground the graveyard the empty shopping mall I drove till the road I drove till the road I drove till the road ended in the county beach I felt the distance between me and everything that's out of reach Does it go on and on and on what if this goes on and on and on what if this goes on and on what if this goes on

27:04and on and on and on what if this goes on And on Up against the open sky What if this goes on and on and on What if this goes on, and on, and on What if this goes on, and on, and on

27:57What if this goes on, and on, and on

28:27It comes out on April 24th, and you can find it at rishikesh.co

Album Release and Tour

28:32I'm also going to be out on tour for the next few months, and the album release shows are going to be sort of a cross between Song Exploder and a concert. In the first half of the evening, I'm going to be joined in each city by a different special guest moderator to talk about the album. And the moderators are just some of my favorite people from different parts of the creative world, including Austin Kleon, Jason Mantzoukas, Samin Nasrat, Alison Russell, Joshua Molina, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Min Jin Lee, and Adam Scott.

29:04And the second half of the evening will be a concert with my band. So I hope you can join us. Tickets are at rishikesh.co slash live, or you can also go to songexploder.net slash live. This episode was produced by me and Mary Dolan, with production assistance from Tiger Biscop. The episode artwork for this one is by Jess Gupta, and there's a t-shirt version of the artwork that I'll also have with me on tour. Song Exploder and The Memory Palace are both proud members of Radiotopia from PRX, a network

29:36of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. I'm Rishikesh, your way, and I'll be back next week with a regular episode of Song Exploder, but thanks for listening to this one.