Speaker 1: This is Me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case, underwear listening podcast. You Can't
Speaker 1: predict anything presented by on X Hunt creators are the
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Speaker 1: you stand with on x. Okay, we're joined here by
Speaker 1: Michael punk, author of the Revenant, who like, Uh, it's
Speaker 1: bold of you to come, and I'm happy that you're
Speaker 1: here because we've made such a hobby out of um
Speaker 1: expressed I have should say we I've made such a
Speaker 1: hobby out of expressing my dissatisfaction with the movie The Revenant,
Speaker 1: because of that they put it in coastal rainforest. I've
Speaker 1: I've heard some rumors about this. Uh so I would
Speaker 1: have thought you'd never want to come talk to me
Speaker 1: because you'd be like, uh, insult didn't hurt. Well, you
Speaker 1: know what, I have pretty thick skin, and I'm happy
Speaker 1: to talk about the Revenant, and I I'll say good
Speaker 1: things about it first, because I there's a lot of
Speaker 1: reasons why I'm happy that movie got made. I can imagine,
Speaker 1: but you know, uh, but there's I've got my own
Speaker 1: qualms with as a as a historian, and somebody cares
Speaker 1: about history, I've got I've got my knits to pick
Speaker 1: with with the Revenant. But but let me be clear,
Speaker 1: I don't want to start totally negative. I don't want
Speaker 1: to start totally negative. I just thought that was a
Speaker 1: good end because I'm still I'm still like just happy
Speaker 1: that you're here. Well, I've got a couple of of
Speaker 1: points to raise about your book to at some point
Speaker 1: depending on how negative this gets, and you know, you
Speaker 1: guys really go after me. Got I got a couple
Speaker 1: of things I want to raise with you, So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna positive. Um, our producer credit sent me some articles
Speaker 1: and um, there's a couple of articles pointing out It's
Speaker 1: like funny that around the time, I guess it was
Speaker 1: probably around the time the movie The Revenue came out,
Speaker 1: there are articles being written profiles of you. There were
Speaker 1: sort of pointing to the fact that you had this
Speaker 1: other life, that you weren't just a writer. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: uh have had varying interests over the years and have
Speaker 1: always been passionate about Western history and I love writing,
Speaker 1: but I also have also been really interested in public
Speaker 1: policy and uh, global politics and have had a career
Speaker 1: that is on that thread as well, and so so yeah,
Speaker 1: it Uh, all these things kind of mixed together and
Speaker 1: makes sense to me in their own way, but that
Speaker 1: probably takes a little bit of explaining. You were You
Speaker 1: were born in mountain Man country. I was born in Wyoming.
Speaker 1: Born in Uh in Level, Wyoming at the foot of
Speaker 1: the Big Horn Mountains. Did you have early Did you
Speaker 1: have an early fascination with the fur trappers? Totally? Totally? Uh,
Speaker 1: my dad. My parents are both retired school teachers, and
Speaker 1: I was, uh super lucky because my mom, an elementary
Speaker 1: school teacher, really kind of instilled a love of history.
Speaker 1: She likes reading and books and and she loves history.
Speaker 1: My dad was a biology teacher and a sportsman, and
Speaker 1: he really they both are from Kansas. They went out
Speaker 1: to have their first teaching job in lovel Wyoming after
Speaker 1: going to college in Kansas, and they fell in love
Speaker 1: with this this little town of Level at the foot
Speaker 1: of the Big Horns. And my dad in particular, who
Speaker 1: kind of grew up fishing and small game hunting in Kansas, uh,
Speaker 1: kind of discovered the potential of fishing and hunting in
Speaker 1: in the West. In in the in the Rockies, and
Speaker 1: uh fell in love with that. And then I think
Speaker 1: especially as a as a bio, I just by training
Speaker 1: it gave him that extra uh, just a different angle
Speaker 1: and interest on on being outdoors and so he definitely
Speaker 1: instilled that in in his kids. Um, and between the
Speaker 1: two of them, I just ended up. Well, I've ended
Speaker 1: up where I belong, which is here. It must have
Speaker 1: been a great advantage to grow up in a place
Speaker 1: like Wyoming if you wanted to be a mountain man,
Speaker 1: because I grew up being obsessed with the history of
Speaker 1: the West, having never been there, right, Uh, and so
Speaker 1: everything was like, uh, it felt very removed. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: just one of the things I love about Western history
Speaker 1: is how Western American history is, how recent a lot
Speaker 1: of it is. And the little street that I grew
Speaker 1: up on in Level, Wyoming, West Seventh Street, there wasn't
Speaker 1: There was an old lady who lived next to us, uh,
Speaker 1: kind of the little old lady in the little white
Speaker 1: house next hours that gave us the Vanilla Wafers. Was
Speaker 1: the friendly old lady in the neighborhood, and she had
Speaker 1: been born in in Level Uh, and she remembered a
Speaker 1: mountain man named John Blue, who would ride out of
Speaker 1: the Big Horn Mountains every two months and come down
Speaker 1: into level to reprovision, and she would tell us this
Speaker 1: story about John Blue with the Mountain Man and I.
Speaker 1: Over the years, Uh, driving up into the Big Horns,
Speaker 1: you could drive past his his old cabin, but literally,
Speaker 1: in the space of one life, you could touch that
Speaker 1: earlier era. And I love that about Wyoming and Montana.
Speaker 1: Are you familiar with the writer Ian Fraser. Yeah, yeah, he.
Speaker 1: I took him on his first hunting trip and we
Speaker 1: floated the river here in Montana, and he'd already he
Speaker 1: had lived here. It's spent quite a bit of time
Speaker 1: in Montana. But you're saying one of the things he
Speaker 1: likes ab out it, um is that when you go
Speaker 1: to a place where something happened, not much happened after that,
Speaker 1: so you can go there and still kind of be like, oh,
Speaker 1: I get it. Yeah, And I thought of that one day.
Speaker 1: I went to see where Dylan Thomas uh drank himself
Speaker 1: to death right in Manhattan. He actually died it the hospital,
Speaker 1: but like kind of where he collapsed, and UM, imagine
Speaker 1: all the ship that's occurred at that intersection since then.
Speaker 1: It makes the heart to picture. But then when you
Speaker 1: go to someplace for like a big fight happened, or
Speaker 1: some people ran some buffalo over a cliff, you go like,
Speaker 1: got it, Yeah, totally can picture because exactly I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm a I love Civil War history too, and and
Speaker 1: have visited a lot of the Civil War battlefields back east,
Speaker 1: and one of the sad things about a lot of
Speaker 1: them is they haven't been very well preserved. And you know,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a McDonald's right in the middle of
Speaker 1: the place where the you know, the cannons were supposed
Speaker 1: to be set up, and it's it's harder to imagine.
Speaker 1: And out here. I was thinking about it today because
Speaker 1: I drove by the Madison Buffalo Jump, which I always
Speaker 1: send people to go see, because I say, what I
Speaker 1: love about the Madison Buffalo Jump is you hike up
Speaker 1: on that on that cliff, and you stand up out
Speaker 1: there and you look down on the valley of the
Speaker 1: Three Forks, and it looks quite pretty close to what
Speaker 1: it looked like, you know, two years ago. And that's
Speaker 1: just a really cool thing that we, you know, can't
Speaker 1: take for granted in this big country that we live in.
Speaker 1: Out here. I suppose It's worth pointing out that in
Speaker 1: the case of the Madison Buffalo jump, the animals are gone.
Speaker 1: The animals noticeable. Yeah, the landscape looks similar. You can
Speaker 1: talk about what you're just walk everybody through your books.
Speaker 1: So I want to over focus. I do want to
Speaker 1: focus a lot on the revenue, because it's not not
Speaker 1: I want to focus on the revenue. I want to
Speaker 1: focus on our mutual interests in those people and what
Speaker 1: they were up to. Yeah. So, Uh, when I'm a
Speaker 1: lawyer by a training, I went to to college. I
Speaker 1: grew up in Wyoming, went to college back east and
Speaker 1: went to law school, and after law school, went to
Speaker 1: work in in Washington, d c. Uh. I work for
Speaker 1: Senator Bacchus. It's where I met my wife. She's from
Speaker 1: she's from Montana. Met her work in Senator Baucus's office. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I like working in government a lot, I found myself.
Speaker 1: You don't hear that very often now. I I like uh,
Speaker 1: public policy and UH and I enjoy especially the most
Speaker 1: recent job I had being a U S Ambassador. I
Speaker 1: love representing the United States of America overseas, and I
Speaker 1: love negotiating on behalf of the country. It was it
Speaker 1: was a blast. I love that. Um. But I found
Speaker 1: myself in Washington, d C. For a time, not working
Speaker 1: in government, instead working in a law firm. And I
Speaker 1: did not like working in a law firm. And I
Speaker 1: started trying to plot my way into something different. And
Speaker 1: I had the idea I'd always been interested in in writing,
Speaker 1: and I thought, well, if I can be a writer,
Speaker 1: I can live wherever I want to live. And my
Speaker 1: wife and I I both wanted to move back to
Speaker 1: the West. And so I started, uh getting up early
Speaker 1: in the morning and writing what became The Revenant, and
Speaker 1: UH and I I always for me, UH really relate
Speaker 1: when I saw shaw sh ank Redemption. And I always
Speaker 1: felt like my shosh Ank Redemption moment was kind of
Speaker 1: chipping through the wall of my cell with those hand tools.
Speaker 1: Was kind of sitting down at the computer every day
Speaker 1: and chipping away at at writing The Revenant. And when
Speaker 1: when I was able to get it published and we
Speaker 1: sold the film rights, that was our kind of escape moment.
Speaker 1: Were you surprised to get published? Um? In, I didn't
Speaker 1: take it for granted, for sure. I as I was
Speaker 1: going along, I was feeling like I had more and
Speaker 1: more of a chance. I mean, when when I started
Speaker 1: writing a book, I didn't really know if I could
Speaker 1: do it, and then I got about halfway into it
Speaker 1: and I'm like, you know what, I can definitely finish this,
Speaker 1: and I felt like it was a great story. I
Speaker 1: didn't know anything about publishing, but I started getting encouragement
Speaker 1: from people. Um, I guess I wasn't surprised, but I was.
Speaker 1: I was. I was thrilled, believe me, because I did.
Speaker 1: I did feel like that was my opportunity to live
Speaker 1: where I wanted to live and go do something different.
Speaker 1: And working as a writer is one of the great
Speaker 1: luxuries that you can have because you have sound much
Speaker 1: freedom to kind of follow you the things you're interested in.
Speaker 1: What year did you come out? It came out in
Speaker 1: I got the contract to publish it right before nine eleven,
Speaker 1: uh so two thousand and one, and it was I
Speaker 1: think published in two thousand and two. And then you
Speaker 1: you went on and published two more or three more.
Speaker 1: Moved back to Montana after we sold the book and
Speaker 1: uh uh published, researched and published two nonfiction books while
Speaker 1: living in in Montana. The first one is a nonfiction
Speaker 1: book called Fire and Brimstone about a mining disaster and
Speaker 1: Beaute in nineteen seventeen. It's a very narrative, nonfiction style book.
Speaker 1: I hope it's told in a very kind of engaging,
Speaker 1: almost novelistic type of way. But it's completely uh nonfiction,
Speaker 1: nothing's made up. Uh. Then after that, I wrote Last Stand,
Speaker 1: the book about the Buffalo, and uh it was after
Speaker 1: writing Last Stand that I had the opportunity to to
Speaker 1: be US ambassador to the World Trade Organization. So we
Speaker 1: moved over to Geneva, Switzerland. My family and I for
Speaker 1: for six years were over there, and uh after I
Speaker 1: came back from that, started to work on the new
Speaker 1: book which will come out in uh June if next year,
Speaker 1: which is is called Ridgeline. It's a another novel, Don't
Speaker 1: go over the Ridge line. Well that that turned out
Speaker 1: to be, uh in hindsight, what the lesson? What the
Speaker 1: lesson should have been? Tell? Uh, yeah, it's like an
Speaker 1: apocalypse now right, Never get out of the boat, Never
Speaker 1: get off the boat, Never get off the boat, and
Speaker 1: then never go over You can share because we we've
Speaker 1: talked about I know, the subject of the book. We
Speaker 1: talked about it now and then actually one day we're
Speaker 1: expect trying to guess what year it was, and someone
Speaker 1: pointed out that we'll tell you what the book is. So.
Speaker 1: Ridgeline is a novel that is based on the Fetterman Fight,
Speaker 1: which is a until the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
Speaker 1: The Fetterman Fight was the worst US military defeat in
Speaker 1: in U s Military history. Eighty one guys right over
Speaker 1: a ridgeline in the Powder River Valley of Wyoming in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty six, and they ride into a massive trap
Speaker 1: that has been set by the Lakota and the Cheyenne
Speaker 1: and the Arapaho, and uh, without revealing too much, it
Speaker 1: ends badly for for a lot of them, the soldiers,
Speaker 1: that is. Um, but it's a badly in a real
Speaker 1: and it ends very badly for a lot of them.
Speaker 1: Um and uh like even post mortem. Yeah, it's uh
Speaker 1: this this this was this was this was not pretty,
Speaker 1: but it's a it's a it's an incredible historical moment
Speaker 1: and story and it's It takes place in the midst
Speaker 1: of what is often called Red Clouds War, which was
Speaker 1: a war that broke out after the after the US
Speaker 1: foisted broke one treaty and foisted another one on on
Speaker 1: the tribes. Walk people through that timeline, like yeah, basically
Speaker 1: was correct me where I'm wrong and pick up you
Speaker 1: know where it's He's fit. But everybody's through with the
Speaker 1: Oregon Trail. UM people wanted to spur off the Oregon
Speaker 1: Trail and get up to the goldfields in the north,
Speaker 1: and that war was kind of centered around like can
Speaker 1: we get can whites have safe passage come to Montana
Speaker 1: to go to the north? Right? So I mean that
Speaker 1: was that like sort of the bait, that was the
Speaker 1: defining argument right that Well, the way I would describe
Speaker 1: it is, ah, before the Civil War, there was a
Speaker 1: flood of migration from the East UH to to California
Speaker 1: and Oregon, and tons of people coming across the continent,
Speaker 1: including coming across UH what's now Wyoming, but they were
Speaker 1: all headed west. They're all headed the California Oregon and
Speaker 1: the tribes in that era were not super psyched about
Speaker 1: that and there was a lot of conflict, but the
Speaker 1: us UH negotiated a treaty that basically gave access across
Speaker 1: the Oregon Trail. Is it fair to say like the
Speaker 1: gripe centered around UM impacts on wildlife movements and our things,
Speaker 1: like they're they're grazing areas, heavily displacing animals out of
Speaker 1: areas that once had animals, making hunting hard. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was that certainly happened along the Oregon Trail. But for
Speaker 1: a while there was a bit of what the treaty
Speaker 1: also did is it gave is it gave the tribes
Speaker 1: most of the land to the north of the Oregon Trail,
Speaker 1: to the north of the of the North Platte River,
Speaker 1: and and there was a fair amount of equilibrium there
Speaker 1: for a while. What happens after the Civil War, during
Speaker 1: and after the Civil War, and even right before, is
Speaker 1: they discover golden in Montana, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: people are not content anymore to sort of go across
Speaker 1: the Oregon Trail on their way to California and Oregon.
Speaker 1: As you say, they started spurring off and going up
Speaker 1: to the gold fields of Montana. Uh. Bozeman Trail, for example,
Speaker 1: head going to Bozeman, and the quickest way to get
Speaker 1: there was right through the Powder River Valley. And that
Speaker 1: was great hunting land and was had absolutely been given
Speaker 1: to the tribes as part of this this earlier treaty.
Speaker 1: And so uh the the US as it does multiple
Speaker 1: times throughout nineteenth century history, when treaties with the tribes
Speaker 1: become inconvenient, uh, they just either break them or force
Speaker 1: a renegotiation, and in this case, they essentially did both.
Speaker 1: They they negotiated a new treaty allowing the US to
Speaker 1: go through the Powder River Valley, but they negotiated it
Speaker 1: largely with tribes that didn't live in the Powder River Valley.
Speaker 1: And as you might imagine, UH, the that that result
Speaker 1: uh was enraging to the to the tribes that actually
Speaker 1: lived there. And what came out of that was was
Speaker 1: war uh, namely Red Clouds War UH. And it's one
Speaker 1: of the things that's interesting about Red Clouds War is
Speaker 1: the is the Indians win. Uh. Their victory ends up
Speaker 1: not lasting very long, but they actually win this war.
Speaker 1: And as a result of winning the war, the U.
Speaker 1: S Army UH retreats from the forts that they had
Speaker 1: set up in the Powder River Valley, and for a
Speaker 1: period of time, the lands went back to the to
Speaker 1: the tribes. What happens then is they discovered gold in
Speaker 1: the Black Hills, and that leads in eighteen seventy six
Speaker 1: to a new gold rush uh and uh, but actually
Speaker 1: I think it's eighteen seventy four that was a discovery
Speaker 1: of gold and within two years, uh, fast forward almost
Speaker 1: to the to the end of the Indian Wars because
Speaker 1: at that point there's just not enough space anymore, uh
Speaker 1: for them to coexist and uh and they the Indian
Speaker 1: Wars come to a fairly quick end end after that.
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting and looking at your your collection
Speaker 1: of work is that you have like a Mountain Man book,
Speaker 1: The Revenant, which is very early stage exploit to to
Speaker 1: the West, like very early stage exploration of the West, right,
Speaker 1: Like people are still just kind of like trying to
Speaker 1: fill in the map, like making, um, the characters near
Speaker 1: hue Glass and those are making sort of legitimate discoveries
Speaker 1: about what river flows in the right. And then you have, uh,
Speaker 1: this forthcoming work that's kind of you know, at a
Speaker 1: real hot point, right and then your Buffalo but sort
Speaker 1: of is almost um, the aftermath dealing with kind of
Speaker 1: like focused on this, this this other element of the West,
Speaker 1: of of people getting around to look and be like
Speaker 1: holy shit, yeah, what did we do well? What's uh?
Speaker 1: And and we talked about this a little bit just
Speaker 1: how in many ways, how compact the recent history of
Speaker 1: the West is that the amount of time that that
Speaker 1: European Americans have been out here. It all happens in uh,
Speaker 1: in the span of a a couple of centuries. And UH,
Speaker 1: there's a lot that goes on in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: For example, when you think about UH, you know Lewis
Speaker 1: and Clark coming out here at the beginning of the
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century, and by the ends of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, you know, the Buffalo were virtually gone, and
Speaker 1: and and the whole West is settled by European Americans.
Speaker 1: And for all of that to happen in a hundred
Speaker 1: years is is stunning when you think about it, that
Speaker 1: that's one lifetime. One of the things I love about
Speaker 1: this this new book is when I was doing the
Speaker 1: research for for Ridgeline and learning about the Powder River War,
Speaker 1: I was thrilled to discover that Jim Bridger shows up
Speaker 1: as an old man scouting for the U. S. Army.
Speaker 1: And for people who read The Revenant, Uh, Jim Bridger
Speaker 1: in eighteen three and the Revenant is the boy who's
Speaker 1: out there. He's the inexperienced boy who is one of
Speaker 1: the two people who abandoned Hugh Glass. And the fact
Speaker 1: that in his life. He goes from you know, being
Speaker 1: part of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and being in
Speaker 1: this part of the country as one of the first
Speaker 1: European Americans to come out here and trap and lives
Speaker 1: through the fur trade era. He establishes a fort. Uh.
Speaker 1: He first of all, he gets half the state named
Speaker 1: after him. He gets half state named half him, including
Speaker 1: a place that's you know, not more than a couple
Speaker 1: hundred yards from here, UM, but he he it's it's
Speaker 1: his recommendation that UH that UH determines the path for
Speaker 1: for the South Pass, which is where the Oregon Trail
Speaker 1: passes over. He sets up a fort on the Oregon Trail,
Speaker 1: and UM makes money selling UH goods and supplies to emigrants.
Speaker 1: So he lives through that whole UH pioneer era. He
Speaker 1: scouts for pioneers, he ends up scouting for the U. S.
Speaker 1: Army UH, and he sees the the end of the
Speaker 1: of the Indian Wars in his life. And that's that's
Speaker 1: just it's epic. It's it's hard to even imagine that.
Speaker 1: The thing I think about him is, you know, when
Speaker 1: everybody UH talks about how everything went the ship in
Speaker 1: their lifetime, you know it used to be no one
Speaker 1: was here used to right. Can you imagine Bridger? Well,
Speaker 1: he had to be like no, no, exactly. Well. And
Speaker 1: one of the one of the really fascinating anecdotes, uh
Speaker 1: that I came across and again and doing the research
Speaker 1: for this new book is not only was Jim Bridger
Speaker 1: scouting for the U. S. Army in this era, but
Speaker 1: James Beckworth also was who uh people who know about
Speaker 1: the former slave and African American uh mountain man, and
Speaker 1: he had actually come out here as part of that
Speaker 1: same uh company they're rocking out in for a company
Speaker 1: that the Jim Bridger had been apart. So both of
Speaker 1: these guys come out as teenagers, uh, to to the
Speaker 1: wild wild West of the eighteen twenties, and then both
Speaker 1: of them end up together as sixty year old men
Speaker 1: scouting for the U. S. Army in eighteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: and they literally get sent out by the commanding officer
Speaker 1: of the fort to find to figure out where the
Speaker 1: Indians are. And I just imagined them and this happened,
Speaker 1: you know, Jim Bridger and James Beckworth riding their horses
Speaker 1: up the Powder River Valley as sixty year old men
Speaker 1: reminiscing on their lives and you know, what conversations were
Speaker 1: they having. And I try and think about that as
Speaker 1: part of as part of the book. One of the
Speaker 1: things I wonder about is, uh, you know, was somebody
Speaker 1: like Jim Bridger, who was known as a person of
Speaker 1: of incredible integrity, was he regretting in any way how
Speaker 1: much he had helped open up the West? And I
Speaker 1: think it absolutely Boone had that. Boon did. And there's
Speaker 1: a set of conversations I think about often like that,
Speaker 1: Like when Boone was very, very old in his seventies,
Speaker 1: he would go on extended hunting trips with his own
Speaker 1: slave who became like his hunting buddy, his confidant, and
Speaker 1: um to imagine, and this is after he had been
Speaker 1: displaced out of places and displaced out of places. And
Speaker 1: he definitely, uh, you know, if you look in his biography,
Speaker 1: had an awareness of what have been lost, and you'd
Speaker 1: have to think that Bridger had it. I I do
Speaker 1: think he had that. And he was married, uh into
Speaker 1: the Shoshonee tribe, so he had lived the Native American
Speaker 1: culture and he was watching it literally being decimated. Uh.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine that they were not profound feelings of
Speaker 1: of misgivings about what was was going on. And so
Speaker 1: it's always difficult because you don't want to ah, sort
Speaker 1: of impose twenty one century views of the universe on
Speaker 1: historical characters and and uh, and so I try not
Speaker 1: to do that, but I think that somebody like Bridger
Speaker 1: uh must have had those types of misgivings. Well, the
Speaker 1: way I think that it's I don't think it's twenty
Speaker 1: and I don't think it's twenty one century views necessarily
Speaker 1: because here's a person who derived his his income and
Speaker 1: livelihood from the land's ability to put off resources. So
Speaker 1: at a time there was at least the hope and
Speaker 1: and you're you watched it happened to your peers that
Speaker 1: you could turn great fortune from trapping beaver, right, and
Speaker 1: it was just there for the taking, and food was
Speaker 1: readily available. It just like it was not like securing
Speaker 1: food was not an issue. There was no pressure about.
Speaker 1: I mean, you had pressure from like indigenous forces who
Speaker 1: didn't want you on their landscape, but because you regarded
Speaker 1: that in a sort of like low priority way, it
Speaker 1: felt like there was like an inexhaustible supply of land
Speaker 1: out there. So even if you just look at it
Speaker 1: totally pragmatically and look at it just and very personally.
Speaker 1: When you get to where the beaver are gone, um,
Speaker 1: it's much harder to secure food. Huge areas that had
Speaker 1: buffalo have been depleted of buffalo, and now you need
Speaker 1: to make your living contracting out to the military. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't think you need to get to nostalgic to
Speaker 1: be like to realize that you have been, that your
Speaker 1: fortunes have gone down well, and the they must have
Speaker 1: had a I mean, at one level they experienced nature
Speaker 1: as and and you see this throughout the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: You know, people in that era had a view of
Speaker 1: nature where first and foremost they had to survive, and
Speaker 1: so they were probably less focused on is it a
Speaker 1: pretty vista? Is it a pretty sunset? But by the
Speaker 1: same token, I just can't imagine that they did not
Speaker 1: have an appreciation for the beauty of the place that
Speaker 1: they that they lived in. And I in small ways
Speaker 1: today as uh, when I try and imagine what it
Speaker 1: felt like to live in that era, I feel nostalgia
Speaker 1: for parts of Montana that that I knew when they
Speaker 1: were wild and they're not wild anymore. And it makes
Speaker 1: me angry sometimes when I when I see that and
Speaker 1: to see it on the scale that that they were
Speaker 1: seeing it. Uh. And that's talking about about Jim Bridger.
Speaker 1: We've even got yet to the perspective of of the
Speaker 1: Native Native Americans who see their there not only their land,
Speaker 1: but their their their whole culture and way of living
Speaker 1: overturned in a in a space of a few years.
Speaker 1: It's it's almost impossible to imagine what that would have
Speaker 1: felt like. What one of the things I try and
Speaker 1: do in the book is to think about what did
Speaker 1: that feel like. That's one of the I think the
Speaker 1: fun things you can do with fiction, as you can imagine,
Speaker 1: not just you don't just talk about what happened, You
Speaker 1: imagine how did it feel and how did it feel
Speaker 1: for the people who are living in that era. To
Speaker 1: experience change at that scale does given away too much
Speaker 1: to tell us whose perspective the book is told, So
Speaker 1: it's told from multiple perspectives. Uh. And I think a
Speaker 1: story that rich and complex has to be told from
Speaker 1: from multiple perspectives. And one of the things that one
Speaker 1: of the problems I have with a lot of Western
Speaker 1: American history is I think too often it's told only
Speaker 1: from the the European American perspective, and that the Native
Speaker 1: perspective is given short shrift, and so I try and
Speaker 1: tell the story from from multiple perspectives. One of the
Speaker 1: experiences that I had, actually one of the one of
Speaker 1: the greatest jobs I had ever in my life is
Speaker 1: I UH was born and raised in Port and Level, Wyoming,
Speaker 1: and UH I went to junior high and high school
Speaker 1: in Torrington, Wyoming, in the southeastern corner of the state,
Speaker 1: and UH loved history and did this job where I
Speaker 1: worked in the summers of high school and college doing
Speaker 1: working for the National Park Service at Fort Laramie National
Speaker 1: Historic Site and dressed up every day literally in a
Speaker 1: eight seventy six cavalry cavalry uniform and shot guns and
Speaker 1: cannons and baked bread using the historic bread recipe and
Speaker 1: talked to tourists all day about the history of the West.
Speaker 1: That was my job. And I realized even at the
Speaker 1: time that the story that we were telling about the
Speaker 1: history of the West, UH was quite one sided. UH,
Speaker 1: and I've always felt like we could do a better
Speaker 1: job of telling that story. And I hope you know,
Speaker 1: in some measure I'm doing that with this this new book.
Speaker 1: It's difficult to pull off though, because, um, you can
Speaker 1: give the perspective of your own culture and own people.
Speaker 1: It was a little bit of a trap and trying
Speaker 1: to give the perspective of someone else, because even a
Speaker 1: well intentioned effort can be met with accusations of colonial appropriation,
Speaker 1: cultural appropriation, right, and so it's like I applaud you
Speaker 1: for not just turning around and saying forget it. Well,
Speaker 1: like it will never be rewarded, it will always be criticized.
Speaker 1: The best that I can do is to h from
Speaker 1: where I sit, to all the research and all the
Speaker 1: work that I can to learn all aspects of the history,
Speaker 1: and try and write it down in a way that
Speaker 1: I hope is accurate, and then subject it, which I've done,
Speaker 1: uh to a lot of two readers with a lot
Speaker 1: of different perspectives, including UH, a lot of different Native
Speaker 1: American readers, and UH, this book has been through a
Speaker 1: lot of drafts, and the draft that it's in reflects
Speaker 1: a lot of that input. So I am sure that
Speaker 1: I'm not telling the story perfectly. H. I know that's
Speaker 1: not the case. I hope I'm telling it in a
Speaker 1: in a fair way that that brings some balance to
Speaker 1: the story. And at that point, if I get things wrong, um,
Speaker 1: people can tell me about that and we can have
Speaker 1: that conversation and we can continue to have that conversation
Speaker 1: and learn all of us. But I think that's a
Speaker 1: more productive way to to two deal with an issue,
Speaker 1: to deal with issues like that, than to ignore them
Speaker 1: or worst, to to write it from only one perspective.
Speaker 1: Are you familiar with the historian Dan Floores? I know,
Speaker 1: not in detail. Um, I know he's written a lot
Speaker 1: about the buffalo and it. I don't I'm not an
Speaker 1: expert on him at all. Yeah, he's done some pretty
Speaker 1: influential work. And um, he's an environmental historian. When I
Speaker 1: was in graduate school, I took his one of his
Speaker 1: seminar courses. You had like you had to sort of
Speaker 1: take a seminar outside of your discipline, you know. So
Speaker 1: it took an environmental history seminar with Dan Flores, and
Speaker 1: he gave a lecture one day about the Battle of
Speaker 1: Adobe Walls. I think it's like the second Battle of
Speaker 1: Adobe Walls. And if you ever heard of this with
Speaker 1: the buffalo hunters and yeah, so they weren't supposed to
Speaker 1: they weren't supposed to hunt south of the state Southern
Speaker 1: Pacific rail line. Right, they weren't supposed to move into
Speaker 1: the southern plains. And these guys paid little, little to
Speaker 1: no attention to that kind of like what you're talking
Speaker 1: about with using the bowsman trail. And they were very
Speaker 1: well armed, um buffalo, Yeah, and uh, extraordinarily good shooters.
Speaker 1: Had this little fortress called Adobe Walls, and they ran
Speaker 1: hide hunting operations out of there, and it was like
Speaker 1: very defendable, and there were experts, um. And at one
Speaker 1: point in time, the tribes gathered in great number to
Speaker 1: go once and for all eliminate these guys out of
Speaker 1: this area. And and and native tellings of what happened
Speaker 1: on the way to this raid. Uh, young brave kills
Speaker 1: a skunk, which is a thing you do not do
Speaker 1: on the way to a fight. When they get to
Speaker 1: Adobe Walls, the hide hunters managed to kill chief at
Speaker 1: like some pot shot, and they kill a chief. And
Speaker 1: the battle, which was supposed to be this great routing
Speaker 1: of these hide hunters fizzles and the Indians right off.
Speaker 1: And then the telling of the hide hunters at Adobe Walls,
Speaker 1: it was there like superior skill, superior firepower, right, that
Speaker 1: one the day and Flori's explains how and the I
Speaker 1: think it's the Southern Cheyenne telling is that that guy
Speaker 1: killed a skunk on the way to that fight, and
Speaker 1: Floris then puts it to you like, um, who's right. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a perfect example of of why we
Speaker 1: should be looking at these historical incidents from multiple perspectives.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, we haven't done that in our history.
Speaker 1: We haven't done a good job of that at all.
Speaker 1: And so again, I I'm sure that there are plenty
Speaker 1: of mistakes in in my book, but I I do
Speaker 1: hope that I've made the effort to tell the best
Speaker 1: story that I possibly can, including making a really big
Speaker 1: effort to to to bring multiple perspectives there. You mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: Um that the Fetterman fight was kind of the biggest
Speaker 1: skirmish in the West prior to Little Big Horn. And
Speaker 1: I've always really liked reading about Little Big Horn. And
Speaker 1: I think that if you read contemporary works about the
Speaker 1: battle Little Big Horn, it's sort of they present it
Speaker 1: as sort of this great culmination, right that all these
Speaker 1: these these like outrageous figures and these like outsized human beings,
Speaker 1: right like collided in this this moment, this sort of
Speaker 1: like crescendo of tension in the American West, and it
Speaker 1: lives like that, Like we know that I was reading
Speaker 1: this book from the sixties recently that touches briefly on
Speaker 1: a Little Big Horn and his treatment of Little Big Horn.
Speaker 1: I think this is before it became popular. His treatment
Speaker 1: a Little Big Horn was basically like if you were
Speaker 1: talking about the d D invasions. Okay, so there's this
Speaker 1: massive undertaking that's going on, and meanwhile, off in some corner,
Speaker 1: a officer makes a mistake and gets a couple hundred
Speaker 1: people killed on D Day. And then later we talked
Speaker 1: about June six. Later we talked about it, and we're like,
Speaker 1: D Day huge successful objective, turned the tide. Oh and
Speaker 1: also this guy kind of screwed up and got everybody killed,
Speaker 1: Like that was his like in the nineties sixties, that
Speaker 1: was his viewpoint of a little Big Horn didn't even
Speaker 1: really warrant. It was just an anomaly, like a guy
Speaker 1: made a stupid mistake. Had no real bearing on how
Speaker 1: the Indian Wars went. Everything kept right on schedule. We
Speaker 1: still like subjugated the Sioux Um. It was just it
Speaker 1: just doesn't really like we focus on it, But why
Speaker 1: are we focused on this? It didn't change the course
Speaker 1: of It didn't change. So here's the course of destiny? Right?
Speaker 1: I think I disagree with that that theory. I'll tell
Speaker 1: you why. Um. Well, first of all, look, these these
Speaker 1: battles where uh, where armies get wiped out are intrinsically fascinating,
Speaker 1: and it's like, you know, you kind of can't look away.
Speaker 1: And so the Fetterman Fight, the Battle a Little Big Horn,
Speaker 1: they just there there cat nip in terms of our
Speaker 1: interest because they're just so graphic. Um. But what I
Speaker 1: think is interesting about the difference between the Fetterman Fight
Speaker 1: and the Battle a Little Big Horn is the impact
Speaker 1: that the battles had politically. And so I agree a
Speaker 1: little bit with the point that the person was making
Speaker 1: that from a military standpoint. Um, you know, we're talking
Speaker 1: about eighty guys who die in the Fetterman fight, and
Speaker 1: I don't remember the precise number with Custer too, U
Speaker 1: twenty or something like that. Um. And if you compare
Speaker 1: that to D Day, uh, that is not a massive battle.
Speaker 1: But both of those uh fights happened at really interesting
Speaker 1: political moments in US history. The Feederman fight happens in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty six, two years after the end of the
Speaker 1: Civil War, when the US is weary of war. They've
Speaker 1: completely uh drawn down the size of the U. S. Army.
Speaker 1: Um they're preoccupied with trying to manage, uh the the
Speaker 1: reconstruction of the South, and that required a huge military
Speaker 1: presence in and of itself. And there just was no
Speaker 1: interest in the in eighteen sixty six in in having
Speaker 1: a big fight out west. And so when Fetterman, when
Speaker 1: the Federman defeat happens, the US pulls back and the
Speaker 1: Indians win this war for a couple of years. My
Speaker 1: favorite anecdote about the Custer Battle is Custer uh fight.
Speaker 1: The battle a little big horn occurs on June eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy six, eighteen seventy six. Takes a long time for
Speaker 1: the news to travel back to Washington, d C. It's
Speaker 1: Independence Day. The news of the Custer massacre arrives in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. On July four, eight seventy six, literally in
Speaker 1: the midst of the celebration of the centennial of the
Speaker 1: hundred year anniversary of the country. It's like the biggest
Speaker 1: turd in the punch bowl in American history. To that point,
Speaker 1: and and the political reaction to the battle of a
Speaker 1: Little Big Horn is the opposite of the of the
Speaker 1: reaction to the fetterment fight. They decide enough, we're not
Speaker 1: gonna lose UH to the Indians in the west. And
Speaker 1: they beginning at that moment, UH, they send out Nelson Miles,
Speaker 1: who you know is one of the most kind of
Speaker 1: BADASSUH warriors in the in the U. S. Army, and
Speaker 1: he and and a big army go out west and
Speaker 1: they start doing something they hadn't done very much before,
Speaker 1: which is attacking UH the Indians in the winter when
Speaker 1: they were at least able to fight. And within two
Speaker 1: years the Indian Wars are over. Um. Crazy horses is
Speaker 1: on the reservation. Uh. He rolled up the nest first
Speaker 1: to the next song the Nez Perce UH surrender and
Speaker 1: UH sitting bowl is in exile in Canada. The Indian
Speaker 1: Wars are over. And so the political significance of those battles,
Speaker 1: even though in the if you look at them compared
Speaker 1: to some of the Civil War battles or or other
Speaker 1: battles where thousands of people die, Um, the political significance
Speaker 1: of those battles I think was huge. In reading Um,
Speaker 1: the revenuet thing I really appreciate. You're gonna come around
Speaker 1: to this. We've warmed up a little bit now, so
Speaker 1: so you've you've been warming up. I feel like you've
Speaker 1: been like like a wind windmilling for a sucker punch
Speaker 1: to bring it on, bring it on. In reading the Revenue,
Speaker 1: you solved for me. You solved for me a thing
Speaker 1: I never understood, and it was a detail that I
Speaker 1: really appreciate it because I like, uh details. Um, even
Speaker 1: with the director Michael Man, like he loved him so
Speaker 1: and Ali and lord knows what other movies. Um, the
Speaker 1: guy this is no burying anything. But the cinematographer Mo
Speaker 1: Foulon that sort of like gave our show, like made
Speaker 1: our show like the way it is, like it looks
Speaker 1: the way it is because this guy Mofoulon, Mofoulin, that
Speaker 1: had been Michael Mann's assistant at a time, and Mo
Speaker 1: would talk talks about how Michael Mann was very attuned
Speaker 1: to details, and you talk about how humans are really
Speaker 1: smart animals, you know, and he viewed audiences that way,
Speaker 1: like intelligent animals, and he wanted things to look and
Speaker 1: feel right, you know. I think it's one of the
Speaker 1: great strengths like Karen McCarthy's, he really cares like how
Speaker 1: things look. But in the book, I've always known that
Speaker 1: mountain you'd see mountain men wearing pants that were leather
Speaker 1: to the knee to the knee, and you see depictions
Speaker 1: of them leather to the knee and wool down from them.
Speaker 1: They're down helpful. I never ever thought about what that was,
Speaker 1: except for I don't know, so, uh, the state of
Speaker 1: the art pants for a uh, state of the art
Speaker 1: mountain man was was leather to the knee and wool
Speaker 1: from the knee down, because, uh, because wool dries quickly
Speaker 1: and remains warm when it's wet. And of course, what
Speaker 1: the fur tuators were doing with the beaver trappers were
Speaker 1: doing was waiting in two cricks to pull out beaver traps.
Speaker 1: So they were constantly wading in and out of water.
Speaker 1: And you can imagine wet, wet buckskin, uh is heavy
Speaker 1: and uncomfortable and doesn't keep you warm. And so they yeah,
Speaker 1: they wore these uh special pants. Uh yeah, knee boots,
Speaker 1: yeah exactly. But but the buckskin upper, what was the
Speaker 1: what's the advantage of that? Why wasn't it just that's
Speaker 1: a good question, Um, durability and availability of resource probably yeah,
Speaker 1: And uh so I guess they didn't have enough wool
Speaker 1: to to get the whole pant made out of wall,
Speaker 1: so they just they did it from the knee down.
Speaker 1: And then I think they're pretty conscious about looks too,
Speaker 1: so they I get the sense they liked the look
Speaker 1: of of buckskin and and you know all that and
Speaker 1: so a little bit of wall. Maybe what research did
Speaker 1: you do that get that sort of brought about ideas
Speaker 1: that they were sort of they had they had ideas
Speaker 1: of fashion or look, there was there were hairstyles. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, they were like like in the frontiers, been
Speaker 1: a little bit earlier, but they would they had they
Speaker 1: would plait their hair, they would braid their hair in
Speaker 1: a specific way. Absolutely, And I think they admired the
Speaker 1: dress of of a lot of the the native tribes
Speaker 1: who also had wonderful uh clothing that they that they wore,
Speaker 1: and they copied that. And um, I think there was
Speaker 1: a I think they were quite fashion conscious in their
Speaker 1: in their own way. A thing that's troubled me, like,
Speaker 1: if there's a for any historians out there, for any
Speaker 1: PhD candidates out there, there is a thing that has
Speaker 1: not been adequately explained about the mountain men. And I'll
Speaker 1: put it to you to see if you have any
Speaker 1: insights on it. Do you have any exposure to trapping?
Speaker 1: Do you have you done at trap? I have not
Speaker 1: trapped myself, I know, so I won't overstate my expertise. Here.
Speaker 1: A beaver in a foothold trap is very, very difficult
Speaker 1: to hang onto. UM we use today. The it's it's
Speaker 1: astounding how little the technology has switched between what they
Speaker 1: were using, which is a double long spring trap. Granted
Speaker 1: these are handful words, UM and and we still use
Speaker 1: double long spring traps today. Like you catch beavers, you can.
Speaker 1: We've kind of gradually switched to something called coil spring,
Speaker 1: but I own some have caught beaver in them, and
Speaker 1: they are like dead ringers for what they're us in
Speaker 1: those days. However, UM we use now a one way
Speaker 1: slide and you put it on a wire or a chain,
Speaker 1: and it's like when the beaver gets caught in the trap,
Speaker 1: he instinctively dives for deep water and there's a one
Speaker 1: way slide wire and he can take the trap down
Speaker 1: in the deep water and it's the slide wire is
Speaker 1: anchored on both ends. It's anchored on the bank and
Speaker 1: it's anchored out in three or four ft of water.
Speaker 1: He can't come back up. The trap won't come back up,
Speaker 1: and that's how you drown them. Anytime that beaver jack's
Speaker 1: that lower stake out or dicks around too much on
Speaker 1: the bank and twist that drowner wire up so that
Speaker 1: the slide can't slide, or any time he anyway incapacitates
Speaker 1: that slide wire, it's like it's probably a gone beaver.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have a toenail. He's gonna be he just
Speaker 1: has gone. You can't hang onto him. And when you
Speaker 1: read historical accounts of how they made their sets, I
Speaker 1: don't think anyone yet understands how they anchored off their
Speaker 1: sets because any explanation I've read, I'm like, no, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't have the success rate. Because these guys are running
Speaker 1: like six sets at a time. Allot of them carried
Speaker 1: six traps, you see it all the time, and they're
Speaker 1: pulling like four or five beaver a day. No one
Speaker 1: knows how they rigged their ship, and that would be
Speaker 1: a great avenue of exploration for someone to find out,
Speaker 1: like how they actually rigged their ship, and then some
Speaker 1: historian would go out and catch and have a four
Speaker 1: or five out of six trap success ratio using that equipment.
Speaker 1: I don't think you could do it. People make a
Speaker 1: big lot of nap in a arrowhead nowadays and like
Speaker 1: killing deer with it. That doesn't impress me at all.
Speaker 1: It would impress me to set six traps with those
Speaker 1: slide wires and catch five beavers. I don't know the
Speaker 1: answer to that. I guess I knew that the way
Speaker 1: that the beaver divers by drowning, but I don't know
Speaker 1: how they I don't remember reading how they how they
Speaker 1: rigged it. The people that saw it happen, I didn't
Speaker 1: think too describe it. I have no They obviously had
Speaker 1: to figure out yeah, they just did it right, and
Speaker 1: they would have been undoubtedly that have been very particular
Speaker 1: about water depth and all kinds of other considerations. But
Speaker 1: instead you just imagine, now it's like these people catching
Speaker 1: all these beavers and you overlook like what it actually involved, yea,
Speaker 1: and to do it while not getting killed. Well, I
Speaker 1: think about that every time I'm fishing, because they you know,
Speaker 1: I'm walking up the same cricks that they were setting
Speaker 1: beaver traps on and you know, they're thickly vegetated and
Speaker 1: I'm not worried about somebody hiding in the trees who
Speaker 1: wants to kill me, and uh, and they were and
Speaker 1: you almost can't see how any of those guys survived. Uh,
Speaker 1: and my god, that they not survived though, I mean,
Speaker 1: they died like flies. Well it's one of the reasons why.
Speaker 1: The fact that that Jim Bridger and James Beckworth are
Speaker 1: sixties sixty something guys in you know, in the eighteen sixties,
Speaker 1: and the fact that they've lived through decades of a
Speaker 1: pretty vigorous lifestyle is it's stunning. And they did it
Speaker 1: with like Bridger, didn't he have the whitman who was
Speaker 1: later in the women massacre. Didn't he carve a broad
Speaker 1: head out of bridge or shoulder blade? Yea at the
Speaker 1: tearing around for years in the bone of his shoulders
Speaker 1: and there's a there's an etching of that happening. And
Speaker 1: Bridger is is leaning across a tree stump. Why this
Speaker 1: while this guy literally I think it's and I think
Speaker 1: the arrowhead had been in there for two or three
Speaker 1: years and and you know, I guess he got super
Speaker 1: drunk and and let the guy kind of hack on
Speaker 1: him for a while, and he yanks out that arrowhead
Speaker 1: and it was like a doctor doing people point out,
Speaker 1: being like the first sort of like the first sort
Speaker 1: of western style official surgery west of some latitude line.
Speaker 1: You can you can imagine the reality TV event that
Speaker 1: that was at the rendezvous, the number of people that
Speaker 1: stood around to kind of watch that. Um, can he
Speaker 1: walk us through the Huge Glass story? So the Huge
Speaker 1: ask you a question. Absolutely, I want you to do it,
Speaker 1: but I'm I'm too I'm too dying. And all the
Speaker 1: answers something, um, do you buy like, I know, you
Speaker 1: know how Huge Glass died? You know what? Walk us
Speaker 1: through the Huge Glass? And then I want to ask
Speaker 1: you if you think that the legend of his death
Speaker 1: is true or not. But just walk us through the
Speaker 1: Hugh Glass story, pirates and everything. Okay, So uh, first
Speaker 1: of all, I'll tell a bit of an embarrassing side story,
Speaker 1: which is that The Revenant is not the first book
Speaker 1: that I started to write. Um. I started to write
Speaker 1: another book which was going to be loosely based on
Speaker 1: me and my experiences as like a young legislative aid
Speaker 1: in Washington, D C. And I got about you, you you
Speaker 1: wouldn't be on this show. Well, I'm getting I'm getting
Speaker 1: to that. I got about I got about halfway through
Speaker 1: that book and started sharing it with a couple of
Speaker 1: friends who I could trust, who both told me that
Speaker 1: it was it was boring, and that was hurtful. Those
Speaker 1: are good friends. That it's it's they're good friends. But
Speaker 1: it was hurtful because that was the fictionalized version of
Speaker 1: my life that they were talking about. So uh so
Speaker 1: right about the moment that I is abandoning a novel
Speaker 1: based on a fictionalized version of my apparently extremely boring life,
Speaker 1: I was. I was reading a book about the Mountain Man,
Speaker 1: nonfiction book, and there were two paragraphs in it about
Speaker 1: Hugh Glass. And these two paragraphs said, Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: there's this guy. He's mauled by a grizzly bear, horribly wounded. Uh.
Speaker 1: Two of his comrades are left to wait for him
Speaker 1: to die and bury him, and instead of doing that,
Speaker 1: they rob him and abandoned him. And first of all,
Speaker 1: out of h anger, he crawls two hundred miles back
Speaker 1: to the last vestige of civilization and survives and re
Speaker 1: equips himself and then goes out to seek revenge, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, Okay, that's a pretty good story. That's a
Speaker 1: that's a lot more interesting than my life. I'm going
Speaker 1: to write a book about that. So that's where I
Speaker 1: got interested in the in the story and started doing
Speaker 1: the research on on Hugh Glass to to write the book.
Speaker 1: And and for me, even when it's fiction, the research
Speaker 1: that you get to do is is half the fun,
Speaker 1: because I gotta not only read all about the mountain men,
Speaker 1: but I gotta read all about wilderness survival and I
Speaker 1: gotta try and figure out, you know, what type of
Speaker 1: uh of trap could a guy who can't use one
Speaker 1: arm uh possibly uh build that allow him to get
Speaker 1: food if he when he doesn't have a knife or
Speaker 1: a rifle or even flint and steel, what what would
Speaker 1: he do? And so I gotta just do all sorts
Speaker 1: of these fun little uh forays into areas that were
Speaker 1: interesting to do research on um. But that is the
Speaker 1: kernel of the story of the part of Hugh glasses
Speaker 1: life that he's most famous for, which is being attacked
Speaker 1: by mall horribly mall by a grizzly abandoned and robbed
Speaker 1: by his comrades, and then going out to seek revenge,
Speaker 1: but before were that, uh, he had a remarkable life.
Speaker 1: And who knows how much of this is legend and
Speaker 1: and how much is is fact. But there's a there's
Speaker 1: a really entertaining and quirky biography a few glass by
Speaker 1: a guy named John Myers Myers. And it was written,
Speaker 1: I think, also in the sixties. And it's it's uh,
Speaker 1: it is uh. It feels a little bit like it
Speaker 1: was written in the sixties, but according to his biographer,
Speaker 1: he was originally a Can I ask what it means
Speaker 1: to feel like it was written in the sixties. It's
Speaker 1: it is not politically correct at all, um, And it
Speaker 1: has a very one sided view of many aspects of
Speaker 1: of of Western history. And he's just John Meyers Myers.
Speaker 1: And I can't imagine he's still alive. You can tell
Speaker 1: he's he's a got character and is a quirky dude.
Speaker 1: And it's this is not like a written like a
Speaker 1: a doctorate thesis. This is a this is freewheeling, which
Speaker 1: makes it kind of fun to read, but also makes
Speaker 1: you kind of wonder sometimes how much is true and
Speaker 1: how much isn't. So I won't vouch for any of
Speaker 1: this being true. The legend, according to his biographer of
Speaker 1: of Hugh Glass is that he started off his life
Speaker 1: as a sailor and that he was on a ship
Speaker 1: that was captured by the pirate UH or or or
Speaker 1: not pirate, depending on your version of history. Jean Lafitte
Speaker 1: and uh and imprisoned UH on an island off the
Speaker 1: shore of Texas and escaped from this pirate island to
Speaker 1: the mainland of Texas. And this would have been in
Speaker 1: the eighteen teens. And uh proceeds literally to walk from
Speaker 1: the Gulf of Mexico to what is now uh well
Speaker 1: to St. Louis, Missouri, uh and has all sorts of
Speaker 1: adventures along the way. Yeah, well one could imagine. It
Speaker 1: wasn't just a smooth it was not there there there
Speaker 1: was no interstate UH. And so that's Hugh glasses life
Speaker 1: before in eight three he signs on with the Rocky
Speaker 1: Mountain for Company to go out and be part of
Speaker 1: one of these first trapping parties that goes uh up
Speaker 1: to Missouri. And when they set out to do this,
Speaker 1: were they setting out to trap, were they setting out
Speaker 1: to trade? Or they set out to do a combination
Speaker 1: of the two. Probably a combination. UM most of the
Speaker 1: earliest trappers both trapped on their own but also traded
Speaker 1: with local tribes who would also bring in uh furs,
Speaker 1: and then they would obviously send those send those down river,
Speaker 1: and so probably both. Um, I want to jump to
Speaker 1: the death part, and then we'll get back to what
Speaker 1: happens in the middle of his life. Uh do you
Speaker 1: buy that? I don't even know where it comes from.
Speaker 1: Legend has and I learned where it comes from. Oh,
Speaker 1: and it's not true. Well I think it was true,
Speaker 1: and I'll tell you why. And this is where this
Speaker 1: is all coming together. Do you want to tell the story?
Speaker 1: Should I tell the story? Well, you tell a story,
Speaker 1: and then I'll tell the story the version effort that
Speaker 1: I know. Uh, they're on the Yellowstone and he's with
Speaker 1: some other trappers and they get into a skirmish with
Speaker 1: Indians and they wind up holding Do we know where
Speaker 1: about the yell Stone? It was going to the mouth
Speaker 1: of the Big Horn, wasn't there was a near the
Speaker 1: confluence of the Big Horn in the Yellowstone. They get
Speaker 1: into a skirmish was some uh erica, I think, And
Speaker 1: they want to hold up in a coolie and they can't.
Speaker 1: They got a little stronghold was not looking good for him,
Speaker 1: and the Indians decided to set fire to the grass.
Speaker 1: And they set fire to the grass and Huge Glass
Speaker 1: and his compatriots there, No, that just not looking good.
Speaker 1: And they touch a match or touch a spark to
Speaker 1: a powder keg and kill themselves. I don't buy it.
Speaker 1: Why not it's wrong that? Well, I'll tell I'll tell you.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you the story that was wrong with that.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you the story. First of all, what I
Speaker 1: heard is it happened in December or January, and the
Speaker 1: Yellowstone was frozen. So the grass fire bit seems a
Speaker 1: little implausible. Um, that's a strike against it. But I
Speaker 1: don't think it puts it to death. But hold on,
Speaker 1: I got more details and I'll tell you where they
Speaker 1: came from. Um. So, one of the fun little side
Speaker 1: forays in doing research for this new book, Ridgeline, is
Speaker 1: I read a biography about James Beckworth the African American
Speaker 1: Mountain and uh Beckworth claims to have found the body
Speaker 1: of Hugh Glass when he was killed. And the story
Speaker 1: that Beckworth tells is this, there was a trading post
Speaker 1: at the mouth of the of the Big Horn, and
Speaker 1: the Yellowstone that's that's a historical fact. Forecast I think
Speaker 1: was one of the I think that in that era,
Speaker 1: and it bounced up and down like a couple miles
Speaker 1: this direction, because there's a couple of different sites, so
Speaker 1: there's a trading post there Forecast, and I think they
Speaker 1: were primarily trading with the Crow, which were the I
Speaker 1: believe in that era, the dominant tribe in that part
Speaker 1: of the story exactly. And Uh, a group of crow
Speaker 1: comes into Forecast and wants to trade um and there
Speaker 1: are not enough goods at Forecast to trade as much
Speaker 1: as the as the as the Indians want to and
Speaker 1: so they dispatch two men from Forecast to a fort
Speaker 1: that's thirty miles away that's affiliated to go get more
Speaker 1: trading goods to bring Bratt back and trade with the crow.
Speaker 1: And Hugh Glass is one of the two guys that
Speaker 1: is dispatched to this other fort to go get more
Speaker 1: trading goods. And the story that Beckworth tells is that
Speaker 1: Glass was crossing the frozen uh Yellowstone River uh and
Speaker 1: was caught out on the ice in the open by
Speaker 1: a raiding party of Ricara, which was not expected in
Speaker 1: that territory in that era. And the Ricara catch him
Speaker 1: out on the glass and kill him. And Beckworth was
Speaker 1: one of the men who went out and found his
Speaker 1: meat ated body. M that's the story in that Beckworth
Speaker 1: tells who was the politician after they discredited the story
Speaker 1: of Paul Revere? Who is the politician? That said, Uh,
Speaker 1: I love Paul Revere, whether he wrote or not, meaning
Speaker 1: I'm sticking with the powder kick story. Well, look, I
Speaker 1: love Hugh Glass. Whichever way he died, that's still that's
Speaker 1: still a pretty epic life. And whether or not he
Speaker 1: was a captive of the pirates or not, look he
Speaker 1: uh he did. He did a lot of ship um
Speaker 1: and so definitely one of those kind of epic uh.
Speaker 1: Nineteenth century lives that I just think are so so
Speaker 1: much fun to study about. How do you pronounce the
Speaker 1: the spy intrigue novelist John law Lakara? I think somebody
Speaker 1: will tell us something we're wrong at that. I thought
Speaker 1: it was pronounced la car. It could be maybe it's
Speaker 1: a car. He's got a great quote he said, watching
Speaker 1: your book being made into a movie is like watching
Speaker 1: an ox and turned into a bull. Young cube. Uh.
Speaker 1: What was the experience like for you? Um? Well again,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna wine too much because but we're not
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not. I'm not asked. I'm not inviting
Speaker 1: you to one. I mean, it's like, listen, I probably
Speaker 1: the greatest thing that ever happened in the whole wide world.
Speaker 1: It was a blast. Who wouldn't want You'll notice that
Speaker 1: John Craze books are all movies. They're all movies. And
Speaker 1: I will tell you that before the movie was made.
Speaker 1: I'm not aware of anybody who read The Revenant who
Speaker 1: wasn't related to me or my friend, Like, I haven't
Speaker 1: read your book that reminds of your great story. Man,
Speaker 1: tell you the story real quick. I went to see
Speaker 1: this this writer one time, and uh, I want to
Speaker 1: see like a bookstory. Then he did, and he told
Speaker 1: a story. I don't know if it's true or not.
Speaker 1: It was a really fine story. He told a story
Speaker 1: that he was one time in a used bookstore okay,
Speaker 1: and sees his own book and he used bookstore and
Speaker 1: opens it and it's the inscribed copy that he gave
Speaker 1: to his mother. Oh man, that hurts. That hurts. I've
Speaker 1: seen a couple of inscribed copies of mine for sale
Speaker 1: on eBay, But my mom has never done that to me.
Speaker 1: She's I hope she sold a private song. If you're listening,
Speaker 1: don't tell me. I don't want to know. Um, but uh,
Speaker 1: but look, it was a blast to have a movie
Speaker 1: made out of my book, and it gave the book
Speaker 1: a huge life. The revenue means back from the dead,
Speaker 1: and you know that's literally what the revenue means. Somehow
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. Yeah, that's what it means, and
Speaker 1: it does it. I feel I feel so like lazy
Speaker 1: now to have not found that out, because I always wondered,
Speaker 1: like why, Well, it comes from French. From it it's
Speaker 1: a it's an English word revenant, but it comes from
Speaker 1: a French word revenue to return to come back really,
Speaker 1: and so it means literally one who returns from the dead.
Speaker 1: Halfway good at my job. That'll been my first question. Um. So, look,
Speaker 1: I feel like the movie brought the book back from
Speaker 1: the dead. And uh, you know, a lot of people
Speaker 1: read the book who otherwise wouldn't have. And it's given
Speaker 1: me an opportunity to write more books and I'm excited
Speaker 1: about that. Are you're disappointed how the book publishing experience went? Uh? Initially?
Speaker 1: You mean when it when it only sold to my
Speaker 1: mom and her friends. Sorry to crawl back, Um, it's
Speaker 1: your book. Did your booked had done well? My first Well,
Speaker 1: they've done well over time. My first book didn't do
Speaker 1: well out of the gate. Well, dude, it was horrible.
Speaker 1: It's horrible. I didn't think they're gonna let me writ
Speaker 1: new more books. Well, I I I'm having a lot
Speaker 1: more opportunities to write books after the Revenant. It's it's easier,
Speaker 1: easier now than it was before. But um, the overall experience,
Speaker 1: I was overseas working for the U. S. Government when uh,
Speaker 1: when the movie was was being shot, and so I was, um,
Speaker 1: how soon after publication? Right? Well, like when did someone
Speaker 1: come and say, like when they bought the film rights?
Speaker 1: Was one of those deals that they give you like
Speaker 1: a dollar a year until it goes into production. It
Speaker 1: was like a real sale. It was a real sale.
Speaker 1: It I still needed to work vigorously, but it was
Speaker 1: you know, it was. It was more than a dollar
Speaker 1: a year for the option. But to tell you how
Speaker 1: long it took, we optioned it actually before we sold
Speaker 1: the book. We sold, we sold, we optioned the film
Speaker 1: rights before we sold the book itself. Um, but the
Speaker 1: first time when I somebody told me it was going
Speaker 1: to be a movie. Uh, and I got super excited
Speaker 1: about this. Uh. They told me that it was gonna
Speaker 1: be directed by Michael Man and and star Daniel day
Speaker 1: Lewis as Hugh Glass and uh and yeah and over
Speaker 1: the course of the next uh twelve years really, oh
Speaker 1: my god. Yeah. It was first option in two thousand
Speaker 1: and one and it became a movie in two thousand
Speaker 1: and I'll never say die Man so Revenant Back from
Speaker 1: the Dead. So that's the funny thing is like, I know,
Speaker 1: you know some of the writers who haven't been through
Speaker 1: this many times and they option something yeah, and then
Speaker 1: they call up like they're gonna yea And I was like, no,
Speaker 1: well you got probably not what they told me at
Speaker 1: the beginning. And this just set my expectations is that
Speaker 1: about one out of three things that gets optioned turned
Speaker 1: into a movie. So my expectations were that the odds
Speaker 1: were against me. Um. But I just call people telling
Speaker 1: everybody like, it's gonna be a big, huge body. I
Speaker 1: didn't tell him it's going to be. I was a
Speaker 1: little more circumspect than that, and it turned out to
Speaker 1: be a good thing. For a long time. And then
Speaker 1: even when it you know, when I heard that, uh
Speaker 1: you know, DiCaprio is going to star in it, and
Speaker 1: uh interview two was kind of directed, I still kind
Speaker 1: of had some scar tissue there that I didn't quite
Speaker 1: believe it. But uh yeah, well more I guess, uh,
Speaker 1: fourteen it became a movie, and two thousand and one
Speaker 1: when it was first option, so I'd gone on with
Speaker 1: my life. Believe me, I was. I wouldn't hold of
Speaker 1: my breath. Um. But but look when they that My
Speaker 1: big thing when I write books is I I love
Speaker 1: history and I want my books to be as historically
Speaker 1: accurate as possible. And to me, that's part of the
Speaker 1: even when you're writing fiction, you ought to really care
Speaker 1: about historical accuracy because I don't want to mislead people
Speaker 1: all and and frankly, history is so great that you
Speaker 1: don't have to make up tons of shipped for it
Speaker 1: to be an amazing story. Um. That said, you know,
Speaker 1: the part of the Revenant my book that people don't
Speaker 1: like is uh the ending, and the ending of my
Speaker 1: book without giving it away, is true to history. It
Speaker 1: is not a Hollywood ending. Uh it is it is Uh,
Speaker 1: it is not the good guy rolling around on the
Speaker 1: ground with the bad guy. And the movie I think
Speaker 1: was never gonna get made without Hollywood ending of the
Speaker 1: good guy rolling around on the ground with a bad guy.
Speaker 1: And uh, and so where does that pressure come from,
Speaker 1: do you think? I think that one difference between book
Speaker 1: world and movie world is just the amount of money
Speaker 1: that's involved. Um. You know, when somebody publishes a book,
Speaker 1: they're not uh risking a whole lot of money. And
Speaker 1: if the book fails, and most books do, um, you know,
Speaker 1: the publishers not doesn't lose their their fortune. A big
Speaker 1: movie and you know, The Revenant I think was a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty million dollars to shoot and another hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty million dollars to to publicize, So three hundred
Speaker 1: million dollars. They're not gonna risk too much about people,
Speaker 1: not like in the ending. And there's a reason there's
Speaker 1: something called the Hollywood ending. It's because audiences like that.
Speaker 1: Audiences want the bad guy to get hacked up by
Speaker 1: the good guy and uh, and so that's what happens
Speaker 1: in the movie. And uh, and it worked because it
Speaker 1: made a half billion dollars. And so surprising what you're
Speaker 1: saying about that it's an interesting point about the money
Speaker 1: because I used to kind of marvel at um. You know,
Speaker 1: a publisher with a certain amount of power can just
Speaker 1: on their own buy book, right if they've proven themselves
Speaker 1: like one individual with only getting like they can just
Speaker 1: get a rubber stamp from who'seever above them and they
Speaker 1: could buy a book. And you can send some writer
Speaker 1: off into exile, you know, for a year, and they
Speaker 1: come back and here's this thing. It's like it's it's
Speaker 1: been impacted by like there's a couple of people, right,
Speaker 1: but also it becomes this thing that's a globally available
Speaker 1: um and it's not a lot to like went into it,
Speaker 1: but here does. But that's a great point with like
Speaker 1: a movie. It's like man, like, uh, many many careers
Speaker 1: around the line, huge amounts of money is on the line.
Speaker 1: It's not like this like it just used to start,
Speaker 1: Like how could it be like that easy to make
Speaker 1: a book? You know that the financial models are dramatically
Speaker 1: different between between book and film, and there's just uh.
Speaker 1: The other example I always think is funny is a
Speaker 1: a book contract is about six pages long and basically
Speaker 1: the whole thing says they can't change a word without
Speaker 1: your permission. A a movie contract is about sixty pages long,
Speaker 1: and basically the whole thing says they can change anything
Speaker 1: they want without your permission. And and so you go
Speaker 1: into the exercise knowing that that your story is going
Speaker 1: to get changed and it's going to be a collaborative,
Speaker 1: uh enterprise. And if if you're not comfortable with that,
Speaker 1: you shouldn't sign the contract. It's just it's a it's
Speaker 1: a different exercise. I mean there's writers involved, and directors
Speaker 1: and actors who interpret and committees who you know, look
Speaker 1: at all that stuff. Um, and so it's just it's
Speaker 1: just a very different process. And and look, uh, the
Speaker 1: from a very selfish standpoint, I love The Revenant because
Speaker 1: it brought the book back to life. But there's there's
Speaker 1: a lot of things I love about that movie. I
Speaker 1: think it uh uh. I think it does h a
Speaker 1: a great job of kind of transporting people to kind
Speaker 1: of a different place and time and giving people a
Speaker 1: sense of just how hard life was in that era
Speaker 1: and the you know, the courage that the people who
Speaker 1: went out there in that in that time frame and
Speaker 1: we're willing to take that risk. Um. I think it's
Speaker 1: well acted. I think it's beautifully shot. I'm a little
Speaker 1: irked that, you know, part of it takes place in
Speaker 1: a rainforest. I've been to South Dakota. It's a beautiful state.
Speaker 1: I didn't see any rainforest when I was there. Uh,
Speaker 1: and so that part of it bothered me. We've had
Speaker 1: a couple of laughs, Like, you know, we've joked about, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, my dissatisfaction with it, and this is like,
Speaker 1: you know, to be perfect fright, Like this has absolutely
Speaker 1: nothing to do with you. Like it. It's a phenomenal book.
Speaker 1: I had known that story and loved that story my
Speaker 1: entire life, and I um, in hanging around the West,
Speaker 1: I had developed that story to be that in my
Speaker 1: head it like occurred in the like arid grasslands, the
Speaker 1: willow lined streams, the sage brush. It did, and it
Speaker 1: would be as though someone told your own story and
Speaker 1: then your own story of growing up, but then put
Speaker 1: it in a different house. And so that really, um
Speaker 1: was a situation where I looked and I couldn't even
Speaker 1: pay attention to the movie. I was so like, like
Speaker 1: just a gas right, because um, that's the most I think,
Speaker 1: that's like the most beautiful landscape on the planet. Right,
Speaker 1: It's it's just like the it's just ripe enrich. And
Speaker 1: to have to imagine someone coming and saying, to imagine
Speaker 1: a director a group of producers looking at that the
Speaker 1: arid grasslands like the Great Plains, looking and being like,
Speaker 1: oh uh no, not like that. I thought it would
Speaker 1: be more like right. It's like it's almost like, um,
Speaker 1: it feels to me like uh them uh disapproving of
Speaker 1: my like inner self. That's where my great that that's
Speaker 1: my only great. But it's like we've gotten a little
Speaker 1: bit of mileage out of complaining about it. Was just
Speaker 1: that it was like it was like a condemnation of uh,
Speaker 1: a landscape that is very dear to me. We were
Speaker 1: talking earlier. I grew up on the high Plains. I
Speaker 1: grew up in eastern Wyoming, and uh, you know, eastern Wyoming,
Speaker 1: like eastern Montana, like a big chunk of of South
Speaker 1: Dakota is high plains. And I I love it. I
Speaker 1: think it's epically beautiful. Um, it doesn't look like what
Speaker 1: people who don't live out here have in their mind's
Speaker 1: eye a lot of times when they think about Wyoming
Speaker 1: or Montana, when they when people on the coast think
Speaker 1: about Wyoming and Montana. They think about, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the t tons and Glacier National Park and kind of
Speaker 1: the the epic mountain vistas. And don't get me wrong,
Speaker 1: I love the mountains too. Those are easy to Uh.
Speaker 1: I think anybody can appreciate that, the high plains. Uh,
Speaker 1: they may. I wonder if they don't require most people
Speaker 1: to kind of grow up in that environment to be
Speaker 1: able to appreciate it the way that I think you
Speaker 1: and I do. Yeah, maybe it takes a little bit
Speaker 1: of a trained a little bit more of an acquired taste. Uh.
Speaker 1: I think you you kind of grow up in that
Speaker 1: and and you uh you know. Just to to give
Speaker 1: my irk about my least favorite description of the planes
Speaker 1: is oftentimes writers who don't understand the planes will describe
Speaker 1: the featureless planes. And it drives me crazy because when
Speaker 1: you walk across the plains, there is so much feature.
Speaker 1: Uh it's just that it's a lot more subtle than
Speaker 1: you know, a mountain jutting up uh to a snow
Speaker 1: capped peak. But uh, you know, asked the guys who
Speaker 1: rode over the ridgeline uh in the Fetterman fight. Uh,
Speaker 1: it was how featureless it was because there were there
Speaker 1: were two thousand Indians hiding in that featureless plane, and
Speaker 1: so asked them how featureless. It's only featureless if you
Speaker 1: maybe haven't walked a few miles, and once you have,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't say that anymore. I say, I pointed out
Speaker 1: to people about hunting antelope will be like my antalope
Speaker 1: hunting strategy. This is basically, you find some way off
Speaker 1: and then the hunt plan is to hunt all the
Speaker 1: ones that you will encounter on the way over to
Speaker 1: the ones you see way off, Like there's so let's
Speaker 1: just go in that direction. Undoubtedly we'll find many more.
Speaker 1: And all the folds increases that curved between here and there,
Speaker 1: you can see a long way on the plains. And
Speaker 1: I love, uh, you know, where I grew up in
Speaker 1: eastern Wyoming, there were you could see Laramie Peak and
Speaker 1: that was uh you know, that was seventy miles away
Speaker 1: from my hometown and you could see that, uh clear
Speaker 1: as day. I love having a seventy mile horizon. That's
Speaker 1: a cool thing. But there was a lot between between
Speaker 1: where you are and the horizon, and it's it ain't
Speaker 1: feature it ain't featureless. I want to get into the
Speaker 1: reprint of Last Stand guys, A quick question before we
Speaker 1: leave the movie? What did UH like daily or was
Speaker 1: there daily? What did collaboration look like you and the
Speaker 1: folks that made the movie? So I as I, as
Speaker 1: I mentioned, I was living overseas at the time, you know,
Speaker 1: working for the for the government, and and was uh
Speaker 1: you know, eight time zones away from where they were filming.
Speaker 1: So honestly, not a ton uh, But that's said the
Speaker 1: one of my good friends, a guy named Keith Redman,
Speaker 1: who's had a company called Anonymous Content, produced the movie
Speaker 1: and he involved me in ways that he could. Also,
Speaker 1: the screenwriter for the Revenue is a guy named Mark Smith,
Speaker 1: another great guy who's very collaborative, and both Keith and
Speaker 1: Mark were very generous in letting me know things that
Speaker 1: were going on. Uh. Mark Smith shared drafts of the
Speaker 1: script at a couple of different junctures with me. I
Speaker 1: made my h historical points which were pretty uniformly ignored.
Speaker 1: But I had my chance at least to see the
Speaker 1: script and kind of see it evolve. Um, So I
Speaker 1: was not uh involved in a detailed way. One of
Speaker 1: the things I that irked me out of that process
Speaker 1: of the Revenue is that I couldn't write the screenplay
Speaker 1: because I've never written a screenplay, and when I moved
Speaker 1: back to Montana, one of the things I learned how
Speaker 1: to do was write screenplays because I kind of vowed
Speaker 1: that I would never have one of my stories turned
Speaker 1: into uh uh you know, a movie again without me
Speaker 1: writing it. And so I'm I'm hoping if there is,
Speaker 1: if there's interest in in this new one Ridge line
Speaker 1: that that that I'll be the writer for that. Do
Speaker 1: you think that it's a little bit dishonest? Um? Do
Speaker 1: you think it's a moral problem with taking history, like
Speaker 1: in the case of Huge Glass and like what Huge
Speaker 1: Glass actually did, um, and making it be that something
Speaker 1: different happened. Do you think it's a little bit of
Speaker 1: moral Um? I guess it depends on how extreme the
Speaker 1: retelling is and whether it uh distorts his story in
Speaker 1: a way that that I mean, For example, Uh, I
Speaker 1: think the way that the Native American story has been
Speaker 1: told in traditional American westerns uh is uh there is
Speaker 1: an immoral immorality in that because it doesn't tell very
Speaker 1: much about about their perspective on things that were happening. UM.
Speaker 1: I understand that that that people will also always seek
Speaker 1: to tell stories that are uh interesting and compelling to
Speaker 1: an audience and entertaining to an audience, and some of
Speaker 1: that I think is is okay. One of the things
Speaker 1: I did at the end of The Revenant, uh, and
Speaker 1: that I do at the end of my of my
Speaker 1: new book is I put I tell the reader where
Speaker 1: I've veered from the truth, and if I made up
Speaker 1: a character, I tell him I made this character up.
Speaker 1: Because you even point out that that you even acknowledge
Speaker 1: that there's some debate about whether or not it was
Speaker 1: Bridger um. And I just think when I'm done reading
Speaker 1: a book, I want to know what what was real
Speaker 1: and what wasn't. And obviously people can can go to
Speaker 1: their own research, and I also try and list books
Speaker 1: that people can go read about nonfiction books to kind
Speaker 1: of learn from themselves or whatever. But I I do
Speaker 1: think that we live in an era where we've lost
Speaker 1: the line between fact and fiction, and so I think
Speaker 1: there's an additional responsibility on on writers, including writers of fiction,
Speaker 1: to be honest about where they are veering off what
Speaker 1: is historical fact. And it doesn't mean that every story
Speaker 1: has to be a a historical treatise. I think there's
Speaker 1: plenty of room for uh, fictional historical fiction. Uh, fictional
Speaker 1: tellings of historical events. But I think we have an
Speaker 1: extra responsibility to to be accurate and to help the
Speaker 1: reader know what's true and what's not. It gives you, yeah,
Speaker 1: because it helps you understand like what can and cannot
Speaker 1: happen in the world. Yeah, and uh and I I
Speaker 1: mean I've always been irked by stories that, especially films,
Speaker 1: because the medium of film is so powerful and uh,
Speaker 1: there's you know, there's whole generations of people who we'll
Speaker 1: see a film and that will be the main ah
Speaker 1: sort of entree point that they have to a particular
Speaker 1: historical incident. And so you know, uh, stories with extreme
Speaker 1: uh conspiracies about the assassination of jfk Uh to me
Speaker 1: bother me because I think they they give a distorted
Speaker 1: perception of history. For example. Uh, I want to touch
Speaker 1: on the reprint of Last Stand, But first I have
Speaker 1: a question for you, because you you know your mountain
Speaker 1: Man stuff. Well, you mentioned Laramie Peak. What's your understanding
Speaker 1: of deal the story of Laramie, of Jacques Laramie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like the sort of absence of a story of Laramie. Uh, Well,
Speaker 1: you tell me, I'm not I know a little bit
Speaker 1: about this, but I'm not sure exactly where you're going. Oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's he's known for being killed by the Indians.
Speaker 1: And then and then was there was not stuffed down
Speaker 1: under the ice and the beaver pond. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: the guy went like bridge like, I mean, she's got
Speaker 1: half the state named after him, this and other states.
Speaker 1: That dude made off like a bandit, and no one
Speaker 1: knows what the hell he was, just like shows up
Speaker 1: and promptly gets killed. And then here's the thing. If
Speaker 1: you're gonna get killed in that era, try and get
Speaker 1: killed next to a river, because if it gets killed
Speaker 1: next to the river, uh, there's a good chance that
Speaker 1: the river is going to be named after you. And
Speaker 1: then whatever forts and towns they put on the river
Speaker 1: might also get named after you. And if there's a
Speaker 1: mountain of bumps into the river, the mountain might get
Speaker 1: named after you. And of course that's exactly what what
Speaker 1: happened with Jacques laurent A. Uh in Lolo, Yeah, Lolo
Speaker 1: got killed like this dude, Lulu, he spelled his name
Speaker 1: spelled the hunter way, Lulu, Lolo whatever, gets killed by
Speaker 1: a grizzly bear and people like, oh, you know the
Speaker 1: creek worl Lolo got killed Scott's Bluff, and then Priests
Speaker 1: was like Lolo the town Lolo, the Creek Lolo, the
Speaker 1: Peak Lolo, the national for Meanwhile, the first thing about
Speaker 1: this dude, well, I have in in the new book,
Speaker 1: I have Bridger as an old man, uh, kind of
Speaker 1: reflecting on the fact that there's a bunch of stuff
Speaker 1: named after him now and and kind of oh yeah absolutely,
Speaker 1: um yeah um, and uh being happy that he didn't
Speaker 1: have to die. I have him standing on top of
Speaker 1: Scott's Bluff, which was named after Scott, who was the
Speaker 1: story he was, Uh, nobody does, nobody else does either.
Speaker 1: Scott was killed by the Indians and died with his
Speaker 1: back up against Scott's Bluff, and so they named it
Speaker 1: Scott's Bluff, Scott's Bluff, you know where Scott died. Um,
Speaker 1: And I have Bridger reflecting on that that that he's
Speaker 1: happy that he didn't have to get killed to get
Speaker 1: stuff named after him. So anyway that was hitting during
Speaker 1: his lifetime. Yeah, oh absolutely, yeah. Um. So he really was,
Speaker 1: like he's just a well known dude. He's he is
Speaker 1: a rock star in terms of fame in his uh well,
Speaker 1: certainly when he's a sixty year old, he's he's famous
Speaker 1: among the soldiers that he's he's guiding. I mean he's uh,
Speaker 1: you know, he was already a legend in his own time,
Speaker 1: and and and it it's been a long time by
Speaker 1: the way he was. It was he'd been on the
Speaker 1: planes for forty plus years at the time he's guiding
Speaker 1: for the army. So he's and this is a place
Speaker 1: where where they're there. The numbers of people out here
Speaker 1: we're not large, and the numbers of places where they
Speaker 1: went were not large. So people bumped into each other.
Speaker 1: I mean talking about last stand the you know, the
Speaker 1: person that that books about George burg Grinnell. I was
Speaker 1: amazed when I was doing the research on him, because
Speaker 1: he meets, he meets everybody. He meets, uh, he meets
Speaker 1: Buffalo Bill, he meets he goes campaigning, uh with Custer, Uh,
Speaker 1: he meets Brigham Young. I mean, he just he bumps
Speaker 1: into everybody. And but it kind of makes sense because
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of like being from a small
Speaker 1: state from well he was like Forrest gum Um and uh.
Speaker 1: But you know, if you live in a in a
Speaker 1: small statement like Montana. It's not crazy that you meet
Speaker 1: somebody and it doesn't take very long before you both
Speaker 1: know somebody in common. And it's because it's a big state,
Speaker 1: but there's you know, there's not that many towns. And Custer, oh,
Speaker 1: not only did he know Custer, of we're talking about
Speaker 1: Grenelle now um. And this the Buffalo book, uh that's
Speaker 1: called Last Stand is about this this nineteenth century hunter
Speaker 1: conservationist named georgeburg Grannell, and he not only did he
Speaker 1: know Custer, but he goes on campaign with Custer. In
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy four, when Custer is sent out to survey
Speaker 1: the Black Hills, Grizzly shoots a huge gride s eight
Speaker 1: the an amazing foot as an amazing bear. Um. And
Speaker 1: but it's on that. The other thing Custer takes along
Speaker 1: on that expedition is he takes miners with him because
Speaker 1: there's rumors of gold in the Black Hills and Custer
Speaker 1: wants to be the one to discover it. And they
Speaker 1: discover gold on this eight seventy four exploration. Custer sends
Speaker 1: a messenger back to Fort Laramie to tell him that
Speaker 1: there's gold in the Black Hills and the gold rush
Speaker 1: is on uh into the heart of the territory that
Speaker 1: was given back uh to the Uh, to the Lakota
Speaker 1: and the Cheyenne at the end of the Fetterman massacre.
Speaker 1: They said, you're right. Uh. So when when when Fetterman
Speaker 1: is defeated and the U. S. Army retreats, they give
Speaker 1: back to the to the Lakota and the Cheyenne. The
Speaker 1: Lakota taken the Black Hills from the Cheyenne from well
Speaker 1: from It's even more complicated than that. And I they
Speaker 1: were all sorts, you know, the all sorts of tribes
Speaker 1: are in there. And that's a complicated prehistory. But just
Speaker 1: in terms of the US piece of the history, they
Speaker 1: seed it back uh in eighteen sixty seven, I think,
Speaker 1: which is when they negotiated the treaty after the after
Speaker 1: the Fetterment fight, and then they in the eighteen seventy
Speaker 1: four when they discover gold, they say, changed our minds.
Speaker 1: You know, we know we have given you two treaties now,
Speaker 1: but the second second one we want to renegotiate as well. Uh.
Speaker 1: When when the Lakota won't renegotiate, it's war, and that's
Speaker 1: when Custer. Then that sets in motion the events that
Speaker 1: lead to the Battle of a Little Big Horn within
Speaker 1: a year and a half, two years, we're talking about fame,
Speaker 1: Bridge are having fame cost She was known to the
Speaker 1: people that killed him. Yeah, and there I guess there's
Speaker 1: some debate about whether or not that he had just
Speaker 1: recently cut his hair. He cut his hair short, his
Speaker 1: wife took the hair, and then after his death had
Speaker 1: a wig made of her husband's hair. She's a fascinating
Speaker 1: character herself. And there's like debate about whether or not
Speaker 1: the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne recognized Custer's body on the
Speaker 1: battlefield because he didn't have his hair. And it was
Speaker 1: a woman that pointed out that that we found him
Speaker 1: and knew who he was, and that she had taken
Speaker 1: a sewing all and punched a hole through his ear
Speaker 1: drums so that in the afterlife he would better hear
Speaker 1: the warnings. And then she used her pony to kick
Speaker 1: up dirt on him, and she says, she says that
Speaker 1: she knew him. Yeah, people running around knowing each other.
Speaker 1: He's coming for you. It's you know, people were they
Speaker 1: were not huge numbers of people in even it's though
Speaker 1: it's vast territory. They were not huge numbers of people.
Speaker 1: So walk us through Grenell real quick, though, do you
Speaker 1: did you when you resea all the stuff? Did you
Speaker 1: find that these guys ever reflected because like he's like
Speaker 1: Steve was saying, they died so much, right, so at
Speaker 1: age sixty, did you ever find them reflecting on how
Speaker 1: lucky they must have been? Well? Um, I didn't find there.
Speaker 1: There's there's some great UH people who write when Bridger
Speaker 1: was still alive about conversations they had with him, and
Speaker 1: they'll so they were these nineteenth century people saying I
Speaker 1: was on a UH, I was on a long ride
Speaker 1: horseback ride with with Bridger and he told me this story.
Speaker 1: Or I was at Fort Laramie at the same time
Speaker 1: the bridge was there, and I heard him tell all
Speaker 1: these stories and I'm gonna write, I'm gonna write down
Speaker 1: all these stories he told. So there's there's those types
Speaker 1: of of stories. Um. I don't remember Bridger ever actually
Speaker 1: saying or being said to upset that he had been lucky. Um,
Speaker 1: but I just again, it's hard to imagine that that
Speaker 1: he didn't recognize that there was some measure of of
Speaker 1: luck in there. And and look at somebody like Hugh Glass.
Speaker 1: I mean, Hug Glass was a talented frontiersman and a
Speaker 1: tough badass who've survived, you know, being mauled by a
Speaker 1: grizzly bear and crawling two miles by himself with no weapons.
Speaker 1: Um and he still ends up I think, uh, in
Speaker 1: the wrong place at the wrong time, you know, walking
Speaker 1: across the frozen Yellowstone and gets caught and killed. And
Speaker 1: so he had a day of bad luck. Good you got.
Speaker 1: It's like a few scraps. The other thing about those
Speaker 1: guys is, you know, we think about like getting mauled
Speaker 1: by a grizzly bear or dying in a in a
Speaker 1: fight with with Indians. But you know, if if you're
Speaker 1: out on your own in the frontier and you snap
Speaker 1: your ankle, you're freaking dead. You know, the the odds
Speaker 1: that you can. Or or you get sick and in
Speaker 1: the middle of the winter and you're off on your own,
Speaker 1: the odds that you can, you know, do all the
Speaker 1: things you need to do to survive with a broken ankle,
Speaker 1: or if you're laid up with a fever for two weeks.
Speaker 1: I don't think it took very much for a lot
Speaker 1: of those guys to die, and Uh, it's just that
Speaker 1: those aren't as as movie worthy, you know, the guy
Speaker 1: who died at the flu You know, I want to
Speaker 1: touch I keep I do want to get to this grenelle, gentleman,
Speaker 1: but I've to tell you our thing. Have you read
Speaker 1: the journal I've been talking about a lot lately, Life
Speaker 1: and Death at the Mouth of the Muscle Shell. Now,
Speaker 1: it's a guy. He spends a couple of years at
Speaker 1: the mouth of where the muscle Shell flows into Missouri.
Speaker 1: Like most the action takes places all in of water
Speaker 1: now because because the four Peck reservoir. Um, it's just
Speaker 1: his like daily account. So'll be like Monday, you know,
Speaker 1: Sonny and warm river came up two inches Tuesday, fight
Speaker 1: Bob got killed, sixties Yeah, huge fight, Bob got killed.
Speaker 1: Finally found Dave's body. Like Wednesday, Sonny again turned cold
Speaker 1: towards evening. Um, the historian that that collected and published
Speaker 1: this journal and commented on this journal, Uh, took it
Speaker 1: upon himself to try to corroborate the existence of all
Speaker 1: of these individuals who are coming and going from this
Speaker 1: outpost at the mouth of the muscle Shell River. So
Speaker 1: the guy, I'll be like, you know, old you know,
Speaker 1: Jed Tompkins came through on the way to check his
Speaker 1: wolf poison baits right, And then the historian will going,
Speaker 1: who is Jed Tompkins And he's like, turns out we
Speaker 1: find record of Jed Tompkins uh taking a line of
Speaker 1: credit at some store in St. Louis. And he's able
Speaker 1: to find the people that come and go. Some other
Speaker 1: mentioned some sometimes like like there's a woman that gets
Speaker 1: scalped and survived. Um, he later learns that she he
Speaker 1: writes about how she wore men's clothing. Um, everybody called
Speaker 1: her names that he said, names that can't be mentioned.
Speaker 1: And you get this portrait of this woman that there's
Speaker 1: this woman who's probably gay at a time it was
Speaker 1: completely unacceptable dressed as a man, was named all these
Speaker 1: derogatory remarks. She eventually marries a guy. He moves her
Speaker 1: down to Colorado. She blows her brains out. All you
Speaker 1: hear about her in the life that of the mouse
Speaker 1: of the muscle shell. So and so got scalped and
Speaker 1: looks like she's gonna make it. But he then was
Speaker 1: able to like like who, Like, who the hell was
Speaker 1: this right? And it's just just just like heartbreaking story
Speaker 1: of like someone who eventually, like what ever, resigns, marries
Speaker 1: a guy and kills herself, Like what the hell happened there?
Speaker 1: But uh, I was in his other book recently, and
Speaker 1: there's this like this character that emerges in the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds of Miles City, Montana, and there's no mention
Speaker 1: of him. But there's this kid whose dad was a
Speaker 1: doctor in Miles City in late eighteen hundreds, and the
Speaker 1: kid he's like later on in life, he's describing who
Speaker 1: comes to his dad who's a doctor. He describes a
Speaker 1: guy coming in who had been long ago scalped and
Speaker 1: it was all healed over, but you still see the
Speaker 1: veins on top of his head and all of his
Speaker 1: fingers had been removed at them at the middle joint. God, Okay,
Speaker 1: who the hell was that guy? Like that? There's a
Speaker 1: story and one hand we're talking about how everybody knows
Speaker 1: these people and they're always running into each other, but
Speaker 1: also it's like, how do you get to be that guy?
Speaker 1: And the only mention is some kid later recollects that
Speaker 1: this dude paid his dad a visit at a doctor
Speaker 1: and had been tortured and had all of his fingers
Speaker 1: removed at the knuckle and his scolts removed, and like
Speaker 1: no one else wrote this down. If you were running
Speaker 1: around town now missing your scalp and all your fingers,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't make your way into lots of materials. The
Speaker 1: fact that that was not more noteworthy tells you something
Speaker 1: about the general population reading them, Like, Okay, I understand it.
Speaker 1: I understand everything now as absolutely uh. But George Burgernell um,
Speaker 1: so I had never heard I had this. I was
Speaker 1: interested when I read your uh, when I read American Buffalo,
Speaker 1: your book at kind of your entree point to the
Speaker 1: Buffalo story and finding the skull and going on this
Speaker 1: hunt which sits in my living room today. I gotta
Speaker 1: see that. Um. But uh, it was interesting to me
Speaker 1: that that was kind of your entree point. My entree
Speaker 1: point to the Buffalo story is after I wrote the
Speaker 1: book about Beaute, I was I had this luxury of
Speaker 1: of literally a month where my my job was to
Speaker 1: go find a new story to write about. And I
Speaker 1: went to the University of Montana library and for a
Speaker 1: month literally just wandered the stacks, kind of follow my
Speaker 1: nose from things that interested me to things that interested me.
Speaker 1: And as I did that, I kind of started getting
Speaker 1: the idea. I'd always been fascinated with the buffalo, and
Speaker 1: I thought about doing a book about the buffalo. And
Speaker 1: then my idea was, I was going to do a
Speaker 1: book about the history of the West as told true
Speaker 1: the Buffalo. And I thought it was cool because you
Speaker 1: could do prehistoric times. You could do Native Americans before
Speaker 1: the arrival of the whites. You could do uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the fur trade. You could do the early fur trade era.
Speaker 1: You could do the buffalo hunting era. You could do
Speaker 1: the birth of the conservation movement. You could tell that
Speaker 1: whole story just through the prison of the Buffalo. And
Speaker 1: that was the book that I was going to write.
Speaker 1: And then I came across this guy, George burg Grunnell,
Speaker 1: who I had never heard of, who it turns out,
Speaker 1: doesn't live through all of that exactly, but he his life,
Speaker 1: he lives through a significant chunk of it, and uh,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't believe I've never heard of him before,
Speaker 1: because he literally is in many ways, the the guy
Speaker 1: who's most responsible for preserving Yellowstone National Park, for uh,
Speaker 1: the establishment of Glacier and along the way, he's largely
Speaker 1: responsible for saving the buffalo from being you know, completely
Speaker 1: exterminated on the North American continent. And so I decided
Speaker 1: i'd write use him as kind of the human vehicle
Speaker 1: to tell the story of the buffalo in a in
Speaker 1: a somewhat similar way to to which you use your
Speaker 1: own experience of fine skull and and going on the hunt.
Speaker 1: And then we've in other parts of the story stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but speaking of which, and I really appreciate your constructive
Speaker 1: criticism on the Revenant and uh and I was just
Speaker 1: gonna ask you about something and I don't talk about now,
Speaker 1: Well there's that. I mean, how did you miss that?
Speaker 1: Come on? But I think the reason you didn't talk
Speaker 1: about Grenell is because you devote so many paragraphs to
Speaker 1: the buffalo Penis. There is like long, long paragraphs about
Speaker 1: the buffalo. Penis. Got to cut this really influential figure Grinnell,
Speaker 1: or you gotta cut some of your penis material. And
Speaker 1: I slept on it and decided just and the decision
Speaker 1: you may probably explains why your Buffalo books sold more
Speaker 1: than mine did so, but as a result, I can't
Speaker 1: even like, I can't even have my children read this anymore.
Speaker 1: It's like, I mean, come on, what the hell so anyway, Um,
Speaker 1: but we digress. Yeah, I think that I uh as
Speaker 1: being not as historian, I'm able to just focus, Like
Speaker 1: I said, I made a joke, but I'm able to
Speaker 1: focus on the weird stuff. Well, that's a great thing
Speaker 1: about the buffalo, that is. I love a lot of
Speaker 1: the the factoids about about the buffalo, Like you know,
Speaker 1: ten times more hair per square inch than a cow,
Speaker 1: which kind of helps you explain why they do. Okay, Um,
Speaker 1: you know the frozen prairie and the birth success rate, Yeah,
Speaker 1: compared to a cow that was aver. And not only that,
Speaker 1: but it's still it's amazing to me that a buffalo
Speaker 1: calf stands at two minutes and can run with a
Speaker 1: herd at the age of one hour. Like I don't
Speaker 1: I don't even get physiologically how muscles can possibly work
Speaker 1: to do that. There's there's a there's a recorded incident
Speaker 1: of I think a three or four day old calf
Speaker 1: running seventy miles with a herd, and just like, that's
Speaker 1: an amazing animal. And so it's it's not surprising in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways that it has this kind of
Speaker 1: iconic stature that it does. But one of the things
Speaker 1: I love so much about about the Grenelle story is
Speaker 1: it really is about the birth of the conservation movement,
Speaker 1: and the birth of the conservation movement really is about
Speaker 1: hunters in a really significant way. What do you think,
Speaker 1: what do you think it was? It was it like
Speaker 1: was it like like, oh my god, what did we do?
Speaker 1: Like like what was in these guys heads? Because he
Speaker 1: was a hunter, right, I mean, he was totally a hunter. Um,
Speaker 1: well he has I'll talk about Grenelle and then and
Speaker 1: then the hunter piece of it, because I think he
Speaker 1: had a couple of incredibly unique experiences that made him,
Speaker 1: i think, able to understand what was going on better
Speaker 1: than most other people could have at the time. One
Speaker 1: thing he understood is when he right, when he got
Speaker 1: out of college and he this is a guy who's
Speaker 1: an East Coast elitist and goes to Yale and his
Speaker 1: father is a rich New York lawyer, but he wants
Speaker 1: to go west. Grinell wants to go west. And he
Speaker 1: comes out in I think eighteen seventy with a Yale
Speaker 1: professor who's doing a dinosaur bone hunt in uh in
Speaker 1: the West, and so he comes out, you know, and
Speaker 1: they're all over like Nebraska, Wyoming and it's still a
Speaker 1: war zone there. The U. S. Cavalry guarded them while
Speaker 1: they while they dug. But what he's digging out, oh
Speaker 1: my god. But what Grennelle is doing in eighteen seventy
Speaker 1: is he's digging up like triceratops bones in Nebraska and
Speaker 1: camel bones and miniature horses. And so what Grennelle understood
Speaker 1: from his own kind of uh tangible experience, is that
Speaker 1: extinction could happen. And this is in an era of
Speaker 1: the the myth of inexhaustibility where people not for crazy reasons,
Speaker 1: by the way, I thought we can't kill all the buffalo.
Speaker 1: There's so many buffalo. The resources out here are are inexhaustible,
Speaker 1: and and so but grennell had that that experience of
Speaker 1: seeing that some stuff that used to be living I
Speaker 1: wasn't here anymore. So that was one of his his experiences,
Speaker 1: his other experience, and he made that connection. He didn't
Speaker 1: at the time use what people who are uncomfortable with
Speaker 1: evolution and extinction on religious grounds today would say, it
Speaker 1: is like the earth was created old. He was a
Speaker 1: hardcore scientist um and he didn't have any problem with that.
Speaker 1: There are animals that that that came and went. Lots
Speaker 1: of time has passed now I think he was. I
Speaker 1: think he viewed that from uh in a very for
Speaker 1: his era, especially uh state of the art scientific way.
Speaker 1: Um well, it's kind amazing to his age, right because
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just a college kid, and to have
Speaker 1: sort of those kind of thoughts already, you know, figuring
Speaker 1: that out from seeing that was pretty bazing. And he
Speaker 1: would have been, you know, with a you know, he's
Speaker 1: with a group that was led by uh, the one
Speaker 1: of the you know foremost UH scientists of his day
Speaker 1: who would have been they've been would be sitting around
Speaker 1: the campfire at night, presumably talking about, you know, dinosaur bones.
Speaker 1: But he did have that very unique experience. The other
Speaker 1: experience that I think he had that really touches on
Speaker 1: the hunter piece of it is his boyhood neighbor was
Speaker 1: the widow of John James Audubon, Lucy Audubon, and she's
Speaker 1: old lady at this point and John is already dead.
Speaker 1: But they lived in there were these barns on the
Speaker 1: property where like all of John James Audubon's old travel
Speaker 1: stuff was stuffed you know stuff, well, his paintings too,
Speaker 1: but like all the things he gathered as he as
Speaker 1: he came back, all the paraphernalia he picked up, and
Speaker 1: Lucy Autobon becomes his tutor. And so, first of all,
Speaker 1: he's tutored at a time when people were learning reading, writing,
Speaker 1: and arithmetic. He's all also learning about natural science. And
Speaker 1: not only that, but she is instilling in him, uh,
Speaker 1: this ethic of what she called self restraint, and what
Speaker 1: self restraint basically meant was that you don't consume everything
Speaker 1: that you can. And when you think about the contrast
Speaker 1: of that in kind of the robber Baron era that
Speaker 1: he lived in and combined with kind of the myth
Speaker 1: of the inexhaustibility that we could never use everything up,
Speaker 1: he had this particularly unique perch to kind of view
Speaker 1: the world and it shaped his view, first of all,
Speaker 1: of what the responsibility of sportsman was. And you know, uh,
Speaker 1: this is the era when they're starting to figure out
Speaker 1: that we shouldn't hunt things, you know, twelve months a year,
Speaker 1: there should be a season for hunting things. We shouldn't
Speaker 1: go out and kill every uh animal that pops up
Speaker 1: in front of us. There should be limits that we
Speaker 1: put on ourselves. And you ask a question, what is
Speaker 1: it about hunters, and I think that they were one
Speaker 1: of the first groups of people to go into wilderness
Speaker 1: and not and see it as a place to to recreate.
Speaker 1: And they wanted to preserve that because they wanted to
Speaker 1: come back the next season and have it not be gone,
Speaker 1: and they wanted to bring their their their kids back
Speaker 1: and have them be able to have the same experience
Speaker 1: the same way that hunters do today. And I think
Speaker 1: that ethic of the wild being a place that had
Speaker 1: intrinsic value you that we should preserve. Uh, when you
Speaker 1: think about it, it makes complete sense that it came
Speaker 1: in significant part from hunters. That's my explanation. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: certain type of hunter, because there's an interesting point in
Speaker 1: American history where these guys coexist with the market hunters.
Speaker 1: These people we've been talking about and kind of like
Speaker 1: celebrating throughout this conversation, Um Boon, Bridger Glass, right, frontiers
Speaker 1: men and later mountain men. Um, we're rapacious like they
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know, uh, you know, they would
Speaker 1: stack up like astounding numbers of animals. And then it
Speaker 1: came to be this point in time when all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you had sport hunters wealthy like generally wealthy
Speaker 1: from the East sport hunters, and the first thing that
Speaker 1: these sport hunters needed to do to win was to
Speaker 1: put these other guys out of business. We generally sit
Speaker 1: around celebrating the accomplishments of these guys that were regarded
Speaker 1: by the sport hunters as the enemies, you know, like
Speaker 1: Roosevelt in the early Boone and Crocker Club and whatever
Speaker 1: they had, Like these different societies and hunters groups kind
Speaker 1: of like the first thing they needed to do, was it,
Speaker 1: like the first thing we're gonna do is try to
Speaker 1: somehow sabotage commercial wildlife markets past the rule that you
Speaker 1: can't serve wild game in New York City. Um. And
Speaker 1: now like hunters today that we kind of like celebrate
Speaker 1: the accomplishments of these conservations like Roosevelt Grennell, um, but
Speaker 1: we really want to talk about who we admire, like
Speaker 1: it's it's Bridger and Glass because like the skill set
Speaker 1: was amazing well and and look, hopefully we gain knowledge
Speaker 1: as we progress as individuals and as a people. And uh,
Speaker 1: the world looked very different in uh the third tis
Speaker 1: to Jim Bridger than it did even by the eighteen
Speaker 1: seventies and certainly by the eighties when uh, when the
Speaker 1: last of the of the of the Montana herd is
Speaker 1: wiped out. Uh, we knew at that point that the
Speaker 1: the inexhaustibility of resources was a myth because the buffalo
Speaker 1: were gone. Um. There there's this uh statistic I came
Speaker 1: across in reading about because you know you point us
Speaker 1: out in your book too. The the arrival of the
Speaker 1: railroad is lights out for the buffalo because it's the
Speaker 1: infrastructure for commercial hunting. Um. The reason they trapped beaver
Speaker 1: in the eighteen thirties instead of buffalo is because buffalo
Speaker 1: pelts buffalo highs are too damn heavy. You can't move them.
Speaker 1: A beaver pelt weighed two pounds, and they could stack
Speaker 1: them up and stick him on a canoe and and
Speaker 1: send him down river. And that was a viable business
Speaker 1: that they couldn't exploit the buffalo in the eighteen thirties
Speaker 1: because they couldn't transport the hides. And what the railroad does,
Speaker 1: first of all when it rives in Kansas and then
Speaker 1: when it arrives in Miles City in Montana, is it
Speaker 1: creates the infrastructure to transport the hides back east. And
Speaker 1: then it's it's lights out, and so I think you
Speaker 1: you lived in Miles City, right, I think the railroad
Speaker 1: arrives in Miles City in eighteen eighty one, I want
Speaker 1: to say, so the buffalo hunters come in with the
Speaker 1: railroad in eighteen eighty two. The railroad keeps statistics and
Speaker 1: there were two hundred thousand hides that were the railroad
Speaker 1: shipped out of Montana in eighteen eighty two. Uh, it
Speaker 1: took I think seventy rail it was. That was the
Speaker 1: equivalent of seventy rail cars. In eighteen eighty three, the
Speaker 1: railroad shipped out forty thousand hides. So it goes from
Speaker 1: two hundred hides to forty thousand hides. In eighteen eighty four,
Speaker 1: there was one box car of buffalo hides that the
Speaker 1: railroad chips out of the state. And Den's over. That's it.
Speaker 1: I liked it. Horn Today. Um, you know, he comes
Speaker 1: out I can't remember what year, but around eight three
Speaker 1: or ready four from the Smithsonian. Yeah, comes out to
Speaker 1: collect somebodies, trying to like shoot the last one just
Speaker 1: to bridger back. And he points out that he points
Speaker 1: out that those hide hunters you talk about, like the inexhausted,
Speaker 1: the myth of inexhaustibility. He points out that the hide
Speaker 1: hunters that were hanging around convinced that more would come
Speaker 1: from the north, and then it's like just over time
Speaker 1: they gradually found their way into ranching and various things.
Speaker 1: In the event you were like, huh, I guess they're
Speaker 1: not coming. Yeah, well they sort of became the they
Speaker 1: became the sort of social fabric of the town. UM.
Speaker 1: And you when you read about uh Montana history in
Speaker 1: the in the eighteen nineties, and I did a bunch
Speaker 1: of research on on Butte, there's all sorts of people
Speaker 1: who are identified as former buffalo hunters for exactly that reason.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, nobody in the eighteen nineties is still
Speaker 1: a buffalo hunter there, but there's a lot of former
Speaker 1: buffalo hunters. Um. So yeah, it's it's UH and the
Speaker 1: Hornaday thing. I mean, think about what it means that
Speaker 1: the Smithsonian Institution UH sends out a crew to find
Speaker 1: what they hope is kind of the last buffalo so
Speaker 1: they can kill it, because they view that is the
Speaker 1: only way that they can you know, quote unquote preserve
Speaker 1: the buffalo in order to have one in the Smithsonian
Speaker 1: stuffed so that people can come look at it and
Speaker 1: see what it was like. Um. I mean, think think
Speaker 1: about what that that says about, you know, the moment
Speaker 1: we were at. And frankly, that's one of the things
Speaker 1: that makes Grenell so amazing is the one in place
Speaker 1: where there's buffalo while buffalo still living in the lower
Speaker 1: forty eight is Yellowstone. And Yellowstone in the eighteen eighties
Speaker 1: has been established as a national park. I think it's
Speaker 1: established in eighteen seventy two, but it's been completely ignored. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, it's always ironic to me when I go
Speaker 1: to Yellowstone because the sweatshirts always have you know, Yellowstone
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy two, because that's the year it was established.
Speaker 1: But the only reason Yellowstone was established is because they
Speaker 1: had figured out there was no gold there. And so
Speaker 1: it wasn't that they wanted to preserve this place. It
Speaker 1: was that they deemed it as having no economic value
Speaker 1: and so like whatever, and so they established Yellowstone. Certain
Speaker 1: no surface gold, no surface gold. Yeah, probably all they
Speaker 1: knew about, yeah, which is what they were after in
Speaker 1: that era. Um. And so what's significant about Grennell is
Speaker 1: he fights to preserve Yellowstone and wild places when it
Speaker 1: actually when there's a contest with a commercial interest, and
Speaker 1: the commercial interest at the time was the railroads, which were,
Speaker 1: of course the big business of the day, and the
Speaker 1: railroads want to build a spur through Yellowstone National Park.
Speaker 1: UM and Grennell and the Boone and Crockett Club and
Speaker 1: Teddy Roosevelt fight that. UM and in they passed the
Speaker 1: Lacy Act, which basically, for the first time ever established
Speaker 1: penalties for destroying wildlife and made it have an economic cost,
Speaker 1: and also took on a vested economic interest, namely the railroads,
Speaker 1: in order to to establish that and they win. So
Speaker 1: really it's that year that is that is the to me,
Speaker 1: the more important year in terms of the history of
Speaker 1: yellow because that's when that's when we when we decided,
Speaker 1: even though it's not easy, and even though there's competing interests,
Speaker 1: we're still going to protect Yellowstone National Park. There's a
Speaker 1: really boring book, except that it would be interesting to
Speaker 1: two or three people in the history of the Lazy Act,
Speaker 1: because it is still a very powerful wildlife tool to
Speaker 1: this day and the foresight of the people who created that.
Speaker 1: I mean, how many how many laws from do we
Speaker 1: still think about today? Yeah, just for for folks are
Speaker 1: saying like the Lazy Act gives um when you commit
Speaker 1: wildlife crimes, and those wildlife crimes move across state lines,
Speaker 1: it gives some real teeth to enforcement. And it made
Speaker 1: it that at the time states that might have been
Speaker 1: lack of days ago about wildlife laws. Um, it gave
Speaker 1: like some it gave some federal oversight on wildlife stuff.
Speaker 1: So the minute you did some poaching, it's still this
Speaker 1: outworks today, Like you might do some poaching in one
Speaker 1: state and drive across. There's even Lazy Act prosecutions where
Speaker 1: someone poaches something to one state, but they drive the
Speaker 1: head of their taxidermist twenty miles down the road who
Speaker 1: happens to be in a different state. That also becomes
Speaker 1: a federal crime. It's a Lazy Act violation, and they
Speaker 1: still use it. Imagine because he was on a daily
Speaker 1: basis today what the The other thing that I love
Speaker 1: about about Grennell in terms of his vision and foresight,
Speaker 1: is he was an incredibly canny political operator because he
Speaker 1: was fighting against the railroads and he knew that the
Speaker 1: most powerful force of his day was I mean, the
Speaker 1: railroads invented lobbying literally and uh, and Grennell knew that
Speaker 1: he needed his own constituency and UH, he needed to
Speaker 1: change the narrative and so his he also used social
Speaker 1: media the day, which was magazines. I mean, this was
Speaker 1: the era after the Civil War. Is the golden age
Speaker 1: in some ways of of magazines. That there's all these
Speaker 1: magazines that flourish, including the one that he was the
Speaker 1: publisher of, UH, which is Forest and Stream. And he
Speaker 1: used that that magazine to to UH editorialize two Hunters
Speaker 1: every week. And his theme was public land and totally
Speaker 1: and because nobody knew what public land meant then, and
Speaker 1: what he explains to people as public land means you
Speaker 1: own it. You hunter in UH. You know who doesn't
Speaker 1: live in UH, in Wyoming or Montana. You own a
Speaker 1: piece of yellowstone. And when somebody is exploiting resources in Yellowstone,
Speaker 1: they're stealing from you, and you should be piste off
Speaker 1: about that. And so Grinnell editorializes on this for years
Speaker 1: to kind of build this theme in this ethic of
Speaker 1: public lands. And he's incredibly successful at doing it. But
Speaker 1: he's a lot of the reason why why we have
Speaker 1: an ethic today that is, you know, supports public lands.
Speaker 1: So he's an amazing character. I want hate with one
Speaker 1: last question if you if someone says you're like, what
Speaker 1: are your books about? Do you have you ever taken
Speaker 1: the time or felt the necessity to bundle them in
Speaker 1: your head as being I right about, And don't tell
Speaker 1: him the West that that's not gonna suffice well. I
Speaker 1: I first and foremost love compelling, vivid, action laden stories.
Speaker 1: That's the type of stuff I like to read. That's
Speaker 1: the type of movies I like to watch. I love
Speaker 1: good stories, and to me, it just so happens that
Speaker 1: The West is full of good stories. And I've loved
Speaker 1: him since I was a little boy. But to me,
Speaker 1: what makes a story a story that I really want
Speaker 1: to marry for a couple of years is that it
Speaker 1: has lessons for today. And I hope all the stories
Speaker 1: that I write have interesting lessons for today that can
Speaker 1: help us to better understand our lives today. And more
Speaker 1: and more, the more the country becomes politically divided, and
Speaker 1: the more and more it becomes difficult to have a
Speaker 1: rational debate between people who disagree, the more and more
Speaker 1: I think history is important because I think sometimes if
Speaker 1: you look at something that is historical, people don't have
Speaker 1: all of the visceral baggage that goes with contemporary debates.
Speaker 1: That's not always true, obviously, but we can be a
Speaker 1: little bit more dispassionate today, for example, about the buffalo
Speaker 1: and the demise of the buffalo and the lessons to
Speaker 1: be learned from that, And you can sit down in
Speaker 1: a bar and have a conversation with people about that,
Speaker 1: and most people would probably agree, you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's uh, we should not have have exterminated them from
Speaker 1: the planet and the way that we did, in a
Speaker 1: way that you couldn't have that same conversation sitting down
Speaker 1: in a bar about global warming. And yet there's a
Speaker 1: lot of lessons from studying the buffalo that should be
Speaker 1: relevant to how we look at an issue like global
Speaker 1: warming or or the environment today. So to me, that
Speaker 1: was a long winded answer to your question. But I
Speaker 1: love vivid, compelling adventure stories that have lessons that are
Speaker 1: relevant to our lives today. That suffices that they all
Speaker 1: happen to be in the West. But anyway, that's fair, ye,
Speaker 1: anyway you got you got any uh rapper I can try,
Speaker 1: so you can always cut it out, like Steve says,
Speaker 1: So Steve will interrupt me halfway through if it's no good,
Speaker 1: you know, reading some of that ore nicles that Karine
Speaker 1: found that were like when Steve started earlier that we're
Speaker 1: people like sort of talking about you as the author
Speaker 1: of the Revenant, but you couldn't really comment because of
Speaker 1: your job. And when I was reading that and simultaneously
Speaker 1: reading the Last Stand and kind of looking like you
Speaker 1: just talked about Grannelle being like this great political you
Speaker 1: know strategists, You've done similar stuff like that in your job, right,
Speaker 1: having to like step up to the table with I
Speaker 1: mean working at the World Trade Organization hundred sixties some
Speaker 1: countries and right, and having to like make big deals happen.
Speaker 1: Do you ever like find comparisons all the time? And
Speaker 1: in fact, the most vivid political lessons that I have learned,
Speaker 1: we're not, you know, living in Washington, d C. For
Speaker 1: a bunch of years, as I did after I got
Speaker 1: out of law school. The most vivid political lessons that
Speaker 1: I've learned were researching George Bird Grinnell and his battle
Speaker 1: against the railroads to preserve public lands and seeing how
Speaker 1: he did that at a time when the odds were
Speaker 1: completely stacked against him. And of course there is no
Speaker 1: place on the planet that has more political history per
Speaker 1: square inch than Butte Montana. And Uh, if you want
Speaker 1: to learn about politics, UH, study the fight between the
Speaker 1: unions and the Standard Oil Company at the turn of
Speaker 1: the century and see on both sides the lessons that
Speaker 1: were applied there. Um. It is a graduate course in politics.
Speaker 1: So there is no question that the most significant political
Speaker 1: lessons of my life have been drawn out of nineteenth
Speaker 1: century Montana history. Good. Yeah, I'm not cutting that ship, don't.
Speaker 1: Author Michael Punk with the E on the end. That's true.
Speaker 1: Michael Punks. They can find them. P U n k E.
Speaker 1: Author of currently Ridgeline. It's not won't be out until June,
Speaker 1: but look for it. But otherwise, author of The Revenant, Uh,
Speaker 1: Fire and Brimstone, Last Stand. Okayanne Forthcoming, Thank you for
Speaker 1: joining us in the Thanks Lone. I trust that a
Speaker 1: bunch of people will go buy your books and you'll
Speaker 1: be thinking that it wasn't such a bad idea to
Speaker 1: come out and defend your come on, defend your movie
Speaker 1: ahead of last Thanks a lot, Thank you, Take care,