The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 275: The Battle of One Hundred in the Hand

Episode Date: May 31, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Michael Punke, Spencer Neuharth, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider,Topics discussed: Go get Michael Punke's new book, "Ridgeline"; a gun that ain't a firearm; when brain matter splatters; how Michael and Steve were both going to write a book about the Nez Perce War; cicadas are a turkey hunter's best friend; free hunting and fishing licences for getting vaccinated; how mountain lions have an unlikely predator; happy endings to raptor rescues; critter vs. human face offs; man punches kangaroo in order to rescue his dog; how you were not supposed to cross the ridgeline; approaches to writing historical nonfiction; when treaties aren't honored; the Bighorn Mountains and Fort Phil Kearny; Lonesome Dove; Nelson Story and his rolling gun battle; that brutal wintry day of December 22nd, 1866; how on earth did 2,000 warriors and their horses remain hidden?; the winkte prophet; the real villain; the challenges of operating a muzzleloader; spherical case shot; the politics of the Fetterman Fight; how Spencer used to meet women with a Hugh Glass pick-up line; 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.

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. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now 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. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by First Light.

Go farther, stay longer. All right, I want everybody to listen real, like, what's this noise? Isn't that satisfying? Don't think I'm actually holding a firearm, because I don't think the federal government regards these as firearms. Really? They're wrong about that. I think it's like a different set of rules. It's a replica, but we're visiting with Michael Punk, who wrote The Revenant and has a forthcoming book.

No, it's now. Yes. Now. The last time Michael Punk was on, he teased his next book, which is called Ridgeline. And he was being diplomatic, but also a good salesman and didn't like lay the whole thing out. Save some for later about Ridgeline. Um, and so he's here to talk with us about Ridgeline and he brought a couple show and tell pieces and Arrow, uh, Circa. I don't know.

Is it, can you get specific? Uh, not too specific. It's, I think it's designed to look like the arrows that they would have had in the 1860s, for example. And I think it's probably pretty accurate. It's got a manufactured metal arrowhead, which would be accurate for that era. Steel trade point you always hear them referred to. Exactly. But otherwise, I think there was an attempt made to use the traditional style of building the arrow. So, yeah.

And this here pistol. That pistol, which would have been comparable to the ones used by the officers and non-commissioned officers, non-commissioned officers in the infantry or in the cavalry especially. And it's a replica of an 1851 36 caliber colt captain ball shoots 36 caliber lead ball out of it that's right if i was gonna like line up guns that i if i had to get hit by one i don't know i wouldn't be like i wouldn't relish getting hit by this one but there's worse things to get hit by. Well, they, by the time they got around to the, to the Colt 45, they had decided that they should up the caliber.

Up the caliber. And they went from 36 to 45. Probably up the powder charge. I would guess. But there's something, yeah, there's something about, I can't remember what it is, but there's something about these where they're not quite firearms.

That's interesting. I think you can order them in the mail and it doesn't need to go through a, don't take my word for it. Do you know what I'm talking about, Spencer? Like, I think you can order one of these in the mail and just shows up at your house. It doesn't need to go through an FFL. I don't know the answer. I'm not going to argue with you.

Well, look it up. All right. Tell us what you're doing. I believe that's the pistol carried by Wild Bill Hickok. And in his hand, I think it was definitely a firearm. And I would not have wanted to be on the receiving end of him. No. Did you notice and did you watch the Battle of the Buster Scruggs?

No. You didn't watch that? No. Oh, dude, it's on Netflix. Yeah, go watch Battle of the Buster Scruggs. I got to check it out. It's funny. The Buster Scruggs sits down to a card game.

And there's a guy that he sits down to a card game. And he wants to get dealt in. But some guy has just left. And they're like, no, you got to play that hand. And he's like, I don't want to play that hand. And he takes a look and it's aces and eights. Dead man's hand. And then later that day.

Yeah. Yeah. But it wasn't even dealt to him. He just sat down at the table and peeked at aces and eights and that's all it took. Yep. That's all it took. Interesting. A lot more than a writer, this gentleman here.

How much of this stuff is still active? So you're a writer. Are you still, you're still a lawyer? Do you keep like up on lawyer business? Are you supposed to send in a check or anything every year? I send in a check in order to keep up my inactive bar status. So that's what you maintain? Yeah. I'm not a practicing lawyer. But it's not once a lawyer, always a lawyer. Well, I don't know. It's not once a member of the bar, always a member of the bar. You got to keep

up your bar membership, mostly by paying dues. Not taking additional testing. Thank God, no. Because I wouldn't do that again. But you do keep going. You can't fall off for 20 years and decide to send in a check and resume, or can you? It's different state by state. Every state regulates their lawyers. And honestly, I haven't kept track of it because I hope not to ever be a practicing lawyer again. Do you do your own contracts? Stupidly. Yeah. Because- You'll review your own book contracts. Yeah. But I've stopped doing that more and more because

I'm both dumb and thinking I know enough to look at them and cheap enough that I don't want to pay a lawyer. And I've gotten a little bit smarter about that over the years and started paying somebody to look at them, which has worked out well for me. I was going to tell you a story, which is too complicated. Nevermind. You used to be an ambassador, former US trade rep, and then former ambassador to the World Trade Organization. I was the deputy US trade representative, part of an agency called the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. And that same job involved being the U.S. ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva. So that was kind of a twofer.

When you did that, did you have to live in Geneva? I did for six years. Oh, yeah. We talked about that. Yeah. Yeah. So it was, we moved to Montana in 2003. I was born and raised in Wyoming and then lived out East for a while.

Uh, went to school out there, came back to Montana after I wrote the Revenant. That's when I quit my law firm job is after we sold the Revenant. I decided to come out, live in the West and be a writer. Move back home. Yeah. And my wife Tracy is from Livingston, Montana. I grew up in Wyoming. We decided for a number of years between Wyoming and Montana and ended up in Missoula. When you were in Wyoming, you were still in the Yellowstone Basin, right? Well, I was born in the Bighorn Basin in Lovell, Wyoming, and lived there until about third grade.

But that still counts as the Yelstone Basin. True, true enough. I think of it as Bighorn Basin. But- I'm saying you, because you were in the sort of broader drainage of where your book takes place. For sure. Yeah. Other side of the Bighorns, because the Powder River's on the eastern side of the Bighorns, but Lovell's on the western side.

But I looked up as a boy at the Bighorn Mountains, and those were kind of the mountains that sparked my initial imagination about all things Western mountain related. We're going to get into Ridgeline real deep, but it takes place at the, what's the closest town? The Fort Fetterman. Yeah. Today, it's the site of Fort Fetterman and the battlefield are between Sheridan and Buffalo. Was I telling you the story about someone I knew from that area who, when I mentioned the Fetterman massacre, Fetterman fight? I don't think you told me that. He's like, oh, brother, every year in school.

Yeah, if you're a local. Getting a bus and going out of that place. No, I. For the field trip. Well, in Lovell, we would go over to the Cody Museum. Oh, that's where your field trips were? Our field trip every year was to Cody. But of course that museum,

if you, if people haven't been there as one of the, there's three museums in Cody and there are some of the, they're really kind of Smithsonian quality museums. They're unbelievable. And that was another thing that really sparked my imagination as a boy, including the, uh,

original painting of, uh, Custer's last stand. Yeah. That they have there. By the German dude or by the, uh, original painting of, uh, Custer's last stand that they have there. By the German dude or by the. No, it's by, well, it's by Paxson. He's, uh, uh, the, the artist's name is Paxson. I don't know about his background.

He was, he lived in the US. Well, you know, there's a guy that like the guy that the, the, you know, the famous like Anheuser-Busch representation. That's a different one. That was German. Well, wait, no, it's not. Um, I think it may be a slightly different one. It looks, it's a different one. That was a German. Well, wait, no, it's not. I think it may be a slightly different one.

It looks, it's a, it's kind of similar layout. And you know the one called After the Fight. Is that the one that's in, on the battlefield side? Yeah, it's in the Olive. There's the one in the Olive in Miles City. Yep. Where Gus McCrae dies, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's mowing some dove.

Yeah. And people like write on it, graffiti. I've thought many times about going in there and just trying to strike a deal with them and get that damn, I want the whole wall. Yeah. And people like write on it, graffiti. I've thought many times about going in there and just trying to strike a deal with them and get that damn, I want the whole wall. Yeah. I like, I'll cut the wall out, put a new wall in.

Well. But it's, it's, they're massacring, it's, they're mutilating, it's the, it's a painting of, of them ransacking the battle site. Right. Right. It's a phenomenal painting. The one.

And then you look and it's like, you know, like people have written on there, like for a good time, call Jesse, you know. The one that was in, I think you're right, it's the Paxson one that was a Budweiser commercial in bars for decades at the, in the last quarter of the century. Look that up, Spencer. Along with a buffalo. I'm going to look that up. A mounted buffalo head.

I can answer the other thing we were talking about. So antique firearms and replicas of antique firearms do not fall under the National Firearms Act, even if manufactured after 1989. So modern versions of flintlocks, matchlocks, and percussion-fired guns do not require the involvement of an FFL. Told you. not require the involvement of an FFL. So there you go. Bush, like Anheuser-Busch bought Custer's last fight. The Paxson one or a different one? I'm trying to find out. They hung it all over bars and everything.

No, Cassilly Adams. Okay. Okay, so I'm looking at this right now. You know the guy named Curly that fought in the fight? One of the scouts of Custer? Yeah. Okay, here's an, I know we're not here to talk about Custer Battlefield, but there's an interesting story about this dude.

Is that Curly was a Crow. Curly was a Crow scout. Is he in the photo with the grizzly? No, that was Dole Knife, I think. Okay. That was a guy that was killed. I think that guy was killed and it rattled, not Custer, but rattled one of Custer's guys. I think he got shot in the head very early on. Yep. As they were riding into the camp.

Yeah. And like his, some of his, I don't know, according to to son of the morning star i think some of his brain matters splattered splattered on an officer and the officer never quite got yeah back to where he needed to get mentally curly either here's why there's like a lot of question about that. So the Anheuser-Busch buys his painting called Custer's Last Fight. And it was based on a Crow Scout named Curly's description of the battle. I gather there's like a little debate about whether Curly was there or not. Some people say that, see, some of his re-scouts and stuff, they knew what was going to happen the next day.

And they did a death ceremony. They knew what was coming. And Custer got pissed off that they were not all in or thought they were going to lose. Yeah, this isn't right. And some people are reportedly skinnied out the night before. Curly claims to have survived, that he was at the battle and got away. And he later met that guy, Gall.

Yep. A Sioux warrior named Gall. And Gall said to him, you must have turned into a bird that day because that's the only way you got out of there. Like wasn't buying it, that he had escaped. But, what were're talking about though. Uh, we were talking about the painting, the Paxson painting.

And then, yeah. Go ahead. Well, I was just saying. You remember what I was asking about. I think I was saying that, uh, we were talking about field trips as, as kids. Oh, that's right. Yeah. And, uh, that Paxson painting of the, of the Custer battle just really fueled my boyhood imagination of that whole era.

And yeah, and that museum, those museums in Cody are unbelievable. It's kind of, I'm a little envious of being able to, you know, to grow up like really amused or, you know, enthralled by mountain men and the Indian wars and to actually live there. Cause you know, if you're living in West Michigan and that's all you can think about, it's just, it all is very abstract. Well, there was a, uh, that was a cool thing growing up in, in Wyoming. And in fact, there was an old lady that lived next door to me when I was a boy in level, her name was Mrs. Weathersby and she was 90 years old. So this was in the 1970s. And she was the lady in the neighborhood who handed out vanilla wafer

cookies to the kids and told stories about her life. And she remembered as a little girl in Lovell, Wyoming, a mountain man named John Blue riding out of the Bighorn Mountains twice a year into Lovell, Wyoming to, to do his twice a year shopping before he, you know, uh, requisite work, you know, stocked up and went back out to his cabin in the Bighorns. So I love that even in my lifetime, I can almost touch some of those people who, who live that. And that's an amazing thing about that history is it's, it's not that long ago. Yeah, for sure. It feels, it feels fresher when you're in some of these areas that haven't been, that haven't had all the subsequent stories overlaid on the landscape too, you know. And the landscape in some of these

places hasn't changed that much. And I mean, that's one of the things I love about the Fetterman fight is compared to the Custer Battlefield. And I love the Custer Battlefield. It's haunting and amazing and a cool place to visit. But that valley has changed a lot more than the valley where the Fetterman fight took place. And there's just a lot more people that visit it. One of the things I love about the Fetterman battlefield is a lot of days you can go out there and wander the battlefield, miles of it, and not see any other people. Oh, is that right? And so it's really, it's not hard to imagine at

all. And it's, it's, it's a cool place. I went to some of the, I don't know if I ever told you, but for a while I was going to do a book about the Nez Perce war. Me too. Yeah. Yeah. Really? I did. I did a lot of traveling for it. I was going to do a book about the Nez Perce war. Me too. Yeah. Yeah.

Really? I did. I did a lot of traveling for it. I did too. I blew a whole summer on it, man. Yeah. That's interesting. I was starting to write that book when I got the last out of ship.

And had to abandon the book because I knew that I was not going to be able to finish it. So that was. Yeah. And then. You know, when he surrendered, you know, his famous, I will fight no more forever. Which may or may not have been what he said. I was, I was good. I was walking the whole damn thing.

I was going to walk that whole 1300 miles. And I, in my pack with a, I had a backpack and a pack raft. Wow. And I started out and did quite a bit of it. And I was going to call my book, I will walk no more forever. But. Well, that'd be the way to do it. But I eventually just lost the thread and gave up on it.

But either way, I went to a lot of those battle sites. Yeah. And they're not even like very effective. They're not even really interpreted. So you got to kind of look at, you got to sort of play historian at the sites and be like, I wonder if that's the mound they're talking about, or I wonder if that's the ridge they're talking about. I'm sure someone knows, but Little Bighorn is so well interpreted.

Yeah. And actually the Fetterman battlefield is a nice combination of being the way that it was, but having some interpretive guides. And I think the state of Wyoming has done a pretty good job on those guides, including by the way, giving both the US soldier perspective and also the native perspective in terms of how they were looking at it. And so it's, it's, it's pretty cool that they've managed to, to,

to mix it in, but still there's a lot of area for speculation about where specific things might've happened. And there's just a lot that is not really known at the end of the day about the battle itself. Once they wrote over that ridgeline, none of the, none of the whites survived.

And, uh, over that ridgeline. None of the whites survived. And there are lots of interesting accounts from native participants, but they're not all consistent. And so there's just a lot of room for speculation. We know how it ended, but in terms of what it was, I thought it was perfect for a novel because there is a lot we don't know. And so you've kind of got the major mileposts there, but there was plenty of space to kind of fill in what people were thinking, what specific things were happening over the course of the battle. And it just made it perfect, I thought, for fiction. Okay. Let's let it hang there for a minute because we got to cover a couple of things.

But oh, another thing. Do you still do the public policy for Amazon? I do. How do you do that plus all this? Or why? Well, in part because I've got kids in college. You know about making a living as a writer, which is up and down.

But yeah, I- Feels real good every couple of years. The publishing industry is not the fastest industry in America. And so things unwind slowly, even if you've got a bit of a tailwind. But so yeah, I still have a day job for Amazon Web Services. Michael, I hope you don't take offense to this. And it's a compliment, really.

Oh, he's going to offend me. I get worried about the question. Where's my interest meter? Where's my interest? I want to turn my interest dial way off. I know how this show works, though. There's usually an ambusher, too, someplace, so here it comes.

I mean it. I mean it. This is a compliment. For your title, writer, lawyer, policy analyst, U.S. trade rep, you look exactly like how I would imagine someone with those titles to look. It's perfect. Like he fits it all. Absolutely perfect. I have no idea what that means. You have to describe

that for the audience, though. He's got a wool vest. He's got some reading glasses. Yeah. Like Phil looks like an audio engineer. But I think Michael looks even more like a writer, lawyer, policy analyst, and U.S. trade rep. I don't know how to take that.

Thank you. It's a compliment. He can wear a lot of hats. You can picture him like a mean old guy yelling at you to get out of his yard. You can picture him as a writer. It's really satisfying to sit across from you with those titles. How old are you? We're probably the same age.

I'm 56. Oh, no, you've got a lot of years on me. But I'm glad that you thought we were the same age. How old are you? 47. Man the same age. I'm 56. Oh, no, you got a lot of years on me. Jeez, man. But I'm glad that you thought we were the same age. How old are you? 47. Man, I'm a decade older than you.

Really? Yeah, wow. Look at Spry, man. I'm jealous of that shit, man. I can see him fronting like an indie folk band, too. Can't you? Sure.

Yeah. Or yelling at kids to get out of his yard. Okay, check this out. We got a couple things. We're going to get back into Ridgeline Hardcore. We just got a couple things we got to go over. I always hear about this every now and then, but this is the – explain this, Spencer.

BruteX? Yeah. It's the 17-year hatch, and it's coming this year. This has been covered a lot, like by every big news source there is, CNN, Fox. So we better get on it. That's us, right? We have covered it. We covered it about two weeks ago.

Okay, go ahead. Lay it out. The Brood X hatch is coming, and it's all these cicadas. Now, I think – But why is it Brood X? I think there's like yeah i think there's like brood x i brood x brood x i i like this is like roman numeral 10 so i got you so this is like a generation whatever this is like a generation of them that they've been hanging out on the

ground as little eggs for 17 years yep and i think think something that other outlets have done a poor job of describing is where exactly this takes place at. Go ahead. When national news sources are covering it, it's like, oh, man, there's going to be the whole country, like the whole continent. That's not really the reality, though. It's basically like my understanding, pretty much every state that touches Kentucky and Tennessee, which is a lot of them, but that region has the brood X hatch coming. And this is really good for fish and really good for turkeys. Millions per acre. Yeah.

From New York to Georgia and west of the Mississippi, be the epicenter of our nation's capital, Washington, D.C. 20 to 25 cicadas per square foot. Here it's just expressing what it means for turkeys. Turkeys like to eat them. So they don't have to hunt around for food. And then raccoons like to eat them. So they get all gorged up on cicadas and don't

eat turkey eggs. So if you like to hunt jakes, next year's your year. If you like to hunt longbeards, 2023. I think for most folks, it was just going to be really annoying. Like trying to drive across a bridge that has a lot of lights on it or trying to play a softball game. And they're loud. In June.

They're incredibly loud. But I like that noise though, man. I do too. Yeah, we had them growing up. It's a cool sound. You know what thing that you um you know earlier i was talking about how your childhood was better than mine one thing that uh that now like living in the arid west you know uh when i go back home to michigan on a summer night the cacophony of sound at night

tree frogs but it's just like you go out into a swamp at night and like a canoe and it's, it's almost disorienting how loud it is at night there. You just don't have that in arid, in arid landscapes. Yeah. Once the, once the crickets quiet down. Yeah.

It's pretty quiet. Oh, it's just like. Yeah. In the jungle, like in, you know, in the Amazon stuff, it's even more, it's, it's almost like you's almost like you're like, shut up, shut up, shut up. Try to think for a minute. I associate cicadas with anxiety. When I was a kid, our cicadas showed up in late summer.

So like early to mid-August, you'd start hearing cicadas at night, and it's like, damn it. School's starting against you. Mom's going to take you shopping for school clothes. Football two-a-days are coming. Like, nothing good came with cicadas. You know, here at Meat Eater, we have a very modest vaccination incentive program. A hundred bucks.

I was insistent that we have a vaccination incentive program, but I wasn't able to get people rallied, and it eventually somehow settled at a hundred bucks. I got my hundred bucks. I was insistent that we have a vaccination incentive program, but I wasn't able to get people rallied and eventually somehow settled at a hundred bucks. I got my hundred bucks. Did you claim your hundred bucks? Yeah, I did. Good. Phil? Oh, yeah. Oh, that's phenomenal. Did you send in and get your hundred bucks? Yes. Oh, good.

Good, good, good, good. It's a good program. But not as good as this one. Well, no, you know, maybe dollar for dollar it is. So different people are doing all these different things that get people to get vaccinated. Free donuts, free milkshakes, free beer, free lamination of your vaccination card, a free ride to get vaccinated. Ohio's launching a million-dollar lotto.

Oh, yeah. People are lining up. People are vaccinating. They are lining up. That's all it took. the curve is just like a straight line yeah million bucks man but to enter you gotta get vaccinated uh maine this is great maine does um fish you can get a fishing license if you get vaccinated you get a hunting license if you get vaccinated you can get a hunting license if you get vaccinated. You can get a park pass if you get vaccinated. You can get a Maine State Park day pass. Who the hell would get the day pass when they could just get the pass?

Well, one's a wildlife park pass. The other one's a state park day pass. Get an L.L. Bean gift card. And then some other things that I don't really care about. Baseball tickets. And a race car ticket. Here's where this, again, is a little bit blown out of proportion. There's about 160,000 licensed hunters in Maine, and they are paying for up to 5,000 of these. So that doesn't go very far.

So is it kind of like a hurry up and get yours now kind of thing? I think so. Or hoping you don't look into the fine print right i saw you know a listener sent this in was talking about you're you're he said you're going to deprive maine of uh you're going to deprive maine's fishing game agency of three hundred thousand dollars in license sales but i don't really understand that because they're buying the licenses it It says the main Department of Health and Human Services will purchase up to 5,000 2021 hunting passes, licenses.

So I don't think they're depriving the state agency of all that revenue. Right, okay. So I think that the listener's gripe, but then he also points out, it's not a gripe because he points out this. COVID was so overwhelmingly positive for Pittman-Robertson funding because early on, everyone was getting armed up to get their neighbors, whatever they were going to do early in the pandemic. And then everybody started going out hunting and shooting all the time and buying all kinds of fishing equipment and hunting

equipment and taking up sport shooting because you just go off by yourself and didn't need to try to go to the whatever horde fest monsters rock whatever people used to go to they play outside now and so it's flooded the pitman robertson fund with. And so it's flooded the Pittman Robertson fund with conservation money. Yep. So it's like, uh, you know, if,

if they missed out on a few bucks here, it's still unbelievable amounts of firearm industry money that has gone into, um, you know, from a Pittman Robertson funding standpoint is the good old days of wildlife funding right now. And probably we'll continue to run that way for a number of years here with a lot of threats against gun ownership. That's not going to slow down.

Interesting paper came out about mountain lions. Explain this one, Spencer. You're good at explaining stuff. We covered this on our website, TheMeteor.com. You can go there and type in study finds mountain lions have an unexpected predator to read the whole thing. We'll touch on some of the main points.

It wasn't unexpected to me though. The headline didn't ring true to me. I think it's unexpected. Especially in like the abundance of it once you get into it. That was unexpected. Yeah. So,

this study took place in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem in northwestern Wyoming, about 900 square mile area. Yeah. Generally, like when you see the GYE, it's about the size of Indiana. Where they kind of lump in, you know. This specific location was selected because the researchers studying the lion population wanted there to both be wolves on the landscape and hunting allowed. Some of the studies in the past didn't have both of those factors when they were looking at mountain lion populations, but this had both those criteria. You mean they wanted to have wolves and human mountain lion hunting? Yes, in the same area. So that's how this area got selected. They noticed between the year 2000 and 2015, a 48% decrease in cougar populations.

To determine this, they use an integrated population model. Lion dens, abundance estimates for different animals, GPS, and VHF collar data. So you should take solace that this was very thorough in doing this. And they determined there were three factors that caused the cougar decline. Human hunting, wolves killing kittens,

and starvation. Now, the lead researcher, Mark Elbrock, said the big take home on this paper is that wolves have the strongest effect on their survival

and the abundance of mountain lions in the system. It's dramatic. Wol wolves are a power on the landscape we saw cats respond but we thought it was anecdotal the strength of the wolves effects surprised every one of us i've heard a couple other things related to this um remy warren one time was looking at a lion on a kill and a group of wolves came in and the lion just ran up a tree. Yep.

And they ate his thing. That was exactly something that they had observed. On the starvation front, it was a number of factors. One was the wolves had just knocked back elk populations in general. During this period, there was a 30% decline in

elk population. So that caused some of the starvation. The thing you just mentioned where they literally run them off kills. And then the other one, the big one, was they valued the elk population shift in where they were hanging out as a 70% shift in the location of the elk herd. So the wolves were blocking elk from mountain lions in two ways. This is a quote from Mark Elbrock, again, the lead researcher. One, by moving them into places where mountain lions were uncomfortable, like the wide open, and two, by literally chasing them off their kills.

So now, instead of the elk hanging out in the mountains and dark timber, wolves pushed them out of there into wide open spaces, which was a problem for mountain lions. I read a paper. I think she's going to be on soon, one of the people that was involved in this. Carmen Van Bianchi, she's coming on be on soon one of the people that was involved in this carvin carmen van bianchi she's coming on right she's uh she researches predators and we had her on we're talking about this thing where um the presence of wolves on the landscape how it shifts the prey base you know saying that it moves like the how white how white tails and mule deer it moves white tails out into out into more whitetail-y stuff. They head out in the open, you know, out in the flats more.

And it moves mule deer into more mule deer-ly stuff. They tend to go up, try to go up into the more craggy, goaty country. And whitetails go out, and it kind of emptied out more of the mid-range habitat. They were linking this to hunters reporting, seeing like so much fewer game. They were trying to, so much fewer game in the presence of wolves they're talking about that they're the hunter

human hunters haven't adjusted yet to the shift and they're going where they've always gone to find deer right but the deer aren't there anymore the deer have moved into new kinds of country another thing i remember reading about this though is uh i can't remember if it was speculation or not but someone was saying with lions losing their kills all the time they kill more stuff because they can't camp out on and eat it for three or four days it's like they get it it's gone they got to get something it's gone they got to get something it's gone and that when people look at the decline of big game populations in the presence of wolves that's like like another factor is that they're not able to kill something and eat it like they normally would. They lose it too quickly.

So on the unexpected front here, when we talk about the predation, only about a third of kittens survived until they were six months old. And then only a quarter ever made it to their first birthday. Wolf predation was the primary cause of their death. Now, the lead researcher again said this is the lowest survival rate ever reported for kittens anywhere. Hmm. And then he went on to say that the researchers would often find kitten parts strewn across the ground after a wolf kill, which he interpreted as wolves treating cats as competition. So they weren't just going in there like kill the cats and eat the cats.

They're just eliminating them off the landscape. Jordan Sillars, the writer of this article, being a good journalist, reached out to an independent third party, our buddy Jim Heffelfinger. And so what do you think of this study that was done? Because the study was funded, I believe, by Panthera, which is like a- The heavy metal band. Yeah, exactly. Like a cougar-

I know Panthera funded. Like a cougar conservation group. So Jordan asked Jim, he said, what do you think of this study? Like, did they get it right? Was this, did they have some bias? And Jim said it was interesting and it was solid from a scientific standpoint. And he really appreciated the discussion portion of the paper and how it remained reasonable without speculation. But he said it's really important to not ignore the 30% elk population decrease. That's like the most important part of this

whole thing. I don't, I don't follow. Jim was saying that. Oh, I follow. That, that can't be like emphasized enough that the wolves knock back elk herds by 30%. Yeah. And that's like sort of the important part.

You reduce, you reduce lion food by. Right. The starvation element. Mm-hmm. So that's like sort of the important part. You reduce lion food by. Right. The starvation element. So what's next now? This is maybe just like the new reality for that area, wherever wolves and mountain lions exist. And this is probably what it looked like pre-European contact or closer to it than it was before. Overall, there's probably just going to be less cats in the area, but more cats hanging out in open spaces where elk currently are. In Osborne Russell's journal, in the end he has these little summations of wildlife.

I think he says that wolverines are common. Tells all that about. Probably pretty effective predators, right? And, uh. What happened to them? Yeah. They like wolves. Eating all that.

Eating all those carcasses, all those just, you know, carcasses on the landscape. I don't know. Send that idea over to Halflefinger, see what he thinks about that. Yeah. Uh, Spencer keeps reporting on people rescuing birds that die, and it's always so sad.

There's always a dark twist ending. It's like someone rescues a bird, brings it to the rescue place, and then we're like, what happened to the bird? Oh, it died. So, our friend Greg Lemon from Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks wanted to point out an actual raptor that was saved. A happy ending.

It's very cute. A rough-legged hawk got hit by a car, had blood in both eyes, went to this raptor facility Spencer's always talking about, and it's fine. No way. Anything you'd fine. No, wait. Anything you'd like to add, Spencer, instead of your macabre raptor dying stories all the time? He was also sharing that FWP rehabilitates raptors.

Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. I'm sorry. So they did that. Yeah, they did that. Oh, I thought they did that in conjunction with the, oh, this was their own rehabilitation center.

But the spectrum of what they rehabilitate is wide. He said like all the way up to bear cubs. And then in this last week, they had a house sparrow come in as well. Hmm. Really? Yeah. Didn't have a BB in it, did it?

House sparrow died before he had a chance of euthanasia. Yeah. You might want to talk to my boy about that. I don't know. Okay, good. Sorry about that, Greg. I didn't mean to take credit away from your outfit. Now, this is fascinating.

Michael, you got anything to add about any of this stuff? Are you cool? I'm cool. Okay. These guys did a survey. This is the last thing we're going to talk about. British International Market Research and Data Analytics Company did a survey this last thing we're gonna talk about a british international market research and data analytics company did a survey of people like asking people of like what wild animals they

feel like they could whoop in a fight just americans oh just america 39 of americans feel that they'd be bested by a goose in a fight. Yeah. So most Americans, an overwhelming number of Americans think that they would best a rat. Slightly fewer people could best a house cat. Slightly fewer could best a dog or goose. More people felt that they could whoop a dog than an eagle. Depends if it was a large dog or a medium dog.

People were like, it goes like, I'd be able to whoop a medium dog. I'd be a little less likely to whoop an eagle, but I'd be a lot less likely to whoop a big dog. Yeah, that's a respectively 49% think that they can beat a medium-sized dog. This is like hand-to-hand. I forgot to say, it's hand-to-hand combat. No weapons involved. Hand-to-hand combat. A weird one is that people think they can whoop a chimpanzee and you're not going to whoop a chimpanzee.

27 27% of Americans think they can whoop a chimpanzee. Am I reading that right? I need to put my cheaters on. 17. Oh, sorry. The one that's jumping out at me is elephant. Enhance Say that six? 8% of Americans think The one that's jumping out at me is elephant. In hand.

Say that six, 8% of Americans. They think they could defeat an elephant in hand. What are we even doing here? That's true, man. What you do is you grab him by that big snout and pinch that snout off. 12% of Americans know they could whoop a wolf. Nine.

More Americans think they could whoop a crocodile. Nine, more Americans think they could whoop a crocodile than an elephant. Somehow, Americans think they are better off whooping a polar bear than a grizzly. The person that shared this with us blames the Coca-Cola commercials

for cutifying polar bears. Ron McGill is the lead zoologist from zoo miami and he does this weekly hit on a sports show that i listen to and listeners can call in and ask him questions and for the last five years the most common question he gets is like what would win in a fight between a crocodile and a polar bear what would win a fight between a gorilla and an elephant? Stuff like that. His last hit, which was a few days ago on the

episode, they had basically like ran him through this whole list. They're like, what did people get right? What'd they get wrong? Like, what's the best fight from this list? And he had said the thing people got wrong the most would be what you said, Steve, chimpanzee. He's like, you, you would not stand a chance against a chimpanzee.

They didn't see Planet of the Apes, apparently. Yeah. Those things play for keeps, too, man. Ron, can you put it in context? Why couldn't we beat a chimpanzee? He's like, okay, well, a chimpanzee with no effort at all can just rip apart a coconut. He's like, that would be your skull. No problem.

They just have unbelievable strength. You ever see those chimpanzees, and this is disgusting. This made me not like chimpanzees. I used to be pro-chimpanzee. You ever see that footage of them ripping apart that poor little monkey and eating it? Yeah. They catch a little monkey and tear him

limb from limb and eat him alive. That might have been on Nature's Metal. No, it was on something different I watched. I feel like they've shown some gruesome chimpanzee release. They go for eyes and genitals immediately, like you're done. And just think about this.

Picture there's a chimpanzee, and you clock back and punch him as hard as you can possibly punch him. There's no way you can knock out a chimpanzee. They also asked Ron, they're like, what would genuinely be the best fight on the list? Like, what's like a 50-50 fight between a human and one of these animals? Do you want to guess what it was?

Well, this would be whooping a medium-sized dog. 49% of people think they're in. He said kangaroo. He said a kangaroo would genuinely be like a good tear down knockout fight that's one of my favorite videos of all time you ever see that australian guy that the cold cocks that kangaroo you ever seen this yeah yeah greatest video ever because he's got his dog yeah he's got his dog and they get no they they the kangaroo like looks like it's squaring off he squares off in a boxer stance and hits it so hard

that it turns its face about 180 degrees the man hits the kangaroo what is the situation that they're even like fighting in the wood they're pig hunting and he comes

and a kangaroo it's the weirdest thing yeah I gotta take my glasses off explain this so if you go to YouTube or whatever

look up like man punching kangaroo my kids watch this 5,000 times when we got onto it. All of a sudden, the guy bails out of his truck and runs up and there's a kangaroo with its arm around a dog's neck, holding the dog standing there. Oh,

wow. Holding it under in a headlock, a kangaroo with a dog in a headlock. That's pretty sophisticated. The guy runs up to it and the kangaroo drops the dog and puts up his dukes i'm not kidding you puts up his dukes the guy reflexively goes into a boxer's stance they do like a little pirouette or whatever and he hauls back and hits that kangaroo so hard wow turns the gives the kangaroo pretty much whiplash.

And then the guy squares off like it's going to be another punch. And then him and his dog walk away. Huh, so he's rescuing his dog. Wow. Greatest video ever. Rod said that would be a genuinely good fight. And it could go either way.

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. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high-end titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX 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, 24 K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. You were always talking about, uh, we're always talking about on X you're on the meat eater podcast. Now you, um, you guys in the great white North can, can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services

handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the

OnX Club, y'all. You want to see me watch this transition? Did you know about this transition that's in here? I may have written it, but... No. No. Because it's in the graphic. You know what they use?

Oh, yeah. Right. The image for the 6% of people that think they could whoop a grizzly is a scene from The Revenant. Yep. And that was based off Michael Punk's book, The Revenant, and he's sitting right here to my left. Wow.

Base site you, Michael. Look at that. Top that. Hugh Glass was not unarmed, though. That was one thing. He had a knife. He had a knife. He had a knife.

Okay. Let's start with this question about... No, I can't decide where to start with Ridgeline. I got too quick. You decide. It's guest choice. Okay. Give us a quick overview of what happened.

Yep. Oh, can I read this? Yes, I think. Well, I want to read the, what do you call the quote in the beginning of a book? Epigraph. Here it is. It's a beauty. It's a real beauty.

The full story of what happened in that brief hour of bloody carnage at high noon under the wintry sky of December 21st, 1866 will never be known. It's a pretty good lead in. It's good. Yeah. And as I said, kind of opens a door for fiction. Yeah. So tell us what happened that day. Sure.

And just like roughly, and then we're going to get into the lead up, like why it happened. But just give a brief overview. And then my next question, you can decide which one to tackle first. How do you decide on historical fiction versus nonfiction? So I'll answer them in order. Okay. Briefly what happened at high noon on- That wintry day. of cavalry and infantrymen out of Fort Phil Kearney, away from the safety of the fort,

and were skillful enough as decoys to lead them over a ridgeline about two and a half miles away from the fort. They were not supposed to go over. They were not supposed to go over that, and it turns out for good reason, because on the other side of that ridgeline, very much to their surprise, is a force that probably numbered around 2,000 combined Cheyenne, Lakota, Arapaho warriors led by Red Cloud. And into that trap, these cavalrymen and infantrymen fell and were wiped out to the man. Eighty-one men killed.

It was the worst defeat. Mostly by arrows. Mostly by arrows. It was the worst defeat in U.S. military history for a decade until the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Hmm. I don't remember if it was mentioned in the book, but I've seen it elsewhere that the decoys, as part of their strategy, were mooning the U.S. soldiers.

Is that something you found to be true? I've read that before. I'm not sure what I think about that, whether that actually happened. I mean, who knows? They probably were doing a lot of things because they kind of led the cavalry that was out in front along for quite a distance. Yeah, you got to make them mad. You got to piss them off.

I'm not sure that that was the – it's a good story. I'm not sure that that piece of it actually happened or not. They certainly were successful in making them angry and getting them to chase. And in defiance of direct orders that they had not to go over this particular ridgeline. So whatever they did, it worked. And I kind of play with that in the book. But to your question of why fiction versus nonfiction, I've written both. This is my second novel. The first novel was The Revenant and Ridgeline is the second. And I've written two narrative nonfiction books. And for me, one of the things that made me decide

to do a novel versus nonfiction is that I think this is a story where there's so much that is unknown that it really, we know a lot about the context, all the things that happened before and after, but when it comes to the battle itself, there's a lot of, a fair amount of mystery there. And it just made it perfect to me for a, a, uh, a fictionalized version as opposed to something like the story of the mining disaster in Butte that I wrote about where there were seven daily newspapers in Butte, Montana at the time of the disaster, all of which were covering this incident and, uh, government reports about it, et cetera, et cetera. You just had all sorts of, of, uh, historical material to work with where you didn't need as much of the fictionalized piece.

So that was kind of one thing that played into it. I could see that being warranted in this case. I hadn't thought about it that way, particularly if you look at Crazy Horse's involvement. I don't know if you've ever read Larry McMurtry. There was a series where novelists would write these bios of famous Americans. And Larry McMurtry, most famous, series where like a novelist would write these bios of famous Americans and Larry McMurtry, um, you know,

most famous, he wrote Lonesome Dove. Yeah. Uh, he wrote the Crazy Horse one. Yeah. Which is very short. Very short.

And it begins with Larry McMurtry basically saying, yeah, I don't know. Well, that's the thing. It was like, basically it was summation.

It was like, I'll tell you what we don't know. And that's kind of what the book goes like. And there's not even a photograph of Crazy Horse because he never allowed himself to be photographed. So unlike a lot of the most famous Native American leaders, there are photographs. Red Cloud, for example, there are lots of photographs. Crazy – or Sitting Bull. Crazy Horse, there's no photograph.

He never allowed himself to be photographed. He's so mysterious. Very mysterious. They took his body. His people took his body. No one knows where they put the body. It's not even clear who stabbed him. I think that there's like a lot of what happened at a time

of his death. He was in Nebraska, correct? Yes. And he was in military. He was on a reservation. He was under some kind of house arrest. He was being returned to, uh, to confinement. He had left one reservation and run off to another one in order to take care of his, of his wife. He was captured, brought back. He saw that he was going to be, uh, imprisoned and, uh, he resisted. And the story that to me makes, I think there's the most support for

is that he was grabbed by two native policemen and then stabbed with a bayonet by a US soldier. Oh, okay. I know there is, when I've read about it, it was that there is like some historical disagreement about who gave the death blow. But I remember Ian Frazier writing that his disdain for the white man was so strong that even after he was stabbed and he was dying, he refused to be laid in the bed. Exactly. He wanted to lay on the ground. Yep. And died in the company of his father that evening after being stabbed. He used to be laid in a bed. Exactly. He wanted to lay on the ground. Yep. And died in the company of his father that evening after being stabbed.

And then presumably somewhere within 20, 30 miles of there, his body is hidden. You would think that, I mean, I guess we don't know, but that's what you would think. Hmm. So point being about that is it allows, I can see that there's reward and risk in taking the approach you take. Sure. Because you're taking a stab at it, right? For sure. And it's an informed stab, but it's, I shouldn't use the word stab because you stabbed death. You're taking a, i don't know a guess yeah yeah for sure and uh and i actually the book doesn't cover that part of crazy horse's life it it it pretty much stops with uh with the the fetterman fight it doesn't go forward the 10 years but yeah personality though that you

establish a personality but for sure and and and i grapple with that a lot as a writer. And I think there's even writing fiction that there's a huge responsibility to get the history right. And I take that super seriously. And I think it's especially important today when, frankly, I feel like as a nation, we're losing our grip on fact versus fiction. No, we just have two versions. In a lot of different capacities. At least there's one, now there's two. Maybe in the future there'll be three. Maybe. But I think that as I, for the books that I write,

I want to not do anything that would lead a reader to a conclusion that I think is not accurate about what happened historically or about what people were like. And so in writing about Crazy Horse and all the other characters, good and bad, I've had a real sense of responsibility to kind of do the research on the characters in order to kind of have the best sense that I could about what they were like as people. And then to write

a story that is consistent with that, even recognizing that you're making up lots of stuff. I mean, in a novel, you write about what people are thinking. We don't know. You're writing about conversations that they had. We don't know. But I hope that I've done this book in a way that is true to history and to the characters. In the end, in a second here, I want to get to sort of the lead up to this fight. But in the end you do, like you have some people that you paint as inept. Yep.

Yes, people like, I guess, not villain isn't the right word, but. Some of them. Yeah. I would call them villains. Some real questionable characters in the book. And then in the end, you have some notes. Well.

That lay out. I take an additional step. That lay out your case. Yeah. That lay out your case. Yeah. That lay out your case. I take an additional step at the end of Ridgeline, and I did the same thing at the end of The Revenant, where I have a section that is historical notes. And basically, any place where I explicitly wrote something that I knew was not correct, I tell the reader about that.

And then I give sources that the reader can use to go do additional nonfiction reading. And again, I feel like when I read a book or see a movie, I always wonder, did that really happen or not? And so at the end of my book, I have a section that kind of attempts to answer that question. Yeah. Okay. Oh, sorry. On themedia.com, we ran an article last year called The Gen revived the new age of Westerns. And we sort of talked about how there's been a shift like since the 1950s when Westerns had a lot of clean violence, bright colors, gunshots that never bled. And then you get into the nineties and there's like sort of, uh, it becomes very action hero. We, and then in like the two thousands and now it's like sort of dark.

Everybody's got PTSD. There's a lot of character development and there's not near as much violence. And if you are like a violent person, they're like kind of the dumb person when they're loose with gunfire. And there's just been like this huge shift over the last 70 years in the whole genre of Westerns.

Has there been any kind of similar shift with like historical fiction or not? That's a great question. I'm not sure that I can answer it in a very generalized way because I think people write so many different kinds of historical fiction ranging from stuff that's just barely influenced by history to, I hope I'm at the other end of the spectrum in terms of wanting to tell a very entertaining story, but having it be as true to history as possible. So I do think it's interesting how, I would say it slightly differently in terms of how I would characterize Westerns. I think the Western motif is something that's at the core of the American soul. And I think every decade, every generation uses the Western in part to

hold the mirror up to the era that they live in in their time. And so 50s Westerns reflected that kind of 50s mentality about good and evil. 70s Westerns. The antihero. The antihero during the Vietnam War reflected a much different view of what a hero even was in a Western context. Something like, a movie like Unforgiven, to me,

is all about violence. And it happened to be at a time. A happened at a time a nation in doubt a nation in doubt you know what is the what is the role of violence what does violence mean and so i think every every era kind of sees western takes different lessons from western history and and i think i do that too so so you think historical fiction like sort of follows that same thing a little bit it's it's a reflection of the era that it comes out in? I think that probably ends up being true, is that, look, we all see everything through our prism of our present experience. And I think if you're trying to be true to history, you try and fight against that a little bit because you want to not be completely distorted by your current vision. But I think that it's tough to get around that.

When you're developing characters, do you kind of envision them or like feel them yourself? Like, what's your process to pick and choose things that may be in a historical account and meshing that with, you know, cause you get into kind of like the psychology of who everyone is. How do you feel through that? So first of all, one of the things I loved about this story is that there's such an incredibly diverse cast. And I mean, the Revenant was really about one guy mauled by a grizzly and there's some people who he goes after, but it's really kind of a one man show, which is an interesting survival story. This story has a sprawling cast. And the West, one of the things

people don't often realize about the West is just how incredibly diverse it was. And, you know, even the diversity within the tribes is incredible. Among the Lakota, just in this story, you have the Minakauju, you have the Oglala. Among the Cheyenne, you have the Northern and Southern Cheyenne, you have the Crow, you have the Arapaho. And so there's a huge diversity just- With language barriers, which you get into, which I hadn't- Exactly. That hadn't occurred to me before. I guess maybe I just hadn't thought about it. Difficulty communicating.

Sure. And that's just the tribes. And then you have, you know, the role of women in the frontier is a lot more pronounced in this era than people realize. One of the most important jobs I ever had for my writing career was when I was in high school and college. I worked summers at Fort Laramie National Historic Site for the National Park Service. And I dressed up. This was the greatest boy job ever. I dressed up every day in 1876 cavalry uniform. And I talked to tourists about in 1876 cavalry uniform. And I, uh, talked to tourists about

the history of the West twice a day. We fired an 1841 mountain howitzer. Um, you know, I learned all about the guns. It was, it was an incredible job. One of the things I learned in that job, first of all, the U S uh, government did not do a very good era job in that era of talking about the role of Native Americans in Western history. One thing they did do a fairly decent job of at that time is they talked about the role of women on a fort. And one of the roles that they talked about in detail was laundresses, because each one of these forts had a community of women whose job was to do the soldiers' laundry. And there was an incredible culture that built up around those women. And so in my book, I portray one of the characters, Janie White, who's a laundress at Fort Phil Kearney in 1866.

So your question was, how do you pick characters? And this one, the hard thing was, was deciding who not to pick because there were so many compelling characters to me. Um, you know, none more so than, than crazy horse who, for the reasons we talked about, uh, including the fact that he's such a, there's such a, an, an, an aspect of mystery around him made him just fascinating to me. The soldiers, there's incredible conflict between the officers and then between the officers and the enlisted men. The soldiers themselves are largely made up of German and Irish immigrants who might have signed up for the army because they want to learn how to speak English, for example, if you're the Germans. And all of a sudden they end up out in this God forsaken Western frontier. Surprise, surprise,

there's women at the fort in 1866, both in the form of officers' wives, because the officers brought their families with them, which is surprising to a lot of people. Oh, for sure. And laundresses. I was surprised to read that. Yeah. I mean, you know, think about where. Oh, for sure. And laundresses. I was surprised to read that book. I didn't know that. You know, think about where they're sitting in that day.

It's the most dangerous spot on the planet. And these officers are bringing their families with them. Yeah. And all your husbands ride out one day and. Yeah. And all these people are interacting with each other in the midst of this incredibly stressful period in history. And to me, that just was inherently dramatic and

interesting. Have you ever read, I can't remember the name of it. There's a really good book about it's a history of Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion to September 10th, 2001. No. Okay. This battle is what day? December 21? December 21, 1866. Give me what was going on up till December 20, 1866. A little background. So I love this part of the story as well, because there's just this incredible, perfect storm of events that come together to create this moment of conflict. And here's, here, you'll be interested in this. If you're really setting the historical stage, you know, what is, what's happening in a massive way is the floodgates are kind of opened on American immigration West. And, and I love this confluence of events. So 1846, the US and the United Kingdom

enter a treaty that gives Oregon, that settles that Oregon will be part of the United States. So 1846, Oregon becomes legally American. That was like the last piece of the puzzle, right? Not quite. And here's the other one. Because the war with Mexico had already- Not quite. Okay.

So 1846, US gets Oregon from the UK. 1847, Brigham Young establishes a settlement in Salt Lake City. 1848, the U.S. signs the treaty that ends the Mexican-American War. So it's 1848 when California becomes American. And two weeks after they signed that treaty with the Mexicans at Sutter's Mill in California, they discover gold. And then you have the 49ers with the gold rush.

Gotcha. So in that three-year period, you have Oregon, California, and Salt Lake City just sort of saying, come West. Yeah. And people started doing it. And then they said, and get rich. And get rich. Yeah. And, you know, but what happens for a while, basically between, you know, the late 1840s and 1866, the era that I'm writing about, is most people are going across.

They're getting across the middle part of the country as quickly as they can. They just want to get to California or Oregon or Salt Lake City. Was that the time in which they would refer to it as the Great American Desert or something? Yes, exactly. And so the first thing that the government does in 1851 is they sign a treaty with the tribes that creates a travel corridor that's basically the Oregon Trail. But the 1851 treaty says to the tribes, you can have everything north of the Platte River, north of the Oregon Trail.

With a treaty like that, what are they specifying? They're specifying that people can pass through unmolested, or are they actually saying, here's a little buffer we don't want anybody to go into? Mostly pass through unmolested or are they actually saying like, here's a little buffer we don't want anybody to go into? Mostly pass through unmolested. Okay. They say, here's the road that you will allow settlers to use. They allowed them to set up forts along the road to defend the trail. But they said to the tribes, everything north of the North Platte is yours.

And they tried to kind of divide it up. Meaning like we'll never touch it. Yes. No interest. Yes. Yeah. And then what happens is the gold, the placer gold, the easy gold runs out in California by the late, by the early 1850s. And so all those guys who went out to California to get rich on gold start coming back to the middle of the continent. And there start to be gold strikes in places like, uh, like Nevada and Colorado, and then in 1862 in Montana.

And what happens when they strike gold in Montana is all these gold miners start peeling off of the Oregon Trail and going north up to Montana to get to Bannock City and Virginia City and the other gold strikes. And when they do that, when those miners start peeling off the Oregon Trail, they're violating the 1851 treaty, which has given all of that to the tribes. And so it creates this conflict. And by 1866, and this is what sometimes is called the Bozeman Trail, and I think was more commonly then called the Montana Road, that the Bozeman Trail goes right through the middle of the Powder River Valley. time when there's conflict between a treaty and the desire to go get gold is they try and in their most benign form they try and renegotiate the treaty with the tribes and say oh now we want to go up there sign a new treaty and so in the summer of 1866 i.e uh six months before the battle that this book is about. At Fort Laramie, they bring the tribes together, some tribes together, because this is a bone of contention as to which tribes actually signed the treaty.

But in the summer of 1866, the U.S. government signs a new treaty that basically says they can travel through the Powder River Valley and build three forts between Fort Laramie and the gold fields in Montana. What do they give as compensation? For that treaty, I can't remember if they, because what they did in 1851 is they said, we'll give you $50,000 worth of annuities every year. And they would come out with wagons full of arrowheads and blankets and metal pots. They did some kinds of like roll like cattle and stuff into that, right? Yeah. Although I don't think the cattle was as common for those annuities.

I don't know if there was an annuity agreement in 1866 or not. But when they do an annuity like that, they would say basically in perpetuity, we'll truck out and drop off at some location X goods. And the tribes would come in annually and collect their annuities. That was- And that was meant to be like- Forever. But what they do in 1866 is they find, and this is part of the misconception of the US government for a long time, certainly then, but even now in terms of wanting to think of the tribes as being monolithic entities. They wanted the Lakota to be France because they were used to having negotiations

between the United States and France, and you would get each country's diplomats together and you'd sign a treaty. And the Lakota, the tribes, the Lakota representatives that they signed treaties with, and then the other representatives that they signed the treaty with in 1866, oftentimes didn't even live in the part of the country that was being given away in the treaty. So those tribes that would sign the treaty, they didn't, it was not an issue for them to sign a treaty saying you can have the Powder River Valley because that's not where those tribes lived. But if you're Red Cloud who lives in the Powder River Valley, who didn't sign that treaty,

then you can imagine that that didn't go over well. But here's the thing that confuses me a little bit though. The Powder River Valley, where the fight takes place, wasn't that supposedly, that wasn't even Lakota ground. Hadn't they agreed that that was the Crow? Not, it was more ambiguous than that. Okay. And so, and there certainly was fighting

between the, among many of the tribes, including between the Lakota and the Crow, very famously, but also between the Lakota and the Shoshone, for example, who lived predominantly on the other side of the big horn. Like historic, like fighting that predates, yeah. Yeah.

Skirmishing or whatever that predates that. And, and the, the, the notion, I mean, the notion that, uh, tribes had defined, uh, very specifically defined territories is very much an, uh, something that I think the U S government wanted to believe because that made it more convenient to negotiate these treaties. But that's not the way that the tribes thought about it. Not to say that they didn't have hunting territories that they would defend, lands that they would defend from other tribes, the Lakota versus the Crow or the Lakota versus the Shoshone. But it was not something that was agreed to in the sense that the U u.s government wanted to think about and so when they try when the u.s government tries to impose this notion of a treaty on the tribes with specifically defined borders and uh you know the notion that one tribe can can sign that on behalf of of another tribe just didn't it didn didn't say well. Saying stuff like this creek, that river, that mountain ridge. Exactly. And so, and in fact, what happens in the summer of 1866 is Red Cloud is at Fort Laramie as part of these negotiations. And in the middle of those negotiations, Colonel Carrington, who I write about in the book, marches into Fort Laramie from Nebraska with 300 troops. And the Lakota find out that his mission

is to go build forts in the Powder River Valley. This is before a treaty has even been signed, even a treaty that they don't like. And so Red Cloud says, screw this, I'm out of here. Like, I thought we were here to negotiate, but it's- You've already decided. Yeah, I got you. And Red Cloud leaves. And that was, because that was an area that he had spent his life in. Yes.

Yeah. And so he sees that, you know, the game was fixed and it's not a real negotiation. And he leaves. After he leaves, other tribes sign a treaty saying you can go occupy the Powder River Valley. Tribes that don't live there. And so that's the setup when you ask what's the setup for uh for december 21st 1866 that's the setup is a couple of decades in which the floodgates have just been uh opened wide in terms of of eastern americans going west uh a history of treaties that have been established and then

violated, and a very recent treaty that is agreed to without the participation of the tribes that live in the land that is subject to the treaty. And then this Carrington guy heads north with none other than Jim Bridger. Jim Bridger. And I could not believe this when I started doing research on this because I love Jim Bridger. And you know-

He was in your first book. And he's a 19-year-old naive greenhorn in the Revenant. And by the time of this book, 1866, he's a 66-year-old legend of the West and truly a legend of the West. I mean, he is famous in his own time. The soldiers are in awe of him because he's famous as an incredible Western scout. And so, yeah, the Army hire Jim Bridger to scout for them in the Powder River Valley in this campaign in 1866.

And not only Jim Bridger, but for mountain men aficionados out there, they also hire James Beckworth, who is a incredibly famous mixed race scout, born a slave with a white father and a black slave mother, freed by his white father as a boy. And both Bridger and Beckworth go out and are part of the original 1823 Rocky Mountain Fur Company expedition that goes out that I write about in the Revenant. And so these two guys who are both in their sixties at this point are, and legends in their own time are scouting for the U S army. One of the things talk about, uh, fiction and why I wrote this as a novel, what happens in real life is Colonel Carrington, the commanding officer of this army group, dispatches Bridger and Beckworth to go figure out where the Indians are. And so there's literally a moment that takes place in the fall of 1866 where Jim frickin'

Bridger and James frickin' Beckworth are riding across the prairie together for two months looking for the tribes and imagining the conversations that those two guys were having, which I try and do in the book. Remember that movie, Drugstore Cowboys? Yeah. They're always like, the things we've seen, Bob. Well, and imagine what they've seen. I mean, they came west in 1823 with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and are part of literally one of the very first commercial fur operations in the 1820s.

And they ride out the whole fur trade era until 1840. invents himself and sets up a fort, uh, that ends up being right on, uh, on the Mormon trail to, to Salt Lake city and makes a ton of money selling provisions to immigrants, uh, on the, on the Oregon trail. And then by the 1860s, he's scouting for the U S or he's making his, his living as a, as a scout for the U S Army. But the history that he's seen is phenomenal to think about. And you paint him as being, and I buy it, but you paint him as becoming conflicted about the changes in the West. Well, I thought about that a lot. And I think, well, we talked a little bit about this when I was here before.

I think for some of those guys like Bridger and Beckworth, they must have been conflicted because their world was changing so much. And the world that and i think there must have been a lot of i think they must have questioned themselves about whether that was exactly the world that they wanted the west to be did they really want civilization yeah if you look at it from a abundance of game yeah oh i mean it's on like they were seeing they're witnessing like here there are all these decades they've been living off these like incomprehensible herds of buffalo. That's vanishing. Already. Along the trail, especially. Yeah. Harder, harder to find. Decimation of the beaver. And then just people, man. Yeah. And so I think, and I also just think as you get older, you're more reflective about things generally and your life and your role. And it's not that I think that Bridger suddenly had a massive conversion and turned away from his earlier life. I don't think

that's what happened. But I think there must have been moments lot there must have been moments where he he asked himself questions and they and i play with that in the book so what do you think the draw was for bridger to participate in this like strictly the money or something else um i think a lot of it was probably making a living and look he was a his living as he was a scout and uh i think he must have been proud that they would need to rely on him and want to rely on him as as much as they did i i i think he might have had some uh some antipathy towards the lakota in part because his the tribes that that he had, uh, married into and spent the most time with were the, were the Shoshone who were historical enemies of the, of the Lakota and the Cheyenne. So I think. Who'd shot him in the back with an arrow? That was a black feet,

right? That was the black feet, I believe. Yeah. Uh, back in the twenties. Yeah. Um, and so look, I'm sure it was, I'm sure there were lots of things going on. And I think people sometimes try and oversimplify how people make decisions. And I try not to do that because I think if we think about our own lives and how we make big decisions, there's usually lots of different things at play. And I don't think there was just one thing at play for Bridger. So Bridger helps them identify, or maybe they've already identified a fort site. Yeah. It's not entirely clear how they decide exactly where the forts are going to be. But talk about that spot. Well, one thing I'll say about Bridger and one

decision he was involved in is Bridger told the army not to go up to Powder River Valley. Oh, okay. I don't remember this. Because Bridger told them to go up the other side of the Bighorns because that's where the Shoshone were, who were more friendly to the U.S. government. And he said if you go up the Shoshone side of the Bighorns, you won't have to fight. But it was longer. And there was such, it took like, I don't know,

10 or 20 days longer if you went on the Eastern side of the Bighorns. And so they were so eager to get to the gold fields that they just wouldn't accept a shorter, a longer route. Hold on a minute now. Wouldn't that be the Western side of the Bighorns? I'm sorry. The longer route was the Shoshone were on the Western side. Western side. Yeah, absolutely. On the Western side of the Bighorns. And it was the Powder River Valleys on the eastern side of the Bighorns. And Bridger told them, go up the western side where the Shoshone are.

You won't have to fight. And the army said, we don't want to take the extra time. And so they foisted a treaty on tribes and went up the Powder River side. And that's what led immediately to the conflict. So that's the one thing I know about where Bridger specifically advised them. I don't know about the individual fort sites once I got on the Powder River side. And they pick a spot. They pick a spot.

You guys have probably been in this part of the country. It's beautiful. These cricks that run off the Bighorn into the Powder River Valley are just – they're timbered and they're green and there's these crystal clear cricks that run off the Bighorn. And you can see why they think that this is a good spot. And this spot where Fort Phil Kearney is, is beautiful. Great water, grass for their stock, especially because they were driving a herd of a thousand cattle. They weren't feeding their horses on, the army didn't feed their horses on grass, but they needed grass for their cattle. There's timber to build a fort with. It's a great Only problem is it's dead center in the middle of Lakota home land and hunting territory. You mentioned that they're packing with, you got to kind of get a picture of what this must look like coming across the landscape.

Yeah. Driving a thousand cattle. They have sawmills. Yep. I mean, they have. They are coming to stay. They're like everything you would need to establish a city. So this is not like a 50s movie where there's 100 cavalrymen out on a patrol.

This is a massive caravan, a massive wagon train that includes hundreds of soldiers, both cavalry and infantry. It includes hundreds of Conestoga wagons bringing supplies, including, as you point out, a sawmill that they construct on the site in order to mill the logs to build the buildings that they're putting up. It includes a herd of a thousand cattle, which they intend, and this doesn't work out very well for them, they're intending to use as their winter food supply. And this is one of the things that must have been most striking to the Lakota, is they see that there are women and children as part of this group, which meant that they weren't on a patrol.

It meant that they were coming to establish a town or a city. And that's exactly what they did. They built this massive fort. And Fort Phil Kearney is huge. You can visit the site today. It was burned by the tribes after the end of this war. But the area that they enclosed in the stockade enclosed 13 acres. So it's huge.

And then inside of this walled area, they built buildings. But it didn't look like the kind of small trading post fort that we kind of sometimes have in our mind's eye. This is a massive fortification. Can you explain what the army wood train is that plays a role in this? Sure. So the daily life at Fort Filcarney in this era basically involved the mission of the fort of this army in the early days is to build the fort. They're not even supposed to really be out looking to fight the tribes. They're supposed to be building the fort and establishing a base. And then they are presumably going to go out in the spring and fight. And so every day what they do is they send out what they call the wood train, which was a caravan of wagons. And they were about three miles away from the good timber.

And they wanted the fort not to be right up against the timber because they wanted it to be more open for defensive purposes. They got cannons. They got cannons and they want to be able to use the cannons, which they did. So every day a wood train that was manned by soldiers would go out three miles to where the timber was and they would cut trees down and then they would haul those trees back to the fort and they would mill those into either the logs they used to actually, they would stand them up straight side by side to build the perimeter of the fort. But then they had the sawmill that they could mill boards with to build all the buildings. So basically what they're doing all through the fall is they're sending out wood

crews and a wood train to cut wood. And what the Lakota do is they are constantly harassing these wood trains. And so they're over the course of the fall, there's this kind of crescendo of violence as they, as the Lakota and the Cheyenne increasingly attack the wood trains in ever more kind of sophisticated types of attacks. And all of that then leads up to this big battle at the end, which is fundamentally different from anything that the army had ever seen before, which is one of the reasons why I think it was so effective. Explain the kind of raids that we're talking about when I say like attack in the wood train. So a typical wood crew would be maybe 20 soldiers to cut wood and 20 soldiers whose job was to stand guard because every time they went out virtually, there was an attack or certainly the threat of attack. of the fall were these very small war parties of 10, 12 warriors that would go out and do these guerrilla style running attacks against the wood crews. And a lot of soldiers died over the course of the fall. I mean, dozens of soldiers died. They did. I mean, you know, but none of those skirmishes

were big. You know, one or two or five soldiers would die. It was not a big battle. It was viewed as more of a, by the army as more of a harassment. They weren't in the mindset that the tribes would come together and attack them in a big way. And frankly, not only were they not in that mindset, but they disregarded in ways that proved quite foolish the ability of the tribes to kind of come together and have a kind of massive strategy or big trap that would challenge them if they went out in force.

In your book, you get into this, it's like a little side story or a inter-story of some sort. I can't find the right word for it, but the cattlemen that show up. Yeah. Is that a thing that happened? It happened. And this was complete catnip for me because of what you said, Larry McMurtry. So my favorite novel of all time is Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, which people have probably read and they know is about the first ever cattle drive from Texas to Montana. And I'm doing the research for- Can we hold there just to explain this real quick?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, like in modern times, you can bring a cow, like a cow goes from birth to sale quicker than it used to. Yeah. Like even today, if you go down to Argentina or wherever, like, you know, they don't grain cattle down there. They don't hit slaughter weight for a couple of years. It's a longer thing.

You could, and these cattle, when you hear about these cattle drives, you could get a bunch of calves, right? Or even start with pregnant cows. What you're doing is you're going up to the north where there's grass. Yep. You're taking them up, like you're taking a single generation up to get fattened for free on free grass and then bring them somewhere

to sell them. So it's not like, it's not like you're bringing them up there to leave them there. You're talking about the Montana drive? No, people would do these, when you hear these like cattle drives going up, a lot of times it'd be like, you're just, they're, they're just feeding them. Yeah. You know, it's not like, it's not like you sold them to some guy up there. Well, this, uh, so the guy that we're talking about here in true book is a guy named nelson story and uh when i was doing the research for the about the you know this powder river uh war in 1866 not only does jim bridger show up there

and james beckworth in the middle of this and as a writer i'm like yay but also in the middle of this war that's going on this texas cattle herd and it's texas longhorns that they're driving literally uh with 20 uh cowboys driving it shows up at fort phil kearney in the fall of 1866 in the middle of this war and the guy that is leading them is a guy named nelson story who had been a gold miner in Bannock, Montana, and made like a pretty decent chunk. He makes like $30,000. Oh yeah. I forgot about this detail. Yeah. And so he, but he doesn't like mining and he sees that what the miners don't have is food. And so what he figures out is he's going to take his $30,000 from panning gold in Bannock, and he rides his horse to Texas, and he gathers up a herd of cattle and hires 20 cowboys. And they literally drive this cattle herd from Texas to Virginia City, Montana successfully with the goal of establishing a herd.

To do not what I was saying and to go and sell cattle. I mean, he sells half of them, but he establishes the first cattle ranch in Paradise Valley and may have named it. And so he establishes a cattle ranch in Paradise Valley near what's now Livingston and becomes the first Montana millionaire selling cattle to gold miners. And half the shit in Bozeman's named after him.

Exactly. Yeah, he's buried here too. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean. Yeah, my kid, when I had to escort his field trip one day, we went to see where they, the last guy they hung down at the courthouse.

Then we went over to see at the gallows, which is still there. And then went over to see Story's tombstone. So, the story of story for me was too enticing not to incorporate into the book. And Larry McMurtry has said that he based in part

the story of Lonesome Dove on his research on Nelson's story. You mentioned in the book that these guys show up and they're better armed than the soldiers. They're much better armed. The army was incredibly stupid about the weapons that they gave their soldiers for a long time. And in 1866, these poor bastards who get sent out to fight on the western frontier are carrying Civil War Springfield muzzle-loading, obviously single-shot rifles. And that's at a time when there were really great repeating rifles that were available. And the civilians were smart enough to have them.

So, for example, you know, there's two civilians that ride out on the day of the battle with Carrington and his men. They're both armed with Henry repeating rifles, which held 16 bullets. Like a two, like a lever action. Lever action, uh, repeating rifle, highly accurate, 16 rounds. They, the joke at the time was you load on Sunday and shoot all week. Yeah. Um, they have at the. Those guys had been laying waste with those

things man they did when you read the details of that battle like the way it was laid out you can imagine just being able to shoot and they were and they were good with them and they were civil war veterans so they were you know they were and and yeah if if the army had had those it would have been a different outcome but could we go back to story one quick second? How did he, like, I know he did, but how did he think that he would live? Well, it's crazy. And he does arm his 20 guys with repeating rifles. And so they're well armed.

But when you think about- Were they just running a rolling gun battle through the valley? Not a rolling battle, but they did fight several battles with the tribes on the way up. Really? I mean, these guys were flat out badass. And the fact that they thought that they could do it is unbelievable. But they succeed. That must have been just a hard night's sleep on that trip. They did have their cattle run off at one point.

They lost like half their herd and they go out with a party, and they recapture. They fight the tribe that took them, and they recapture the battle and herd the strays back into the herd and keep going. I mean, it's an amazing story. The story story is an amazing story. 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. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated well if you're

sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x 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 hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. So what's different on December 21 when the wood train sets out? allies have just spent the fall learning about their enemy and taking into consideration everything that they learn. The US Army has been doing exactly the opposite. They first of all underestimate their enemy in terms of that enemy's ability to conduct a massive operation.

I think there's a good amount of prejudice that goes into that in terms of how they thought that the tribes were even capable of fighting. They're very focused just on building the fort and not thinking about fighting. And what Red Cloud does is he does something that is unprecedented for that time, and it totally takes the army by surprise. The first thing he does is he creates this coalition of tribes, and the tribes had not typically fought together in this way before. But Red Cloud does this great diplomacy with the Cheyenne, with the Arapaho. There's evidence that he even tried to reach out to the Crow to be part of that coalition, which shows you how much he was recalculating the position of the tribes on the plains at that time. The Crow didn't want to be

a part of it, but he may have actually reached out to them. So he creates this massive coalition. He also decides that they're going to do something that is legions beyond anything they've ever done before. The biggest war party that they had ever put together over the course of the fall is probably one or 200 warriors. And the war party that he brings together, and usually, as we talked about before, it was a dozen kind of guerrilla style hits. What he does on December 21st, 1866, is he pulls together 2000 warriors, this coalition of Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho. And he finds this valley three miles away from the fort where if they can get the army there, they won't have any of the advantage that they have at the fort, either of the fortification or the cannons or anything else. And he places these-

In like a level of secrecy. In complete secrecy. Because no one in the forest can see what- Nobody, and they can't see this. You can't, once you go over Lodge Trail Ridge, which is the ridge line in the force can see what- numbers and get them to go three miles over the ridge line into the trap so that it can be sprung. And that's the job of crazy horse, crazy horse job. I want to put in another challenge you spent, and maybe you'll get to it, but you spent a lot of time talking about it is how far they lured these people in with no one noticing that there's 2000 people hiding under clumps of sagebrush.

And not just people, horses. Yeah. Like the subterfuge. Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's, and when you walk the battlefield. Yeah, 2,000 people with horses. With horses. And when you walk the battlefield, and we talked about this when I was here before too, the notion that, you know, people always talk about featureless planes.

And that's the stupidest description ever because planes are anything but featureless. There's all sorts of coolies and draws and creek beds and you name it. And when you walk this battlefield, there's all of that. But it's still pretty open. And it's pretty open certainly if you're trying to hide 2000 warriors and their horses. And so to me, that's one of the biggest mysteries uh, mysteries of the battle. And one of the most amazing things that they did is they, they hid themselves in their horses such that all of these, uh, these cavalrymen and infantrymen get up on this ridgeline and look down and don't see anything and ride in. It made me want to, it makes me want to go back there just to look there and be like, I don't understand how there's that. Like, I'd want to go look to get a better grip on how you could hide that many people.

I've, I've, I've walked it, a lot of it. And, uh, and you can, you can imagine it, but you also see the skill that it took, uh, just to keep the horses quiet and to, and to hold their positions, they had to wait because they were basically on, if you think of the battlefield as a clock, they're basically, and if you imagine the army riding in at 12 o'clock, they basically have warriors deployed between 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock, all around the clock. Yeah, yeah. And so between, the army has to ride in between 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock, all around the clock. Yeah, yeah. And so between, the Army has to ride in between 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock. And get to the center of the clock.

And get to the center of the clock, and then they close it up. But they have to suck them into the center of that clock to do it. And that's not 200 yards. That's like a mile. And so it's a massive battlefield. And so, but that's what they successfully do, is they suck them into the center of that clock and then they quickly close up between 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock and then it's a massacre. Is it – because your book gets into it. Is it undisputed that they were forbidden to like, sure, go chase them.

Don't go over the ridge. So I think it's pretty close to undisputed. Okay. And I say that with a little bit of hesitation because Colonel Carrington, who is in the fort during the battle and thereby survives. He's the head cheese. He's the head cheese. He's the guy who sends these guys out, but he doesn't go fight and therefore he doesn't go die. After this massacre happens, it's hugely politically controversial in the US because it's the worst to that time, as I said, the worst defeat in US military history until Custer. huge like investigation of what happened. And Carrington basically spends the rest of his career defending himself that it wasn't his fault. And there does seem to be pretty good evidence that

he gave the very explicit order, don't go over Lodge Trail Ridge. And if they hadn't gone over Lodge Trail Ridge, they wouldn't have died because the traps on the other side of lodge trail ridge um but uh but i do say it with a little bit of hesitation because he he does a lot of other things that i think very deliberately distort the the record including blaming fetterman overwhelmingly as the the villain of the of the battle i think some of the scholarship that has been done more recently rightly puts the blame on another one of the officers, a guy named Grummond, who is much more the villain in my book. You paint him out to be a real a-hole. I think he was an a-hole. And there's good evidence of that. And let me compare those

two guys in terms of the historical evidence, by the way. So Fetterman – and they're both Civil War veterans and by all accounts, all of the officers with the exception of Carrington who was a logistics guy in the war. All of the other officers at the fort were – had a lot of combat experience in the Civil War and were decorated. But Fetterman had a reputation for not only bravery, but also for being kind of a company man and following orders. The reputation of Grumman, by contrast, he was court-martialed during the Civil War for beating one of his non-commissioned officers. He was court-martialed for shooting an unarmed civilian. And he was court-martialed for disobeying orders and charging ahead when he wasn't supposed to. So when you weigh their records and you think who is more likely to have been the one who disobeyed orders and went over the ridgeline, to me, it comes down on Grumman. And in the aftermath, Carrington's wife sort of like goes on.

How are we in the aftermath? Well, I'm not, but I'm saying Carrington's wife sort of like goes on tour blaming Fetterman, right? She does. How does that influence things? because I think she's a very fascinating character. But you're right. Carrington's wife, his first wife, Margaret Carrington, joins him in making this defense of her husband. And she writes an autobiography in which she basically says she gives Carrington's version of the battle, including don't go over Lodge Trail Ridge, and she blames Fetterman like Carrington. But Carrington's first wife, Margaret, dies, and he ends up marrying Grumman's wife. And then Grumman's-

Whose husband dies in the fight. Whose husband died in the fight. And Grumman's wife then writes her own autobiography, and she also repeats, in some cases, almost word for word, the account of the battle that her husband propagated that he was not at fault. So he put two people up to it. He put two wives up to it. Yeah. To do his dirty work. The 10 warriors that sort of act as the decoys.

You have like two Cheyenne, two Araparo, two from Ogallala. Is there any significance to that? There was. And I think we don't know exactly who the who the decoys were there's i think there's pretty good evidence that crazy horse is one of them but they my understanding is that the the tribes uh picked honorary decoys that were representative of of their of their of their people. And so I think it's, it's probably pretty accurate that there was a, the type of mixture that I, that I described there. And that comes a lot from a lot of the oral, uh, accounts of the battle from, from different, uh, from

different tribes. When, um, what's the, the, you know, for a long time, people would call it the Fetterman Massacre. Yeah. Also the Fetterman Fight. But it had the Battle of the 100 in hand, right? Yeah. Was that a Sioux name? That was what the Lakota call it. Because they had, someone had a prop.

Someone said, like, if you want to catch a bunch of them, a half man. So there's a transgender Lakota. and we don't know his name. In my book, I give the name Moon for this person. But when I first read about this, I wondered about it. But there is an account of this from George Byrd Grinnell, who's a guy that I wrote a book about, who was a conservationist and also a Native American ethnologist. And in 1915, he wrote a book called The Fighting Cheyenne. And as part of his research in 1915, he interviews a Cheyenne warrior named White Elk who had been at the Fetterman fight, who fought at the Fetterman

fight and walks the battlefield with him. And this Cheyenne warrior, White Elk, tells the story of a transgender Lakota, their word for it was Winkte, a transgender Dakota. And the Winktay were revered in Lakota culture, which I think is very interesting as having the wisdom of both men and women. They were revered in the tribe and they were often turned to that George Byrd Grinnell wrote down from the story he heard from a Cheyenne warrior, a white elk, which I think is pretty good evidence. And it was – it wasn't quite 100. It was eight. What was the number? Well, to go to your question. So the prophecy, what happens is Red Cloud and the other leaders kind of go to the battlefield the day before to survey it and decide

where they're going to hide everybody. And in deciding whether or not to use that site as the battlefield, they call upon this Wink Winkte prophet to, to tell him what's going to happen. And he prophesizes that, uh, he, he, he rides the, the prophet rides all over the battlefield and comes back three separate times. And on his third time coming back he he is uh acting out that his arms are full and that his hands are full and he tells red cloud and the other chiefs that he has a hundred in his hands a hundred dead soldiers in his hands and that's his prophecy for what will happen if they have the battle at this place and so that's the moment when Red Cloud decides this is the place and time and place.

And so the Lakota refer to the battle as the battle of the hundred in the hands. Not quite a hundred die, but 81 die, which is, I don't know what the, probably we keep track on prophecies, but that one's not too far off. Once they spring the trap, so the 10 decoys, we kind of established these 10 decoys.

These 10 decoys rile up, skirmish with, somehow infuriate and get these 84 soldiers to just be like, now's our chance. We're finally going to get these suckers. Yep. They ride into the center of the clock. Once they spring the trap, how long does it take them to kill them all? 30 minutes and there are unbelievable arrows yeah and there are unbelievable accounts of 30 minutes 30 minutes and so what starts happening back at the fort um and there's a good

there's good you know uh written history of this is uh all of a sudden they start hearing gunshots. Um, and then they start hearing a shitload of gunshots and then they stop hearing any gunshots and, and, and they, they know something and they can't see any of this because they've gone over the ridgeline and they've sent out, uh, what's supposed to be a relief force, although it gets there way too late. And they, actually the, the relief force, once they get up on the ridgeline and look down there, they can see what's going on. The relief force is smart enough not to write down there. But, uh, but 30 minutes is about the amount of time that the battle takes. And what's the amount of friendly fire from both sides that's sort of happening? Quite a bit, uh, including, well, I don't, I don't know as much on

the, on the, on the U S army side Army side how much friendly fire was because they probably were firing more outward. But there was a lot of friendly fire between the tribes because they're in a circle and they're firing toward the center. But there is quite a bit of anecdotal evidence about Native American warriors being, native American warriors being killed by arrows, uh, because there were so many arrows. And of course it's, it's chaotic in the center. Oh, the sky must have just been a buzz with arrows. I mean, you see these movies now where they show these waves of, of arrows, you know, flying in and it, that's, it, it, it must've been unbelievable. Um, you have it that there's some suicide among the soldiers.

That is one of the controversies about the battle. And I talk at the end about the fact that I don't know that that happened. I think it's quite plausible that when it got down to the end, there's a famous trope in Western stories of, you know, save the last bullet for yourself. Yeah, yeah. And I think it must have at the end to those guys, that handful of guys who were left, surrounded on all sides, been obvious that they weren't going to make it. And I think a few of them probably did make this decision. And you're not going to become a prisoner of war. You're not going to be a POW.

They were watching their fellow soldiers. You know, the way these guys die if they don't get shot with an arrow is they get hacked to death. You're getting bludgeoned and you're getting killed with war clubs and hatchets. Yeah, like torn limb from limb. Torn limb from limb. And so it's not at all implausible to me that, that some of them at the end chose to commit suicide instead. And two of those people that the, the suicide speculation sort of exists around are Fetterman and Brown, right? That's right. And, uh, there, there is contrary evidence, which I also talk about at the end of the book. There is a Lakota warrior who claims to have killed Fetterman did not have wounds consistent with suicide.

That piece I find a little bit less plausible because it's not like this was Quincy Jones, you know, autopsy on these soldiers. For one thing, the post-surgeon was not a forensic surgeon. He was a post-surgeon, and he had 80 bodies brought in, and all the bodies were mutilated, too, with the exception of one soldier. So I don't find it particularly plausible that the post-surgeon was able to tell how somebody died. I think there is a credible potential that Fetterman was actually killed by one of the Lakota warriors as opposed to committing suicide. And so 81 soldiers dead. Yep. How many warriors?

Different accounts. Probably somewhere around 30, I think, is a pretty good guess. Maybe more than that. But I mean, and you talked, Stephen, about the two civilians who had the Henry rifles. Most of the evidence of native deaths were in a semicircle around the stones, the rocks that these two civilians sheltered behind in the early part of the battle where they tried to hold out for a while with those Henry rifles. And there were some real hard asses too. And they were, they were, they were civil war veterans. They had good weapons and they knew

how to use them. And there's a lot of of evidence that they they killed quite a few at that part of the battle in the rest of the battle i don't think that there were nearly as many uh of the native americans killed because they you know they're just they the army just wasn't organized in any way to to mount an effective defense at that point it's all running you talk about like you know these guys with single shots like they'd shoot a shot and then people would just swarm them and by hand, drag them down off their horse and cut them up. Well, I mean, I've fired these muzzleloading guts before as I'm, I know you guys have, and it's not an easy, fast thing to load a muzzleloader, even if you're good at it. And to do that with hundreds of warriors running towards you and arrows flying around and people dying all around you, and especially when they weren't in any kind of an organized line or position, I just don't think those guys fired their guns very many times. I think they probably got a shot or two off,

and then their gun was a club. This is an ignorant question, but, like, in the aftermath of this, what happens to the guns that the soldiers had? Did the warriors swoop in and clean some of that stuff up? They did. They gathered all those weapons up and that was, as you would imagine, they would gather everything of use off the battlefield before they left. There's a saucy detail from the Little Bighorn Battle where the 7th Cavalry was carrying a gun that had a newer gun. They had a distinct sound that set it apart.

You know, you can tell like different kind of like bigger guns, smaller guns, right? And the people that weren't caught up in that battle but were surrounded on another ridgeline. Yeah. The next day realized that they were being shot at. With their gun. With the gun that they were being shot at. With their gun. With the gun that they recognized as their own. And that was the early clue of what might have happened. What might have happened to Custer's command.

That's wild. Where'd they get those? Well, talking about the guns that they had and 10 years, it's interesting because in 1866, in this battle, most of the, a lot of the Native American warriors did not have rifles or the rifles they had were single shots and they preferred to use their bows and arrows because they could fire so much more rapidly. By 1876, 10 years later, Battle of Little Bighorn, a lot of the Native American warriors had henry repeating rifles

yeah it was a gunfight yeah but the u.s army still gave their their their soldiers at that point had had mostly 1873 springfield either rifles or carbines which were those stupid trap door single shot they fired a metal cartridge, but they were single shots and had to be loaded one shot at a time through a trap door in the breach. And they were, by all accounts, not great guns. And the army just had a doctrinary belief in that era that if you gave a soldier the ability to fire rapidly, that they would waste their shots. And so this, instead of giving him Henry rifles, they gave him eventually guns that fired a metal cartridge, but still single shots.

I can't remember what museum I was at, but it had some firearms. I can't remember what tribe had had them, but they were demonstrations of their gunsmithing where they'd get these and then keeping them going and stocks put back together with rawhide barrels, like barrels fashioned to stocks with rawhide wrappings and filed pieces. You'd get these things, maybe even got it broken and then finding a way to just to

keep them functioning. Well, you think about, I portray Jim Bridger – there was a great thing on Instagram yesterday from the Montana State Historical Society which has Jim Bridger's hawking at the Montana State Historical Society in Helena. And I – one of my goals in life is to go there and have somebody let me hold that because I just think that would be a really cool thing to hold Jim Bridger's hawking. But he apparently still had a Hawken in this era, and I have a fictionalized scene between him and Beckworth, where Beckworth is making fun of him for still using an old Hawken rifle. And part of his defense in the book I have is that he's used to it, and he knows how to fix it. He knows how it works. And I would imagine that for somebody like that, an old timer in particular, that having a gun that you knew every bit of it, and that you knew that if it broke down, you had some chance of being

able to fix it, even on the frontier, as opposed to the complexity of a, of a repeating rifle system for an old timer might be like, I don't want to deal with that. I feel like I've told the story a thousand times, but I was with an Amerindian group in South America and they had a 16-gauge shotgun, a break-open 16-gauge shotgun, and they only had 12-gauge shells. So they would, in getting ready to go hunt at night,

they would take that 12-gauge shell, cut it open, take a leaf and pour the shot into a leaf. Make their own. Get the wad out, pour the powder into a leaf, knock the primers with the same, primers are compatible. Knock the primer out, put the primer into the 16 gauge, pour the powder in. Unbelievable. Build their own shells. Yeah. Use like this little, they'd make this little leaf thing to act as a wadding, put the shot

in, melt a candle, steal the whole thing off with candle wax. They do two or three of those and head off into the jungle. Oh my gosh. That's unbelievable. That's like good ingenuity, right? That's very good ingenuity.

Speaking of ingenuity, one of the things that is fascinating to me is the canon technology of that era. And we were talking before about how wars are a great booster of innovation, especially on weaponry. And one of the things I learned about working at Fort Laramie National Historic Site as a teenager is, as I said, we fired these 1841 mountain howitzer twice a day. And I was amazed to learn at the sophistication of cannon technology in that day. And I had always thought of a cannon as shooting out either a solid cannon ball, you know, to knock down walls, or they would use grape shot, which is basically like turning a cannon into a big giant shotgun. But one of the options they had with cannons, even in that era, is something called spherical case shot.

And it looked like a cannonball, but it was hollow on the inside and the inside was filled with smaller cannonballs and gunpowder. And there was a fuse that was on the top of the cannonball that could be cut to blow up at different ranges. And when the cannon would go off, the flame from the ignition would light that fuse in the front of the cannonball. And then as the cannonball flew downrange, the fuse would burn in and at the

appointed range, you know, a thousand yards, for example, blow up and all of those cannonball or the musket balls inside of the cannonball would then disperse on the battlefield. I mean, it was a, that's an incredibly sophisticated weapon. And there's a lot of mathematics that go behind that. And in fact, in that era, oftentimes the smartest guys at West Point were made artillerymen because the high technology of the day was artillery and mathematics. And so if you were smart and could do math, you were an artilleryman. And in the days leading up to this fight, they had, the tribes kind of had to learn to scout and deal with those guys trying to touch those cannonballs off over their heads all the time. Yeah, because I think it was surprising, obviously, to the tribes that there was the ability to set these charges off with that kind of precision, you know, a thousand yards away from the walls of the fort. It's one of the reasons why there are very few battles in history where Native American tribes attack a fort. And that's the classic kind of John Wayne, you know, movie. movie, but that didn't happen very often because the tribes were smart enough to know that the

fort was the place where all the advantages were with the army, whether it was hiding behind walls and shooting outward with long range rifles or, or cannon. And what they were smart enough to know is they needed to draw the army out onto their terrain. And that's of course, exactly what they do in, in this story. And a follow-up attack on the fort never happens. Like after we have these 81 dead soldiers, 30 dead warriors, they don't then go and try to take over the fort? They didn't. Because I think they still, for one thing, I think they felt like they had fulfilled the prophecy that they were seeking to fulfill. But also because I think they still respected, even with the force that they had gathered, the strength of the cannon at the fort and the soldiers that remained there.

But they do end up winning that war. Yeah, we keep comparing to Little Bighorn, but Little Bighorn was like a very pirate victory. Very, very pirate. I mean, they, even in winning, they knew they had lost. They dispersed and went into hiding. But in this, like for a while so kind of won including getting a new treaty uh where the u.s army agrees and i this is the only time i ever know of this happening and it didn't last very long but it happened it lasted for a while at because of the federman fight and it's interesting actually because the

politics of the united states in 1876 are are very different from the politics of the Fetterman fight, and it's interesting actually because the politics of the United States in 1876 are very different from the politics of the United States in 1866. In 1866 after the Fetterman fight, keep in mind it's only a year after the – basically a year after the end of the Civil War. And the politics of the US at that point are like, we don't want to go fight a war out on the frontier. And so this Fetterman battle happens and Red Cloud, I think rightly predicts that if he can inflict a massive defeat, that maybe he can scare the whites off for a while. And that's exactly what happens. They signed a new treaty. They abandoned the Montana Road. They abandoned the three forts. The tribes come in and burn those three forts, including Fort Fetterman, to the ground. And really, for a period of years, at least relative to what's going to happen later, the tribes win back the Powder River Valley and other places, including the Black Hills.

In 1876, the politics of the country have changed. And- What if they had the foresight to be like, yeah, we want it, but it's not going to last? I think they must've been worried. But I don't know. It's a really interesting question. But by 1876, when the Little Bighorn defeat happens, and I love this fact of history, the news of the Little Bighorn is June 25th, 1876. The news of the Little Bighorn reaches Washington, D.C. on July 4th, 1876, the exact 100-year centennial of the country. And it is a turd in the punch bowl of that celebration. And the reaction of the country at that point is, we're not going to let this stand.

And from that point on, it's total war against the tribes. And in a year and a half, the war against the Northern Plains Indians is over. And Crazy Horse has been forced to surrender on a reservation. Sitting Bull has fled into Canada. 1877 is the year of the Nez Perce. The Nez Perce. They're defeated.

It's over. And so once the U.S. really turned its full military force on the war, it was pretty inevitable. I came across something really interesting in the research for this. I read that the total population of all the Plains tribes in the 1860s was probably about 76,000. Really? Of the Lakota, there were probably about 16,000, of which there were about 4,000 Lakota fighting men. So think about that. The US at that time had 31 million people. During the Civil War, there was a standing army of 2.1 million people on the North and 1 million people on the South. So when you think about those numbers, once the U.S. kind of decided that we're not going to let the stand anymore, it wasn't going to. And that's exactly what

happens after 1876. The fort, like following the days of the battle, they have to be on edge, right? Because they don't, they don't evacuate immediately. They're not gone the next day. lost, you know, half their fighting force. And so they're, they, maybe Red Cloud could have overtaken that for it if he'd been willing to kind of, you know, do a World War I style fight against an entrenched position. I don't know, but they're worried about that. And so Colonel Carrington sends a rider out from Fort Phil Kearney to Fort Laramie. It's in the middle of a blizzard. And this guy over, his name is Portuguese Phillips. That's Phil's great-grandfather. His name is Portuguese Phillips. And he rides through a blizzard. I can't remember the exact number of miles, but it's hundreds of miles in a blizzard. It takes him like 48 hours. And he literally arrives at Fort Laramie

in the middle of a Christmas Eve party. So I guess it took him that long, between the 21st and the 24th, three days. His horse dies in front of the unmarried officer's quarters building where they're having a Christmas party. and he staggers into this christmas party with the news of the of the federman of the federman fight and then fort laramie sends out troops to to to reinforce the fort horse dies out front horse dies literally get off that way in front easier to dismount uh the poor horse step aside dies in front the name of the building is Old Bedlam. It's a building at Fort Laramie that was the unmarried officer's quarter.

What was that guy's name? Portuguese Phillips. What would end up happening to him? I don't know, but there's a monument to him at Fort Laramie for making that ride. And the fort, meanwhile, is prepped for a a worst case scenario and they have explosives rigged up. Yeah. This is fascinating. It's an emergency thing.

So Carrington is so worried about them being overrun that he comes up with a plan. They stored the powder, the armory, in the middle of Fortville, was in the middle of Fortville, Kearney, in like a dugout kind of building where they stored set the powder off and blow it up so that the they would not suffer the the death that they would otherwise suffer if the if the fort were overrun but they were so worried about that that they actually that was the they had a plan for that tough fuse the light man it'd be tough use the light that's on the call this podcast episode make a note of that, Corinne. All right. The book is like, you can buy the book right now. Right now. Just buy it. It'll ship to you the next day or whatever.

Everywhere books are sold. Everywhere books are sold. Tell people how to find you. Do you do social media? Yeah, I do. My kids think I'm not very good at it, but I'm on Twitter. I'm on, because of Corinne, I'm on Instagram. So on Instagram, I'm MWPunk, that's P-U-N-K-E. And on Twitter, I'm MPunk, P-U-N-K-E. And the book is called?

The book is called Ridgeline. And you can go ask your local bookstore, Amazon. What if you want to listen to Barnes & Noble, which my mom's husband calls Books and Nobles. Barnes & Noble. What if you want to listen to it? There is a great audio version of this. What, did you read it? I did not. I read the historical notes at the end. Who did they hire to read it? I did not. I read a little, I read the historical notes

at the end. Who did you hire to read it? Soap opera actor? A great guy. I love this, I love this, that this person does it. The person who reads this book

is a Lakota named Tatanka Means. Okay, I like that. He's the son of Russell Means. Oh, really? Yeah. From the American Indian Movement? Yeah.

You're kidding me. Oh, I love Yeah. From the American Indian Movement? You're kidding me. Oh, I love that. And he is a Native American actor and does a great job reading it. And so, yeah, there's the audio book version. Did you try to read it and they wouldn't let you?

I did not. I didn't think I would be very good at reading the dialogue and things like that. I mean, it'd be one thing to read a nonfiction book and I read the historical notes at the end, like I say, and I can do that. But I don't think I'd be very good at giving the right intonation to the arguments.

They also, and this was kind of interesting, the parts of the book that are with the character of Frances Grumman, which are in the book written as journal entries, they hired a woman actor to read those parts. So it actually works out. I think it's a good audio book. I didn't get to read my first books, and then they sold my audio rights.

Random House sold, for my Buffalo book, they sold my audio rights to this thing, I think it was called Brilliance Audio, which weirdly was not far from where I grew up. I think it was, whatever the hell they were called. They did a lot of audio. And they hired some soap opera guy to do it. I got those.

Were you pretty pleased? Oh my, listen. I remember getting that thing in the mail and putting it in. And the second, the second that guy opened his mouth, I couldn't get across the, I couldn't get across the living room fast enough to turn it in. And the second, the second that guy opened his mouth, I couldn't get across the, I couldn't get across the living room fast enough to turn it off.

I was like, that's not how it sounds. That's, that's tough. That's pretty personal. And then they had the, they had 10 years. They had the audio rights for 10 years.

Oh man. So at the end of that 10 years, my publisher got back my audio rights and I got to go down and read my own damn book. That's a good thing. Well, for your books in particular, it's so much your voice that I think it'd be really hard to have somebody else do it. Yeah, it was real, real painful. But I'm glad you're happy with it. Yeah.

No, it's a good audio book. I mean, people have the choice. If they prefer their books in audio form, it's a good, it's a good audio book. I mean, I, uh, I, people have the choice if they prefer their books in audio form. It's, it's there. Okay. The Ridgeline. Am I saying, I'm adding the, it's not. No, the, no article, just Ridgeline. Ridgeline, a novel, Michael Punk. And again, punk with an E on the end. That's right. Thank you. Can I tell you one final story? Yes.

Oh, yeah, yeah, tell me. I grew up in South Dakota and I took great pride in like the history of Deadwood and the western part of the state when I was a kid. Read all the books.

Knew all the figures. And when I went to college, 2011 to 2015, whenever we would like take a shot at a bar or something, you got to say a cheers, right? I'd always cheers

to Hugh Glass because then it allowed me like a couple minutes to tell the story of Hugh Glass, which is just one of my favorite stories. You meet a lot of girls like that?

I already had my wife. No, but I get to entertain people with this cool story that was like my story. It was like my story. Yeah. Right? And then the movie came out in 2016. I'm sorry. And no longer can I give that toast to people.

So you robbed it from me. Well, I'll buy you a beer to try and compensate in part. Why don't you tip him off on some, you're a Western history. Yeah, give me something new that I can entertain folks with. We'll come up with some, maybe in the Portuguese Phillips or something. Oh yeah, like here's the Portuguese Phil. I actually know his grandson. Who knows how many locals in what Northern Wyoming you robbed of the Ridgeline story now when they're taking a shot at a bar.

They can have this couple minutes to sort of tell the Fetterman battle. Here's the Fetterman. My apologies to any of those people. I have a feeling, though, that most Wyomingites will like this story being told. I think so. I'm going to start a new segment called Spencer's Pickup Life. Pickup advice from Spencer. Which do you see?

Quickly, speaking of movies, is this going to be turned into a cinematic? I hope so. We have optioned it to the same company, Anonymous Content, that optioned and produced The Revenant. They are a great filmmaking company. They have

optioned it. We're looking at it initially more as a scripted series as opposed to... That's a good move. I think the story, this story is too big or you could do it as a feature film and I can imagine a good one, but I would love to have the opportunity to tell it in an even longer form of a scripted series. Did I tell you John Locke Ray's quote last time you were here? No.

I didn't? Well, wait a minute. I think it was his. Remind me. Having your book made into a movie is like watching an ox and turned into a bullion cube. It is a collaborative process

and you better be ready for that when you sign the option check like really that's all there was to it huh that little square thing I have higher higher hopes than that you can do a lot

with a series that's true I think you can well and there's so many great there's so much great storytelling being done through scripted series today.

Plus, I'm just jealous. I just said that because I'm jealous. I'm trying to make myself feel better. I want to have some Wild West movies made. I got to write a Wild West book. You got to write that. All right, Michael Punk, thank you very much for coming on. Thank you, guys. Go get Ridgeline. I know we talked, we told the whole story, but we didn't even, we didn't, because

I don't know how long, it takes 20 hours to read a book, right? It does. Yeah. For me. So you don't know crap yet from listening to this. There's a lot untold. There's a lot untold. 20 to the leading hours ahead, folks.

All right. So you'll write another book and come back in, I don't know, two years? I would love to. Okay. Standing invite. All right. Thank you for that. So that'll motivate you. I will.

That is a big motivator. Thanks for that. All right. Thank you for that. So that'll motivate you. I will. That is a big motivator. Thanks for that 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 that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

Now, 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. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.