Ep. 236: Crawling Back from the Dead with Michael Punke

most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store, nor where you stand with on x. Okay, we're joined here by Michael punk, author of the Revenant, who like, Uh, it's bold of you to come, and I'm happy that you're here because we've made such a hobby out of um expressed I have should say we I've made such a hobby out of expressing my dissatisfaction with the movie The Revenant, because of that they put it in coastal rainforest. I've

I've heard some rumors about this. Uh so I would have thought you'd never want to come talk to me because you'd be like, uh, insult didn't hurt. Well, you know what, I have pretty thick skin, and I'm happy to talk about the Revenant, and I I'll say good things about it first, because I there's a lot of

reasons why I'm happy that movie got made. I can imagine, but you know, uh, but there's I've got my own qualms with as a as a historian, and somebody cares about history, I've got I've got my knits to pick with with the Revenant. But but let me be clear, I don't want to start totally negative. I don't want to start totally negative. I just thought that was a good end because I'm still I'm still like just happy

that you're here. Well, I've got a couple of of points to raise about your book to at some point depending on how negative this gets, and you know, you guys really go after me. Got I got a couple of things I want to raise with you, So I'm gonna positive. Um, our producer credit sent me some articles and um, there's a couple of articles pointing out It's like funny that around the time, I guess it was probably around the time the movie The Revenue came out,

there are articles being written profiles of you. There were sort of pointing to the fact that you had this

other life, that you weren't just a writer. Yeah. I uh have had varying interests over the years and have always been passionate about Western history and I love writing, but I also have also been really interested in public policy and uh, global politics and have had a career that is on that thread as well, and so so yeah, it Uh, all these things kind of mixed together and makes sense to me in their own way, but that probably takes a little bit of explaining. You were You

were born in mountain Man country. I was born in Wyoming. Born in Uh in Level, Wyoming at the foot of the Big Horn Mountains. Did you have early Did you have an early fascination with the fur trappers? Totally? Totally? Uh, my dad. My parents are both retired school teachers, and I was, uh super lucky because my mom, an elementary school teacher, really kind of instilled a love of history. She likes reading and books and and she loves history. My dad was a biology teacher and a sportsman, and

he really they both are from Kansas. They went out to have their first teaching job in lovel Wyoming after going to college in Kansas, and they fell in love with this this little town of Level at the foot of the Big Horns. And my dad in particular, who kind of grew up fishing and small game hunting in Kansas, uh, kind of discovered the potential of fishing and hunting in in the West. In in the in the Rockies, and

uh fell in love with that. And then I think especially as a as a bio, I just by training it gave him that extra uh, just a different angle and interest on on being outdoors and so he definitely instilled that in in his kids. Um, and between the two of them, I just ended up. Well, I've ended

up where I belong, which is here. It must have been a great advantage to grow up in a place like Wyoming if you wanted to be a mountain man, because I grew up being obsessed with the history of the West, having never been there, right, Uh, and so everything was like, uh, it felt very removed. Yeah. Well, just one of the things I love about Western history is how Western American history is, how recent a lot

of it is. And the little street that I grew up on in Level, Wyoming, West Seventh Street, there wasn't There was an old lady who lived next to us, uh, kind of the little old lady in the little white

house next hours that gave us the Vanilla Wafers. Was the friendly old lady in the neighborhood, and she had been born in in Level Uh, and she remembered a mountain man named John Blue, who would ride out of the Big Horn Mountains every two months and come down into level to reprovision, and she would tell us this story about John Blue with the Mountain Man and I. Over the years, Uh, driving up into the Big Horns, you could drive past his his old cabin, but literally,

in the space of one life, you could touch that earlier era. And I love that about Wyoming and Montana. Are you familiar with the writer Ian Fraser. Yeah, yeah, he. I took him on his first hunting trip and we floated the river here in Montana, and he'd already he had lived here. It's spent quite a bit of time

in Montana. But you're saying one of the things he likes ab out it, um is that when you go to a place where something happened, not much happened after that, so you can go there and still kind of be like, oh, I get it. Yeah, And I thought of that one day. I went to see where Dylan Thomas uh drank himself to death right in Manhattan. He actually died it the hospital, but like kind of where he collapsed, and UM, imagine all the ship that's occurred at that intersection since then.

It makes the heart to picture. But then when you go to someplace for like a big fight happened, or some people ran some buffalo over a cliff, you go like, got it, Yeah, totally can picture because exactly I mean, I'm a I love Civil War history too, and and have visited a lot of the Civil War battlefields back east, and one of the sad things about a lot of

them is they haven't been very well preserved. And you know, there's a there's a McDonald's right in the middle of the place where the you know, the cannons were supposed to be set up, and it's it's harder to imagine.

And out here. I was thinking about it today because I drove by the Madison Buffalo Jump, which I always send people to go see, because I say, what I love about the Madison Buffalo Jump is you hike up on that on that cliff, and you stand up out there and you look down on the valley of the Three Forks, and it looks quite pretty close to what it looked like, you know, two years ago. And that's just a really cool thing that we, you know, can't take for granted in this big country that we live in.

Out here. I suppose It's worth pointing out that in the case of the Madison Buffalo jump, the animals are gone. The animals noticeable. Yeah, the landscape looks similar. You can talk about what you're just walk everybody through your books. So I want to over focus. I do want to focus a lot on the revenue, because it's not not I want to focus on the revenue. I want to focus on our mutual interests in those people and what they were up to. Yeah. So, Uh, when I'm a

lawyer by a training, I went to to college. I grew up in Wyoming, went to college back east and went to law school, and after law school, went to work in in Washington, d c. Uh. I work for Senator Bacchus. It's where I met my wife. She's from she's from Montana. Met her work in Senator Baucus's office. Uh. And I like working in government a lot, I found myself. You don't hear that very often now. I I like uh, public policy and UH and I enjoy especially the most

recent job I had being a U S Ambassador. I love representing the United States of America overseas, and I love negotiating on behalf of the country. It was it was a blast. I love that. Um. But I found myself in Washington, d C. For a time, not working in government, instead working in a law firm. And I did not like working in a law firm. And I

started trying to plot my way into something different. And I had the idea I'd always been interested in in writing, and I thought, well, if I can be a writer, I can live wherever I want to live. And my wife and I I both wanted to move back to the West. And so I started, uh getting up early in the morning and writing what became The Revenant, and UH and I I always for me, UH really relate

when I saw shaw sh ank Redemption. And I always felt like my shosh Ank Redemption moment was kind of chipping through the wall of my cell with those hand tools. Was kind of sitting down at the computer every day and chipping away at at writing The Revenant. And when when I was able to get it published and we sold the film rights, that was our kind of escape moment. Were you surprised to get published? Um? In, I didn't

take it for granted, for sure. I as I was going along, I was feeling like I had more and more of a chance. I mean, when when I started writing a book, I didn't really know if I could do it, and then I got about halfway into it and I'm like, you know what, I can definitely finish this, and I felt like it was a great story. I didn't know anything about publishing, but I started getting encouragement from people. Um, I guess I wasn't surprised, but I was.

I was. I was thrilled, believe me, because I did. I did feel like that was my opportunity to live where I wanted to live and go do something different. And working as a writer is one of the great luxuries that you can have because you have sound much freedom to kind of follow you the things you're interested in. What year did you come out? It came out in I got the contract to publish it right before nine eleven, uh so two thousand and one, and it was I

think published in two thousand and two. And then you you went on and published two more or three more. Moved back to Montana after we sold the book and uh uh published, researched and published two nonfiction books while living in in Montana. The first one is a nonfiction book called Fire and Brimstone about a mining disaster and Beaute in nineteen seventeen. It's a very narrative, nonfiction style book. I hope it's told in a very kind of engaging,

almost novelistic type of way. But it's completely uh nonfiction, nothing's made up. Uh. Then after that, I wrote Last Stand, the book about the Buffalo, and uh it was after writing Last Stand that I had the opportunity to to be US ambassador to the World Trade Organization. So we moved over to Geneva, Switzerland. My family and I for for six years were over there, and uh after I came back from that, started to work on the new book which will come out in uh June if next year,

which is is called Ridgeline. It's a another novel, Don't go over the Ridge line. Well that that turned out to be, uh in hindsight, what the lesson? What the lesson should have been? Tell? Uh, yeah, it's like an apocalypse now right, Never get out of the boat, Never get off the boat, Never get off the boat, and then never go over You can share because we we've

talked about I know, the subject of the book. We talked about it now and then actually one day we're expect trying to guess what year it was, and someone pointed out that we'll tell you what the book is. So. Ridgeline is a novel that is based on the Fetterman Fight, which is a until the Battle of the Little Big Horn. The Fetterman Fight was the worst US military defeat in

in U s Military history. Eighty one guys right over a ridgeline in the Powder River Valley of Wyoming in eighteen sixty six, and they ride into a massive trap that has been set by the Lakota and the Cheyenne and the Arapaho, and uh, without revealing too much, it ends badly for for a lot of them, the soldiers, that is. Um, but it's a badly in a real and it ends very badly for a lot of them.

Um and uh like even post mortem. Yeah, it's uh this this this was this was this was not pretty, but it's a it's a it's an incredible historical moment and story and it's It takes place in the midst of what is often called Red Clouds War, which was a war that broke out after the after the US foisted broke one treaty and foisted another one on on the tribes. Walk people through that timeline, like yeah, basically was correct me where I'm wrong and pick up you

know where it's He's fit. But everybody's through with the Oregon Trail. UM people wanted to spur off the Oregon Trail and get up to the goldfields in the north, and that war was kind of centered around like can we get can whites have safe passage come to Montana

to go to the north? Right? So I mean that was that like sort of the bait, that was the defining argument right that Well, the way I would describe it is, ah, before the Civil War, there was a flood of migration from the East UH to to California and Oregon, and tons of people coming across the continent, including coming across UH what's now Wyoming, but they were

all headed west. They're all headed the California Oregon and the tribes in that era were not super psyched about that and there was a lot of conflict, but the us UH negotiated a treaty that basically gave access across the Oregon Trail. Is it fair to say like the gripe centered around UM impacts on wildlife movements and our things, like they're they're grazing areas, heavily displacing animals out of areas that once had animals, making hunting hard. Yeah, that

was that certainly happened along the Oregon Trail. But for a while there was a bit of what the treaty also did is it gave is it gave the tribes most of the land to the north of the Oregon Trail, to the north of the of the North Platte River, and and there was a fair amount of equilibrium there

for a while. What happens after the Civil War, during and after the Civil War, and even right before, is they discover golden in Montana, and all of a sudden, people are not content anymore to sort of go across the Oregon Trail on their way to California and Oregon. As you say, they started spurring off and going up to the gold fields of Montana. Uh. Bozeman Trail, for example, head going to Bozeman, and the quickest way to get

there was right through the Powder River Valley. And that was great hunting land and was had absolutely been given to the tribes as part of this this earlier treaty. And so uh the the US as it does multiple times throughout nineteenth century history, when treaties with the tribes become inconvenient, uh, they just either break them or force a renegotiation, and in this case, they essentially did both.

They they negotiated a new treaty allowing the US to go through the Powder River Valley, but they negotiated it largely with tribes that didn't live in the Powder River Valley. And as you might imagine, UH, the that that result uh was enraging to the to the tribes that actually lived there. And what came out of that was was war uh, namely Red Clouds War UH. And it's one of the things that's interesting about Red Clouds War is

the is the Indians win. Uh. Their victory ends up not lasting very long, but they actually win this war. And as a result of winning the war, the U. S Army UH retreats from the forts that they had set up in the Powder River Valley, and for a period of time, the lands went back to the to

the tribes. What happens then is they discovered gold in the Black Hills, and that leads in eighteen seventy six to a new gold rush uh and uh, but actually I think it's eighteen seventy four that was a discovery of gold and within two years, uh, fast forward almost to the to the end of the Indian Wars because at that point there's just not enough space anymore, uh for them to coexist and uh and they the Indian Wars come to a fairly quick end end after that.

I think it's interesting and looking at your your collection of work is that you have like a Mountain Man book, The Revenant, which is very early stage exploit to to the West, like very early stage exploration of the West, right, Like people are still just kind of like trying to fill in the map, like making, um, the characters near hue Glass and those are making sort of legitimate discoveries

about what river flows in the right. And then you have, uh, this forthcoming work that's kind of you know, at a real hot point, right and then your Buffalo but sort of is almost um, the aftermath dealing with kind of like focused on this, this this other element of the West, of of people getting around to look and be like holy shit, yeah, what did we do well? What's uh?

And and we talked about this a little bit just how in many ways, how compact the recent history of the West is that the amount of time that that European Americans have been out here. It all happens in uh, in the span of a a couple of centuries. And UH, there's a lot that goes on in the nineteenth century.

For example, when you think about UH, you know Lewis and Clark coming out here at the beginning of the of the nineteenth century, and by the ends of the nineteenth century, you know, the Buffalo were virtually gone, and and and the whole West is settled by European Americans. And for all of that to happen in a hundred years is is stunning when you think about it, that

that's one lifetime. One of the things I love about this this new book is when I was doing the research for for Ridgeline and learning about the Powder River War, I was thrilled to discover that Jim Bridger shows up as an old man scouting for the U. S. Army. And for people who read The Revenant, Uh, Jim Bridger in eighteen three and the Revenant is the boy who's out there. He's the inexperienced boy who is one of the two people who abandoned Hugh Glass. And the fact

that in his life. He goes from you know, being part of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and being in this part of the country as one of the first European Americans to come out here and trap and lives through the fur trade era. He establishes a fort. Uh. He first of all, he gets half the state named

after him. He gets half state named half him, including a place that's you know, not more than a couple hundred yards from here, UM, but he he it's it's his recommendation that UH that UH determines the path for for the South Pass, which is where the Oregon Trail passes over. He sets up a fort on the Oregon Trail, and UM makes money selling UH goods and supplies to emigrants.

So he lives through that whole UH pioneer era. He scouts for pioneers, he ends up scouting for the U. S. Army UH, and he sees the the end of the of the Indian Wars in his life. And that's that's just it's epic. It's it's hard to even imagine that. The thing I think about him is, you know, when everybody UH talks about how everything went the ship in their lifetime, you know it used to be no one was here used to right. Can you imagine Bridger? Well,

he had to be like no, no, exactly. Well. And one of the one of the really fascinating anecdotes, uh that I came across and again and doing the research for this new book is not only was Jim Bridger scouting for the U. S. Army in this era, but James Beckworth also was who uh people who know about the former slave and African American uh mountain man, and he had actually come out here as part of that same uh company they're rocking out in for a company

that the Jim Bridger had been apart. So both of these guys come out as teenagers, uh, to to the wild wild West of the eighteen twenties, and then both of them end up together as sixty year old men scouting for the U. S. Army in eighteen sixty six, and they literally get sent out by the commanding officer of the fort to find to figure out where the

Indians are. And I just imagined them and this happened, you know, Jim Bridger and James Beckworth riding their horses up the Powder River Valley as sixty year old men reminiscing on their lives and you know, what conversations were they having. And I try and think about that as part of as part of the book. One of the things I wonder about is, uh, you know, was somebody like Jim Bridger, who was known as a person of of incredible integrity, was he regretting in any way how

much he had helped open up the West? And I think it absolutely Boone had that. Boon did. And there's a set of conversations I think about often like that, Like when Boone was very, very old in his seventies, he would go on extended hunting trips with his own slave who became like his hunting buddy, his confidant, and um to imagine, and this is after he had been

displaced out of places and displaced out of places. And he definitely, uh, you know, if you look in his biography, had an awareness of what have been lost, and you'd have to think that Bridger had it. I I do think he had that. And he was married, uh into the Shoshonee tribe, so he had lived the Native American culture and he was watching it literally being decimated. Uh. I can't imagine that they were not profound feelings of

of misgivings about what was was going on. And so it's always difficult because you don't want to ah, sort of impose twenty one century views of the universe on historical characters and and uh, and so I try not to do that, but I think that somebody like Bridger uh must have had those types of misgivings. Well, the way I think that it's I don't think it's twenty and I don't think it's twenty one century views necessarily because here's a person who derived his his income and

livelihood from the land's ability to put off resources. So at a time there was at least the hope and and you're you watched it happened to your peers that you could turn great fortune from trapping beaver, right, and it was just there for the taking, and food was readily available. It just like it was not like securing food was not an issue. There was no pressure about.

I mean, you had pressure from like indigenous forces who didn't want you on their landscape, but because you regarded that in a sort of like low priority way, it felt like there was like an inexhaustible supply of land out there. So even if you just look at it totally pragmatically and look at it just and very personally. When you get to where the beaver are gone, um, it's much harder to secure food. Huge areas that had buffalo have been depleted of buffalo, and now you need

to make your living contracting out to the military. Yeah. Um, I don't think you need to get to nostalgic to be like to realize that you have been, that your fortunes have gone down well, and the they must have had a I mean, at one level they experienced nature as and and you see this throughout the nineteenth century. You know, people in that era had a view of nature where first and foremost they had to survive, and so they were probably less focused on is it a

pretty vista? Is it a pretty sunset? But by the same token, I just can't imagine that they did not have an appreciation for the beauty of the place that they that they lived in. And I in small ways today as uh, when I try and imagine what it felt like to live in that era, I feel nostalgia for parts of Montana that that I knew when they were wild and they're not wild anymore. And it makes me angry sometimes when I when I see that and to see it on the scale that that they were

seeing it. Uh. And that's talking about about Jim Bridger. We've even got yet to the perspective of of the Native Native Americans who see their there not only their land, but their their their whole culture and way of living overturned in a in a space of a few years. It's it's almost impossible to imagine what that would have felt like. What one of the things I try and do in the book is to think about what did

that feel like. That's one of the I think the fun things you can do with fiction, as you can imagine, not just you don't just talk about what happened, You imagine how did it feel and how did it feel for the people who are living in that era. To experience change at that scale does given away too much to tell us whose perspective the book is told, So it's told from multiple perspectives. Uh. And I think a story that rich and complex has to be told from

from multiple perspectives. And one of the things that one of the problems I have with a lot of Western American history is I think too often it's told only from the the European American perspective, and that the Native perspective is given short shrift, and so I try and

tell the story from from multiple perspectives. One of the experiences that I had, actually one of the one of the greatest jobs I had ever in my life is I UH was born and raised in Port and Level, Wyoming, and UH I went to junior high and high school in Torrington, Wyoming, in the southeastern corner of the state, and UH loved history and did this job where I worked in the summers of high school and college doing working for the National Park Service at Fort Laramie National

Historic Site and dressed up every day literally in a eight seventy six cavalry cavalry uniform and shot guns and cannons and baked bread using the historic bread recipe and talked to tourists all day about the history of the West. That was my job. And I realized even at the time that the story that we were telling about the history of the West, UH was quite one sided. UH, and I've always felt like we could do a better

job of telling that story. And I hope you know, in some measure I'm doing that with this this new book. It's difficult to pull off though, because, um, you can give the perspective of your own culture and own people. It was a little bit of a trap and trying to give the perspective of someone else, because even a well intentioned effort can be met with accusations of colonial appropriation, cultural appropriation, right, and so it's like I applaud you

for not just turning around and saying forget it. Well, like it will never be rewarded, it will always be criticized.

The best that I can do is to h from where I sit, to all the research and all the work that I can to learn all aspects of the history, and try and write it down in a way that I hope is accurate, and then subject it, which I've done, uh to a lot of two readers with a lot of different perspectives, including UH, a lot of different Native American readers, and UH, this book has been through a lot of drafts, and the draft that it's in reflects a lot of that input. So I am sure that

I'm not telling the story perfectly. H. I know that's not the case. I hope I'm telling it in a in a fair way that that brings some balance to the story. And at that point, if I get things wrong, um, people can tell me about that and we can have that conversation and we can continue to have that conversation

and learn all of us. But I think that's a more productive way to to two deal with an issue, to deal with issues like that, than to ignore them or worst, to to write it from only one perspective. Are you familiar with the historian Dan Floores? I know, not in detail. Um, I know he's written a lot about the buffalo and it. I don't I'm not an expert on him at all. Yeah, he's done some pretty

influential work. And um, he's an environmental historian. When I was in graduate school, I took his one of his seminar courses. You had like you had to sort of take a seminar outside of your discipline, you know. So it took an environmental history seminar with Dan Flores, and he gave a lecture one day about the Battle of Adobe Walls. I think it's like the second Battle of

Adobe Walls. And if you ever heard of this with the buffalo hunters and yeah, so they weren't supposed to they weren't supposed to hunt south of the state Southern Pacific rail line. Right, they weren't supposed to move into the southern plains. And these guys paid little, little to no attention to that kind of like what you're talking about with using the bowsman trail. And they were very well armed, um buffalo, Yeah, and uh, extraordinarily good shooters.

Had this little fortress called Adobe Walls, and they ran hide hunting operations out of there, and it was like very defendable, and there were experts, um. And at one point in time, the tribes gathered in great number to go once and for all eliminate these guys out of this area. And and and native tellings of what happened on the way to this raid. Uh, young brave kills a skunk, which is a thing you do not do

on the way to a fight. When they get to Adobe Walls, the hide hunters managed to kill chief at like some pot shot, and they kill a chief. And the battle, which was supposed to be this great routing of these hide hunters fizzles and the Indians right off.

And then the telling of the hide hunters at Adobe Walls, it was there like superior skill, superior firepower, right, that one the day and Flori's explains how and the I think it's the Southern Cheyenne telling is that that guy killed a skunk on the way to that fight, and Floris then puts it to you like, um, who's right. Well, I mean, it's a perfect example of of why we should be looking at these historical incidents from multiple perspectives.

And uh, you know, we haven't done that in our history. We haven't done a good job of that at all. And so again, I I'm sure that there are plenty of mistakes in in my book, but I I do hope that I've made the effort to tell the best story that I possibly can, including making a really big effort to to to bring multiple perspectives there. You mentioned earlier, Um that the Fetterman fight was kind of the biggest skirmish in the West prior to Little Big Horn. And

I've always really liked reading about Little Big Horn. And I think that if you read contemporary works about the battle Little Big Horn, it's sort of they present it as sort of this great culmination, right that all these these these like outrageous figures and these like outsized human beings, right like collided in this this moment, this sort of like crescendo of tension in the American West, and it lives like that, Like we know that I was reading

this book from the sixties recently that touches briefly on a Little Big Horn and his treatment of Little Big Horn. I think this is before it became popular. His treatment a Little Big Horn was basically like if you were talking about the d D invasions. Okay, so there's this massive undertaking that's going on, and meanwhile, off in some corner, a officer makes a mistake and gets a couple hundred people killed on D Day. And then later we talked

about June six. Later we talked about it, and we're like, D Day huge successful objective, turned the tide. Oh and also this guy kind of screwed up and got everybody killed, Like that was his like in the nineties sixties, that was his viewpoint of a little Big Horn didn't even really warrant. It was just an anomaly, like a guy made a stupid mistake. Had no real bearing on how the Indian Wars went. Everything kept right on schedule. We

still like subjugated the Sioux Um. It was just it just doesn't really like we focus on it, But why are we focused on this? It didn't change the course of It didn't change. So here's the course of destiny? Right? I think I disagree with that that theory. I'll tell you why. Um. Well, first of all, look, these these battles where uh, where armies get wiped out are intrinsically fascinating, and it's like, you know, you kind of can't look away.

And so the Fetterman Fight, the Battle a Little Big Horn, they just there there cat nip in terms of our interest because they're just so graphic. Um. But what I think is interesting about the difference between the Fetterman Fight and the Battle a Little Big Horn is the impact that the battles had politically. And so I agree a little bit with the point that the person was making

that from a military standpoint. Um, you know, we're talking about eighty guys who die in the Fetterman fight, and I don't remember the precise number with Custer too, U twenty or something like that. Um. And if you compare that to D Day, uh, that is not a massive battle. But both of those uh fights happened at really interesting political moments in US history. The Feederman fight happens in eighteen sixty six, two years after the end of the

Civil War, when the US is weary of war. They've completely uh drawn down the size of the U. S. Army. Um they're preoccupied with trying to manage, uh the the reconstruction of the South, and that required a huge military presence in and of itself. And there just was no interest in the in eighteen sixty six in in having a big fight out west. And so when Fetterman, when the Federman defeat happens, the US pulls back and the

Indians win this war for a couple of years. My favorite anecdote about the Custer Battle is Custer uh fight. The battle a little big horn occurs on June eighteen seventy six, eighteen seventy six. Takes a long time for the news to travel back to Washington, d C. It's Independence Day. The news of the Custer massacre arrives in Washington, d C. On July four, eight seventy six, literally in the midst of the celebration of the centennial of the

hundred year anniversary of the country. It's like the biggest turd in the punch bowl in American history. To that point, and and the political reaction to the battle of a Little Big Horn is the opposite of the of the reaction to the fetterment fight. They decide enough, we're not

gonna lose UH to the Indians in the west. And they beginning at that moment, UH, they send out Nelson Miles, who you know is one of the most kind of BADASSUH warriors in the in the U. S. Army, and he and and a big army go out west and they start doing something they hadn't done very much before, which is attacking UH the Indians in the winter when they were at least able to fight. And within two years the Indian Wars are over. Um. Crazy horses is

on the reservation. Uh. He rolled up the nest first to the next song the Nez Perce UH surrender and UH sitting bowl is in exile in Canada. The Indian Wars are over. And so the political significance of those battles, even though in the if you look at them compared to some of the Civil War battles or or other battles where thousands of people die, Um, the political significance of those battles I think was huge. In reading Um, the revenuet thing I really appreciate. You're gonna come around

to this. We've warmed up a little bit now, so so you've you've been warming up. I feel like you've been like like a wind windmilling for a sucker punch to bring it on, bring it on. In reading the Revenue, you solved for me. You solved for me a thing I never understood, and it was a detail that I really appreciate it because I like, uh details. Um, even with the director Michael Man, like he loved him so and Ali and lord knows what other movies. Um, the

guy this is no burying anything. But the cinematographer Mo Foulon that sort of like gave our show, like made our show like the way it is, like it looks the way it is because this guy Mofoulon, Mofoulin, that had been Michael Mann's assistant at a time, and Mo would talk talks about how Michael Mann was very attuned to details, and you talk about how humans are really smart animals, you know, and he viewed audiences that way, like intelligent animals, and he wanted things to look and

feel right, you know. I think it's one of the great strengths like Karen McCarthy's, he really cares like how things look. But in the book, I've always known that mountain you'd see mountain men wearing pants that were leather to the knee to the knee, and you see depictions of them leather to the knee and wool down from them.

They're down helpful. I never ever thought about what that was, except for I don't know, so, uh, the state of the art pants for a uh, state of the art mountain man was was leather to the knee and wool from the knee down, because, uh, because wool dries quickly and remains warm when it's wet. And of course, what the fur tuators were doing with the beaver trappers were doing was waiting in two cricks to pull out beaver traps. So they were constantly wading in and out of water.

And you can imagine wet, wet buckskin, uh is heavy and uncomfortable and doesn't keep you warm. And so they yeah, they wore these uh special pants. Uh yeah, knee boots, yeah exactly. But but the buckskin upper, what was the what's the advantage of that? Why wasn't it just that's a good question, Um, durability and availability of resource probably yeah, And uh so I guess they didn't have enough wool to to get the whole pant made out of wall, so they just they did it from the knee down.

And then I think they're pretty conscious about looks too, so they I get the sense they liked the look of of buckskin and and you know all that and so a little bit of wall. Maybe what research did you do that get that sort of brought about ideas that they were sort of they had they had ideas

of fashion or look, there was there were hairstyles. Oh my god, they were like like in the frontiers, been a little bit earlier, but they would they had they would plait their hair, they would braid their hair in a specific way. Absolutely, And I think they admired the dress of of a lot of the the native tribes who also had wonderful uh clothing that they that they wore, and they copied that. And um, I think there was a I think they were quite fashion conscious in their

in their own way. A thing that's troubled me, like, if there's a for any historians out there, for any PhD candidates out there, there is a thing that has not been adequately explained about the mountain men. And I'll put it to you to see if you have any insights on it. Do you have any exposure to trapping? Do you have you done at trap? I have not trapped myself, I know, so I won't overstate my expertise. Here. A beaver in a foothold trap is very, very difficult

to hang onto. UM we use today. The it's it's astounding how little the technology has switched between what they were using, which is a double long spring trap. Granted these are handful words, UM and and we still use double long spring traps today. Like you catch beavers, you can. We've kind of gradually switched to something called coil spring, but I own some have caught beaver in them, and they are like dead ringers for what they're us in

those days. However, UM we use now a one way slide and you put it on a wire or a chain, and it's like when the beaver gets caught in the trap, he instinctively dives for deep water and there's a one way slide wire and he can take the trap down in the deep water and it's the slide wire is anchored on both ends. It's anchored on the bank and it's anchored out in three or four ft of water. He can't come back up. The trap won't come back up,

and that's how you drown them. Anytime that beaver jack's that lower stake out or dicks around too much on the bank and twist that drowner wire up so that the slide can't slide, or any time he anyway incapacitates that slide wire, it's like it's probably a gone beaver. You're gonna have a toenail. He's gonna be he just

has gone. You can't hang onto him. And when you read historical accounts of how they made their sets, I don't think anyone yet understands how they anchored off their sets because any explanation I've read, I'm like, no, you wouldn't have the success rate. Because these guys are running like six sets at a time. Allot of them carried six traps, you see it all the time, and they're

pulling like four or five beaver a day. No one knows how they rigged their ship, and that would be a great avenue of exploration for someone to find out, like how they actually rigged their ship, and then some historian would go out and catch and have a four or five out of six trap success ratio using that equipment. I don't think you could do it. People make a big lot of nap in a arrowhead nowadays and like killing deer with it. That doesn't impress me at all.

It would impress me to set six traps with those slide wires and catch five beavers. I don't know the answer to that. I guess I knew that the way that the beaver divers by drowning, but I don't know how they I don't remember reading how they how they rigged it. The people that saw it happen, I didn't think too describe it. I have no They obviously had to figure out yeah, they just did it right, and they would have been undoubtedly that have been very particular

about water depth and all kinds of other considerations. But instead you just imagine, now it's like these people catching all these beavers and you overlook like what it actually involved, yea,

and to do it while not getting killed. Well, I think about that every time I'm fishing, because they you know, I'm walking up the same cricks that they were setting beaver traps on and you know, they're thickly vegetated and I'm not worried about somebody hiding in the trees who wants to kill me, and uh, and they were and you almost can't see how any of those guys survived. Uh, and my god, that they not survived though, I mean, they died like flies. Well it's one of the reasons why.

The fact that that Jim Bridger and James Beckworth are sixties sixty something guys in you know, in the eighteen sixties, and the fact that they've lived through decades of a pretty vigorous lifestyle is it's stunning. And they did it with like Bridger, didn't he have the whitman who was later in the women massacre. Didn't he carve a broad head out of bridge or shoulder blade? Yea at the tearing around for years in the bone of his shoulders and there's a there's an etching of that happening. And

Bridger is is leaning across a tree stump. Why this while this guy literally I think it's and I think the arrowhead had been in there for two or three years and and you know, I guess he got super drunk and and let the guy kind of hack on him for a while, and he yanks out that arrowhead and it was like a doctor doing people point out, being like the first sort of like the first sort of western style official surgery west of some latitude line.

You can you can imagine the reality TV event that that was at the rendezvous, the number of people that stood around to kind of watch that. Um, can he walk us through the Huge Glass story? So the Huge ask you a question. Absolutely, I want you to do it, but I'm I'm too I'm too dying. And all the answers something, um, do you buy like, I know, you know how Huge Glass died? You know what? Walk us through the Huge Glass? And then I want to ask you if you think that the legend of his death

is true or not. But just walk us through the Hugh Glass story, pirates and everything. Okay, So uh, first of all, I'll tell a bit of an embarrassing side story, which is that The Revenant is not the first book that I started to write. Um. I started to write another book which was going to be loosely based on me and my experiences as like a young legislative aid in Washington, D C. And I got about you, you you wouldn't be on this show. Well, I'm getting I'm getting

to that. I got about I got about halfway through that book and started sharing it with a couple of friends who I could trust, who both told me that it was it was boring, and that was hurtful. Those are good friends. That it's it's they're good friends. But it was hurtful because that was the fictionalized version of my life that they were talking about. So uh so right about the moment that I is abandoning a novel based on a fictionalized version of my apparently extremely boring life,

I was. I was reading a book about the Mountain Man, nonfiction book, and there were two paragraphs in it about Hugh Glass. And these two paragraphs said, Uh, you know, there's this guy. He's mauled by a grizzly bear, horribly wounded. Uh. Two of his comrades are left to wait for him to die and bury him, and instead of doing that,

they rob him and abandoned him. And first of all, out of h anger, he crawls two hundred miles back to the last vestige of civilization and survives and re equips himself and then goes out to seek revenge, and I'm like, Okay, that's a pretty good story. That's a that's a lot more interesting than my life. I'm going to write a book about that. So that's where I got interested in the in the story and started doing the research on on Hugh Glass to to write the book.

And and for me, even when it's fiction, the research that you get to do is is half the fun, because I gotta not only read all about the mountain men, but I gotta read all about wilderness survival and I gotta try and figure out, you know, what type of uh of trap could a guy who can't use one arm uh possibly uh build that allow him to get food if he when he doesn't have a knife or a rifle or even flint and steel, what what would

he do? And so I gotta just do all sorts of these fun little uh forays into areas that were interesting to do research on um. But that is the kernel of the story of the part of Hugh glasses life that he's most famous for, which is being attacked by mall horribly mall by a grizzly abandoned and robbed by his comrades, and then going out to seek revenge, but before were that, uh, he had a remarkable life. And who knows how much of this is legend and

and how much is is fact. But there's a there's a really entertaining and quirky biography a few glass by a guy named John Myers Myers. And it was written, I think, also in the sixties. And it's it's uh, it is uh. It feels a little bit like it was written in the sixties, but according to his biographer, he was originally a Can I ask what it means to feel like it was written in the sixties. It's it is not politically correct at all, um, And it has a very one sided view of many aspects of

of of Western history. And he's just John Meyers Myers. And I can't imagine he's still alive. You can tell he's he's a got character and is a quirky dude. And it's this is not like a written like a a doctorate thesis. This is a this is freewheeling, which makes it kind of fun to read, but also makes you kind of wonder sometimes how much is true and how much isn't. So I won't vouch for any of

this being true. The legend, according to his biographer of of Hugh Glass is that he started off his life as a sailor and that he was on a ship that was captured by the pirate UH or or or not pirate, depending on your version of history. Jean Lafitte and uh and imprisoned UH on an island off the shore of Texas and escaped from this pirate island to the mainland of Texas. And this would have been in

the eighteen teens. And uh proceeds literally to walk from the Gulf of Mexico to what is now uh well to St. Louis, Missouri, uh and has all sorts of adventures along the way. Yeah, well one could imagine. It wasn't just a smooth it was not there there there was no interstate UH. And so that's Hugh glasses life before in eight three he signs on with the Rocky Mountain for Company to go out and be part of one of these first trapping parties that goes uh up

to Missouri. And when they set out to do this, were they setting out to trap, were they setting out to trade? Or they set out to do a combination of the two. Probably a combination. UM most of the earliest trappers both trapped on their own but also traded with local tribes who would also bring in uh furs, and then they would obviously send those send those down river, and so probably both. Um, I want to jump to the death part, and then we'll get back to what

happens in the middle of his life. Uh do you buy that? I don't even know where it comes from. Legend has and I learned where it comes from. Oh, and it's not true. Well I think it was true, and I'll tell you why. And this is where this is all coming together. Do you want to tell the story? Should I tell the story? Well, you tell a story, and then I'll tell the story the version effort that

I know. Uh, they're on the Yellowstone and he's with some other trappers and they get into a skirmish with Indians and they wind up holding Do we know where about the yell Stone? It was going to the mouth of the Big Horn, wasn't there was a near the confluence of the Big Horn in the Yellowstone. They get into a skirmish was some uh erica, I think, And they want to hold up in a coolie and they can't.

They got a little stronghold was not looking good for him, and the Indians decided to set fire to the grass. And they set fire to the grass and Huge Glass and his compatriots there, No, that just not looking good. And they touch a match or touch a spark to a powder keg and kill themselves. I don't buy it. Why not it's wrong that? Well, I'll tell I'll tell you. I'll tell you the story that was wrong with that.

I'll tell you the story. First of all, what I heard is it happened in December or January, and the Yellowstone was frozen. So the grass fire bit seems a little implausible. Um, that's a strike against it. But I don't think it puts it to death. But hold on, I got more details and I'll tell you where they

came from. Um. So, one of the fun little side forays in doing research for this new book, Ridgeline, is I read a biography about James Beckworth the African American Mountain and uh Beckworth claims to have found the body of Hugh Glass when he was killed. And the story that Beckworth tells is this, there was a trading post at the mouth of the of the Big Horn, and

the Yellowstone that's that's a historical fact. Forecast I think was one of the I think that in that era, and it bounced up and down like a couple miles this direction, because there's a couple of different sites, so there's a trading post there Forecast, and I think they were primarily trading with the Crow, which were the I believe in that era, the dominant tribe in that part

of the story exactly. And Uh, a group of crow comes into Forecast and wants to trade um and there are not enough goods at Forecast to trade as much as the as the as the Indians want to and so they dispatch two men from Forecast to a fort that's thirty miles away that's affiliated to go get more trading goods to bring Bratt back and trade with the crow. And Hugh Glass is one of the two guys that is dispatched to this other fort to go get more

trading goods. And the story that Beckworth tells is that Glass was crossing the frozen uh Yellowstone River uh and was caught out on the ice in the open by a raiding party of Ricara, which was not expected in that territory in that era. And the Ricara catch him out on the glass and kill him. And Beckworth was one of the men who went out and found his meat ated body. M that's the story in that Beckworth tells who was the politician after they discredited the story

of Paul Revere? Who is the politician? That said, Uh, I love Paul Revere, whether he wrote or not, meaning I'm sticking with the powder kick story. Well, look, I love Hugh Glass. Whichever way he died, that's still that's still a pretty epic life. And whether or not he was a captive of the pirates or not, look he uh he did. He did a lot of ship um and so definitely one of those kind of epic uh. Nineteenth century lives that I just think are so so much fun to study about. How do you pronounce the

the spy intrigue novelist John law Lakara? I think somebody will tell us something we're wrong at that. I thought it was pronounced la car. It could be maybe it's a car. He's got a great quote he said, watching your book being made into a movie is like watching an ox and turned into a bull. Young cube. Uh. What was the experience like for you? Um? Well again, I'm not gonna wine too much because but we're not you know, I'm not. I'm not asked. I'm not inviting

you to one. I mean, it's like, listen, I probably the greatest thing that ever happened in the whole wide world. It was a blast. Who wouldn't want You'll notice that John Craze books are all movies. They're all movies. And I will tell you that before the movie was made. I'm not aware of anybody who read The Revenant who wasn't related to me or my friend, Like, I haven't read your book that reminds of your great story. Man,

tell you the story real quick. I went to see this this writer one time, and uh, I want to see like a bookstory. Then he did, and he told a story. I don't know if it's true or not. It was a really fine story. He told a story that he was one time in a used bookstore okay, and sees his own book and he used bookstore and opens it and it's the inscribed copy that he gave

to his mother. Oh man, that hurts. That hurts. I've seen a couple of inscribed copies of mine for sale on eBay, But my mom has never done that to me. She's I hope she sold a private song. If you're listening, don't tell me. I don't want to know. Um, but uh, but look, it was a blast to have a movie made out of my book, and it gave the book a huge life. The revenue means back from the dead, and you know that's literally what the revenue means. Somehow

I didn't know that. Yeah, that's what it means, and it does it. I feel I feel so like lazy now to have not found that out, because I always wondered, like why, Well, it comes from French. From it it's a it's an English word revenant, but it comes from a French word revenue to return to come back really, and so it means literally one who returns from the dead. Halfway good at my job. That'll been my first question. Um. So, look, I feel like the movie brought the book back from

the dead. And uh, you know, a lot of people read the book who otherwise wouldn't have. And it's given me an opportunity to write more books and I'm excited about that. Are you're disappointed how the book publishing experience went? Uh? Initially? You mean when it when it only sold to my mom and her friends. Sorry to crawl back, Um, it's your book. Did your booked had done well? My first Well, they've done well over time. My first book didn't do well out of the gate. Well, dude, it was horrible.

It's horrible. I didn't think they're gonna let me writ new more books. Well, I I I'm having a lot more opportunities to write books after the Revenant. It's it's easier, easier now than it was before. But um, the overall experience, I was overseas working for the U. S. Government when uh, when the movie was was being shot, and so I was, um, how soon after publication? Right? Well, like when did someone come and say, like when they bought the film rights?

Was one of those deals that they give you like a dollar a year until it goes into production. It was like a real sale. It was a real sale. It I still needed to work vigorously, but it was you know, it was. It was more than a dollar a year for the option. But to tell you how long it took, we optioned it actually before we sold the book. We sold, we sold, we optioned the film rights before we sold the book itself. Um, but the first time when I somebody told me it was going

to be a movie. Uh, and I got super excited about this. Uh. They told me that it was gonna be directed by Michael Man and and star Daniel day Lewis as Hugh Glass and uh and yeah and over the course of the next uh twelve years really, oh my god. Yeah. It was first option in two thousand and one and it became a movie in two thousand and I'll never say die Man so Revenant Back from

the Dead. So that's the funny thing is like, I know, you know some of the writers who haven't been through this many times and they option something yeah, and then they call up like they're gonna yea And I was like, no, well you got probably not what they told me at the beginning. And this just set my expectations is that about one out of three things that gets optioned turned into a movie. So my expectations were that the odds were against me. Um. But I just call people telling

everybody like, it's gonna be a big, huge body. I didn't tell him it's going to be. I was a little more circumspect than that, and it turned out to be a good thing. For a long time. And then even when it you know, when I heard that, uh you know, DiCaprio is going to star in it, and uh interview two was kind of directed, I still kind of had some scar tissue there that I didn't quite

believe it. But uh yeah, well more I guess, uh, fourteen it became a movie, and two thousand and one when it was first option, so I'd gone on with my life. Believe me, I was. I wouldn't hold of my breath. Um. But but look when they that My big thing when I write books is I I love history and I want my books to be as historically

accurate as possible. And to me, that's part of the even when you're writing fiction, you ought to really care about historical accuracy because I don't want to mislead people all and and frankly, history is so great that you don't have to make up tons of shipped for it to be an amazing story. Um. That said, you know, the part of the Revenant my book that people don't like is uh the ending, and the ending of my book without giving it away, is true to history. It

is not a Hollywood ending. Uh it is it is Uh, it is not the good guy rolling around on the ground with the bad guy. And the movie I think was never gonna get made without Hollywood ending of the good guy rolling around on the ground with a bad guy. And uh, and so where does that pressure come from, do you think? I think that one difference between book world and movie world is just the amount of money that's involved. Um. You know, when somebody publishes a book,

they're not uh risking a whole lot of money. And if the book fails, and most books do, um, you know, the publishers not doesn't lose their their fortune. A big movie and you know, The Revenant I think was a hundred and fifty million dollars to shoot and another hundred and fifty million dollars to to publicize, So three hundred million dollars. They're not gonna risk too much about people, not like in the ending. And there's a reason there's

something called the Hollywood ending. It's because audiences like that. Audiences want the bad guy to get hacked up by the good guy and uh, and so that's what happens in the movie. And uh, and it worked because it made a half billion dollars. And so surprising what you're saying about that it's an interesting point about the money

because I used to kind of marvel at um. You know, a publisher with a certain amount of power can just on their own buy book, right if they've proven themselves like one individual with only getting like they can just get a rubber stamp from who'seever above them and they could buy a book. And you can send some writer off into exile, you know, for a year, and they

come back and here's this thing. It's like it's it's been impacted by like there's a couple of people, right, but also it becomes this thing that's a globally available um and it's not a lot to like went into it, but here does. But that's a great point with like a movie. It's like man, like, uh, many many careers around the line, huge amounts of money is on the line. It's not like this like it just used to start, Like how could it be like that easy to make

a book? You know that the financial models are dramatically different between between book and film, and there's just uh. The other example I always think is funny is a a book contract is about six pages long and basically the whole thing says they can't change a word without your permission. A a movie contract is about sixty pages long, and basically the whole thing says they can change anything

they want without your permission. And and so you go into the exercise knowing that that your story is going to get changed and it's going to be a collaborative, uh enterprise. And if if you're not comfortable with that, you shouldn't sign the contract. It's just it's a it's a different exercise. I mean there's writers involved, and directors and actors who interpret and committees who you know, look at all that stuff. Um, and so it's just it's

just a very different process. And and look, uh, the from a very selfish standpoint, I love The Revenant because it brought the book back to life. But there's there's a lot of things I love about that movie. I think it uh uh. I think it does h a a great job of kind of transporting people to kind of a different place and time and giving people a sense of just how hard life was in that era and the you know, the courage that the people who went out there in that in that time frame and

we're willing to take that risk. Um. I think it's well acted. I think it's beautifully shot. I'm a little irked that, you know, part of it takes place in a rainforest. I've been to South Dakota. It's a beautiful state. I didn't see any rainforest when I was there. Uh, and so that part of it bothered me. We've had a couple of laughs, Like, you know, we've joked about, uh, you know, my dissatisfaction with it, and this is like, you know, to be perfect fright, Like this has absolutely

nothing to do with you. Like it. It's a phenomenal book. I had known that story and loved that story my entire life, and I um, in hanging around the West, I had developed that story to be that in my head it like occurred in the like arid grasslands, the willow lined streams, the sage brush. It did, and it would be as though someone told your own story and then your own story of growing up, but then put

it in a different house. And so that really, um was a situation where I looked and I couldn't even pay attention to the movie. I was so like, like just a gas right, because um, that's the most I think, that's like the most beautiful landscape on the planet. Right, It's it's just like the it's just ripe enrich. And to have to imagine someone coming and saying, to imagine a director a group of producers looking at that the arid grasslands like the Great Plains, looking and being like,

oh uh no, not like that. I thought it would be more like right. It's like it's almost like, um, it feels to me like uh them uh disapproving of my like inner self. That's where my great that that's my only great. But it's like we've gotten a little bit of mileage out of complaining about it. Was just that it was like it was like a condemnation of uh, a landscape that is very dear to me. We were

talking earlier. I grew up on the high Plains. I grew up in eastern Wyoming, and uh, you know, eastern Wyoming, like eastern Montana, like a big chunk of of South Dakota is high plains. And I I love it. I think it's epically beautiful. Um, it doesn't look like what people who don't live out here have in their mind's eye a lot of times when they think about Wyoming or Montana, when they when people on the coast think

about Wyoming and Montana. They think about, uh, you know, the t tons and Glacier National Park and kind of the the epic mountain vistas. And don't get me wrong, I love the mountains too. Those are easy to Uh. I think anybody can appreciate that, the high plains. Uh, they may. I wonder if they don't require most people to kind of grow up in that environment to be able to appreciate it the way that I think you and I do. Yeah, maybe it takes a little bit

of a trained a little bit more of an acquired taste. Uh. I think you you kind of grow up in that and and you uh you know. Just to to give my irk about my least favorite description of the planes is oftentimes writers who don't understand the planes will describe the featureless planes. And it drives me crazy because when you walk across the plains, there is so much feature. Uh it's just that it's a lot more subtle than you know, a mountain jutting up uh to a snow

capped peak. But uh, you know, asked the guys who rode over the ridgeline uh in the Fetterman fight. Uh, it was how featureless it was because there were there were two thousand Indians hiding in that featureless plane, and so asked them how featureless. It's only featureless if you maybe haven't walked a few miles, and once you have, you wouldn't say that anymore. I say, I pointed out to people about hunting antelope will be like my antalope

hunting strategy. This is basically, you find some way off and then the hunt plan is to hunt all the ones that you will encounter on the way over to the ones you see way off, Like there's so let's just go in that direction. Undoubtedly we'll find many more. And all the folds increases that curved between here and there,

you can see a long way on the plains. And I love, uh, you know, where I grew up in eastern Wyoming, there were you could see Laramie Peak and that was uh you know, that was seventy miles away from my hometown and you could see that, uh clear as day. I love having a seventy mile horizon. That's a cool thing. But there was a lot between between where you are and the horizon, and it's it ain't

feature it ain't featureless. I want to get into the reprint of Last Stand guys, A quick question before we leave the movie? What did UH like daily or was there daily? What did collaboration look like you and the folks that made the movie? So I as I, as I mentioned, I was living overseas at the time, you know, working for the for the government, and and was uh you know, eight time zones away from where they were filming.

So honestly, not a ton uh, But that's said the one of my good friends, a guy named Keith Redman, who's had a company called Anonymous Content, produced the movie and he involved me in ways that he could. Also, the screenwriter for the Revenue is a guy named Mark Smith, another great guy who's very collaborative, and both Keith and Mark were very generous in letting me know things that were going on. Uh. Mark Smith shared drafts of the

script at a couple of different junctures with me. I made my h historical points which were pretty uniformly ignored. But I had my chance at least to see the script and kind of see it evolve. Um, So I

was not uh involved in a detailed way. One of the things I that irked me out of that process of the Revenue is that I couldn't write the screenplay because I've never written a screenplay, and when I moved back to Montana, one of the things I learned how to do was write screenplays because I kind of vowed that I would never have one of my stories turned into uh uh you know, a movie again without me writing it. And so I'm I'm hoping if there is, if there's interest in in this new one Ridge line

that that that I'll be the writer for that. Do you think that it's a little bit dishonest? Um? Do you think it's a moral problem with taking history, like in the case of Huge Glass and like what Huge Glass actually did, um, and making it be that something different happened. Do you think it's a little bit of

moral Um? I guess it depends on how extreme the retelling is and whether it uh distorts his story in a way that that I mean, For example, Uh, I think the way that the Native American story has been told in traditional American westerns uh is uh there is an immoral immorality in that because it doesn't tell very

much about about their perspective on things that were happening. UM. I understand that that that people will also always seek to tell stories that are uh interesting and compelling to an audience and entertaining to an audience, and some of that I think is is okay. One of the things I did at the end of The Revenant, uh, and that I do at the end of my of my new book is I put I tell the reader where I've veered from the truth, and if I made up a character, I tell him I made this character up.

Because you even point out that that you even acknowledge that there's some debate about whether or not it was Bridger um. And I just think when I'm done reading a book, I want to know what what was real and what wasn't. And obviously people can can go to their own research, and I also try and list books that people can go read about nonfiction books to kind

of learn from themselves or whatever. But I I do think that we live in an era where we've lost the line between fact and fiction, and so I think there's an additional responsibility on on writers, including writers of fiction, to be honest about where they are veering off what is historical fact. And it doesn't mean that every story has to be a a historical treatise. I think there's plenty of room for uh, fictional historical fiction. Uh, fictional

tellings of historical events. But I think we have an extra responsibility to to be accurate and to help the reader know what's true and what's not. It gives you, yeah, because it helps you understand like what can and cannot

happen in the world. Yeah, and uh and I I mean I've always been irked by stories that, especially films, because the medium of film is so powerful and uh, there's you know, there's whole generations of people who we'll see a film and that will be the main ah sort of entree point that they have to a particular historical incident. And so you know, uh, stories with extreme uh conspiracies about the assassination of jfk Uh to me bother me because I think they they give a distorted

perception of history. For example. Uh, I want to touch on the reprint of Last Stand, But first I have a question for you, because you you know your mountain Man stuff. Well, you mentioned Laramie Peak. What's your understanding of deal the story of Laramie, of Jacques Laramie. Yeah, like the sort of absence of a story of Laramie. Uh, Well, you tell me, I'm not I know a little bit

about this, but I'm not sure exactly where you're going. Oh, yeah, he's he's he's known for being killed by the Indians. And then and then was there was not stuffed down under the ice and the beaver pond. Yeah, and then the guy went like bridge like, I mean, she's got half the state named after him, this and other states. That dude made off like a bandit, and no one knows what the hell he was, just like shows up

and promptly gets killed. And then here's the thing. If you're gonna get killed in that era, try and get killed next to a river, because if it gets killed next to the river, uh, there's a good chance that the river is going to be named after you. And then whatever forts and towns they put on the river might also get named after you. And if there's a mountain of bumps into the river, the mountain might get

named after you. And of course that's exactly what what happened with Jacques laurent A. Uh in Lolo, Yeah, Lolo got killed like this dude, Lulu, he spelled his name spelled the hunter way, Lulu, Lolo whatever, gets killed by a grizzly bear and people like, oh, you know the creek worl Lolo got killed Scott's Bluff, and then Priests was like Lolo the town Lolo, the Creek Lolo, the Peak Lolo, the national for Meanwhile, the first thing about this dude, well, I have in in the new book,

I have Bridger as an old man, uh, kind of reflecting on the fact that there's a bunch of stuff named after him now and and kind of oh yeah absolutely, um yeah um, and uh being happy that he didn't have to die. I have him standing on top of Scott's Bluff, which was named after Scott, who was the story he was, Uh, nobody does, nobody else does either. Scott was killed by the Indians and died with his back up against Scott's Bluff, and so they named it

Scott's Bluff, Scott's Bluff, you know where Scott died. Um, And I have Bridger reflecting on that that that he's happy that he didn't have to get killed to get stuff named after him. So anyway that was hitting during his lifetime. Yeah, oh absolutely, yeah. Um. So he really was, like he's just a well known dude. He's he is a rock star in terms of fame in his uh well, certainly when he's a sixty year old, he's he's famous

among the soldiers that he's he's guiding. I mean he's uh, you know, he was already a legend in his own time, and and and it it's been a long time by the way he was. It was he'd been on the planes for forty plus years at the time he's guiding for the army. So he's and this is a place where where they're there. The numbers of people out here we're not large, and the numbers of places where they went were not large. So people bumped into each other.

I mean talking about last stand the you know, the person that that books about George burg Grinnell. I was amazed when I was doing the research on him, because he meets, he meets everybody. He meets, uh, he meets Buffalo Bill, he meets he goes campaigning, uh with Custer, Uh, he meets Brigham Young. I mean, he just he bumps into everybody. And but it kind of makes sense because you know, it's kind of like being from a small state from well he was like Forrest gum Um and uh.

But you know, if you live in a in a small statement like Montana. It's not crazy that you meet somebody and it doesn't take very long before you both know somebody in common. And it's because it's a big state, but there's you know, there's not that many towns. And Custer, oh, not only did he know Custer, of we're talking about

Grenelle now um. And this the Buffalo book, uh that's called Last Stand is about this this nineteenth century hunter conservationist named georgeburg Grannell, and he not only did he know Custer, but he goes on campaign with Custer. In eighteen seventy four, when Custer is sent out to survey the Black Hills, Grizzly shoots a huge gride s eight the an amazing foot as an amazing bear. Um. And

but it's on that. The other thing Custer takes along on that expedition is he takes miners with him because there's rumors of gold in the Black Hills and Custer wants to be the one to discover it. And they

discover gold on this eight seventy four exploration. Custer sends a messenger back to Fort Laramie to tell him that there's gold in the Black Hills and the gold rush is on uh into the heart of the territory that was given back uh to the Uh, to the Lakota and the Cheyenne at the end of the Fetterman massacre. They said, you're right. Uh. So when when when Fetterman is defeated and the U. S. Army retreats, they give

back to the to the Lakota and the Cheyenne. The Lakota taken the Black Hills from the Cheyenne from well from It's even more complicated than that. And I they were all sorts, you know, the all sorts of tribes

are in there. And that's a complicated prehistory. But just in terms of the US piece of the history, they seed it back uh in eighteen sixty seven, I think, which is when they negotiated the treaty after the after the Fetterment fight, and then they in the eighteen seventy four when they discover gold, they say, changed our minds. You know, we know we have given you two treaties now,

but the second second one we want to renegotiate as well. Uh. When when the Lakota won't renegotiate, it's war, and that's when Custer. Then that sets in motion the events that lead to the Battle of a Little Big Horn within a year and a half, two years, we're talking about fame, Bridge are having fame cost She was known to the people that killed him. Yeah, and there I guess there's some debate about whether or not that he had just

recently cut his hair. He cut his hair short, his wife took the hair, and then after his death had a wig made of her husband's hair. She's a fascinating character herself. And there's like debate about whether or not the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne recognized Custer's body on the

battlefield because he didn't have his hair. And it was a woman that pointed out that that we found him and knew who he was, and that she had taken a sewing all and punched a hole through his ear drums so that in the afterlife he would better hear the warnings. And then she used her pony to kick up dirt on him, and she says, she says that she knew him. Yeah, people running around knowing each other.

He's coming for you. It's you know, people were they were not huge numbers of people in even it's though it's vast territory. They were not huge numbers of people. So walk us through Grenell real quick, though, do you did you when you resea all the stuff? Did you find that these guys ever reflected because like he's like Steve was saying, they died so much, right, so at age sixty, did you ever find them reflecting on how lucky they must have been? Well? Um, I didn't find there.

There's there's some great UH people who write when Bridger was still alive about conversations they had with him, and they'll so they were these nineteenth century people saying I was on a UH, I was on a long ride horseback ride with with Bridger and he told me this story. Or I was at Fort Laramie at the same time the bridge was there, and I heard him tell all these stories and I'm gonna write, I'm gonna write down all these stories he told. So there's there's those types

of of stories. Um. I don't remember Bridger ever actually saying or being said to upset that he had been lucky. Um, but I just again, it's hard to imagine that that he didn't recognize that there was some measure of of luck in there. And and look at somebody like Hugh Glass. I mean, Hug Glass was a talented frontiersman and a tough badass who've survived, you know, being mauled by a grizzly bear and crawling two miles by himself with no weapons.

Um and he still ends up I think, uh, in the wrong place at the wrong time, you know, walking across the frozen Yellowstone and gets caught and killed. And so he had a day of bad luck. Good you got. It's like a few scraps. The other thing about those guys is, you know, we think about like getting mauled by a grizzly bear or dying in a in a fight with with Indians. But you know, if if you're out on your own in the frontier and you snap your ankle, you're freaking dead. You know, the the odds

that you can. Or or you get sick and in the middle of the winter and you're off on your own, the odds that you can, you know, do all the things you need to do to survive with a broken ankle, or if you're laid up with a fever for two weeks. I don't think it took very much for a lot of those guys to die, and Uh, it's just that those aren't as as movie worthy, you know, the guy who died at the flu You know, I want to touch I keep I do want to get to this grenelle, gentleman,

but I've to tell you our thing. Have you read the journal I've been talking about a lot lately, Life and Death at the Mouth of the Muscle Shell. Now, it's a guy. He spends a couple of years at the mouth of where the muscle Shell flows into Missouri. Like most the action takes places all in of water now because because the four Peck reservoir. Um, it's just

his like daily account. So'll be like Monday, you know, Sonny and warm river came up two inches Tuesday, fight Bob got killed, sixties Yeah, huge fight, Bob got killed. Finally found Dave's body. Like Wednesday, Sonny again turned cold towards evening. Um, the historian that that collected and published this journal and commented on this journal, Uh, took it upon himself to try to corroborate the existence of all of these individuals who are coming and going from this

outpost at the mouth of the muscle Shell River. So the guy, I'll be like, you know, old you know, Jed Tompkins came through on the way to check his wolf poison baits right, And then the historian will going, who is Jed Tompkins And he's like, turns out we find record of Jed Tompkins uh taking a line of credit at some store in St. Louis. And he's able to find the people that come and go. Some other mentioned some sometimes like like there's a woman that gets

scalped and survived. Um, he later learns that she he writes about how she wore men's clothing. Um, everybody called her names that he said, names that can't be mentioned. And you get this portrait of this woman that there's this woman who's probably gay at a time it was completely unacceptable dressed as a man, was named all these derogatory remarks. She eventually marries a guy. He moves her down to Colorado. She blows her brains out. All you hear about her in the life that of the mouse

of the muscle shell. So and so got scalped and looks like she's gonna make it. But he then was able to like like who, Like, who the hell was this right? And it's just just just like heartbreaking story of like someone who eventually, like what ever, resigns, marries a guy and kills herself, Like what the hell happened there? But uh, I was in his other book recently, and there's this like this character that emerges in the late eighteen hundreds of Miles City, Montana, and there's no mention

of him. But there's this kid whose dad was a doctor in Miles City in late eighteen hundreds, and the kid he's like later on in life, he's describing who comes to his dad who's a doctor. He describes a guy coming in who had been long ago scalped and it was all healed over, but you still see the veins on top of his head and all of his fingers had been removed at them at the middle joint. God, Okay,

who the hell was that guy? Like that? There's a story and one hand we're talking about how everybody knows these people and they're always running into each other, but also it's like, how do you get to be that guy? And the only mention is some kid later recollects that this dude paid his dad a visit at a doctor and had been tortured and had all of his fingers removed at the knuckle and his scolts removed, and like

no one else wrote this down. If you were running around town now missing your scalp and all your fingers, you wouldn't make your way into lots of materials. The fact that that was not more noteworthy tells you something about the general population reading them, Like, Okay, I understand it. I understand everything now as absolutely uh. But George Burgernell um,

so I had never heard I had this. I was interested when I read your uh, when I read American Buffalo, your book at kind of your entree point to the Buffalo story and finding the skull and going on this hunt which sits in my living room today. I gotta see that. Um. But uh, it was interesting to me that that was kind of your entree point. My entree point to the Buffalo story is after I wrote the book about Beaute, I was I had this luxury of of literally a month where my my job was to

go find a new story to write about. And I went to the University of Montana library and for a month literally just wandered the stacks, kind of follow my nose from things that interested me to things that interested me. And as I did that, I kind of started getting the idea. I'd always been fascinated with the buffalo, and I thought about doing a book about the buffalo. And then my idea was, I was going to do a book about the history of the West as told true

the Buffalo. And I thought it was cool because you could do prehistoric times. You could do Native Americans before the arrival of the whites. You could do uh, you know, the fur trade. You could do the early fur trade era. You could do the buffalo hunting era. You could do the birth of the conservation movement. You could tell that whole story just through the prison of the Buffalo. And that was the book that I was going to write.

And then I came across this guy, George burg Grunnell, who I had never heard of, who it turns out, doesn't live through all of that exactly, but he his life, he lives through a significant chunk of it, and uh, and I couldn't believe I've never heard of him before, because he literally is in many ways, the the guy who's most responsible for preserving Yellowstone National Park, for uh, the establishment of Glacier and along the way, he's largely

responsible for saving the buffalo from being you know, completely exterminated on the North American continent. And so I decided i'd write use him as kind of the human vehicle to tell the story of the buffalo in a in a somewhat similar way to to which you use your own experience of fine skull and and going on the hunt.

And then we've in other parts of the story stuff. Yeah, but speaking of which, and I really appreciate your constructive criticism on the Revenant and uh and I was just gonna ask you about something and I don't talk about now, Well there's that. I mean, how did you miss that? Come on? But I think the reason you didn't talk about Grenell is because you devote so many paragraphs to the buffalo Penis. There is like long, long paragraphs about

the buffalo. Penis. Got to cut this really influential figure Grinnell, or you gotta cut some of your penis material. And I slept on it and decided just and the decision you may probably explains why your Buffalo books sold more than mine did so, but as a result, I can't even like, I can't even have my children read this anymore. It's like, I mean, come on, what the hell so anyway, Um,

but we digress. Yeah, I think that I uh as being not as historian, I'm able to just focus, Like I said, I made a joke, but I'm able to focus on the weird stuff. Well, that's a great thing about the buffalo, that is. I love a lot of the the factoids about about the buffalo, Like you know, ten times more hair per square inch than a cow, which kind of helps you explain why they do. Okay, Um, you know the frozen prairie and the birth success rate, Yeah,

compared to a cow that was aver. And not only that, but it's still it's amazing to me that a buffalo calf stands at two minutes and can run with a herd at the age of one hour. Like I don't I don't even get physiologically how muscles can possibly work to do that. There's there's a there's a recorded incident of I think a three or four day old calf running seventy miles with a herd, and just like, that's an amazing animal. And so it's it's not surprising in a lot of ways that it has this kind of

iconic stature that it does. But one of the things I love so much about about the Grenelle story is it really is about the birth of the conservation movement, and the birth of the conservation movement really is about hunters in a really significant way. What do you think, what do you think it was? It was it like was it like like, oh my god, what did we do? Like like what was in these guys heads? Because he

was a hunter, right, I mean, he was totally a hunter. Um, well he has I'll talk about Grenelle and then and then the hunter piece of it, because I think he had a couple of incredibly unique experiences that made him, i think, able to understand what was going on better

than most other people could have at the time. One thing he understood is when he right, when he got out of college and he this is a guy who's an East Coast elitist and goes to Yale and his father is a rich New York lawyer, but he wants to go west. Grinell wants to go west. And he comes out in I think eighteen seventy with a Yale professor who's doing a dinosaur bone hunt in uh in the West, and so he comes out, you know, and they're all over like Nebraska, Wyoming and it's still a

war zone there. The U. S. Cavalry guarded them while they while they dug. But what he's digging out, oh my god. But what Grennelle is doing in eighteen seventy is he's digging up like triceratops bones in Nebraska and camel bones and miniature horses. And so what Grennelle understood from his own kind of uh tangible experience, is that

extinction could happen. And this is in an era of the the myth of inexhaustibility where people not for crazy reasons, by the way, I thought we can't kill all the buffalo. There's so many buffalo. The resources out here are are inexhaustible, and and so but grennell had that that experience of seeing that some stuff that used to be living I wasn't here anymore. So that was one of his his experiences,

his other experience, and he made that connection. He didn't at the time use what people who are uncomfortable with evolution and extinction on religious grounds today would say, it is like the earth was created old. He was a hardcore scientist um and he didn't have any problem with that. There are animals that that that came and went. Lots of time has passed now I think he was. I think he viewed that from uh in a very for his era, especially uh state of the art scientific way.

Um well, it's kind amazing to his age, right because I mean, it's just a college kid, and to have sort of those kind of thoughts already, you know, figuring that out from seeing that was pretty bazing. And he would have been, you know, with a you know, he's with a group that was led by uh, the one of the you know foremost UH scientists of his day who would have been they've been would be sitting around the campfire at night, presumably talking about, you know, dinosaur bones.

But he did have that very unique experience. The other experience that I think he had that really touches on the hunter piece of it is his boyhood neighbor was the widow of John James Audubon, Lucy Audubon, and she's old lady at this point and John is already dead.

But they lived in there were these barns on the property where like all of John James Audubon's old travel stuff was stuffed you know stuff, well, his paintings too, but like all the things he gathered as he as he came back, all the paraphernalia he picked up, and Lucy Autobon becomes his tutor. And so, first of all, he's tutored at a time when people were learning reading, writing,

and arithmetic. He's all also learning about natural science. And not only that, but she is instilling in him, uh, this ethic of what she called self restraint, and what self restraint basically meant was that you don't consume everything

that you can. And when you think about the contrast of that in kind of the robber Baron era that he lived in and combined with kind of the myth of the inexhaustibility that we could never use everything up, he had this particularly unique perch to kind of view the world and it shaped his view, first of all, of what the responsibility of sportsman was. And you know, uh, this is the era when they're starting to figure out that we shouldn't hunt things, you know, twelve months a year,

there should be a season for hunting things. We shouldn't go out and kill every uh animal that pops up in front of us. There should be limits that we put on ourselves. And you ask a question, what is it about hunters, and I think that they were one of the first groups of people to go into wilderness and not and see it as a place to to recreate.

And they wanted to preserve that because they wanted to come back the next season and have it not be gone, and they wanted to bring their their their kids back and have them be able to have the same experience the same way that hunters do today. And I think that ethic of the wild being a place that had intrinsic value you that we should preserve. Uh, when you think about it, it makes complete sense that it came

in significant part from hunters. That's my explanation. Yeah, a certain type of hunter, because there's an interesting point in American history where these guys coexist with the market hunters. These people we've been talking about and kind of like celebrating throughout this conversation, Um Boon, Bridger Glass, right, frontiers men and later mountain men. Um, we're rapacious like they you know, I don't know, uh, you know, they would

stack up like astounding numbers of animals. And then it came to be this point in time when all of a sudden you had sport hunters wealthy like generally wealthy from the East sport hunters, and the first thing that these sport hunters needed to do to win was to

put these other guys out of business. We generally sit around celebrating the accomplishments of these guys that were regarded by the sport hunters as the enemies, you know, like Roosevelt in the early Boone and Crocker Club and whatever they had, Like these different societies and hunters groups kind of like the first thing they needed to do, was it, like the first thing we're gonna do is try to somehow sabotage commercial wildlife markets past the rule that you

can't serve wild game in New York City. Um. And now like hunters today that we kind of like celebrate the accomplishments of these conservations like Roosevelt Grennell, um, but we really want to talk about who we admire, like it's it's Bridger and Glass because like the skill set was amazing well and and look, hopefully we gain knowledge

as we progress as individuals and as a people. And uh, the world looked very different in uh the third tis to Jim Bridger than it did even by the eighteen seventies and certainly by the eighties when uh, when the last of the of the of the Montana herd is wiped out. Uh, we knew at that point that the the inexhaustibility of resources was a myth because the buffalo were gone. Um. There there's this uh statistic I came across in reading about because you know you point us

out in your book too. The the arrival of the railroad is lights out for the buffalo because it's the infrastructure for commercial hunting. Um. The reason they trapped beaver in the eighteen thirties instead of buffalo is because buffalo pelts buffalo highs are too damn heavy. You can't move them. A beaver pelt weighed two pounds, and they could stack them up and stick him on a canoe and and

send him down river. And that was a viable business that they couldn't exploit the buffalo in the eighteen thirties because they couldn't transport the hides. And what the railroad does, first of all when it rives in Kansas and then when it arrives in Miles City in Montana, is it

creates the infrastructure to transport the hides back east. And then it's it's lights out, and so I think you you lived in Miles City, right, I think the railroad arrives in Miles City in eighteen eighty one, I want to say, so the buffalo hunters come in with the railroad in eighteen eighty two. The railroad keeps statistics and there were two hundred thousand hides that were the railroad shipped out of Montana in eighteen eighty two. Uh, it took I think seventy rail it was. That was the

equivalent of seventy rail cars. In eighteen eighty three, the railroad shipped out forty thousand hides. So it goes from two hundred hides to forty thousand hides. In eighteen eighty four, there was one box car of buffalo hides that the railroad chips out of the state. And Den's over. That's it. I liked it. Horn Today. Um, you know, he comes out I can't remember what year, but around eight three

or ready four from the Smithsonian. Yeah, comes out to collect somebodies, trying to like shoot the last one just to bridger back. And he points out that he points out that those hide hunters you talk about, like the inexhausted, the myth of inexhaustibility. He points out that the hide hunters that were hanging around convinced that more would come from the north, and then it's like just over time they gradually found their way into ranching and various things.

In the event you were like, huh, I guess they're not coming. Yeah, well they sort of became the they became the sort of social fabric of the town. UM. And you when you read about uh Montana history in the in the eighteen nineties, and I did a bunch of research on on Butte, there's all sorts of people who are identified as former buffalo hunters for exactly that reason. It's like, yeah, nobody in the eighteen nineties is still a buffalo hunter there, but there's a lot of former

buffalo hunters. Um. So yeah, it's it's UH and the Hornaday thing. I mean, think about what it means that the Smithsonian Institution UH sends out a crew to find what they hope is kind of the last buffalo so they can kill it, because they view that is the only way that they can you know, quote unquote preserve the buffalo in order to have one in the Smithsonian stuffed so that people can come look at it and

see what it was like. Um. I mean, think think about what that that says about, you know, the moment we were at. And frankly, that's one of the things that makes Grenell so amazing is the one in place where there's buffalo while buffalo still living in the lower forty eight is Yellowstone. And Yellowstone in the eighteen eighties has been established as a national park. I think it's

established in eighteen seventy two, but it's been completely ignored. Um. You know, it's always ironic to me when I go to Yellowstone because the sweatshirts always have you know, Yellowstone eighteen seventy two, because that's the year it was established. But the only reason Yellowstone was established is because they had figured out there was no gold there. And so it wasn't that they wanted to preserve this place. It was that they deemed it as having no economic value

and so like whatever, and so they established Yellowstone. Certain no surface gold, no surface gold. Yeah, probably all they knew about, yeah, which is what they were after in

that era. Um. And so what's significant about Grennell is he fights to preserve Yellowstone and wild places when it actually when there's a contest with a commercial interest, and the commercial interest at the time was the railroads, which were, of course the big business of the day, and the railroads want to build a spur through Yellowstone National Park. UM and Grennell and the Boone and Crockett Club and

Teddy Roosevelt fight that. UM and in they passed the Lacy Act, which basically, for the first time ever established penalties for destroying wildlife and made it have an economic cost, and also took on a vested economic interest, namely the railroads,

in order to to establish that and they win. So really it's that year that is that is the to me, the more important year in terms of the history of yellow because that's when that's when we when we decided, even though it's not easy, and even though there's competing interests,

we're still going to protect Yellowstone National Park. There's a really boring book, except that it would be interesting to two or three people in the history of the Lazy Act, because it is still a very powerful wildlife tool to this day and the foresight of the people who created that. I mean, how many how many laws from do we

still think about today? Yeah, just for for folks are saying like the Lazy Act gives um when you commit wildlife crimes, and those wildlife crimes move across state lines, it gives some real teeth to enforcement. And it made it that at the time states that might have been lack of days ago about wildlife laws. Um, it gave like some it gave some federal oversight on wildlife stuff. So the minute you did some poaching, it's still this outworks today, Like you might do some poaching in one

state and drive across. There's even Lazy Act prosecutions where someone poaches something to one state, but they drive the head of their taxidermist twenty miles down the road who happens to be in a different state. That also becomes a federal crime. It's a Lazy Act violation, and they

still use it. Imagine because he was on a daily basis today what the The other thing that I love about about Grennell in terms of his vision and foresight, is he was an incredibly canny political operator because he was fighting against the railroads and he knew that the most powerful force of his day was I mean, the railroads invented lobbying literally and uh, and Grennell knew that he needed his own constituency and UH, he needed to change the narrative and so his he also used social

media the day, which was magazines. I mean, this was the era after the Civil War. Is the golden age in some ways of of magazines. That there's all these magazines that flourish, including the one that he was the publisher of, UH, which is Forest and Stream. And he used that that magazine to to UH editorialize two Hunters every week. And his theme was public land and totally and because nobody knew what public land meant then, and what he explains to people as public land means you

own it. You hunter in UH. You know who doesn't live in UH, in Wyoming or Montana. You own a piece of yellowstone. And when somebody is exploiting resources in Yellowstone, they're stealing from you, and you should be piste off about that. And so Grinnell editorializes on this for years to kind of build this theme in this ethic of public lands. And he's incredibly successful at doing it. But he's a lot of the reason why why we have an ethic today that is, you know, supports public lands.

So he's an amazing character. I want hate with one last question if you if someone says you're like, what are your books about? Do you have you ever taken the time or felt the necessity to bundle them in your head as being I right about, And don't tell him the West that that's not gonna suffice well. I I first and foremost love compelling, vivid, action laden stories. That's the type of stuff I like to read. That's

the type of movies I like to watch. I love good stories, and to me, it just so happens that The West is full of good stories. And I've loved him since I was a little boy. But to me, what makes a story a story that I really want to marry for a couple of years is that it has lessons for today. And I hope all the stories that I write have interesting lessons for today that can

help us to better understand our lives today. And more and more, the more the country becomes politically divided, and the more and more it becomes difficult to have a rational debate between people who disagree, the more and more I think history is important because I think sometimes if you look at something that is historical, people don't have all of the visceral baggage that goes with contemporary debates.

That's not always true, obviously, but we can be a little bit more dispassionate today, for example, about the buffalo and the demise of the buffalo and the lessons to be learned from that, And you can sit down in a bar and have a conversation with people about that, and most people would probably agree, you know, it's it's it's uh, we should not have have exterminated them from the planet and the way that we did, in a way that you couldn't have that same conversation sitting down

in a bar about global warming. And yet there's a lot of lessons from studying the buffalo that should be relevant to how we look at an issue like global warming or or the environment today. So to me, that was a long winded answer to your question. But I love vivid, compelling adventure stories that have lessons that are relevant to our lives today. That suffices that they all

happen to be in the West. But anyway, that's fair, ye, anyway you got you got any uh rapper I can try, so you can always cut it out, like Steve says, So Steve will interrupt me halfway through if it's no good, you know, reading some of that ore nicles that Karine found that were like when Steve started earlier that we're people like sort of talking about you as the author of the Revenant, but you couldn't really comment because of

your job. And when I was reading that and simultaneously reading the Last Stand and kind of looking like you just talked about Grannelle being like this great political you know strategists, You've done similar stuff like that in your job, right, having to like step up to the table with I mean working at the World Trade Organization hundred sixties some countries and right, and having to like make big deals happen.

Do you ever like find comparisons all the time? And in fact, the most vivid political lessons that I have learned, we're not, you know, living in Washington, d C. For a bunch of years, as I did after I got out of law school. The most vivid political lessons that I've learned were researching George Bird Grinnell and his battle against the railroads to preserve public lands and seeing how he did that at a time when the odds were

completely stacked against him. And of course there is no place on the planet that has more political history per square inch than Butte Montana. And Uh, if you want to learn about politics, UH, study the fight between the unions and the Standard Oil Company at the turn of the century and see on both sides the lessons that were applied there. Um. It is a graduate course in politics. So there is no question that the most significant political lessons of my life have been drawn out of nineteenth

century Montana history. Good. Yeah, I'm not cutting that ship, don't. Author Michael Punk with the E on the end. That's true. Michael Punks. They can find them. P U n k E. Author of currently Ridgeline. It's not won't be out until June, but look for it. But otherwise, author of The Revenant, Uh, Fire and Brimstone, Last Stand. Okayanne Forthcoming, Thank you for

joining us in the Thanks Lone. I trust that a bunch of people will go buy your books and you'll be thinking that it wasn't such a bad idea to come out and defend your come on, defend your movie ahead of last Thanks a lot, Thank you, Take care,