The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Crow Mary: A Novel by Kathleen Grissom

Episode Date: June 3, 2023

Crow Mary: A Novel by Kathleen Grissom https://amzn.to/3C8u3On The New York Times bestselling author of the “touching” (The Boston Globe) book club classics The Kitchen House and the “emotionally rewarding” (Booklist) Glory Over Everything returns with a sweeping saga inspired by the true story of Crow Mary—an indigenous woman torn between two worlds in 19th-century North America. In 1872, sixteen-year-old Goes First, a Crow Native woman, marries Abe Farwell, a white fur trader. He gives her the name Mary, and they set off on the long trip to his trading post in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan, Canada. Along the way, she finds a fast friend in a Métis named Jeannie; makes a lifelong enemy in a wolfer named Stiller; and despite learning a dark secret of Farwell’s past, falls in love with her husband. The winter trading season passes peacefully. Then, on the eve of their return to Montana, a group of drunken whiskey traders slaughters forty Nakota—despite Farwell’s efforts to stop them. Mary, hiding from the hail of bullets, sees the murderers, including Stiller, take five Nakota women back to their fort. She begs Farwell to save them, and when he refuses, Mary takes two guns, creeps into the fort, and saves the women from certain death. Thus, she sets off a whirlwind of colliding cultures that brings out the worst and best in the cast of unforgettable characters and pushes the love between Farwell and Crow Mary to the breaking point. From an author with a “stirring and uplifting” (David R. Gillham, New York Times bestselling author) voice, Crow Mary sweeps across decades and the landscape of the upper West and Canada, showcasing the beauty of the natural world, while at the same time probing the intimacies of a marriage and one woman’s heart.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys coming on. Remember, the Chris Voss Show is the massive family that loves you but doesn't judge you,

at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law does. She's a nice woman, I've heard. But anyway, guys, refer to the show, your family, friends, and relatives, because you want them to be part of the big, big family under the giant circus test of podcasts in the sky. Whatever the hell that means. I don't even know what that means. I'm just seeing lions and tigers and bears in some Skynet up there. And I'll let you figure it out.

It's probably something AI should probably do. But it brings us to the plugs. Go to YouTube.com for just Chris Voss. Goodreads.com for just Chris Voss. LinkedIn.com for just Chris Vossin.com for just christmas the big linkedin newsletter and of course tiktok we're trying to be cool over there it's not working so we need all that we can get please help us mother anyway guys we have an amazing author on the show uh she's uh done a ton of books i can't even count this high uh because they flunk second grade but

we'll get into how what she's done and some of the wonderful works that she's put out there. She's the author of the newest book that's going to come out here in a few more days, June 6, 2023, Crow Mary, a novel by Kathleen Grissom. She joins us on the show today and she was born and raised in Saskatchewan and spent a decade researching and writing Crow Mary. You're going to get someone who spent 10 damn years writing this book or something like that. We'll find out more here in a second. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Kitchen House, Glory Over Everything, and now Crow Mary. And she's happily rooted in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Welcome to the show, Kathleen. How are you? I'm fine. How are you, Chris? I am. Thank you for having me. And thank you for coming. It's certainly an honor to have you.

Give us a.com or wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs. Oh, well, I think the easiest is to go to my website, which is just www.kathleengrissom.com. Very easy. There we go. Grissom with two S's. So Kathleen, how many books do you have in the can here? I'm counting a whole bunch here on the page. Yeah, three.

Three. There you go. When you said you didn't graduate second grade, I figured, well, okay. So they didn't teach him his numbers then. They didn't. They didn't. I'm still working on numbers and language. So there you go. And you took 10 years to write this book or over a decade? Actually, I did 20 years of research off and on, not for 20 full

years, of course. I was writing other books, but I became interested in this story 20 years ago. And I began to put, I started reaching out to different people at the Crow Agency and began research then. So, yes, 20 years. It took me about six years to write it. Wow, that's amazing. And so this has been kind of maybe sometimes on the back burner and cooking all this time, huh? It has been. I really, I had intended to write it as my second book.

But if we get into the story of how I came to write, I can tell you how those plans changed. So that is why this one was put sort of, just like you say, on the back burner. And then I got to it. And now it's finally here. And everybody can read it and get to know it better. Give us a 30,000 overview of the book and kind of some of the details or the deets as the kids call it. Well, I guess the easiest way for me to start would be to tell you that how I came to write this story. And I was with my parents. I was visiting my parents. I've lived down in Virginia

for 30 some years. But I was visiting my parents who lived've lived down in Virginia for 30 some years. But I was visiting my parents who lived in Saskatchewan, and we went out to the Cypress Hills in Saskatchewan. And that is, it's a very unique place, because as I'm sure you know, Saskatchewan is very, very flat. It's the plains, considered to be very flat. And the Cypress Hills about, oh, I don't know, was over on the east side of Saskatchewan, is very rolling and beautiful green hills. And it was there that we went to visit where the Northwest Mounted Police had first set up their fort. So while we were there, there were docents that were dressed and they were telling the story of how this came to be. And over on one of the hills, overlooking the rest of the rolling hills, was this young woman who was dressed as a Crow native. And she was saying,

my name is Crow Mary. And she was there to replicate this woman. And she was saying, my name was Crow Mary and I was newly married to Abe Farwell, the lead fur trader up here, when a massacre happened of 40 Nakoda natives. Oh, no. Yeah. And during this massacre, some of these wolfers, I'll tell you later on who they are, but these were some bad men, took some of the women, the women that weren't from the Nakoda tribe, that weren't murdered. They took four of these women and took them back to the fort and were going to rape and

murder them. And she said, I single-handedly went in with my two guns and I saved those women. Wow. And I had this chill go through me. And I thought, that's the next person I'm supposed to write about. There you go. That I was supposed to. Destiny.

That started, I think, I look at my writing as sort of a spiritual gift. I'm not religiously affiliated, but I certainly believe there's a God and I'm not it. And I asked for guidance, and this was my guidance. This, I felt, was my guidance. This I felt was my guidance. There you go. So was this a historical novel, would you say? Is it based upon her life? Yeah, I was really surprised when I started to do research

and discovered that she had actually lived. And then I discovered that there was some documentation on her life, which is, you can imagine back in 1873, how much documentation there would be on a Crow Native woman. But there were sketches of it, and I found enough that I was so excited. Then I went on to Ancestry.com, and to my amazement, I discovered that she had a great-granddaughter still alive. So I made contact with her, and that was the beginning. That was the beginning.

Wow. And so you put together the story based upon her life, what you could kind of research, what you could put together, and where is this set in? Give us the time zone this is set in, or time zone, time era. Yeah, time era. Well, it started around 1872, but there is sort of a backstory on Crow Mary's life, which would take us back to 16 years previous to that. And then later on, it advances probably another, oh, maybe 15, 20 years.

Wow. So that's the time period that it takes place. There you go. And was it a thing where you really just had to develop the story, feel right about it, explore different maybe avenues or straws of stories and her lineage and stuff, and that's why it took a long time to put this together? Well, part of the reason that it took such a long time is because once i started to do research i really understood i really saw how little i understood of of the crow culture and i realized how very uh intricate it was and how detailed it was and And as a white woman, I knew that if I was going

to even attempt this, I needed to have some kind of intrinsic understanding of this woman's life. So I began to put pieces together of her timeline. And then I went to the Crow people, and I was so very lucky, I guess is the right word, to have met some really wonderful elders who guided me and helped me and really helped me fine tune some of the details. So the way I do my writing, I do the research and I do loads of research, but then I get out of the way and I let the character come and tell the story. So they will do that for me if I know the details, but I need to know the details, the teeny tiny details in order for them to be able to somehow work through me. There you go. Well, she sounds like a real badass she takes two guns creeps in a fort and saves the women and and i guess kills the dudes that are the bad the bad guys i won't tell you that okay we gotta buy the book and yeah it's always the ending

in the middle part yeah well actually it's a big part of the story after that because um she's trying to she and her husband abe definitely do try to hold them accountable but therein lies a problem a big problem ah hi voksters voss here with a little station break hope you're enjoying the show so far we'll resume here in a second uh i'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, uh podcasting corporate stuff uh with over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as ceo and be sure to check out

chris foss leadership institute.com now back to the show now who are these is wolfer is a term i've never heard that term before this is why i do the show so i learn something new every day yeah and that's why i do research, because I love to learn like that. Wolfers were a group of generally white men. Generally, they had come from the East, and they were also known as some were fur traders. But their idea was to get wolf pelts, because they were getting, at that time, they were getting $2.50 per wolf pelt, which was a lot of money for them. So what they would do, they would take strychnine and they would do approximately a six mile radius. And within that six mile radius, they would put about a couple of buffalo carcasses

down that they would poison with strychnine. So the wild animals would come and eat from these carcasses and, of course, die. Wow. And they then could go and pick up huge amounts of wolf carcasses. Wow. However, they were disliked by all of the natives because their dogs often would eat from those carcasses. Oh, yeah. And they would die. And also there was the waste that the natives,

the indigenous people would never have considered doing. It's kind of cowardly too, I think. And they probably felt it was dishonorable maybe. I'm sure that was a factor. Yeah. Damn. That's some evil stuff. That's right.

That's like, what was it? Saddam Hussein or whatever. And some people, they used to throw grenades in to go fishing, and they just throw them in the lake. And so you're like, it's kind of a weird way to go about that. It's not really sportsmanlike. Well, it was a way of making fast money, right? There you go. There you go.

I've been called a wolf before, but that's usually when I get in front of a burrito or Taco Bell. I don't know. We do the jokes on the show. Well, that was kind of good. I laughed. Chris is wolfing it down. There you go. Well, we're proud of one. There we go. The rest of the audience is going, that's not bad. It's an inspiring story. what do you what do you hope people come away from reading your book on this yeah that's a question that i'm often asked about

um why i write the book and that kind of thing i personally wrote this book because i was fascinated by her that i had that initial chill and then when I began to do research, she did other things that were just beyond belief almost. Wow. And she was known by these wolfers and these men out on the prairie at that time. And you know they were a tough crowd. Oh, yeah. She was known as Mean Mary. She was known as Big Mary.

So she had a reputation, right? Yeah. But in studying her, I thought I had one really tough cookie on my hands. And then when I was doing my research, I was introduced to a woman, Janine Pease, who is Crow. She founded a college out at the Crow Agency. And when I went to the, people kept telling me I should go see her and that she was just the most, you can imagine a strong woman who had to put together all of the, you can only imagine how she had to work for this college. It was the Little Bighorn College. So she founded it. I went to see her. I managed to get an appointment with her and I went in, I was expecting this big office and this really, like I said, a tough,

tough woman. And instead, Janine was this, she was sitting in a little office and she had her granddaughter on her lap. Oh, wow. And she was this gentle, kind woman. And I realized that you can be real strong, but you can also be gentle and kind. So with that, I wrote the story. And I let Crow Mary, like I say, she just sort of came through me. That's the way I look at it. There you go.

And you probe the intimacies of marriage and one woman's heart, according to the PR line here. Yes. There you go. There you go. Well, I can't say that I probed it. I followed along to the story of what happened between Crow Mary and Abe. There you go. And followed that through.

And I guess it's a love story too then. It's most definitely a love story. I feel they were in love. And they just had two different, they came from two totally different cultures. So, of course, he was a white man, and he was from the East, and it was believed that he had fought in the war, but it's uncertain about his background. There you go. Well, this is a part of history. People don't really talk about it. There's a lot of the stuff that got lost in history. So, it's good that it's brought to the forefront these days. Well, i think history is interesting if it's told if the truth is told right

or or actually i shouldn't say it that way i think if we if we look at it from all angles that's kind of what struck me with the research was because i knew so little about the crow culture and then to see through their eyes what had happened, as opposed to looking through blue eyes. I was looking through brown eyes. Oh, wow. Right? So that was very interesting to me.

There you go. And I think Canada is still struggling with the same problems we do with our history. I think they're still struggling with their treatment of the natives. Most definitely. Up there. Most definitely. Yeah. It's really, really a hot topic right now, as you can imagine.

Yeah. We didn't do much better down here. We were pretty much pretty bad. We were pretty bad folks back there in the days. Well, you know, it was a different time, and people were driven for different reasons. As I said before, you know, the Wolfers were driven to make money, and they did it the way they knew how. I'm not condoning it. I'm just saying that people did things differently back then, and if we look at it in today's eyes, then we can fault it, of course, but we didn things differently back then. Um, and if we look at it in today's eyes, then we can fault it of course,

but we didn't live back then. We don't know what their challenges were either. I mean, it was, it was definitely harder to survive and harder to whatever. And, you know, the wild West and,

you know, new frontiers and people just, uh, you know, one battle on why, you know, this, that,

and the other, but, uh, it's interesting and it's one battle and this, that, and the other. But it's interesting. And it's interesting to learn from. Was there anything that surprised you as you were going through all of your research that stood out to you? Like, holy crap, that just blows my mind. Gosh, that's a good question. So many things surprised me. Yeah.

Particularly how little I understood the culture. And I think how little the white man understands the indigenous people's culture. Because it's very intricate. And each, I thought that indigenous people all kind of shared the same language and the same religion or spiritual practices. And that just wasn't true at all. And they had their enemies and they fought their enemies and had a whole, I keep saying intricate, but it really was very intricate there you go it was something to really understand and see and study and they they seem to have more

of a regard and honor to the earth to animals you know i mean they didn't they didn't go kill all the buffalo like when we showed up and we about wiped the buffalo out and uh you know we we just pretty much put sidewalks and cement over everything uh you know and they seem to care more about the land and they they kind of realized that there was a a cycle or a subsistence cycle to taking care of the world they lived in and and uh it giving back to them and you know that sort of thing where we're just kind of like locusts here in America. We just moved in. We're like, we're going to eat and mow over everything, damn it.

Well, it's what we know, right? It's how we grew up. Yeah. And I think that as we evolved, if we want to call it evolving, we just let go of a lot of that. Because I know I was raised in a farming community, and I was raised to appreciate the land and everything that came from the land. But I know that if I step ahead a couple of generations,

that's just not the case any longer, because I don't think that there's that same connection, right? Yeah, we don't grow up on farms anymore. When I was a kid, we would go to the local farms and our friends worked the local farms. I'd go help my friends with milk and we'd wade knee deep through the cattle poo in the cattle yard and we'd have milk and eggs from the thing. And so there was a real connection. And I guess they say one of the people, one of the reasons people have like peanut allergies and other allergies now is because they didn't grow up on farms.

And when you grow up on farms, you're exposed to all sorts of different, I guess, bacteria or whatever. Obviously, I'm not a scientist. I flunked second grade, people. That's the callback joke for a while now. We were going to go with kindergarten, but second grade, everyone decided it was funnier. I don't know why, but I don't know. It seems to work. I would say at that point, you weren't being tested for dyslexia or something like that.

No. It was mostly a helmet and a short bus, but that's another story. You're going to love it. So what's on the future for you? You've written these books. Is there anything cooking in the background we should know about, or maybe you don't want to tell us? It isn't a matter of not wanting to tell you.

It's more a matter of after this stretch of writing, Crow Mary, and we had some real hurdles to overcome. I'm taking a little bit of a rest. I'm taking a breather and then heaven only knows what's down the pike, right? So you've got to find some inspiration. We've got to get some inspiration to come out and do

all that. Well, honestly there's plenty you know, all you have to do is look around and particularly I find, well, all you have to do is look around. And particularly, well, all you have to do is pay attention. And I believe everyone has a story, don't you? I mean, really. Yeah, that's why we do the show is people come on and tell me stories.

And it's like, that's life lesson, the life manual. My audience is probably sick of hearing me say this but i mean stories are the life lessons and the the the owner's manual to life exactly and that's why i read that's why i read as a child it opened up my world right and i'm sure it was the same for you there you go yeah it is i i learned every stuff every day i learned today what a woofer is here i thought it was a guy who just ate you know burritos i've been a wolf for most of my life shoving stuff into my pie hole and it shows uh let's get a plug in here for your your big book the kitchen house uh do you want to tell us a little bit about that and we'll get a plug in for that well uh i don't know how much time we have we have as much time as you want well oh i i can tell you how I came to write it.

That seems to be what the book clubs, I've talked to a lot of book clubs. So my husband and I moved down to this beautiful place that had once been a plantation, which we didn't realize at the time. We just found this beautiful old brick house. So we started to do renovation. While we were doing renovation on that house, there was a map. Someone showed us a map. And next to our place that was called Harvey's Tavern, there was a handwritten notation that said Negro Hill. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I just became obsessed with wanting to find out. I drove up there. It was about a half mile away. I looked around. It was a beautiful rolling hills of Virginia. And I thought, what happened here? Why did they write that in?

So there was nothing. I went to four local historians, no collective story. So then I went to speak to an old African American woman, Mrs. Bessie Lowe, who passed away about six months after I talked to her. And I thought if anyone would have the story, she would have it. But she told me a story of where a young Black woman was hung in the town square. And I said to her, but Mrs. Lowe, don't you think something else happened? And she looked at me for a while and she said, why don't you write your own story? And she was a very religious woman. And I said, well, I don't have a story to tell. And then she looked at me for a while. She studied me. And then she said, why don't you pray on it? And I thought, well, I can pray all I want, but I knew I didn't have a story.

But I didn't say that to her. I left and I was kind of disappointed, right? But came home and I do meditate every morning. And I don't know if I started to incorporate that in meditation, but one morning after meeting with her, I walked up, there was this little stream on our property and I walked up this hill and I looked out toward where Negro Hill would have been. And I just said out loud, what happened there? And then I came back into the house to do my daily journaling, which I had done for years. But that day when I picked up my pencil, a movie started to play in my head. And it was so vivid and so real that I just started to write down what I was seeing. And it was the prologue to The Kitchen House. It was where this little girl and her mother were

running up the hill and they were desperate to get to the top of the hill. I was pulled right in with them. I was right with them. And when we got to the top of the hill, there was a black woman hanging on the tree. Oh, wow. And I just dropped my pencil, and I thought, I don't know what's happening to me here. I don't know what's happening, but this is way too dark for me. Wow.

So I put it away in my desk drawer, thought that was the end of it. Mm-hmm. Then I was talking to my dad a couple of weeks later. He was living in Saskatchewan, Canada. And he was talking to me about his buddy who was doing research on his family, on his ancestry. And he was able to trace his family back to 1790 when they came on board ship from Ireland over to Norfolk, Virginia. Oh, wow. But on board ship, the parents died, and they left three little orphans.

So dad said he can find the two little boys, but he can't find a trace of the little girl. And that's where I had that same chill go through me that I had with Crow Mary. I just had this deep chill go through me, and I knew that I was meant to write her story. So I started to do research, 1790 South Central Virginia. And that's what I did. There you go.

And I'm seeing some history that's being pulled up here. This is from the Library of Congress about a riot of some type that took place there and some other things. In fact, they recently renamed the hill Noakes Hill, evidently, in 2020. Oh, this would have been a different place. This is very rural. This would have been very rural in South Central Virginia. I think it is.

Oh, this is an island. Okay. Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. But yeah, really interesting. And the book just killed it. It did awesome.

Well, I think it may have been the right time, the right place, and the right story, right? Yeah. Yeah. People just really identified it. And then I think you had a second book of that series that you put out as well. I did. I was going to write about Crow Mary. While I was writing The Kitchen House, I had this experience with Crow Mary. So I was, but I went out to the Crow Reservation, but I couldn't feel her. And I

knew that there was like a, it felt like a blanket down in front of me. And I knew that it was Jamie, one of the characters from The Kitchen House saying, uh-uh, you don't write her story next, you have to write my story next. So I always had an idea of where he was i knew he was up in philadelphia i knew he was about 33 years old and uh i knew this time period was around 1840 so i went up to philadelphia started to do research up there and that's how the second book came about there you go that's how i wrote glory over everything. Well, awesome sauce. In fact, I should throw the plug in here too. The Kitchen House won, it has a Goodreads Choice Award nominee and probably won some other awards too as well, didn't it?

Over 1 million copies in print. So order all the books up, folks, that Kathleen has put out. That's basically what we're saying here. It's basically what we're pitching. So this is great. And we're just going to look forward to the next 20 years when you put your next book. Don't wait that long, please.

Oh, no. I'm not going to do the math on that one. There you go. There you go. Well, it's been delightful to have you on, Kathleen. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Well, KathleenGrissom.com. There you go.

That's simple. And thank you very much for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me, Chris. I appreciate you inviting me. Thank you. I'm going to go woofer down some burritos. You do that.

There you go. Order up wherever fine books are sold, folks. You can still be the first one on your book club to read it uh it comes out june 6 2023 crow mary a novel by kathleen grissom thanks for tuning in my audience we certainly love you and appreciate you and as always we have the greatest stories brilliant minds and authors on the show and of course none of the brilliant minds are me that's why we have guests people uh go to youtube.com fortress chris fuss goodreads.com fortress chris fuss linkedin and twit tiktok thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe we'll see you guys next time and that should have us out