News from rural America.

We begin this week in Weiser, Idaho – a town battling a cat-astrophe. Reporter Astra Lincoln brings us the story of the rural town’s efforts to tackle the influx of hundreds of stray cats through a trap and release program. Next, we’re heading to western North Carolina, where Anya Petrone Slepyan reports on Cherokee pottery traditions that have been practiced for nearly 3,000 years. Then, Pulitzer Prize finalist Megan Kate Nelson tells us about her latest book, The Westerners: Myth and Belonging on the American Frontier. We continue our series on rural southern churches that are welcoming LGBTQ members, and get some advice on seeing the forest through the trees from Daily Yonder columnist Donna Kallner. Finally, we commemorate four years since deadly flooding in Eastern Kentucky, with the story of some “drunk angels” who came by to help out. And our featured musicians this week are the Gladson Family Band out of Hancock County Tennessee.

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, I'm Jared Eby, the host of Yonder Radio.

Well, every week, you know what we do.

We take rural conversations and amplify them with national reach.

Thanks to you listening.

Weezer, Idaho is in the news because they've been overrun by cats.

Reporter Astral Lincoln survives my insufferable attempt to fill the story with puns.

And then we're heading to Western North Carolina, where Anya Patron Slepian reports on Cherokee pottery.

And Pulitzer Prize finalist Megan Kate Nelson joins us with her book, The Westerners.

Myth and Belonging on the American Frontier.

We continue our series with Whitney Kimball Co., the Rural Faith Initiative on Welcoming LGBTQ Plus Members into Churches.

And finally, we commemorate four years since the deadly flooding in eastern Kentucky with a story about drunk angels.

And I don't want to play favorites, but it's the best part of this show.

And the featured musician is the Glatson family out of Hancock County, Tennessee.

Tune in for all that and more on Yonder Radio. video.

Thank you.

Beyonder Radio Rural Conversations with National Reach.

Hello, Jared E.

Wee here, your host.

And let's just load up in this Conestoga and go out west, people.

We're bringing on author Megan Kate Nelson, nominated for a Pulitzer.

She's coming out the other side of that ceremony with the Westerners, myth-making and belonging on the American frontier.

And she talks about overlooked people throughout history.

Coming up on this show, we're going to be talking about drunken angels, and that short clip tops everything.

That's on the way along with trivia, news, and music.

And speaking of news, Jan Patalski here, news editor of the Daily Yonder.

What's going on in rural headlines?

Hi, Jared.

We started this week with Democracy Docket and the story about Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, who in her recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal said that she's not inclined to vote in favor of the Save America Act, a legislation near and dear to Donald Trump's heart that would make it much harder for folks to vote due to increased ID requirements.

According to Murkowski, not only people of Alaska would be heavily impacted, but it could have wide repercussions across the country.

Legislation proposes to severely limit or completely remove voting by mail.

It requires specific government-issued IDs, which could impact folks who use native IDs to vote.

Currently, at least for now, Murkowski seems to be a no on the vote.

Well, I can provide clarity on both sides of this issue.

They say voter fraud is less likely than getting hit by lightning, but I've been hit by lightning.

So if that helps you.

Food Environment Network, poisoned water in Iowa.

Doesn't sound good.

That's a very interesting story that sheds some light on how political dynamics are changing across the country.

In this case, Iowa.

Iowa being one of the nation's leading states when it comes to cancer rates, it's the second highest.

One of only three states where those rates are still rising.

The current research ties that to things like nitrates and glyphosates, which are chemicals used in commercial agriculture known to taint water sources.

Now, what happens is, according to the story, voters are mad and turning to Democratic candidates.

Probably the biggest surprise, according to the piece, is that a Democrat has a real shot at taking over the Secretary of Agriculture position in the state.

And from ProPublica, this is a real interesting story.

A deserted island in Alaska.

Yes, going all the way back to Alaska on the Attic Island in the Bering Sea, 1,200 miles off the coast of Alaska, there's an entire almost abandoned former military base that still draws money from Federal Communications Commission to subsidize internet access.

Currently, the population is estimated to be about 77, which makes it about $14,000 a year per person in federal subsidies for broadband internet.

However, the investigative team from ProPublica discovered that nobody uses the services provided by the company on the ground.

Instead, residents use Starlink, which is not subsidized for their internet needs.

Well, thank you so much, Jan Patalski, Headlines from Rural America.

I appreciate you stopping by.

Thank you, Jared.

Now, Astra Lincoln writing about cats in Weezer, Idaho.

I'm going to see what I can do as far as puns go.

Okay, and she is going to see if she can maintain being professional.

We'll see how this goes.

I may go completely feral and it could go off the rails, but let's talk about this.

And I think before we get into this, I must ask you, do you even like cats?

I love cats.

I'm a huge cat person.

When I was first assigned this story, it was with a little bit of trepidation, I think, on behalf of the assigning editor who said, I'm so sorry, this is not going to be the best story that you do in your life.

And privately in my head, I thought, this is a lifetime assignment.

I love cats.

Astra was sent to Idaho, Weezer, Idaho, and wrote this article for Daily Yonder.

In Idaho, a community addresses a catastrophe because there's a lot of cats in Weezer, Idaho.

What is going on in Weezer, Astra?

Yeah, so in most communities, it's pretty common for stray cats to exist.

It can be a combination of people having their pets get out.

If a pet hasn't been fixed, then it's liable to start a colony.

I think what's unique about Weezer is that for some reason there just hasn't been a lot of predation like you normally would get in a more rural community.

They have coyotes in the neighborhood.

They have bears that live in the neighborhood.

For some reason, the only animal that seems to be killing off these cats that are getting born is a type of snake that lives in the area.

And they actually try to encourage these snakes to come into the town to do just that.

But that's only happening on the borders of town.

And so without any predation and with just a handful of stray cats already living there, they've had allegedly quite an influx of strays just over the last two or three years.

I'm under the impression that parts of the town can become quite fragrant because of the density of cats that live there.

Can you share your impressive collection of cat breeding statistics that may have helped lead to the situation in Weezer?

Idaho.

Sure.

So a mother cat can have three to five litters of kittens in one season.

Each litter will have three to eight cats per pregnancy.

And so what that means is that unabated, an average cat could have 100 kittens in its lifetime.

What that means is that all you need is two stray cats introduced to a community for a cat colony of potentially hundreds of cats to establish.

Estra, that is literally insane.

So what are they doing?

What can be done to curb the cats?

Yeah, so in a lot of communities, programs will be established that are called trap and release programs.

That's what they've done in Weezer, to the chagrin of some of the residents in the town who I heard would have preferred to kind of have an open kill permit established.

But for now, they are working with a trap and release program.

And that program, they're working with animal control through the police department to capture as many cats as they can, fix them, working with the local veterinarian, and then release the fixed cats back into the community where they'll continue to live for the rest of their natural life expectancy.

So it's not an immediate fix.

Whether or not it's working to curb the overall population is kind of a wait and see.

What was it like being a journalist wandering around town with a notepad and an eye for cats?

Did people accept you in their human colony?

Were they curious about what you were doing?

They were.

I have to admit, I was a little bashful prowling the alleyways of this town.

The first woman that I saw when I had found the first cat colony that I saw, which is behind the local bookstore, I was just standing in the middle of the alleyway, surrounded by cats.

I was having the time of my life trying to woo them.

And then a woman came out.

And this is not a joke.

She was wearing head-to-toe leopard print.

I think you stumbled upon the queen.

I know.

I was like, this is, I mean, surely she's the leader.

But I felt a little awkward because obviously, you know, this is a 5,000-person town.

Everyone knows each other.

And I was just like, this is literally the most random location a stranger could be in this town. and I kind of bashfully said, oh, I'm just looking for this stray cat.

And she was psyched.

She told me that she brings food out for the cats every day.

Did you at all feel that at any moment you could bring home a cat or two?

There were.

I actually went into the assignment with plans not only to bring myself home a cat, but to bring home a cat for my friend.

And then I realized that I did not want to drive the seven hours home with a non-litter box trained cat inside my private vehicle.

So I did not bring any cats home.

Well, let me do a little Bob Barker here to remind you to spay and neuter your animals.

As Astra has told us earlier, an average cat can birth 100 kittens in its lifetime.

That sounds like a pyramid scheme.

And I'm trying to fit in as many cat puns as I can during this interview.

Astra, how is it going so far?

I mean, I think you've outdone yourself.

Well, we are very fortunate to be connected with Astro Lincoln, who has written the article for DailyYonder.com.

In Idaho, a community addresses a catastrophe.

And she set the tone for the puns, and I can't stop myself.

A trap-neuter release program in Weezer, Idaho addresses a rapidly increasing cat colony.

And that's just some of what she talks about in her article.

And we greatly appreciate you coming by.

Yeah, my pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

That reporting was supported by the Lore Foundation.

You can find more of Astra's writing on topics from wheelchair ramps to the climate crisis at astralincoln.com.

And now we'll hear from this week's featured musical guest, the Gladson Family Band, a true heartwarming family act.

It's like the Von Trapp family.

If the Von Trapps lived in Hancock County, Tennessee, would they just be called the Von Trappers?

Well, they play old-time and bluegrass music, and we're going to hear that here with Daily Yonder contributor Phillip Norman, who caught up with the Gladsons earlier this year at the Big Ears Music Festival in Knoxville.

Let's meet the band.

I'm Juliet Gladson.

I'm the mom of the band.

I play the guitar and sing and keep everybody together and make sure we are going where we're supposed to go.

You can call me a manager if you want.

Try and make sure everybody has food and have a fun time.

My name is Harlan Gladson.

I'm the banjo player for the band, although I will occasionally pick up some other instrument that's required.

I'm also the oldest son.

I'm Lemuel Gladson.

I play the mandolin, occasionally the guitar.

I'm the youngest child of this family, and I can play the fiddle.

I'm Lindy Gladson, the middle child.

I'm the daughter.

I play fiddle, guitar, and I can sometimes chop the mandolin.

I love to sing, and I love to sing with my brothers especially and sing lead in harmony with them.

My name's Todd Gladson and I'm the daddy going on about 30 years now playing music.

It's a blessing to be able to have my family play music with me and be able to interact that way.

So I'm the bass player most of the time these days except whenever I get a minute to get another instrument in my hand.

Y'all kind of blew up the TV and moved to the country.

So just like talk about how you made that decision.

Why'd you decide to go to Hancock County?

I'm from Charleston, South Carolina.

I met Todd on the road playing music in San Francisco, and we settled in Knoxville and had a little farm in Knoxville.

So even though we were in the city, we lived a pretty rural-type lifestyle.

It wasn't until about 14 years ago that we just realized we weren't going to be able to grow enough food for livestock, and we just wanted our kids to be able to have a little more open space.

And we were just right near, you know, we were outgrowing our space here in Knoxville. mostly we prayed for a place to be able to bring our kids where it was just a nice open space, and it didn't take long, and we found Hancock County.

And the TV definitely got blown up when we went there.

Did as much living off the land as we could, and it was a fun transition.

I say Hancock County, it chose us, really.

Something was presented there to us that we really didn't have much control over, that grabbed us and reeled us into it, you know, and was like, made it.

It was like the heavens opened up and said, hey, you can be here.

Yeah, I'd love to hear from y'all.

What do y'all like about just like rural living?

I like the aspect of having room for animals because I'm an animal person and we have our horses and we're getting to where we can have them on our farm because of the land we have. and just the thought of being able to wake up and go to my horse in the morning and be with my horse during the day.

I like going in the woods on random days.

We're homeschooled also so we don't have we have a schedule but it's not as tight as certain schedules can be.

So just walking in the woods and having the land to go to and be on is what I love about it.

I definitely love being outside.

I've always have and I love being out in the woods.

That's my favorite thing to do is just be out in woods and just hang out.

And I also like doing gardens.

I've always enjoyed being outside and just experiencing nature as it moves around me, you know, working with the land, growing food.

I'd always say that I would rather be outside in the wide open than cooped up in a building.

I love that.

Well, yeah, let's talk about the music.

I mean, the music that y'all play is very connected to these open spaces.

So yeah, just talk about that, the music in connection to this rural life.

When I first ever was interested in this, in fiddle music or banjo music, you know, it was people that were out in the country and it was old timers that you could go sit over on the porch and learn something from.

And when I was a teenager, I read Self-Reliance and I read Thoreau and those things set before the music ever, before my playing of the music ever came along was the feeling of being able to be dependent on yourself and to be able to connect the open spaces to a way of life.

And so the music absolutely comes from that for me.

When I am sitting outside at the farm and we're, you know, we've sat in circles where we'll be working on harmonies or singing or something and we'll just pause and I'll be like, you know, listen to the water over there.

It's in a key.

It is that inspiration of the sounds that are around you that comes into you that you hear.

I like the idea of having people in my community, like we live in Sneadville and that's where Jimmy Martin is from, and I like the thought of me playing his songs and carrying on what he made.

The music that comes from our region, I love that we're playing that.

If you find a community of music players, you'll find a small community of people that are carrying their tradition together and having a good time.

Like, it's not just focused on performing.

It's focused on, you know, sitting around in the living room on the front porch and just enjoying the evening together, playing the music that their ancestors played, and just relaxing.

And, you know, even unknowingly carrying their tradition by having a good time doing what they've always done.

And, I mean, if you go out here in these little communities and talk to old people and ask them about their music, they'll just talk about how it's a way of life.

The heaven light is shining just a-shining on me.

The heaven light is shining just a-shining on me.

Way up yonder in that new right world.

The heaven light is shining on me.

It's interesting how music has found its way, or we've found music in the community, like Harlan said, in a very natural way, not through performing.

But we met some of our dearest friends in our county or the surrounding county by making molasses.

We grow sorghum.

Telling Todd, we need to find somebody with a mule to help us, you know, do the go round and around and press the juice out.

Last minute, it was probably like a week before it was time to cut the cane, we met a fella out of Claiborne County.

And he said, sure, I'll come over.

And all of a sudden, they realized that we play music because at the Molasses Macon, we were all jammed.

And that opened up a friendship of a family and a community of molasses makers.

And we also started our Junior Appalachian Musicians Program, continued to carry that music on with others, and just found a huge amount of families that just were looking for the same thing, to learn the traditional music, to teach their children the traditional music, and in a way that's just, like Harlan said, fun.

If any of y'all others have anything to say about Junior Appalachian Musicians, I mean, that's really interesting to me as a program.

So at Jam, I primarily teach the guitar.

One of the coolest things about Jam is the way that it teaches in a group setting.

It's not the same as going out and getting a private guitar lesson.

As it's called Junior Appalachian Musicians, Jam, It's focused on the group setting, and it's focused on the fun part of music.

We're learning this part together, and then when we're done, we're all going to go play the tune together.

I really love jam because I've met so many people, like my best friends I met in jam.

And I teach mandolin and sometimes guitar, and it's just so fun teaching them and see the ear light in their eyes whenever I show them something.

And they're like, I want to play this.

That's what I want to do.

I want to do that.

What I like about Jam is that I get to teach kids my age, and I feel like they're more comfortable with a person their age, a peer that they can look up to and be like, she's so close to my age and she can do this, that means I can do this.

I know I can do this.

That was Juliet, Todd, Lindy, Harlan, and Lamiel Gladson, a family band out of Hancock County, Tennessee, talking with Daily Yonder contributor Phillip Norman.

And now it's time for trivia.

We'll give you three clues throughout the episode and reveal the answer at the end.

Here's the first clue.

The answer to this week's trivia is a public service that reached legendary status, though it only lasted for around 18 months.

Love the answer coming up for you.

And as legend has it, if you say the word pottery three times, Anya Patron Slepian shows up talking about it with Living Traditions in Central Appalachia.

That's next on Beyonder Radio.

Yonder Radio, rural conversations with National Reach.

Hello, Jared Ewee here.

How are you?

And I absolutely adore Anya Patron Slepian's pottery reporting.

She's going out again.

This time, the Cherokee people, they've been making pottery in the mountains of western North Carolina for nearly 3,000 years.

And there are relatively few Cherokee potters carrying on the art form today.

I mean, after centuries of colonization and targeted cultural oppression.

But thanks to community-led pottery workshops, a new generation of Cherokee potters is emerging.

They're sustaining age-old traditions while building a contemporary practice of their own.

Anya Patron-Slepian, of course, has the story.

In a field on the outskirts of the Koala Boundary, next to a two-lane road, Levi West is sitting under a picnic shelter.

He's shaping a pinch pot out of a ball of clay.

I would start with my clay, kind of get it into a cylinder.

You're just going to take and put your thumb in and slowly work your way around.

He works the brown clay with his hands, forming a small bowl.

He sets it aside and grabs another handful of clay.

It's a bit dry, so he sprinkles it with water and begins to work it into a long coil shape.

So now maybe it won't crack on us.

Levi is demonstrating the first steps of building a traditional Cherokee coil pot.

He sets the coil on top of the pinch pot base and begins to smooth it with his thumb, connecting it to the bowl.

He'll keep on adding coils until the pot reaches the height and width that he wants.

Try to smooth out things and get it like the most symmetrical I could.

Levi took his first pottery class in 2022.

Less than three years later, he won first place in traditional pottery at the 112th Cherokee Indian Fair.

He was excited to win the award, but the real prize was beating his mentor, renowned Cherokee potter Tara McCoy.

I really wanted to beat her at the fair, just to kind of make her proud, you know, not like I want to be better than her.

I just wanted to make her proud and show her that, like, you know, what you did was really meaningful.

Levi's introduction to ceramics was through a pottery program led by Tara and supported by the Museum of the Cherokee People.

Now in its fourth year, the workshop currently goes by the name Diranesiski Garwadli, or the Mud Dauber Community Workshop.

Tara started this three-month program because she was concerned about the decline in the number of Cherokee potters.

Dakota Brown oversees the pottery program in her role as director of education at the museum.

She's been amazed by the results of Tara's program over the last four years.

The success that she's had with doing what she originally set out to do, which was increase ceramic artists in our community and make sure that pottery continued on for future generations, like to see how fast that that's happened just from her class is crazy.

Since 2022, more than 40 students have participated in the workshop.

Tara teaches her students a wide range of skills, including how to dig and process clay and how to hand build and fire pots.

For Levi, Tara's mentorship was transformative.

I found a love, something I love, and I could never repair for that again, right?

Like, it's just lifelong I'll be doing this.

The Mud Doppers Workshop is just one of several cultural and artistic programs run by the Museum of the Cherokee People.

The museum also hosts events related to Cherokee history, genealogy, and language, as well as other traditional crafts like basket weaving.

Dakota believes that maintaining cultural traditions is an important responsibility for contemporary members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

Because of colonization and systematic oppression, by all accounts, Cherokee people shouldn't have culture.

We should be absorbed into American identity.

But we do.

And we do because people fought to have these things.

That's like worth something.

Dakota says pottery is especially symbolic because it's an art form that makes use of the land itself.

We as Cherokee people believe that we originated here, that we're of this land, that we're of this place.

And this is where our origins as people are.

Historical Cherokee potters used local clays and built their vessels by hand.

They'd roll clay into coils, join them together, and hit them with a wooden paddle to strengthen and lengthen the walls of the pot.

Engravings on the paddles were transmitted to the clay surface, serving to both decorate and strengthen the pieces.

Once dried, the pots were heated into hard ceramic, either in the coals of an open fire or in a pit dug into the earth.

While the pottery was highly decorative, it was made to be used.

Cooking pots and storage containers were especially common.

So were ceramics with ceremonial purposes, like effigy pots and fire pots.

Dakota says that in the Mud Dauber's workshop, Tara emphasizes these historical methods and designs while also promoting experimentation.

She fully respects our ancestral practices when it comes to ceramics.

And then at the same exact time, we'll completely encourage somebody to go totally, I guess, off the rails of what traditional Cherokee pottery is.

Dakota and Levi say this emphasis on innovation is especially important for Cherokee artists, who often face pressure to fit within what is considered Indian or traditional.

It's so unfair because we're alive and we're living people.

And one of the signs of a living people is that culture changes over time.

Language changes over time.

Ceramics change over time.

Any Cherokee person that gets into pottery should learn the traditional way.

And I mean from start to finish.

And then once you have that understanding and that base knowledge, then it's like, okay, push it.

Push it further.

Dakota says balancing traditional pottery with contemporary innovation echoes an important principle in Cherokee culture.

There's this concept that whatever you do as a Cherokee person, that it's not about you.

It's about the seven generations that came before you, honoring those seven generations that came before you, and then building for the seven generations that are going to come after you.

Levi is a proud representative of the next generation of Cherokee potters.

He's already started assisting Tara with her classes.

Whatever I learn, I come back and share with whoever is willing to listen and learn.

Like Tara, he wants to reclaim pottery practices that were undermined in the wake of colonization and targeted cultural oppression.

Levi hopes that where we're sitting, in a picnic shelter on a green patch of land, can be part of that reclamation.

He's planning to develop this field into a community art compound.

We walk to the small creek that runs parallel to the road.

Levi points out a clay deposit in the creek bed that he recently discovered.

Wish I had a shovel here.

Levi digs his fingers into the wet earth, pointing to a clump of gray amid the brown dirt.

Here we go, there's a good piece right here.

That gray right there.

Back at the picnic shelter, a small wood fire kiln is halfway completed.

In addition to the kiln, Levi plans to have a space for pit firing and areas for processing clay, dug from the surrounding land.

This clay paradise will also be used to cultivate materials for other crafts, like river cane for basket weaving and native plants for natural dyes.

Levi hopes the compound will play a role in maintaining the histories and practices that are vital to Cherokee life.

It's not just important to learn about pottery and clay, but all of it.

If we're all doing our part, then all that stuff will come back to us.

For the Center for Rural Strategies and Living Traditions, I'm Anya Patron-Zlapian.

Thank you, Anya.

That was Living Traditions from Cherokee, North Carolina.

And now it's time for some more music from the Gladson Family Band.

Here they are performing for the WVDX Blue Plate Special.

WVDX is in Knoxville, and, well, you could hear it.

I hear a voice calling, I'll gain a reward for the land where we never shall die.

The Savior who died on through Calvary, He shed His life's blood so the world might be free.

So I follow His footsteps up the narrow way, and be ready to meet Him when He calls on that day.

I hear a voice calling.

That was the Gladson Family Band.

You can find their touring schedule and more of their music at gladsonfamilyband.com.

And now Megan Kate Nelson.

I have been looking forward to talking to her for a while.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist and the author of five books.

She lives in Massachusetts but was born and raised in Colorado.

Her most recent book is called The Westerners, myth-making and belonging on the American frontier.

It's a lot.

There's a lot.

There's seven historical figures that read like an all-star lineup of overlooked heroes.

And then the myths, and you're weaving this all together.

Can you encapsulate this without a few hundred pages of a novel?

Yes, I think I can.

So there are, yeah, seven protagonists is a lot of people.

But when I think about this, I think, you know what?

George R.

R.

Martin had like 8 million characters, and we were all fine with that.

So four of these seven protagonists, these people who lived in the American West and moved through it and built families and communities and really kind of created the region in the 19th century, four of them who I write about are women.

So the first person in the book that readers will meet is someone they will know, probably, Sacagawea.

And you kind of meet her before she meets Lewis and Clark.

She, you know, is most famous, of course, for her work on the Lewis and Clark expedition.

But what was remarkable to me, I read the Lewis and Clark journals, and they talk about her more than 150 times.

Wow.

So you will get a kind of on the ground view of her and her work in botany and in translation and topography and how she kind of became an explorer in her own right.

And we move from her story to the story of, I think, my favorite protagonist.

I know we're not supposed to have favorites.

I was going to ask, Megan, I was going to ask which one of these characters would you fist bump?

Is this the one?

Yes, this is the one.

Maria Gertrudez Barceló.

She was born in Sonora when it was New Spain.

So she was a Spanish colonist and then moved north to Albuquerque with her family when Mexico was freeing itself from Spain.

So then she became a Mexican citizen.

And she kind of figured out pretty early on, her husband taught her to play this card game called Spanish Monty.

And she learned to play it and then deal it.

And she was so good at it that she built a gambling empire in Santa Fe in the 1830s and 40s.

And she was the wealthiest woman in New Mexico territory when the Americans arrived as part of the Mexican-American War.

And she was just a complete badass.

Like she just, she ran her own business.

If people, you know, maligned her, she took them to court.

I mean, she was just, she was amazing.

And I really love her story because it's one you don't hear very often in the American West.

Well, and that led to something I think it's probably all too common throughout our history is the demonization of successful people who aren't white males.

Yes, because, yeah, all four women in this book are depicted at one point or another as sex workers.

Like they just, you know, everyone talks about them as if they are madams and brothels and all of these things when really they're running all kinds of different businesses and they're not doing that.

And one of those was Ella Watson, who's a Canadian immigrant who ends up in Wyoming.

She has this dream of becoming a cattle rancher and running a courting house roadhouse along the road because she's an amazing cook.

She's going to make all this money doing this, but she runs afoul of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association.

That is kind of, I think, the saddest story in the book.

In fact, my father called me and was like, how could you?

I was like.

Did I not raise you right?

It wasn't me.

I didn't do it.

I'm just writing about what happened to her.

I didn't do it.

But someone who actually has a story that is slightly similar, but she is more long-lived is Polly Bemis, who's trafficked from China in the 1870s and ends up in this majority Chinese mining town in Idaho and running a boarding house, running a saloon with a man who will later become her husband, a white man.

And she also was a complete badass and by all accounts, extremely funny and charming and warm.

And she, you know, she built these businesses and became a fixture in the community for 60 years.

We don't often hear about Chinese Westerners in general and certainly not about Chinese women in the West.

These are the four women in the book.

This is why this book is not just for dads.

I mean, I think we think of history books as like, oh, here's a Father's Day present.

But these women are awesome.

And I think both women and men would enjoy reading about them because they're pretty great.

So how do you take this raft of characters and then have them all exist in the same space?

This was the hardest part of writing the book and then also kind of connecting them to all the larger developments and forces in play in 19th century American history, that was the biggest thing.

What was interesting, though, is that many of these people met each other or crossed paths in an interesting way.

One of the protagonists, Jim Beckworth, he had been born into slavery in Virginia, but he ended up in the West with his freedom.

He was biracial.

And he ends up rooming with Sacagawea's son.

Wild.

In California, in the California gold mines, which is just crazy.

We could play a game called Six Degrees of Sacagawea, it seems like.

We could.

We could.

Because she kind of met everyone.

She was one of the most well-traveled women really in the entire 19th century.

But yeah, it took some work and it took some kind of overhauling and a lot of work in the revision phase to bring all of their stories together in a way that made sense and then also connect them to the kind of larger frontier myth that's developing and then also just American history writ large. well you're not only an author you're a cocktail enthusiast and i was wondering if somebody's reading this book what is the recommended pairing okay so i would say if you are a bourbon or whiskey person then the cocktail for you is the gold rush which is bourbon or whiskey honey syrup and lemon okay i'm curious and then you can switch out though if you were like oh the bourbon's really like giving me too much of a headache these days uh and you would prefer tequila it also goes quite well with tequila or mezcal and then uh that is called el oro perfect for the west perfect for the west and its history and then it's also a really just a tasty cocktail like not too sweet you know but not bitter just like all westerners well said megan kate nelson the author of the book the westerners myth making and belonging This has been great.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

The book is The Westerners by Megan Kate Nelson.

It's out now and you can find it at your library or online or a bookstore near you.

And speaking of the West, it's time for our second trivia clue.

This service was put out of business by the first transcontinental telegraph line, which connected New York to San Francisco in 1861.

So we'll have the answer to that coming up.

And also the drunken angels will appear.

And this story, a miracle on its own, on the way on Yonder Radio.

Yonder Radio, rural conversations with National Reach.

Hello, your host here, Jared Iwi.

May I get you a table?

Please enjoy Daily Yonder columnist now, Donna Callner.

She has a tip for finding common ground with neighbors and appreciating the world around you.

My husband and I live on two and a half rural acres that he bought before we were married.

For less than the current price of most new vehicles, he got land that included an old farmhouse and barn and a granary that still looks like it might collapse under the next heavy snow.

The property had been a farmstead back when people valued trees for more than their ornamental contributions.

Box elders shaded the farmhouse.

Apple trees produced food to feed the family.

The wooden posts used to build the barn and granary might have been harvested right here.

In northern Wisconsin, we talk about trees a lot.

We talk about timber cuts and firewood harvesting.

We talk about young stands of aspen that look like ideal habitat for roughed grouse and where beavers have been busy felling trees.

We send fourth graders into the woods to tap trees and make maple syrup.

Wisconsin history is in the trees.

Those conversations may sound foreign to people who grew up in sterile suburban yards and manicured green spaces.

But trees are something we can talk about, even when there are many topics that are much harder to discuss.

Maybe it's time for all of us to brush up on tree talk so we feel more comfortable in conversation with rural neighbors who hold different views.

There's no need to become an expert, but it helps to have a moderate level of fluency in a handful of examples.

Maybe we can start to build fluency with, say, five trees.

Five we can not only identify, but also know enough about to really appreciate when we meet them elsewhere, or they come up in conversation.

Five trees that help us see the forest as something greater than the sum of its parts, and the parts as integral to the whole.

My five would be eastern white pine, white spruce, northern cedar, willow, and of course, apple.

What are your five?

This is Donna Callner from 45 Degrees North for Yonder Radio.

That was Donna Callner.

Hope she's not barking up the wrong tree with that.

Now this segment comes from our partners at the Rural Faith Initiative.

Whitney Kimball Coe is the director and an ordained minister at the Episcopal Church.

Welcome back to another segment from our Rural Faith series, where we're exploring research and stories from LGBTQ plus affirming churches in the rural South.

This research and these stories have been collected by the Reverend Claire Brown, an Episcopal priest in rural Tennessee.

The congregations we've heard about so far often have an uphill battle when it comes to encountering the prevailing culture of social conservatism.

But it's not just about a general cultural idea.

Many churches and their leaders find themselves at odds with other local religious communities.

In this segment, we look at points of conflict and areas of collaboration between affirming churches and those neighboring faith communities that might not agree on human sexuality and gender.

How do these communities find each other, come into conversation or not with each other?

Sure.

With churches that already have a formal position, that's fairly easy.

In the Episcopal Church, we're full communion partners with the Evangelical Lutheran Church, for instance.

You know how to find your folks in that way.

But then, of course, it can be tough to collaborate with churches that might disagree.

As a pastor, you've still got to think about keeping your LGBT community members safe and having the courage to hold up your convictions while navigating the background you're in.

And that looks different everywhere.

So in my context in rural East Tennessee, we have a local ministerial association and it brings together a pretty eclectic crew.

I had several church leaders that I've talked with in neutral to positive rapport.

That's true for me.

It was true for many of the church leaders I spoke with, with colleagues who have different convictions on human sexuality, or maybe colleagues that are individually affirming pastors in non-affirming denominations.

And this comes sometimes with some willingness to table the conversation.

But it also looks like finding larger community projects where people are aligned.

Often social service work for the sake of our common love of Jesus, a sense of calling to care for neighbors, can bridge the other differences.

How do you walk that line around knowing when to table the conversation and when to pursue it?

Yeah, that's a great question.

And different people in different contexts find different answers to it.

There's not only one path.

Certainly there are times when a tense conversation can lead to continued dialogue.

I heard a lot about that.

But then there are certainly limits to what's possible when there's other Christian pastors who aren't even interested in finding common ground.

There's one community I interviewed that had such a stark experience that's pretty noteworthy around inter-church conflict.

And it's because of their particularly unique town.

Eureka Springs, Arkansas is a small community in the Ozarks on the very edge of the region that I studied.

And it is a cultural outlier.

By some estimates, about a quarter of the population of this town is LGBTQ.

And there are even two affirming churches there.

There's an Episcopal parish and a United Methodist congregation.

And I spoke to Blake Lasseter, who's the Methodist pastor in this town.

And he said that being in step as an affirming pastor, as a reconciling congregation in the UMC, they've been right on track with the local community.

And there's been a lot of joy in that.

There's also been a lot of friction with other conservative Christians who position themselves against that affirming community culture.

Eureka Springs is also the home of a giant annual theater production about the crucifixion of Jesus.

It also has an enormous statue of him, stories tall.

And every year in the spring, close to Easter, the local conservative ministerial alliance hosts an event called the Celebrate Jesus Parade.

And so Pastor Blake and a cohort of people from that UMC showed up one year.

It was about 10 years ago they came to join the parade.

And the event organizers came to them during the lineup and told them they had to leave. they brought along a big banner with the name of their church and a simple slogan jesus loves all now i ask for clarification there was no rainbow flag on this banner there was no mention of pride there was no trans rainbow nothing explicitly affirming but one of the other pastors said we all know what you mean by that they were only allowed to join the parade if they'd put it away well that was pretty much a line in the sand for eureka springs umc If God's love for all people is a bridge too far that you won't even be permitted to participate with such a slogan, they found that there's not a whole lot of room to find space at the table together.

And they haven't been back to the parade.

I wonder where do you go from that in a small town if you can't show up in that parade ever?

There's not just one way to engage, but there are a few nuggets, crucial ways to show up and build common ground.

The first, as I think that story shows, is that it's really important to have internal clarity within the community about theology, why we believe that all people are welcome, and a strong sense of call to this ministry of being an affirming church.

The people within the community have to know why they are doing what they're doing and living out religious convictions that they have.

They have to know why it's valid, why it's biblical, and why it's fully Christian.

Another key component that I saw again and again is a commitment to broader community service.

In every single one of the churches that I spoke with, there's a collaborative attitude to community service work.

This invites positive relationships with other churches.

It cements them as an invested part of the broader community and builds all different kinds of relationships.

But finally, I saw a repeated attitude, just this posture of tenacity and patience.

See, these affirming congregations aren't outsiders to their rural communities.

They're equal stakeholders.

And they're moving along.

They're just doing and being exactly what and who they believe God is calling them to do and be as part of the fabric of that local community.

So they're willing to show up to the neighbors again and again with a consistent invitation to dialogue and without apologizing for who they are.

It's that consistency, that willingness to show up over and over that lets relationships form across difference and maybe even start to open up people's hearts and minds.

Today's conversation is part of a rural faith series that looks at research and stories from LGBTQ plus affirming churches in the rural South.

This research and these stories have been collected by the Reverend Claire Brown, an Episcopal priest in rural Tennessee.

Reverend Clare will join us again for another segment in which we will tie up all of our loose ends and explore how churches see diverse welcome expressed as core identity, extending to racial and ethnic diversity, student ministry, aging and disability awareness, and recovery, education, and community partnership efforts.

It's all connected.

That was Whitney Kimball Coe talking to the Reverend Clare Brown out of East Tennessee.

Now, four years ago, a thousand-year flood hit eastern Kentucky, sweeping away homes and killing dozens of people.

The Center for Rural Strategies, which is based in Lecter County, Kentucky, documented the stories of the people and the communities affected by the flood.

We're about to hear one incredible tale of people coming in and lending a hand in the recovery.

This is from Gwen Johnson, who runs the Black Sheep Bakery at the Hemphill Community Center in Jackhorn, Kentucky.

We're just kind of hanging out, wore out, you know, and wondering what to do.

We just plotted our course minute by minute, you know.

And this big rental truck pulls in, and these three guys get out, and they can't even stand up.

I was like, these guys are drunk.

And they said, are we welcome here?

And I said, well, yeah, everybody's welcome.

And they said, we've come to cook for y'all.

And they got these coolers of meat and brought them in here.

And it was the finest of hamburger and hot dogs and steak.

And they had cans of Spam.

That's the funny thing.

So the next morning, when I get down here, they said, we got you breakfast over here.

Well, hillbillies love Spam.

I mean, most of them do.

And they fixed me up a spam sandwich on white bread.

Now, I really never tasted nothing.

It tastes no better that morning.

And give me a cup of coffee.

And they stayed here with us three days.

I don't think they drew a sober breath while they was here.

And they just kept on cooking.

That's why I call them drunk angels.

They come out of nowhere, and they went right back into nowhere.

And we don't know.

And they had ear gauges and they had big full sleeve tattoos.

I mean, they were unlikely looking angels, but I really believe they were angels. - That was a story from the East Kentucky flood.

You can find the full documentary on YouTube at dailyyonder.com.

And may a drunken angel somehow improve your life at some point.

It's time for our third and final trivia clue.

We're talking about a legendary public service that was put out of business by the Transcontinental Telegraph Line in 1861.

Here's the final clue.

This service sent mail across eight states in only 10 days.

The answer?

That's right, the Pony Express.

Created to deliver mail to the growing population in the West, the Pony Express was designed as a relay system that spanned over 1,800 miles from St.

Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California, Galloping at a top speed across the landscape, riders would switch horses every 10 to 15 miles and then swap out with a different rider after 75 to 100 miles.

Although it was quickly replaced by the telegraph line, the Pony Express is an enduring symbol of the American West.

And it's not too late to see it in action.

Every summer, the National Pony Express Association organizes a re-ride in which a team of riders carry a bag of mail along the original route.

We have delivered.

Yet another hour of Yonder Radio, and we're glad you are here to sign for it.

We'll do it again next week, and you can hear all our episodes at yonderradio.com.

Thank you for listening to Yonder Radio, a production of the Center for Rural Strategies, publisher of the Daily Yonder.

I'm your host, Jared Ewe.

Thanks to Don Castle and the Tennessee Sheiks, Steph Gunno and the Lone Tones, Quincy Ponfair, Leo Pozel, and Tim Merima for the great music.

Our editor and producer is Susanna Brown.

This episode was also produced by Alana Newman with additional support from Anya Patron-Slepian and Julia Tilton.

Our executive producer is Joel Cohen.

The executive in charge of production is Adam Georgi.

Yonder Radio, Rural Conversations with National Reach. guitar solo Thank you.