WEBVTT - Ep. 236: Crawling Back from the Dead with Michael Punke 0:00:08.960 --> 0:00:13.320 This is Me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely 0:00:13.440 --> 0:00:18.599 bug bitten in my case, underwear listening podcast. You Can't 0:00:18.600 --> 0:00:22.680 predict anything presented by on X Hunt creators are the 0:00:22.680 --> 0:00:26.479 most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt 0:00:26.520 --> 0:00:29.600 app from the iTunes or Google play store, nor where 0:00:29.680 --> 0:00:37.120 you stand with on x. Okay, we're joined here by 0:00:37.360 --> 0:00:41.560 Michael punk, author of the Revenant, who like, Uh, it's 0:00:41.560 --> 0:00:43.800 bold of you to come, and I'm happy that you're 0:00:43.800 --> 0:00:48.280 here because we've made such a hobby out of um 0:00:48.320 --> 0:00:50.680 expressed I have should say we I've made such a 0:00:50.760 --> 0:00:56.400 hobby out of expressing my dissatisfaction with the movie The Revenant, 0:00:57.000 --> 0:00:59.959 because of that they put it in coastal rainforest. I've 0:01:00.080 --> 0:01:02.200 I've heard some rumors about this. Uh so I would 0:01:02.240 --> 0:01:03.640 have thought you'd never want to come talk to me 0:01:03.640 --> 0:01:06.560 because you'd be like, uh, insult didn't hurt. Well, you 0:01:06.600 --> 0:01:09.319 know what, I have pretty thick skin, and I'm happy 0:01:09.360 --> 0:01:12.880 to talk about the Revenant, and I I'll say good 0:01:12.880 --> 0:01:14.680 things about it first, because I there's a lot of 0:01:14.720 --> 0:01:17.240 reasons why I'm happy that movie got made. I can imagine, 0:01:17.440 --> 0:01:20.759 but you know, uh, but there's I've got my own 0:01:20.840 --> 0:01:23.679 qualms with as a as a historian, and somebody cares 0:01:23.720 --> 0:01:26.560 about history, I've got I've got my knits to pick 0:01:26.640 --> 0:01:28.960 with with the Revenant. But but let me be clear, 0:01:29.120 --> 0:01:31.880 I don't want to start totally negative. I don't want 0:01:31.880 --> 0:01:33.560 to start totally negative. I just thought that was a 0:01:33.560 --> 0:01:36.000 good end because I'm still I'm still like just happy 0:01:36.000 --> 0:01:38.319 that you're here. Well, I've got a couple of of 0:01:38.680 --> 0:01:40.600 points to raise about your book to at some point 0:01:40.600 --> 0:01:43.280 depending on how negative this gets, and you know, you 0:01:43.280 --> 0:01:46.400 guys really go after me. Got I got a couple 0:01:46.400 --> 0:01:47.760 of things I want to raise with you, So I'm 0:01:47.760 --> 0:01:53.960 gonna positive. Um, our producer credit sent me some articles 0:01:54.200 --> 0:01:57.280 and um, there's a couple of articles pointing out It's 0:01:57.320 --> 0:01:59.960 like funny that around the time, I guess it was 0:02:00.240 --> 0:02:02.200 probably around the time the movie The Revenue came out, 0:02:02.760 --> 0:02:06.480 there are articles being written profiles of you. There were 0:02:06.480 --> 0:02:08.520 sort of pointing to the fact that you had this 0:02:09.520 --> 0:02:13.280 other life, that you weren't just a writer. Yeah. I 0:02:14.280 --> 0:02:19.440 uh have had varying interests over the years and have 0:02:19.560 --> 0:02:24.880 always been passionate about Western history and I love writing, 0:02:25.560 --> 0:02:29.200 but I also have also been really interested in public 0:02:29.240 --> 0:02:34.480 policy and uh, global politics and have had a career 0:02:34.600 --> 0:02:39.360 that is on that thread as well, and so so yeah, 0:02:39.400 --> 0:02:42.080 it Uh, all these things kind of mixed together and 0:02:42.120 --> 0:02:44.240 makes sense to me in their own way, but that 0:02:44.320 --> 0:02:48.799 probably takes a little bit of explaining. You were You 0:02:48.840 --> 0:02:51.840 were born in mountain Man country. I was born in Wyoming. 0:02:51.960 --> 0:02:54.160 Born in Uh in Level, Wyoming at the foot of 0:02:54.200 --> 0:02:57.960 the Big Horn Mountains. Did you have early Did you 0:02:58.000 --> 0:03:03.520 have an early fascination with the fur trappers? Totally? Totally? Uh, 0:03:03.560 --> 0:03:07.760 my dad. My parents are both retired school teachers, and 0:03:07.800 --> 0:03:11.840 I was, uh super lucky because my mom, an elementary 0:03:11.880 --> 0:03:16.320 school teacher, really kind of instilled a love of history. 0:03:16.639 --> 0:03:20.280 She likes reading and books and and she loves history. 0:03:20.400 --> 0:03:24.840 My dad was a biology teacher and a sportsman, and 0:03:24.960 --> 0:03:28.480 he really they both are from Kansas. They went out 0:03:28.560 --> 0:03:32.080 to have their first teaching job in lovel Wyoming after 0:03:32.080 --> 0:03:36.080 going to college in Kansas, and they fell in love 0:03:36.160 --> 0:03:38.840 with this this little town of Level at the foot 0:03:38.840 --> 0:03:42.000 of the Big Horns. And my dad in particular, who 0:03:42.120 --> 0:03:47.040 kind of grew up fishing and small game hunting in Kansas, uh, 0:03:47.120 --> 0:03:51.080 kind of discovered the potential of fishing and hunting in 0:03:51.080 --> 0:03:55.280 in the West. In in the in the Rockies, and 0:03:55.560 --> 0:03:58.160 uh fell in love with that. And then I think 0:03:58.280 --> 0:04:01.160 especially as a as a bio, I just by training 0:04:01.280 --> 0:04:05.400 it gave him that extra uh, just a different angle 0:04:05.400 --> 0:04:09.040 and interest on on being outdoors and so he definitely 0:04:09.680 --> 0:04:13.880 instilled that in in his kids. Um, and between the 0:04:13.920 --> 0:04:17.280 two of them, I just ended up. Well, I've ended 0:04:17.360 --> 0:04:20.080 up where I belong, which is here. It must have 0:04:20.120 --> 0:04:26.039 been a great advantage to grow up in a place 0:04:26.120 --> 0:04:29.000 like Wyoming if you wanted to be a mountain man, 0:04:29.360 --> 0:04:32.480 because I grew up being obsessed with the history of 0:04:32.480 --> 0:04:36.440 the West, having never been there, right, Uh, and so 0:04:36.640 --> 0:04:40.240 everything was like, uh, it felt very removed. Yeah. Well, 0:04:40.480 --> 0:04:42.719 just one of the things I love about Western history 0:04:42.800 --> 0:04:45.719 is how Western American history is, how recent a lot 0:04:45.760 --> 0:04:48.440 of it is. And the little street that I grew 0:04:48.520 --> 0:04:53.279 up on in Level, Wyoming, West Seventh Street, there wasn't 0:04:53.440 --> 0:04:57.120 There was an old lady who lived next to us, uh, 0:04:57.200 --> 0:04:59.479 kind of the little old lady in the little white 0:04:59.480 --> 0:05:02.960 house next hours that gave us the Vanilla Wafers. Was 0:05:03.040 --> 0:05:07.719 the friendly old lady in the neighborhood, and she had 0:05:07.760 --> 0:05:13.159 been born in in Level Uh, and she remembered a 0:05:13.240 --> 0:05:17.240 mountain man named John Blue, who would ride out of 0:05:17.320 --> 0:05:21.080 the Big Horn Mountains every two months and come down 0:05:21.080 --> 0:05:25.839 into level to reprovision, and she would tell us this 0:05:25.960 --> 0:05:28.680 story about John Blue with the Mountain Man and I. 0:05:29.120 --> 0:05:32.119 Over the years, Uh, driving up into the Big Horns, 0:05:32.160 --> 0:05:36.560 you could drive past his his old cabin, but literally, 0:05:36.600 --> 0:05:40.719 in the space of one life, you could touch that 0:05:40.800 --> 0:05:44.440 earlier era. And I love that about Wyoming and Montana. 0:05:44.720 --> 0:05:49.720 Are you familiar with the writer Ian Fraser. Yeah, yeah, he. 0:05:50.080 --> 0:05:52.960 I took him on his first hunting trip and we 0:05:53.400 --> 0:05:55.600 floated the river here in Montana, and he'd already he 0:05:55.600 --> 0:05:56.920 had lived here. It's spent quite a bit of time 0:05:56.920 --> 0:05:59.440 in Montana. But you're saying one of the things he 0:05:59.520 --> 0:06:02.960 likes ab out it, um is that when you go 0:06:03.080 --> 0:06:07.360 to a place where something happened, not much happened after that, 0:06:08.279 --> 0:06:10.480 so you can go there and still kind of be like, oh, 0:06:10.520 --> 0:06:12.680 I get it. Yeah, And I thought of that one day. 0:06:12.680 --> 0:06:15.640 I went to see where Dylan Thomas uh drank himself 0:06:15.720 --> 0:06:21.200 to death right in Manhattan. He actually died it the hospital, 0:06:21.839 --> 0:06:25.680 but like kind of where he collapsed, and UM, imagine 0:06:25.680 --> 0:06:28.800 all the ship that's occurred at that intersection since then. 0:06:28.920 --> 0:06:31.160 It makes the heart to picture. But then when you 0:06:31.200 --> 0:06:33.560 go to someplace for like a big fight happened, or 0:06:33.760 --> 0:06:36.720 some people ran some buffalo over a cliff, you go like, 0:06:37.040 --> 0:06:41.400 got it, Yeah, totally can picture because exactly I mean, 0:06:41.400 --> 0:06:44.600 I'm a I love Civil War history too, and and 0:06:44.680 --> 0:06:48.400 have visited a lot of the Civil War battlefields back east, 0:06:48.440 --> 0:06:50.440 and one of the sad things about a lot of 0:06:50.480 --> 0:06:53.440 them is they haven't been very well preserved. And you know, 0:06:53.560 --> 0:06:56.880 there's a there's a McDonald's right in the middle of 0:06:56.880 --> 0:06:59.680 the place where the you know, the cannons were supposed 0:06:59.680 --> 0:07:02.159 to be set up, and it's it's harder to imagine. 0:07:02.320 --> 0:07:04.720 And out here. I was thinking about it today because 0:07:04.720 --> 0:07:08.160 I drove by the Madison Buffalo Jump, which I always 0:07:08.160 --> 0:07:10.840 send people to go see, because I say, what I 0:07:10.880 --> 0:07:13.760 love about the Madison Buffalo Jump is you hike up 0:07:13.760 --> 0:07:16.800 on that on that cliff, and you stand up out 0:07:16.840 --> 0:07:19.440 there and you look down on the valley of the 0:07:19.520 --> 0:07:23.160 Three Forks, and it looks quite pretty close to what 0:07:23.200 --> 0:07:26.960 it looked like, you know, two years ago. And that's 0:07:27.000 --> 0:07:30.280 just a really cool thing that we, you know, can't 0:07:30.280 --> 0:07:33.320 take for granted in this big country that we live in. 0:07:33.320 --> 0:07:35.760 Out here. I suppose It's worth pointing out that in 0:07:35.800 --> 0:07:39.000 the case of the Madison Buffalo jump, the animals are gone. 0:07:39.360 --> 0:07:48.040 The animals noticeable. Yeah, the landscape looks similar. You can 0:07:48.080 --> 0:07:52.520 talk about what you're just walk everybody through your books. 0:07:53.280 --> 0:07:55.520 So I want to over focus. I do want to 0:07:55.560 --> 0:07:58.560 focus a lot on the revenue, because it's not not 0:07:58.760 --> 0:08:01.520 I want to focus on the revenue. I want to 0:08:01.560 --> 0:08:07.640 focus on our mutual interests in those people and what 0:08:07.680 --> 0:08:12.480 they were up to. Yeah. So, Uh, when I'm a 0:08:12.560 --> 0:08:17.160 lawyer by a training, I went to to college. I 0:08:17.200 --> 0:08:21.280 grew up in Wyoming, went to college back east and 0:08:21.320 --> 0:08:23.800 went to law school, and after law school, went to 0:08:23.840 --> 0:08:27.800 work in in Washington, d c. Uh. I work for 0:08:27.840 --> 0:08:30.720 Senator Bacchus. It's where I met my wife. She's from 0:08:30.960 --> 0:08:35.800 she's from Montana. Met her work in Senator Baucus's office. Uh. 0:08:36.520 --> 0:08:41.240 And I like working in government a lot, I found myself. 0:08:41.679 --> 0:08:44.719 You don't hear that very often now. I I like uh, 0:08:45.120 --> 0:08:51.719 public policy and UH and I enjoy especially the most 0:08:51.720 --> 0:08:54.200 recent job I had being a U S Ambassador. I 0:08:54.240 --> 0:08:57.840 love representing the United States of America overseas, and I 0:08:57.880 --> 0:09:00.960 love negotiating on behalf of the country. It was it 0:09:01.000 --> 0:09:04.520 was a blast. I love that. Um. But I found 0:09:04.520 --> 0:09:07.920 myself in Washington, d C. For a time, not working 0:09:07.920 --> 0:09:10.560 in government, instead working in a law firm. And I 0:09:10.600 --> 0:09:13.440 did not like working in a law firm. And I 0:09:13.480 --> 0:09:19.280 started trying to plot my way into something different. And 0:09:19.360 --> 0:09:22.360 I had the idea I'd always been interested in in writing, 0:09:22.679 --> 0:09:24.840 and I thought, well, if I can be a writer, 0:09:24.960 --> 0:09:28.200 I can live wherever I want to live. And my 0:09:28.240 --> 0:09:31.400 wife and I I both wanted to move back to 0:09:31.600 --> 0:09:36.320 the West. And so I started, uh getting up early 0:09:36.360 --> 0:09:41.839 in the morning and writing what became The Revenant, and 0:09:42.040 --> 0:09:46.880 UH and I I always for me, UH really relate 0:09:47.120 --> 0:09:50.640 when I saw shaw sh ank Redemption. And I always 0:09:50.640 --> 0:09:53.400 felt like my shosh Ank Redemption moment was kind of 0:09:53.480 --> 0:09:57.760 chipping through the wall of my cell with those hand tools. 0:09:57.880 --> 0:09:59.760 Was kind of sitting down at the computer every day 0:09:59.800 --> 0:10:03.640 and chipping away at at writing The Revenant. And when 0:10:04.360 --> 0:10:06.000 when I was able to get it published and we 0:10:06.080 --> 0:10:10.439 sold the film rights, that was our kind of escape moment. 0:10:10.559 --> 0:10:15.880 Were you surprised to get published? Um? In, I didn't 0:10:15.920 --> 0:10:19.080 take it for granted, for sure. I as I was 0:10:19.160 --> 0:10:22.480 going along, I was feeling like I had more and 0:10:22.559 --> 0:10:24.760 more of a chance. I mean, when when I started 0:10:24.760 --> 0:10:26.320 writing a book, I didn't really know if I could 0:10:26.320 --> 0:10:30.040 do it, and then I got about halfway into it 0:10:30.080 --> 0:10:32.040 and I'm like, you know what, I can definitely finish this, 0:10:32.800 --> 0:10:35.080 and I felt like it was a great story. I 0:10:35.080 --> 0:10:38.559 didn't know anything about publishing, but I started getting encouragement 0:10:38.600 --> 0:10:43.240 from people. Um, I guess I wasn't surprised, but I was. 0:10:43.480 --> 0:10:46.560 I was. I was thrilled, believe me, because I did. 0:10:47.080 --> 0:10:51.079 I did feel like that was my opportunity to live 0:10:51.120 --> 0:10:54.520 where I wanted to live and go do something different. 0:10:54.920 --> 0:10:57.679 And working as a writer is one of the great 0:10:57.880 --> 0:11:00.199 luxuries that you can have because you have sound much 0:11:00.200 --> 0:11:03.199 freedom to kind of follow you the things you're interested in. 0:11:04.840 --> 0:11:08.240 What year did you come out? It came out in 0:11:09.000 --> 0:11:13.520 I got the contract to publish it right before nine eleven, 0:11:14.360 --> 0:11:17.080 uh so two thousand and one, and it was I 0:11:17.080 --> 0:11:19.959 think published in two thousand and two. And then you 0:11:19.960 --> 0:11:22.920 you went on and published two more or three more. 0:11:23.040 --> 0:11:26.800 Moved back to Montana after we sold the book and 0:11:27.080 --> 0:11:32.640 uh uh published, researched and published two nonfiction books while 0:11:32.720 --> 0:11:36.160 living in in Montana. The first one is a nonfiction 0:11:36.400 --> 0:11:40.160 book called Fire and Brimstone about a mining disaster and 0:11:40.280 --> 0:11:45.000 Beaute in nineteen seventeen. It's a very narrative, nonfiction style book. 0:11:45.000 --> 0:11:46.920 I hope it's told in a very kind of engaging, 0:11:48.000 --> 0:11:52.199 almost novelistic type of way. But it's completely uh nonfiction, 0:11:52.320 --> 0:11:56.360 nothing's made up. Uh. Then after that, I wrote Last Stand, 0:11:56.840 --> 0:12:01.679 the book about the Buffalo, and uh it was after 0:12:01.720 --> 0:12:05.120 writing Last Stand that I had the opportunity to to 0:12:05.320 --> 0:12:10.120 be US ambassador to the World Trade Organization. So we 0:12:10.200 --> 0:12:13.040 moved over to Geneva, Switzerland. My family and I for 0:12:13.040 --> 0:12:17.320 for six years were over there, and uh after I 0:12:17.360 --> 0:12:19.480 came back from that, started to work on the new 0:12:19.520 --> 0:12:23.240 book which will come out in uh June if next year, 0:12:23.320 --> 0:12:27.280 which is is called Ridgeline. It's a another novel, Don't 0:12:27.320 --> 0:12:30.120 go over the Ridge line. Well that that turned out 0:12:30.160 --> 0:12:32.640 to be, uh in hindsight, what the lesson? What the 0:12:32.720 --> 0:12:35.640 lesson should have been? Tell? Uh, yeah, it's like an 0:12:35.640 --> 0:12:37.920 apocalypse now right, Never get out of the boat, Never 0:12:37.960 --> 0:12:39.880 get off the boat, Never get off the boat, and 0:12:39.880 --> 0:12:42.960 then never go over You can share because we we've 0:12:43.000 --> 0:12:46.760 talked about I know, the subject of the book. We 0:12:46.800 --> 0:12:49.000 talked about it now and then actually one day we're 0:12:49.120 --> 0:12:51.280 expect trying to guess what year it was, and someone 0:12:51.320 --> 0:12:54.559 pointed out that we'll tell you what the book is. So. 0:12:54.920 --> 0:13:00.760 Ridgeline is a novel that is based on the Fetterman Fight, 0:13:01.200 --> 0:13:06.000 which is a until the Battle of the Little Big Horn. 0:13:06.160 --> 0:13:10.360 The Fetterman Fight was the worst US military defeat in 0:13:10.360 --> 0:13:14.200 in U s Military history. Eighty one guys right over 0:13:14.240 --> 0:13:18.120 a ridgeline in the Powder River Valley of Wyoming in 0:13:18.280 --> 0:13:22.560 eighteen sixty six, and they ride into a massive trap 0:13:22.720 --> 0:13:26.199 that has been set by the Lakota and the Cheyenne 0:13:26.320 --> 0:13:30.800 and the Arapaho, and uh, without revealing too much, it 0:13:31.200 --> 0:13:34.880 ends badly for for a lot of them, the soldiers, 0:13:34.880 --> 0:13:38.280 that is. Um, but it's a badly in a real 0:13:38.760 --> 0:13:41.400 and it ends very badly for a lot of them. 0:13:41.600 --> 0:13:45.760 Um and uh like even post mortem. Yeah, it's uh 0:13:46.080 --> 0:13:50.079 this this this was this was this was not pretty, 0:13:50.120 --> 0:13:54.520 but it's a it's a it's an incredible historical moment 0:13:54.720 --> 0:13:57.600 and story and it's It takes place in the midst 0:13:57.679 --> 0:14:01.040 of what is often called Red Clouds War, which was 0:14:01.120 --> 0:14:06.920 a war that broke out after the after the US 0:14:07.600 --> 0:14:12.440 foisted broke one treaty and foisted another one on on 0:14:12.559 --> 0:14:17.080 the tribes. Walk people through that timeline, like yeah, basically 0:14:17.160 --> 0:14:20.320 was correct me where I'm wrong and pick up you 0:14:20.320 --> 0:14:23.560 know where it's He's fit. But everybody's through with the 0:14:23.600 --> 0:14:28.400 Oregon Trail. UM people wanted to spur off the Oregon 0:14:28.440 --> 0:14:31.080 Trail and get up to the goldfields in the north, 0:14:31.840 --> 0:14:35.280 and that war was kind of centered around like can 0:14:35.360 --> 0:14:39.920 we get can whites have safe passage come to Montana 0:14:40.000 --> 0:14:42.280 to go to the north? Right? So I mean that 0:14:42.360 --> 0:14:43.760 was that like sort of the bait, that was the 0:14:43.880 --> 0:14:48.440 defining argument right that Well, the way I would describe 0:14:48.440 --> 0:14:53.400 it is, ah, before the Civil War, there was a 0:14:53.440 --> 0:14:59.400 flood of migration from the East UH to to California 0:14:59.480 --> 0:15:03.560 and Oregon, and tons of people coming across the continent, 0:15:03.640 --> 0:15:08.240 including coming across UH what's now Wyoming, but they were 0:15:08.240 --> 0:15:13.160 all headed west. They're all headed the California Oregon and 0:15:13.840 --> 0:15:16.960 the tribes in that era were not super psyched about 0:15:17.000 --> 0:15:19.440 that and there was a lot of conflict, but the 0:15:19.520 --> 0:15:26.360 us UH negotiated a treaty that basically gave access across 0:15:26.400 --> 0:15:29.120 the Oregon Trail. Is it fair to say like the 0:15:29.160 --> 0:15:36.120 gripe centered around UM impacts on wildlife movements and our things, 0:15:36.120 --> 0:15:39.440 like they're they're grazing areas, heavily displacing animals out of 0:15:39.520 --> 0:15:43.800 areas that once had animals, making hunting hard. Yeah, that 0:15:44.120 --> 0:15:48.200 was that certainly happened along the Oregon Trail. But for 0:15:48.240 --> 0:15:50.960 a while there was a bit of what the treaty 0:15:51.000 --> 0:15:54.480 also did is it gave is it gave the tribes 0:15:55.400 --> 0:15:58.640 most of the land to the north of the Oregon Trail, 0:15:58.720 --> 0:16:00.960 to the north of the of the North Platte River, 0:16:01.760 --> 0:16:05.720 and and there was a fair amount of equilibrium there 0:16:05.760 --> 0:16:08.480 for a while. What happens after the Civil War, during 0:16:08.480 --> 0:16:11.360 and after the Civil War, and even right before, is 0:16:11.400 --> 0:16:15.400 they discover golden in Montana, and all of a sudden, 0:16:15.720 --> 0:16:19.080 people are not content anymore to sort of go across 0:16:19.240 --> 0:16:22.040 the Oregon Trail on their way to California and Oregon. 0:16:22.480 --> 0:16:25.720 As you say, they started spurring off and going up 0:16:25.920 --> 0:16:31.560 to the gold fields of Montana. Uh. Bozeman Trail, for example, 0:16:32.160 --> 0:16:36.600 head going to Bozeman, and the quickest way to get 0:16:36.640 --> 0:16:39.920 there was right through the Powder River Valley. And that 0:16:40.160 --> 0:16:48.920 was great hunting land and was had absolutely been given 0:16:48.960 --> 0:16:52.480 to the tribes as part of this this earlier treaty. 0:16:52.640 --> 0:16:58.440 And so uh the the US as it does multiple 0:16:58.560 --> 0:17:04.400 times throughout nineteenth century history, when treaties with the tribes 0:17:04.520 --> 0:17:09.399 become inconvenient, uh, they just either break them or force 0:17:09.520 --> 0:17:13.080 a renegotiation, and in this case, they essentially did both. 0:17:13.600 --> 0:17:17.560 They they negotiated a new treaty allowing the US to 0:17:17.640 --> 0:17:20.879 go through the Powder River Valley, but they negotiated it 0:17:21.000 --> 0:17:24.240 largely with tribes that didn't live in the Powder River Valley. 0:17:24.600 --> 0:17:28.440 And as you might imagine, UH, the that that result 0:17:28.840 --> 0:17:32.560 uh was enraging to the to the tribes that actually 0:17:32.600 --> 0:17:35.879 lived there. And what came out of that was was 0:17:35.960 --> 0:17:42.080 war uh, namely Red Clouds War UH. And it's one 0:17:42.119 --> 0:17:44.520 of the things that's interesting about Red Clouds War is 0:17:44.600 --> 0:17:50.680 the is the Indians win. Uh. Their victory ends up 0:17:50.880 --> 0:17:54.600 not lasting very long, but they actually win this war. 0:17:54.880 --> 0:17:57.600 And as a result of winning the war, the U. 0:17:57.760 --> 0:18:03.200 S Army UH retreats from the forts that they had 0:18:03.240 --> 0:18:05.520 set up in the Powder River Valley, and for a 0:18:05.600 --> 0:18:09.000 period of time, the lands went back to the to 0:18:09.160 --> 0:18:14.119 the tribes. What happens then is they discovered gold in 0:18:14.480 --> 0:18:17.840 the Black Hills, and that leads in eighteen seventy six 0:18:17.880 --> 0:18:22.200 to a new gold rush uh and uh, but actually 0:18:22.240 --> 0:18:24.720 I think it's eighteen seventy four that was a discovery 0:18:24.760 --> 0:18:30.280 of gold and within two years, uh, fast forward almost 0:18:30.280 --> 0:18:32.800 to the to the end of the Indian Wars because 0:18:32.840 --> 0:18:36.679 at that point there's just not enough space anymore, uh 0:18:36.800 --> 0:18:42.200 for them to coexist and uh and they the Indian 0:18:42.240 --> 0:18:44.439 Wars come to a fairly quick end end after that. 0:18:45.280 --> 0:18:50.400 I think it's interesting and looking at your your collection 0:18:50.440 --> 0:18:53.720 of work is that you have like a Mountain Man book, 0:18:53.760 --> 0:19:00.199 The Revenant, which is very early stage exploit to to 0:19:00.240 --> 0:19:03.080 the West, like very early stage exploration of the West, right, 0:19:03.119 --> 0:19:04.679 Like people are still just kind of like trying to 0:19:04.680 --> 0:19:08.919 fill in the map, like making, um, the characters near 0:19:09.040 --> 0:19:11.400 hue Glass and those are making sort of legitimate discoveries 0:19:11.440 --> 0:19:17.200 about what river flows in the right. And then you have, uh, 0:19:17.320 --> 0:19:22.520 this forthcoming work that's kind of you know, at a 0:19:22.560 --> 0:19:26.920 real hot point, right and then your Buffalo but sort 0:19:26.960 --> 0:19:34.639 of is almost um, the aftermath dealing with kind of 0:19:34.640 --> 0:19:38.240 like focused on this, this this other element of the West, 0:19:38.320 --> 0:19:41.560 of of people getting around to look and be like 0:19:41.600 --> 0:19:47.600 holy shit, yeah, what did we do well? What's uh? 0:19:47.640 --> 0:19:49.840 And and we talked about this a little bit just 0:19:49.920 --> 0:19:54.639 how in many ways, how compact the recent history of 0:19:54.720 --> 0:19:57.560 the West is that the amount of time that that 0:19:57.640 --> 0:20:01.600 European Americans have been out here. It all happens in uh, 0:20:01.680 --> 0:20:04.960 in the span of a a couple of centuries. And UH, 0:20:05.000 --> 0:20:09.080 there's a lot that goes on in the nineteenth century. 0:20:09.080 --> 0:20:12.399 For example, when you think about UH, you know Lewis 0:20:12.400 --> 0:20:15.560 and Clark coming out here at the beginning of the 0:20:15.680 --> 0:20:18.359 of the nineteenth century, and by the ends of the 0:20:18.440 --> 0:20:22.960 nineteenth century, you know, the Buffalo were virtually gone, and 0:20:22.960 --> 0:20:28.680 and and the whole West is settled by European Americans. 0:20:28.800 --> 0:20:31.600 And for all of that to happen in a hundred 0:20:31.680 --> 0:20:34.480 years is is stunning when you think about it, that 0:20:34.480 --> 0:20:36.919 that's one lifetime. One of the things I love about 0:20:37.480 --> 0:20:40.720 this this new book is when I was doing the 0:20:40.800 --> 0:20:46.080 research for for Ridgeline and learning about the Powder River War, 0:20:46.880 --> 0:20:51.560 I was thrilled to discover that Jim Bridger shows up 0:20:51.840 --> 0:20:55.200 as an old man scouting for the U. S. Army. 0:20:55.320 --> 0:20:58.480 And for people who read The Revenant, Uh, Jim Bridger 0:20:58.880 --> 0:21:03.400 in eighteen three and the Revenant is the boy who's 0:21:03.600 --> 0:21:08.919 out there. He's the inexperienced boy who is one of 0:21:08.960 --> 0:21:13.960 the two people who abandoned Hugh Glass. And the fact 0:21:13.960 --> 0:21:17.560 that in his life. He goes from you know, being 0:21:17.640 --> 0:21:21.280 part of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and being in 0:21:21.440 --> 0:21:24.359 this part of the country as one of the first 0:21:25.200 --> 0:21:29.320 European Americans to come out here and trap and lives 0:21:29.359 --> 0:21:33.879 through the fur trade era. He establishes a fort. Uh. 0:21:34.240 --> 0:21:36.640 He first of all, he gets half the state named 0:21:36.640 --> 0:21:38.520 after him. He gets half state named half him, including 0:21:38.520 --> 0:21:40.080 a place that's you know, not more than a couple 0:21:40.160 --> 0:21:44.680 hundred yards from here, UM, but he he it's it's 0:21:44.840 --> 0:21:51.320 his recommendation that UH that UH determines the path for 0:21:51.320 --> 0:21:54.680 for the South Pass, which is where the Oregon Trail 0:21:54.960 --> 0:21:58.600 passes over. He sets up a fort on the Oregon Trail, 0:21:58.840 --> 0:22:04.919 and UM makes money selling UH goods and supplies to emigrants. 0:22:04.960 --> 0:22:08.399 So he lives through that whole UH pioneer era. He 0:22:08.480 --> 0:22:12.080 scouts for pioneers, he ends up scouting for the U. S. 0:22:12.200 --> 0:22:16.400 Army UH, and he sees the the end of the 0:22:16.560 --> 0:22:19.720 of the Indian Wars in his life. And that's that's 0:22:19.760 --> 0:22:22.520 just it's epic. It's it's hard to even imagine that. 0:22:22.680 --> 0:22:24.040 The thing I think about him is, you know, when 0:22:24.080 --> 0:22:27.919 everybody UH talks about how everything went the ship in 0:22:27.960 --> 0:22:31.200 their lifetime, you know it used to be no one 0:22:31.280 --> 0:22:35.800 was here used to right. Can you imagine Bridger? Well, 0:22:36.240 --> 0:22:42.000 he had to be like no, no, exactly. Well. And 0:22:42.160 --> 0:22:46.840 one of the one of the really fascinating anecdotes, uh 0:22:47.080 --> 0:22:49.439 that I came across and again and doing the research 0:22:49.480 --> 0:22:52.199 for this new book is not only was Jim Bridger 0:22:52.280 --> 0:22:55.199 scouting for the U. S. Army in this era, but 0:22:55.320 --> 0:22:59.159 James Beckworth also was who uh people who know about 0:22:59.720 --> 0:23:05.159 the former slave and African American uh mountain man, and 0:23:05.200 --> 0:23:07.159 he had actually come out here as part of that 0:23:07.280 --> 0:23:10.719 same uh company they're rocking out in for a company 0:23:10.720 --> 0:23:12.720 that the Jim Bridger had been apart. So both of 0:23:12.720 --> 0:23:18.040 these guys come out as teenagers, uh, to to the 0:23:18.080 --> 0:23:21.040 wild wild West of the eighteen twenties, and then both 0:23:21.080 --> 0:23:24.120 of them end up together as sixty year old men 0:23:24.640 --> 0:23:28.040 scouting for the U. S. Army in eighteen sixty six, 0:23:28.400 --> 0:23:30.840 and they literally get sent out by the commanding officer 0:23:31.000 --> 0:23:33.520 of the fort to find to figure out where the 0:23:33.560 --> 0:23:37.760 Indians are. And I just imagined them and this happened, 0:23:38.359 --> 0:23:43.159 you know, Jim Bridger and James Beckworth riding their horses 0:23:44.119 --> 0:23:47.200 up the Powder River Valley as sixty year old men 0:23:47.359 --> 0:23:51.200 reminiscing on their lives and you know, what conversations were 0:23:51.240 --> 0:23:55.040 they having. And I try and think about that as 0:23:55.119 --> 0:23:57.320 part of as part of the book. One of the 0:23:57.320 --> 0:24:02.560 things I wonder about is, uh, you know, was somebody 0:24:02.600 --> 0:24:07.040 like Jim Bridger, who was known as a person of 0:24:07.040 --> 0:24:11.000 of incredible integrity, was he regretting in any way how 0:24:11.119 --> 0:24:14.840 much he had helped open up the West? And I 0:24:14.880 --> 0:24:18.760 think it absolutely Boone had that. Boon did. And there's 0:24:18.760 --> 0:24:21.040 a set of conversations I think about often like that, 0:24:21.080 --> 0:24:23.480 Like when Boone was very, very old in his seventies, 0:24:24.480 --> 0:24:28.280 he would go on extended hunting trips with his own 0:24:28.440 --> 0:24:34.280 slave who became like his hunting buddy, his confidant, and 0:24:34.400 --> 0:24:36.960 um to imagine, and this is after he had been 0:24:36.960 --> 0:24:39.919 displaced out of places and displaced out of places. And 0:24:39.960 --> 0:24:42.919 he definitely, uh, you know, if you look in his biography, 0:24:43.000 --> 0:24:47.760 had an awareness of what have been lost, and you'd 0:24:47.840 --> 0:24:51.679 have to think that Bridger had it. I I do 0:24:51.840 --> 0:24:57.480 think he had that. And he was married, uh into 0:24:57.560 --> 0:25:04.360 the Shoshonee tribe, so he had lived the Native American 0:25:04.359 --> 0:25:09.600 culture and he was watching it literally being decimated. Uh. 0:25:10.640 --> 0:25:17.879 I can't imagine that they were not profound feelings of 0:25:17.880 --> 0:25:21.119 of misgivings about what was was going on. And so 0:25:21.640 --> 0:25:25.880 it's always difficult because you don't want to ah, sort 0:25:25.920 --> 0:25:32.760 of impose twenty one century views of the universe on 0:25:32.960 --> 0:25:37.000 historical characters and and uh, and so I try not 0:25:37.040 --> 0:25:39.800 to do that, but I think that somebody like Bridger 0:25:40.760 --> 0:25:45.560 uh must have had those types of misgivings. Well, the 0:25:45.560 --> 0:25:47.639 way I think that it's I don't think it's twenty 0:25:47.760 --> 0:25:51.320 and I don't think it's twenty one century views necessarily 0:25:51.359 --> 0:25:55.840 because here's a person who derived his his income and 0:25:55.880 --> 0:25:59.800 livelihood from the land's ability to put off resources. So 0:26:00.560 --> 0:26:04.080 at a time there was at least the hope and 0:26:04.440 --> 0:26:07.680 and you're you watched it happened to your peers that 0:26:07.760 --> 0:26:12.800 you could turn great fortune from trapping beaver, right, and 0:26:12.800 --> 0:26:15.199 it was just there for the taking, and food was 0:26:15.240 --> 0:26:19.400 readily available. It just like it was not like securing 0:26:19.480 --> 0:26:22.879 food was not an issue. There was no pressure about. 0:26:23.000 --> 0:26:25.760 I mean, you had pressure from like indigenous forces who 0:26:25.800 --> 0:26:30.399 didn't want you on their landscape, but because you regarded 0:26:30.480 --> 0:26:33.480 that in a sort of like low priority way, it 0:26:33.600 --> 0:26:37.280 felt like there was like an inexhaustible supply of land 0:26:37.280 --> 0:26:39.439 out there. So even if you just look at it 0:26:39.480 --> 0:26:43.000 totally pragmatically and look at it just and very personally. 0:26:43.480 --> 0:26:47.920 When you get to where the beaver are gone, um, 0:26:47.960 --> 0:26:51.440 it's much harder to secure food. Huge areas that had 0:26:51.840 --> 0:26:55.320 buffalo have been depleted of buffalo, and now you need 0:26:55.359 --> 0:27:00.320 to make your living contracting out to the military. Yeah. Um, 0:27:00.400 --> 0:27:02.359 I don't think you need to get to nostalgic to 0:27:02.440 --> 0:27:07.080 be like to realize that you have been, that your 0:27:07.200 --> 0:27:12.280 fortunes have gone down well, and the they must have 0:27:12.359 --> 0:27:17.199 had a I mean, at one level they experienced nature 0:27:18.000 --> 0:27:20.760 as and and you see this throughout the nineteenth century. 0:27:21.040 --> 0:27:23.399 You know, people in that era had a view of 0:27:23.480 --> 0:27:26.719 nature where first and foremost they had to survive, and 0:27:26.760 --> 0:27:29.760 so they were probably less focused on is it a 0:27:29.800 --> 0:27:33.919 pretty vista? Is it a pretty sunset? But by the 0:27:33.960 --> 0:27:37.600 same token, I just can't imagine that they did not 0:27:37.760 --> 0:27:40.600 have an appreciation for the beauty of the place that 0:27:40.680 --> 0:27:46.000 they that they lived in. And I in small ways 0:27:46.520 --> 0:27:53.000 today as uh, when I try and imagine what it 0:27:53.119 --> 0:27:57.160 felt like to live in that era, I feel nostalgia 0:27:57.280 --> 0:28:00.959 for parts of Montana that that I knew when they 0:28:00.960 --> 0:28:04.440 were wild and they're not wild anymore. And it makes 0:28:04.480 --> 0:28:09.600 me angry sometimes when I when I see that and 0:28:09.720 --> 0:28:11.640 to see it on the scale that that they were 0:28:11.640 --> 0:28:16.080 seeing it. Uh. And that's talking about about Jim Bridger. 0:28:16.560 --> 0:28:19.439 We've even got yet to the perspective of of the 0:28:19.520 --> 0:28:24.080 Native Native Americans who see their there not only their land, 0:28:24.119 --> 0:28:26.960 but their their their whole culture and way of living 0:28:27.800 --> 0:28:32.520 overturned in a in a space of a few years. 0:28:31.880 --> 0:28:35.639 It's it's almost impossible to imagine what that would have 0:28:35.680 --> 0:28:38.840 felt like. What one of the things I try and 0:28:38.880 --> 0:28:41.840 do in the book is to think about what did 0:28:41.840 --> 0:28:43.640 that feel like. That's one of the I think the 0:28:43.640 --> 0:28:47.520 fun things you can do with fiction, as you can imagine, 0:28:47.600 --> 0:28:49.600 not just you don't just talk about what happened, You 0:28:49.600 --> 0:28:52.440 imagine how did it feel and how did it feel 0:28:52.480 --> 0:28:54.960 for the people who are living in that era. To 0:28:55.280 --> 0:29:01.080 experience change at that scale does given away too much 0:29:01.120 --> 0:29:05.840 to tell us whose perspective the book is told, So 0:29:05.920 --> 0:29:10.640 it's told from multiple perspectives. Uh. And I think a 0:29:10.720 --> 0:29:13.800 story that rich and complex has to be told from 0:29:13.920 --> 0:29:19.480 from multiple perspectives. And one of the things that one 0:29:19.480 --> 0:29:21.080 of the problems I have with a lot of Western 0:29:21.080 --> 0:29:23.960 American history is I think too often it's told only 0:29:24.000 --> 0:29:30.480 from the the European American perspective, and that the Native 0:29:30.480 --> 0:29:34.640 perspective is given short shrift, and so I try and 0:29:34.680 --> 0:29:39.520 tell the story from from multiple perspectives. One of the 0:29:39.520 --> 0:29:41.960 experiences that I had, actually one of the one of 0:29:42.000 --> 0:29:44.720 the greatest jobs I had ever in my life is 0:29:45.720 --> 0:29:49.760 I UH was born and raised in Port and Level, Wyoming, 0:29:49.800 --> 0:29:52.800 and UH I went to junior high and high school 0:29:52.800 --> 0:29:55.560 in Torrington, Wyoming, in the southeastern corner of the state, 0:29:56.240 --> 0:30:01.280 and UH loved history and did this job where I 0:30:01.280 --> 0:30:03.880 worked in the summers of high school and college doing 0:30:04.320 --> 0:30:06.920 working for the National Park Service at Fort Laramie National 0:30:06.960 --> 0:30:10.840 Historic Site and dressed up every day literally in a 0:30:10.920 --> 0:30:17.200 eight seventy six cavalry cavalry uniform and shot guns and 0:30:17.400 --> 0:30:22.000 cannons and baked bread using the historic bread recipe and 0:30:22.040 --> 0:30:25.040 talked to tourists all day about the history of the West. 0:30:25.080 --> 0:30:29.120 That was my job. And I realized even at the 0:30:29.160 --> 0:30:32.040 time that the story that we were telling about the 0:30:32.120 --> 0:30:37.440 history of the West, UH was quite one sided. UH, 0:30:37.480 --> 0:30:40.200 and I've always felt like we could do a better 0:30:40.280 --> 0:30:42.680 job of telling that story. And I hope you know, 0:30:42.720 --> 0:30:45.200 in some measure I'm doing that with this this new book. 0:30:45.320 --> 0:30:52.240 It's difficult to pull off though, because, um, you can 0:30:52.320 --> 0:30:56.200 give the perspective of your own culture and own people. 0:30:56.360 --> 0:30:59.240 It was a little bit of a trap and trying 0:30:59.240 --> 0:31:03.160 to give the perspective of someone else, because even a 0:31:03.240 --> 0:31:11.720 well intentioned effort can be met with accusations of colonial appropriation, 0:31:12.440 --> 0:31:17.239 cultural appropriation, right, and so it's like I applaud you 0:31:17.320 --> 0:31:22.560 for not just turning around and saying forget it. Well, 0:31:22.720 --> 0:31:25.800 like it will never be rewarded, it will always be criticized. 0:31:27.280 --> 0:31:32.280 The best that I can do is to h from 0:31:32.280 --> 0:31:35.760 where I sit, to all the research and all the 0:31:35.800 --> 0:31:40.440 work that I can to learn all aspects of the history, 0:31:40.720 --> 0:31:43.760 and try and write it down in a way that 0:31:44.880 --> 0:31:50.400 I hope is accurate, and then subject it, which I've done, 0:31:51.360 --> 0:31:54.280 uh to a lot of two readers with a lot 0:31:54.280 --> 0:31:58.160 of different perspectives, including UH, a lot of different Native 0:31:58.160 --> 0:32:02.040 American readers, and UH, this book has been through a 0:32:02.040 --> 0:32:05.440 lot of drafts, and the draft that it's in reflects 0:32:05.480 --> 0:32:10.160 a lot of that input. So I am sure that 0:32:10.280 --> 0:32:14.800 I'm not telling the story perfectly. H. I know that's 0:32:14.840 --> 0:32:17.320 not the case. I hope I'm telling it in a 0:32:17.560 --> 0:32:21.880 in a fair way that that brings some balance to 0:32:22.040 --> 0:32:27.520 the story. And at that point, if I get things wrong, um, 0:32:27.640 --> 0:32:29.640 people can tell me about that and we can have 0:32:29.680 --> 0:32:32.600 that conversation and we can continue to have that conversation 0:32:32.680 --> 0:32:35.960 and learn all of us. But I think that's a 0:32:36.000 --> 0:32:41.200 more productive way to to two deal with an issue, 0:32:41.280 --> 0:32:44.360 to deal with issues like that, than to ignore them 0:32:44.480 --> 0:32:47.680 or worst, to to write it from only one perspective. 0:32:48.080 --> 0:32:54.680 Are you familiar with the historian Dan Floores? I know, 0:32:54.960 --> 0:32:57.880 not in detail. Um, I know he's written a lot 0:32:57.880 --> 0:33:01.479 about the buffalo and it. I don't I'm not an 0:33:01.480 --> 0:33:03.720 expert on him at all. Yeah, he's done some pretty 0:33:03.960 --> 0:33:09.200 influential work. And um, he's an environmental historian. When I 0:33:09.200 --> 0:33:13.240 was in graduate school, I took his one of his 0:33:13.320 --> 0:33:16.480 seminar courses. You had like you had to sort of 0:33:16.480 --> 0:33:19.200 take a seminar outside of your discipline, you know. So 0:33:19.240 --> 0:33:21.920 it took an environmental history seminar with Dan Flores, and 0:33:22.000 --> 0:33:25.360 he gave a lecture one day about the Battle of 0:33:25.400 --> 0:33:28.000 Adobe Walls. I think it's like the second Battle of 0:33:28.000 --> 0:33:30.320 Adobe Walls. And if you ever heard of this with 0:33:30.360 --> 0:33:32.720 the buffalo hunters and yeah, so they weren't supposed to 0:33:32.880 --> 0:33:36.280 they weren't supposed to hunt south of the state Southern 0:33:36.280 --> 0:33:38.880 Pacific rail line. Right, they weren't supposed to move into 0:33:38.920 --> 0:33:42.840 the southern plains. And these guys paid little, little to 0:33:42.880 --> 0:33:45.200 no attention to that kind of like what you're talking 0:33:45.200 --> 0:33:48.800 about with using the bowsman trail. And they were very 0:33:48.800 --> 0:33:56.840 well armed, um buffalo, Yeah, and uh, extraordinarily good shooters. 0:33:58.040 --> 0:34:01.720 Had this little fortress called Adobe Walls, and they ran 0:34:02.080 --> 0:34:04.080 hide hunting operations out of there, and it was like 0:34:04.200 --> 0:34:08.600 very defendable, and there were experts, um. And at one 0:34:08.600 --> 0:34:12.200 point in time, the tribes gathered in great number to 0:34:12.280 --> 0:34:17.000 go once and for all eliminate these guys out of 0:34:17.000 --> 0:34:25.600 this area. And and and native tellings of what happened 0:34:25.719 --> 0:34:30.680 on the way to this raid. Uh, young brave kills 0:34:30.800 --> 0:34:36.040 a skunk, which is a thing you do not do 0:34:37.160 --> 0:34:40.680 on the way to a fight. When they get to 0:34:40.719 --> 0:34:46.440 Adobe Walls, the hide hunters managed to kill chief at 0:34:46.600 --> 0:34:51.160 like some pot shot, and they kill a chief. And 0:34:51.200 --> 0:34:53.200 the battle, which was supposed to be this great routing 0:34:53.239 --> 0:34:58.279 of these hide hunters fizzles and the Indians right off. 0:34:59.280 --> 0:35:02.160 And then the telling of the hide hunters at Adobe Walls, 0:35:02.239 --> 0:35:06.759 it was there like superior skill, superior firepower, right, that 0:35:06.920 --> 0:35:12.320 one the day and Flori's explains how and the I 0:35:12.360 --> 0:35:15.799 think it's the Southern Cheyenne telling is that that guy 0:35:16.760 --> 0:35:20.080 killed a skunk on the way to that fight, and 0:35:20.160 --> 0:35:25.319 Floris then puts it to you like, um, who's right. Well, 0:35:25.440 --> 0:35:29.400 I mean, it's a perfect example of of why we 0:35:29.440 --> 0:35:33.680 should be looking at these historical incidents from multiple perspectives. 0:35:34.400 --> 0:35:39.880 And uh, you know, we haven't done that in our history. 0:35:39.960 --> 0:35:41.319 We haven't done a good job of that at all. 0:35:42.000 --> 0:35:47.160 And so again, I I'm sure that there are plenty 0:35:47.160 --> 0:35:50.200 of mistakes in in my book, but I I do 0:35:50.360 --> 0:35:52.839 hope that I've made the effort to tell the best 0:35:52.880 --> 0:35:56.439 story that I possibly can, including making a really big 0:35:56.480 --> 0:36:01.799 effort to to to bring multiple perspectives there. You mentioned earlier, 0:36:02.320 --> 0:36:05.760 Um that the Fetterman fight was kind of the biggest 0:36:07.120 --> 0:36:10.759 skirmish in the West prior to Little Big Horn. And 0:36:11.160 --> 0:36:14.680 I've always really liked reading about Little Big Horn. And 0:36:15.080 --> 0:36:17.080 I think that if you read contemporary works about the 0:36:17.080 --> 0:36:20.080 battle Little Big Horn, it's sort of they present it 0:36:20.200 --> 0:36:25.040 as sort of this great culmination, right that all these 0:36:25.160 --> 0:36:31.600 these these like outrageous figures and these like outsized human beings, 0:36:31.680 --> 0:36:35.200 right like collided in this this moment, this sort of 0:36:35.200 --> 0:36:39.759 like crescendo of tension in the American West, and it 0:36:40.200 --> 0:36:43.000 lives like that, Like we know that I was reading 0:36:43.000 --> 0:36:46.800 this book from the sixties recently that touches briefly on 0:36:46.960 --> 0:36:49.319 a Little Big Horn and his treatment of Little Big Horn. 0:36:50.239 --> 0:36:52.840 I think this is before it became popular. His treatment 0:36:52.840 --> 0:36:54.960 a Little Big Horn was basically like if you were 0:36:54.960 --> 0:36:58.560 talking about the d D invasions. Okay, so there's this 0:36:58.800 --> 0:37:02.920 massive undertaking that's going on, and meanwhile, off in some corner, 0:37:04.560 --> 0:37:08.880 a officer makes a mistake and gets a couple hundred 0:37:08.920 --> 0:37:12.800 people killed on D Day. And then later we talked 0:37:12.800 --> 0:37:18.239 about June six. Later we talked about it, and we're like, 0:37:18.480 --> 0:37:25.040 D Day huge successful objective, turned the tide. Oh and 0:37:25.080 --> 0:37:27.080 also this guy kind of screwed up and got everybody killed, 0:37:27.440 --> 0:37:30.200 Like that was his like in the nineties sixties, that 0:37:30.239 --> 0:37:32.399 was his viewpoint of a little Big Horn didn't even 0:37:32.400 --> 0:37:36.319 really warrant. It was just an anomaly, like a guy 0:37:36.360 --> 0:37:39.319 made a stupid mistake. Had no real bearing on how 0:37:39.360 --> 0:37:43.960 the Indian Wars went. Everything kept right on schedule. We 0:37:44.120 --> 0:37:49.880 still like subjugated the Sioux Um. It was just it 0:37:49.960 --> 0:37:52.480 just doesn't really like we focus on it, But why 0:37:52.520 --> 0:37:55.160 are we focused on this? It didn't change the course 0:37:55.200 --> 0:37:59.239 of It didn't change. So here's the course of destiny? Right? 0:37:59.719 --> 0:38:02.520 I think I disagree with that that theory. I'll tell 0:38:02.560 --> 0:38:07.800 you why. Um. Well, first of all, look, these these 0:38:07.840 --> 0:38:15.800 battles where uh, where armies get wiped out are intrinsically fascinating, 0:38:15.880 --> 0:38:18.320 and it's like, you know, you kind of can't look away. 0:38:18.560 --> 0:38:23.320 And so the Fetterman Fight, the Battle a Little Big Horn, 0:38:23.880 --> 0:38:28.120 they just there there cat nip in terms of our 0:38:28.360 --> 0:38:34.279 interest because they're just so graphic. Um. But what I 0:38:34.320 --> 0:38:37.799 think is interesting about the difference between the Fetterman Fight 0:38:38.680 --> 0:38:43.400 and the Battle a Little Big Horn is the impact 0:38:43.400 --> 0:38:45.759 that the battles had politically. And so I agree a 0:38:45.840 --> 0:38:48.440 little bit with the point that the person was making 0:38:48.960 --> 0:38:52.800 that from a military standpoint. Um, you know, we're talking 0:38:52.840 --> 0:38:57.439 about eighty guys who die in the Fetterman fight, and 0:38:57.760 --> 0:39:00.120 I don't remember the precise number with Custer too, U 0:39:00.440 --> 0:39:04.480 twenty or something like that. Um. And if you compare 0:39:04.560 --> 0:39:09.720 that to D Day, uh, that is not a massive battle. 0:39:10.520 --> 0:39:15.600 But both of those uh fights happened at really interesting 0:39:15.600 --> 0:39:19.560 political moments in US history. The Feederman fight happens in 0:39:19.600 --> 0:39:22.480 eighteen sixty six, two years after the end of the 0:39:22.520 --> 0:39:29.000 Civil War, when the US is weary of war. They've 0:39:29.040 --> 0:39:35.480 completely uh drawn down the size of the U. S. Army. 0:39:35.600 --> 0:39:43.040 Um they're preoccupied with trying to manage, uh the the 0:39:43.080 --> 0:39:45.960 reconstruction of the South, and that required a huge military 0:39:45.960 --> 0:39:48.719 presence in and of itself. And there just was no 0:39:48.840 --> 0:39:53.160 interest in the in eighteen sixty six in in having 0:39:53.160 --> 0:39:58.480 a big fight out west. And so when Fetterman, when 0:39:58.480 --> 0:40:02.839 the Federman defeat happens, the US pulls back and the 0:40:02.880 --> 0:40:08.080 Indians win this war for a couple of years. My 0:40:08.120 --> 0:40:14.120 favorite anecdote about the Custer Battle is Custer uh fight. 0:40:14.480 --> 0:40:18.560 The battle a little big horn occurs on June eighteen 0:40:18.719 --> 0:40:23.440 seventy six, eighteen seventy six. Takes a long time for 0:40:23.480 --> 0:40:26.600 the news to travel back to Washington, d C. It's 0:40:26.800 --> 0:40:34.480 Independence Day. The news of the Custer massacre arrives in Washington, 0:40:34.600 --> 0:40:40.520 d C. On July four, eight seventy six, literally in 0:40:40.560 --> 0:40:44.600 the midst of the celebration of the centennial of the 0:40:44.680 --> 0:40:47.320 hundred year anniversary of the country. It's like the biggest 0:40:47.440 --> 0:40:50.560 turd in the punch bowl in American history. To that point, 0:40:51.480 --> 0:40:55.960 and and the political reaction to the battle of a 0:40:55.960 --> 0:40:59.360 Little Big Horn is the opposite of the of the 0:40:59.400 --> 0:41:04.920 reaction to the fetterment fight. They decide enough, we're not 0:41:05.200 --> 0:41:11.360 gonna lose UH to the Indians in the west. And 0:41:11.840 --> 0:41:17.040 they beginning at that moment, UH, they send out Nelson Miles, 0:41:17.160 --> 0:41:19.920 who you know is one of the most kind of 0:41:20.040 --> 0:41:25.360 BADASSUH warriors in the in the U. S. Army, and 0:41:25.640 --> 0:41:29.200 he and and a big army go out west and 0:41:29.239 --> 0:41:32.280 they start doing something they hadn't done very much before, 0:41:32.320 --> 0:41:35.880 which is attacking UH the Indians in the winter when 0:41:35.920 --> 0:41:39.919 they were at least able to fight. And within two 0:41:40.040 --> 0:41:45.759 years the Indian Wars are over. Um. Crazy horses is 0:41:45.800 --> 0:41:50.720 on the reservation. Uh. He rolled up the nest first 0:41:50.719 --> 0:41:54.120 to the next song the Nez Perce UH surrender and 0:41:54.880 --> 0:41:57.960 UH sitting bowl is in exile in Canada. The Indian 0:41:57.960 --> 0:42:03.560 Wars are over. And so the political significance of those battles, 0:42:03.600 --> 0:42:07.040 even though in the if you look at them compared 0:42:07.080 --> 0:42:09.399 to some of the Civil War battles or or other 0:42:09.400 --> 0:42:14.760 battles where thousands of people die, Um, the political significance 0:42:14.760 --> 0:42:30.240 of those battles I think was huge. In reading Um, 0:42:30.280 --> 0:42:33.680 the revenuet thing I really appreciate. You're gonna come around 0:42:33.680 --> 0:42:35.799 to this. We've warmed up a little bit now, so 0:42:35.800 --> 0:42:37.560 so you've you've been warming up. I feel like you've 0:42:37.560 --> 0:42:40.279 been like like a wind windmilling for a sucker punch 0:42:40.840 --> 0:42:43.200 to bring it on, bring it on. In reading the Revenue, 0:42:43.280 --> 0:42:48.560 you solved for me. You solved for me a thing 0:42:48.600 --> 0:42:51.799 I never understood, and it was a detail that I 0:42:51.840 --> 0:42:56.760 really appreciate it because I like, uh details. Um, even 0:42:56.800 --> 0:43:02.120 with the director Michael Man, like he loved him so 0:43:03.239 --> 0:43:06.920 and Ali and lord knows what other movies. Um, the 0:43:07.000 --> 0:43:13.719 guy this is no burying anything. But the cinematographer Mo 0:43:14.000 --> 0:43:17.279 Foulon that sort of like gave our show, like made 0:43:17.280 --> 0:43:18.959 our show like the way it is, like it looks 0:43:18.960 --> 0:43:21.400 the way it is because this guy Mofoulon, Mofoulin, that 0:43:21.680 --> 0:43:27.279 had been Michael Mann's assistant at a time, and Mo 0:43:27.360 --> 0:43:30.839 would talk talks about how Michael Mann was very attuned 0:43:30.960 --> 0:43:35.799 to details, and you talk about how humans are really 0:43:35.840 --> 0:43:39.680 smart animals, you know, and he viewed audiences that way, 0:43:39.840 --> 0:43:43.879 like intelligent animals, and he wanted things to look and 0:43:43.960 --> 0:43:46.719 feel right, you know. I think it's one of the 0:43:46.719 --> 0:43:50.000 great strengths like Karen McCarthy's, he really cares like how 0:43:50.040 --> 0:43:53.400 things look. But in the book, I've always known that 0:43:53.480 --> 0:43:57.479 mountain you'd see mountain men wearing pants that were leather 0:43:58.680 --> 0:44:02.400 to the knee to the knee, and you see depictions 0:44:02.400 --> 0:44:05.080 of them leather to the knee and wool down from them. 0:44:05.200 --> 0:44:09.759 They're down helpful. I never ever thought about what that was, 0:44:09.800 --> 0:44:13.440 except for I don't know, so, uh, the state of 0:44:13.480 --> 0:44:17.040 the art pants for a uh, state of the art 0:44:17.080 --> 0:44:22.400 mountain man was was leather to the knee and wool 0:44:22.680 --> 0:44:28.760 from the knee down, because, uh, because wool dries quickly 0:44:29.160 --> 0:44:33.440 and remains warm when it's wet. And of course, what 0:44:33.480 --> 0:44:36.560 the fur tuators were doing with the beaver trappers were 0:44:36.560 --> 0:44:41.080 doing was waiting in two cricks to pull out beaver traps. 0:44:41.440 --> 0:44:44.280 So they were constantly wading in and out of water. 0:44:45.040 --> 0:44:50.719 And you can imagine wet, wet buckskin, uh is heavy 0:44:50.760 --> 0:44:54.239 and uncomfortable and doesn't keep you warm. And so they yeah, 0:44:54.239 --> 0:45:00.000 they wore these uh special pants. Uh yeah, knee boots, 0:45:00.120 --> 0:45:03.319 yeah exactly. But but the buckskin upper, what was the 0:45:03.480 --> 0:45:07.879 what's the advantage of that? Why wasn't it just that's 0:45:07.880 --> 0:45:12.959 a good question, Um, durability and availability of resource probably yeah, 0:45:13.080 --> 0:45:16.080 And uh so I guess they didn't have enough wool 0:45:16.200 --> 0:45:18.319 to to get the whole pant made out of wall, 0:45:18.440 --> 0:45:20.239 so they just they did it from the knee down. 0:45:20.680 --> 0:45:22.799 And then I think they're pretty conscious about looks too, 0:45:22.840 --> 0:45:25.439 so they I get the sense they liked the look 0:45:25.480 --> 0:45:29.640 of of buckskin and and you know all that and 0:45:29.719 --> 0:45:33.759 so a little bit of wall. Maybe what research did 0:45:33.760 --> 0:45:36.080 you do that get that sort of brought about ideas 0:45:36.080 --> 0:45:38.240 that they were sort of they had they had ideas 0:45:38.239 --> 0:45:41.680 of fashion or look, there was there were hairstyles. Oh 0:45:41.719 --> 0:45:44.680 my god, they were like like in the frontiers, been 0:45:44.680 --> 0:45:46.239 a little bit earlier, but they would they had they 0:45:46.239 --> 0:45:48.920 would plait their hair, they would braid their hair in 0:45:48.960 --> 0:45:51.480 a specific way. Absolutely, And I think they admired the 0:45:51.600 --> 0:45:55.360 dress of of a lot of the the native tribes 0:45:55.360 --> 0:46:01.160 who also had wonderful uh clothing that they that they wore, 0:46:01.200 --> 0:46:04.719 and they copied that. And um, I think there was 0:46:04.800 --> 0:46:07.480 a I think they were quite fashion conscious in their 0:46:07.560 --> 0:46:11.399 in their own way. A thing that's troubled me, like, 0:46:11.480 --> 0:46:15.399 if there's a for any historians out there, for any 0:46:15.440 --> 0:46:18.759 PhD candidates out there, there is a thing that has 0:46:18.800 --> 0:46:23.520 not been adequately explained about the mountain men. And I'll 0:46:23.560 --> 0:46:24.719 put it to you to see if you have any 0:46:24.719 --> 0:46:26.840 insights on it. Do you have any exposure to trapping? 0:46:26.960 --> 0:46:28.839 Do you have you done at trap? I have not 0:46:29.480 --> 0:46:33.359 trapped myself, I know, so I won't overstate my expertise. Here. 0:46:33.600 --> 0:46:41.520 A beaver in a foothold trap is very, very difficult 0:46:41.840 --> 0:46:49.440 to hang onto. UM we use today. The it's it's 0:46:49.480 --> 0:46:55.839 astounding how little the technology has switched between what they 0:46:55.840 --> 0:46:59.200 were using, which is a double long spring trap. Granted 0:46:59.200 --> 0:47:03.480 these are handful words, UM and and we still use 0:47:03.560 --> 0:47:06.279 double long spring traps today. Like you catch beavers, you can. 0:47:07.160 --> 0:47:09.600 We've kind of gradually switched to something called coil spring, 0:47:10.560 --> 0:47:13.520 but I own some have caught beaver in them, and 0:47:13.560 --> 0:47:17.440 they are like dead ringers for what they're us in 0:47:17.440 --> 0:47:23.839 those days. However, UM we use now a one way 0:47:24.520 --> 0:47:27.360 slide and you put it on a wire or a chain, 0:47:28.120 --> 0:47:29.960 and it's like when the beaver gets caught in the trap, 0:47:30.480 --> 0:47:33.839 he instinctively dives for deep water and there's a one 0:47:33.880 --> 0:47:36.879 way slide wire and he can take the trap down 0:47:36.880 --> 0:47:39.360 in the deep water and it's the slide wire is 0:47:39.400 --> 0:47:41.480 anchored on both ends. It's anchored on the bank and 0:47:41.480 --> 0:47:43.560 it's anchored out in three or four ft of water. 0:47:44.520 --> 0:47:47.239 He can't come back up. The trap won't come back up, 0:47:47.440 --> 0:47:52.120 and that's how you drown them. Anytime that beaver jack's 0:47:52.200 --> 0:47:59.239 that lower stake out or dicks around too much on 0:47:59.320 --> 0:48:02.480 the bank and twist that drowner wire up so that 0:48:02.719 --> 0:48:07.879 the slide can't slide, or any time he anyway incapacitates 0:48:08.680 --> 0:48:12.680 that slide wire, it's like it's probably a gone beaver. 0:48:13.800 --> 0:48:16.960 You're gonna have a toenail. He's gonna be he just 0:48:17.000 --> 0:48:19.759 has gone. You can't hang onto him. And when you 0:48:19.760 --> 0:48:22.680 read historical accounts of how they made their sets, I 0:48:22.680 --> 0:48:29.040 don't think anyone yet understands how they anchored off their 0:48:29.080 --> 0:48:32.960 sets because any explanation I've read, I'm like, no, you 0:48:33.000 --> 0:48:35.280 wouldn't have the success rate. Because these guys are running 0:48:35.280 --> 0:48:37.600 like six sets at a time. Allot of them carried 0:48:37.640 --> 0:48:39.600 six traps, you see it all the time, and they're 0:48:39.600 --> 0:48:42.279 pulling like four or five beaver a day. No one 0:48:42.320 --> 0:48:44.680 knows how they rigged their ship, and that would be 0:48:44.760 --> 0:48:47.560 a great avenue of exploration for someone to find out, 0:48:47.640 --> 0:48:50.960 like how they actually rigged their ship, and then some 0:48:51.120 --> 0:48:54.359 historian would go out and catch and have a four 0:48:54.480 --> 0:48:57.760 or five out of six trap success ratio using that equipment. 0:48:57.800 --> 0:48:59.680 I don't think you could do it. People make a 0:48:59.680 --> 0:49:02.319 big lot of nap in a arrowhead nowadays and like 0:49:02.400 --> 0:49:04.879 killing deer with it. That doesn't impress me at all. 0:49:05.360 --> 0:49:07.680 It would impress me to set six traps with those 0:49:07.719 --> 0:49:10.440 slide wires and catch five beavers. I don't know the 0:49:10.480 --> 0:49:13.200 answer to that. I guess I knew that the way 0:49:13.239 --> 0:49:17.279 that the beaver divers by drowning, but I don't know 0:49:17.360 --> 0:49:21.640 how they I don't remember reading how they how they 0:49:21.719 --> 0:49:25.440 rigged it. The people that saw it happen, I didn't 0:49:25.840 --> 0:49:29.879 think too describe it. I have no They obviously had 0:49:29.880 --> 0:49:31.880 to figure out yeah, they just did it right, and 0:49:31.920 --> 0:49:35.040 they would have been undoubtedly that have been very particular 0:49:35.080 --> 0:49:39.520 about water depth and all kinds of other considerations. But 0:49:39.560 --> 0:49:42.080 instead you just imagine, now it's like these people catching 0:49:42.120 --> 0:49:47.000 all these beavers and you overlook like what it actually involved, yea, 0:49:47.320 --> 0:49:50.160 and to do it while not getting killed. Well, I 0:49:50.200 --> 0:49:53.560 think about that every time I'm fishing, because they you know, 0:49:54.160 --> 0:49:57.880 I'm walking up the same cricks that they were setting 0:49:58.880 --> 0:50:04.560 beaver traps on and you know, they're thickly vegetated and 0:50:05.200 --> 0:50:08.040 I'm not worried about somebody hiding in the trees who 0:50:08.120 --> 0:50:12.160 wants to kill me, and uh, and they were and 0:50:12.320 --> 0:50:16.719 you almost can't see how any of those guys survived. Uh, 0:50:17.320 --> 0:50:20.480 and my god, that they not survived though, I mean, 0:50:20.480 --> 0:50:23.719 they died like flies. Well it's one of the reasons why. 0:50:23.760 --> 0:50:27.359 The fact that that Jim Bridger and James Beckworth are 0:50:27.560 --> 0:50:33.000 sixties sixty something guys in you know, in the eighteen sixties, 0:50:33.040 --> 0:50:38.239 and the fact that they've lived through decades of a 0:50:38.280 --> 0:50:42.279 pretty vigorous lifestyle is it's stunning. And they did it 0:50:42.320 --> 0:50:48.239 with like Bridger, didn't he have the whitman who was 0:50:48.320 --> 0:50:50.919 later in the women massacre. Didn't he carve a broad 0:50:51.000 --> 0:50:53.560 head out of bridge or shoulder blade? Yea at the 0:50:54.760 --> 0:50:58.239 tearing around for years in the bone of his shoulders 0:50:58.320 --> 0:51:01.719 and there's a there's an etching of that happening. And 0:51:01.800 --> 0:51:07.640 Bridger is is leaning across a tree stump. Why this 0:51:07.840 --> 0:51:10.520 while this guy literally I think it's and I think 0:51:10.560 --> 0:51:12.839 the arrowhead had been in there for two or three 0:51:12.920 --> 0:51:17.480 years and and you know, I guess he got super 0:51:17.560 --> 0:51:20.000 drunk and and let the guy kind of hack on 0:51:20.080 --> 0:51:23.760 him for a while, and he yanks out that arrowhead 0:51:23.920 --> 0:51:26.000 and it was like a doctor doing people point out, 0:51:26.040 --> 0:51:28.239 being like the first sort of like the first sort 0:51:28.239 --> 0:51:32.399 of western style official surgery west of some latitude line. 0:51:32.480 --> 0:51:36.160 You can you can imagine the reality TV event that 0:51:36.160 --> 0:51:39.279 that was at the rendezvous, the number of people that 0:51:39.360 --> 0:51:42.480 stood around to kind of watch that. Um, can he 0:51:42.560 --> 0:51:45.560 walk us through the Huge Glass story? So the Huge 0:51:46.000 --> 0:51:48.239 ask you a question. Absolutely, I want you to do it, 0:51:48.280 --> 0:51:50.279 but I'm I'm too I'm too dying. And all the 0:51:50.280 --> 0:51:56.160 answers something, um, do you buy like, I know, you 0:51:56.160 --> 0:51:59.120 know how Huge Glass died? You know what? Walk us 0:51:59.120 --> 0:52:00.919 through the Huge Glass? And then I want to ask 0:52:00.960 --> 0:52:02.919 you if you think that the legend of his death 0:52:02.960 --> 0:52:04.279 is true or not. But just walk us through the 0:52:04.320 --> 0:52:10.200 Hugh Glass story, pirates and everything. Okay, So uh, first 0:52:10.239 --> 0:52:13.640 of all, I'll tell a bit of an embarrassing side story, 0:52:14.040 --> 0:52:16.759 which is that The Revenant is not the first book 0:52:16.800 --> 0:52:20.440 that I started to write. Um. I started to write 0:52:20.480 --> 0:52:24.520 another book which was going to be loosely based on 0:52:24.719 --> 0:52:29.360 me and my experiences as like a young legislative aid 0:52:29.600 --> 0:52:32.839 in Washington, D C. And I got about you, you you 0:52:32.880 --> 0:52:35.920 wouldn't be on this show. Well, I'm getting I'm getting 0:52:35.960 --> 0:52:40.919 to that. I got about I got about halfway through 0:52:40.960 --> 0:52:42.920 that book and started sharing it with a couple of 0:52:42.920 --> 0:52:47.040 friends who I could trust, who both told me that 0:52:47.200 --> 0:52:51.719 it was it was boring, and that was hurtful. Those 0:52:51.719 --> 0:52:53.640 are good friends. That it's it's they're good friends. But 0:52:53.680 --> 0:52:55.920 it was hurtful because that was the fictionalized version of 0:52:55.920 --> 0:52:58.600 my life that they were talking about. So uh so 0:52:58.719 --> 0:53:02.080 right about the moment that I is abandoning a novel 0:53:02.160 --> 0:53:07.240 based on a fictionalized version of my apparently extremely boring life, 0:53:07.719 --> 0:53:12.919 I was. I was reading a book about the Mountain Man, 0:53:13.320 --> 0:53:16.800 nonfiction book, and there were two paragraphs in it about 0:53:17.000 --> 0:53:21.120 Hugh Glass. And these two paragraphs said, Uh, you know, 0:53:21.200 --> 0:53:26.520 there's this guy. He's mauled by a grizzly bear, horribly wounded. Uh. 0:53:26.560 --> 0:53:30.120 Two of his comrades are left to wait for him 0:53:30.120 --> 0:53:34.000 to die and bury him, and instead of doing that, 0:53:34.360 --> 0:53:39.839 they rob him and abandoned him. And first of all, 0:53:39.960 --> 0:53:44.200 out of h anger, he crawls two hundred miles back 0:53:44.280 --> 0:53:48.640 to the last vestige of civilization and survives and re 0:53:48.719 --> 0:53:51.920 equips himself and then goes out to seek revenge, and 0:53:51.960 --> 0:53:54.759 I'm like, Okay, that's a pretty good story. That's a 0:53:55.000 --> 0:53:56.759 that's a lot more interesting than my life. I'm going 0:53:56.840 --> 0:53:59.719 to write a book about that. So that's where I 0:53:59.760 --> 0:54:02.759 got interested in the in the story and started doing 0:54:02.760 --> 0:54:05.720 the research on on Hugh Glass to to write the book. 0:54:05.719 --> 0:54:10.040 And and for me, even when it's fiction, the research 0:54:10.120 --> 0:54:11.879 that you get to do is is half the fun, 0:54:11.960 --> 0:54:14.920 because I gotta not only read all about the mountain men, 0:54:14.960 --> 0:54:17.440 but I gotta read all about wilderness survival and I 0:54:17.480 --> 0:54:20.520 gotta try and figure out, you know, what type of 0:54:20.840 --> 0:54:24.439 uh of trap could a guy who can't use one 0:54:24.600 --> 0:54:29.120 arm uh possibly uh build that allow him to get 0:54:29.160 --> 0:54:31.920 food if he when he doesn't have a knife or 0:54:31.960 --> 0:54:34.359 a rifle or even flint and steel, what what would 0:54:34.360 --> 0:54:36.680 he do? And so I gotta just do all sorts 0:54:36.680 --> 0:54:40.560 of these fun little uh forays into areas that were 0:54:40.719 --> 0:54:45.759 interesting to do research on um. But that is the 0:54:45.840 --> 0:54:48.840 kernel of the story of the part of Hugh glasses 0:54:48.880 --> 0:54:51.840 life that he's most famous for, which is being attacked 0:54:51.840 --> 0:54:55.719 by mall horribly mall by a grizzly abandoned and robbed 0:54:55.719 --> 0:54:58.640 by his comrades, and then going out to seek revenge, 0:54:59.360 --> 0:55:05.240 but before were that, uh, he had a remarkable life. 0:55:05.840 --> 0:55:10.080 And who knows how much of this is legend and 0:55:10.080 --> 0:55:13.560 and how much is is fact. But there's a there's 0:55:13.560 --> 0:55:18.719 a really entertaining and quirky biography a few glass by 0:55:18.719 --> 0:55:22.520 a guy named John Myers Myers. And it was written, 0:55:22.680 --> 0:55:25.520 I think, also in the sixties. And it's it's uh, 0:55:25.719 --> 0:55:28.560 it is uh. It feels a little bit like it 0:55:28.600 --> 0:55:32.319 was written in the sixties, but according to his biographer, 0:55:32.680 --> 0:55:35.600 he was originally a Can I ask what it means 0:55:35.640 --> 0:55:37.799 to feel like it was written in the sixties. It's 0:55:38.280 --> 0:55:42.880 it is not politically correct at all, um, And it 0:55:42.880 --> 0:55:46.239 has a very one sided view of many aspects of 0:55:46.239 --> 0:55:50.240 of of Western history. And he's just John Meyers Myers. 0:55:50.440 --> 0:55:53.319 And I can't imagine he's still alive. You can tell 0:55:53.400 --> 0:55:57.080 he's he's a got character and is a quirky dude. 0:55:57.560 --> 0:56:01.439 And it's this is not like a written like a 0:56:01.440 --> 0:56:07.479 a doctorate thesis. This is a this is freewheeling, which 0:56:07.480 --> 0:56:08.960 makes it kind of fun to read, but also makes 0:56:09.000 --> 0:56:11.120 you kind of wonder sometimes how much is true and 0:56:11.120 --> 0:56:13.120 how much isn't. So I won't vouch for any of 0:56:13.120 --> 0:56:17.320 this being true. The legend, according to his biographer of 0:56:17.320 --> 0:56:20.240 of Hugh Glass is that he started off his life 0:56:20.280 --> 0:56:24.080 as a sailor and that he was on a ship 0:56:24.680 --> 0:56:30.920 that was captured by the pirate UH or or or 0:56:30.960 --> 0:56:34.400 not pirate, depending on your version of history. Jean Lafitte 0:56:35.160 --> 0:56:42.080 and uh and imprisoned UH on an island off the 0:56:42.120 --> 0:56:49.560 shore of Texas and escaped from this pirate island to 0:56:49.719 --> 0:56:53.360 the mainland of Texas. And this would have been in 0:56:53.400 --> 0:57:01.759 the eighteen teens. And uh proceeds literally to walk from 0:57:01.800 --> 0:57:06.600 the Gulf of Mexico to what is now uh well 0:57:06.680 --> 0:57:10.279 to St. Louis, Missouri, uh and has all sorts of 0:57:10.320 --> 0:57:13.759 adventures along the way. Yeah, well one could imagine. It 0:57:13.800 --> 0:57:17.160 wasn't just a smooth it was not there there there 0:57:17.280 --> 0:57:22.240 was no interstate UH. And so that's Hugh glasses life 0:57:22.600 --> 0:57:28.280 before in eight three he signs on with the Rocky 0:57:28.280 --> 0:57:31.840 Mountain for Company to go out and be part of 0:57:31.840 --> 0:57:36.160 one of these first trapping parties that goes uh up 0:57:36.200 --> 0:57:39.400 to Missouri. And when they set out to do this, 0:57:39.520 --> 0:57:43.440 were they setting out to trap, were they setting out 0:57:43.480 --> 0:57:45.360 to trade? Or they set out to do a combination 0:57:45.400 --> 0:57:50.280 of the two. Probably a combination. UM most of the 0:57:50.360 --> 0:57:54.840 earliest trappers both trapped on their own but also traded 0:57:55.280 --> 0:57:59.320 with local tribes who would also bring in uh furs, 0:57:59.560 --> 0:58:02.480 and then they would obviously send those send those down river, 0:58:02.960 --> 0:58:06.360 and so probably both. Um, I want to jump to 0:58:06.360 --> 0:58:07.640 the death part, and then we'll get back to what 0:58:07.680 --> 0:58:10.760 happens in the middle of his life. Uh do you 0:58:10.920 --> 0:58:13.760 buy that? I don't even know where it comes from. 0:58:14.040 --> 0:58:16.560 Legend has and I learned where it comes from. Oh, 0:58:16.640 --> 0:58:19.040 and it's not true. Well I think it was true, 0:58:19.080 --> 0:58:20.960 and I'll tell you why. And this is where this 0:58:21.040 --> 0:58:22.640 is all coming together. Do you want to tell the story? 0:58:22.680 --> 0:58:24.200 Should I tell the story? Well, you tell a story, 0:58:24.200 --> 0:58:25.800 and then I'll tell the story the version effort that 0:58:25.840 --> 0:58:32.400 I know. Uh, they're on the Yellowstone and he's with 0:58:32.440 --> 0:58:36.160 some other trappers and they get into a skirmish with 0:58:36.320 --> 0:58:39.160 Indians and they wind up holding Do we know where 0:58:39.160 --> 0:58:42.160 about the yell Stone? It was going to the mouth 0:58:42.160 --> 0:58:44.400 of the Big Horn, wasn't there was a near the 0:58:44.400 --> 0:58:46.560 confluence of the Big Horn in the Yellowstone. They get 0:58:46.640 --> 0:58:53.200 into a skirmish was some uh erica, I think, And 0:58:53.720 --> 0:58:57.720 they want to hold up in a coolie and they can't. 0:58:58.440 --> 0:59:02.760 They got a little stronghold was not looking good for him, 0:59:02.880 --> 0:59:06.200 and the Indians decided to set fire to the grass. 0:59:07.720 --> 0:59:10.920 And they set fire to the grass and Huge Glass 0:59:10.960 --> 0:59:13.880 and his compatriots there, No, that just not looking good. 0:59:14.720 --> 0:59:18.040 And they touch a match or touch a spark to 0:59:18.160 --> 0:59:22.240 a powder keg and kill themselves. I don't buy it. 0:59:23.000 --> 0:59:25.560 Why not it's wrong that? Well, I'll tell I'll tell you. 0:59:26.040 --> 0:59:28.480 I'll tell you the story that was wrong with that. 0:59:28.520 --> 0:59:30.400 I'll tell you the story. First of all, what I 0:59:30.440 --> 0:59:34.240 heard is it happened in December or January, and the 0:59:34.320 --> 0:59:37.920 Yellowstone was frozen. So the grass fire bit seems a 0:59:37.960 --> 0:59:41.800 little implausible. Um, that's a strike against it. But I 0:59:41.840 --> 0:59:43.440 don't think it puts it to death. But hold on, 0:59:43.480 --> 0:59:45.200 I got more details and I'll tell you where they 0:59:45.240 --> 0:59:49.720 came from. Um. So, one of the fun little side 0:59:49.760 --> 0:59:53.680 forays in doing research for this new book, Ridgeline, is 0:59:54.040 --> 0:59:59.120 I read a biography about James Beckworth the African American 0:59:59.480 --> 1:00:07.080 Mountain and uh Beckworth claims to have found the body 1:00:07.120 --> 1:00:11.040 of Hugh Glass when he was killed. And the story 1:00:11.080 --> 1:00:15.920 that Beckworth tells is this, there was a trading post 1:00:16.000 --> 1:00:21.160 at the mouth of the of the Big Horn, and 1:00:21.160 --> 1:00:25.920 the Yellowstone that's that's a historical fact. Forecast I think 1:00:26.040 --> 1:00:27.640 was one of the I think that in that era, 1:00:27.840 --> 1:00:29.680 and it bounced up and down like a couple miles 1:00:29.680 --> 1:00:33.000 this direction, because there's a couple of different sites, so 1:00:33.080 --> 1:00:38.440 there's a trading post there Forecast, and I think they 1:00:38.440 --> 1:00:43.160 were primarily trading with the Crow, which were the I 1:00:43.200 --> 1:00:47.200 believe in that era, the dominant tribe in that part 1:00:47.520 --> 1:00:54.520 of the story exactly. And Uh, a group of crow 1:00:54.640 --> 1:01:00.400 comes into Forecast and wants to trade um and there 1:01:00.440 --> 1:01:05.200 are not enough goods at Forecast to trade as much 1:01:05.200 --> 1:01:09.040 as the as the as the Indians want to and 1:01:09.120 --> 1:01:14.240 so they dispatch two men from Forecast to a fort 1:01:14.320 --> 1:01:18.720 that's thirty miles away that's affiliated to go get more 1:01:18.760 --> 1:01:22.400 trading goods to bring Bratt back and trade with the crow. 1:01:23.480 --> 1:01:25.680 And Hugh Glass is one of the two guys that 1:01:25.840 --> 1:01:28.600 is dispatched to this other fort to go get more 1:01:28.640 --> 1:01:32.680 trading goods. And the story that Beckworth tells is that 1:01:33.880 --> 1:01:40.200 Glass was crossing the frozen uh Yellowstone River uh and 1:01:40.440 --> 1:01:44.080 was caught out on the ice in the open by 1:01:44.120 --> 1:01:48.400 a raiding party of Ricara, which was not expected in 1:01:48.480 --> 1:01:52.840 that territory in that era. And the Ricara catch him 1:01:52.840 --> 1:01:56.440 out on the glass and kill him. And Beckworth was 1:01:56.480 --> 1:01:59.040 one of the men who went out and found his 1:01:59.720 --> 1:02:03.760 meat ated body. M that's the story in that Beckworth 1:02:03.800 --> 1:02:11.360 tells who was the politician after they discredited the story 1:02:11.400 --> 1:02:15.080 of Paul Revere? Who is the politician? That said, Uh, 1:02:15.160 --> 1:02:21.240 I love Paul Revere, whether he wrote or not, meaning 1:02:21.280 --> 1:02:24.760 I'm sticking with the powder kick story. Well, look, I 1:02:24.880 --> 1:02:28.440 love Hugh Glass. Whichever way he died, that's still that's 1:02:28.440 --> 1:02:30.240 still a pretty epic life. And whether or not he 1:02:30.320 --> 1:02:34.240 was a captive of the pirates or not, look he 1:02:34.400 --> 1:02:38.280 uh he did. He did a lot of ship um 1:02:38.400 --> 1:02:42.600 and so definitely one of those kind of epic uh. 1:02:42.840 --> 1:02:46.040 Nineteenth century lives that I just think are so so 1:02:46.160 --> 1:02:53.000 much fun to study about. How do you pronounce the 1:02:52.280 --> 1:03:01.480 the spy intrigue novelist John law Lakara? I think somebody 1:03:01.520 --> 1:03:03.800 will tell us something we're wrong at that. I thought 1:03:03.800 --> 1:03:06.160 it was pronounced la car. It could be maybe it's 1:03:06.160 --> 1:03:09.560 a car. He's got a great quote he said, watching 1:03:09.560 --> 1:03:12.920 your book being made into a movie is like watching 1:03:12.920 --> 1:03:18.480 an ox and turned into a bull. Young cube. Uh. 1:03:19.320 --> 1:03:22.200 What was the experience like for you? Um? Well again, 1:03:22.280 --> 1:03:24.760 I'm not gonna wine too much because but we're not 1:03:25.240 --> 1:03:27.000 you know, I'm not. I'm not asked. I'm not inviting 1:03:27.040 --> 1:03:33.200 you to one. I mean, it's like, listen, I probably 1:03:33.200 --> 1:03:35.160 the greatest thing that ever happened in the whole wide world. 1:03:35.840 --> 1:03:38.800 It was a blast. Who wouldn't want You'll notice that 1:03:38.920 --> 1:03:43.440 John Craze books are all movies. They're all movies. And 1:03:43.480 --> 1:03:46.280 I will tell you that before the movie was made. 1:03:46.600 --> 1:03:48.919 I'm not aware of anybody who read The Revenant who 1:03:48.960 --> 1:03:53.640 wasn't related to me or my friend, Like, I haven't 1:03:53.680 --> 1:03:55.960 read your book that reminds of your great story. Man, 1:03:56.520 --> 1:03:57.840 tell you the story real quick. I went to see 1:03:57.840 --> 1:04:02.960 this this writer one time, and uh, I want to 1:04:02.960 --> 1:04:05.880 see like a bookstory. Then he did, and he told 1:04:05.920 --> 1:04:07.000 a story. I don't know if it's true or not. 1:04:07.040 --> 1:04:08.600 It was a really fine story. He told a story 1:04:08.680 --> 1:04:12.400 that he was one time in a used bookstore okay, 1:04:12.920 --> 1:04:17.080 and sees his own book and he used bookstore and 1:04:17.280 --> 1:04:20.560 opens it and it's the inscribed copy that he gave 1:04:20.600 --> 1:04:28.800 to his mother. Oh man, that hurts. That hurts. I've 1:04:28.840 --> 1:04:32.160 seen a couple of inscribed copies of mine for sale 1:04:32.160 --> 1:04:35.200 on eBay, But my mom has never done that to me. 1:04:35.360 --> 1:04:38.920 She's I hope she sold a private song. If you're listening, 1:04:38.960 --> 1:04:43.080 don't tell me. I don't want to know. Um, but uh, 1:04:43.320 --> 1:04:47.360 but look, it was a blast to have a movie 1:04:47.440 --> 1:04:51.480 made out of my book, and it gave the book 1:04:52.800 --> 1:04:56.560 a huge life. The revenue means back from the dead, 1:04:57.200 --> 1:05:00.480 and you know that's literally what the revenue means. Somehow 1:05:00.520 --> 1:05:02.640 I didn't know that. Yeah, that's what it means, and 1:05:02.920 --> 1:05:05.400 it does it. I feel I feel so like lazy 1:05:05.440 --> 1:05:07.560 now to have not found that out, because I always wondered, 1:05:07.600 --> 1:05:10.560 like why, Well, it comes from French. From it it's 1:05:10.560 --> 1:05:12.920 a it's an English word revenant, but it comes from 1:05:12.920 --> 1:05:15.840 a French word revenue to return to come back really, 1:05:15.920 --> 1:05:18.320 and so it means literally one who returns from the dead. 1:05:19.400 --> 1:05:24.080 Halfway good at my job. That'll been my first question. Um. So, look, 1:05:24.280 --> 1:05:27.560 I feel like the movie brought the book back from 1:05:27.600 --> 1:05:30.360 the dead. And uh, you know, a lot of people 1:05:30.400 --> 1:05:32.560 read the book who otherwise wouldn't have. And it's given 1:05:32.600 --> 1:05:34.880 me an opportunity to write more books and I'm excited 1:05:34.920 --> 1:05:41.160 about that. Are you're disappointed how the book publishing experience went? Uh? Initially? 1:05:41.160 --> 1:05:43.640 You mean when it when it only sold to my 1:05:43.680 --> 1:05:50.200 mom and her friends. Sorry to crawl back, Um, it's 1:05:50.240 --> 1:05:52.760 your book. Did your booked had done well? My first Well, 1:05:53.040 --> 1:05:55.240 they've done well over time. My first book didn't do 1:05:55.240 --> 1:05:57.840 well out of the gate. Well, dude, it was horrible. 1:05:58.400 --> 1:06:00.000 It's horrible. I didn't think they're gonna let me writ 1:06:00.040 --> 1:06:03.480 new more books. Well, I I I'm having a lot 1:06:03.520 --> 1:06:07.840 more opportunities to write books after the Revenant. It's it's easier, 1:06:08.200 --> 1:06:13.320 easier now than it was before. But um, the overall experience, 1:06:13.560 --> 1:06:18.080 I was overseas working for the U. S. Government when uh, 1:06:18.160 --> 1:06:24.280 when the movie was was being shot, and so I was, um, 1:06:24.360 --> 1:06:27.880 how soon after publication? Right? Well, like when did someone 1:06:27.960 --> 1:06:30.720 come and say, like when they bought the film rights? 1:06:30.760 --> 1:06:32.040 Was one of those deals that they give you like 1:06:32.040 --> 1:06:34.080 a dollar a year until it goes into production. It 1:06:34.200 --> 1:06:36.400 was like a real sale. It was a real sale. 1:06:37.080 --> 1:06:41.120 It I still needed to work vigorously, but it was 1:06:41.240 --> 1:06:42.880 you know, it was. It was more than a dollar 1:06:42.920 --> 1:06:44.960 a year for the option. But to tell you how 1:06:45.000 --> 1:06:49.000 long it took, we optioned it actually before we sold 1:06:49.040 --> 1:06:52.600 the book. We sold, we sold, we optioned the film 1:06:52.680 --> 1:06:57.160 rights before we sold the book itself. Um, but the 1:06:57.280 --> 1:06:59.880 first time when I somebody told me it was going 1:07:00.000 --> 1:07:03.280 to be a movie. Uh, and I got super excited 1:07:03.280 --> 1:07:06.120 about this. Uh. They told me that it was gonna 1:07:06.840 --> 1:07:11.160 be directed by Michael Man and and star Daniel day 1:07:11.240 --> 1:07:17.080 Lewis as Hugh Glass and uh and yeah and over 1:07:17.120 --> 1:07:21.960 the course of the next uh twelve years really, oh 1:07:22.000 --> 1:07:24.440 my god. Yeah. It was first option in two thousand 1:07:24.520 --> 1:07:27.000 and one and it became a movie in two thousand 1:07:27.000 --> 1:07:31.440 and I'll never say die Man so Revenant Back from 1:07:31.440 --> 1:07:34.920 the Dead. So that's the funny thing is like, I know, 1:07:35.720 --> 1:07:38.880 you know some of the writers who haven't been through 1:07:38.920 --> 1:07:44.520 this many times and they option something yeah, and then 1:07:44.560 --> 1:07:47.960 they call up like they're gonna yea And I was like, no, 1:07:48.480 --> 1:07:50.920 well you got probably not what they told me at 1:07:50.960 --> 1:07:53.320 the beginning. And this just set my expectations is that 1:07:53.520 --> 1:07:57.000 about one out of three things that gets optioned turned 1:07:57.040 --> 1:08:00.840 into a movie. So my expectations were that the odds 1:08:00.880 --> 1:08:03.560 were against me. Um. But I just call people telling 1:08:03.600 --> 1:08:05.600 everybody like, it's gonna be a big, huge body. I 1:08:05.640 --> 1:08:07.600 didn't tell him it's going to be. I was a 1:08:07.640 --> 1:08:10.080 little more circumspect than that, and it turned out to 1:08:10.080 --> 1:08:12.440 be a good thing. For a long time. And then 1:08:12.480 --> 1:08:15.200 even when it you know, when I heard that, uh 1:08:15.240 --> 1:08:17.599 you know, DiCaprio is going to star in it, and 1:08:18.360 --> 1:08:21.240 uh interview two was kind of directed, I still kind 1:08:21.280 --> 1:08:23.840 of had some scar tissue there that I didn't quite 1:08:23.840 --> 1:08:27.639 believe it. But uh yeah, well more I guess, uh, 1:08:28.040 --> 1:08:32.720 fourteen it became a movie, and two thousand and one 1:08:32.760 --> 1:08:35.680 when it was first option, so I'd gone on with 1:08:35.720 --> 1:08:38.519 my life. Believe me, I was. I wouldn't hold of 1:08:38.560 --> 1:08:43.920 my breath. Um. But but look when they that My 1:08:44.040 --> 1:08:47.000 big thing when I write books is I I love 1:08:47.120 --> 1:08:49.880 history and I want my books to be as historically 1:08:49.880 --> 1:08:53.479 accurate as possible. And to me, that's part of the 1:08:54.040 --> 1:08:57.120 even when you're writing fiction, you ought to really care 1:08:57.120 --> 1:09:00.000 about historical accuracy because I don't want to mislead people 1:09:00.000 --> 1:09:02.120 all and and frankly, history is so great that you 1:09:02.120 --> 1:09:04.160 don't have to make up tons of shipped for it 1:09:04.200 --> 1:09:07.800 to be an amazing story. Um. That said, you know, 1:09:07.880 --> 1:09:11.040 the part of the Revenant my book that people don't 1:09:11.080 --> 1:09:15.920 like is uh the ending, and the ending of my 1:09:16.000 --> 1:09:19.320 book without giving it away, is true to history. It 1:09:19.439 --> 1:09:26.519 is not a Hollywood ending. Uh it is it is Uh, 1:09:26.600 --> 1:09:28.880 it is not the good guy rolling around on the 1:09:28.880 --> 1:09:32.320 ground with the bad guy. And the movie I think 1:09:32.680 --> 1:09:35.960 was never gonna get made without Hollywood ending of the 1:09:35.960 --> 1:09:39.040 good guy rolling around on the ground with a bad guy. 1:09:39.240 --> 1:09:42.160 And uh, and so where does that pressure come from, 1:09:42.200 --> 1:09:45.960 do you think? I think that one difference between book 1:09:46.000 --> 1:09:47.920 world and movie world is just the amount of money 1:09:47.960 --> 1:09:51.360 that's involved. Um. You know, when somebody publishes a book, 1:09:51.760 --> 1:09:56.400 they're not uh risking a whole lot of money. And 1:09:56.439 --> 1:10:00.559 if the book fails, and most books do, um, you know, 1:10:00.600 --> 1:10:05.040 the publishers not doesn't lose their their fortune. A big 1:10:05.080 --> 1:10:08.200 movie and you know, The Revenant I think was a 1:10:08.320 --> 1:10:11.880 hundred and fifty million dollars to shoot and another hundred 1:10:11.880 --> 1:10:16.479 and fifty million dollars to to publicize, So three hundred 1:10:16.520 --> 1:10:21.920 million dollars. They're not gonna risk too much about people, 1:10:22.320 --> 1:10:25.559 not like in the ending. And there's a reason there's 1:10:25.600 --> 1:10:29.800 something called the Hollywood ending. It's because audiences like that. 1:10:29.920 --> 1:10:33.880 Audiences want the bad guy to get hacked up by 1:10:33.920 --> 1:10:38.000 the good guy and uh, and so that's what happens 1:10:38.000 --> 1:10:40.120 in the movie. And uh, and it worked because it 1:10:40.160 --> 1:10:44.680 made a half billion dollars. And so surprising what you're 1:10:44.680 --> 1:10:47.120 saying about that it's an interesting point about the money 1:10:47.120 --> 1:10:51.120 because I used to kind of marvel at um. You know, 1:10:51.200 --> 1:10:57.880 a publisher with a certain amount of power can just 1:10:58.200 --> 1:11:04.080 on their own buy book, right if they've proven themselves 1:11:04.120 --> 1:11:07.320 like one individual with only getting like they can just 1:11:07.360 --> 1:11:11.200 get a rubber stamp from who'seever above them and they 1:11:11.200 --> 1:11:13.639 could buy a book. And you can send some writer 1:11:13.760 --> 1:11:19.920 off into exile, you know, for a year, and they 1:11:19.960 --> 1:11:22.280 come back and here's this thing. It's like it's it's 1:11:22.280 --> 1:11:25.479 been impacted by like there's a couple of people, right, 1:11:25.720 --> 1:11:28.480 but also it becomes this thing that's a globally available 1:11:29.520 --> 1:11:32.640 um and it's not a lot to like went into it, 1:11:33.600 --> 1:11:35.560 but here does. But that's a great point with like 1:11:35.560 --> 1:11:39.160 a movie. It's like man, like, uh, many many careers 1:11:39.640 --> 1:11:42.240 around the line, huge amounts of money is on the line. 1:11:42.240 --> 1:11:43.960 It's not like this like it just used to start, 1:11:44.080 --> 1:11:45.720 Like how could it be like that easy to make 1:11:45.760 --> 1:11:50.600 a book? You know that the financial models are dramatically 1:11:50.680 --> 1:11:53.920 different between between book and film, and there's just uh. 1:11:55.240 --> 1:11:58.559 The other example I always think is funny is a 1:11:58.560 --> 1:12:02.479 a book contract is about six pages long and basically 1:12:02.560 --> 1:12:04.559 the whole thing says they can't change a word without 1:12:04.600 --> 1:12:09.880 your permission. A a movie contract is about sixty pages long, 1:12:10.200 --> 1:12:12.320 and basically the whole thing says they can change anything 1:12:12.360 --> 1:12:16.599 they want without your permission. And and so you go 1:12:16.640 --> 1:12:19.760 into the exercise knowing that that your story is going 1:12:19.800 --> 1:12:21.840 to get changed and it's going to be a collaborative, 1:12:22.600 --> 1:12:25.280 uh enterprise. And if if you're not comfortable with that, 1:12:25.520 --> 1:12:28.400 you shouldn't sign the contract. It's just it's a it's 1:12:28.400 --> 1:12:33.120 a different exercise. I mean there's writers involved, and directors 1:12:33.160 --> 1:12:37.240 and actors who interpret and committees who you know, look 1:12:37.240 --> 1:12:40.400 at all that stuff. Um, and so it's just it's 1:12:40.439 --> 1:12:45.160 just a very different process. And and look, uh, the 1:12:46.840 --> 1:12:50.280 from a very selfish standpoint, I love The Revenant because 1:12:50.280 --> 1:12:52.880 it brought the book back to life. But there's there's 1:12:52.880 --> 1:12:54.960 a lot of things I love about that movie. I 1:12:55.000 --> 1:12:59.840 think it uh uh. I think it does h a 1:13:00.000 --> 1:13:04.479 a great job of kind of transporting people to kind 1:13:04.479 --> 1:13:07.040 of a different place and time and giving people a 1:13:07.080 --> 1:13:11.439 sense of just how hard life was in that era 1:13:12.360 --> 1:13:15.960 and the you know, the courage that the people who 1:13:16.000 --> 1:13:18.280 went out there in that in that time frame and 1:13:18.400 --> 1:13:21.960 we're willing to take that risk. Um. I think it's 1:13:21.960 --> 1:13:25.679 well acted. I think it's beautifully shot. I'm a little 1:13:25.720 --> 1:13:28.280 irked that, you know, part of it takes place in 1:13:28.280 --> 1:13:31.960 a rainforest. I've been to South Dakota. It's a beautiful state. 1:13:33.000 --> 1:13:36.080 I didn't see any rainforest when I was there. Uh, 1:13:36.120 --> 1:13:39.320 and so that part of it bothered me. We've had 1:13:39.320 --> 1:13:43.800 a couple of laughs, Like, you know, we've joked about, uh, 1:13:44.479 --> 1:13:49.240 you know, my dissatisfaction with it, and this is like, 1:13:49.439 --> 1:13:52.320 you know, to be perfect fright, Like this has absolutely 1:13:52.360 --> 1:13:55.439 nothing to do with you. Like it. It's a phenomenal book. 1:13:56.479 --> 1:14:01.479 I had known that story and loved that story my 1:14:01.720 --> 1:14:08.559 entire life, and I um, in hanging around the West, 1:14:09.240 --> 1:14:11.880 I had developed that story to be that in my 1:14:12.000 --> 1:14:17.800 head it like occurred in the like arid grasslands, the 1:14:17.920 --> 1:14:24.240 willow lined streams, the sage brush. It did, and it 1:14:24.280 --> 1:14:30.840 would be as though someone told your own story and 1:14:30.880 --> 1:14:34.120 then your own story of growing up, but then put 1:14:34.160 --> 1:14:39.040 it in a different house. And so that really, um 1:14:39.479 --> 1:14:44.760 was a situation where I looked and I couldn't even 1:14:44.800 --> 1:14:47.800 pay attention to the movie. I was so like, like 1:14:48.040 --> 1:14:53.800 just a gas right, because um, that's the most I think, 1:14:53.840 --> 1:14:57.880 that's like the most beautiful landscape on the planet. Right, 1:14:58.080 --> 1:15:01.560 It's it's just like the it's just ripe enrich. And 1:15:01.920 --> 1:15:05.480 to have to imagine someone coming and saying, to imagine 1:15:06.120 --> 1:15:11.479 a director a group of producers looking at that the 1:15:11.560 --> 1:15:15.080 arid grasslands like the Great Plains, looking and being like, 1:15:15.560 --> 1:15:21.160 oh uh no, not like that. I thought it would 1:15:21.160 --> 1:15:25.080 be more like right. It's like it's almost like, um, 1:15:26.439 --> 1:15:32.439 it feels to me like uh them uh disapproving of 1:15:32.680 --> 1:15:36.000 my like inner self. That's where my great that that's 1:15:36.000 --> 1:15:37.920 my only great. But it's like we've gotten a little 1:15:37.960 --> 1:15:39.880 bit of mileage out of complaining about it. Was just 1:15:40.040 --> 1:15:47.480 that it was like it was like a condemnation of uh, 1:15:47.479 --> 1:15:50.040 a landscape that is very dear to me. We were 1:15:50.360 --> 1:15:54.840 talking earlier. I grew up on the high Plains. I 1:15:54.880 --> 1:15:59.879 grew up in eastern Wyoming, and uh, you know, eastern Wyoming, 1:16:00.080 --> 1:16:04.320 like eastern Montana, like a big chunk of of South 1:16:04.360 --> 1:16:08.880 Dakota is high plains. And I I love it. I 1:16:08.920 --> 1:16:14.160 think it's epically beautiful. Um, it doesn't look like what 1:16:15.120 --> 1:16:17.920 people who don't live out here have in their mind's 1:16:17.920 --> 1:16:20.120 eye a lot of times when they think about Wyoming 1:16:20.240 --> 1:16:24.280 or Montana, when they when people on the coast think 1:16:24.320 --> 1:16:27.720 about Wyoming and Montana. They think about, uh, you know, 1:16:27.920 --> 1:16:30.640 the t tons and Glacier National Park and kind of 1:16:30.720 --> 1:16:35.200 the the epic mountain vistas. And don't get me wrong, 1:16:35.240 --> 1:16:37.679 I love the mountains too. Those are easy to Uh. 1:16:37.760 --> 1:16:42.520 I think anybody can appreciate that, the high plains. Uh, 1:16:42.880 --> 1:16:45.920 they may. I wonder if they don't require most people 1:16:46.040 --> 1:16:47.960 to kind of grow up in that environment to be 1:16:48.000 --> 1:16:49.680 able to appreciate it the way that I think you 1:16:49.720 --> 1:16:52.479 and I do. Yeah, maybe it takes a little bit 1:16:52.479 --> 1:16:55.200 of a trained a little bit more of an acquired taste. Uh. 1:16:55.360 --> 1:16:57.080 I think you you kind of grow up in that 1:16:57.320 --> 1:17:01.280 and and you uh you know. Just to to give 1:17:01.320 --> 1:17:05.839 my irk about my least favorite description of the planes 1:17:06.560 --> 1:17:10.040 is oftentimes writers who don't understand the planes will describe 1:17:10.120 --> 1:17:14.519 the featureless planes. And it drives me crazy because when 1:17:14.520 --> 1:17:18.559 you walk across the plains, there is so much feature. 1:17:19.320 --> 1:17:22.599 Uh it's just that it's a lot more subtle than 1:17:22.960 --> 1:17:28.559 you know, a mountain jutting up uh to a snow 1:17:28.560 --> 1:17:33.200 capped peak. But uh, you know, asked the guys who 1:17:33.280 --> 1:17:37.919 rode over the ridgeline uh in the Fetterman fight. Uh, 1:17:38.320 --> 1:17:41.320 it was how featureless it was because there were there 1:17:41.320 --> 1:17:45.240 were two thousand Indians hiding in that featureless plane, and 1:17:45.320 --> 1:17:48.080 so asked them how featureless. It's only featureless if you 1:17:48.120 --> 1:17:51.280 maybe haven't walked a few miles, and once you have, 1:17:52.080 --> 1:17:54.400 you wouldn't say that anymore. I say, I pointed out 1:17:54.439 --> 1:17:58.160 to people about hunting antelope will be like my antalope 1:17:58.200 --> 1:18:03.360 hunting strategy. This is basically, you find some way off 1:18:04.200 --> 1:18:06.400 and then the hunt plan is to hunt all the 1:18:06.439 --> 1:18:09.080 ones that you will encounter on the way over to 1:18:09.120 --> 1:18:11.920 the ones you see way off, Like there's so let's 1:18:11.920 --> 1:18:14.519 just go in that direction. Undoubtedly we'll find many more. 1:18:15.120 --> 1:18:18.040 And all the folds increases that curved between here and there, 1:18:18.120 --> 1:18:20.800 you can see a long way on the plains. And 1:18:21.200 --> 1:18:24.880 I love, uh, you know, where I grew up in 1:18:25.320 --> 1:18:29.840 eastern Wyoming, there were you could see Laramie Peak and 1:18:29.920 --> 1:18:32.799 that was uh you know, that was seventy miles away 1:18:32.840 --> 1:18:37.000 from my hometown and you could see that, uh clear 1:18:37.040 --> 1:18:40.880 as day. I love having a seventy mile horizon. That's 1:18:40.880 --> 1:18:44.679 a cool thing. But there was a lot between between 1:18:44.680 --> 1:18:48.080 where you are and the horizon, and it's it ain't 1:18:48.080 --> 1:18:50.800 feature it ain't featureless. I want to get into the 1:18:50.840 --> 1:18:54.280 reprint of Last Stand guys, A quick question before we 1:18:54.360 --> 1:18:57.720 leave the movie? What did UH like daily or was 1:18:57.760 --> 1:19:01.000 there daily? What did collaboration look like you and the 1:19:01.040 --> 1:19:03.960 folks that made the movie? So I as I, as 1:19:03.960 --> 1:19:07.400 I mentioned, I was living overseas at the time, you know, 1:19:07.479 --> 1:19:12.559 working for the for the government, and and was uh 1:19:12.600 --> 1:19:15.639 you know, eight time zones away from where they were filming. 1:19:16.080 --> 1:19:21.880 So honestly, not a ton uh, But that's said the 1:19:22.720 --> 1:19:26.559 one of my good friends, a guy named Keith Redman, 1:19:26.680 --> 1:19:31.559 who's had a company called Anonymous Content, produced the movie 1:19:32.360 --> 1:19:36.840 and he involved me in ways that he could. Also, 1:19:37.040 --> 1:19:40.240 the screenwriter for the Revenue is a guy named Mark Smith, 1:19:40.240 --> 1:19:45.439 another great guy who's very collaborative, and both Keith and 1:19:45.520 --> 1:19:50.360 Mark were very generous in letting me know things that 1:19:50.400 --> 1:19:54.519 were going on. Uh. Mark Smith shared drafts of the 1:19:54.560 --> 1:19:58.519 script at a couple of different junctures with me. I 1:19:58.640 --> 1:20:03.479 made my h historical points which were pretty uniformly ignored. 1:20:04.280 --> 1:20:05.680 But I had my chance at least to see the 1:20:05.720 --> 1:20:09.840 script and kind of see it evolve. Um, So I 1:20:10.000 --> 1:20:14.160 was not uh involved in a detailed way. One of 1:20:14.160 --> 1:20:19.000 the things I that irked me out of that process 1:20:19.000 --> 1:20:22.400 of the Revenue is that I couldn't write the screenplay 1:20:22.439 --> 1:20:25.760 because I've never written a screenplay, and when I moved 1:20:25.800 --> 1:20:28.080 back to Montana, one of the things I learned how 1:20:28.120 --> 1:20:31.240 to do was write screenplays because I kind of vowed 1:20:31.280 --> 1:20:34.240 that I would never have one of my stories turned 1:20:34.240 --> 1:20:38.120 into uh uh you know, a movie again without me 1:20:38.240 --> 1:20:43.280 writing it. And so I'm I'm hoping if there is, 1:20:43.439 --> 1:20:45.920 if there's interest in in this new one Ridge line 1:20:45.960 --> 1:20:59.000 that that that I'll be the writer for that. Do 1:20:59.040 --> 1:21:02.360 you think that it's a little bit dishonest? Um? Do 1:21:02.360 --> 1:21:10.120 you think it's a moral problem with taking history, like 1:21:10.200 --> 1:21:12.800 in the case of Huge Glass and like what Huge 1:21:12.760 --> 1:21:17.679 Glass actually did, um, and making it be that something 1:21:17.680 --> 1:21:19.120 different happened. Do you think it's a little bit of 1:21:19.240 --> 1:21:24.360 moral Um? I guess it depends on how extreme the 1:21:24.439 --> 1:21:29.120 retelling is and whether it uh distorts his story in 1:21:29.160 --> 1:21:33.720 a way that that I mean, For example, Uh, I 1:21:34.120 --> 1:21:36.880 think the way that the Native American story has been 1:21:36.920 --> 1:21:42.760 told in traditional American westerns uh is uh there is 1:21:42.760 --> 1:21:48.040 an immoral immorality in that because it doesn't tell very 1:21:48.120 --> 1:21:53.280 much about about their perspective on things that were happening. UM. 1:21:53.400 --> 1:22:00.240 I understand that that that people will also always seek 1:22:00.320 --> 1:22:04.200 to tell stories that are uh interesting and compelling to 1:22:04.240 --> 1:22:08.439 an audience and entertaining to an audience, and some of 1:22:08.479 --> 1:22:11.320 that I think is is okay. One of the things 1:22:11.400 --> 1:22:14.320 I did at the end of The Revenant, uh, and 1:22:14.439 --> 1:22:16.120 that I do at the end of my of my 1:22:16.160 --> 1:22:21.920 new book is I put I tell the reader where 1:22:22.040 --> 1:22:25.200 I've veered from the truth, and if I made up 1:22:25.240 --> 1:22:27.400 a character, I tell him I made this character up. 1:22:27.960 --> 1:22:32.560 Because you even point out that that you even acknowledge 1:22:32.560 --> 1:22:34.360 that there's some debate about whether or not it was 1:22:34.400 --> 1:22:39.000 Bridger um. And I just think when I'm done reading 1:22:39.000 --> 1:22:41.479 a book, I want to know what what was real 1:22:41.560 --> 1:22:44.519 and what wasn't. And obviously people can can go to 1:22:44.560 --> 1:22:47.240 their own research, and I also try and list books 1:22:47.240 --> 1:22:49.800 that people can go read about nonfiction books to kind 1:22:49.800 --> 1:22:53.120 of learn from themselves or whatever. But I I do 1:22:53.240 --> 1:22:56.719 think that we live in an era where we've lost 1:22:57.160 --> 1:23:00.720 the line between fact and fiction, and so I think 1:23:00.720 --> 1:23:06.360 there's an additional responsibility on on writers, including writers of fiction, 1:23:06.960 --> 1:23:11.760 to be honest about where they are veering off what 1:23:11.960 --> 1:23:15.080 is historical fact. And it doesn't mean that every story 1:23:15.160 --> 1:23:18.360 has to be a a historical treatise. I think there's 1:23:18.400 --> 1:23:24.599 plenty of room for uh, fictional historical fiction. Uh, fictional 1:23:24.640 --> 1:23:27.920 tellings of historical events. But I think we have an 1:23:27.920 --> 1:23:32.960 extra responsibility to to be accurate and to help the 1:23:32.960 --> 1:23:37.360 reader know what's true and what's not. It gives you, yeah, 1:23:37.439 --> 1:23:39.719 because it helps you understand like what can and cannot 1:23:39.800 --> 1:23:44.960 happen in the world. Yeah, and uh and I I 1:23:45.000 --> 1:23:51.559 mean I've always been irked by stories that, especially films, 1:23:51.600 --> 1:23:56.679 because the medium of film is so powerful and uh, 1:23:56.720 --> 1:24:02.200 there's you know, there's whole generations of people who we'll 1:24:02.200 --> 1:24:05.800 see a film and that will be the main ah 1:24:06.040 --> 1:24:08.480 sort of entree point that they have to a particular 1:24:08.880 --> 1:24:17.000 historical incident. And so you know, uh, stories with extreme 1:24:18.080 --> 1:24:22.920 uh conspiracies about the assassination of jfk Uh to me 1:24:23.720 --> 1:24:27.320 bother me because I think they they give a distorted 1:24:28.000 --> 1:24:34.160 perception of history. For example. Uh, I want to touch 1:24:34.200 --> 1:24:36.800 on the reprint of Last Stand, But first I have 1:24:36.840 --> 1:24:38.799 a question for you, because you you know your mountain 1:24:38.800 --> 1:24:43.360 Man stuff. Well, you mentioned Laramie Peak. What's your understanding 1:24:43.400 --> 1:24:48.120 of deal the story of Laramie, of Jacques Laramie. Yeah, 1:24:48.439 --> 1:24:51.639 like the sort of absence of a story of Laramie. Uh, Well, 1:24:51.680 --> 1:24:53.600 you tell me, I'm not I know a little bit 1:24:53.640 --> 1:24:57.160 about this, but I'm not sure exactly where you're going. Oh, yeah, 1:24:57.240 --> 1:24:59.960 he's he's he's known for being killed by the Indians. 1:25:00.080 --> 1:25:03.240 And then and then was there was not stuffed down 1:25:03.439 --> 1:25:06.040 under the ice and the beaver pond. Yeah, and then 1:25:06.040 --> 1:25:07.920 the guy went like bridge like, I mean, she's got 1:25:07.920 --> 1:25:10.320 half the state named after him, this and other states. 1:25:10.920 --> 1:25:13.120 That dude made off like a bandit, and no one 1:25:13.120 --> 1:25:16.000 knows what the hell he was, just like shows up 1:25:16.040 --> 1:25:19.240 and promptly gets killed. And then here's the thing. If 1:25:19.280 --> 1:25:21.880 you're gonna get killed in that era, try and get 1:25:21.960 --> 1:25:24.400 killed next to a river, because if it gets killed 1:25:24.439 --> 1:25:26.680 next to the river, uh, there's a good chance that 1:25:26.720 --> 1:25:28.880 the river is going to be named after you. And 1:25:28.920 --> 1:25:32.920 then whatever forts and towns they put on the river 1:25:33.080 --> 1:25:34.720 might also get named after you. And if there's a 1:25:34.720 --> 1:25:36.840 mountain of bumps into the river, the mountain might get 1:25:36.920 --> 1:25:39.160 named after you. And of course that's exactly what what 1:25:39.280 --> 1:25:44.240 happened with Jacques laurent A. Uh in Lolo, Yeah, Lolo 1:25:44.360 --> 1:25:46.920 got killed like this dude, Lulu, he spelled his name 1:25:46.960 --> 1:25:50.320 spelled the hunter way, Lulu, Lolo whatever, gets killed by 1:25:50.320 --> 1:25:51.760 a grizzly bear and people like, oh, you know the 1:25:51.800 --> 1:25:54.840 creek worl Lolo got killed Scott's Bluff, and then Priests 1:25:55.040 --> 1:25:58.240 was like Lolo the town Lolo, the Creek Lolo, the 1:25:58.240 --> 1:26:02.160 Peak Lolo, the national for Meanwhile, the first thing about 1:26:02.200 --> 1:26:04.759 this dude, well, I have in in the new book, 1:26:04.880 --> 1:26:09.360 I have Bridger as an old man, uh, kind of 1:26:09.400 --> 1:26:12.320 reflecting on the fact that there's a bunch of stuff 1:26:12.400 --> 1:26:17.160 named after him now and and kind of oh yeah absolutely, 1:26:17.760 --> 1:26:22.679 um yeah um, and uh being happy that he didn't 1:26:22.680 --> 1:26:24.920 have to die. I have him standing on top of 1:26:24.920 --> 1:26:29.120 Scott's Bluff, which was named after Scott, who was the 1:26:29.160 --> 1:26:32.200 story he was, Uh, nobody does, nobody else does either. 1:26:32.439 --> 1:26:36.600 Scott was killed by the Indians and died with his 1:26:36.680 --> 1:26:39.000 back up against Scott's Bluff, and so they named it 1:26:39.160 --> 1:26:44.200 Scott's Bluff, Scott's Bluff, you know where Scott died. Um, 1:26:44.320 --> 1:26:46.519 And I have Bridger reflecting on that that that he's 1:26:46.520 --> 1:26:48.360 happy that he didn't have to get killed to get 1:26:48.400 --> 1:26:52.759 stuff named after him. So anyway that was hitting during 1:26:52.800 --> 1:26:57.559 his lifetime. Yeah, oh absolutely, yeah. Um. So he really was, 1:26:57.640 --> 1:27:00.080 like he's just a well known dude. He's he is 1:27:00.120 --> 1:27:04.280 a rock star in terms of fame in his uh well, 1:27:04.400 --> 1:27:07.799 certainly when he's a sixty year old, he's he's famous 1:27:07.880 --> 1:27:12.400 among the soldiers that he's he's guiding. I mean he's uh, 1:27:12.439 --> 1:27:15.400 you know, he was already a legend in his own time, 1:27:15.479 --> 1:27:18.080 and and and it it's been a long time by 1:27:18.120 --> 1:27:20.080 the way he was. It was he'd been on the 1:27:20.120 --> 1:27:22.639 planes for forty plus years at the time he's guiding 1:27:22.640 --> 1:27:24.920 for the army. So he's and this is a place 1:27:24.960 --> 1:27:30.200 where where they're there. The numbers of people out here 1:27:30.800 --> 1:27:33.960 we're not large, and the numbers of places where they 1:27:34.000 --> 1:27:36.639 went were not large. So people bumped into each other. 1:27:36.680 --> 1:27:40.400 I mean talking about last stand the you know, the 1:27:41.280 --> 1:27:44.680 person that that books about George burg Grinnell. I was 1:27:44.720 --> 1:27:47.360 amazed when I was doing the research on him, because 1:27:47.400 --> 1:27:51.160 he meets, he meets everybody. He meets, uh, he meets 1:27:51.200 --> 1:27:58.439 Buffalo Bill, he meets he goes campaigning, uh with Custer, Uh, 1:27:58.439 --> 1:28:01.599 he meets Brigham Young. I mean, he just he bumps 1:28:01.640 --> 1:28:04.839 into everybody. And but it kind of makes sense because 1:28:05.560 --> 1:28:07.360 you know, it's kind of like being from a small 1:28:07.400 --> 1:28:11.880 state from well he was like Forrest gum Um and uh. 1:28:11.920 --> 1:28:13.439 But you know, if you live in a in a 1:28:13.479 --> 1:28:17.200 small statement like Montana. It's not crazy that you meet 1:28:17.240 --> 1:28:20.920 somebody and it doesn't take very long before you both 1:28:21.400 --> 1:28:25.479 know somebody in common. And it's because it's a big state, 1:28:25.560 --> 1:28:29.839 but there's you know, there's not that many towns. And Custer, oh, 1:28:30.000 --> 1:28:32.679 not only did he know Custer, of we're talking about 1:28:32.800 --> 1:28:37.760 Grenelle now um. And this the Buffalo book, uh that's 1:28:37.760 --> 1:28:40.880 called Last Stand is about this this nineteenth century hunter 1:28:40.960 --> 1:28:46.000 conservationist named georgeburg Grannell, and he not only did he 1:28:46.040 --> 1:28:51.160 know Custer, but he goes on campaign with Custer. In 1:28:51.320 --> 1:28:56.400 eighteen seventy four, when Custer is sent out to survey 1:28:56.560 --> 1:28:59.800 the Black Hills, Grizzly shoots a huge gride s eight 1:28:59.880 --> 1:29:04.000 the an amazing foot as an amazing bear. Um. And 1:29:04.400 --> 1:29:07.040 but it's on that. The other thing Custer takes along 1:29:07.160 --> 1:29:11.040 on that expedition is he takes miners with him because 1:29:11.280 --> 1:29:14.240 there's rumors of gold in the Black Hills and Custer 1:29:14.360 --> 1:29:17.639 wants to be the one to discover it. And they 1:29:17.680 --> 1:29:22.799 discover gold on this eight seventy four exploration. Custer sends 1:29:23.439 --> 1:29:26.720 a messenger back to Fort Laramie to tell him that 1:29:26.760 --> 1:29:30.799 there's gold in the Black Hills and the gold rush 1:29:31.120 --> 1:29:37.200 is on uh into the heart of the territory that 1:29:37.360 --> 1:29:42.559 was given back uh to the Uh, to the Lakota 1:29:43.000 --> 1:29:46.519 and the Cheyenne at the end of the Fetterman massacre. 1:29:47.040 --> 1:29:51.280 They said, you're right. Uh. So when when when Fetterman 1:29:51.360 --> 1:29:55.639 is defeated and the U. S. Army retreats, they give 1:29:55.720 --> 1:30:00.040 back to the to the Lakota and the Cheyenne. The 1:30:01.000 --> 1:30:05.439 Lakota taken the Black Hills from the Cheyenne from well 1:30:05.479 --> 1:30:08.280 from It's even more complicated than that. And I they 1:30:08.280 --> 1:30:10.719 were all sorts, you know, the all sorts of tribes 1:30:10.720 --> 1:30:15.280 are in there. And that's a complicated prehistory. But just 1:30:15.360 --> 1:30:17.920 in terms of the US piece of the history, they 1:30:18.080 --> 1:30:22.880 seed it back uh in eighteen sixty seven, I think, 1:30:22.880 --> 1:30:26.920 which is when they negotiated the treaty after the after 1:30:26.920 --> 1:30:29.960 the Fetterment fight, and then they in the eighteen seventy 1:30:29.960 --> 1:30:33.200 four when they discover gold, they say, changed our minds. 1:30:33.600 --> 1:30:35.800 You know, we know we have given you two treaties now, 1:30:36.080 --> 1:30:40.960 but the second second one we want to renegotiate as well. Uh. 1:30:40.960 --> 1:30:46.760 When when the Lakota won't renegotiate, it's war, and that's 1:30:46.800 --> 1:30:50.120 when Custer. Then that sets in motion the events that 1:30:50.240 --> 1:30:53.920 lead to the Battle of a Little Big Horn within 1:30:54.439 --> 1:30:57.760 a year and a half, two years, we're talking about fame, 1:30:58.040 --> 1:31:02.160 Bridge are having fame cost She was known to the 1:31:02.200 --> 1:31:05.240 people that killed him. Yeah, and there I guess there's 1:31:05.280 --> 1:31:07.280 some debate about whether or not that he had just 1:31:07.320 --> 1:31:10.080 recently cut his hair. He cut his hair short, his 1:31:10.120 --> 1:31:12.080 wife took the hair, and then after his death had 1:31:12.080 --> 1:31:16.800 a wig made of her husband's hair. She's a fascinating 1:31:16.840 --> 1:31:21.880 character herself. And there's like debate about whether or not 1:31:22.200 --> 1:31:28.000 the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne recognized Custer's body on the 1:31:28.040 --> 1:31:30.400 battlefield because he didn't have his hair. And it was 1:31:30.439 --> 1:31:33.760 a woman that pointed out that that we found him 1:31:33.960 --> 1:31:36.599 and knew who he was, and that she had taken 1:31:36.600 --> 1:31:41.400 a sewing all and punched a hole through his ear 1:31:41.479 --> 1:31:45.000 drums so that in the afterlife he would better hear 1:31:45.800 --> 1:31:49.280 the warnings. And then she used her pony to kick 1:31:49.360 --> 1:31:52.800 up dirt on him, and she says, she says that 1:31:52.840 --> 1:31:55.840 she knew him. Yeah, people running around knowing each other. 1:31:56.880 --> 1:32:01.000 He's coming for you. It's you know, people were they 1:32:01.040 --> 1:32:04.120 were not huge numbers of people in even it's though 1:32:04.120 --> 1:32:06.240 it's vast territory. They were not huge numbers of people. 1:32:06.400 --> 1:32:09.120 So walk us through Grenell real quick, though, do you 1:32:09.200 --> 1:32:11.040 did you when you resea all the stuff? Did you 1:32:11.120 --> 1:32:13.960 find that these guys ever reflected because like he's like 1:32:14.000 --> 1:32:16.479 Steve was saying, they died so much, right, so at 1:32:16.520 --> 1:32:19.680 age sixty, did you ever find them reflecting on how 1:32:19.760 --> 1:32:25.000 lucky they must have been? Well? Um, I didn't find there. 1:32:25.040 --> 1:32:30.200 There's there's some great UH people who write when Bridger 1:32:30.280 --> 1:32:34.280 was still alive about conversations they had with him, and 1:32:34.320 --> 1:32:38.240 they'll so they were these nineteenth century people saying I 1:32:38.280 --> 1:32:41.200 was on a UH, I was on a long ride 1:32:41.320 --> 1:32:44.200 horseback ride with with Bridger and he told me this story. 1:32:44.360 --> 1:32:46.439 Or I was at Fort Laramie at the same time 1:32:46.439 --> 1:32:47.840 the bridge was there, and I heard him tell all 1:32:47.880 --> 1:32:49.680 these stories and I'm gonna write, I'm gonna write down 1:32:49.720 --> 1:32:53.040 all these stories he told. So there's there's those types 1:32:53.320 --> 1:32:57.439 of of stories. Um. I don't remember Bridger ever actually 1:32:57.840 --> 1:33:03.559 saying or being said to upset that he had been lucky. Um, 1:33:03.600 --> 1:33:08.160 but I just again, it's hard to imagine that that 1:33:08.280 --> 1:33:11.360 he didn't recognize that there was some measure of of 1:33:11.479 --> 1:33:14.599 luck in there. And and look at somebody like Hugh Glass. 1:33:14.640 --> 1:33:19.360 I mean, Hug Glass was a talented frontiersman and a 1:33:19.400 --> 1:33:23.400 tough badass who've survived, you know, being mauled by a 1:33:23.439 --> 1:33:27.240 grizzly bear and crawling two miles by himself with no weapons. 1:33:27.840 --> 1:33:31.800 Um and he still ends up I think, uh, in 1:33:31.840 --> 1:33:34.360 the wrong place at the wrong time, you know, walking 1:33:34.400 --> 1:33:40.320 across the frozen Yellowstone and gets caught and killed. And 1:33:40.880 --> 1:33:46.519 so he had a day of bad luck. Good you got. 1:33:47.479 --> 1:33:52.080 It's like a few scraps. The other thing about those 1:33:52.120 --> 1:33:55.599 guys is, you know, we think about like getting mauled 1:33:55.600 --> 1:33:58.320 by a grizzly bear or dying in a in a 1:33:58.360 --> 1:34:02.479 fight with with Indians. But you know, if if you're 1:34:02.479 --> 1:34:05.679 out on your own in the frontier and you snap 1:34:05.720 --> 1:34:10.320 your ankle, you're freaking dead. You know, the the odds 1:34:10.320 --> 1:34:13.600 that you can. Or or you get sick and in 1:34:13.640 --> 1:34:15.840 the middle of the winter and you're off on your own, 1:34:16.280 --> 1:34:19.439 the odds that you can, you know, do all the 1:34:19.479 --> 1:34:22.839 things you need to do to survive with a broken ankle, 1:34:23.080 --> 1:34:25.639 or if you're laid up with a fever for two weeks. 1:34:26.680 --> 1:34:28.320 I don't think it took very much for a lot 1:34:28.360 --> 1:34:33.040 of those guys to die, and Uh, it's just that 1:34:33.080 --> 1:34:37.400 those aren't as as movie worthy, you know, the guy 1:34:37.439 --> 1:34:40.680 who died at the flu You know, I want to 1:34:40.680 --> 1:34:44.360 touch I keep I do want to get to this grenelle, gentleman, 1:34:44.439 --> 1:34:47.400 but I've to tell you our thing. Have you read 1:34:47.439 --> 1:34:50.519 the journal I've been talking about a lot lately, Life 1:34:50.520 --> 1:34:52.479 and Death at the Mouth of the Muscle Shell. Now, 1:34:53.280 --> 1:34:55.720 it's a guy. He spends a couple of years at 1:34:55.720 --> 1:34:58.120 the mouth of where the muscle Shell flows into Missouri. 1:34:58.240 --> 1:35:00.360 Like most the action takes places all in of water 1:35:00.439 --> 1:35:04.559 now because because the four Peck reservoir. Um, it's just 1:35:04.560 --> 1:35:06.680 his like daily account. So'll be like Monday, you know, 1:35:06.720 --> 1:35:09.840 Sonny and warm river came up two inches Tuesday, fight 1:35:09.960 --> 1:35:15.160 Bob got killed, sixties Yeah, huge fight, Bob got killed. 1:35:15.800 --> 1:35:20.240 Finally found Dave's body. Like Wednesday, Sonny again turned cold 1:35:20.240 --> 1:35:26.719 towards evening. Um, the historian that that collected and published 1:35:26.920 --> 1:35:30.200 this journal and commented on this journal, Uh, took it 1:35:30.280 --> 1:35:34.759 upon himself to try to corroborate the existence of all 1:35:34.800 --> 1:35:37.280 of these individuals who are coming and going from this 1:35:37.360 --> 1:35:41.120 outpost at the mouth of the muscle Shell River. So 1:35:41.200 --> 1:35:43.160 the guy, I'll be like, you know, old you know, 1:35:43.360 --> 1:35:45.840 Jed Tompkins came through on the way to check his 1:35:45.880 --> 1:35:50.240 wolf poison baits right, And then the historian will going, 1:35:51.000 --> 1:35:54.240 who is Jed Tompkins And he's like, turns out we 1:35:54.320 --> 1:35:59.120 find record of Jed Tompkins uh taking a line of 1:35:59.240 --> 1:36:02.800 credit at some store in St. Louis. And he's able 1:36:02.840 --> 1:36:09.240 to find the people that come and go. Some other 1:36:09.320 --> 1:36:12.080 mentioned some sometimes like like there's a woman that gets 1:36:12.120 --> 1:36:18.200 scalped and survived. Um, he later learns that she he 1:36:18.240 --> 1:36:23.960 writes about how she wore men's clothing. Um, everybody called 1:36:23.960 --> 1:36:26.439 her names that he said, names that can't be mentioned. 1:36:26.640 --> 1:36:28.599 And you get this portrait of this woman that there's 1:36:28.640 --> 1:36:32.559 this woman who's probably gay at a time it was 1:36:32.560 --> 1:36:37.240 completely unacceptable dressed as a man, was named all these 1:36:37.280 --> 1:36:41.559 derogatory remarks. She eventually marries a guy. He moves her 1:36:41.560 --> 1:36:44.840 down to Colorado. She blows her brains out. All you 1:36:44.920 --> 1:36:47.040 hear about her in the life that of the mouse 1:36:47.080 --> 1:36:49.840 of the muscle shell. So and so got scalped and 1:36:49.960 --> 1:36:52.080 looks like she's gonna make it. But he then was 1:36:52.120 --> 1:36:53.960 able to like like who, Like, who the hell was 1:36:54.040 --> 1:36:57.040 this right? And it's just just just like heartbreaking story 1:36:57.920 --> 1:37:02.519 of like someone who eventually, like what ever, resigns, marries 1:37:02.560 --> 1:37:05.960 a guy and kills herself, Like what the hell happened there? 1:37:06.240 --> 1:37:10.320 But uh, I was in his other book recently, and 1:37:10.360 --> 1:37:12.720 there's this like this character that emerges in the late 1:37:12.720 --> 1:37:15.880 eighteen hundreds of Miles City, Montana, and there's no mention 1:37:15.880 --> 1:37:18.080 of him. But there's this kid whose dad was a 1:37:18.120 --> 1:37:21.320 doctor in Miles City in late eighteen hundreds, and the 1:37:21.439 --> 1:37:24.120 kid he's like later on in life, he's describing who 1:37:24.120 --> 1:37:26.960 comes to his dad who's a doctor. He describes a 1:37:27.000 --> 1:37:30.640 guy coming in who had been long ago scalped and 1:37:30.680 --> 1:37:32.080 it was all healed over, but you still see the 1:37:32.120 --> 1:37:34.280 veins on top of his head and all of his 1:37:34.400 --> 1:37:39.640 fingers had been removed at them at the middle joint. God, Okay, 1:37:39.920 --> 1:37:42.760 who the hell was that guy? Like that? There's a 1:37:42.800 --> 1:37:44.960 story and one hand we're talking about how everybody knows 1:37:44.960 --> 1:37:46.800 these people and they're always running into each other, but 1:37:46.840 --> 1:37:48.639 also it's like, how do you get to be that guy? 1:37:48.760 --> 1:37:51.680 And the only mention is some kid later recollects that 1:37:51.760 --> 1:37:54.559 this dude paid his dad a visit at a doctor 1:37:54.800 --> 1:37:57.320 and had been tortured and had all of his fingers 1:37:57.320 --> 1:38:00.280 removed at the knuckle and his scolts removed, and like 1:38:00.439 --> 1:38:03.080 no one else wrote this down. If you were running 1:38:03.080 --> 1:38:07.639 around town now missing your scalp and all your fingers, 1:38:07.680 --> 1:38:10.760 you wouldn't make your way into lots of materials. The 1:38:10.760 --> 1:38:13.719 fact that that was not more noteworthy tells you something 1:38:13.760 --> 1:38:16.960 about the general population reading them, Like, Okay, I understand it. 1:38:17.000 --> 1:38:25.240 I understand everything now as absolutely uh. But George Burgernell um, 1:38:25.320 --> 1:38:29.559 so I had never heard I had this. I was 1:38:29.600 --> 1:38:33.360 interested when I read your uh, when I read American Buffalo, 1:38:33.400 --> 1:38:36.200 your book at kind of your entree point to the 1:38:36.240 --> 1:38:39.680 Buffalo story and finding the skull and going on this 1:38:39.880 --> 1:38:42.000 hunt which sits in my living room today. I gotta 1:38:42.000 --> 1:38:46.320 see that. Um. But uh, it was interesting to me 1:38:46.360 --> 1:38:48.719 that that was kind of your entree point. My entree 1:38:48.800 --> 1:38:51.840 point to the Buffalo story is after I wrote the 1:38:51.840 --> 1:38:56.360 book about Beaute, I was I had this luxury of 1:38:56.360 --> 1:38:59.000 of literally a month where my my job was to 1:38:59.040 --> 1:39:02.280 go find a new story to write about. And I 1:39:02.320 --> 1:39:07.519 went to the University of Montana library and for a 1:39:07.600 --> 1:39:12.080 month literally just wandered the stacks, kind of follow my 1:39:12.160 --> 1:39:16.400 nose from things that interested me to things that interested me. 1:39:17.040 --> 1:39:19.800 And as I did that, I kind of started getting 1:39:19.800 --> 1:39:23.240 the idea. I'd always been fascinated with the buffalo, and 1:39:23.320 --> 1:39:25.960 I thought about doing a book about the buffalo. And 1:39:26.000 --> 1:39:27.400 then my idea was, I was going to do a 1:39:27.400 --> 1:39:30.679 book about the history of the West as told true 1:39:31.240 --> 1:39:32.960 the Buffalo. And I thought it was cool because you 1:39:32.960 --> 1:39:37.040 could do prehistoric times. You could do Native Americans before 1:39:37.280 --> 1:39:40.200 the arrival of the whites. You could do uh, you know, 1:39:40.240 --> 1:39:42.760 the fur trade. You could do the early fur trade era. 1:39:42.920 --> 1:39:45.640 You could do the buffalo hunting era. You could do 1:39:45.640 --> 1:39:48.280 the birth of the conservation movement. You could tell that 1:39:48.320 --> 1:39:51.160 whole story just through the prison of the Buffalo. And 1:39:51.400 --> 1:39:52.800 that was the book that I was going to write. 1:39:52.800 --> 1:39:55.200 And then I came across this guy, George burg Grunnell, 1:39:55.280 --> 1:39:57.760 who I had never heard of, who it turns out, 1:39:58.439 --> 1:40:01.799 doesn't live through all of that exactly, but he his life, 1:40:02.600 --> 1:40:07.360 he lives through a significant chunk of it, and uh, 1:40:07.439 --> 1:40:09.599 and I couldn't believe I've never heard of him before, 1:40:09.640 --> 1:40:14.559 because he literally is in many ways, the the guy 1:40:14.640 --> 1:40:20.080 who's most responsible for preserving Yellowstone National Park, for uh, 1:40:20.120 --> 1:40:24.120 the establishment of Glacier and along the way, he's largely 1:40:24.160 --> 1:40:28.600 responsible for saving the buffalo from being you know, completely 1:40:28.640 --> 1:40:33.599 exterminated on the North American continent. And so I decided 1:40:33.640 --> 1:40:37.000 i'd write use him as kind of the human vehicle 1:40:37.439 --> 1:40:40.559 to tell the story of the buffalo in a in 1:40:40.560 --> 1:40:42.800 a somewhat similar way to to which you use your 1:40:42.800 --> 1:40:45.840 own experience of fine skull and and going on the hunt. 1:40:45.840 --> 1:40:50.639 And then we've in other parts of the story stuff. Yeah, 1:40:50.760 --> 1:40:54.240 but speaking of which, and I really appreciate your constructive 1:40:54.240 --> 1:40:56.760 criticism on the Revenant and uh and I was just 1:40:56.800 --> 1:40:59.880 gonna ask you about something and I don't talk about now, 1:41:00.080 --> 1:41:02.400 Well there's that. I mean, how did you miss that? 1:41:02.520 --> 1:41:05.479 Come on? But I think the reason you didn't talk 1:41:05.479 --> 1:41:08.519 about Grenell is because you devote so many paragraphs to 1:41:08.520 --> 1:41:12.760 the buffalo Penis. There is like long, long paragraphs about 1:41:12.760 --> 1:41:17.759 the buffalo. Penis. Got to cut this really influential figure Grinnell, 1:41:19.240 --> 1:41:23.879 or you gotta cut some of your penis material. And 1:41:23.920 --> 1:41:26.960 I slept on it and decided just and the decision 1:41:27.000 --> 1:41:29.760 you may probably explains why your Buffalo books sold more 1:41:29.800 --> 1:41:33.080 than mine did so, but as a result, I can't 1:41:33.080 --> 1:41:35.759 even like, I can't even have my children read this anymore. 1:41:35.840 --> 1:41:39.280 It's like, I mean, come on, what the hell so anyway, Um, 1:41:39.439 --> 1:41:44.519 but we digress. Yeah, I think that I uh as 1:41:44.560 --> 1:41:48.080 being not as historian, I'm able to just focus, Like 1:41:48.120 --> 1:41:49.560 I said, I made a joke, but I'm able to 1:41:49.600 --> 1:41:52.720 focus on the weird stuff. Well, that's a great thing 1:41:52.720 --> 1:41:55.800 about the buffalo, that is. I love a lot of 1:41:55.840 --> 1:42:00.519 the the factoids about about the buffalo, Like you know, 1:42:01.040 --> 1:42:04.320 ten times more hair per square inch than a cow, 1:42:04.880 --> 1:42:08.320 which kind of helps you explain why they do. Okay, Um, 1:42:08.320 --> 1:42:13.519 you know the frozen prairie and the birth success rate, Yeah, 1:42:13.800 --> 1:42:17.559 compared to a cow that was aver. And not only that, 1:42:17.840 --> 1:42:21.680 but it's still it's amazing to me that a buffalo 1:42:21.800 --> 1:42:27.000 calf stands at two minutes and can run with a 1:42:27.040 --> 1:42:29.880 herd at the age of one hour. Like I don't 1:42:29.880 --> 1:42:35.360 I don't even get physiologically how muscles can possibly work 1:42:36.000 --> 1:42:39.400 to do that. There's there's a there's a recorded incident 1:42:40.120 --> 1:42:43.160 of I think a three or four day old calf 1:42:44.080 --> 1:42:49.519 running seventy miles with a herd, and just like, that's 1:42:49.560 --> 1:42:53.640 an amazing animal. And so it's it's not surprising in 1:42:53.640 --> 1:42:55.120 a lot of ways that it has this kind of 1:42:55.320 --> 1:42:58.080 iconic stature that it does. But one of the things 1:42:58.120 --> 1:43:01.960 I love so much about about the Grenelle story is 1:43:02.880 --> 1:43:07.360 it really is about the birth of the conservation movement, 1:43:07.840 --> 1:43:10.839 and the birth of the conservation movement really is about 1:43:11.240 --> 1:43:14.840 hunters in a really significant way. What do you think, 1:43:15.080 --> 1:43:17.680 what do you think it was? It was it like 1:43:17.960 --> 1:43:21.479 was it like like, oh my god, what did we do? 1:43:21.640 --> 1:43:24.760 Like like what was in these guys heads? Because he 1:43:24.800 --> 1:43:27.879 was a hunter, right, I mean, he was totally a hunter. Um, 1:43:27.960 --> 1:43:31.439 well he has I'll talk about Grenelle and then and 1:43:31.479 --> 1:43:33.360 then the hunter piece of it, because I think he 1:43:33.439 --> 1:43:37.160 had a couple of incredibly unique experiences that made him, 1:43:37.200 --> 1:43:41.320 i think, able to understand what was going on better 1:43:41.400 --> 1:43:44.519 than most other people could have at the time. One 1:43:44.520 --> 1:43:48.639 thing he understood is when he right, when he got 1:43:48.680 --> 1:43:51.840 out of college and he this is a guy who's 1:43:51.840 --> 1:43:56.160 an East Coast elitist and goes to Yale and his 1:43:56.280 --> 1:44:00.320 father is a rich New York lawyer, but he wants 1:44:00.320 --> 1:44:02.720 to go west. Grinell wants to go west. And he 1:44:02.840 --> 1:44:08.479 comes out in I think eighteen seventy with a Yale 1:44:08.840 --> 1:44:14.160 professor who's doing a dinosaur bone hunt in uh in 1:44:14.240 --> 1:44:18.080 the West, and so he comes out, you know, and 1:44:18.120 --> 1:44:22.600 they're all over like Nebraska, Wyoming and it's still a 1:44:22.680 --> 1:44:27.320 war zone there. The U. S. Cavalry guarded them while 1:44:27.400 --> 1:44:33.439 they while they dug. But what he's digging out, oh 1:44:33.439 --> 1:44:41.120 my god. But what Grennelle is doing in eighteen seventy 1:44:41.280 --> 1:44:45.960 is he's digging up like triceratops bones in Nebraska and 1:44:46.160 --> 1:44:51.680 camel bones and miniature horses. And so what Grennelle understood 1:44:51.920 --> 1:44:55.479 from his own kind of uh tangible experience, is that 1:44:55.600 --> 1:44:59.639 extinction could happen. And this is in an era of 1:44:59.680 --> 1:45:05.759 the the myth of inexhaustibility where people not for crazy reasons, 1:45:05.800 --> 1:45:09.320 by the way, I thought we can't kill all the buffalo. 1:45:09.720 --> 1:45:15.160 There's so many buffalo. The resources out here are are inexhaustible, 1:45:15.640 --> 1:45:18.920 and and so but grennell had that that experience of 1:45:18.960 --> 1:45:22.720 seeing that some stuff that used to be living I 1:45:22.840 --> 1:45:25.880 wasn't here anymore. So that was one of his his experiences, 1:45:26.240 --> 1:45:28.840 his other experience, and he made that connection. He didn't 1:45:28.840 --> 1:45:33.479 at the time use what people who are uncomfortable with 1:45:34.760 --> 1:45:38.080 evolution and extinction on religious grounds today would say, it 1:45:38.240 --> 1:45:41.320 is like the earth was created old. He was a 1:45:41.320 --> 1:45:45.280 hardcore scientist um and he didn't have any problem with that. 1:45:45.320 --> 1:45:48.799 There are animals that that that came and went. Lots 1:45:48.800 --> 1:45:51.439 of time has passed now I think he was. I 1:45:51.479 --> 1:45:54.360 think he viewed that from uh in a very for 1:45:54.560 --> 1:45:58.240 his era, especially uh state of the art scientific way. 1:45:59.040 --> 1:46:02.240 Um well, it's kind amazing to his age, right because 1:46:02.240 --> 1:46:04.280 I mean, it's just a college kid, and to have 1:46:04.520 --> 1:46:07.200 sort of those kind of thoughts already, you know, figuring 1:46:07.240 --> 1:46:09.360 that out from seeing that was pretty bazing. And he 1:46:09.400 --> 1:46:11.960 would have been, you know, with a you know, he's 1:46:12.000 --> 1:46:14.320 with a group that was led by uh, the one 1:46:14.360 --> 1:46:19.200 of the you know foremost UH scientists of his day 1:46:19.439 --> 1:46:21.960 who would have been they've been would be sitting around 1:46:22.000 --> 1:46:26.439 the campfire at night, presumably talking about, you know, dinosaur bones. 1:46:26.920 --> 1:46:30.040 But he did have that very unique experience. The other 1:46:30.120 --> 1:46:33.479 experience that I think he had that really touches on 1:46:33.520 --> 1:46:39.479 the hunter piece of it is his boyhood neighbor was 1:46:40.160 --> 1:46:46.040 the widow of John James Audubon, Lucy Audubon, and she's 1:46:46.240 --> 1:46:50.000 old lady at this point and John is already dead. 1:46:50.400 --> 1:46:53.519 But they lived in there were these barns on the 1:46:53.600 --> 1:46:59.439 property where like all of John James Audubon's old travel 1:46:59.560 --> 1:47:05.080 stuff was stuffed you know stuff, well, his paintings too, 1:47:05.120 --> 1:47:08.720 but like all the things he gathered as he as 1:47:08.760 --> 1:47:12.720 he came back, all the paraphernalia he picked up, and 1:47:12.800 --> 1:47:16.479 Lucy Autobon becomes his tutor. And so, first of all, 1:47:16.680 --> 1:47:20.040 he's tutored at a time when people were learning reading, writing, 1:47:20.040 --> 1:47:24.240 and arithmetic. He's all also learning about natural science. And 1:47:24.320 --> 1:47:27.920 not only that, but she is instilling in him, uh, 1:47:28.040 --> 1:47:32.240 this ethic of what she called self restraint, and what 1:47:32.320 --> 1:47:36.640 self restraint basically meant was that you don't consume everything 1:47:37.040 --> 1:47:40.959 that you can. And when you think about the contrast 1:47:40.960 --> 1:47:43.920 of that in kind of the robber Baron era that 1:47:44.040 --> 1:47:47.519 he lived in and combined with kind of the myth 1:47:47.560 --> 1:47:50.400 of the inexhaustibility that we could never use everything up, 1:47:50.920 --> 1:47:55.519 he had this particularly unique perch to kind of view 1:47:55.560 --> 1:47:59.439 the world and it shaped his view, first of all, 1:47:59.520 --> 1:48:04.920 of what the responsibility of sportsman was. And you know, uh, 1:48:05.160 --> 1:48:07.800 this is the era when they're starting to figure out 1:48:07.840 --> 1:48:12.360 that we shouldn't hunt things, you know, twelve months a year, 1:48:12.560 --> 1:48:16.200 there should be a season for hunting things. We shouldn't 1:48:16.200 --> 1:48:21.439 go out and kill every uh animal that pops up 1:48:21.439 --> 1:48:24.080 in front of us. There should be limits that we 1:48:24.160 --> 1:48:27.640 put on ourselves. And you ask a question, what is 1:48:27.680 --> 1:48:32.880 it about hunters, and I think that they were one 1:48:32.920 --> 1:48:36.960 of the first groups of people to go into wilderness 1:48:37.760 --> 1:48:40.960 and not and see it as a place to to recreate. 1:48:41.600 --> 1:48:44.000 And they wanted to preserve that because they wanted to 1:48:44.000 --> 1:48:46.320 come back the next season and have it not be gone, 1:48:46.760 --> 1:48:49.360 and they wanted to bring their their their kids back 1:48:49.720 --> 1:48:51.880 and have them be able to have the same experience 1:48:51.920 --> 1:48:54.920 the same way that hunters do today. And I think 1:48:55.000 --> 1:48:58.719 that ethic of the wild being a place that had 1:48:58.880 --> 1:49:03.040 intrinsic value you that we should preserve. Uh, when you 1:49:03.080 --> 1:49:05.920 think about it, it makes complete sense that it came 1:49:06.360 --> 1:49:11.680 in significant part from hunters. That's my explanation. Yeah, a 1:49:11.760 --> 1:49:14.760 certain type of hunter, because there's an interesting point in 1:49:14.800 --> 1:49:18.040 American history where these guys coexist with the market hunters. 1:49:18.640 --> 1:49:20.439 These people we've been talking about and kind of like 1:49:20.520 --> 1:49:26.960 celebrating throughout this conversation, Um Boon, Bridger Glass, right, frontiers 1:49:26.960 --> 1:49:32.559 men and later mountain men. Um, we're rapacious like they 1:49:32.920 --> 1:49:37.120 you know, I don't know, uh, you know, they would 1:49:37.160 --> 1:49:40.600 stack up like astounding numbers of animals. And then it 1:49:40.720 --> 1:49:42.280 came to be this point in time when all of 1:49:42.320 --> 1:49:48.080 a sudden you had sport hunters wealthy like generally wealthy 1:49:48.240 --> 1:49:51.559 from the East sport hunters, and the first thing that 1:49:51.600 --> 1:49:56.880 these sport hunters needed to do to win was to 1:49:56.920 --> 1:49:59.519 put these other guys out of business. We generally sit 1:49:59.560 --> 1:50:02.879 around celebrating the accomplishments of these guys that were regarded 1:50:02.920 --> 1:50:05.760 by the sport hunters as the enemies, you know, like 1:50:05.880 --> 1:50:08.080 Roosevelt in the early Boone and Crocker Club and whatever 1:50:08.080 --> 1:50:11.800 they had, Like these different societies and hunters groups kind 1:50:11.840 --> 1:50:13.800 of like the first thing they needed to do, was it, 1:50:13.920 --> 1:50:15.680 like the first thing we're gonna do is try to 1:50:15.720 --> 1:50:19.680 somehow sabotage commercial wildlife markets past the rule that you 1:50:19.720 --> 1:50:23.439 can't serve wild game in New York City. Um. And 1:50:23.680 --> 1:50:26.840 now like hunters today that we kind of like celebrate 1:50:26.880 --> 1:50:32.920 the accomplishments of these conservations like Roosevelt Grennell, um, but 1:50:33.120 --> 1:50:36.960 we really want to talk about who we admire, like 1:50:38.360 --> 1:50:42.840 it's it's Bridger and Glass because like the skill set 1:50:42.880 --> 1:50:48.000 was amazing well and and look, hopefully we gain knowledge 1:50:48.360 --> 1:50:55.640 as we progress as individuals and as a people. And uh, 1:50:55.840 --> 1:51:00.320 the world looked very different in uh the third tis 1:51:00.720 --> 1:51:04.240 to Jim Bridger than it did even by the eighteen 1:51:04.640 --> 1:51:09.720 seventies and certainly by the eighties when uh, when the 1:51:09.800 --> 1:51:13.280 last of the of the of the Montana herd is 1:51:13.280 --> 1:51:18.400 wiped out. Uh, we knew at that point that the 1:51:18.400 --> 1:51:22.599 the inexhaustibility of resources was a myth because the buffalo 1:51:22.640 --> 1:51:27.120 were gone. Um. There there's this uh statistic I came 1:51:27.360 --> 1:51:30.760 across in reading about because you know you point us 1:51:30.760 --> 1:51:33.920 out in your book too. The the arrival of the 1:51:34.000 --> 1:51:38.360 railroad is lights out for the buffalo because it's the 1:51:38.479 --> 1:51:43.639 infrastructure for commercial hunting. Um. The reason they trapped beaver 1:51:43.720 --> 1:51:47.200 in the eighteen thirties instead of buffalo is because buffalo 1:51:47.280 --> 1:51:51.080 pelts buffalo highs are too damn heavy. You can't move them. 1:51:52.240 --> 1:51:55.559 A beaver pelt weighed two pounds, and they could stack 1:51:55.640 --> 1:51:58.920 them up and stick him on a canoe and and 1:51:59.000 --> 1:52:02.360 send him down river. And that was a viable business 1:52:02.400 --> 1:52:04.559 that they couldn't exploit the buffalo in the eighteen thirties 1:52:04.600 --> 1:52:08.200 because they couldn't transport the hides. And what the railroad does, 1:52:08.360 --> 1:52:10.000 first of all when it rives in Kansas and then 1:52:10.040 --> 1:52:13.080 when it arrives in Miles City in Montana, is it 1:52:13.120 --> 1:52:17.000 creates the infrastructure to transport the hides back east. And 1:52:17.000 --> 1:52:20.759 then it's it's lights out, and so I think you 1:52:20.760 --> 1:52:23.599 you lived in Miles City, right, I think the railroad 1:52:23.680 --> 1:52:26.639 arrives in Miles City in eighteen eighty one, I want 1:52:26.640 --> 1:52:32.320 to say, so the buffalo hunters come in with the 1:52:32.400 --> 1:52:37.280 railroad in eighteen eighty two. The railroad keeps statistics and 1:52:37.360 --> 1:52:41.360 there were two hundred thousand hides that were the railroad 1:52:41.400 --> 1:52:46.040 shipped out of Montana in eighteen eighty two. Uh, it 1:52:46.080 --> 1:52:48.040 took I think seventy rail it was. That was the 1:52:48.040 --> 1:52:52.160 equivalent of seventy rail cars. In eighteen eighty three, the 1:52:52.240 --> 1:52:55.519 railroad shipped out forty thousand hides. So it goes from 1:52:55.560 --> 1:52:59.400 two hundred hides to forty thousand hides. In eighteen eighty four, 1:53:00.000 --> 1:53:04.360 there was one box car of buffalo hides that the 1:53:04.439 --> 1:53:08.600 railroad chips out of the state. And Den's over. That's it. 1:53:09.560 --> 1:53:15.639 I liked it. Horn Today. Um, you know, he comes 1:53:15.640 --> 1:53:17.880 out I can't remember what year, but around eight three 1:53:17.920 --> 1:53:20.320 or ready four from the Smithsonian. Yeah, comes out to 1:53:20.320 --> 1:53:23.439 collect somebodies, trying to like shoot the last one just 1:53:23.520 --> 1:53:27.439 to bridger back. And he points out that he points 1:53:27.439 --> 1:53:30.800 out that those hide hunters you talk about, like the inexhausted, 1:53:30.800 --> 1:53:34.160 the myth of inexhaustibility. He points out that the hide 1:53:34.200 --> 1:53:39.840 hunters that were hanging around convinced that more would come 1:53:40.320 --> 1:53:43.519 from the north, and then it's like just over time 1:53:44.080 --> 1:53:48.799 they gradually found their way into ranching and various things. 1:53:48.800 --> 1:53:52.960 In the event you were like, huh, I guess they're 1:53:52.960 --> 1:53:57.439 not coming. Yeah, well they sort of became the they 1:53:57.479 --> 1:54:00.720 became the sort of social fabric of the town. UM. 1:54:00.800 --> 1:54:04.080 And you when you read about uh Montana history in 1:54:04.120 --> 1:54:07.000 the in the eighteen nineties, and I did a bunch 1:54:07.000 --> 1:54:09.759 of research on on Butte, there's all sorts of people 1:54:09.760 --> 1:54:13.360 who are identified as former buffalo hunters for exactly that reason. 1:54:13.439 --> 1:54:16.840 It's like, yeah, nobody in the eighteen nineties is still 1:54:16.840 --> 1:54:18.840 a buffalo hunter there, but there's a lot of former 1:54:18.880 --> 1:54:23.080 buffalo hunters. Um. So yeah, it's it's UH and the 1:54:23.160 --> 1:54:26.120 Hornaday thing. I mean, think about what it means that 1:54:26.160 --> 1:54:32.320 the Smithsonian Institution UH sends out a crew to find 1:54:32.600 --> 1:54:35.600 what they hope is kind of the last buffalo so 1:54:35.680 --> 1:54:38.960 they can kill it, because they view that is the 1:54:39.040 --> 1:54:41.600 only way that they can you know, quote unquote preserve 1:54:41.680 --> 1:54:45.480 the buffalo in order to have one in the Smithsonian 1:54:45.640 --> 1:54:48.760 stuffed so that people can come look at it and 1:54:48.840 --> 1:54:51.760 see what it was like. Um. I mean, think think 1:54:51.800 --> 1:54:54.800 about what that that says about, you know, the moment 1:54:54.880 --> 1:54:56.920 we were at. And frankly, that's one of the things 1:54:56.920 --> 1:55:00.440 that makes Grenell so amazing is the one in place 1:55:00.440 --> 1:55:05.280 where there's buffalo while buffalo still living in the lower 1:55:05.360 --> 1:55:12.480 forty eight is Yellowstone. And Yellowstone in the eighteen eighties 1:55:12.880 --> 1:55:17.320 has been established as a national park. I think it's 1:55:17.400 --> 1:55:23.360 established in eighteen seventy two, but it's been completely ignored. Um. 1:55:23.400 --> 1:55:25.280 You know, it's always ironic to me when I go 1:55:25.360 --> 1:55:28.480 to Yellowstone because the sweatshirts always have you know, Yellowstone 1:55:28.640 --> 1:55:31.400 eighteen seventy two, because that's the year it was established. 1:55:31.760 --> 1:55:34.520 But the only reason Yellowstone was established is because they 1:55:34.520 --> 1:55:37.840 had figured out there was no gold there. And so 1:55:38.000 --> 1:55:40.600 it wasn't that they wanted to preserve this place. It 1:55:40.760 --> 1:55:44.280 was that they deemed it as having no economic value 1:55:44.360 --> 1:55:48.680 and so like whatever, and so they established Yellowstone. Certain 1:55:48.760 --> 1:55:52.640 no surface gold, no surface gold. Yeah, probably all they 1:55:52.680 --> 1:55:55.120 knew about, yeah, which is what they were after in 1:55:55.160 --> 1:56:00.920 that era. Um. And so what's significant about Grennell is 1:56:01.800 --> 1:56:09.000 he fights to preserve Yellowstone and wild places when it 1:56:09.120 --> 1:56:12.840 actually when there's a contest with a commercial interest, and 1:56:12.880 --> 1:56:16.040 the commercial interest at the time was the railroads, which were, 1:56:16.200 --> 1:56:19.200 of course the big business of the day, and the 1:56:19.280 --> 1:56:23.880 railroads want to build a spur through Yellowstone National Park. 1:56:24.600 --> 1:56:27.720 UM and Grennell and the Boone and Crockett Club and 1:56:27.720 --> 1:56:33.960 Teddy Roosevelt fight that. UM and in they passed the 1:56:34.080 --> 1:56:38.360 Lacy Act, which basically, for the first time ever established 1:56:38.560 --> 1:56:44.520 penalties for destroying wildlife and made it have an economic cost, 1:56:45.120 --> 1:56:49.440 and also took on a vested economic interest, namely the railroads, 1:56:49.480 --> 1:56:52.520 in order to to establish that and they win. So 1:56:52.640 --> 1:56:56.560 really it's that year that is that is the to me, 1:56:56.760 --> 1:56:59.680 the more important year in terms of the history of 1:56:59.760 --> 1:57:02.640 yellow because that's when that's when we when we decided, 1:57:03.520 --> 1:57:06.960 even though it's not easy, and even though there's competing interests, 1:57:07.160 --> 1:57:10.320 we're still going to protect Yellowstone National Park. There's a 1:57:10.360 --> 1:57:12.760 really boring book, except that it would be interesting to 1:57:12.840 --> 1:57:15.680 two or three people in the history of the Lazy Act, 1:57:15.880 --> 1:57:20.320 because it is still a very powerful wildlife tool to 1:57:20.400 --> 1:57:24.600 this day and the foresight of the people who created that. 1:57:24.640 --> 1:57:28.040 I mean, how many how many laws from do we 1:57:28.040 --> 1:57:30.480 still think about today? Yeah, just for for folks are 1:57:30.480 --> 1:57:34.680 saying like the Lazy Act gives um when you commit 1:57:34.720 --> 1:57:39.839 wildlife crimes, and those wildlife crimes move across state lines, 1:57:40.560 --> 1:57:43.640 it gives some real teeth to enforcement. And it made 1:57:43.680 --> 1:57:45.640 it that at the time states that might have been 1:57:45.720 --> 1:57:50.400 lack of days ago about wildlife laws. Um, it gave 1:57:50.480 --> 1:57:54.600 like some it gave some federal oversight on wildlife stuff. 1:57:54.680 --> 1:57:57.560 So the minute you did some poaching, it's still this 1:57:57.640 --> 1:58:00.240 outworks today, Like you might do some poaching in one 1:58:00.280 --> 1:58:03.920 state and drive across. There's even Lazy Act prosecutions where 1:58:03.920 --> 1:58:06.520 someone poaches something to one state, but they drive the 1:58:06.520 --> 1:58:09.920 head of their taxidermist twenty miles down the road who 1:58:09.960 --> 1:58:12.120 happens to be in a different state. That also becomes 1:58:12.120 --> 1:58:16.040 a federal crime. It's a Lazy Act violation, and they 1:58:16.040 --> 1:58:18.600 still use it. Imagine because he was on a daily 1:58:18.640 --> 1:58:23.040 basis today what the The other thing that I love 1:58:23.080 --> 1:58:27.560 about about Grennell in terms of his vision and foresight, 1:58:28.320 --> 1:58:34.160 is he was an incredibly canny political operator because he 1:58:34.200 --> 1:58:36.680 was fighting against the railroads and he knew that the 1:58:36.720 --> 1:58:39.280 most powerful force of his day was I mean, the 1:58:39.360 --> 1:58:44.560 railroads invented lobbying literally and uh, and Grennell knew that 1:58:44.640 --> 1:58:49.879 he needed his own constituency and UH, he needed to 1:58:49.960 --> 1:58:55.040 change the narrative and so his he also used social 1:58:55.040 --> 1:58:57.600 media the day, which was magazines. I mean, this was 1:58:57.840 --> 1:59:01.120 the era after the Civil War. Is the golden age 1:59:01.160 --> 1:59:04.280 in some ways of of magazines. That there's all these 1:59:04.360 --> 1:59:07.000 magazines that flourish, including the one that he was the 1:59:07.880 --> 1:59:12.200 publisher of, UH, which is Forest and Stream. And he 1:59:12.320 --> 1:59:18.120 used that that magazine to to UH editorialize two Hunters 1:59:18.560 --> 1:59:24.960 every week. And his theme was public land and totally 1:59:25.160 --> 1:59:29.160 and because nobody knew what public land meant then, and 1:59:29.240 --> 1:59:32.040 what he explains to people as public land means you 1:59:32.080 --> 1:59:36.960 own it. You hunter in UH. You know who doesn't 1:59:37.000 --> 1:59:41.320 live in UH, in Wyoming or Montana. You own a 1:59:41.360 --> 1:59:49.440 piece of yellowstone. And when somebody is exploiting resources in Yellowstone, 1:59:49.520 --> 1:59:52.400 they're stealing from you, and you should be piste off 1:59:52.440 --> 1:59:57.919 about that. And so Grinnell editorializes on this for years 1:59:58.160 --> 2:00:01.400 to kind of build this theme in this ethic of 2:00:01.480 --> 2:00:05.080 public lands. And he's incredibly successful at doing it. But 2:00:05.160 --> 2:00:07.960 he's a lot of the reason why why we have 2:00:08.200 --> 2:00:12.320 an ethic today that is, you know, supports public lands. 2:00:12.520 --> 2:00:15.320 So he's an amazing character. I want hate with one 2:00:15.400 --> 2:00:20.760 last question if you if someone says you're like, what 2:00:20.800 --> 2:00:24.920 are your books about? Do you have you ever taken 2:00:24.960 --> 2:00:28.320 the time or felt the necessity to bundle them in 2:00:28.440 --> 2:00:35.400 your head as being I right about, And don't tell 2:00:35.440 --> 2:00:40.240 him the West that that's not gonna suffice well. I 2:00:40.240 --> 2:00:47.680 I first and foremost love compelling, vivid, action laden stories. 2:00:48.040 --> 2:00:50.320 That's the type of stuff I like to read. That's 2:00:50.320 --> 2:00:52.240 the type of movies I like to watch. I love 2:00:52.400 --> 2:00:56.480 good stories, and to me, it just so happens that 2:00:56.560 --> 2:00:59.800 The West is full of good stories. And I've loved 2:00:59.840 --> 2:01:03.320 him since I was a little boy. But to me, 2:01:03.480 --> 2:01:06.440 what makes a story a story that I really want 2:01:06.440 --> 2:01:11.800 to marry for a couple of years is that it 2:01:11.920 --> 2:01:18.080 has lessons for today. And I hope all the stories 2:01:18.080 --> 2:01:22.240 that I write have interesting lessons for today that can 2:01:22.280 --> 2:01:28.000 help us to better understand our lives today. And more 2:01:28.040 --> 2:01:31.440 and more, the more the country becomes politically divided, and 2:01:31.440 --> 2:01:33.880 the more and more it becomes difficult to have a 2:01:34.000 --> 2:01:37.840 rational debate between people who disagree, the more and more 2:01:37.880 --> 2:01:40.920 I think history is important because I think sometimes if 2:01:40.920 --> 2:01:43.920 you look at something that is historical, people don't have 2:01:44.040 --> 2:01:48.879 all of the visceral baggage that goes with contemporary debates. 2:01:49.040 --> 2:01:51.600 That's not always true, obviously, but we can be a 2:01:51.640 --> 2:01:55.720 little bit more dispassionate today, for example, about the buffalo 2:01:56.400 --> 2:01:59.080 and the demise of the buffalo and the lessons to 2:01:59.120 --> 2:02:01.560 be learned from that, And you can sit down in 2:02:01.600 --> 2:02:04.240 a bar and have a conversation with people about that, 2:02:04.760 --> 2:02:08.080 and most people would probably agree, you know, it's it's 2:02:08.120 --> 2:02:11.960 it's uh, we should not have have exterminated them from 2:02:12.000 --> 2:02:14.240 the planet and the way that we did, in a 2:02:14.280 --> 2:02:16.640 way that you couldn't have that same conversation sitting down 2:02:16.640 --> 2:02:20.640 in a bar about global warming. And yet there's a 2:02:20.680 --> 2:02:24.200 lot of lessons from studying the buffalo that should be 2:02:24.240 --> 2:02:26.800 relevant to how we look at an issue like global 2:02:26.840 --> 2:02:30.600 warming or or the environment today. So to me, that 2:02:30.720 --> 2:02:33.080 was a long winded answer to your question. But I 2:02:33.120 --> 2:02:38.600 love vivid, compelling adventure stories that have lessons that are 2:02:38.640 --> 2:02:45.360 relevant to our lives today. That suffices that they all 2:02:45.360 --> 2:02:48.800 happen to be in the West. But anyway, that's fair, ye, 2:02:48.920 --> 2:02:52.840 anyway you got you got any uh rapper I can try, 2:02:53.720 --> 2:02:56.120 so you can always cut it out, like Steve says, 2:02:56.200 --> 2:02:58.640 So Steve will interrupt me halfway through if it's no good, 2:02:59.040 --> 2:03:00.839 you know, reading some of that ore nicles that Karine 2:03:00.880 --> 2:03:04.360 found that were like when Steve started earlier that we're 2:03:04.480 --> 2:03:07.000 people like sort of talking about you as the author 2:03:07.040 --> 2:03:09.200 of the Revenant, but you couldn't really comment because of 2:03:09.240 --> 2:03:12.880 your job. And when I was reading that and simultaneously 2:03:12.920 --> 2:03:15.480 reading the Last Stand and kind of looking like you 2:03:15.560 --> 2:03:19.240 just talked about Grannelle being like this great political you 2:03:19.280 --> 2:03:24.480 know strategists, You've done similar stuff like that in your job, right, 2:03:24.560 --> 2:03:26.840 having to like step up to the table with I 2:03:26.880 --> 2:03:31.720 mean working at the World Trade Organization hundred sixties some 2:03:31.880 --> 2:03:35.040 countries and right, and having to like make big deals happen. 2:03:35.080 --> 2:03:39.040 Do you ever like find comparisons all the time? And 2:03:39.160 --> 2:03:44.440 in fact, the most vivid political lessons that I have learned, 2:03:44.880 --> 2:03:48.040 we're not, you know, living in Washington, d C. For 2:03:48.400 --> 2:03:50.640 a bunch of years, as I did after I got 2:03:50.640 --> 2:03:53.880 out of law school. The most vivid political lessons that 2:03:53.920 --> 2:03:59.400 I've learned were researching George Bird Grinnell and his battle 2:03:59.560 --> 2:04:04.760 against the railroads to preserve public lands and seeing how 2:04:04.800 --> 2:04:07.200 he did that at a time when the odds were 2:04:07.240 --> 2:04:09.800 completely stacked against him. And of course there is no 2:04:09.880 --> 2:04:13.320 place on the planet that has more political history per 2:04:13.440 --> 2:04:17.840 square inch than Butte Montana. And Uh, if you want 2:04:17.880 --> 2:04:22.920 to learn about politics, UH, study the fight between the 2:04:23.080 --> 2:04:26.320 unions and the Standard Oil Company at the turn of 2:04:26.360 --> 2:04:31.600 the century and see on both sides the lessons that 2:04:31.640 --> 2:04:37.600 were applied there. Um. It is a graduate course in politics. 2:04:38.000 --> 2:04:40.840 So there is no question that the most significant political 2:04:40.920 --> 2:04:44.000 lessons of my life have been drawn out of nineteenth 2:04:44.040 --> 2:04:50.440 century Montana history. Good. Yeah, I'm not cutting that ship, don't. 2:04:52.920 --> 2:04:58.200 Author Michael Punk with the E on the end. That's true. 2:04:58.440 --> 2:05:01.320 Michael Punks. They can find them. P U n k E. 2:05:02.360 --> 2:05:08.280 Author of currently Ridgeline. It's not won't be out until June, 2:05:08.520 --> 2:05:13.160 but look for it. But otherwise, author of The Revenant, Uh, 2:05:13.440 --> 2:05:19.680 Fire and Brimstone, Last Stand. Okayanne Forthcoming, Thank you for 2:05:19.800 --> 2:05:21.920 joining us in the Thanks Lone. I trust that a 2:05:21.960 --> 2:05:23.480 bunch of people will go buy your books and you'll 2:05:23.520 --> 2:05:25.520 be thinking that it wasn't such a bad idea to 2:05:26.120 --> 2:05:28.520 come out and defend your come on, defend your movie 2:05:28.760 --> 2:05:31.520 ahead of last Thanks a lot, Thank you, Take care,