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The MeatEater Podcast
Ep. 275: The Battle of One Hundred in the Hand
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2h13m
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.
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Speaker 1: This is the me Eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening. Don't podcast. You can't predict anything presented by first light. Go farther, stay longer. Alright, I want to. I want everybody to listen, really like, what's this noise that's satisfying? Don't think I'm actually holding the firearms. I don't think the federal government regards these his firearms different. I think it's like a different set of rules. It's a it's a repple covered. We're visiting with Michael Pump, who wrote The Revenant um and as 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 uh, he was being diplomatic but also a good salesman and didn't like lay the whole thing out, save something for later about Ridgeline. UM. And so he's here to talk with us about Ridgeline. And he brought a couple of 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 eighteen sixties, for example. And I think it's probably pretty accurate. It's got a a manufactured metal arrowhead, which would be accurate for that era steel trade point I was here and referred to exactly, but otherwise I think it was there was an attempt made to use the traditional style of building the arrow. So yeah, and this year pistol, that pistol which would have been comfortable to the ones used by the officers and non commissioned officers and non commission officers in the in the infantry or in the caffree especially, And it's a it's a replica of an eighteen fifty one thirty six caliber Colt. Shall shoots thirty six 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 worst things to get hit by. Well, they by the time they got around to the to the Colt forty five, they had decided that they should up the caliber of the caliber and they went from thirty powder charge. I would guess, but there's something, Um, 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. And I think you can order them the mail. It doesn't need to go through Uh, don't take my word for it, you know what I'm like. I think you can order one of the he's in the mail and just shows up at your house, doesn't need to go through an FFL. I don't know the answer. I'm not gonna argue with you. We'll look it up till else you're doing. I believe that's the pistol carried by wild Bill Hiccock and in his hand. I think he was definitely a firearm and I would not have wanted to be on the receiving end of of him. No, did you notice? And um, did you watch the ball? The buster scrugs? You don't watch that, No, dude, it's never check it out. It's funny's he's Buster scrug 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 gotta 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 peaked at aces and eights and that's all. It's all rushing a lot more than the writer. This gentleman here, Um, how much 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 day? I sent in a check in order to keep up my inactive bar status mostly, so that's what you maintain. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not a practicing lawyer. But it's like, 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've got to keep up your bar membership mostly by paying dues and not taking additional testing. Thank god no, because I wouldn't do that again. So but you do keep it, You do keep going. You can't fall off for twenty years and decided to send in a check and resume or can you. I don't. It's a 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 because you'll you'll review of your own book contract. Yeah, but I've stopped doing that more and more because I am I'm both uh dumb and thinking I know enough to to look at him and cheap enough that I don't want to pay a lawyer. And I've gotten a little bit smart about that over the years and started paying somebody to look at him, which has worked out well for me. Um, I was gonna tell your story was just too complicated in her mind. Used to being an ambassador, former US Trade rep and then former ambassador to the World Trade Organization. It was I was the deputy U. S. Trade Representative, part of an agency called the US on the opposite of the U. S Trade Representative, and at that same job involved being the US Ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva. So that was kind of a two fer when you did that that you have to live in Geneva. I did for six years. Oh here we talking about that? Yea, so it was we We moved to Montana in two thousand and three. I was born and raised in Wyoming and then lived out east for a while. I 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 back home. Yeah, and uh, my wife is 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 yellow Stone Basin, right, Well, I was born in the Big Horn Basin in Lovell, Wyoming and lived there. Tell about third grade, and that still counsels the Elstone Basin. True, true enough, I think if it is as Big Horn Basin. Um. But I want to say you you because you were. You were in the sort of broader drainage of where your book takes place, for sure, the other side of the Big Horns, because the powder rivers on the eastern side of the Big Horns but uh, levels on the western side. But I looked up as a boy at the Big Horn Mountains and those were kind of the the mountains that uh sparked my initial imagination about all things Western Mountain related. Uh, we're gonna get into Ridgeline real deep. But it uh takes place at the what's the closest town, the Fort Fetterman. Yeah, today it's uh, the site of Fort Fetterman and the battlefield are between Sheridan and Buffalo. Was I telling you the story about something I knew from that area? Who? When I mentioned the Fetterman massacre fight? I don't think you told me that he's like oh brother. Every year in school? Yeah that. Now for the field trip, well, in Level we would go over to the Cody Museum Cody. Our field trip every year was to Cody. But of course that museum if you people haven't been there, is one of the there's three museums and Cody and they're some of the Their really kind of Smithsonian quality museums are unbelievable. And that was another thing that really sparked my imagination as a boy, including the original painting of Custer's Last Stand that they have there by the German duter by the No, it's by well, it's by Paxson. He's uh, the artist's name is Paxson. I don't know about his background. He was like the guy that you know, the famous like anheuser Busch representatives. It'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 it's kind of similar layout. And you know the one called after the fight? Um, is that the one that's in on the battlefield side. Yeah, it's in the Olive. There's the one in the Olive and Miles City where GOLs mccraid eyes I think, and um and people like right on it, gff. 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. I like, I'll cut the wall out, put a new wall in. But it's it's their massacrerent Is, they're mutilating the it's the it's a painting of of them ransacking the battle site right right. It's a phenomenal painting there looking it's like you know, like people have written on there, like for a good time called Jesse. You know the one that was in Uh. I think you're right. It's the packs and one that was a Budweiser commercial in bars for decades at the in the last quarter of the of the century, along along with the buffalo. Look that up a mounted buffalo head. I can answer the other thing we're talking about. So, antique firearms and replicas of antique firearms do not fall under the National Firearms Act, even if manufactured after Some Modern versions of flint locks, matchlocks, and percussion fired guns do not require the involvement of an FFL. Told you Bush like Ann Heuser Busch bought Custers last fight. The packing win are in different one trying to find out they hung it all over bars and everything. No, Cassily Adams. Okay, so I'm looking at right now. You know a guy named Curly that fought in the fight, Uh, one of the Scouts of Custer. Yeah, okay, here's the 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 Dull knife. That was a guy that was killed. I think 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 as they were writing into the camp. Yeah, and like his some of his according to Son of the Morning Star, I think some of his brain matters splattered on an officer and the officer never quite got back to where he needed to get mentally. Curly either. Here's why there's like a lot of questions about 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 gathered there's like a little uh debate about whether Curly was there or not. Some people say that see some of his re scouts and stuff, like did they knew what was going to happen the next day and he did like a like a death ceremony. They knew what was coming and Custer got pished off. They were uh, you know, not all in or yeah, they were like, 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 led him. He later met that guy gaul Um, a Sue warrior named gaul and gall said to him, Um, 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 um, don't we talking about though? Uh? We were talking about the painting, the paction painting, and yeah, go ahead, Well I was just what I was asking about it. I think I was saying that we were talking about field trips as as a kid, and that paction painting at the of the Custom Battle just really fueled my boyhood imagination of that whole era. And yeah, and that museum, those museums are in Cody or unbelievable. It's kind of a little envious that 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, because you know, if you're living in West Michigan and that's all you can think about, it's just all is very drafts. Well there was that was a cool thing growing up 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 ninety years old, so this was in you know, the nineteen seventies, and she was the lady in the neighborhood who handed out vanilla way for cookies to the kids and told stories about you know, her life, and she remembered as a as a little girl. In Level, Wyoming, a mountain man named John Blue riding out of the Big Horn Mountains twice a year into Level, Wyoming to to do his twice a year shopping before he you know, requisitor, you know, stocked up and went back out to his cabin in the Big Horns. So I love that, even in my lifetime, I can almost touch some of those people who lived that. And that's an amazing thing about that history is it's it's not that long ago, for sure, if you if it was fresher one year in some of these areas that haven't been they haven't had all the subsequent stories overlaid 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 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 visited. 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, 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've ever told you. But for a while I was going to do a book about the Nez Perce War me too. Yeah, I did a lot of traveling for I blew a whole summer on the man. Yeah. I was already to write that book when I got the assettership and had to abandon the book because I knew that I was not gonna be able to finish it. So that was And then you know, when when he surrendered, you know his famous I will fight no more forever, which may or may not have what he said I was. I was good. I was walking the whole damn thing. I was gonna walk that wholes and I in my path with a I had a backpack and a pack raft when I started out and did quite a bit of it, I was gonna call my book I will walk no More forever. But well, that'd be the way to do. But I eventually just lost the thread and gave up on it. But either way, I want a lot of those battle sites, and they're not even like very effect. They're not even really interpreted. So you gotta kind of look at you gotta sort of play historian at the sites and be like, if that's the mile they're talking about, or if that's the bridge they're talking about. I'm sure someone knows, But but a little big horn is so well interpreted. Yeah, And actually the Feederman Battlefield is a is a nice combination of being the way that it was but having some interpretive guides. And I think the State away Aming has done a pretty good job on those guides, including by the way, giving both a this the U. S. 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 mix it in, but still there's a lot of area for speculation about where specific things might have happened, and there's just a lot that is not really known at the end of the day about the battle itself. Once they rode over that ridgeline, none of the none of the whites survived, and uh, there are lots of interesting accounts, uh from from Native participants, but they're 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 for a novel because there there is a lot we don't know, and so you've kind of got the major mile posts there, but there's it was there was plenty of space to kind of fill in what people were thinking, you know, what specific things were happening in over the course of the battle, and it it just made it perfect I thought for fiction. Okay, let's let it hang there for a minute, because I gotta we gotta cover a couple of things. But well, nor thing, are you do you still do the public policy for Amazon? I do? How did you do do that? Plus all this well, uh in part because I've got kids in college, you know, about making a living as a as a writer, which is uh up and down. Um, but uh yeah it was really good every couple of years. The publishing industry is not the fastest industry in in America, and so things things that wind slowly, even if you've got a bit of a tail wind. But so yeah, I still have a day day job for Amazon Web Services. Michael, I hope you don't take offense this and it's a compliment. Really get I get worried about the interest me where my interest style. You know, I know how this show works. There's usually an ambush your two so so here here it comes. I mean, I mean this is for your title writer, lawyer, policy analyst, US Trade rip. You look exactly like how I would imagine someone with those titles to look. It's perfect, absolutely perfect, no idea what them for the ace don't like glass? Yeah, like Phil looks like an audio engineer, but I think Michael looks even more like a writer, lawyer, policy analyst in US trade REP. I don't know, I don't know how to take that, but I thank you. It's a comp you could picture him like a menal guy yelling at to get out of his yard. It's really it's really satisfying with those titles. How old are you? We're probably the same. I'm fifty six. Oh no, you got a lot of yours. But I'm glad that you saw were the same? You tell are you for seven? Man? I'm a decade older than you? Really, spri Man, I'm ship man. I can see him fronting like like an indie folk band, too ye, or yelling at kids a good obviously, Okay, check this out. We got couple we're gonna get back into. We're gonna get back into ridgeline hardcore. We've got a couple of things we gotta go over. Um. I always here about this every now and then, but this is the explain this Spencer Brewed X. Yeah, it's the seventeen year hatch and it's coming this year. This has been covered a lot, like by every big news source there is, CNN, Fox and we better, we better getting out of it. We have covered it, we covered about two weeks ago. Go ahead, play it out. The Brewed X hatches coming and it's all these cicadas now, I think, but why is it brewed X. I think I think there's like, yeah, I think there's like brewed x I, brewed X, brewed x I. I like this is the numerals, So I got you. So this is like a generation whatever. This is like a generation of them that they've been hanging out in the ground as little eggs for seventeen years. And I think something that other outlets have done a poor job of describing is where exactly it takes place at When national news sources are covering, it's like, oh man, there's gonna be the whole country. You're 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 that region has the brewed X hatch coming um and this is really good for fish and really good for turkeys. Millions per acre from New York to Georgia and west of the Mississippi, the epicenter of our nation's capital, Washington, d c. Cicadas per square foot here, it's just expresses 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 don't eat turkey eggs. So if you like to hunt Jake's next year is your year you like to hunt long beards. Three. I think for most folks it was just gonna 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 in June. They're incredibly loud. I like that noise though, Man's it's it's a cool sound, you know, the thing that you um. You know, earlier I was talking about how your childhood is better mine. One thing that uh that now like living in the in the arid West. You know, ah, when I go back home to Michigan on a summer night, the cophony 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 air and air landing once the once the crickets quiet down, you know, it's pretty quiet. It's just like then the jungle, like you know, the Amazon and stuff. It's even more. It's it's almost like you want like shut up, shut up, shut up. Associate for a minute. I associate cicadas with anxiety. When I was ar cicada showed up in late summer. UM, so like a mid August you'd start hearing cicadia's at night and it's like, damn it, school starting against you. I was going to take a shopping for clo two days they're coming. Uh like nothing good came as you know, uh here at meat eat or we have a very modest vaccination incentive program um hunter Bucks. I was insistent that we have a vaccination incentive program, but it wasn't able to get people rallied and eventually somehow settled at a hunter Bucks. Did you did you claim your hunter bus? Yeah, Phil, Yeah that's probable. But you send your you send it and get your hunter Bucks. Good good, good, good good. It's a good program. Uh this but not as good as this one? Well no, you know, maybe dollar for dollar. It is like so different people are doing all these different things that get people to get vaccinated. Free donuts, free milk shakes, free beer, free lamination of your vaccination card, a free ride to get vaccinated. Ohio's launching a million dollar lotto. Oh yeah, they're vaccine there. People are lying and curve is just like a straight line million bucks man. But to enter, you gotta get vaccinated. Uh, Maine, this is great. Maine does fish. You get a fishing license, if you get vaccinated, you get a hunting license. If you get vaccinated, you can get a park pass. If you get vaccinated, you get a main state park day pass. Who the hell get the day pass? And you can just get the pass well once a wildlife park pass. The other one is a state park day pass. Get an ll being gift card, and then uh some other things that really care about baseball tickets in a race car ticket. Here's what this again is a little bit blown out of proportion. There's about a hundred and sixty thousand licensed hunters in Maine and they are paying for up to five thousands of these, so that doesn't go very far. So is it kind of like a hurry up and get years now kind of thing or hoping you don't look in at the fine print? Right? I saw you know listeners sent this in was talking about you're you're you said you're gonna deprive Maine of You're gonna deprive Mains Fish and Game Agency of three hundred thousand dollars in license sales. But I don't really understand that because they're buying the licenses. It's I mean, it says the main Department of Health and Human Services will purchase up to five thousand hunting passes license, So I don't think they're depriving the state agency of all that revenue. So I think that his the listeners great, But then he he also points out it's not a great because he points out this COVID was so overwhelmingly positive for Pittman Robertson funding because early on everyone was getting armed up two get their neighbors whatever they were gonna 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 sports shooting because you can just go off by yourself and didn't need to try to go to the whatever hordfest. Monsters are rock whatever people used to go to. They play outside now and so it's flooded. The Pittman Robertson fun with conservation money. So it's like a you know, 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 wild byfe funding right now and probably will continue to run that way for a number of years here with a lot of threats against gun ownership, it's not that's not gonna slow down. UM. Interested paper came out about mountain lions. Explain this one spencer, you're gonna explain stuff. We covered this on our website, the media dot Com. You can go there and type in study fines Mountain lions have an unexpected predator. To read the whole thing, well, we'll touch you on some of the main points. He wasn't unexpected to me, though the headline didn't ring true to me. I think it's unexpected m especially in like the the abundance of it once once you get into it. That was unexpected. So this study took place in the Greater Yellstone ecosystem in northwestern wyom and about nine square mile area. They generally like when you see the g y e. It's about the size of Indiana what they kind of lump in. You know, this specific location was selected because the researchers and studying the line population wanted there to both be wolves on the landscape and hunting aloud. 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. I mean, they wanted to have wolves and human mountain lion hunting in the same area. So that's how this area got selected. They noticed between the year two thousand and eight percent decrease in cougar populations. To determine this, they use an integrated population model, lion Den's abundance estimates for different animals, GPS, and VHF color data. So you should take solace like this was very thorough in doing this, and they termed there were three factors that caused the Kouger decline human hunting, wolves, kill and kittens, and starvation. Now, the lead researcher, Mark L. Brock, said, the big take home on these papers that wolves had the strongest effect on the survival and the abundance of mountain lions in the system. It's dramatic. Wolves are power on the landscape. We saw cats respond, but we thought it was anecdotal. The strength of the wolves effects surprise every one of us. I've heard a couple of 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 lions ran up a tree and they ate his thing. That was exactly something that they had observed on the starvation fronto. It was a number of factors. One was the wolves had just knocked back elk populations in general during this period, there was a thirty percent decline in elk population, so that caused some of the starvation. The thing you just mentioned where they had literally run him off kills, um. And then the other one, the big one, was they valued the elk population ship lift and where they were hanging out as a seventy shift in the location of the elk herd. So the wolves were blocking out from mountain lions in two ways. This is a quote from Mark L. Brock, again, the lead researcher. One by moving them into places where mountain lions were uncomfortable, like the wide open and too 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 gonna be on soon. One of the people that was involved in this, a carbon Carmen van Biancy. She's coming on right, She's she researches predators, and we had her arm. 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 how white tails and mule deer. It moves white tails out into more white tailey stuff. They head out in the open, you know, out in the flats more and it moves mule deer into more mule deally stuff. They tend to go up, try to go up into the more craggy gordy country, and white tails go out and it kind of emptied out more of the mid range habitat. They were linking this. Two hunters reporting seeing like so much fewer game. They were trying to so much fewer game in the presence of wolves and they're talking about that there 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 moved into new kinds of country. Another thing I remember reading about this though, is I can't here and feel 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 need it for three or four days. It's like they get it, it's gone. They gotta get something that's gone. They gotta get something that's gone. And that when people look at the decline of big game populations in the presence of wolves, that's like another factor is that that they're not able to They don't they're not able to kill something and need it like they normally would, they lose it to quickly. So on on the unexpected front here, when we talk about the predation, only about a third of kitten 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. Mm hmm uh. And then then he went on to say that the researchers would often find kitten parts strown strown across the ground after wolf care after a wolf kill, which he interpreted as the wolves treating cats as competition, So they weren't just going in there like kill the cats, neath the cats, They're just eliminating them off the landscape. Jordan Stiller is the writer of this article, being a good journalist, reach out to an independent third party, our buddy Jim Haffelfinger, And so what do you think of this study that was done because the study was funded I believe by Panthera, which is like the heavy metal band. Yeah, exactly, like a kind of like a cougar conservation group. So Jordan's Jim, he said, what do you think of the study? Like, did did they get it right? Was this? Uh? 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 it's really important to um not ignore the thirty percent 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, that that can't be like emphasized enough. That the wolves knocked back elk herds by and that's 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, this probably is gonna be less cats in the area, but more cats hanging out in open spaces where else where elk currently are um In Osborne Russell's journal in the end, he has these little summations of wildlife. He I think. He says that wolverines are common, tells all that about probably pretty effective predators, right, and uh, but what happened to them? They like wolves eating all that eating, all all those carcasses, all those just you know, carcasses on the landscape. I don't know send that I did over the half a finger CEO thinks about that. Uh. Spencer keeps reporting on people rescuing birds that die and it's always so sad. So there's always a dark twist ending which like someone rescues a bird, brings it to the rescue place, and they were like the bird died. So our friend Greg Lemon from Montana Fish Walting Parks wanted to point out an actual raptor that was saved, 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 Spencers always talking about, and it's fine. And then you'd like to add Spencer and stead of your rafter Dian stories. All the time. He was also sharing that that FWP rehabilitates raptors. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry they did that. I thought they did that in conjunction with the Oh this is their own rehabilitation center, but they rehabilitate is wide. He said, uh, like all the way up to bear cubs. And then in this last week they had a house sparrow come in as well. Mm hmm. Really I didn't have beb and it did it? How sparrow died before moment talking boy about that, I don't know. Um, okay, good, Sorry about that. Greg. I didn't mean to take credit away from your outfit. Now this fascinating, Michael, get anything to add by any of this stuff? Are you cool? Cool? These guys did a survey this last thing we're talking about. Uh. 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? Just at pent of Americans feel that they'd be bested by a goose in a fight. Um yeah, so more most Americans and overwhelming hum. A number of Americans things that they would best a rat, slightly fewer people who could best a house cat, slightly fewer could best a dog or goose. Um. More people felt that they could whoop a dog than the eagle. Depends it was a large dog or a medium dog. People are like, it goes like I'd be able to whoop a medium dog. Um, 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 think that they can beat a medium sized dog. This is like without and this is like you know, hand to hand hand. I forgot to say it's hand to hand hand to hand combat. A weird one is that people think they could whoop a chimpanzee. And you're not gonna whoop a chimpanzee. Percent of Americans think they could whoop a chimpanzee. Am I reading that right? I need to put my cheats on. Sorry, the woman's jumping out of elephant enhand sick? Say? That's six eight percent of Americans they think they could defeat an elephant in handdand grabam by that big snout and pitch that snout. Offer of Americans know they could whoop a wolf. Nine more Americans think they could whoop a crocodile than an elephant. Hmmm. Somehow Americans think they are better off whooping a polar bear than a grizzly and someone that he the person that shared us with his blames the Coca Cola commercials for que defying polar bears. Ron McGill is that leads you Wild leads zoologists from Zoom Miami and he does this weekly hit on a sports show that into and listeners can call in and asking questions, And for the last five years, the most common question he gets is like, what would win and fight between crocodile and polar bear? What would win a fight between a gorilla uh 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, like what did people get right? What they get wrong? Like what's the best fight from this list? And he had said the thing people got wrong the most be what you said, Steve chimpanzee. He's like you, you you would not stand at change against chimpanzee. They didn't see Planet of the Apes apparently, Yeah, they're like those things play for keeps? Ron, could you like put it in context? Like why couldn't we be the chimpanzee. He's like, okay, well a chimpanzee like with with no effort at all, can just like rip apart of coconut. He's like, that would be your skull, Like no problem there. They just have like unbelievable strength. You ever see those chimpanzees. This is disgusted. This made me not like chimpanzees. I used to be pro chimpanzee. You ever see that footage them ripping apart that poor little monkey and eating it? Yeah, they catch a little monkey and tear them limb from limb and eat them alive. That might have been a Nature's Metal. No, it was on something different. I wanted. I feel like they've shown some grouco chimpanzee 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 them. There's no way you can knock out a chimpanzee. They also asked around, They're like, what would what would genuinely be the best fight on the list, Like, what's what's like a fifty fifty fight between the human and one of the animals. The only guess what it was? Well, this would be the whooping a medium sized dog. 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 that cold cock that kangaroo the greatest video ever because he's got his dog's got his dog and they getting they the kangaroo like looks like it's square and off. He squares off in a boxer stands and hits it so hard that it turns its face by degrees. The man hits the kangaroo. What what is the situation that they're even like fighting in there? And he comes in a kangaroo. It's the weirdest thing I got. So if you go to YouTube or whatever, look up like man punching kangaroo. My kids watch this five thousand 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 holding it under in a headlock. A kangaroo or a dog and a headlock. That's pretty sophistically. 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 stance they do, like a little pirouette or whatever, and he hauls back and hits that kangaroo so hard it turns the gives the kangaroo pretty much whiplash, and then the guy squares off like it's gonna be another punch, and then him and his dog walk Away. It's great video's greatest video ever. Rod said, that would be a genuinely good fight and it could go either way. You want to see me watch this transition. Did you know about this transition? It's in here. I may have written it because it's in the graphic. You know what they use the image for the fighting for the six percent of people that think they could whoop a grizzly is a scene from the Revenant, and that was based off Michael Punk's pook The Revenant, and he's sitting right here to my left top that huge glass. Was not unarmed though, that was one thing. So you had a knife, he had a knife, had a knife. Okay, why here, let's start with this question about No, I can't decide where to start with Ridgeline. I got two you decide, it's uh, it's it's guest choice. Give us a quick overview of what happened. Oh can I can I read this? Yes? I think well, I want I want to read that. What do you call the quote in the beginning of the book here it is, it's 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 one, eighteen sixty six will never be known. It's pretty good leading and as I said, kind of opens a door for fiction. Yeah, so tell us what happened that day, and just like roughly, they're gonna get into the lead up, like why that happened, but just give a brief overview and then my next question you can decide which you want to tackle first. How do you decide on historical fiction versus nonfiction? So I'll answer I'll answer them in order. Um, briefly, what happened at high noon on that wintry day, wintry day, December one, in the Powder River Valley of Wyoming is ten decoys, ten Native American decoys, a mixture of Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho decoyed a group of cavalry and infantryman out of Fort phil Karney away from the safety of the fort. And we're skillful enough as decoys to lead them over a ridgeline ah about two and a half miles away from the They were not supposed to go. 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, were is a force probably numbered around two thousand combined Cheyenne, Lakota, Arapaho warriors led by Red Cloud, and into that trapped. These calvarymen and infantrymen fell and were wiped out to the man men killed. It was the worst, most mostly by earrows. It was the worst defeat in US military history for a decade until the the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Mhmm. I don't remember if he mentioned the book, but I've seen elsewhere that the decoys, as part of their strategy, were mooning the U. S soldiers. That's something you found to be true. I've read that before. Um. I'm not sure what I think about that, whether that actually happened. I uh, I mean, who knows. They probably were doing a lot of things because they kind of lead the cavalry that was out in front along for quite a distance. You. UM, 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. Uh. They certainly were successful in making them angry and getting them to chase uh, and in defiance of direct orders that they had not to go over this particular origin line. 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, UM, I've written both. The This is my second novel. The first novel was The Revenant, and Origin Line 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 a fictionalized version, as opposed to something like the story of the mining disaster and Butte that I wrote about, where there were seven daily newspapers in Butte, Montana at the time of the disaster, all of which we're covering this incident and government reports about it, etcetera, etcetera. You just had all sorts of of of historical material to work with, where you didn't need as much of the of the fictionalized piece. So that was 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. Um, particularly if you look at at Crazy Horses involvement. I don't know if you've ever read LARRYM. Merchery, there was a series where like novelists would write these I was famous Americans and Larry McMurtry, um, you know, most famous. He wrote Lonesome Dove h He wrote the Crazy Horse one, which is very short, very short, and it begins with Larry E. Merchany basis staying I don't know. Well, it was like basically it was like I'll tell you what we don't know, and that's kind of what the book called 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 who Red Cloud, for example, there are lots of photographs Crazy Uh sitting bowl. Crazy Horse. There's no there's no photograph. He never allowed himself to be photograph. He's so mysterious, very mysterious. They don't 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 what happened at the time of his death. He was in Nebraska correct, yes, and he was in he was in UH military. He was like under some kind of house arrest. He's being returned to UH to confinement 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 imprisoned, and he resisted. And the story that ah 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. I know there was when I've read about it, it was that there is like some historical disagreement about who gave the death blow. But but I remember Ian Frasier writing that um, his disdain for the white man was still strong that even after he was stabbed and he was dying, he refused to be laid in the bed exactly. UH. He wanted to lay on the ground and died in the company of his of his father, that that evening after being stabbed, and then presumably somewhere within there his body is hidden. You would you would think that, I mean, I guess, we don't know, but that's what you would think. M hm. So the point being about that is it allows I can see that there's reward and risk and taking the approach to take sure because you're taking a stab at it right and perform stab but it's it's I shouldn't use the word STABBU you stabbed death. You're taking a I don't know, I guess, yeah, yeah, for sure. And uh and I actually the book doesn't cover that part of Crazy Horses life. It pretty much stops with with the fetterment fight. That doesn't go forward the ten years that personality that you established personality, But for sure, and and and I grapple with that a lot as a 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 as a nation, we're losing our grip on fact versus fiction and veracities. Yeah maybe, um, 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 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 I 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. It 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 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 that is true to history and to the characters. In the end, in a secondary I want to get to the sort of the lead up to this fight. But in the end, you do like you have some people that you paint as a napped and ye, yes, like I guess not villain isn't the right word, but some of them, yeah, I would call him villains. Some real questionable characters in the book, and then in the end you have some notes well that that lay out off the case I lay out your case. I've 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 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. Sorry. On the media dot Com, we read an article last year called the Genre Revived the New Age of Westerns, and we sort of talked about how there's been a shift like since the nineteen fifties, 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 it becomes very action here we and then in like the two thousands, and now it's like sort of dark. There's a lot of character development, um, and there's not years 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 it's just been like this huge shift over less seventy years and the whole genre of Westerns. Has there been any kind of similar shift with like historical fiction or not. Um, 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. Too. 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 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 to the era that we live in that they live in in their time, and so fifties westerns reflected that kind of fifties mentality about about good and evil. Seventies western's anti hero. The anti hero during the Vietnam War reflected a much different view of what a hero even was in a Western context. Uh, something like a movie like Unforgiven to Me is all about the it's all about violence, and it happened to be at a time a nation in doubt, a nation in doubt. You know, what does 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 I think I do that too. 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, and that I think that probably ends up being true. Is that, Look, we all see the path, we all see everything through our prism of of our present experience. And I think you 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 uh distorted by your your current vision. But I think that it's 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 maybe in a historical account and meshing that with you know, because 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, Malbia 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 is has a sprawling cast, and and the West, you know, one of the things people don't often realize about the West is just how incredibly diverse it was. And uh, you know, even the diversity within the tribes is incredible. Among the Lakota, just in this story, you have the Menacaoju, you have the Oglala. Among the Cheyenne, you have the northern and southern Cheyenne, you have the Crow, you have the Arapaho, uh. And so there's a huge diversity just with language barriers which you get into, which I had that hadn't occurred to me before. I guess maybe I had just hadn't thought about it. Difficult to communicate and and that's just the tribes. And then you have uh, you know, the role of women in the frontier is a lot more pronounced in this era than 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 eight seventy six cavalry uniform and I uh talked to tourists about the history of the West. Twice a day. We fired in 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 US 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 as 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 Karney in eighteen sixty six. So in your question was how do you 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, including the fact that he's such a there's such a an aspect of mystery around him, made him just fascinating to me. The soldiers, there's incredible conflict between the officers, between 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 uh 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 ft in eighteen sixty six, both in the form of officers wives because the officers brought their families with them, which is surprising to a lot of people. And Laundre says, I was surprised to read that. I mean, you know, think about where they're they're sitting in that day, that it's the most dangerous spot on the planet. And these officers are bringing their families with him and all your husbands right out one day and yeah, and all these people are interacting with with each other in the midst of this incredibly stressful period in history. And to me, that just was inherently dramatic and interesting. Um, have you ever read uh, I can't remember the name, but there's a really good book about there's a history of Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion to September two thousand one? No, okay, uh, this battles what day? December one? December one? Give me what was going on up to December sixty six? 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 eighteen forty six, the US and the United Kingdom enter a treaty that gives Oregon, that settles that Oregon will be part of the United States. So eighteen forty six Oregon becomes legally American. That was that was like the last piece of the puzzle, right, not quite. And here's the other the war with Mexico. Not quite. So eighteen forty six U S gets Oregon from the UK. Eighteen forty seven, Brigham young establishes a a settlement in Salt Lake City. Eighteen forty eight, the us UH signs the treaty that ends the Mexican American War. So it's forty eight when California becomes American. And two weeks after they signed that treaty with the Mexicans, at Sutter's Mill in California, they discovered gold. And then you have the forty Niners with the gold Rush. So in that three year period you have Oregon, California, and Salt Lake City just sort of saying come west, and people start doing it. And then they said he get rich and get rich. Yeah, and you know, but what happens for a while basically between uh, you know, the late eighteen forties and eighteen sixty six, the era that that 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. They were was at the time in which they would refer to it as the Great American Desert or something exactly. And so the first thing that the government does in eighteen fifty one is they they they sign a treaty with the tribes that creates a travel corridor that's basically the Oregon Trail. And they but the fifty one treaty says to the tribes, you can have everything north of of the Platte River, north of the Oregon Trail. With a treaty like that, Like, what are they specifying the specifying that people can pass through unmolested. Are they actually saying like, here's a little buffer we don't want anybody to go into mostly passed through them unmolested. They say, here's the road that you can do that, you will allow settlers to use. They allowed him 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 tell yes, no interest yes. And then what happens is the gold, the plastic gold, the easy gold, runs out in California by the late by the early eighteen fifties, 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's start to be gold strikes in places like uh like Nevada and Colorado, and then in eighteen sixty two 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 the Bannock City in Virginia City and the other gold strikes. And when they do that, when those when those miners start peeling off the Oregon Trail, they're violating the treat the eight fifty one treaty, which has given all of that too. The tribes, and so it creates this conflict. And by eighteen sixty six, and this is the this is what sometimes it's called the Bozeman Trail, and I think it was more commonly then called the Montana Road. That the Bozeman Trail goes right through the middle of the Powder River Valley. And what the U. S. Government does, and this is what the U. S. Government does every single 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 signed a new treaty. And so in the summer of eighteen sixty six 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 eighteen sixty six, the US government signs a new treaty that basically says they can travel through the Powder River Valley and build three words between Fort Laramie and the gold fields in Montana. What are they given? What do they give us compensation? Uh? For that treaty? I I can't remember if they because what they did in eighteen fifty one is they said, we'll give you fifty dollars worth of annuities every year and they would come out with wagons full of arrowheads and blankets and metal pots and some kind of like rolling cattle and stuff into there. Right. Yeah, although I don't think the cattle was as common for those annuities. I don't know if if there was an annuity agreement in eighteen sixty six or not. But when they do an annuity like that, they would say basically in perpetuity, Yeah, we'll truck out and drop off at some locations goods and the tribes will come in annually and collect their annuities. That was that was meant to be like forever. Uh. But what they do in eighteen sixty six is they they find And this is part of the misconception of the U. S Government for a long time, certainly then but even even now in terms of wanting to think of of the tribes as being monolithic entities. They wanted they wanted the Lakota to be France because they were used to having the negotiations between you know, the United States and France, and you would get each country's diplomats together and you sign a treaty. And the Lakotah, the tribes, the Lakota representatives that they signed treaties with, and then the other representatives that they signed the treaty with in 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 they didn't Uh, 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 a Red Cloud who lives in the Powder River Valley who didn't sign that treaty then, and you can imagine that that didn't go over well. But here's the thing that confused me a little bit though. The Powder River Valley where where the fight takes place. Wasn't that supposedly that wasn't even Lakota ground hadn't then, But hadn't they agreed that that was the crow not It was more ambiguous than that. Um and so and and 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 of the Big Hornament. But history like, yeah, skirmishing whatever that predates that. And and the notion, I mean, the notion that tribes had defined very specifically defined territories is very much and uh something that I think the US 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 that was you know, agreed to in the sense that that the U. S Government wanted to think about. And so when they try and when the US 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 consign that on behalf of another tribe just didn't it didn't like this creek, that river, or that mountain ridge exactly and so and in fact, uh, what happens in the summer of eighteen sixty six is Red Cloud is at Fort Laramie as part of these negotiations. And in the middle of those negotiations, Colonel Carrington, who I read about in the book, marches into Fort Laramie from Nebraska with three hundred troops, and the Lakota find out that his mission is to go build forts in the Powder River Valley. This is before the treaty has even been signed, even a treaty that they don't like. And so Red Cloud says, you know, screw this, I'm out of here. Like I thought we were here to negotiate, but you've already decided um. And Red Cloud leaves. And that was because that was an area that he had spent his life in, yes, 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 signed 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 set up for for December twenty one six, that's the setup. Is a couple of decades in which the floodgates have just been 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, and he's a nineteen year old naive greenhorn in The Revenant, and by the time of this book eighteen sixty six, he's a sixty six year old legend of the West, and truly a legend of the West. I mean, he's he is in his own day. The soldiers are in awe of him because he's he's famous as a incredible Western scout. And so yeah, the Army hire Jim Bridger to scout for them in the Powder River Valley in this campaign in eighteen sixty six, 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 UH father as a boy, and both Bridger and Beckworth and go out and are part of the original eight twenty three Rocky Mountain Fur Company expedition that goes out that I read 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 the of the 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 eighteen sixty six where Jim freaking Bridger and James freaking Beckworth are riding across the prairie together for for two months UH looking for the tribes and and imagining the conversations that those two guys were having, which I try and do in the book that movie Drug Store Cowboys. We've seen Bob well and and imagine what they've seen. I mean, they came. They came West in eighteen twenty three with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and are part of literally one of the very first commercial for operations in the eighteen twenties, and they ride through, uh, they ride out the whole fur trade era until the until eighteen forty. Bridger then reinvents himself and sets up a fort that ends up being right on on the Mormon Trail to to Salt Lake City and makes a ton of money selling provisions to immigrants on the on the Oregon Trail. And then by the eighteen sixties he's scouting for the US or he's making his living as a as a scout for the U. S. Army. But the history that he's seen is phenomenal thinking. And you paint him as being um like, and I buy it. Well, you paint him as as becoming conflicted about the changes in the West. Well, I thought about that a lot, and I think we talked about 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 drew them to the west, uh, you know, the truly open frontier was changing, and not only was it changing, but they were helping to facilitate 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? And if you look at it from a abundance of game, yeah, oh, I mean that they were seeing their witnessing like here there are all these decades they have been living off these like incomprehensible herds of buffalo that's vanishing, like it already along the trail, especially harder, harder, fun 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 about things generally and and your life and your role. And it's not that I think that Bridger suddenly had a massive conversion and and you know, uh, turned away from his earlier life. I don't I don't think that's I don't think that's what happened, But I think there must have been a 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 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 think he might have had some some antipathy towards the Lakota, in part because his tribes that he had married into and spent the most time with, where the whether Shoshonee, who were historical enemies of the of the Lakota and the Cheyenne. So I think who shot him in the back with an arrow? That was a black Feet? Right? That was the Blackfeet, I believe, Yeah, 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 you 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 that played for for Bridger. So Bridger helps them identify or mare they've already identified a fort site. Yeah, it's not entirely clear how they decide exactly where are going to be, but we'll talk about that spot. Well. One thing I'll say about Bridger and one decision he was involved when is Bridger told the army not to go up to powder Over Valley because he Bridger told them to go up the other side of the Big Horns because that's where the Shoshony were, who were more friendly to the U. S. Government. And he said, if you go up to the Shoshony side of the Big Horns, uh, you won't have to fight. But it was longer, and there was such it took like Tanner twenty days longer if you went on the eastern side of the Big Horns. And so they were so eager to get to the gold fields that they just wouldn't except a short a longer route wouldn't that be the western side of the Big Horn. I'm sorry that the longer route was the shy were on the western side side, absolutely on the western side of the Big Horns, and it was the Powder River valleys on the on the eastern side of the Big Horns. And Bridget told him go up the western side, whether 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've foisted a treaty on tribes and went up the Powder River side and that's what led immediately to the conflict. So that was that's the one thing I know about where Bridgers specifically advised them. I don't know about the individual fort sites. Once I got on the on the Powder riverside um and they pick a spot, they pick a spot. Uh. You've guys are probably been in this part of the country. It's it's it's beautiful. These these creeks that run off the Big Horn uh into the Powder River Valley are are just they're timbered and they're green, and there's these crystal clear cricks that run off the Big Horn uh and and you can see why they think that this is a good spot and this, this spot where Fort Philcarney is is beautiful, great water grass for their stock, especially because they were driving a herd of a thousand cattle. Uh, they weren't feeding their their horses on on the army didn't feed their horses on on grass, but they needed grass for for their cattle. There's timber to build a fort with. It's a great fort site. The only problem is it's dead center in the middle of Lakota. Uh, home planned and and hunting territory. When you you mentioned that they're packing with, you gotta kind of get a picture of what this most look like coming across the landscape. Yeah, driving a thousand cattle. They have sawmills, I mean they have. They are coming to stay there, like everything you need to establish a city. Yes, So this is not like a fifties movie where there's a hundred cavalrymen out on a on a patrol. This is Uh. This is a massive caravan, a mass of wagon train that includes hundreds of soldiers, both cavalry and infantry. It includes hundreds of Condostoga wagons bringing supplies including as you point out, a sawmill that they construct on the site in order to to mill the logs to 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 work out very well for them. They're they're intending to use as their winner food supply and and this is one of the things that must have been most striking to the to the Lakota is they see that there are women and children as part of this 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. There's not the it was burned by the by the tribes after the after the end of this war, but the the area that they enclosed in the stockade enclosed thirteen acres, so it's huge. And then inside of this walled area there they built buildings. But it it didn't look like the the kind of small trading post fort and we kind of sometimes have in our mind's eye. This is a massive fortification. Can you explain what the army would trade is that plays a role in this sure so. Uh. The daily life at Fort phil Karney in this era basically involved the mission of the fort of these of this army and in the early days, is to build the fort. They're not even supposed to really be out looking to to fight the tribes. They're supposed to be building the fort and establishing a base and then they're presumably going to go out in the spring and fight. And so every day what they do is they send out what they called the wood train, which was a caravan of of wagons, and they would 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. Cannons, they got cannons, and they want to be able to use use the cannons, which they did. So every day a wood train that was manned by soldiers would would go out three miles to where the timber was and they would cut trees down and then they would hold those trees back to the fort and they would mill those into either the logs they used to actually uh, 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 to the fall is they're sending out wood cruise and a wood train to cut wood. And what the 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 uh in ever more uh kind of sophisticated types of attacks, and all of that then leads up to this big battle at the end, which is uh fundamentally different from anything that the army had had ever seen before, which is one of the reasons why I think it was so effective. Explain the kind of raids that were taught about when to say, like attack in the wood train. So of what a typical wood crew would be maybe uh twenty soldiers to cut wood and twenty soldiers whose job was to stand guard because they every time they went out virtually there was an attack or certainly the threat of attack. So what an attack would be over the course of the fall, were these very small war parties of you know, ten twelve warriors that would go out and do these guerilla style running attacks against the wood cruise. And a lot of soldiers died over the course of the fall. I mean dozens, they did. They I mean, you know, but none of the of those skirmishes were big. You know, one or two or five soldiers would die. It was not a big battle. It was it was viewed as more of a by the by the army, as more of a of a harassment. They weren't in the mindset that the that the tribes would come together and attack them in a in a big way. And frankly, not only were they not in that mindset, but they disregarded in ways that that proved quite foolish the ability of the of the tribes to kind of come together and have a kind of massive strategy or big trap that would challenge them if they had, if they went out and force. In your book, you get into this um it's like a little side story or inter story of some sort. I can't find the right word for it. With the cattlemen that show up, is that was is that a thing to happen? It happened, and this was complete catnip for me because of what you of what you said, Larry McMurtry. So my favorite, uh novel of all time is is Lonesome by by Larry McMurtry, which people have probably read and people they know, is about the first ever cattle drive from Texas to Montana. And I'm doing the research for can We Hold Their just explains from yeah, um, now like in modern times, you can bring a cow like a cargo from birth to sale quicker than it used to like even today, if you go down to Argentina wherever, like you know, they don't grain cattle down there. Um, 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 is grass. You're you're taking them up like you're taking a single generation up to get fattened for free on free grass, and then bring him somewhere to sell them. So it's not like it's not you're bringing them up there to leave them there you're talking about the Montana driver. You know, people would do it's like cattle drives going up a lot of times to be like you're just they're they're just feeding them, you know, it's like it's not you sold them to some guy up there. Well this uh So the guy that we're talking about here in truth is a guy named Nelson Store. And when I was doing the research for the about the you know, this Powder River War in eighteen sixty six, not only does Jim Bridger show up there and James Beckworth in the middle of this and as a writer, I'm like, yeah, 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 twenty uh cowboys driving it shows up at Fort phil Karney in the fall of eighteen sixty six, 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 thirty dollars. Oh yeah, I forgot about this details 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 figures out is he's going to take his thirty dollars from panning golden bannock and he dropped. He rides his horse to Texas and he gathers up a herd of cattle and hires twenty cowboys and they literally drive this cattle herd from Texas to Virginia City, Montana, successfully with the goal of establishing do not what I was saying, And I mean he he sells half of them, but he keeps. He establishes the first cattle ranch in Paradise Valley and may have named it um. And so he establishes a cattle ranch in Paradise Valley, uh near what's now Livingston, and becomes the first Montana millionaire selling cattle to gold miners. And half the ship in Bowsman is named after him. Exactly. Yeah, he's buried here. Yeah yeah, so, I mean, yeah, my kid when I had to escort his field his field trip, one day, we went to look at we went to see where they last guy they hung down at the courthouse, and then he went over to see at the gallows, which is still there. And then went over to see, uh stories Tombstone. So this the story of story for me was too enticing not to incorporate into the book because it's just it is. And Larry mcmintry has said that he based in part the story of Lonesome Dove on his research on Nelson's story. You mentioned the book that, um, these guys show up and they're better armed, the soldiers much better armed. The army was incredibly stupid about the weapons that they gave their soldiers for a long time, and in eighteen sixty six, these poor bastards who get sent out to fight on the western frontier are carrying civil war uh 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, uh, you know, there's two civilians that right out on the day of the battle with with with Carrington is man, they're both armed with Henry repeating rifles which held sixteen bullets like a two like a lever action lever action repeating rifle, highly accurate sixteen rounds. They joke at the time, was you load on Sunday and shoot all week. Um, they have at that those guys had been laying waste with those things. Man, they didn't want 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. Who go back to story one quick step? Um, how did he like? I know he did, but how did he think that he would live? Well, it's crazy and uh uh. He does arm his twenty guys with repeating rifles and so they're well armed. But when you think about they just running a rolling gun battle through the valley, not a roll rolling battle, but they did. They did fight several battles with the tribes on the way up. I mean, these guys were we're flat out badass and the fact that they thought that they could do it is unbelievable. And they but they succeed, and our night's sleep well and they they did have their cattle runoff at one point, they lost like half their heard and they go out with a party and they recapture, they fight the tribe that took him, and they recapture the battle and heard the the strays back into the herd and keep going. I mean, it's an amazing story. The story story is an amazing story. So what's different on December when the wood train sets out? So what is different is uh the what I think is really happening is the Lakota and Crazy Horse and the Red Cloud and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies have just spent the fall learning about their enemy and taking into consideration everything that they learn. The U. S. Army has been doing exactly the opposite. They've they first of all, underestimate their enemy in terms of that enemy's ability to uh 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 are even capable of fighting. Um, they they're very focused just on building the fort and not thinking about about fighting. And what Red Cloud does is he 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 of the tribes on the on the plains at that time. The Crow didn't want to be a part of it, but he may have. I've 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 two hundred warriors. And the war party that he brings together and and usually, as we talked about before, it was a dozen kind of guerilla style hits. What he does on December twenty one six is he pulls together two thousand 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 the fortification or the cannons or anything else. And he places like a level of secrecy, in complete secrecy because nobody they and they can't see this. You can't if once you go over a lodge trail ridge, which is the ridgeline in the book, you can't see on the other side. You can't see from the from the fort the other side. And then the trick, and this is a huge trick, is somehow they've got to get the army to come out of the fort in numbers and get them to go three miles over the ridgeline into the trap so that it can be sprung. And that's the job of crazy horse. Crazy horse job. I want to put it in Another challenge you spent and maybe you're good to you spend a lot of time talking about it, is how far they lured these people in with no one noticing that there's two thousand people hiding under clumps of stage and not just people horses like the subterfuge. Yes, I mean it's and when you walk the people with horses with horses, and and when you walk the battlefield. And we talked about this when I was here before to 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 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 there's but it's still pretty open. And it's pretty open, certainly if you're trying to hide two thousand warriors and their horses. And so to me, that's one of the biggest, uh mysteries of the battle and one of the most amazing things that they did is they they hid themselves and their horses such that all of these uh, these cavalrymen and infantrymen get up on this ridge line and look down and don't see anything and write it and maybe want to It makes me want to go back there just to look like, I don't understand how does that like? I 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 just to keep the horses quiet and to and to hold their positions, they had to wait because they were they're basically on if it's a if it's a if you think of it of the battlefield as a as a clock, they're basically and and if you imagine that the army riding in at twelve o'clock, they basically have uh warriors deployed between ten o'clock and two o'clock all around the clock. And so between the army has to ride in between ten o'clock and two o'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 of that clock to do it, and and to do and that's a that's that's not two yards, that's like a mile, and so it's a it's a massive battlefield. And so but that's what they successfully do is they suck them into the center of that of that clock and then they quickly close up between ten o'clock and two o'clock and then it's a masker Is it undis because your book gets into it. Is it undisputed that they were for they were forbidden to the like, sure, go chase them, don't go over the ridge. So I think it's pretty close to undisputed. And I say that with a little bit of hesitation because Colonel Carrington, who is in the fort during the battle, and he's the he's the head cheese, he's the guy who sends these guys out, but he doesn't he doesn't go fight, and therefore he doesn't go die. Ah. He after this, 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 U S military history until Custer. And so there's a 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 record, including blaming Fetterman overwhelmingly as 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 Grummand who is much more the villain in in my book, you pay him, you pay him out of a whole I think he wasn't a whole. Um And there's uh and there's good evidence of that. Um. 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 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. Ah ah, the the the reputation of Grummond. By contrast, he was court martialed during the Civil War for for beating one of his noncommissioned officers. He was court martialed for shooting an unarmed civilian, and he was court martialed for disobeying orders and charging head when he wasn't supposed to. So when you weigh there, 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, how are we going to the aftermath? Well, I'm not, but I'm saying Carrington's wife sort of like goes on to her blaming Vetterman. Right, how does that influence things? Well, a lot because and uh and it's crazy because uh uh, just it's a little bit incestuous here because at the time that the book Taste takes place, both Carrington and Grumman's wives are part of the fort. And in fact, I write a lot about Francis Gruman 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 Rington's version of the battle, including don't go over Lodge trail Ridge, and she blames Fetterman like Carrington. But uh but uh, Carrington's first wife, Margaret dies and and he ends up marrying Grumman's wife and then he's been died in the fight and uh. And Grumman's wife then writes her own autobiography, and she also repeats, in some cases almost word for word, uh, the 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 ten warriors that sort of acted as the decoys you have, like to Chyenne, to rappero Um two from. 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 and crazy Horse is one of them. But they My understanding is that the tribes picked honorary decoys that were representative of of their of their people, and so I think it's it's probably pretty accurate that there was the type of mixture that I that I described there, and that comes a lot from a lot of the oral accounts of the battle from from different uh from different tribes, when, um, what's the the you know, for a long time people called the Fetterman Massacre also the Fetterman Fight, but it had the battle of hand? Was that? Was that a sue name? That was what the Lakota call it because they had someone had a problem that there is someone said like if you want to catch a bunch of them a half man. So there is a there's a transgender Lakota and we don't know his name in in my book I give I give the name Moon for this person. But when I when I first read about this, I wondered about it. But there is an account of this from George Bird Grinnell, who's a guy that I wrote a book about who was a conservationist and also in a Native American ethnologist. And in nineteen fifteen he wrote a book called The Fighting Cheyenne, and as part of his research in nineteen fifteen, he interviews a Cheyenne warrior named white Elk who had been at the 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 of a transgender Lakota. Their their word for it was winked, a transgender Dakota, and the and the the winkday 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 they were often turned to or advice, whether it was in family matters or in in battle. And so this account that I use as the basis for what I write about in the novel is from this nineteen fifteen account that George Bird Grennell wrote down from the story here he heard from a Cheyenne wear a white elk, which I think is pretty good, pretty good evidence. Um, and it was it wasn't quite a hunter hole was the numbers? 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 gonna they're gonna hide everybody, And in deciding whether or not to use that site as the battlefield, they call upon this this wink to a profit to to tell him what's going to happen, and he prophesieses that uh, he rides. The prophet rides all over the battlefield and comes back three separate times. And on his third time coming back, he is acting out that his arms are full and that his hands are full, and he tells red Cloud in 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 that this is the place and time and place. And so the Dakoda referred to the battle as the battle of the hundred in the hands. Not quite a hundred die, but eighty one die, which is I don't know what the probably we keep track on prophecies, but that was not too far off. Once they spring the trap, so that the ten dco we kind of state was he's ten decoys, rile up skirmish with somehow infuriate um and get these soldiers to just be like, now our chance, We're finally gonna get these suckers. Ye, they ride into the center of the clock. Once they spring the trap, how long does it take them to kill them? All thirty minutes, and there are unbelievable Yeah, and there are unbelievable accounts of thirty minutes thirty minutes, And so what starts happening back at the fort um and there's a good there's good you know, written history of this is all of a sudden they start hearing gunshots, um, and then they start hearing a shipload of gun shots, 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 send out what's supposed to be a relief force so that it gets their way too late, and they actually the relief force once they get up on the ridge line and look down there, they can see what's going on. The relief force is smart enough not to write down there. But but thirty 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 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 they're in a circle and they're firing towards the center. But there is is quite a bit of of anecdotal evidence about about Native American warriors being killed by arrows because there were so many arrows, and of course it's it's chaotic in the center, must be a buzz with arrows. I mean, you see these movies now where they show these waves of arrows, you know, flying in and it that's it must have 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 we don't I don't know that that happened. I think it's quite plausible that when it got down to the end, you know, there's a there's a famous trope in Western stories of of you know, save the last bullet for yourself, and I think it 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 You're not going to become a prisoner a war. You're not going to be a pow. Um. They were watching their uh, their fellow soldiers. You know the way these guys die. If they don't get shot with an arrows, they get hacked to death. Um, you're getting bludgeoned and you're getting killed with with with war clubs and and hatchets. And so it's not at all implausible to me that that some of them at the end chose to to commit suicide instead. And two of those well that the suicide speculation sort of exists around our Fetterman in Brown, right, that's right. And Uh, there there is contrary evidence which all which I also talked about at the end of the book. Uh, there is a a there's a there's a La Coda warrior who claims to have killed Fetterman in a in a within an account that is quite plausible, I think. Um. And there's also some evidence from the post surgeon that 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. Uh, you know, autopsy on these soldiers. For one thing, this the post surgeon was not a forensic surgeon. He was a post surgeon, and he had eighty bodies brought in and and all the bodies were were mutilated to with the exception of of 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 uh potential that that that fetterman was actually killed by by one of the Lakota Wears, as opposed to committing suicide soldiers dead how many warriors different accounts, Probably uh, somewhere around thirty I think is a is a pretty good guess. Maybe maybe more than that, but I mean there. And you talked Stephen about the two civilians who had the Henry rifles. Most of the evidence of of of Native deaths were in a semi circle 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. Some real hard ass 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 evidence that they killed quite a few at that part of the battle and the rest of the battle, I don't think that they 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 was all running, 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 caught them up. Well, I mean, I've fired these muzzleloading guds 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 to do that with hundreds of warriors running towards you and arrows flying around and people dying all around you, and especially when they 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 and then their gun was a was a club. This is an ignorant question, but like in the aftermath this, what happens to the guns that the soldiers had did the warriors swooping and clean some of that stuff up. They did. They gathered all those weapons up, and you know, and that was as you would imagine they would, they would gather everything of use off the battlefield before they before they left. There's a saucy detail from the Little Big Horn battle where the seventh Cavalry was carrying a gun that had a newer gun. They had a distinct sound that set it apart, you know, you know, you tell it like different kind of like bigger guns, smaller guns, right, um. And the people that weren't caught up in that battle, but were we're surrounded on another ridgeline the next day, realized 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 where well, talking about the guns that they had and and ten years, it's interesting because in eighteen sixty six, in this battle, most of a lot of the of the Native American warriors did not have rifles, or the rifles they had were single shots, and they preferred to use their their bows and arrows because they could fire so much more rapidly. By eighteen seventy six. Ten years later, Battle of a Little Big Horn, A lot of the of the Native American warriors had Henry repeating rifles gunfight, but the U. S. Army still gave their their their Their soldiers at that point had mostly eighteen seventy three Springfield either rifles or car beans, which were those stupid trap door single shot They fired a metal cartridge, but they they were single shots and had to be loaded, you know, one shot at a time through a trap door in the 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 it had them, but um there were demonstrations of their gunsmithing where they'd get these and then keeping them going. It stocks put back together with barrels like barrels, fashioned stocks with raw hide wrappings and filed pieces. You'd get these things, maybe even got it broken. Yeah, And in finding a way to just to keep him well, you think about I I portray Jim Bridger. Uh. There. There's a great thing on Instagram yesterday from the Montana State Historical Society which has Jim Bridgers hacking at the Montana State Historical Society in in Helena, and I one of my goals in life is to go there and and have somebody let me hold that, because I just think that would be a really cool thing to hold Jim Bridgers hocking. But he apparently still had a hocking 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 hawk and rifle. And part of his defense in the book I have is 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, and 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 to being able to fix it, even on the frontier as opposed to the complexity of a repeating rifle system. For an old timer might be like, I don't I don't want to deal with that. I've like, I've told the story thousand times. But I was with an Amerindian group in South America and they had sixteen They had a sixteen gage shotgun, a break open sixteen gage shotgun, and they only had twelve gage shells. So they wouldn't get ready to go hunt at night. They would take that twelve gage 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, knocked the primers with the same The primers are compatible. Knocked the primer out, put the primer into the sixteen gauge, pour the powder in uli. Yeah. Usually this little they'd make this little leaf thing to act as a wadding, put the shot in, melt a candle, steal the holding off of candle. Acts. They do two or three of those and head off into the Jungeral gosh, that's unbelievable. It's like good ingenuity, right, that's very good ingenuity. Speaking of ingenuity, one of the things that is fascinating to me is the cannon technology of that era. And we were talking before about how wars are a great booster of of innovation, especially on weaponry. And one of the things I learned about working at Fort Landarmy National Historic Site as a teenagers, as I said, we fired these mountain howitz or 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 is shooting out a solid either a solid cannon ball, you know, to knock down walls, or they would they would use grape shot, which is basically like turning a shotgun into a cannon, into a big, giant shotgun. But one of the the weapons are one of the options they had with cannons even in that era is something called spherical case shot, and that was a it looked like a cannon ball, 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 cannon ball that could be cut to blow up at different ranges, and when the cannon would go off, the flame from the ignition with light that fuse in the front the cannon ball, and then it as the cannonball flew down range, the fuse would burn in and at the appointed range you know a thousand yards for example, blow up and and all of those cannonballs, the musket balls inside of the cannonball would then disperse on the battlefield. I mean, it was a that's an incredibly sophisticated weapon. Uh. And there's a lot of mathematics that go behind that. And and in fact, in that era, oftentimes the smartest guys at West Point were made artillery. And because the high technology the day was artillery and mathematics, and so if you were smart and could do math, you were an artilleryman. And then and in the days leading up to this fight, they had the tribes kind of had learned a 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 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 a very few battles in history where Native American tribes attack a fort, and that's the classic kind of John Wayne uh you know 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 out word 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 eighty one dead soldiers thirty dead warriors that 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 of the cannon at the fort and the soldiers that remained there. But they do end up winning that war. Yeah, Like yeah, we keep comparing a little big Horm. A little Big Horm was like a very pirate victory, very they even in winningly knew they had lost. They dispersed and went into hiding. When this like for a while, so kind of one, including getting a new treaty, uh where the U. S. Army agrees. And this is the only time I ever know of this happening, And it didn't last very long, but it happened lasted for a while because of the Fetterman fight. And it's interesting actually, because the politics of the United States in eighteen seventy six are very different from the politics of the United States in eighteen sixty six. In eighteen sixty six, 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 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 scare the Whites off for a while. And that's exactly 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 including the Black Hills. In eighteen seventy six, the politics of the country have changed. And or if they had the foresight to be like, yeah, we want it, but it's not gonna last, I think they must have been worried. Um, but I don't know. It's a really interesting question. But by eighteen seventy six, when the Little Big Horn defeat happens, and this I love this fact of history. The news of a little Big Horn, A little big Horn is June eighteen seventy six. The news of the Little Big Horn reaches Washington, d c. On July four, eighteen seventy six, the exact one years centennial of the country, and it is a turd in the punch bowl of that celebration. And the reaction to the country at that point is we're not going to let this stand. And at from that point on it's total war against the tribes, and in in a year and a half, the war against the Northern Plains Indians is over and Crazy Horse has been forced to uh surrender on a reservation. Sitting Bowl has fled into Canada. Eighteen seventy seven is the year of the They're defeated. It's over, and so once the US really turned its full military force on the war, it was pretty inevitable. I came across something really interesting in the research for this. There's I read that the total population of all the Plains tribes in the eighteen sixties was probably about seventy six thousand. Of the Lakota of the they were probably about sixteen thousand, of which there were about four thousand Lakota fighting men. So think about that. The US at that time had thirty one million people. During the Civil War, the US had there was a standing army of two point one million people on the on the north and one million people in the South. So when you think about those numbers, once the US kind of decided we're not gonna let the stand anymore, it wasn't going to and that's exactly what happens after eighteen seventy six. The fot like, following the days of the battle, they have to be on the edge, right because they don't they don't evacuate immediately. They're not gone the next day. It's there's an amazing story that I don't talk about in the book, but we talked about all the time at Fort Laramie UH after the after the battle, they are afraid that they're going to be attacked, and of course they've just lost, you know, half their fighting force, and so there they maybe Red Cloud could have overtaken that for it if you've been willing to kind of, you know, do a World War One style fight against UH an entrenched position. I don't know, but they're worried about that, and so Colonel Arrington sends a rider out from Fort phil Karney 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 forty eight hours and he literally arrives at Fort Laramie on in the middle of a Christmas Eve party. So I guess it took him that long between the twenty one and three days. His horse dies in front of the unmarried officers quarters building where they're having a Christmas party, and he staggers into this Christmas party with the news of the of the Fetterman, of the Fetterman fight, and then Fort Laramie sends out troops to to to reinforce the fort. Horse dies front. Horse dies in front, easier to dismount. The poor horse dies in front. The name of the building is his old Bedlam. It's a fort at it's a it's a building at Fort Laramie that was the enlisted or the unmarried Officers corp Portuguese Phillips want to end up having 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 like a worst case scenario, and they have explosives rigged up and breaking emergency thing. So Carrington is so worried about them being overrun that he uh he comes up with a plan and the they stored the powder. The armory at the in the middle of Fort Fille was in the middle of Fort Field Carney and like a dugout kind of building where they stored all the powder, and the plan was that if the walls were breached, all of the women and children would go into the go down where the gunpowder was and they would set the powder off and blow it up so that 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 today. Actually that was they had a plan for that tough use the light man used to light. That's not to call this podcast episode. Make a note of that. Ar all right. The book is like you can buy the book right now, right now, just buy it'll shift you the next day or everywhere books are sold. Everywhere books are sold. Tell people how to find you? Are you do you do social media? Yeah? I do? Uh my kids think I'm not very good at it. But I'm on Twitter. I'm on because of Karan. I'm on Instagram. Uh so on Instagram, I'm m w punk that's pun k E. And on Twitter I'm m punk p U and K. And the book is called the book is called Ridgeline. And you can go ask your local bookstore, Amazon and Barnes. My mom's husband, Um calls Books and Nobles, Barnes and Noble. What if you want to listen to it? There is a great audio version. I did not. I read a little. I read the historical notes at the end. Who they hire to read a soap opera actor, A great guy. I love this. I love this. Uh that this person does it. That the person who reads this book is is a Lakota named Tatanka Means. He's the son of Russell Means, and he's from American Indian Movement, and he is a he is a Native American actor and uh and does a great job reading it. And so yeah, there's the audiobook version that did you try to read it? The wouldn't let you. I did not. I didn't think I would be very good at at reading the dialogue and things like that. I mean to be one thing, to read a nonfiction book. And I read the historical notes at the end, like I said, And I can do that, but I don't think i'd be very good at at like giving the right intonation to the arguments. They also and this is kind of interesting the parts of the book that are with the character of Francis Grammont, which are in the book written as journal entries. They hired a a a woman actor to read those parts, so it actually works out. I think. I think it's a good audio book. Um, I didn't get to read my first books. And then they sold my they sold my audio rights. Random House sold from my Buffalo book. They sold my audio rights. This thing I think it's called Brilliance Audio, which weirdly was, um not far from where I grew up. I think whatever the hell they were called. They did a lot of audio. They hired some soul popera guy to do it. I got those 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 room. I couldn't get across the living room. Past turned off. I was like, that's not how it sounds. That's stuff that's personal. They had that they had ten years, They had the audio rights for ten years. Oh man. So at the end of that ten years, Um, my publisher got back my audio rights and I got to go down and read my own damn book. That's that's a good thing for that for 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 it's a good audio book. I mean, I uh, people have the choice if they prefer their books in audio form. It's it's there, okay, the ridge Line saying no article Ridge Line, the novel Michael Punk and again Punk with the E on the end. Yes, right, thank you. Can I tell you one final story? Yes. 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. I knew all the figures. And when it's college, whenever we would like take a shot at a bar or something, you gotta say it cheers, right, i'dowas cheers to Hugh Glass, because then it allowed me, like a couple of minutes to tell the story of Hugh Glass, which is just one of my favorite story. A lot of girls like that. I already had my wife, no, but I'd get you entertained with this cool story that was like my story. It was like my story, right, And then the movie came out and no, longer. Can I give that toast to be so you robbed it from I'll buy you a beer to western give me something new stories entertained folks will come up with some maybe into Portuguese philips or something else. Yeah, like here's the Portuguese film. Well his grandson. Who knows how many locals in what northern Wyoming you robbed of the ridge Line story? Now when they're taking a shot at a bar, they have this couple of minutes to sort of tell the Fetterman battle. Here's the apologies to any of those people I have. I have a feeling though that the most Wyomings will like this story being told. I'm going to start a new segment called Spencer's pick Up on pickup Advice, which do you see? Um? 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. Uh so they are great filmmaking company. They have optioned it. We're looking at it initially more as a scripted series. I think story this story is is too big, or you could do it as 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. I'll tell you, John Lockery is quote last time you were here, I know I didn't. Well, wait a minute, I think it is. Remind me, um, having your book made into a movie is like watching the ox and turned into a bullion cube. It is a It is a collaborative process, and you better be ready for that when you signed the option check. Like that a little square. I have hired 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. That jealous. I just said that because I'm jealous. I'm trying to make myself filled. I want to have some wild West movies. Maybe I got to read a wild West, but you gotta write that. Um. All right, Michael Punk, thank you very much for coming on. Everybody, go get a ridge line. I know we talked, we told the whole story. We didn't even we didn't because it takes twenty hours to read a book, right it does? Yeah? Me, So you don't know. Crap. Yeah, I'm listening to this at twenty two later hours ahead, folks. All Right, so you'll write another book and come back and I don't know, two years, I would love to, Okay, standing standing invite, all right, thank you for that, so that that'll motivate you. I will. That is a big motivator. Thanks, thank you, all right, thank you,
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