History Unplugged Podcast20 Nov 2025

A Utah Indian Chief Controlled the 1800s Mountain West Through Slave Trading, Building Pioneer Trails, Horse Stealing, and Becoming Mormon

The American Indian leader Wakara was among the most influential and feared men in the nineteenth-century American West. He and his pan-tribal cavalry of horse thieves and slave traders dominated the Old Spanish Trail, the region’s most important overland route. They widened the trail and expanded its watering holes, reshaping the environmental and geographical boundaries of the region. They also exacted tribute from travelers passing along the trail and assisted the trail’s explorers with their mapmaking projects—projects that shaped the political and cultural boundaries of the West. What’s more, as the West’s greatest horse thief and horse trader as well as the region’s most prolific trader in enslaved Indians, Wakara supplied Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American settlers from Santa Fe to San Bernardino with the labor and horsepower that fueled empire and settler colonial expansion as well as fueled great changes to the West’s environmental landscape.

Today’s guest is Max Mueller, author of of Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West. We look at his complex and sometimes paradoxical story, revealing a man who both helped build the settler American West and defended Native sovereignty. Wakara was baptized a Mormon and allied with Mormon settlers against other Indians to seize large parts of modern-day Utah. Yet a pan-tribal uprising against the Mormons that now bears Wakara’s name stalled and even temporarily reversed colonial expansion. Through diplomacy and through violence, Wakara oversaw the establishment of settlements, built new trade routes, and helped create the boundaries that still define the region.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(1100)

Washington’s Power Went Beyond President or General – He Was a Full-Fledged Patriarch

Washington was the perfect man for an impossible moment — aristocratic enough to command the respect of erudite founders like Hamilton and Jefferson, yet only a mid-level Virginia planter who understo...

7 Jul 54min

Abigail Adams Beat Warren Buffet’s Rate of Return and Ben Franklin Loved Debt: Personal Finance Lessons From Colonial America

Many so-called timeless beliefs about money pitched by financial advisors today (compound interest, real estate, index funds, retiring early) are not timeless pieces of wisdom, but a set of ideas inve...

2 Jul 54min

The Highs and Lows of Roman Slavery: From the Emperor's Advisor to Suffocating in Sulfur Mines

When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul he boasted that he killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. This is the truth about the Roman empire: Rome could not function without slavery as it underpi...

30 Jun 56min

A Day at the Gladiatorial Games: Beast Hunts, Mass Slaughter, and Flooding the Colosseum to Reenact Roman Naval Battles

A gladiator named Diodorus defeated his opponent Demetrius in the arena, accepted his submission, discarded his own helmet and shield, and reached for the palm branch that marked his victory. Then the...

25 Jun 52min

The Black Death’s Global Ripple Effects, and How They Were Felt Outside Europe

Of the millions of victims of the Black Death, one was a teenager named Joseph ben Meir Abulafia, who died of the plague in Toledo in 1349 alongside his new wife. His tombstone was inscribed as a conv...

23 Jun 52min

The Part of the Declaration of Independence Nobody Reads (Grievances Against King George) Is the Part That Actually Mattered

On July 9, 1776, a group of American soldiers listened to the Declaration of Independence read aloud in New York City, then rushed down Broadway and spent several minutes prying a two-ton golden eques...

18 Jun 48min

Children of Abraham: The 1,400-Year History of Jewish–Muslim Relations

For more than 1400 years, the history of Jewish and Muslim engagement has been a complex story of cooperation and conflict. The best known events are hostile encounters (like the 1066 Granada massacre...

16 Jun 56min

How 10 Whalers Survived Three Years Shipwrecked in the South Pacific

In 1832, a New Bedford whaleship called the Mentor struck a reef in the remote Pacific archipelago of Palau. The tiny, 100-foot-long ship began sinking immediately, and the 22 men who made up its crew...

11 Jun 54min