welcome to connect it gives me great pleasure for us to continue and find out a little bit more about our community and various programs and people who are here in our midst and see if we can't find out a little bit more about and my guest today is landon jones who is a wonderful author a terrific writer and his he has a book out that i just thought would be terrifically interesting because ken burns has been running a series on our national parks and this book talks about shaping the west and lanny welcome welcome so much because it's a wonderful book it does have a little war involved in this so that i have to take a deep breath at times when flipping through but it's it's just wonderful and i love the fact that you call shaping the west and i'd love to know tell us a little bit about when you started your interest i know you went to a school that was called clarke i walk you up and said laura some of the orson clark story was very familiar to people in that people don't know much about william clark and the rest of his life and even his life before that orson clark expedition which is really extraordinary and i initially thought that i would be writing a lot about the expedition because it's a great adventure stor ultimately happened is that i wrote about crocs live long after the expedition he was the most prominent american in the west for frutti years and in that time he carved out about six states he acquired the land from various native american tribes some of this is sort of heartwarming and patriotic in the senate and in that he participated in western expansion some of it is pretty depressing because he was  indiana and that all of the tribes there were moved by a quark and they came through st louis and kept them going and so that that was important to our there were other things too  he was instrumental and defending the west to win the war of eighteen twelve from the british some of the british could've come down from canada and basically sawed off the everything west of the mississippi and that didn't happen really goes on and on is a most remarkable story that i can remember this is an aside and i'm from ohio but i was staying in washington with a couple who in their guest room had all of the major left side they would say that's the that's the kentucky kentucky shore and on the right side was the indian store and so there were there were there was indian territory and clark is a very young man participated in waves up in that area too people would say well william clark everyone knows he who he is he was the major american representative in the west for food years and he carved out all these states and he and he suppressed its wives and he would move to other tribes  you wouldn't even need to talk about the exploration and he would be better known to to school schoolchildren indeed indeed have you our schoolchildren should know about this this is it's amazing and that was a very long and tragic tale there were many indians died but no one realizes how many tribes had been moved out of ohio and kentucky and indiana now on oil i remember as a little boy  not really in the history books they didn't realize what they were doing really and they thought they were helping the tribes and the whole idea had been to move the indians from the east so the unscrupulous radical toting twenty two's wouldn't take advantage of them you know that the animals were there to that they could be fed by the name down by them and all of a sudden there was no respect really and they had so much reason malice it is sad when you read about this pastor that it was a crock expedition when great lenny i just i mean for you to have this stick to it if this find this man and say all right let's do it because you had mentioned no one was doing  norse and that's when there's a lot of controversy among scholars as to why not really most scholars think the he killed himself some people think that he was murdered and clark certainly thought he was  from the pressures of the celebrity culture right but how interesting the combination was for you to go having gone to princeton going into new york started with timing came back here worked at the press athlete or whatever movie star or ordinary people who do extraordinary things are but even when i was the editor of the one nine hundred ninety s they could do pretty much anything and so we would review books by my friend bob preservation groups and and many non profits  doing interesting things and trying very hard to for instance value right now there's a big discussion as to whether they should just tear it down i know and i think i would i thought about they're walking it into into the into the have a space that's available and so there's a foundation another foundation and we do alan foundation that's in there now called living space and other people do it too not profit scramble for space they do scramble and they need to know each other and what they're doing so they don't overlap there's no purpose in having us over that and yet we do need to know what each other mean there's a wonderful guy on at the woodrow wilson school he's doing a lot of work on nonprofits the nonprofit world is huge and as we know with every a pack of mail that comes in day we know how active it is so what do you think are the other strengths of this community are the strengths i think just what you said that there are individuals who are bothering to step up and say look the environment is important let's see what we can do about it let's get some young person to run a program and teach us all how to be more environmentally care home and we go by the banks we go by the library where the lights are on you believe late at night and you think and then they you go and find out about it they say well that's the only time that it can be cleaned and we you know it's not being cleaned to work so it's just little ways and you know and then getting the children involved and they're very good about saving bottle tops or whatever they save and they count them all it's part of your garden program it's a lovely way that you that we all pay attention to each other the food alone lanny you have he had a wonderful garden and you should see what they're doing at riverside school i mean our children are i mean the white house may do it about you but i i don't know i think it's a wonderful community and it has so much to offer and people such as yourself who are so willing to come on and tell us a little bit about what you've been doing because very few people i think know who've moved here in the past five years you know very much about your book so we're hoping we have learned them and if you go to labyrinth or to barnes and noble you could find this wonderful book so let me thank you so much for coming this is what i'm doing great great and i look forward to another time when he has another wonderful book about the baby boom we're talk about that sometime and i'd love to have a talk about that it's just full of all that we've seen going on forgive me i got to go thank you thank you everyone for joining us and we look forward to seeing you next