EPISODE 95: Tom Le Forge: The Real Dances with Wolves

“The adopted father gave away many presents to the people, and these in turn gave presents to me. Thus I became a Crow Indian, a brother of Three Irons and a son of Yellow Leggings, who was a leading counselor of Blackbird, chief of the Mountain Crow tribe.” — Tom Le Forge 

“Cherry was utterly cool… under fire. She was as brave as the bravest. She liked to sing and pray, she was jolly and amiable, but on proper occasion she would stand her ground and fight bravely if that were necessary.” — Tom Le Forge about his wife Cherry

“The white-man system of continual struggle for money began to pall upon me. My thoughts dwelt more and more upon the simplicity of Crow Indian life, where I had acquired moderate wealth without special effort, or by efforts entirely to my liking. In fact, among them, great accumulation of material wealth was not of importance. Nobody having an amiable disposition ever came to dire want among them.” — Tom Le Forge 

“I worship the Sun and the Bighorn Mountains. The towering range just south of my present home is to me both father and mother. My stomach craves meat cooked in the Indian way… I was born an Ohio American. I shall die a Crow Indian American. My last white wife, in Seattle, got a divorce from me, because of my desertion of her. She was a good woman, but I could not live any longer the life of a white man. When comes the time for me to leave this earth I want to dwell wherever are the spirits of my wives—my Indian wives—both of them.” — Tom Le Forge

I am fascinated by tales of people who lived across cultures—particularly back in the day when knowledge of different ways of living was severely limited. The tale of Tom Le Forge reads like a real-life Dances with Wolves story. Born as an Anglo-American in 1850, when he was still a teenager he was adopted by a family from the Crow nation, and for all intents and purposes became a Crow, marrying into the tribe, living as one of them, and going to war with them against their traditional enemies. Le Forge also joined the ranks of Crow scouts that helped the U.S. army during the last phase of the Plains Indian wars. His story is a love letter to a way of life that disappeared once the buffalo were gone and the frontier was no more. 

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[RERUN] EPISODE 48: Give Me Back My Legions! (Part 2)

“In order to depict a battle, there is required one of those powerful painters who have chaos in their brushes” — Victor Hugo 

“Inconceivable!” — From The Princess Bride 

A little over 2,000 years ago, Rome was a well-oiled war machine crushing everything in its path. At that time, the Roman legions were the most deadly military force in the Western world, and possibly in the whole world. Every year, they conquered new peoples and pushed the boundaries of their empire. Rape and pillage was the name of the game, and they were masters at it. But in the year 9 CE, something happened in the forests of Germany that was going to have a profound impact on the destiny of the world. Some historians go so far as to suggest that both the German and English languages may not exist as we know them, had things gone differently. News arriving from Germany, along with a severed head delivered by courier, threw Emperor Augustus in a deep depression. 

In this second and final part of the series (for the first part you can check Episode 47)about the clash between Rome’s power with Germanic tribesmen, we’ll consider topics such as how suicide post-defeat in battle was a family tradition for one of the key characters in our story, when Varus ordered 2,000 people crucified, the training of the Roman army, Arminius’ skill at playing the long con, the battle that changed history, having to cut your friends’ throat out of kindness, the German passion for human sacrifice, Roman vengeance, how these events may be tied to the creation of the English language, and much more. 

If you feel generous and enjoy History on Fire, please consider joining my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/historyonfire to access plenty of bonus content. 

If you’d like to go to Japan for a historical tour with yours truly as a guide, please check out https://geeknationtours.com/tours/signature-battlefield-series-classic-samurai-from-the-gempei-war-to-the-mongol-invasions-2023/

EPISODE 94: The Last War Chief

“Reflecting upon the chiefs I had known, I realized that here had never been one who was very well off. Poverty was part of a chief’s obligations…” — Frank Bird Linderman  

“While we painted ourselves the drums kept beating, and our women sang war-songs. No man can feel himself a coward at such a time. Every man that lives will welcome battle while brave men and women sing war-songs. I would have willingly gone alone against our enemies that day.”  — Plenty Coups

“To be alone with our war-horses at such a time teaches them to understand us, and us to understand them. My horse fights with me and fasts with me, because if he is to carry me in battle he must know my heart and I must know his or we shall never become brothers. I have been told that the white man, who is almost a god, and yet a great fool, does not believe that the horse has a spirit. This cannot be true. I have many times seen my horse’s soul in his eyes.” — Plenty Coups

"The story of Joseph Medicine Crow is something I've wanted to tell for 20 years." — Ken Burns 

“I felt good. I was a Crow warrior. My grandfathers would have been proud of me.” — Joe Medicine Crow 

Lakota history has been the subject of many episodes of History on Fire. Today, however, we’ll see history through the eye of their traditional enemies, the Crow. Part of the episode will cover the history and culture of the Crow nation up to the late 1800s. The other part will move into the 1900s and follow the tale of Joe Medicine Crow, the last man to achieve the status of war chief of the Crow Nation thanks to the coups he counted during WWII against the Nazi. The fact that Joe Medicine Crow’s story has not been made into a movie is a crime. I can’t fix that, but at least I can dedicate a podcast to him. 

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EPISODE 93: The Beast of Gevaudan

“This animal is a monster whose father is a lion; it remains open what the mother is.” — Jean-Baptiste Boulanger Duhamel

“I would be tempted to imagine that we are dealing with a witch, or the devil in person, if only I could believe it.” — Jean-Baptiste Boulanger Duhamel

It’s the 1760s, in the Gevaudan area of South Central France. Imagine being a kid. Maybe 12 years old. Maybe as young as 8. You have heard the rumors. Maybe, you saw the mangled bodies. There’s a monster out there. A monster that hunts people and eats them. It has killed people in the woods, on the pastures, and even just a few feet out of their homes. Time and time again, the men have gone out to try to put an end to the monster’s reign of terror, but time and time again the monster has outsmarted them. Some say it’s an animal that escaped a private zoo—a lion or a hyena, or something else you have never seen. Some people say it’s a giant wolf. Some say a demon that can’t be killed by bullets. Maybe, it’s a werewolf. 

Just knowing that this monster wanders the countryside, right around your village… that would be terrifying. With this bloodthirsty beast roaming around, the door to your house doesn’t seem that solid anymore, and any suspicious noise outside can make you jump. So, it’s more than legitimate for you to think this is scary. But the reality is that this is nothing. Things don’t get truly scary until you take into account the fact that someone has to go outside and take care of the animals. And I don’t mean simply walking to the barn a few yards away from your house. I mean having to leave the relative safety of your home, go out there in the forest, and take them to the pastures, possibly for days at a time. Authorities have been warning people to stay home. Yeah… right… that’s a sweet concept but is practically impossible. If you stay home, your whole family starves. Your father and mother have other jobs that require their presence on the land. Taking animals to pasture… that’s your job. If you are lucky, you get to band with few other friends your age, and tend to the animals together, while you pray that the monster doesn’t choose to come for you. Think about being a 10-year old kid, and that’s your lot in life. 

This is the story of a monster that killed in the neighborhood of 100 people during the 1760s in France as well as the story of the men sent to hunt it. In the course of this episode, we’ll tackle the entire saga of the monster’s reign of terror, the mystery of the monster’s identity, and the role that the press played in shaping the events. Honorable mentions to the film Brotherhood of the Wolf, Georges St. Pierre, Alan Watts & The Wisdom of Insecurity.  

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EPISODE 92: Jujitsuffragettes With Attitude

“…a mad, wicked folly…” — Queen Victoria about the notion of women having the right to vote

“When I watched a policeman fell a girl to the ground and kick her across the platform, my only regret was that I had no weapon with which to strike him an effective blow.” — Eunice G. Murray

“£100 to any man who can defeat him. Notwithstanding the physical disadvantages against heavier men (for Tani weighs 9 stone only), Apollo will pay any living man twenty guineas who Tani fails to defeat in fifteen minutes: Professional champion wrestlers specially invited.” — Music Hall advertisement 

“Physical force seems to be the only thing in which women have not demonstrated their equality to men, and whilst we are waiting for the evolution which is slowly taking place and bringing about that equality, we might just as well take time by the forelock and use ju-jitsu." — Edith Garrud

These days, pretty much any time I run into a movie or a book or a tv series with a strong woman among the lead characters, almost inevitably I run into comments by people whining about it, basically implying that strong women are a Hollywood invention created purely to satisfy some PC, affirmative action requirement. What we play with today is not that kind of a story. There’s nothing fictional about the rather intense ladies starring in this episode. One of them, in particular, Edith Garrud is Exhibit A when it comes to real life tough women from humanity’s past. 

Our story takes place at the very beginning of the 1900s in England, and it weaves together some rather unlikely elements: how the upper classes’ fear of crime associated with urbanization led to the popularization of Asian martial arts, how the very legitimate request for women to have the right to vote unleashed some rather extreme violence… We’ll talk about suffragettes and terrorism, the early days of pro wrestling, Sherlock Holmes, and some Japanese expats (including that Mitsuyo Maeda destined to set in motion a sequence of events leading to the creation of modern MMA and the UFC.) And most of all, we’ll talk about Edith Garrud, one of the very first women to become a martial arts teacher and to star in the granddaddy of martial arts movies. 

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