The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 236: Crawling Back from the Dead with Michael Punke

Episode Date: August 31, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Michael Punke and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: Expressing dissatisfaction with "The Revenant" movie; the Madison buffalo jump looking like it did 200 years ago; dressing up in an 1876 cavalry uniform; the challenge of giving someone else’s perspective; maiming corpses after the Fetterman Fight; carving an arrowhead out of Jim Bridger's shoulder; mountain man Hugh Glass and whether or not he blew himself up by touching a spark to a powder keg; watching an oxen turn into a bullion cube; history being so great that you don't need to make up stuff to tell a good story; how it’s so wrong to substitute high plains for rain forest; the George Bird Grinnell story as the birth of the American conservation movement; the ethic of self restraint; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Okay, we're joined here by Michael Punk, author of The Revenant. It's bold of you to come, and I'm happy that you're here because we've made such a hobby out of expressing... I have, I 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 never would have come talk to me because you'd be like uh insulted and hurt well you know what i have pretty thick skin and uh i'm happy to talk about the the revenant and i uh I'll say good things about it first because there's a lot of reasons why I'm happy that movie got made.

Oh, I can imagine. But, you know, I've got my own qualms as a historian and somebody who cares about history. I've got my nits to pick with The Revenant. But let me be clear. Oh, yeah, 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 just happy that you're here. Well, I've got a couple of points to raise about your book, too, at some point, depending on how negative this gets. Oh, really? You guys really go after me here. I'm just going to keep super positive. I got a couple of things I want to raise with you.

I'm going to keep super positive then. Our producer, Corinne, had sent me some articles and there's a couple articles pointing out it's like funny that around the time i guess it was probably around the time the movie the revenant came out there were articles being written profiles of you that were sort of pointing to the fact that you had this other life that you weren't just a writer? Yeah, I 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 global politics and have had a career that is on that thread as well. And so, yeah, all these things kind of mix together and make sense to me in their own way,

but that probably takes a little bit of explaining. You were born in mountain man country. I was. Born in Wyoming. Born in Lovell, Wyoming at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. Did you have an early fascination with the fur trappers? Totally. Totally.

My dad, my parents are both retired school teachers. And I was super lucky because my mom, an elementary school teacher, really kind of instilled a love of history. She likes reading and books 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 Lovell, Wyoming after going to college in Kansas. And they fell in love with this little town of Lovell at the foot of the Bighorns. And my dad in particular, who kind of grew up fishing and small game hunting in Kansas, kind of discovered the potential of fishing and hunting in the West, in the Rockies,

and fell in love with that. And then I think especially as a biologist by training, it gave him that extra, just a different angle and interest on being outdoors. And so he definitely instilled that in his kids. 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. Yeah. Having never been there. Right. And so everything was like, 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 Lovell, Wyoming, West 7th Street, there was an old lady who lived next to us, kind of the little old lady in the little white house next to ours that gave us the vanilla wafers, was the friendly old lady in the neighborhood. And she had been born in Lovell, and she remembered a mountain man named John Blue, who would ride out of the Bighorn Mountains every two months and come down into Lovell to reprovision. And she would tell us this story about John Blue, the mountain man. And I, over the years, uh, driving up into the big horns, you could drive past his, his old cabin.

But, uh, literally in the space of, of one life, uh, you could touch that earlier era. And I, I love that about Wyoming and Montana. Are you familiar with the writer Ian Frazier? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, he, I took him on his first hunting trip and we floated a river here in montana and he'd already he had lived here and spent quite a bit of time in montana but he's saying one of the things he likes about it um is that when you go to a place where something happened yeah not much happened

after that yeah and so you 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 drank himself to death, right? In Manhattan. He actually died at the hospital, but kind of where he collapsed. Yeah. And imagine all the shit that's occurred at that intersection since then. Yeah. Makes it hard to picture.

Right. But then when you go to some place where a big fight happened or some people ran some buffalo over a cliff, you go like, got it. Totally can picture. Exactly. I love Civil War history too 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, uh, 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 200 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 are gone. Which is a noticeable omission. That part is different. Yeah. The landscape looks similar. Yeah, for sure. You can talk about what you're, just walk everybody through your books, the you've done sure so i don't want to over focus i do want to focus a lot on the revenant because it's not not i don't want to focus a lot on the revenant i want to focus on uh our mutual interest in those people yeah

and what they were up to yeah sure okay so uh when, I'm a lawyer by training, I went to, to college. I grew up in Wyoming, went to college, uh, back East and went to law school. And after law school, I went to work in, in Washington, DC. Uh, I worked for Senator Bacchus. It's where I met my wife. She's from, she's from Montana. I met her working for in Senator Bacchus's office's where I met my wife. She's from Montana. I met her working in Senator Bacchus's office. And I liked working in government a lot. I found myself- Is that right? You don't hear that very often. No, I like public policy 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 a blast. I love that. 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 writing. And I thought, well, if I can be a writer, I can live wherever I want to live. And my wife and I both wanted to move back to the West. And so I started getting up early in the morning and writing what became The Revenant. And I always, for me, really relate when I saw Shawshank Redemption. And I always felt like my Shawshank 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 writing The Revenant. And 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 it 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. I guess I wasn't surprised, but I was thrilled, believe me, because 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 so much freedom to kind of follow the things you're interested in.

What year did it come out? It came out in, I got the contract to publish it right before 9-11. So 2001. And it was, I think, published in 2002. And then you went on and published two more or three more? Moved back to Montana after we sold the book and published, researched and published two nonfiction books while living in Montana. The first one is a

nonfiction book called Fire and Brimstone about a mining disaster in Butte in 1917. 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 nonfiction. Nothing's made up. Then after that, I wrote Last Stand, the book about the buffalo. And it was after writing Last Stand that I had the opportunity to be U.S. ambassador to the World Trade Organization. So we moved over to Geneva, Switzerland. my family and I for six years, we're over there. And after I came back from that, started to work on the new book, which will come out in June of next year, which is called Ridgeline. It's another novel.

Don't go over the ridgeline. Well, that turned out to be in hindsight, what the lesson should have been. Tell, 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 the Ridgeline. Never go over the Ridgeline. You can share, because we've talked about, I know the subject of the book. Yeah.

And we talk about it now. And then actually one day, we're spec trying to guess what year it was. And someone pointed out that, well, tell me 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 Bighorn, the Fetterman fight was the worst U.S. military defeat in U.S. military history. 81 guys ride over a ridgeline in the

Powder River Valley of Wyoming in 1866, and they ride into a massive trap that has been set by the Lakota and the Cheyenne and the Arapaho. And without revealing too much, it ends badly for a lot of them. The soldiers, that is. But it's a... Like badly in a real... It ends very badly for a lot of them. Like even post-mortem. Yeah. It's...

This was not pretty. Try not to reveal too much. This was not pretty. But it's an incredible historical moment and story. And it takes place in the midst of what is often called Red Clouds War, which was a war that broke out after the U.S. foisted, broke one treaty and foisted another one on uh on the tribes walk people through that timeline like yeah it basically was correct me when i'm wrong and pick up you know where it sees fit but everybody's familiar with the oregon trail yep um people wanted to spur off the oregon trail and get up to the gold fields in the north and it that war was kind of centered around

like can we get say can whites have safe passage come to Montana to go to the north right yeah so I mean that was that like sort of the bait that was the defining argument right that is well the way I would describe it is uh before the civil war there was a flood of migration from the East to California and Oregon. And tons of people coming across the continent, including coming across what's now Wyoming, but they were all headed West. They're all headedifornia and oregon and the tribes in that era were not super psyched about that and there was a lot of conflict but the u.s uh negotiated a treaty that basically gave access uh for 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 grazing areas heavily displacing animals out of areas that once had animals making hunting hard yeah uh that was that certainly happened along the oregon trail but for a while there was a bit of what what the treaty also did is it gave the tribes most of the land to the north of the Oregon Trail, to the north of the North Platte River. 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 gold 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 start spurring off and going up to the gold fields of Montana,

Bozeman Trail, for example, going to Bozeman trail uh for example uh heading going to to bozeman and the quickest way to get there was right through the powder river valley and that was a great uh hunting land and was had absolutely been given to the tribes as part of this this treaty. And so the U.S., as it does multiple times throughout 19th century history, when treaties with the tribes become inconvenient, they just either break them or force a renegotiation. And in this case, they essentially did both. They negotiated a new treaty allowing the U.S. 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, that result 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 retreats from the forts that they they discover gold in the Black Hills, and that leads in 1876 to a new gold rush. Actually, I think it was 1874 that was a discovery of gold. And within two years, fast forward almost to the end of the Indian Wars because at that point, there's just not enough space anymore for them to coexist. And the Indian Wars come to a fairly quick end after that. I think what's interesting in looking at your collection of work is that you have like a mountain man book the revenant

which is very early stage exploitation of 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 right they're like making um the characters near hugh glass others, are making sort of like legitimate discoveries about what river flows in the what. And then you have this forthcoming work that's kind of at a real hot point, right? And then your Buffalo book sort of is almost the aftermath. Before and aftermath. Yeah, 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 yeah 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, the amount of time that European Americans have been out here. It all happens in the span of a couple of centuries. And there's a lot that goes on in the 19th century, for example. When you think about Lewis and Clark coming out here at the beginning of the 19th century, for example, when you think about, uh, you know, Lewis and Clark coming out here at the beginning of the, of the 19th century. And by the end of the 19th century, you know, the Buffalo were virtually gone and, and, and the whole West is, 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, Jim Bridger in 1823 in 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 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. First of all, he- Gets half the state named after him. He gets half the state named after him, including a place that's not more than a couple hundred yards from here.

But it's his recommendation that determines the path for the South Pass, which is where the Oregon Trail passes over. He sets up a fort on the Oregon Trail and makes money selling goods and supplies to immigrants. So he lives through that whole pioneer era. He scouts for pioneers. He ends up scouting for the U.S. Army.

And he sees the end of the Indian Wars in his life. Yeah. And that's just, it's epic. It's hard to even imagine that. The thing I think about him is, you know, when everybody talks about how everything went to shit in their lifetime, you know? Used to be no one was here. Used to be no one skied this hill right can you imagine

bridger well he'd have to be like no no exactly let me tell you something really watch things 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 j Jim Bridger scouting for the U.S. Army in this era, but James Beckwith also was, who people who know about the mountain man era. Former slave, right? Former slave and African-American mountain man. And he had actually come out here

as part of that same company, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, that Jim Bridger had been a part. So both of these guys come out as teenagers to the wild, wild west of the 1820s. And then both of them end up together as 60-year-old men scouting for the U.S. Army in 1866. And they literally get sent out by the commanding officer of the fort to figure out where the Indians are. And I just imagine them, and this happened, you know, Jim Bridger and James Beckworth riding their horses up the Powder River Valley as 60-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 the book. One of the things I wonder about is, you know, was somebody like Jim Bridger, who was known as a person of incredible integrity, was he regretting in any way how much he had helped open up the west i guess i think absolutely

boone had that boone did yeah and there's a set of conversations i think about often like that like when boone was very very old in his 70s 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'd been displaced out of places and displaced out of places and he definitely uh you know if you look in his biography he had an awareness of what had been lost and you'd have to think that bridger had it i i i do think he had that and he uh was married uh into the shoshone tribe so he had uh lived the the native american culture and he was watching it uh literally being decimated, I can't imagine that there were not profound feelings of misgivings about what was going on. And so it's always difficult because you don't want to sort of impose 21st century views of the universe on historical characters. and uh and so i try not to do that

but i 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 20 and i don't think it's 21st century views necessarily because here's a person who derived his income and livelihood from the land's ability to put off resources, okay? So at a time, there was at least the hope and you watched it happen to your peers that you could turn great fortune

from trapping beaver, right? And it was just there for the taking yeah and food was readily available it just like was not like securing food was not an issue yeah 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. I don't think you need to get too nostalgic to be like, to realize that you have been, that your fortunes have gone down. Yeah. Well, and they must have had a, I mean, at one level, they experienced nature as, and you see this throughout the 19th 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 lived in. And in small ways today, when I try and imagine what it felt like to live in that era, I feel nostalgia for parts of Montana that I knew when they were wild and they're not wild anymore. And it makes me angry sometimes when I see that. And to see it on the scale that they were they were seeing it. Uh, and that's talking

about, uh, about Jim Bridger. Uh, we haven't even got yet to the perspective of, of the Native Americans who see their land, their, not only their land, but their, their, their whole culture and way of living, uh, overturned in a, in a space of, of a few years. It's almost impossible to imagine what that would have felt like. 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 is 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 were living in that era to experience change at that scale does it give away too much to uh tell us like 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 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 European American perspective, and the native perspective is given short shrift. And so I try and tell the story from multiple perspectives. One of the experiences that I had, actually one of the greatest jobs I had ever in my life is I was born and raised in Port and Lovell, Wyoming, and went to junior high and high school in Torrington, Wyoming, in the southeastern corner of the state, and loved history, and had this job where I worked in the summers of high school and college working for the National Park Service at Fort Laramie

National Historic Site, and dressed up every day, literally, in an 1876 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 was quite one-sided. 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 new book. It's difficult to pull off, though, because you can give the perspective of your own culture and own people there's a little bit of a

trap in trying to give the perspective of someone else because even a well-intentioned effort can be met with accusations of colonial yep appropriation cultural appropriation. Yep. Right? And so it's like, I applaud you for not just turning around and saying, forget it. Well. Like it'll never be rewarded.

It'll always be criticized. Yeah. The best that I can do is to, from where I sit, do all the research and all the work that I can to learn all aspects of the history and try and write it down in the way that I hope is accurate. And then subject it, which I've done, to a lot of, to readers with a lot of different perspectives, including a lot of different Native American readers. And 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. Uh, I know that's not the case. I hope I'm telling it in a, in a fair way that, uh, 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 deal with issues like that than to ignore them or worse, to write it from only one perspective. Are you familiar with the historian Dan Flores? No, not in detail. I know he's written a lot about the buffalo, but I'm not an expert on him at all. Yeah, he's done some pretty influential work,

and he's an environmental historian. When I was in graduate school, uh his one of his seminar courses he had like he had to sort of take a seminar outside of your discipline you know so i took an environmental history seminar with dan flores and he gave a lecture one day about the battle of adobe walls i think it was like the second battle of adobe walls i don't know if you ever heard of this yeah this is with the buffalo hunters and yeah. Yeah. So they weren't supposed to, they weren't supposed to hunt south of the. State.

Southern Pacific rail line. Yeah. 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 Bozeman trail. And they were very well armed. Well fortified. Sharp's buffalo rifles. Yeah. I's Buffalo Rifles, if you remember. Yeah, and extraordinarily good shooters. Had this little fortress called Adobe Walls, and they ran hide hunting operations out of there, and it was very defendable, and they were experts.

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. A 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 a chief at like some 800, 900 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 ride off and then the telling of the hide hunters at adobe walls it was their like superior skill superior firepower right that won the day and flores explains how in the i think it was the Southern Cheyenne telling, is that that guy killed a skunk

on the way to that fight. And Flores then puts it to you, like, who's right? Well, I mean, it's a perfect example of why we should be looking at these historical incidents from multiple perspectives. And, 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'm sure that there are plenty of mistakes in my book, but 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 bring multiple perspectives to bear. You mentioned earlier that the Fetterman fight was kind of the biggest skirmish in the West prior to Little Bighorn.

And I've always really liked reading about little bighorn and i think that if you read contemporary works about the battle little bighorn 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 this lives like that like we know that i was reading this book from the 60s recently that touches briefly on little bighorn and his treatment of little bighorn i think this is before it became popular his treatment of little bighorn was basically like if you were talking about the d-day 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 talk about june 6 june 6 1944 later we talk about it and we're like d-day huge uh successful objective turn the tide oh and also this guy kind of screwed up and got everybody killed like that was his like in the 1960s that was his viewpoint of little bighorn. Didn't even really warrant, it was just an anomaly. A guy made a stupid mistake, had no real bearing on how the Indian Wars went. Everything kept right on schedule. We still subjugated the Sioux.

It just doesn't really, we focus on it, but why are we focused on this? It didn't change the course of, it didn't change the course of destiny, right? I think I disagree with that, that theory. Okay. I'll tell you why. Well, first of all, look, these battles 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 of Little Bighorn, they just, they're catnip in terms of our interest because they're just so graphic. But what I think is interesting about the difference between the Fetterman fight and the Battle of Little Bighorn 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, we're talking about, we're talking about, uh, 80 guys who die in the Fetterman fight. And I don't remember the precise number with Custer 220 or something like that. Um, and if you compare that to D-Day, uh, that is not a massive, uh, battle, but both of those, uh, fights happened at really interesting political moments in U.S.

history. The Fetterman fight happens in 1866, two years after the end of the Civil War. When the U.S. is weary of war, they've completely uh uh uh drawn down the size of the u.s army um they're preoccupied with trying to manage uh the uh the reconstruction of the south and that required a huge military presence in and of itself and there just was no interest in in 1866 in in having a big fight out west. And so when the Fetterman defeat happens, the U.S. pulls back and the Indians win this war for a couple of years. My favorite anecdote about the Custer battle is Custer fight, the Battle of Little Bighorn, occurs on June 25th, 1876. 1876. It takes a long time for the news to travel back to Washington, D.C.

It's on Independence Day. News of the Custer Massacre arrives in Washington, D.C. on July 4th, 1876, literally in the midst of the celebration of the centennial of the 100-year anniversary of the country. It's like the biggest turd in a punch bowl in American history to that point. And the political reaction to the Battle of Little Bighorn is the opposite of the reaction to the Fetterman fight. They decide, enough. We're not going to lose to the Indians in the West. And they, beginning at that moment, they send out Nelson Miles, who you know is one of the most kind of badass warriors in the U.S. Army. And he 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 least able to fight and within uh two years the indian wars are over um crazy horse is uh is on the reservation uh uh he rolled up the nez perce to the next summer the nezz Perce surrender and Sitting Bull is in exile in Canada. The Indian Wars are over. And so the political significance of those battles, even though if you look at them compared to some of the Civil War battles or other battles where thousands of people die, the political significance of those battles, I think, was huge.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. In reading The Revenant, the thing I really appreciated was- I knew you were going to come around to this. We've warmed up a little bit now. So you've been warming up.

I feel like you've been like a windmilling for a sucker punch here. So bring it on, bring it on. In 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 appreciated because i like uh details um you familiar with the director michael man? Yeah. He made like He. I love him. He also made Last of the Mohicans. Yeah. So, and Ali and Lord knows what other movies. The guy, this has no bearing on anything,

but the cinematographer, Mo Fallon, 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, Mo Fallon. Mo Fallon had been Michaeln's assistant at a time and mo would talk talks about how michael mann was very uh 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 that's one of the great strengths like cormac mccarthy's he

really cares like how things look but in the book i'd always known that mount 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 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 leather to the knee and wool from the knee down because wool dries quickly and remains warm when it's wet. And of course, what the fur traders were doing, what the beaver trappers were doing was wading into creeicks to pull out beaver traps. So they were constantly wading in and out of water. And you can imagine wet buckskin is heavy and uncomfortable

and doesn't keep you warm. And so they, yeah, they wore these special pants. Like, knee boots. Yeah, exactly. But the buckskin upper, what's the advantage of that? Why wasn't it just all wool? Yeah, wool pants. That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that.

Durability and availability of resources. Probably, yeah. And so I guess they didn't have enough wool to get the whole pant made out of wool, so they did it from the knee down. And I think they're pretty conscious about looks too. So they, I get the sense they like the look of, of buckskin and, and, you know, all that. And so a little bit of wool maybe was enough. What research did you do that sort of brought about ideas that they were sort of, that had,

they had ideas of fashion or look? Oh, there was, There were hairstyles. Oh, my God. Like the frontiersmen a little bit earlier, but they would plate their hair. They would braid their hair in a specific way. Absolutely. And I think they admired the dress of a lot of the native tribes who also had wonderful clothing that they wore. And they copied that.

And I think they were quite fashion conscious 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 a little bit i i have not trapped myself i've no so i won't overstate my expertise here a beaver in a foothold trap is very very difficult to hang on to um we use today the it's it's astounding how little the technology is switched between what they were using which is a double long spring trap i mean granted these are hand forged yeah um and and we still use double long spring trap. I mean, granted, these are hand forged. And we still use double long spring traps today. Like you catch beavers, you can. We've kind of gradually switched to something called a coil spring.

But I own some, have caught beaver in them, and they are like dead ringers for what they used in those days. Yep. However, 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 into 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 four feet 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 jacks 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 any way 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 is gone you can't hang on to 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 yeah you wouldn't have the success rate because these guys are running like six sets at a time a lot of them carried six traps you see that all the time and they're pulling like four or five beaver a day no one knows how they rigged their shit yeah and that would be a great avenue of

exploration for someone to find out like how they actually rigged their shit and that 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 yeah people make a big deal out of napping an arrowhead nowadays and like killing deer with it that doesn't impress me at all it would impress me to set six traps with no slide wires and catch five beavers i don't know the answer to that i guess i i knew that the way that the the beaver died was by drowning but i don't know how they i don't remember reading how they rigged it. The people that saw it happen didn't think to describe it.

I have no, they obviously had it figured out. Didn't even think about it. Yeah, they just did it, right? And they would have been, undoubtedly they would 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 what it actually involved. Yeah. And to do it while not getting killed. Well, I think about that every time I'm fishing because I'm walking up the same cricks that they were setting beaver traps on. And they're thickly vegetated.

And I'm not worried about somebody hiding in the trees who wants to kill me. And they were. And you almost can't see how any of those guys survived. My God, did they not survive, though? I mean, they died like flies. Well, that's one of the reasons why the fact that, that Jim Bridger and, and James Beckworth are 60, 60 something guys in, you know, 18, in the 1860s. And the fact that they've lived through decades of a pretty vigorous lifestyle is it's stunning.

Yeah. They did it with like Bridger. Didn't he have the Whitman, who was later in the Whitman massacre, didn't he carve a broadhead out of Bridger's shoulder blade? Yeah, at one of the rendezvous. He'd been carrying around for years, stuck in the bone of his shoulder blade. There's an etching of that happening

and Bridger is leaning across a tree stump while this guy literally, and I think the arrowhead had been in there for two or three years. And I guess he got super drunk 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 it.

People point out being like the first sort of like, first sort of Western style official surgery west of some latitude line. 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. Can you walk us through the Hugh Glass story? So the Hugh Glass story- First, can I ask you a question? Absolutely.

I want you to do it, but I'm too dying to know the answer to something. Do you buy, like, I know you know how Hugh Glass died. Yeah. You know what? Walk us through the Hugh Glass story. 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, uh, the Revenant is not the first book that I started to

write. Um, I started to write another book another book, which was going to be loosely based on me and my experiences as like a young legislative aide in Washington, D.C. And I got about- Yeah, you wouldn't be on this show. Well, I'm getting to that. I got about- You would have pissed away your chance to come on the show. 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 boring. And that was hurtful because- That's blessed, really.

Those are good friends, actually. They're good friends, but it was hurtful because that was the fictionalized version of my life that they were talking about. So right about the moment that I was abandoning a novel based on a fictionalized version of my apparently extremely boring life, I was reading a book about The Mountain Man, a nonfiction book, and there were two paragraphs in it about Hugh Glass. And these two paragraphs said, you know, there's this guy, he's mauled by a grizzly bear, horribly wounded. Two of his comrades are left to wait for him to die and bury him.

And instead of doing that, they rob him and abandon him. And first of all, out of anger, he crawls 200 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 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, the research that you get to do is, is half the fun because I got to not only read all about the mountain men, but I got to read all about wilderness survival. And I got to 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 will 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 got to just do all sorts of these fun little, uh, forays into areas that were interesting to do research on. But that is the kernel of the story of the part of Hugh Glass's life that he's most famous for, which is being attacked by, horribly mauled by a grizzly, abandoned and robbed by his comrades, and then going out to seek revenge. But before that, he had a remarkable life. And who knows how much of this is legend and how much is fact. But there's a really entertaining and quirky biography of Hugh 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, it feels a little bit like it was written in the sixties, but according to his biographer, he was originally a, can I ask you what it means to feel like it was written in the sixties? It's, it is not all. And it has a very one-sided view of many aspects of Western history. And he's just a John Myers Myers, and I can't imagine he's still alive. You can tell he's got character and is a quirky dude. And this is not written like a doctorate thesis. 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 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 or not pirate, depending on your version of history, Jean Lafitte, and imprisoned 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 18-teens and proceeds literally to walk from the Gulf of Mexico to what is now, well, to St. Louis, Missouri. And has all sorts of adventures along the way. Yeah, one could imagine it wasn't just a smooth sailing.

It was not, there was no interstate. And so that's Hugh Glass's life before in 1823, he signs on with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company to go out and be part of one of these first trapping parties that goes up to Missouri. And when they set out to do this, were they setting out to trap? Were they setting out to trade? Or were they setting out to trap? Were they setting out to trade? Or were they setting out to do a combination of the two? Probably a combination. Most of the earliest trappers both trapped on their own, but also traded with local tribes

who would also bring in furs. And then they would obviously send those down river. And so probably both. I want to jump to the death part and then we'll get back to what happens in the middle of his life. Do you buy that? And I don't even know where it comes from. Legend has it. 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, or should I tell the story? Well, you tell the story, and then I'll tell the story, the version of it that I know.

They're on the Yellowstone, and he's with some other trappers, and they get into a skirmish with Indians, and they wind up holing up. Sorry, do we know whereabouts on the Yellowstone? Yeah. It was near the mouth of the Bighorn, the Yellowstone? Yeah. It was near the mouth of the Bighorn, wasn't it? Yeah.

Yeah. There was a, near the confluence of the Bighorn and the Yellowstone. They get into a skirmish with some, uh, erychra, I think. Yep.

And they wind up holed up in a coulee. And they can't, they, they got a little stronghold there, but it's not looking good for them. And the Indians decide to just set fire to the grass.

And they set fire to the grass and Hugh Glass and his compatriots there know that shit's 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? What's wrong with that? a spark to a powder keg and kill themselves. I don't buy it. Why not? What's wrong with that? Well, I'll tell you the story that I read. What is wrong with that? I'll tell you the story that I read.

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. 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. 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 man. And 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 Bighorn and the Yellowstone. That's a historical fact. They call it Fort Cass or something, right? Fort Cass, I think, was one of the, I think in that era. And it bounced up and down like a couple miles this direction, a couple miles that direction. Yeah, because there's a couple different sites.

So there's a trading post there, Fort Cass, and I think they were primarily trading with the Crow, which were the, I, in that era, the dominant tribe in that part of the country. Exactly. And a group of Crow comes into Fort Cass and wants to trade. And there are not enough goods at Fort Cass to trade as much as the Indians want to. And so they dispatch two men from Fort Cass to a fort that's 30 miles away that's affiliated to go get more trading goods to bring 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 Yellowstone River and was caught out on the ice in the open by a raiding party of Arikara, which was not expected in that territory in that era. And the Arikara catch him out on the glass and kill him. And Beckworth was one of the men who went out and found his mutilated body. That's the story that Beckwith tells. Who was the politician after they discredited the story of Paul Revere? Who was the politician that said, I love Paul Revere, whether he wrote or not? Meaning I'm sticking with the powder keg story. Well, look, I love Hugh Glass,

whichever way he died. That's still a pretty epic life. And whether or not he was a captive of the pirates or not, look, he did a lot of shit. And so definitely one of those kind of epic uh 19th century lives that i just think are so uh so much fun to study about how do you pronounce the the the the spy intrigue novelist uh john law oh le carreare. I think. Somebody will tell us if we're wrong, I bet.

I thought it was pronounced Licare. It could be. Maybe it's Licare. He's got a great quote. He said, watching your book being made into a movie is like watching an oxen turned into a bullion cube. What was the experience like for you?

Well, again, I'm not going to whine too much because but we're not you know i'm not asking i'm not inviting you to one i mean it's like listen uh i probably the greatest thing to ever happen in the whole wide world it was a blast who wouldn't want i mean like you'll notice that john lochere's books yeah are all movies. They do okay. 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. And so I was like, I haven't read your book. Oh, that reminds me of a great story, man. I just want to tell you a story real quick. I went to see this writer one time. And I went to see like a bookstore event he did. And he told a story real quick i went to see this this writer one time and uh i went to see like a book story van he did and he told the story i don't know if it's true or not it was a really

funny story he told a story that he was one time in a used bookstore okay and sees his own book in a used bookstore and opens it and it's the inscribed copy that he gave to his mother. Oh, man, that hurts. Oh, that hurts. I don't know how true it is, but I just laughed my ass off. I've seen a couple of inscribed copies of mine for sale on eBay, but my mom's never done that to me. She's sold it in a private sale. Mom, if you're listening, don't tell me. I don't want to know. But look, it was a blast to have a movie made out of my book. And it gave the book a huge life.

The Revenant means back from the dead. And that's literally what The Revenant means. You know what? Somehow I didn't know that. Yeah, that's what it means really it does it uh 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 uh from it's an it's an english word revenant but it comes from a french word revenir to return to come back really and so it means literally one who returns from the dead god God, if I was like halfway good at my job, that would have been my first question.

So look, I feel like the movie brought the book back from the dead. And 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. Were you disappointed in how the book publishing experience went? Initially, you mean?

Yeah. When it only sold to my mom and her friends? That stuff's devastating, man. It's hard to crawl back. I had that happen. It's hard to crawl back. Your books have done well. Well, they've done well over time.

My first book didn't do well out of the gate. All right. Dude, it was horrible. It was horrible. I didn't think they were going to let me write any more books. Well, I'm having a lot more opportunities to write books, uh, after the Revenant. Sure, man. It's, uh, it's easier, easier now than it was before. But, um, the, 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 pretty far moved. Can you back up earlier on that? Sure. How soon after publication, right? Well- Like when did someone come and say like, when they bought the film rights, was it one of those deals where they give you

like a dollar a year until it goes into production or was it like a real sale? It was a real sale. Okay. I still needed to work vigorously, but 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 optioned the film rights before we sold the book itself.

That's great. But the first time when somebody told me it was going to be a movie, and I got super excited about this, they told me that it was going to be directed by Michael Mann and star Daniel Day-Lewis as Hugh Glass. Attention to detail. Yeah. And over the course of the next 12 years. No. Really? Oh, 12 years. No. Really? Oh, my God, yeah.

It was first optioned in 2001, and it became a movie in 2015, I guess. God, never say die, man. So, Revenant, Back from the Dead. That's a funny thing. I know so many writers who haven't been through this many times, and they option something yeah and then they call up like they're gonna yeah and i was like no well you got probably not gonna what they told me at the beginning and this this set my expectations is that about one out of three things that gets

optioned turns into a movie oh i didn't know So my expectations were that the odds were against me. Okay. But I didn't call people telling everybody like, it's going to be a big, huge movie. I didn't tell them it was going to be a, 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, you know, DiCaprio was going to star in it and Inuitu was going to direct it, I still kind of, i had some scar tissue there that i didn't quite believe it 12 years uh yeah uh well more i guess uh 14 it was 2015 and it it became a movie in 2001 when it was first optioned so i'd gone on with my life believe me i wasn't sure man he kept cranking i wasn't holding my breath. Um, but, but look when they, the, my big thing when I write books is I, I love history and I, 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, uh, you ought to really care about historical accuracy because I, you don't want to mislead people. And frankly, history is so great that you don't have to make up tons of shit for it to be an amazing story. That said, you know, the part of The Revenant, my book that people don't like, is the ending. And the ending of my book, without giving it away, is true to history.

It is not a Hollywood ending. It's a story of love and forgiveness. 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 a Hollywood ending of the good guy rolling around on the ground with the bad guy. Where does that pressure come from?

Do you think, I think the 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, do, you know, the publisher doesn't lose their fortune. A big movie, and, you know, The Revenant, I think, was $150 million to shoot and another $150 million to publicize. So $300 million, they're not going to risk too much about people not liking 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.

Yeah, it's surprising what you're saying about that. It's an interesting point about the money because I used to kind of marvel at, you know, a publisher with a certain amount of power can just on their own buy a book, if they've proven themselves like one individual with only getting like they can just get a rubber stamp from right who's ever above them they could buy a book yep and you could send some writer off into exile yeah 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 people yeah right but also it becomes this thing that's globally available um and there's not a lot that like went into it yeah but here it is but that's a great point with like a movie it's like man like uh many many careers yeah are on the line huge amounts of money is on the line. It's not like this, like it used to start with like, how could it be like that easy to make a book? You know? The financial models are dramatically different

between book and film. And there's just, the other example I always think is funny is a book contract is about six pages long. And basically the whole thing says they can't change a word without your permission. A movie contract is about 60 pages long. And basically the whole thing says they can change anything they want without your permission. And so you go into the exercise knowing 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, and committees who review, you know, look at all

that stuff. Um, and so it's just a, it's just a very different process. And, and look, uh, the, the, from a very selfish standpoint, uh, I love the Revenant cause 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, uh, a great job of kind of transporting people to a different place in time and giving people a sense of just how hard life was in that era. And the courage of the people who went out there in that timeframe and were willing to take that risk. I think it's well acted. I think it's well acted. I think it's beautifully shot. I'm a little irked that 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. And so that part of it bothered me. Yeah, we've had a couple laughs. Like, you know, we've joked about, you know, my dissatisfaction with it. And this has, like, you know, to be perfectly frank, like, this has absolutely nothing to do with you.

Like, it's a phenomenal book. I had known that story and loved that story my entire life. And I, 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 linedlined streams, the sagebrush. It did. I've been there. 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 was a situation where I looked and I couldn't even pay attention to the movie. I was so like, just aghast, right? Because that's the most, I think that's like the most beautiful landscape on the planet, right?

It's just so ripe and rich. I love that 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'd be more like right yeah 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's my only gripe it's like we've gotten a little bit of mileage out of complaining about it. It was just that. It was like a condemnation of 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 eastern Wyoming, like Eastern Montana, like a big chunk of, of South Dakota is, is high plains. And I, I love it. I think it's epically beautiful. Um, it doesn't look like what, uh, 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 people on the coast think about Wyoming and Montana, they think about the Tetons and Glacier National Park and kind of the epic mountain vistas. And don't get me wrong, I love the mountains too.

Those are easy to, I think anybody can appreciate that. The, uh, the high planes, 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 eye. 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 just 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 planes, there is so much feature. It's just that it's a lot more subtle

than a mountain jutting up to a snow-capped peak. But ask the guys who rode over the ridgeline in the Fetterman fight. How flat it was. How featureless it was, because there were 2, indians hiding in that featureless plane and so ask them how featureless it's only featureless if you maybe haven't walked a few miles yeah and once you have give it a shot you wouldn't say that anymore i say i point out

to people about hunting antelope will be like my antelope hunting strategy 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 some let's just go in that direction undoubtedly we'll find many more yeah and all the folds and creases that occur between here and there. You can see a long way on the plains. And I love, you know, where I grew up in Eastern Wyoming, there were, you could see Laramie Peak. And that was, you know, that was 70 miles away from my hometown. And you could see that clear as day. I love having a 70 mile horizon. That's a cool thing. But there was a lot between where you are and the horizon. And it ain't featureless.

I want to get into the reprint of Last Stand. Can I ask a quick question before we leave the movie? What did like daily, or was there daily, what did collaboration look like between 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 you know eight time zones away from where they were filming so honestly not a ton uh but that said the uh one of my uh good friends a guy named keith redman who's at a company called anonymous content produced uh the the movie and uh he involved me in ways that he could also the the screenwriter for the revenvenant 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.

Mark Smith shared drafts of the script at a couple different junctures with me. I made my historical points, which were pretty uniformly ignored, but I had my chance at least to see the script and kind of see it evolve. So I was not involved in a detailed way. One of the things that irked me out of that process of The Revenant is that I couldn't write the screenplay because I'd 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 a, uh, you know, a movie again without me writing it. And so, uh, I'm, I'm hoping if there is,

if there's interest in, in this new one, Ridgeline, that, that, uh, that I'll be the writer for that. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps waypoints and tracking

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Do you think that it's a little bit dishonest? Do you think there's a moral problem with taking history, like in the case of Hugh Glass and like what Hugh Glass actually did um and making it be that something different happened do you think it's a little bit immoral um I guess it depends on how extreme the the retelling is and whether it uh distorts a story in a way that that I mean for example I I think the way that the Native American story has been told in traditional American Westerns is there is some immoral immorality in that because it it it doesn't tell very much about about their perspective on things that were happening.

I understand that people will also always seek to tell stories that are interesting and compelling to an audience and entertaining to an audience. And some of that I think is okay. One of the things I did at the end of The Revenant and that I do at the end of my new book is I tell the reader where I veered from the truth. Yeah. And if I made up a character,

I tell them I made this character up. Because- You even point out that you even acknowledge that there's some debate about whether or not it was Bridger. Yeah. And I just think when I'm done reading a book, I want to know what was real and what wasn't. And obviously people can go do their own research.

And I also try and list books that people can go read about nonfiction books to kind of learn for themselves or whatever. But 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 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 historical treatise. I think there's plenty of room for fictional historical fiction, fictional tellings of historical events. But I think we have an extra responsibility 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 I mean, I've always been irked by stories that, especially films, because the medium of film is so powerful. And there's whole generations of people who will see a film and that will be the main sort of entree point that they have to a particular historical incident. And so, you know, uh, uh, stories with, uh, uh, extreme, uh, conspiracies about the assassination of JFK, uh, to me, uh, bother me because I think they, they give distorted uh 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 yeah what's your understanding of uh do you know the story of laramie of jacques laramie yeah or like the sort of absence of a story of Laramie? Of Jacques Laramie? Yeah. Or like the sort of absence of a story of Laramie?

Well, you tell me, I know a little bit about this, but I'm not sure exactly where you're going. No one knows who the hell he was. Oh yeah. He's known for being killed

by the Indians. And then was or was not stuffed down under the ice in a beaver pond. Yeah. But then the guy went, like Bridger, like I mentioned,

he's got half the state named after him and other states. That dude made off like a bandit. And no one knows who the hell he was. He just shows up and promptly gets killed. Here's the thing. If you're going to get killed in that era,

try and get killed next to a river. Because if you get killed next to the river, there's a good chance that the river is going to be named after you. And then whatever forts and towns they put on 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 that bumps into the river, the mountain might get named after you. And of course, that's exactly what happened with Jacques Laramie. And Lolo. Yeah. Lolo got killed. Like, he's a dude. Lulu,

he's spelled, his name's spelled a hundred ways. Lulu, Lolo, whatever. Gets killed by a grizzly bear. And people are like, oh, you know the creek where old Lolo got killed. Scott's Bluff. And then pretty soon it's like, Lolo the town, Lolo the creek, Lolo the peak, Lolo the national forest. And meanwhile, no one knows the first thing about this dude. Well, I have in the new book, I have Bridger as an old man

kind of reflecting on the fact that there's a bunch of stuff named after him now and kind of wondering about that. Oh, that was in his lifetime? Oh yeah, absolutely. Really? Yeah. I didn't know that.

And 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- I don't know the story. He was, 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. You know, Scott's Bluff.

Scott's Bluff, you know, where Scott died. And I have Bridger reflecting on that, that he's happy that he didn't have to get killed to get stuff named after him. So anyway, it's a phenomenon. I didn't know that that was hitting during his lifetime. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

So he really was like, he's just a well-known dude. He is a rock star in terms of fame in his, well, certainly when he's a 60-year-old. He's famous among the soldiers that he's a 60 year old, he's, he's famous among the, 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, and it'd been a long time, by the way, he was, it was, he'd been on the planes for 40 plus years at the time he's guiding for the army. So he's, and this is a place where, where they're, they're the numbers of people out here were 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 person that that book's about, George Berg Grinnell, I was amazed when I was doing the research on him because he meets everybody. He meets, uh, he meets Buffalo Bill. He meets, he goes, uh, 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, uh, you know, it's kind of like being from a small state from Montana. He's like Forrest Gump. Well, he was like Forrest Gump. But, you know, if you live in a small state 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. I had no idea he knew Custer. Oh, not only did he know Custer, we're talking about Grinnell now. Yeah. And the Buffalo book that's called Last Stand is about this 19th century hunter conservationist named George Bird Grinnell.

And not only did he know Custer, but he goes on campaign with Custer in 1874 when Custer is sent out to survey the Black Hills. And shoots a big old grizzly. Shoots a huge grizzly. There's an amazing foot. It's a nice bear, man. That's an amazing bear. 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 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 1874 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 into the heart of the territory that was given back to the Lakota and the Cheyenne at the end of the Fetterman massacre. They said, you're right. So when Fetterman is defeated and the U.S. Army retreats, they give back to the Lakota and the Cheyenne. Hadn't the Lakota taken the Black Hills from the Cheyenne? From the northern Cheyenne? Well, it's even more complicated than that. And all sorts of tribes are in there. And that's a complicated prehistory. But just in terms of the U.S. piece of the history, they ceded back in 1867, I think, which is when they negotiated the treaty after the Fetterman fight. And then in 1874, when they discover gold,

they say, changed our minds. We know we have given you two treaties now, but the second one we want to renegotiate as well. When the Lakota won't renegotiate, it's war. And that's when Custer then, that sets in motion the events that lead to uh the battle of the little bighorn within a year and a half two years we're talking about fame bridger having fame custer was known to the people that killed him yeah and there i guess there's

some debate about whether or not they he had just 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 we found him and knew who he was and that she had taken a sewing awl and punched a hole through his eardrums so that in the afterlife he would better hear the warnings. Yeah. And then she used her pony to kick up dirt on him. And she says that she knew him. Yeah.

But yeah, people running around knowing each other. Yeah. Who's coming for you? It's, you know, people were, there were not huge numbers of people in, even though it's vast territory, there were not huge numbers of people. So walk us through Grinnell. Oh, go ahead. Real quick though, did you, when you researched all this stuff,

did you find that these guys ever reflected? Because like Steve was saying, they died so much, right? So at age 60, did you ever find them reflecting on how lucky they must have been? Well, I didn't find, there's some great people who write when Bridger was still alive about conversations they had with him. And so there are these 19th century people saying, I was on a long horseback ride with Bridger and he told me this story. Or I was at Fort Laramie at the same time that Bridger was there and I heard him tell all these stories and I'm going to write down all these stories he told. So there's those types of stories.

I don't remember Bridger ever actually saying or being said to have said that he had been lucky. But I just, again, it's hard to imagine that he didn't recognize that there was some measure of luck in there. And look at somebody like Hugh Glass. I mean, Hugh Glass was a talented frontiersman and a tough badass who survived being mauled by a grizzly bear and crawling 200 miles by himself with no weapons. And he still ends up, I think, in the wrong place at the wrong time, walking across the frozen Yellowstone and gets caught and killed. And so he had a day of bad luck.

I wonder if he was quick to realize, like, this ain't good. You gotta think. He's like, I've been through a few scraps, but this ain't good. The gotta think. It's like, he's like, I've been through a few scraps, but this ain't good. The other thing about those guys is, you know, we think about like

getting mauled by a grizzly bear or dying in a fight with Indians. But, you know, if you're out on your own in the frontier and you snap your ankle, you're frigging dead. You know?

The odds that you can, 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 it's just

that those aren't as movie worthy, you know, the guy who died of the flu. Yeah. You know, I want to touch, I keep, I do want to get to this Grinnell gentleman, but I have to tell you another thing. Have you read the journal? I've been talking about it a lot lately life and death at the mouth of the muscle shell now it's a guy he spends a couple years at the mouth of where the muscle shell flows into missouri like most of the action takes place is all underwater now because right because of four-pack reservoir um it's just his like daily account so it'd be like monday you know sunny and warm river came up two inches tuesday huge fight bob got killed what's the era 1860s okay yeah huge fight bob got killed

finally found dave's body like wednesday sunny again turned cold toward 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 will 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 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 75 of the people that come and go right out of some other mention 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 right in the life and death of the mouse the muscle shell so and so got scalped and looks like she's gonna make it but he then was able to like put like who like who the hell was this right and it's just just just like heartbreaking story yeah of like someone who eventually like whatever resigns marries a guy and kills herself yeah like what the hell happened there but uh i was reading this other book recently and there's this

like this character that emerges in the late 1800s in miles city montana and there's no mention of him but there's this kid whose dad was a doctor in miles city in the late 1800s and the kid he's like later on in life he's describing who comes to his dad who's a doctor yeah he describes a guy coming in who had been long ago scalped. And it was all healed over, but you can still see the veins on top of his head. And all of his fingers had been removed at the middle joint. Oh, God.

Okay. Who the hell was that guy? Yeah, right. There's a story there. In 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 scalps removed and then like no one else wrote this down yeah if you were running around town now missing your scalp and all your fingers you You would make your way into lots of material. The fact that that was not more noteworthy tells you something about the general population. Reading that, I'm like, okay, I understand it.

I understand everything now. Absolutely, absolutely. But George Berggrinnell. So I'd 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 then going on this hunt. Which sits in my living room today.

I got to 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 Butte, I had this luxury of literally a month where my job wasered the stacks, kind of follow my nose from thing that interested me to thing 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 through 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 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 prism of the Buffalo. And that was the book that I was going to write. And then I came across this guy, George Berg Grinnell, who I'd never heard of, who it turns out doesn't live through all of that exactly, but he, his life, uh, he lives through a significant chunk of it. And, uh, and I couldn't believe I'd 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 somewhat similar way to which you use your own experience of finding the skull and going on the hunt and then weave in other parts of the story. All the weird stuff. Yeah.

But speaking of which, and I really appreciate your constructive criticism on the Revenant. And I was just going to ask you about something. Like why I don't talk about Grinnell? No, well, there's that. I mean, how did you miss that? Come on. I think I mentioned him.

But I think the reason you didn't talk about Grinnell is because you devote so many paragraphs to the buffalo penis. There is like long, long paragraphs about the buffalo penis I know my editor's like we either got to cut this really influential figure Grinnell or you got to cut some of your penis material and that and I slept on it and decided just to and the decision you made probably explains why your buffalo book sold more than mine did. But as a result, I can't even have my children read this anymore. It's like, I mean, come on, what the hell?

So anyway, but we digress. Yeah, I think that I, as being not as historian, I'm able to just focus, like I said earlier, I made a joke about it. I'm able to focus on the weird stuff. Well, that's the great thing about the buffalo, though, is I love a lot of the factoids about the buffalo, like, you know, 10 times more hair per square inch than a cow, which kind of helps you explain why they do okay on the frozen prairie.

And the birth success rate. Yeah. Compared to a cow. Yeah. That was amazing when I read that. And not only that, but 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 even get physiologically how muscles can possibly work to do that.

There's a recorded incident of, I think, a three or four day old calf running 70 miles with a herd. And just like, that's an amazing animal. And so 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 the Grinnell 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 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 well he has, I'll talk about Grinnell and then, and then the hunter piece of it. Cause 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, uh, his father's a rich New York lawyer. Uh, but he wants to go West. Grinnell wants to go West. And he comes out in, I think, 1870 with a Yale professor who's doing a dinosaur bone hunt 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. The US cavalry guarded them while they dug.

But what he's digging up- Can you imagine what the locals thought of that? Oh my God. They're gonna be like, hold on a minute, you mean- What? You mean to tell me? Yeah. But what Grinnell is doing in 1870

is he's digging up like triceratops bones in Nebraska and camel bones and miniature horses. And so what Grinnell understood from his own kind of tangible experience is that extinction could happen. And this is in an era of the myth of inexhaustibility, where people, not for crazy reasons, by the way, thought we can't kill all the buffalo. There's so many buffalo. The resources out here are inexhaustible. And so, but Grinnell had that experience of seeing that some stuff that used to be living

wasn't here anymore. So that was one of 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's just 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 came and went and lots of time has passed. No, I think he viewed that for his era,

especially state-of-the-art scientific way. Gotcha. Well, it's kind of amazing too, his age, right? Because I mean, he's just a college kid and to have sort of those kinds of thoughts already, figuring that out from seeing that is pretty amazing. And he would have been, he's with a group that was led by the, one of the, you know, foremost 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, stuffed animals. You mean his collections?

Well, his paintings too. But like all the things he gathered as he came back, all the paraphernalia he picked up. And Lucy Audubon becomes his tutor. And so, first of all, he's tutored at a time when people were learning reading, writing, and arithmetic. He's also learning about natural science. And not only that, but she is instilling in him 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 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 sportsmen was. And, you know, this is the era when they're starting to figure out that we shouldn't hunt things, you know, 12 months a year. There should be a season for hunting things. We shouldn't go out and kill every animal that pops up in front of us. There should be limits that we put on ourselves. And you asked the question, what is it about hunters? And I think that they were one of the first groups of people to go into wilderness and see it as a place 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 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 that we should preserve, when you think about it, it makes complete sense that it came in significant part from hunters. That's my explanation. explanation yeah a certain type of hunter because there's an interesting point in american history where these guys coexist with the market hunters yep these people we've been talking about and kind of like celebrating throughout this conversation um boone bridger glass right frontiersmen and later mountain men um were rapacious like they you know i don't know

uh you know they would stack up like astounding numbers of animals and then there 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 yeah to win was to put these other guys out of business we generally sit around like celebrating the accomplishments of these guys that were regarded by the sport hunters as the enemies you know like roosevelt and the early boone and crocker club and whatever they had like the these different societies and hunters groups kind of like the first thing they needed to do was like first thing we're going to do is try to somehow sabotage commercial wildlife markets pass a rule

that you can't serve wild game in new york city um and then now like hunters today that we kind of like celebrate the accomplishments of these conservationists like Roosevelt, Grinnell. But we really want to talk about who we admire. Like it's Bridger and Glass because like the skillset was amazing. Well, and look, hopefully we gain knowledge as we progress as individuals and as a people. And the world looked very different in the 1830s to Jim Bridger than it did even by the 1870s. And certainly by the 1880s, when the last of the Montana herd is wiped out,

we knew at that point that inexhaustibility of resources was a myth because the buffalo were gone. There's this statistic I came across in reading about, because you point this out in your book too, the arrival of the railroad lights out for the buffalo because it's the infrastructure for commercial hunting. The reason they trapped beaver in the 1830s instead of buffalo is because buffalo pelts, buffalo hides are too damn heavy. You can't move them. A beaver pelt weighed two pounds and they could stack them up and stick them on a canoe and, and send them down river. And that was a viable business that they couldn't exploit the Buffalo in the 1830s because they couldn't transport the hides. And what the railroad does, first of all,

when it arrives 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, uh, you, you lived in Miles City, right? That's right. I think the railroad arrives in Miles City in 1881, I want to say. Yeah. Winter, winter 81, 82. So, uh, the Buffalo hunters come in with a railroad. In 1881, I want to say. Yeah, winter 81, 82. So the Buffalo Hunters come in with the railroad. In 1882, the railroad keeps statistics. And there were 200,000 hides that were, the railroad shipped out of Montana in 1882. It took, I think, 70 rail cars. that was the equivalent of 70 rail cars in 1883 the railroad shipped out 40 000 hides so it goes from 200 000 hides to 40 000 hides in 1884 there was one box car of buffalo hides that the railroad ships out of the state and then it's over that's it

i liked it horn today um you know he comes out i can't remember what year but around 83 or 84 from the smithsonian yeah comes out to collect some bodies to try to like shoot the last one just to bring it back and he points out that uh he points out that those hide hunters you you talk about the myth of inexhaustibility. He points out that the hide hunters that were hanging around were convinced that more would come from the north. And then he's like, just over time, they gradually found their way into ranching and various things.

And they eventually were like, huh, I guess they're not coming. And they sort of became the sort of social fabric of the town. Yep. And when you read about Montana history in the 1890s, and I did a bunch of research 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 1890s

is still a buffalo hunter, but there's a lot of former buffalo hunters. So yeah, and the Hornaday thing, I mean, think about what it means that the Smithsonian Inst institution sends out a crew to find what they hope is kind of the last buffalo so they can kill it because they view that as 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. I mean, think about

what that says about, you know, the moment we were at. And frankly, that's one of the things that makes Grinnell so amazing is the one place where there's buffalo,. And Yellowstone in the 1880s has been established as a national park. I think it's established in 1872, but it's been completely ignored. It's always ironic to me when I go to Yellowstone because the sweatshirts always have, you know, Yellowstone 1872, 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 they're like, whatever. And so they established Yellowstone. Meaning no surface gold. No surface gold. Yeah. Which is probably all they knew about yeah which is what they were after in that era um and so what's significant about grinnell 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 Grinnell and the Boone and Crockett Club and Teddy Roosevelt fight that. And in 1894, they passed the Lacey 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 establish that, and they win. So really, it's that year, 1894, that is, to me, the more important year in terms of the history of Yellowstone. Because that's 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 it'll be interesting to two or three people, in the history of the Lacey Act, because it is still a very powerful wildlife tool to this day. Yep. And the foresight of the people who created that, I mean, how many laws from 1894 do we still think about today? Yeah. Just for folks that are saying like the Lacey Act gives, 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've been lackadaisical about wildlife laws, it gave some federal oversight on wildlife stuff so the minute you did some poaching it's still this how it works today like you might do some poaching in one state and drive across there's even lacy act prosecutions where someone poaches something to one state but they drive the head to their taxidermist 20 miles down the road who happens to be in a different state, that also becomes a federal crime. Yeah.

It's a Lacey Act violation. Yeah. And they still use it, I imagine it gets used on a daily basis today. The other thing that I love about Grinnell 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 Grinnell 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, of, which is Forest and Stream. And he used that magazine to editorialize to hunters every week. And his theme was public land. Is that right? Totally. And because nobody knew what public land meant then. And what he explains to people is public land means you own it. You, Hunter, who doesn't live in Wyoming or Montana, you own a resources in Yellowstone, they're stealing from you and you should be pissed off about that.

And so Grinnell editorializes on this for years to kind of build this theme and this ethic of public lands. And he's incredibly successful at doing it, but he's a lot of the reason why we have an ethic today that supports public lands. So he's a lot of the reason why why we have a an ethic today that is you know supports public lands so he's an amazing character uh i want to hit you with one last question if you if someone says you 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 write about, and don't tell me the rest. That's not going to 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 them 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, we should not have exterminated them from the planet in 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 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. It's a hell of a lot better than just saying the West. They all happen to be in the West, but anyway. That's fair. Yanni, what do you got? You got any wrap-roppers?

I can try. Bill, you can always cut it out, like Steve says. Steve will interrupt me halfway through if it's no good. You know, reading some of the articles that Corinne found that were like when Steve started earlier, that were people 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 Grinnell being like this great political strategist, 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, 160 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 were 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 Byrd 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 if you want to learn about politics, 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. It is a graduate course in politics. So there is no question

that the most significant political lessons in my life have been drawn out of 19th century Montana history. Good. Yeah. I'm not cutting that shit out. You like that one? Are you kidding me?

All right. Author Michael Punk, with an E on the end. That's true. Michael Punk, so you can find him. P-U-N-K-E. Author of, currently. Ridgeline. It won't be out until June.

Look for it. But otherwise, author of The Revenant Fire and Brimstone Last Stand okay and Ridgeline Forthcoming thank you

for joining us thanks a lot and 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 out and defend your movie ahead of last thanks a lot take care Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. On-axe hunt is now in canada it is now at your fingertips you canadians the great features

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