“Where-ever an Englishman sets his foot, all that he hath is the King’s,” one of the governor’s allies proclaimed. Except that this was 1689, so the moment comes to us in a document full of s’s written as f’s: “an Englifhman fets his foot.”

Such text always brings out the giggling 12-year-old boy in me. When the governor phrases the same sentiment as a question, a minister, John Higginfon, “told him I was furprized with fuch a queftion, and was not willing to fpeak to it.” Encountering such words, I’m always tempted to stop reading and watch the Monty Python’s Life of Brian highlights where the Jews demand that the Roman orators with speech impediments “Welease Bwian!” or “theveral theeditiouth thcribeths from Theaethearea”!

But I’ll try to be mature and explore this moment. Because the queftion is ftill with us.

Governor Edmund Andros posed his question in colonial Massachusetts just three years before the Salem Witch Trials. Quite the authoritarian, he’d already abolished the local legislature. He’d limited town meetings. He’d questioned land claims. He’d appropriated a Puritan meetinghouse for an Anglican church service. And he would clearly accept only one answer: everything belonged to the King.

Although Andros’ opponent, Rev. Higginson, would soon be associated with the humorless morons who hanged alleged witches, in this case, he spoke for common people whose grim religious fervor was a balm for poverty and suffering.

It’s often said that American law and culture—our bedrock political philosophy—depends on property rights. And even though I’ve owned property for almost 36 years now, I felt like I hadn’t fully grasped that concept until reading about this episode. Who owns the land? What actions give you the associated rights?

It had always seemed obvious to me: I owned my house because I had paid the previous owner for it. There were a bunch of attendant rights and responsibilities: I had registered with various authorities, paid taxes and insurance, mowed the lawn, painted the exterior, hired a professional to do a better job of painting the exterior, remodeled the interior, planted some trees, shoveled a lot of snow, made friends with the neighbors, took out a home equity line of credit, and twice learned that my insurance didn’t cover floods. But which of these were rights, and which responsibilities? Which were associated with ownership, and which with occupancy? As a freelancer, my “retirement plan” is a couple of rental houses. There, my tenants are the ones who mow, shovel, and form community. The division of roles has always felt obvious, like we’re all following a set of well-established rules without needing to think about them.

Andros thought about those rules. The way he saw it, this was an English colony, operating under an English charter. So the colony’s tax laws needed to conform with English law. Incompetence around land title processes had led to conflicting claims and irregular property taxes. To chaos. The only way to straighten it out was for Andros to reassert on these fractious people the authority of the king and his rules.

Higginson countered: “I did not understand that the Lands of [New England] were the King’s, but the King’s Subjects’, who had for more than sixty years had the possession and use of them.” The land belonged to the settlers who had worked it, he continued. They had toiled: digging, sawing, planting, weeding. They were of the earth. That earth shouldn’t be taken from them by some legal mumbo-jumbo about violations of a charter or a king’s arrogant beliefs about his subjects.

Today, the episode is often cited as a precursor to the American Revolution. Andros is the British villain who exploited the labor of the common folk for the benefit of a lazy king. Higginson is the hero, standing up for the dignity of independent work. Their argument peaked when Andros thundered, “Either you are subjects or you are rebels!”

Like Higginson, I want to side with the rebels. The homesteaders, the sharecroppers, the Okies, the plains populists, and the residents of allegedly blighted neighborhoods usurped by urban renewal. I want “I worked this land” to be the cry of the oppressed subject turning into the valiant rebel.

And then I remember I own property myself. I based my retirement plan on centuries of precedent in property rights.

I love Life of Brian because the Roman orators are so hilariously unaware of their speech impediments—and also unaware of the fact that their position as colonialists necessarily makes them oppressors. (One of them has a funny name, too.) The Higginson-Andros typography suggested to me that these blind spots were not unique to ancient Rome. I thus started to wonder: When it comes to fubjectf and opprefforf, are we sure we can always tell them apart?

End notes:

• Happy Election Day! Publishing before results are in, I wanted to tell a story exploring deeper historical conflicts that may affect those results.

• I first encountered the Higginson/Andros episode in Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1692.

• An early draft got bogged down in Higginson’s claim that settlers owned the land because they’d paid the previous residents for it. (Andros found the claim meaningless; I wanted more evidence before accepting its moral authority.) The story became way too long and complicated. Yet as I streamlined for the purposes of investigating political philosophy, I became troubled by an unexpected flavor of dispossession: not only of Indigenous property rights, but of their very presence in the story.

• As a regular reminder, if you’re reading this for free, that’s because of the generosity of my paying subscribers. Aren’t they the best?

When I was a kid, my parents kept me away from Tarzan. Their reasons were practical: they didn’t want me trying to jump out of our backyard trees.

Perhaps also ideological: As liberals, they abhorred the stories’ racism. As internationalists, they scorned the fact that author Edgar Rice Burroughs had never even visited Africa. And as skeptics of capitalism, they despised the way popular culture had exploited Tarzan literature through everything from movies to action figures.

Yet as a writer today, I’m especially curious about the source of Burroughs’ popularity—the quality of Tarzan stories as stories. In the magnificent biography Tarzan Forever, John Taliaferro shows that Burroughs (1875-1950) had an almost instinctual genius for storytelling. It expressed itself in something of a formula, which Burroughs successfully applied to Tarzan in the jungle, David Innes in Pellucidar, and John Carter on Mars. A hero of noble birth is caught in a strange, threat-filled world. He often has great affection for that world, and perhaps even sees himself to be a native of it, but needs to resolve its tension with civilization.

The genius of this approach is that it’s so relatable. As a reader, you’re eager to put yourself in Tarzan’s shoesloincloth. In that sense, Burroughs’ world-view matters. My parents were probably right: if as a kid I’d imagined myself as Tarzan, I would have grown up seeing civilization-versus-wilderness in Tarzan tropes.

We’re coming up on the 100^th anniversary of a fascinating experiment: Burroughs applied his formula to the Apache Tribe. When he published The War Chief in 1927, he was writing of a place far less foreign than Africa, since Burroughs himself had spent part of his Army service at an Arizona outpost. It was not so easily racialized, since Burroughs and many of his readers wanted to be sympathetic to the Apache, and might even meet one on the street. Yet simultaneously, this world Burroughs wrote about brimmed with eugenicist depictions of savagery connected to living in nature.

Personally, I can’t get past page one of The War Chief. It begins “Naked but for a G-string…” and then scans around a “barbaric atmosphere that was as yet uncontaminated by the fetid breath of civilization… Here was freedom.”

Here was bullcrap. Here was every tired cliché that white males loved to project onto “primitive” civilizations in the foolish hope that a lack of freedom was the only thing constricting their own power.

Maybe it’s harmless as fantasy. The clash of tarnished civilization and the strange-but-pure “other” is the stuff of classic mythology, from The Odyssey to Mad Max. But look at typical settings: After an apocalypse. In outer space. Among the Na’vi. One danger of setting any novel in a real-life place is that readers expect the story to be fictional but the setting to be true.

Certainly that’s how The War Chief was received at the time. “Mr. Burroughs has dropped the weird fantasy of the Tarzan stories,” wrote John P. Lewis in the Rocky Mountain News, to instead write “a story that could have happened, even if it didn’t.”

An infant, Shoz-Dijiji, is adopted by the Apache after his parents were slain. He’s “carefully taught the arts of the Indian, and with them the Indian’s hatred of the white man,” but somehow not “the Indian’s process of torture for his victims,” Lewis summarizes. Lewis accepts the boy’s “white parentage” despite the fact that his mother was one-quarter Cherokee, giving him dark eyes and black hair that make others—and even the boy himself—think he’s Apache. Thus, when Shoz-Dijiji falls in love with a white girl, they are “unable to bridge a gulf that did not exist,” Lewis says.

Shoz-Dijiji is Tarzan in a new setting. They even talk the same: “You are white—Shoz-Dijiji is Apache. White girl could not love Apache.” (The biographer Taliaferro reports that although Tarzan never literally said, “Me Tarzan. You Jane,” he did use many similarly ungrammatical constructions.)

Among the accomplishments of Tarzan Forever: Taliaferro shows how difficult Burroughs’ life could be. After 1912, when Tarzan of the Apes became a sensation, everyone wanted him to write it again. But not literally. So how would that work? Burroughs tried giving Tarzan new adventures and a son, and new antagonists of many races. His sequels never fully recaptured the original’s magic.

Burroughs had better luck rewriting his fable in other settings, such as Mars and Pellucidar (an inner surface of a hollow Earth). The Old West struck Burroughs as another logical extension. As with all his stories, Burroughs hoped this one would finally break him out of pulp magazines into serialization in the better-paying, higher-status slick magazines. He failed: To the gatekeepers of that era’s culture, success required either literary sophistication or Zane Grey–style cowboy heroes. Burroughs lacked both.

Still, The War Chief sold respectably. It was further evidence of a 20^th-century shift in white attitudes toward Indigenous people: a hint of regret or even shame at the actions of the previous century. There was still a lot of racism, given that the story’s paradise-lost vibe depended on not just the noble savage stereotype but also its personification in a basically-white hero.

However, compared to Burroughs’ depiction of Indigenous Africans, his depiction of Indigenous Americans was marginally more sensitive. That’s not enough to let Burroughs off the hook for his racism. But maybe it’s enough to let readers off the hook? Despite his formula’s baggage, maybe you enjoy the fantasy, the action, and the world-building. Maybe we’re all hungry to swing on vines, wear headdresses, and dance to drumbeats—so hungry that despite everybody’s flaws, we feel Tarzan and Shoz-Dijiji as deeply human.

Burroughs’s personal life was itself scarred by gigantic flaws. But he did have a remarkable talent for creating relatable characters. Paired with his wise investments in new media—including movies, cartoons, and radio—that talent makes Burroughs himself a fascinating hero.

Because I never experienced Tarzan as a kid, I went decades without appreciating our shared heritage. A relative gave me a biography of the John Clayton who pioneered American botany. I found a John Clayton driving a taxi for Sherlock Holmes. But the first time I was introduced to someone who responded, “Lord Greystoke, I presume,” I had no idea what they were talking about. I didn’t know that John Clayton was Tarzan’s white name.

That’s who I was, John-Clayton-as-Tarzan, when I discovered that the Apache youth Shoz-Dijiji is Tarzan. David Innes is Tarzan. John Carter is Tarzan. Indeed, once I started looking for Tarzan, I found him even the characters of Daniel Kraus’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2025 novel of World War I, Angel Down—it turns out that Kraus too is exploring Tarzan of the Apache.

This discovery delighted me: We are all Tarzan. We are all adrift in a cultural clash we didn’t sign up for and don’t really understand. Caught between our loves of freedom and citizenship. Desperate to live a more “natural” life in a more natural world. Deeply flawed, scarred by the racism of the society in which we were created. Always tempted by stories that paint us as more noble than the others, and—when we look at the trees and the vines and the cliffs—more athletic.

We’re eager to meet that nature with a loud, ululating yodel. We’re even tempted to follow Burroughs in calling it a victory cry.

Corruption? I was dismayed. Surely there was more to the story of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s TV show “The Great American Road Trip” than the fact that it was funded mostly by companies Duffy regulates. Surely, in addition to muckraking important evidence of the corruption of Trump administration officials, the media could review the show as a show.

Plenty of books, movies, and other cultural products have had tawdry backstories, while still illuminating the moment in which they were made. I myself found that Caroline Lockhart’s novel Me-Smith said a lot about Wyoming in 1911, despite being written primarily to settle scores with an ex-boyfriend.

Set aside politics. Set aside relationships with sponsors like Toyota, Waymo, and an asphalt company. Set aside quality, even. Does “The Great American Road Trip” say something useful about road-tripping in America in 2026?

First, the good news: All the sponsorship money leads to amazing production values. Plenty of drone shots provide vivid, romantic views of the six destinations: Philadelphia, Boston, Yellowstone, Charleston, Fort Worth, and Arizona. The cinematography, graphics, and editing feel professional. A catchy jingle ends with an appropriate Bob Wills–style a-ha.

Furthermore, the camera loves Duffy. He exudes casual charisma when captured in even the most mundane tasks. Others in his family—he and his wife, Fox News personality Rachel Campos-Duffy, have nine children—are also fairly telegenic. This isn’t surprising given that Sean and Rachel both first came to prominence on the 1990s MTV reality show “The Real World.”

Nevertheless, I came into “The Great American Road Trip” unprepared for a distinction: this is reality TV, not a documentary. It’s designed to capture drama in the moment, not to define or study or even mindlessly venerate the Great American Road Trip. This should make for a promising set-up: after all, great road trip content—from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to Jim Carrey’s Dumb and Dumber—has always been set on the road rather than in the analysis.

So once we meet all nine kids (and the oldest often brings her husband), I guess I expected them all to pile into an updated version of Ken Kesey’s psychedelic Furthur Bus, from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Drama ahead! Which kid is going to lace Sean’s drink with acid?

Sadly, however, “The Great American Road Trip” contains little actual road-tripping. With the exception of DC-to-Philadelphia, it’s clear that the Duffy family flies to each destination. As a matter of practical ethics, I get it: he’s trying to cram these activities around a fulltime job, and apparently his boss won’t let him attend cabinet meetings via Zoom while driving and forgetting to mute.

But as a matter of personal budgeting, this is crazy. A dozen plane tickets to Bozeman, plus a pair of six-bedroom rental homes in West Yellowstone, some Toyota minivans, a snowmobile tour of the park, and then ski lessons for everyone in Jackson Hole?? You couldn’t even pay for that with the booty of a corrupt politician.

Which explains why the sponsorships were needed. And the need to satisfy sponsors explains why the show feels less like a road trip and more like a sponcon festival. Hey kids, did you know there are Waymos in Phoenix? Why look, who’s that visiting the Liberty Bell—is it… could it be… Interior Secretary Doug Burgum? Hey everybody, let’s visit Texas and tour the asphalt plant!

It’s not explicit, but I sensed an homage to the original Great European Road Trip—the Crusades. The Duffys go to lots of famous tourist sites as performative prayer. They pray over Philly cheesesteaks at Geno’s. They pray over barbeque at Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth. And they pray on the campus of “people who hate us, hate our values” (in Rachel’s words) with a Catholic priest who tries to assure her that Harvard University wouldn’t corrupt her daughter’s mind.

Then—also like the Crusades—they go shopping. They bring back from Texas enough loot to host a cowgirl-themed Sweet Sixteen party.

It’s easy to mock. But I’m grateful, because watching “The Great American Road Trip” gave me some insights on how to make American road tripping great again.

1. Stakes. The Duffys do this for no good reason. (Other than America250, a deadline they miss by six weeks.) They invent some reasons—a gender reveal road trip!—but even these can’t carry a reality TV show. By contrast, William Least Heat-Moon had lost his wife and his job when he set out on the desperate search for rural authenticity that became Blue Highways.

2. Roads. Watching the Duffys, I longed for car-based footage of an endless unspooling desert, a mossy Carolina live-oak forest, or even a miserable Boston traffic jam. The kids would become bored and hungry and aggravating. Duffy would threaten, as my dad often did, “If you kids don’t settle down, we’re just going to end this road trip and go home right now.” That’s drama—and love.

3. Ideas. Americans have always sought to imbue those occasionally frustrating, often joyful travel experiences with deeper meaning. We’ve attached the road trip to ideas about democracy (Tocqueville), expression (Walt Whitman), nature (John Muir), creativity (Jack Kerouac), fear of aging (John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley), clashes of values (Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), feminism (Thelma & Louise), post-apocalyptic hope (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road), or race (Green Book). Not all of these tributes have been successful, nor have all the ideals been perfect. Nevertheless, the ambition made these road trips matter.

With such a lengthy history, the Great American Road Trip isn’t going to be stymied by anything as ephemeral as Sean Duffy’s politics. Or airplanes, Zoom meetings, BS jobs, gender reveal parties, or new media platforms.

I know what you’re thinking: It’s easy to analyze. The Duffys deserve credit for understanding that analysis doesn’t land like a great story does. I only wish that the next high profile, big budget, generously sponsored story of a road trip actually, you know, goes on the road.

End notes:

• I’d love to know what the city of Wheeling, West Virginia did to a) get edited out of the show, and b) get considered for inclusion in the first place. Did sponsorship from the World’s Largest Piece of Cut Lead Crystal fall through at the last minute?

• Thanks to Andrew Guschausky for the Big Sky Journal review of my book Wonderlandscape.

• Thanks as always to my paying subscribers!

When David Stauffer commented a few weeks ago that instead of interviewing other writers, I should be the subject of an interview here, I at first demurred. It sounded too egocentric. But Dave is a Founding Member of Natural Stories (customer service!) and a business writer whose interviewing skills I admire. So we called each other’s bluff! Here’s his interview of me.

Dave: Your beat, so to speak, is Yellowstone Park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. How do you convey to readers the looks, sounds, smells, and feel of the world’s (arguably) most stunning and inspirational location using only words on paper?

John: Gosh, my first reaction is “Not well enough.” This place is full of fascinating people and ideas. But to immerse readers in it, as you say, I need to activate all five senses. Substack’s photo-friendly interface helps. But when was the last time I described the wet, sweet, sulphury smell of walking through a geyser basin?

Dave: Do you go everywhere you write about? If not, how do you “take” readers to those places?

John: I prefer to visit the place, precisely to experience these sensory details and feelings. For example, I spent multiple days at Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park, trying to capture how it felt at all hours, for the climax of my book Natural Rivals. When I can’t afford a special visit—as with Caroline Lockhart in Honduras—I rely on memoirs, pictures, maps, and guidebooks.

Although as someone who writes about history, I will also add: places change. I took pride in tracking down the Denver home that Arthur Carhart lived in back in the 1950s. But when I got there, I had to ask myself if its magnificent foliage was quite so extensive back in his day.

Dave: Does the star of your writing tend to be the places or the people?

John: When I was 23, a friend of a friend landed at Sports Illustrated, which at the time was a dream job. She said the interview involved a writing exercise: You’re assigned to write an article about a championship game in an obscure sport. People who failed the interview tried to explain the sport’s rules or the contenders’ win-loss records. She succeeded by instead profiling a single athlete.

Although, like Joe Wilkins, I consider myself a writer of place, that lesson has stuck with me: Everyone always prefers to read about people.

Dave: When and how did it first occur to you that you might make a living writing words? And how long did it take to get there?

John: My very first job, aged 15, was reporting our high-school basketball games for a regional daily newspaper. Meanwhile, every day I was reading Bob Ryan and Peter Gammons in the Boston Globe, so it seemed like this was a possible career path, if not one my parents would approve of. And with a few short exceptions, I have felt that writing words drove my satisfaction (if not income!) at almost every job I’ve had since.

Dave: When did you first have an interest in writing about nature? In writing about the US West?

John: I did journalism in college because I got to write. But I discovered that I loved the quest to find out why things are the way they are. After I chose Montana in 1990, that quest intensified for this new setting. And I was intrigued that here, far more than elsewhere, the answers were tied to the surrounding natural world and the history of people’s reactions to it.

Dave: A mutual friend of ours says he didn’t want to be a writer, but that writing was how he could live and work in nature. How about you? Is nature the objective and writing only the mechanism?

John: No, it’s the opposite. Writing—indulging my passion for assembling words into sentences and sentences into stories—is the objective. Nature is just my current beat, so to speak. It’s a great one! But other beats such as Western history, business strategy, small-town life, and dog columns have also been mechanisms to achieve the objective.

Dave: About your being an essayist: Is it fair to say you found your way to it by trial and error?

John: In the sense that I don’t have an MFA degree—correct. In the sense that I’m using this Natural Stories endeavor, and its weekly deadline, to try (and likely sometimes err at!) different essay formats in public—correct.

But I must admit to being troubled by a couple of the phrases in this question: “being an essayist” and “found your way to it.” In the same way that Allen Jones has written poetry his whole life, though hardly publishing any until Mumblecusser, I feel like I’ve been writing essays my whole life, until last month’s anniversary story somehow outed me. And in the sense of the old advice about behavior versus identity—instead of saying “You are an a**hole,” one should say, “You are behaving like an a**hole”---I’m not fully comfortable with “being an essayist.” I sometimes write essays.

Dave: Who’s your favorite essayist? What essayist do you most admire or wish to emulate?

John: My all time favorite book, Mark Spragg’s Where Rivers Change Direction, is often seen as a memoir of his Wyoming childhood. But at its publication, many reviewers called it a collection of essays. Let me also shout out what I consider to be an underappreciated classic, Peter Hessler’s Strange Stones. Hessler is known as an expert on life in China, and writes well about it. But also, “Dr. Don” is one of my favorite portraits of life in the rural American West.

Dave: Same two questions about nature writers: your favorite and most admired?

John: In my second-ever essay here at Natural Stories, I wrote that I didn’t consider myself a nature writer, but then neither did famous practitioners like Edward Abbey or Marjory Stoneman Douglas. So at the risk of mis-characterizing or offending him, I’ll say that my favorite and most-admired nature writer is our mutual friend Gary Ferguson. To return to our previous themes: the first thing I noticed was that he wrote about nature by engaging all five senses and writing about people in nature.

Dave: I was trying to identify the single quality of your writing that stands a little above all your other qualities, and the internet suggested a word that I was not very familiar with: perspicacity. Any thoughts?

John: In the 1980s, when my grandparents were very elderly, they co-wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe, lauding a recent editorial. In my recollection, the letter read, in its entirety, “We admire your perspicacity.”

The family was very excited that the letter had been published and that its brevity made it widely read. But personally, I thought it was bad writing: the letter didn’t add to our understanding of whatever the editorial had been about (I’ve since forgotten!) or even why the editorial was good. The letter didn’t tell a story or create emotional intimacy with its readers. It was just a vocabulary word. And I figured that most readers would respond, as I did, with “What the hell does that mean?”

So it’s funny that you phrase the question this way. Because I can say that whatever perspicacity means, I come by my admiration for it honestly.

A week ago Saturday—the day news broke that Major League Baseball (MLB) and Trump administration officials had scouted potential sites in Grand Teton National Park to host a high-profile game—I approached an extremely well-dressed man in adjacent Yellowstone.

“Is this the path to the Madison Information Station?” I asked him. A sign pointed vaguely to the right. But did the sign refer to the path he and his tuxedoed companions were taking, or a path to the left of there?

“No, it’s a wedding,” he snapped. I didn’t see how a path could be a wedding, but at least that explained the clothes. And apparently what he meant was that his shaded path went to a small amphitheater overlooking the meadows at the confluence of the Gibbon and Firehole rivers—the site of the wedding. I wanted the other, sunshiny path.

By Thursday, MLB had retracted its interest in Grand Teton. But for four days, my feeds were filled with overwhelming outrage. I want to talk about that outrage: what it says about how Americans today view our national parks—and why it may be dangerous.

I had mixed feelings about the wedding. Part of me looked at the fancy clothes and thought, “Inappropriate for hiking.” Then I remembered that the vast majority of Yellowstone visitors don’t hike; even I was wearing Keens rather than hiking boots.

That same skeptic in me mistrusted the idea that this large group was taking over an amphitheater that had been built for fireside ranger talks. Should public lands really be used for such private-group purposes? Then I remembered that I was there with 28 other people from a nearby university; we were gathering at the Information Station for me to tell them about its history.

My biggest misgivings about the wedding concerned the ethics of orienting to nature. Isn’t a wedding a ritual of human society rather than the natural world? And so doesn’t it belong outside the park’s boundaries, in a building in a town, rather than in a place that’s reserved for wilderness? One could say the same about baseball.

This human-versus-wilderness tension has always been with us. In Yellowstone, I often think of the Park Service’s Mission 66 program, which built lots of parking lots while shunting much commercial activity to gateway communities. But more deeply, when I wrote Natural Rivals, I addressed the preservation-versus-conservation divide. Preservationists such as John Muir and the founders of the National Park Service saw a sanctity in the natural world that should not be contaminated by human activities. Conservationists such as Gifford Pinchot, founder of the US Forest Service, saw nature as a set of resources—timber, grass, wildlife, scenery—that are valuable to humans and need to be stewarded for future generations.

Both impulses are valid and honorable. They’re especially important in contrast to the drill-baby-drill attitude that we should exploit all resources immediately with no regard to a bigger picture or longer timeline. And they’re especially valuable when they’re combined and internalized, as they are in most agencies and in most human hearts.

Grand Teton today is seen as a preservationist institution. But when any national park enshrines ecosystems and scenery, it is empowered to do so not for the ecosystem itself, but because of the human reaction—that impulse for sanctity. Which means the ecosystems and scenery are resources to be conserved.

I took the students to the Madison Information Station because I wanted to spur their wonder at Yellowstone’s nature, and I knew that wonder would be aided by human-built infrastructure including the building, amphitheater, picnic area, campground, and parking lot. The national park’s value arose from its mix of preservation and conservation.

Meanwhile, the Forest Service is often seen as a conservationist institution that regulates logging and grazing. But it also oversees some of the nation’s most spectacular wilderness areas, the ultimate expression of preservation. Likewise, I found much to admire in both Muir and Pinchot—and even more to admire in their little-known collaborations.

But like anti-Trump politicians, preservationists and conservationists seem to spend most of their time attacking each other. Embracing the moral purity of your stance provides more dopamine hits than engaging in practical alliances.

That’s why I was so conflicted about the wedding. I wanted “my” national park to be a place of moral purity, a place where people only hike or admire wildlife and geysers. A place that bans frivolity such as weddings. (…Unless maybe the bride and groom are granola-loving rangers who wear Birkenstocks and throw pine needles instead of confetti? … No! I have to be morally pure! I must vigorously protest the wedding!)

The same desire for preservationist moral purity fueled the baseball controversy. Granted, building a stadium on public lands that serve as important wildlife habitat is an idea that deserves skepticism. I myself oppose it—though I wouldn’t call it outrageous. After all, Iowa’s Field of Dreams ballpark, presumably the model for this proposal, has a capacity of only 4,200. And the Tetons receive more than 3 million visits per year.

Baseball is “civilization”; the Tetons are “wilderness.” It’s a time-honored distinction, philosophically and ecologically valuable. But we should all feel conflicted because it’s also dangerously oversimplified. A Teton-area classical music festival draws 22,000 visitors per year; is that as outrageous as the MLB proposal, or are we making class-based distinctions about appropriate activities?

The record shows that baseball and greater Yellowstone have always co-existed. WyoFile found seven existing ballfields in the two national parks. Historically, the Tetons’ Elbo [dude] Ranch featured baseball, and more recently baseball has been advertised at the nearby Triangle C and Spotted Horse dude ranches. Although the Tetons are now rightly honored for their wildlife populations, they were originally set aside to honor that dude ranching lifestyle.

The romance of that lifestyle is that its cultural activities unspool against a grand scenic backdrop. For example, among my favorite memories are playing in annual softball tournaments not far beyond the parks’ boundaries; the combination of the national pastime and glorious mountains made it a fun and patriotic American ritual loved by people of many political ideologies.

Part of me understands the preservationist outrage: we live in untrustworthy times. Next year’s MLB season is threatened. Trump officials have intervened to alter long-determined priorities of Grand Teton National Park. They have slashed park budgets, tried to ram through proposals for lavish arches and ballrooms, reduced public comment periods, and loosened regulations that protect wildlife habitat. It’s hard not to see the motivations for any of these actions as boiling down to greed. It’s valuable to respond to greed with unified outrage.

But part of me sees bigger risks. National parks inspire love because they celebrate America in all of its wholesome, diverse, pragmatic idealism. Preservation and conservation. Expansive wildlife habitat and sufficient parking. Opportunities for solitude and tuxedoed grooms. Baseball (one national park enshrines a Negro League stadium) and motherhood and apple pie. If we insist that something as all-American as baseball is inherently at odds with a national park, we risk repeating the folly of the preservation-versus-conservation divide.

Gathered at the left of the Madison Information Station, the students and I could look forward at a gorgeous meadow and mountain, an inspiring backdrop for lessons of environmental history. If we happened to look to the right, past the romantic old building, we could see the well-dressed people gathered in the amphitheater, using a similar backdrop for the lessons of love.

The lesson of Substack is like the lesson of life: You’re better off being more like yourself.

There are exceptions, certainly, if your deepest self is grammatically incoherent, or a sociopath. But in the case of Natural Stories, my deepest self seems to be an essayist. In the past year I’ve committed even more fully to the form.

And it has paid off—if not (yet, fully) financially, then through ambition and fulfillment.

When I started this initiative three years ago, it was largely business-driven. Publishers wanted authors to have a platform—evidence that book-buyers liked their writing and would buy their books. But traditional forms of platform were collapsing: magazines going bankrupt, Twitter becoming a cesspool, and speaking engagements tanked by the pandemic. Substack offered a new potential source of platform growth.

Furthermore, it offered a chance to build a platform by writing. I didn’t have to buy podcasting equipment, learn how to film short-form video, or make endless cold calls. I could write natural stories, using the same voice I use in my books. If y’all liked the stories, that should be especially good proof that y’all would like the books.

I expected the content to be a lot of outtakes. With every book I write, huge chunks of text get left out—they’re good stories, just not relevant to the book’s point. I expected to resurrect them here. But I still haven’t gotten around to most of that material.

Instead, the biggest joy of this endeavor for me has been the discovery that I wanted to write new stories. I’d chosen the title Natural Stories for business purposes—it would fit the types of books I expected to be supporting. Instead the title inspired me to expand my ambitions.

I discovered that I wanted to write in the essay format. As a platform, Substack claims to be form-agnostic: you can publish letters, criticism, memoirs, fiction, political persuasion, financial analysis, or old-fashioned news from your tiny niche. But in practice, Substack turns out to be the ideal home for that oldest of modern nonfiction writing formats: the essay.

Essayer is French for “to try” or “to attempt.” In the 1500s, Frenchman Michel de Montaigne described his work as “attempts” to put his thoughts into writing. Essays have since evolved into dozens of forms and styles; you could write a great essay attempting to define the essay.

But it seems to me that defining the essay boils down to two things: length and art. The essay is shorter than a book but longer than an aphorism. And the essay is more creative, more artistically aspirational, than a fact—while being less creative, in the sense of not making stuff up, than a fiction.

Substack is great for essays because its user interface fits their length and its audience fits their goals. I try to put my thoughts in writing with enough creativity that you’re entertained rather than merely informed, and at a length that I can complete (and you can consume) one per week.

I’ve always loved reading and writing essays. Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to find some regional magazine/website editors, and even book editors, to encourage me. But Substack vastly expands the potential market for my essays, as well as the opportunities to experiment with essay formats.

In the past year, I have figured this out (or at least figured out that I had been figuring it out for a while). I’ve experimented with form, writing trilogies and map-nerdiness and historical argument and literary analysis. I’m learning how best to put myself in the story, with memoirs, and learning how best to put other writers in the story, with conversations. I’ve reluctantly weighed in on politics and gleefully plumbed my archives.

I know that some of the pieces work better than others. But I feel like my batting average is rising—along with slugging percentage, OPS, WAR, and other metrics that I wish Substack would import from baseball. Subscriber numbers continue to increase, as do revenues. Metrics such as conversion rate, open rate, and churn rate appear to indicate relative success. That’s a product of you readers’ actions—so thank you!!

Every year on this anniversary, I think, Wow, I’ve published 52/104/156 essays here? How will I ever come up with another year’s worth? And every year, that attempt (essayer) brings me great joy.

End notes:

• LaughingJohn recently converted from a free to a paid subscription. Thanks!

This week’s story is a conversation with author Carla Chung Mattix. After a 26-year career as an attorney in the U.S. Department of the Interior, last month she published National Parks and the Supreme Court: Groundbreaking Legal Battles (Univ. of Nevada Press).

John Clayton: I’m so excited to be talking to someone who knows something about Race Horse, a little-known 1896 Supreme Court decision that I find not only fascinating but also unsettled even today in terms of its implications. Can you start us off by briefly summarizing the case?

Carla Chung Mattix: I agree with you. Though over a century old, Race Horse is a fascinating case that remains relevant today. Between 1778 and 1871, the U.S. government ratified 370 treaties with Native American tribes to make way for non-Native settlers. Tribes gave up large swaths of their territory in exchange for exclusive reservations, promises of protection and welfare, and guarantees to hunt and fish on ceded lands.

In 1895, John Race Horse, a member of the Bannock Tribe, killed seven elk in Wyoming. The hunt took place on land that was not part of the Tribe’s reservation—but it was on land where the Tribe understood that it retained hunting rights under an 1868 treaty. A Wyoming sheriff arrested Race Horse for violating the state’s hunting laws.

This was all part of an orchestrated legal case designed by the U.S. government and the Governor of Wyoming. The state was eager to curtail the hunting rights. Yellowstone National Park, which also contained ceded lands, wanted to restrict hunting in the park. The U.S. government wanted to protect the rights of the Tribe. All sides, including the Tribe, agreed to abide by a federal court’s decision. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court.

John: So the government is torn between the two sides: the national park supports Wyomingites in trying to restrict Indigenous hunting, while the Bureau of Indian Affairs supports the Bannock in asserting their treaty rights. How did this test case come about?

Carla: Around 1890, increased non-Native settlement in the greater Yellowstone region and visitation to Yellowstone National Park led to clashes with Native American tribes in their traditional territories. These tensions culminated in a terrible incident where Wyoming officials shot and killed several Bannock tribal members who were on a hunting trip outside of their reservation, and arrested others. To prevent additional violence, the federal government proposed the test case to determine the validity of the Bannock’s treaty rights.

Up until the start of the Race Horse case, park superintendents voiced opposition to Indigenous hunting in the park and showed support for Wyoming settlers’ early efforts to stop such hunting near the park’s boundaries. They wanted to protect wildlife and visitors.. At the same time, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and reservation agents acknowledged that tribal members needed to hunt outside of reservations to supplement their food supplies. Ultimately, the U.S. government spoke with one voice during the Race Horse litigation to defend the Bannock Tribe’s off-reservation treaty rights.

John: I gather there was lots of debate about a word the treaties hadn’t really defined: “unoccupied.”

Carla: The 1868 treaty between the U.S. government and the Bannock Tribe specified that the tribal members had the right to hunt on the unoccupied lands of the United States so long as game may be found there. The arguments in the lower court focused on the term “unoccupied.” As you note, the treaty did not define this term so the judge analyzed the words of the treaty and evidence to determine that the land where the elk were hunted remained unoccupied. The judge also found that the treaty had not been invalidated when Wyoming obtained statehood in 1890.

John: Because presumably “occupied” means “homesteaded.” The treaties had been designed to make sure that Indigenous people wouldn’t hunt in a town or on somebody’s private land. And Race Horse wasn’t. His group was up in the mountains, on government land that had not yet been homesteaded, and thus was unoccupied. The state of Wyoming lost in the lower court and appealed to the Supreme Court, where it seemed likely they would lose again, yes?

Carla: Homesteaded lands would likely be one example of occupied land. Military reservations would be another. The 1868 treaty involved here also contains the condition “so long as peace subsists among the whites and Indians on the borders of the hunting districts,” so the term “hunting districts” would also factor into the equation. I think Interior and the Department of Justice felt very confident about their case going into the Supreme Court. From my research, it appears that nearly all of the U.S. government officials, from the reservation agents to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, believed that the Bannock Tribe’s off-reservation treaty rights were valid. Even though the local population strongly opposed the hunting rights, national sentiment generally supported the Tribe.

John: But Wyoming made some innovative arguments at the Supreme Court, which ended up carrying the day.

Carla: The Supreme Court Justices concluded that the Tribe’s hunting right ended in Wyoming when it became a state in 1890. Under a legal concept called the “Equal Footing Doctrine,” all states are admitted to the Union with the same powers as the thirteen original states. The Court found that Wyoming’s power to regulate game automatically repealed the Tribe’s 1868 treaty hunting right. To bolster their reasoning, the Court agreed with Wyoming’s attorneys and interpreted the 1872 Yellowstone Act as ending the Bannock hunting right in the park. The Court said that passage of the Yellowstone Act showed Congress’ intent that such rights were meant to be “temporary and precarious.”

The Justices in 1896 did not consider the term “unoccupied” because they determined that the treaty right had been extinguished. Since no right existed, in their minds, they did not need to determine the extent of any right. But, that ultimately would not be the end of the term “unoccupied.”

John: Your book takes us through the whole fascinating story. Subsequent courts were skeptical of using the Equal Footing Doctrine to change broader treaty obligations. Later Justices seemed reluctant to apply Race Horse as a precedent, but they refused to fully repudiate it until 2019. And even then, as I understand it, they didn’t fully rule on what seems to be the key question: Is a national forest or a national park “unoccupied land”?

If it’s unoccupied, then don’t the treaties say that Indigenous people get to hunt there? And if it isn’t—if it’s “occupied” by white civilization—then why do we revere it as untouched “wilderness”?

Carla: Those are good questions and unfortunately the answers are complicated. In the 2019 case of Herrera v. Wyoming, involving Bighorn National Forest, the Supreme Court’s repudiation effectively overturned Race Horse but left open a treaty interpretation question. The Justices’ determination in Herrera that statehood did not extinguish the treaty hunting right triggered a need to consider the meaning of “unoccupied.” The 2019 Court held that Bighorn National Forest did not become categorically occupied when it was established, but the state of Wyoming could still argue that specific areas are occupied within the meaning of the 1868 treaty. The Court did not address the arguments or reasoning in Race Horse that addressed Yellowstone National Park. So, where members of the Bannock Tribe may hunt off reservation remains unsettled.

Carla Chung Mattix is the author of National Parks and the Supreme Court: Groundbreaking Legal Battles. You can find her online at https://carlachungmattix.com and https://nationalparkslegalhistory.substack.com/ (where this interview was also published).

John Clayton is the author of nonfiction books including Natural Rivals, Wonderlandscape, and Stories from Montana’s Enduring Frontier. You can find him online at www.johnclaytonbooks.com and here at Natural Stories.

On a September weekday about ten years ago, I’d snagged the last site at Indian Creek campground in the northwest section of Yellowstone National Park. After a day doing research at the park archives, I would tour the sites, in the combination of “work” and “vacation” that’s a perk of being a freelance writer.

But first, the requirements of living. I crawled out of the tent, leashed the dog, and trudged to the toilets. They too were cold. They weren’t in danger of freezing—it may have even been above 40 degrees—but they sure didn’t encourage dawdling. I returned to the site and packed up the tent.

I was going through a “Less Stuff” phase. Small tent, backpacking stove—no need for a camp chair because the site had a picnic table. If the point of camping was to be outside, then I needed to reject every comfort of a trailer or recreational vehicle—heater, soft bed, stove for coffee.

I packed quickly, my fingers growing numb in the cold. I loaded the dog into the car. There was now enough light that I could see I’d left nothing behind. And I drove off—blessed car heater! But a half-hour later, when I stopped at a picnic area to make coffee and oatmeal, I had a reckoning.

It was still cold, so cold that the flame on my stove wouldn’t light. My fingers were getting numb again. My brain was complaining about the lack of coffee. And I realized that stuff might be comfort—but it’s also home.

The historic photo above includes two hammocks! Although the front one doesn’t look very comfortable. Given the wind associated with most Yellowstone rain events, it’s hard for me to believe that tarp would do much good. And all the tying of ropes looks like a lot of work.

Although Less-Stuff-Guy told himself that the point of camping was being outside, this photo shows camping as the enjoyable process of creating a home. The rope-tying, the kitchen set-up, the deployment of tablecloths and nightlights—these are not tedious chores but fulfilling activities. You’ll never make your camp as comfortable as your real home, but in making it more comfortable than an empty spot in the woods, you are having an effect on the world.

Yellowstone’s fame arises partly from simple camping. You cook on a grill, let the kids run loose, gather around a campfire, and live just enough outdoors to feel continuity with your ancestors. In this vision, Yellowstone is not wilderness but the moment after wilderness succumbed to the frontier.

I don’t see how this man can be comfortable, wearing a tie in camp. But he probably wears a tie at home! His party has set up chairs and a three-sided tent. He has his tobacco. Now he can relax.

It must not have been easy to fit all this stuff in a Model T Ford. But this was 1923, when a Ford was still quite the novelty. And the freedom! They could camp wherever they wanted to.

Which is why it always surprises me how we always choose to camp near other people. These people of the early 1920s may be crowded into the Mammoth Public Auto Camp only because Yellowstone has opened designated campsites to curb the environmental degradation of boondocking. But how they love it!

This party even put up a sign to advertise their origins to other Indianans. They go to Yellowstone and one of their primary enjoyments isn’t geysers or animals or historical museums. Their trip is made meaningful by material trappings and other people.

The insight that people seek people, even in places of profound nature like Yellowstone, inspired me to write Wonderlandscape, a history of how people have chosen to interpret such profound nature. And in that pre-coffee moment near Indian Creek, I was coming to a similar insight about stuff.

When my mother moved from a four-bedroom home to a one-bedroom apartment in a facility with resources to mitigate her dementia, her biggest problem was choosing which stuff to bring. The “Do you use it?” test proved unhelpful, because the most important element of each piece of stuff was its origin: where she got it and the people who were with her at the time. It wasn’t a thing, it was a story.

When I look at these photographs of people creating temporary homes in a wilderness, I’m fascinated by the stories they bring with them in the form of stuff. To say that campers today have lots of stuff is not to say that they’re pampered, lazy, soft, or unable to appreciate the natural world. Instead, it’s to say that they have rich biographies: complex lives full of meaningful people and heartwarming emotions, expressed in objects.

The occasion of visiting a national park is often a form of pilgrimage: momentous and vulnerable. The people who bring hammocks, tarps, ties, pipes, and handwritten signs to such an occasion deserve admiration for their bold declarations of who they are.

This week’s story is a conversation with author Allen Morris Jones. The current Montana Poet Laureate, Allen has also published novels, nonfiction, and kids’ books. Last month he published his first collection of short fiction, A Kind of Man: Montana Stories.

John Clayton: I want to talk first about “Twilight on the Little Bighorn.” It was first published in Montana Quarterly, where editor Scott McMillion called it “Some of the best fiction we’ve ever run. And that’s saying something.” In the story, all of the dead—white and Indian, Custer and his subordinates—are in a sort of purgatory, figuring out a new world. How did this idea come to you, and how did you have fun with it?

Allen Jones: That one started out as a poem, oddly enough. Researching Custer and the Little Bighorn, I came across a compelling and kind of enigmatic figure, Mitch Bouyer. A mixed blood scout. Something about him drew my attention. I started writing verses from his perspective, and it seemed only natural that it should be in the voice of the dead. At some point the line breaks just got sort of silly and I decided it was a short story. Then I changed the voice and perspective, as you do. And then I introduced an unexpected conflict, as you also do.

John: “Jacob Dies,” which was first published in Big Sky Journal in 1995, seems to presage current discussions of the “crisis of masculinity.” Were you, or Montana, ahead of the sociological trends?

Allen: The thing I especially enjoy and appreciate about that story, through the lens of thirty-years-later, is that it leaves room for interpretation. That one’s got some layers to it. It hadn’t occurred to me that you could read it as a comment on toxic masculinity, though you absolutely can. Rather, my intention was to write a commentary on the changing west. A cowboy displaced into the New West. Toxic modernity, maybe.

John: The story has a scene set in a bar in Helena, which I imagine as the Gold Bar on Last Chance Gulch. In 1995, I was doing some software work in Helena, and the Gold Bar struck me as a place I shouldn’t bring my programmer-colleagues, because they epitomized this changing west, and the Gold Bar felt like ground zero for its tensions. I went back this summer, and the Gold Bar was great—the tension had eased or maybe moved somewhere else.

Allen: Montana has great bars, especially in some of the smaller towns. They’re community centers as much as watering holes. I quit drinking some years ago, but I still love a good small town bar. I’ve yet to find one in Montana that wasn’t welcoming and warm.

John: The title story, a novella set during the 1917 Butte Speculator mine disaster, is a cross between a domestic character study and a murder mystery. Did you have genre in mind when you started writing it? Plot?

Allen: One of the things I enjoy about crime and mystery as a genre is the way the compelling, overarching question gives you room to play around with character and language. Once the reader’s hooked, once they want to find out what happens, you can do all sorts of fun stuff. That was my approach to “A Kind of Man.” I wanted to write a period piece set in Butte (one of my favorite places in the world), and I wanted to explore themes of masculine identity, work, family, that sort of thing. A murder mystery offers a good opportunity to do that.

John: You must be about halfway through your tenure in the unpaid but prestigious position of Montana Poet Laureate. How’s it going?

Allen: Very well. It’s been such a great opportunity, getting to drive around Montana, meeting readers and writers. An opportunity and a privilege. We live in an amazing place.

John: Earlier in your career, I didn’t think of you as a poet—at least, you weren’t publishing poetry. Were you writing it? Or is this an evolution?

Allen: I’ve been writing poetry most of my adult life. It’s just taken me a while to get to the point where I can step back and say, yeah, this is pretty good, this is worthwhile. It’s one of the challenges of being a writer, I think. Any kind of writer, poet or journalist or novelist. You need to somehow find some objectivity about your own work. You need to be able to remove yourself and, in the context of everything else you’ve read and studied and admired, say that, yes, this is pretty good, or, no, this isn’t something I should share.

John: You’ve published literary fiction and crime fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and kids’ books. You’ve worked as an editor of magazines, books, and technical documents. How much of this reflects the diversity of your talents, and how much reflects the difficulty of making a living as a writer in Montana?

Allen: Thank you for the question. It’s very kind. But I feel like the “diversity of talent” may be more a reflection of necessity and circumstances. Also, a roving eye in terms of keeping myself entertained with the work. So maybe 50 percent making a living, 40 percent needing fresh material, and 10 percent talent?

John: Still, it’s admirable how you make a living in deeply creative spheres. This book comes from Bangtail Press, where you are editor and publisher. Bangtail has also published work by acclaimed Montana authors such as Paul Zarzyski, Russell Rowland, and Fred Haefele. Can you talk about the state of Montana publishing today?

Allen: It’s a big question, and I go back and forth, waffling between optimism and pessimism. On the one hand, we have so many fantastic writers in the region. It’s hard not to look around and be astonished by the concentration of talent. On the other hand—and this is something I wrestle with in my own work, pretty much on a daily basis—it’s hard not to feel like the world’s leaving the writer behind.

The novel, the poem, the literary arts… in my down moments, it feels like my chosen creative paths are all being lost in a larger cultural cacophony. Between AI and the newest iteration of Grand Theft Auto and the addictive Insta scroll, I think we’re seeing the stature of the writer reduced. But then I tell myself that as long as I can reach one dedicated reader, find at least one person who’s moved by what I’m working on, then what I’m doing is worthwhile.

John: I am one such reader. Here’s hoping that publishing this conversation will highlight a few more!

Allen Morris Jones is the award-winning author of the poetry collection Mumblecusser; the novels Last Year’s River, A Bloom of Bones, and Sweeney on the Rocks; the nonfiction book A Quiet Place of Violence; plus Yellowstone for Kids, Good Hunting for Kids, and other books. His latest, A Kind of Man: Montana Stories, came out in July 2026. You can find him online at https://allenmorrisjones.com/.

End notes:

• When I started Natural Stories, I imagined writing book reviews or otherwise highlighting the great literary culture around today’s (broadly defined) nature writing. It struck me as potentially valuable given the decline in book review outlets. In the past few months, I’ve been exploring this conversation format as a more accessible way of telling these stories of new books. I’m always interested in your feedback!

• Allen and I will continue this conversation in person at This House of Books in Billings on Friday, September 11 at 6:00 p.m. The event is free and all are welcome!

At the trailhead, my heart sank. Other cars! It was a late-winter gray day, with temperatures in the lower 40s Fahrenheit. It had been more than a week since the last storm, and snow on the ground was patchy—but the trail itself had been packed into ice. Given the lousy conditions, I had hoped that I could at least gain solitude at this otherwise-popular trailhead. Alas, others had come with the same idea.

You’re being silly, I told myself. There’s nothing wrong with other people. The pandemic is over—and even during the pandemic, people rarely infected each other in the outdoors. These cars at the trailhead represent people just like you.

The argument wasn’t terribly convincing. Despite my failures at wilderness solitude, I often find myself pursuing it. Alone on the trail, dog off the leash, I… somehow feel more authentic.

On this occasion, I tried getting off the trail. I wandered the woods alongside it, where the footing was better with no ice. Knowing the area well, I occasionally meandered farther away. I can’t recall many details about the route because—did I mention I fail at wilderness solitude?—my brain decided to chew on other things.

There’s a theory that Donald Trump represents a “post-literate” culture. Or, to take the Trump-bashing out of it, that we may be transitioning from a culture based on the written word (including science, impartial journalism, complex management, and books) to an opposing one more based on oral storytelling (for which Trump happens to have particular genius).

Trump famously acquires information more from television than books. That’s true for all sorts of people—there’s a hullaballoo about the decline of reading. Meanwhile, the quick hits of social media are more conversational—more like oral storytelling—than essays or novels. TikTok combines these two trends with quick hits of oral-and-visual storytelling. And that’s how increasing numbers of people take in the world around them. (Even smart, “literate” people are increasingly post-literate.)

On the drive to the trailhead, I’d been listening to a podcast conversation between Joe Weisenthal, a popularizer of this theory, and journalist Derek Thompson. They note that orality isn’t necessarily worse than literacy; indeed, the hot literary masterwork of the summer, The Odyssey, is a product of an oral culture, Homeric Greece.

Many modern novels explore the independent condition of human thought (the best, contrasting, examples are Ayn Rand and George Orwell). Such a novel isn’t merely an artifact of literacy culture—it’s a celebration of the very cultural elements that literacy culture encourages. In other words, literacy culture feeds on itself. It highlights, and gives moral authority to, the elements that it creates. Such a novel might well fail to reach people in an oral culture—might fail to move Donald Trump.

At one point on that hike, I encountered another party. I put my dog on her leash, which caused her to bark and lunge. (Leash culture gave her a different set of values than unleashed culture.) Then I went back to my “solitude.” Which is to say that instead of noticing the nature around me, I recursively pondered the idea of solitude.

I sit alone to write a history book or Substack essay. You sit alone to read it. In that interaction, our literacy-based culture is rewarding a particular solitude-dependent form of knowledge. Because of literacy, the pursuit of solitude has become worthy and admirable. In oral cultures, knowledge is held collectively, in the storytelling event. Thus solitude is far less useful, far less moral.

Might this distinction have implications for our belief that solitude is one of the least-complicated arguments for wilderness? When someone like Edward Abbey asks who could be against preserving landscapes that allow the pursuit of solitude, he’s assuming a universal literacy culture.

If literacy culture is not universal—if it’s in conflict with oral culture—that might explain why wilderness solitude doesn’t have the power that advocates want it to. Indeed, almost 50 years after Abbey said, “The idea of wilderness needs no defense, only more defenders,” the number of defenders is still dwindling. Is it, as many wilderness advocates believe, an “education” problem? (People haven’t heard the arguments for wilderness solitude.) Or is it a problem of values? (People don’t buy the arguments, because they aren’t invested in the literacy culture where those arguments live.)

In other words, maybe the reason I keep pursuing wilderness solitude despite being lousy at it is that I embrace a literacy-based culture that encourages solitude. And maybe people less enthralled by literacy-based culture don’t register the value of solitude in wilderness.

An interesting test case is Indigenous cultures. Needless to say, all Indigenous people are different (just like all white people are different), and there are some heroic Indigenous people who work for today’s Abbey-inflected vision of wilderness. But in the run-up to the 1964 Wilderness Act, most tribes asked to be excluded from this white idea of how to relate to nature. Indeed, of the 16 reservation wilderness areas (4.8 million acres) that Bob Marshall had created as a Bureau of Indian Affairs employee in the 1930s, only one made it into the official wilderness system of the 1960s.

This had a lot to do with tribal mistrust of the federal government. I’ve always believed there was a cultural mismatch as well: Indigenous attitudes toward landscapes don’t support this weird wilderness-versus-development dichotomy. But here’s a more fundamental mismatch—why would solitude-based, literacy-based arguments persuade an orality-based Indigenous culture?

Highlighting literacy-based arguments would also explain why so many advocates of wilderness solitude are from the educated classes. It would explain why defenses of wilderness so often cite the poetic language of the Wilderness Act (“untrammeled by man”). It would add a layer to the Bob Marshall quote, “Just a few more years of hesitation and the only trace of that wilderness which has exerted such a fundamental influence in molding American character will lie in the musty pages of pioneer books.”

Arguments for wilderness sometimes get derided as class warfare. But instead, the problem is that the idea really sings to the stars of literacy-based culture. It doesn’t translate as well to the (and here I’ll use a synonym for a well-known subset of the white people who lean more toward orality) Trump voter.

On a warm day in early August, I took a footbridge over an irrigation canal and then crossed the central quad of Montana State University–Billings. The trees were green, the grass shaded, and the paths empty with students on summer break. I entered the nearly-deserted library and climbed to the second floor. During an end-of-semester rush, a library can feel like a useful tool in students’ ambition—but on a dead midsummer day, it’s more of a shrine to books and knowledge.

On a shelf, I found Walter Ong’s 1985 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Weisenthal, Thompson, and others talking about orality today continually cite this source, and I had decided that I needed to read it myself.

But I couldn’t read it.

I mean, I tried to read the introduction. I sat there, at a comfortable desk near a window, and focused my eyes on the words. But my mind kept flitting elsewhere. I sternly commanded myself to pay attention. But podcasts had already given me the summary of Ong’s work, and reading the original, in Ong’s voice, didn’t do much for me. I skipped around in the book, trying in vain to find nuggets that podcasters hadn’t mentioned, or anecdotes where his personality showed through.

It was, I have to admit, a very familiar feeling. I spent much of college in this space: bored by the required reading, wishing I could acquire the necessary knowledge in some other way. The academic, storytelling-free voice of Ong (1912–2003), an English professor and Jesuit priest, reminded me of many of the brilliant experts that I’d failed to connect with in my youth.

I felt the irony: I had set out to read this important book about the importance of reading—and I was failing to read it.

So I put the book down and went for a walk around campus. Maybe, I thought, orality and literacy have long been complementary contributors to American culture. And maybe our culture—not to mention our wilderness politics—would be better off if we admitted it.

End notes:

• I quote Edward Abbey and Bob Marshall from https://wilderness.net/learn-about-wilderness/quotes.php. I like to think that the very existence of this site, “Learn about Wilderness: Quotes,” buttresses my point: that the wilderness ideal is mostly about literacy culture.

• Although Natural Stories is free to all, it depends on the generosity of paying subscribers. If you like this writing, please consider joining them to make essays like this possible.

This week’s story is a conversation with author Joe Wilkins. Joe has published award-winning poetry, memoir, and fiction, and is perhaps best known for his extraordinary recent novel The Entire Sky. Next week is Publication Day for his nonfiction book Every Sky at Home: Essays on Landscape and Family.

John Clayton: Several of these essays are set in what your fans will find familiar territory: your hardscrabble childhood in eastern Montana’s Big Dry high desert. In “On Edges” you write that it is “a country that has never not been true frontier.” What makes a frontier?

Joe Wilkins: A frontier is, simply, a far and lonesome place. Various governmental agencies and nonprofits define frontier country as having less than six people per square mile and being thirty minutes or more from necessary services, and I think those are pretty good numeric markers. But frontier connotates, too, a wildness and a sense of being on one’s own. This frontier mentality can be thrilling and bracing — which is one reason I continue to find myself seeking out such places, wanting to continue to learn from such places — but a blind adherence to this mentality can keep us, in the far places, from understanding our bonds with one another and building community, which we all need, no matter how far and lonesome the place we call home.

John: “We need a new mythology,” you write in an essay titled “Not the Cowboy but the Shepherd.” I have friends who’ve been saying this for years. But it feels more compelling coming from someone who a) has the language and storytelling chops to aspire to mythmaking, and b) once lived on an actual sheep ranch.

Joe: I’m definitely joining a chorus of writers and thinkers — William Kittredge, Mark Spragg, and Kim Barnes leap to mind immediately — with this call. And I’m indebted to them for helping me rewrite my own personal mythologies, which is where, of course, this work begins — in our own selves. We always need to be reminded; we need to hear the good news that true, challenging stories bring us; and we then need to be rigorous and honest with our own values and the decisions we make.

I know, too, as I’m trying to raise a teenage boy of my own, as I encounter young men in my classrooms, that at this very moment we are in deep need of new mythologies surrounding masculinity and what it means to be a man. We have, as a culture, begun to take apart the old mythologies, which is good, but we need truer, more capacious stories to step in and do that necessary mythological undergirding. Without it, we’re trying to build on Jello; we’re at the mercy of the flawed, destructive stories spouted by various podcasters and influencers and way too many of our national leaders.

John: A shorter essay that moved me was “Shimmer,” in which two strands eventually converge. Even more than its ideas or themes, I was struck that its innovation — and thus its beauty and power — arose from its poem-like structure. Do you consciously cross-pollinate genres?

Joe: Perhaps since I began scribbling as a poet, form feels generative to me — where you break a line allows and disallows all kinds of associations and possible meanings. It’s a little different in prose, but the shape of a sentence, and the sentence that follows that one, or the paragraph break and what comes next — these formal gestures are always bringing a force to bear on me as a writer. With “Shimmer,” I thought perhaps the threads would be more tightly intertwined, but the language and the subject/narrative kept pushing me towards the more distinct back and forth that became the essay’s final form. So, yes, I guess I do!

For me, whether poem, essay, or story, language is language, and you’re always trying to follow it, to see where the next line or sentence might lead.

John: Some of the essays are set in the other places you’ve lived as an adult: Mississippi, Idaho, Iowa, Oregon. I found several of these quite compelling, and realized that you’re not necessarily a Montana writer, but a great writer of place who happened to be raised in Montana. Do you see yourself that way?

Joe: I’m absolutely a writer of place. One of the first questions I ask myself — whether I’m at work on a lyric poem or a sprawling novel — is where am I. If I can’t answer that, well, I pretty much can’t keep writing. The same is true for me as a reader; if I don’t have a strong sense of where I am, I’m going to put the book down.

That said, I don’t think I’m the writer of place I am without my Montana boyhood, which allowed and asked of me a deep immersion in the everyday facts of landscape. As a farm and ranch family, we lived a deeply placed life. Though I don’t do that work anymore, the lessons of it are still with me. I can’t help but find and understand myself in place.

John: Several of the essays are set at an incredibly remote spot on Oregon’s Rogue River where you were a Boyden Writing Resident. Most writers’ retreats I know won’t even accept a dog. But you brought your whole family, including your four- and six-year-old kids. Indeed their encounter with the wilderness becomes one of your central subjects, yes?

Joe: Though the essays in Every Sky at Home traverse many landscapes, the book as a whole takes root in that singular experience, in the astonishing gift it was to watch my children come to know the mountain meadow and the forest trail and the river itself as kith, as each day’s measure. In watching them learn that far place, I saw myself as a boy learning my own far place. I began to see as well the very reasons my parents chose to farm and ranch in eastern Montana, just as my wife and I chose those months on the Rogue for our family.

I’ve found one of the great joys and mysteries of parenting is how time begins to circle and get all mixed-up. In an instant we’re both parent and child, and we see how it must have been the same for our parents and our grandparents, and these swirling moments have helped me give grace to those relatively young folks my parents were, to myself and my wife as we try to get it right, to my children as they grow and change and continually become themselves.

Joe Wilkins is the author of two novels, The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die; a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and five collections of poetry, including Pastoral, 1994 and When We Were Birds. His latest, Every Sky at Home: Essays on Landscape and Family, is forthcoming from Bison Books in the fall of 2026. Born and raised on a sheep ranch north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana, he lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon. You can find him online at https://joewilkins.org/ and joewilkinswriter.substack.com (where this interview is being simultaneously published).

When I arrived in Montana in 1990, there was a “business” in my small town that had a chained bear patrolling an empty lot. I guess you could pay money to interact with it, though I never did. I silently cheered when it was confiscated on humanitarian grounds and taken to a rehab facility in Oregon.

I stayed silent because I didn’t want to impose my East Coast values on the small community I was hoping to enter. But it turned out those small-town values were evolving on their own. The confiscation was done by some local/regional authority, not a nationwide advocacy group.

This was a shift. Back in the 1950s, a semi-tame bear cub had been tied up at a local gas station; people fondly remembered buying it a Coke from the nearby vending machine.

Chaining up bears as pets had been a decades-long tradition all over the country. Gifford Pinchot, founder of the US Forest Service, described visiting Jonesboro, Arkansas, as a young man in 1891. “I wrote home about the nice people I had met, and in particular and in detail about how much I liked Betsy. Then, when I judged the family were sufficiently keyed up over the prospect of an Arkansas flatwoods daughter-in-law, I sent them a photograph of Betsy and me very close together, with the molasses bottle in full flood.” Betsy was a bear. “It [the photo] achieved an instant and unconditional success.”

Bears served as people’s pets even inside Yellowstone National Park. Part 1 of this trilogy featured some snapshots of 1920s pet bears Juno and Pard; this week’s image features snapshots of other park bear pets.

A century ago, bears could be pets, or even business resources. As a gas station owner, you might buy a bear and build it a dwelling so that people could interact with it and you could make money selling them Cokes. This trend brings some context to the stories of the last couple of weeks, of people feeding bears in Yellowstone and the authorities encouraging them.

It would be weird to be able to feed a bear in a nearby town but not inside the park’s boundaries. A national park stands for a set of national values, not just one consecrated place.

Indeed, the 1960s decision to enforce Yellowstone’s bear-feeding prohibitions proved to be an act of nationwide moral leadership. Once, you could treat a bear as a pet anywhere the bear would let you. Today, the essence of any bear is its wildness. Park leaders’ management decisions were part of a nationwide agenda-setting (with many other institutions involved, of course, and a time lag to widespread acceptance).

And I’d like to argue that the same dynamics were at work in the period from the 1890s to the 1920s. Park leaders were encouraging people to feed bears—to treat them like pets—because this was a remarkable humanitarian improvement from the previous culture-wide attitudes. Previously, people had seen bears as a representation of evil, and/or as a feature of the threatening wilderness that needed to be exterminated. It was all fear, no wonder.

So park leaders modeled a change in nationwide behavior. If the park superintendent could keep a bear chained up in his backyard, maybe a gas-station owner could too. Neither had to shoot the bear on sight.

You may want to argue here that a chained-up bear symbolized hideously macho white male dominion. That the bears’ “owners” were all about controlling these “lesser” creatures rather than loving them. That the Yellowstone tourist bear-feeding spectacle represented the same dynamic on a smaller scale—even more hideous because the tourists weren’t asked to take year-round responsibility for the bears or even see them in physical chains. Just enjoy the bear’s “performance,” and then go home.

I won’t disagree with you.

What I will say is that feeding candy to a semi-tame or chained-up bear gave people the opportunity to see bears up close. Up close, these creatures hardly resembled the rampaging Satans of myth. It was not just the owner who realized that bears didn’t need to be shot on sight—it was all of the many tourists graced by the encounter.

In an era when human activity was leading to the near-extinction of once-common animals such as the bison and passenger pigeon, the instinct to treat bears as pets may have helped save the species. If naturalists of the 1890s foolishly believed that loving bears meant feeding them, at least it was a more-loving alternative than exterminating them.

And if those naturalists further foolishly believed that animals would respond to love with docility and grace, then at least the bears’ response was varied. Some bears did temporarily exhibit an ability to be tamed… much as some people do. It may be traumatic, in both cases, or even monstrous. But it may also be a grimly wise coping strategy.

Only by going down this path—by feeding candy to a Yellowstone “hold-up bear,” or a Coke to a cub chained at a nearby gas station—could people get close enough to bears to realize how wrong were their previous attitudes. Only close up could you feel, and thus mourn, the tame bears’ loss of wildness. And only as those feelings rippled through the culture could that notion of untamable wildness replace the notion of tamability as the quality we most revere in wildlife.

Shocking as it may seem today, the practice of feeding bears in Yellowstone was more enlightened than previous policies. And it served as a stepping-stone to even more enlightened policies. When I think of historical progress, this—more than some clever mechanical invention or advance in systems of governance or hot new social-media trend—is what I have in mind.

End notes:

· I quote Pinchot from Breaking New Ground, p. 38.

· This is part 3 of a trilogy. Part 1: “The appalling stories of early 20th century tourists feeding Yellowstone bears” Part 2: “National park leaders were the worst offenders in last century’s Yellowstone bear-feeding” Thanks for following! And thanks to you paying subscribers for making this work possible.

The scrapbook image above features lots of photos of 1920s Yellowstone superintendent Horace Albright feeding bears. He feeds bears from outside rather than inside his car. He feeds bears by holding a snack high in the air. He demonstrates for nearby tourists.

Like the photos I showed last week, these show how common bear-feeding was a century ago. More importantly, they show how the practice was not limited to Yellowstone’s tourists. Yellowstone’s leaders modeled the behavior.

Here’s Yellowstone chief ranger Sam Woodring (later superintendent of Grand Teton National Park) feeding a bear. Here’s Park Service director Steve Mather feeding a bear. Want to see it in motion? Here’s film of President Warren Harding feeding a bear.

I’m particularly fascinated by the image below, which I didn’t recall seeing before, of President Calvin Coolidge feeding the bear named Jesse James. (James was a “hold-up bear”: holding you up for snacks. The image is duplicated because it’s shot from a stereoscopic camera, a then-popular technology that with proper viewing devices created three-dimensional effects.) Granted, it’s not particularly newsworthy: Coolidge was merely mimicking Harding’s well-documented activities from four years previously.

Nevertheless, this behavior was illegal. Yellowstone’s rules against feeding bears dated back to at least 1902. When asked about the rules, Albright would always hem and haw. Presumably he understood the rules’ value: He saw the injury reports from encounters gone wrong. He occasionally compensated people, out of Park Service funds, for damages to their cars caused by bears. He knew about the “problem bears” that were “removed” from the population (in other words, he had ordered them to be killed).

But he also talked about how he was serving a “public who like the bears… much more than the geysers.” For example, President Harding dutifully watched various geysers erupt, but explicitly asked to meet Jesse James. Since Yellowstone depended on Congressional appropriations, Albright wanted to keep politicians and their constituents happy.

Horace Albright is a gigantic figure in National Park Service history. In 1916, he helped Steve Mather found the agency, despite being barely out of college. Then Mather got sick, and Albright served as Acting Director for 18 months. In the 1930s, he succeeded Mather as Director, then entered the private sector. With amazing recall and a buttoned-down sense of moral authority, his influence as an eminence grise extended well beyond his 1987 death.

Albright valiantly posed bear-feeding as a management challenge. Could he keep tourists happy while preserving the bear populations they came to see? The message played well with scientists and journalists of the era, many of whom saw nature, even wilderness, as a technocratic challenge.

But with these scrapbooks of photos, we can see the challenge as one not of technocracy but moral values. Surely Albright is forming a personal relationship to this bear that is just inches from his fingers? So isn’t he obliged to help safeguard that bear’s life? And maybe also the wildness that makes it special? Not to mention the safety of the surrounding tourists.

The moral component gives added meaning to these scrapbook pages. All of these pictures of Albright feeding bears—as well as many others—feature the handwritten notation “Neg. removed.” Without the negatives, it’s really hard for books and magazines to reproduce these images. Without the images, it’s hard to tell the story.

(To clarify: especially before the technological advances of the last decade or so, you needed the photographic negative to gain sufficient resolution for print quality. A snapshot of a snapshot would come out too blurry in a book or article. Yet there was no other way to disseminate information. Before the scrapbooks were digitized by the Open Parks Network, they were on the verge of becoming useless historical artifacts. Today, between high-resolution scanners and online publications such as this one, the situation is a bit different.)

Did Albright remove the negatives in an effort to destroy evidence that he himself regularly fed bears inappropriately? He sometimes claimed that there was a proper way to feed bears (from a bowl, from your car—not from your hand, or teasing) and if you fed bears properly, you wouldn’t get hurt. Scientists today know that this is absurd; one suspects that Albright knew it then… but it’s hard to prove. Evidence that he regularly fed bears improperly might bolster the case that he was acting immorally.

Alas, it’s impossible to know who removed the negatives, or why. A few of the snapshots themselves are also missing, with notes that they were loaned to Howard Stagner of the Park Service’s Washington office in 1959. Stagner was a well-respected ecologist then serving as a middle manager in the agency’s bureaucracy; it’s hard to imagine him as part of a nefarious anti-wildlife plot. But the notes about Stagner suggest a similar motivation for the notes about the negatives.

In short, the easiest explanation for the removed negatives is that stuff gets lost. Stuff gets borrowed and not returned. Stuff gets misclassified. Maybe stuff was returned but not to this scrapbook. Maybe the negatives were removed from one location and put in another.

In short, although I have no idea what happened to these negatives, a conspiracy strikes me as unlikely. Partly that’s because nobody paid much attention at the time. Nobody expected these negatives to be important. Why would anybody steal something so unimportant, so benignly typical of the day’s values?

Nobody expected these pictures to be important because nobody in the 1920s could have predicted this vast change in the morality of bear-feeding. And so the question becomes: How and why did that morality change? And might Albright’s actions have played a positive role? For the answer, stay tuned next week!

End notes:

· This is part 2 of a trilogy. Part 1: “The appalling stories of early 20th century tourists feeding Yellowstone bears” Part 3: “Why feeding Yellowstone bears was necessary, even heartwarming history.”

· I quote Albright from a letter to Newton Drury, Apr. 3, 1944, cited in Alice Wondrak Biel, Do (Not) Feed the Bears: The Fitful History of Wildlife and Tourists in Yellowstone. (That’s an affiliate link.)

From the 1920s through the 1960s, people were wild for feeding bears in Yellowstone. The chief reason to visit the national park was to have a bear eat a piece of candy from your hand. It seems crazy, today, when we know bears to be wild animals, and thus dangerous. Today, what we find most interesting and valuable about a bear is its wildness—the idea that neither you nor the bear have any desire for such an interaction.

People who experienced bear hand-feeding firsthand are dying off. The park started enforcing regulations against the practice in the mid-1960s, so anyone under 65 has no such memories.

However, scrapbooks of old images have been preserved on the internet. The image atop this essay features (top middle) a tourist holding a piece of candy for a bear standing in the road near Yellowstone Lake in 1923. It’s on a page from a scrapbook, accompanied by images of tourists feeding bears, often by hand, and of two “pet” bears named Juno and Pard.

An outfit called the Open Parks Network has made available these terrific US government (public domain) images. It scanned and somewhat indexed dozens of scrapbooks. Here’s another page:

This page features people leaning out of their cars in 1934 to feed sometimes-reluctant bears. (One hesitates to call them “begging” bears. More like begging tourists!) It shows how often people left the safety of their vehicles to feed bears, and how popular Juno and Pard remained for a decade.

Just to make the point, one more page:

Here bears hold up traffic because everyone has gotten out of their cars to feed them. It’s a party! This is just the sort of social interaction with other visitors that parks advocates today try to encourage…. except, you know, they’re also interacting with dangerous wild creatures. In another photo, the cook appears to be teasing a bear. In a third, a bear has walked up to the door of Camp Roosevelt.

When I came across these photos (and you can page through the scrapbooks for many more), I was shocked. My brain knew that people once fed bears from their cars. I’d read books such as Alice Wondrak Biel’s terrifically-titled Do (Not) Feed the Bears, with a cover photo of bears standing up against an automobile to beg. As Biel’s title implies, the park’s official position prohibited feeding bears, but until the 1960s, enforcement was… inconsistent. Reading Biel’s book, I wondered if she (like me) was torn between condemning the hypocrisy and hesitating to criticize the behavior of friendly, heroic, deeply moral park rangers.

I’d also read James A. Pritchard’s Preserving Yellowstone’s Natural Conditions, with a cover photo of a bear standing up against an automobile to beg. Pritchard’s thorough research made me wonder if more cynicism might be deserved: park leaders such as 1920s superintendent Horace Albright seemingly knew that feeding was bad for bears, but fudged the science to keep tourists (and their Congresspeople) happy.

But seeing these scrapbook images was a different experience for me than reading those books. I felt the emotional reality. My gosh, bear-feeding was everywhere! And people weren’t just feeding bears from the “safety” of their cars. It’s amazing that more bears weren’t euthanized, and more people weren’t hurt (…although Biel suggests that Albright may have downplayed such incidents).

Historians always caution against presentism: We shouldn’t judge people of the past by the standards of today. We can be shocked at the scale of bear-feeding. But not necessarily appalled, because public attitudes toward bears’ wildness is different today than 80–100 years ago.

Thus the natural story I want to present this week is one that emerges within me, and maybe now within you too. How do we form the right emotional relationship to these pictures? Shock. Empathy for bears. Belief in science. Empathy for tourists who didn’t yet know that science. Empathy for managers who maybe did? Phew, that’s tough! Yet any great story starts with a sympathetic character (me and you!) facing a challenge.

This story will take the form of a trilogy, and by Part 3 I hope we will be edging toward a solution. But before we get there, the challenge will become more difficult. Next week’s Part 2 will offer something for the conspiracy-minded: Why do so many of these photographs feature a note in the caption: “Neg. removed”? What happened to all these photographic negatives—the images’ source?

End notes:

· Kudos to those who have previously documented the bear-feeding phenomenon, including Atlas Obscura, Buckrail, M. Mark Miller, Cowboy State Daily, National Geographic, Daily Mail, and others. I’m not arguing that nobody has told this story before—just that these scrapbook images helped me see it in a new way.

· This essay contains affiliate links for Bookshop.org, an online bookseller that supports local bookstores. As an affiliate of Bookshop, I earn a small commission, at no cost to you, when you click through and make a purchase there. But I’m just as happy if you support your local independent bookseller!

· Previous trilogies at Natural Stories have included stories about wilderness solitude, Rex Stout’s novel Forest Fire, and nontraditional national parks.

Shortly after I moved to Montana in 1990, a guy in a bar explained to me how he was going to get rich because he had trademarked the name “John Johnston’s Trading Post.”

I needed to understand, he said, that “Jeremiah Johnson,” the Robert Redford movie, was based on a true story but—and this part not many people knew—the guy’s name was not Jeremiah but John. And—this part hardly anybody knew—it wasn’t Johnson but Johnston. Imagine the value of trademarking the real name of this legendary figure.

I like talking to people in bars. I like to think I create a space in which they feel like I’m actually listening. I thus remember feeling weirdly proud that this guy had to explain his scheme to me several times.

I want to emphasize here that I was young and ignorant. My failure to grasp his brilliance was my problem, not his. In retrospect, I realize that he absolutely should have gotten rich, if only he’d known anything about how to run a profitable trading post.

Even today, there’s a huge hunger for the real-life John Johnston, who traveled West in the 1840s to live off the land. “Jeremiah Johnson” remains an incredibly popular movie, as David Gessner laid out a few months ago. Its popularity arises largely from the fact that people perceive it as true—or at least as close as Hollywood ever gets, filmed on location and “based on a true story.”

The only problem: none of it is true.

In the early 2000s, in one of my first assignments for Montana Quarterly magazine, I was asked to write about the life of John Johnston, who was known as “Liver-Eatin’” because he’d allegedly eaten the livers of Indian warriors he’d killed in battle.

So I read Crow Killer, the 1958 Johnston “biography” that was also a chief source for the Redford movie. Or, I tried to read the book. It was clearly fiction. Especially the part about Johnston’s alleged vendetta against the Apsáalooke (Crow) tribe. Did he really kill, scalp, and devour the livers of more than 300 Crow Indians? He himself later denied it. According to some Crow traditions, they called him “Liver Eater” because he was one of the few white men who would celebrate a successful hunt with them by sharing in the consumption of raw deer liver.

Crow Killer was fiction masquerading as a true story—and worse, it was racist, sexist, horrifically violent fiction. It told alluring stories of a man heroically fighting the nasties who threatened him. But the book had no sources. I went looking for better-sourced books that might contain actual facts about Johnston. I couldn’t find any.

I didn’t have access to the research that scholars like Nathan Bender and Dorman Nelson were then doing, which suggests that the source of some of these outlandish tales was Johnston himself. But I’m not sure that would have made any difference. Johnston lied, just like Jim Bridger lied. It was a common habit of mountain men. They lied to friends and strangers alike, because they didn’t have a lot of other sources of entertainment.

I ended up devising a theory about Johnston’s 20^th century fame: In the moment, 19^th century dime novelists had codified the campfire-tale lies about real people like Buffalo Bill and Calamity Jane, but somehow never got around to Johnston. So when people later remembered this other set of stories about a guy who never made it into the dime novels, those stories were perceived as more authentic. These were the tales actually told around the campfire, rather than sullied up by dime novelists. Which, people conveniently forgot, didn’t make them true.

With 20 years’ distance from my article, I can acknowledge that’s just a theory. I can acknowledge that scholars have unearthed a few more facts about Johnston’s life. But I still love that essay, which I later published in Stories from Montana’s Enduring Frontier. I still think it chronicled all the major facts of Johnston’s life, which is not many facts.

The rest is fiction. There’s nothing wrong with fiction—great stories that get at deeper truths about the values of the writer’s society. But we shouldn’t love fiction for the facts it’s (not) based on. Especially when that fiction is racist, sexist, and ultraviolent.

I felt like a scold, sitting in that bar in 1990. I felt like a nit-picker, a wet blanket, a killjoy. Your business would out-compete “Jeremiah Johnson’s Trading Post” because of its trademark’s authenticity? People would flock to it instead of “John Johnson’s Trading Post” because it’s properly spelled?

I knew that I didn’t understand. But it took years for me to understand what it was that I hadn’t understood: This guy had a special angle on a myth that was particularly popular in Montana. And the West’s fortunes have always been built on mythology.

We have a hunger for myth. We have a hunger for authentic detail. Sometimes the combination of those hungers gives us blind spots when it comes to facts, common sense, and decency.

In his own lifetime, John Johnston was never famous. Granted, he may have been happy. He may have even imagined a way in which his stitched-together lies made his life legendary. But to the wider culture, it was null story. It didn’t exist.

Until later: When the 20^th century equivalents of dime novelists discovered and repackaged the stories, a legend emerged to fit the values of their own times. The importance of “Liver-eatin’ Johnson” and “Jeremiah Johnson” are in the way these storytellers crafted a myth out of nothing.

End notes:

• I get a slight commission when you click on affiliate book links including those above, but I’m just as happy if you buy from a local independent bookseller.

• Special thanks to my paying subscribers, who make these essays possible. If you have not yet joined them, would you consider doing so today?

A few months ago, a friend asked me, “Do you know this story about Truman Everts, lost for weeks in Yellowstone in 1870?”

“Yeah.” I tried to shrug, hoping to blunt the force of the argument I feared was coming.

“I find it fascinating!” he said. Yup, here was the implied argument: I should have written more about it in my book about Yellowstone, Wonderlandscape. And I’ll admit the argument’s power: it’s one hell of a story.

In the thick forests and fallen timber south of Yellowstone Lake, 54-year-old Truman Everts—the oldest, least athletic, and most nearsighted of his group of explorers—got separated from the others. Soon his horse bolted away. It had his gun, blankets, matches, and nearly everything else he would need to survive. The others sent out numerous search parties, but September snowstorms, soon totaling two feet in accumulation, obscured his tracks. They lingered for almost a week, and left a small search party for another several days, but running low of food themselves, had to head back to civilization.

At first Truman waited near a hot spring, subsisting mostly on thistle roots. On two occasions the search parties were within a half-mile of him, though neither knew it. Truman eventually headed north along the lake, and was able to retrace his incoming trail. He could make fires with his opera glass, although later he lost it. He also lost his homemade sandals. He suffered frostbite, a scalded leg, and scorched hair from a campfire. On October 6, 37 days after he’d initially gone missing, he was rescued by another party come from Helena. They described him as shoeless in the cold sleet, with clothing in shreds, weighing about 50 pounds, inarticulate and irrational. But he lived.

Given such drama, I can totally understand why any storyteller would put Truman Everts front-and-center in the history of Yellowstone. But note how this story frames the park’s central tension: it’s a lone white man versus the wilderness.

If you start a book with that story, every subsequent story should expand on its themes. How did development help white men conquer the wilderness? How did these vast landscapes provide opportunities for other white men to test themselves against wilderness dangers? How did the National Park Service balance the preservation of this wilderness (these dangers) with making it accessible to the general public?

But today’s culture is less enamored of heroic-white-man narratives, landscapes as places to be conquered, and wilderness as danger rather than wonder. Everts-type stories are at best overexposed, and at worst a fundamental misunderstanding of Yellowstone and its role in American identity.

To me, the 1870 expedition represented many of the worst aspects of mainstream American culture at the time. Its military leader, Gustavus Doane, was fresh off the Marias Massacre, where he’d participated in the killing of about 200 Piegan Blackfeet people (mostly women, children, and old men). When I was reading George Black’s Yellowstone history book Empire of Shadows, I kept wondering why the park didn’t show up until three-quarters of the way through the book. Then I realized what Black was arguing: the 1870 expedition was entangled with Indigenous genocide, making it problematic as a founding mythology.

It’s problematic in other ways, too. These weren’t the first white people in Yellowstone, merely the most elite. Early fur trappers may have been illiterate; men on an 1869 expedition didn’t have political or publishing connections. By comparison, the chief 1870 promoter, Nathaniel Langford, followed up with hundreds of sponsored speeches, sounding about as trustworthy as a used-car salesman—all the more annoying because the car isn’t here in front of us but off somewhere in Wyoming.

And then there’s Everts: probably a nice guy, but totally unqualified to be there. He’d been foolishly invited by the expedition’s political leader, Henry Washburn, a bureaucrat on a boondoggle. If Everts had kept any sort of diary, we might have a blow-by-blow account of a man both resourceful and desperate, of a landscape both beautiful and terrifying (in a favorite word of the era, sublime). But he didn’t, so instead we have a glib adventure narrative: “Yellowstone almost killed him!”

Stories of Yellowstone’s founding sometimes conflate the 1870 Washburn/Doane/Langford expedition with Ferdinand Hayden’s 1871 expedition. But in fact Hayden’s trip is a contrast, an alternative, a rival. Indeed, it represented some of the best aspects of mainstream American culture at the time: It included plenty of diverse scientists making factual observations. It was professionally organized under an official Congressional appropriation. It welcomed photographers including William Henry Jackson—plus an artist, Thomas Moran.

When you start a book with the story of Thomas Moran, every subsequent story can expand on art and culture. How did Moran’s paintings and Jackson’s photographs change the way Americans perceived the West? How were those meanings expanded through architecture (the Old Faithful Inn) and cartooning (Yogi Bear)? How did Yellowstone provide opportunities for varied cultural figures to continually redefine America through its signature landscape?

That’s what I tried to do in Wonderlandscape. I did get to mention Truman Everts’ escapade, as well as the important-if-true campfire comments of his 1870 co-expeditioner Cornelius Hedges. The Everts and Hedges stories played a surprising role in a 1926 debate over the script of the park’s official pageant.

I didn’t want to ignore Everts, his suffering and bravery. I just wanted to keep him in perspective. When it comes to the history of Yellowstone, what’s important isn’t just drama, like Everts’ story. It’s how those stores are remembered, and what they are believed to mean.

End notes:

• Aubrey Haines, the dean of Yellowstone historians, presents the most vigorous characterization of Langford as untrustworthy. See, for example, pp. 67 and 342-3 of The Yellowstone Story, vol. 1. Other good books on this topic include Anne F. Hyde, American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture 1820-1920 (NYU Press, 1990); Thurman Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998); James Cassidy, Ferdinand V. Hayden: Entrepreneur of Science (U. Nebraska Press, 2000); and Peter Bacon Hales, William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape (Temple University Press, 1988). M. Mark Miller’s Rediscovering Wonderland (Two Dot, 2022) has a comprehensive account of Everts’ adventure.

• Wonderlandscape is now available in paperback!

• If you are in the Cody, Wyoming, area on Thursday, August 6, I’d love to see you at my free Lunchtime Expedition talk at the Buffalo Bill Center for the West, at noon.

This week’s story is a conversation with journalist and outdoorswoman Heather Hansman. Today is Publication Day for her book Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Love for the Wild.

John: Let’s dive into the deep end. I admired your books Downriver and Powder Days, but now you say that “I’d been chasing a masculine conception of adventure… because I didn’t see other paths to follow.” So the memoir portions of Fierce Country become something of a reckoning, yes?

Heather: Yes. Or maybe less of a reckoning than a chance to develop a more subtle understanding. I’ve spent basically my whole career, both as a guide and as a journalist, in the outdoor world. It’s such a big part of who I am, and what I value, and my community, but I think that without realizing it I spent a lot of time trying to fit into a relatively narrow idea of what it means to be an outdoors person.

For instance, in my first book Downriver, the narrative throughline was a big source-to-confluence river trip. It was great, but it was also a very specific kind of outdoor experience, a kind of conquering with something to prove. As I’ve gotten older, and worked through some of those stories and experiences, I’ve had a chance to figure out what I value. And I’ve found that it’s less of those accomplishment-focused experiences—which are often those masculine, hero’s-journey kind of experiences—and often more connective. I had to figure that out through experiences. So yes, I think it’s a kind of reckoning, but I think I had to reckon with myself first.

John: This book is terrific in mixing those personal perspectives with more biographical/historical material. For example, you portray Georgie White, the first woman to guide the Grand Canyon. And in Georgie I recognized similarities to Caroline Lockhart, subject of my book The Cowboy Girl. Caroline was another overlooked early Western woman; among her “firsts” was to be the first woman to float the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. Also, she could be a bit of a jerk. How did you handle writing about flawed heroes?

Heather: First of all, I think the idea of an unflawed person, hero or not, is a total myth. No one is perfect, and I think we’ve seen that a lot in the last handful of years, as some of the people we’ve historically held up as heroes (especially in the outdoor world) have been taken to task. I’m thinking about things like John Muir’s racism being revealed, or Edward Abbey’s sexism.

I wanted the book to be really honest, and I wanted it to be something deeper and more complex than a laudatory hero story. I just think that’s more real. And as I dug into these women’s stories I had a lot more empathy, and found them a lot more relatable as I uncovered the less shiny parts of them. It made the story more interesting, and I couldn’t paint a full picture without it. When you see Anne LaBastile as defensive because she’s scared, or Georgie White as someone who is lying to keep up appearances, because she’s holding on to her company by the skin of her teeth, you get much more context about what they were dealing with, and how they had to build defense mechanisms.

John: Like Caroline, your heroes reject feminism, and in one case eco-feminism. Can you talk about why?

Heather: This is one of the big themes of the book, and it’s another thing I had to work through my own biases about. In their time, all three of these women were fighting for space as the only women in male-dominated places. They felt like they had to constantly prove themselves, to be the toughest and the best—and better than any other woman—to be considered legitimate. It’s this idea sociologists call the Superwoman Myth, the feeling that you have to be superior, and not part of the pack, to be included, because there is only space for one woman.

I know I’ve felt that. So I think that because they’d fought so hard to be singular they didn’t want to be considered part of a movement that they maybe thought was beneath them, even if their actions and the way they lived their lives was explicitly feminist. I got really frustrated by that, because it felt hypocritical and backwards to me, but I also tried to have some empathy for what they were up against, and the stories they had to tell themselves to keep going.

John: Well said! I think it was the same with Caroline. You’re helping explain her to me, all these years later. Fierce Country is powered by what I might call Dirtbag Authenticity. You know river culture and ski culture, and write from within about their flawed heroes. Why is it important to convey the values of these subcultures to a wider audience?

Heather: Thanks for saying that! I think that idea of authenticity is really important because it grounds the stories in a specific place and context. I think that broadly what these women were working through could have happened—and does happen—in so many other subcultures: academia, business, sports. I guess this is just the world I know and the one I can write honestly about with some depth. I always think stories are better when they’re specifics. So hopefully that makes the book stronger, and then the deeper ideas are relatable.

John: You have a line I love in this book. You talk about your need to “intellectualize the feeling of being outside.” And sure enough, Fierce Country takes us on an intellectual journey that starts with recreation, and moves through conservation and philosophy. Is your need related to the fact that, like me, you were raised in greater Boston?

Heather: What are you, my therapist?

John (giggling): Or quoting my own…

Heather: Yes, I 100 percent think that need comes from my upbringing in a place where hyper intellectualism is valued, and maybe over valued. I think I have a hard time just feeling things without trying to think about what they mean. But I’m working on that. And I also think, or hope, that need serves the story and gives it more depth. I see that as the root of my job: trying to explain things, and to get into the complexity of something that might seem simple. There are a lot of books about the outdoors that feel pretty surface-level to me. I think it’s more interesting, especially in book form, to dig into the why, and to give the action some meaning.

John: In another line that I love, you talk about gender as “an ideology gap, not an ability one.” Given that we are of different genders, you’re now talking across that gap—what else would you like me to know?

Heather: When I dug into the question of what does it mean to be a woman outside, and what makes it hard or different, I learned that there’s a ton of research and social science about why. It’s everything from the way young girls aren’t taken out into nature as much as boys, to the way we assume leaders should look, to the military history of adventure sports, to the language we use. So I think that’s something for all of us to chew on: how have we been swallowing assumptions and how much of what we think about being outside is just an idea.

Heather Hansman is a Colorado-based freelance writer and editor. Her book Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Love for the Wild was published July 14, 2026. (I’ve provided a sponsored link but I’m just as happy if you support your local independent bookseller.)

Once upon a time, a bold new interstate highway was proposed to Yellowstone National Park. It came from outside of establishment planning processes. It had no budget. And its informal name honored a single man, which made it seem a bit silly. But its environmental and cultural implications were profound.

You may think I’m talking about today’s “Trump Interstate” proposal, which would designate US-287 as a future Interstate highway, “I-47,” from Texas to Montana. But I’m actually talking about 1913.

In times of turmoil, history can ground us. It can remind us that however crazy politics-of-the-moment may seem, similar events have likely happened in the past. Sometimes the passage of decades allows us to look at those past events with a little less angst. We can think more rationally about their causes and implications. We can carry those lessons forward.

In the 1910s, as automobiles began to proliferate, a problem emerged: Where would you drive them? Traditionally, “roads” had been pathways or trails for horses and stagecoaches. They’d been built by municipalities or (on busy routes) entrepreneurs. In rural areas, they were maintained by neighboring farmers, who typically paid their road taxes in the form of labor, during road maintenance days.

There was no interstate highway system, nor even intercounty or intercity or interneighborhood. In an era of small government, the idea of government paying for new transportation networks seemed like a dangerous precedent. It was a lot of money to spend for little benefit. If a route could be a profitable toll road, it would be handled by the marketplace; why should the establishment step in to subsidize the unprofitable stuff?

But increasing numbers of people—bicyclists as well as automobilists—wanted roads for their vehicles. One such person was Joseph W. Parmley of Ipswich, South Dakota. He wanted a good road from Ipswich to nearby Aberdeen. As a state representative, he tried increasing state government road budgets, but couldn’t convince the establishment. Likewise as a local booster, he tried persuading county officials to build and maintain roads, with no luck.

Parmley hit on a new strategy: If people couldn’t get excited about a road from Ipswich to Aberdeen, maybe they’d support a road from Minneapolis to Yellowstone. Minneapolis was a large, growing city with lots of car-lovers. Yellowstone was America’s signature national park, a much-desired destination currently restricted by the fact that you could only get there with an expensive train ticket.

Yet Parmley could plan the route from Minneapolis to Yellowstone to go through Aberdeen and Ipswich. He would gain his local road. Meanwhile, his county would gain tax revenues thanks to all the new tourists’ spending. He invited neighboring communities to sign on, and at one of their earliest conventions, they were so pleased with his innovation that they called the proposed route the “Parmley Highway.”

Eventually sound marketing practices won out, and instead they called it the Yellowstone Trail. The Yellowstone Trail was arguably the nation’s first cross-country highway, eventually extending, in Parmley’s words, “from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound.” Its grassroots nature gained it more cachet than the automaker-funded Lincoln Highway a few hundred miles to the south.

Leaders of Yellowstone, who hadn’t had much say in these matters, were concerned. Automobiles were then banned inside the park’s boundaries. The superintendent said that he was facing strong pressure to allow cars, with lobbying coming “mostly from those living in states contiguous to the Park, and in my belief for commercial ends.”

In other words, commercial interests associated with the new technology threatened the special qualities of the park—including wildlife that, many feared, would be scared off by the noisy machines. At least the superintendent was able to secure funding from Congress to retrofit the park’s infrastructure for the impending change—although the wheels of the establishment turned slowly, they did eventually respond to the changes overwhelming rural places.

Thus when Yellowstone first officially admitted automobiles on July 31, 1915, some of those early tourists came over the Yellowstone Trail. The only reason they didn’t all come over the Trail from Ipswich was that competing roads were also arising, including the Yellowstone Highway from Denver, the Black [Hills] and Yellow [stone] Trail in central South Dakota, the Red Trail through North Dakota, and the Utah-Idaho-Yellowstone Highway from Salt Lake City.

Today, Senator John Cornyn is similar to Joe Parmley in that he wants to upgrade a local Texas road. To build wider interest, he proposes upgrading US-287 all the way to Montana. He tries to argue that the need to redo all of US-287 comes from its distinction as the nation’s “second-longest three-digit highway.”

But Joe Parmley could stand for the cause of millions of users of a transformative new technology, the automobile. Whereas Cornyn ties his local cause only to flattery of “the most effective and influential president of our lifetime.”

The gambit behind Cornyn’s bill has already failed—he lost his primary to a Trump-endorsed candidate. Thus everything I’ve ever learned about history and political science tells me his Trump Interstate proposal is dead. Nobody has reason to blast this bill out of committee. Also, the bill has no budget or timeline; it’s purely a statement rather than an implementable policy. Indeed, nobody in the executive branch has endorsed it.

Thus national media have ignored the story—probably correctly. All sorts of crazy bills get introduced every year and die in committee. That’s not news, it’s how the system works.

Yet the Trump Interstate is a hot topic of conversation here in greater Yellowstone. Local media have covered it; at least one environmental group has developed a petition opposing it. One friend lamented to me how crazy it would be to build a four-lane interstate through her favorite remote valley; another independently asked why you would end an Interstate highway not at the Canadian border but in the town of Choteau, Montana (pop. 1,721). These strike me as logical, grounded questions that would be appropriate if this were a traditional establishment proposal. But it’s not.

So why do the questions gain traction? To me, there are two potential answers. First, maybe the highway really is going to happen. Maybe Trump has so decimated establishment norms, upset traditional political processes, and discovered such an unstoppable new wellspring of political power, that he really is the second coming of Joe Parmley. If so, we are right to worry about the implications for environmental quality in Yellowstone, not to mention the entirety of the American establishment.

The second answer: average Americans no longer trust the New York Times, other national media, Congress, most mainstream environmental groups, the Democratic and Republican parties, and the rest of the traditional establishment. My caring, well-informed friends prefer to believe the random social-media influencers who have highlighted the Trump Interstate than they are people who’ve invested in studying history and political science—because the influencers tell them what they already know, that the establishment no longer represents them.

Either answer seems sadly possible to me. But I’m especially curious about the latter scenarui: The Trump Interstate doesn’t get built. Environmental conditions in Yellowstone face no sudden increase in threats. Cornyn, and eventually even Trump, leave office. Where does that leave the establishment?

End notes:

• I quote Yellowstone superintendent Lloyd Brett from a letter to Adolph Miller, July 9, 1913, in the Yellowstone archives (catalog YELL 203479, series 2, box 058).

• For more on Joe Parmley, see the website of the Yellowstone Trail Association, whose co-founders also wrote the book The Yellowstone Trail.

• If you want to spend more time with history and less with politics-of-the-moment, you could start with my Yellowstone history book, Wonderlandscape, which is now out in paperback. (These are affiliate links, but I’m just as happy if you order from your local independent bookstore.)

• As far as I can tell, these rankings fluctuate randomly. Still, maybe we should celebrate?

  

On July 4, 1924, Horace Albright articulated a bold vision of what Yellowstone National Park should mean to America. Few people know about this speech, which indeed Albright himself may not have seen as bold.

The Yellowstone superintendent was speaking in the gateway town of Cody, Wyoming. He often met dignitaries there, gave speeches, and checked up on concessionaires. He’d once spent a dismal night in Buffalo Bill’s Irma Hotel, with a drunken man barging into his room and falling asleep next to him on the bed. He may have hoped that this day would be better by being unremarkable.

But when I read his speech, I found it a key that unlocked Yellowstone history.

Albright was in Cody for the dedication of an oversized statue of the late William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody—one that anchors and identifies the town still today. Albright’s speech lauded Buffalo Bill’s frontier values and the importance of “maintaining here forever at Cody and in Yellowstone Park… the picturesque customs and costumes of a day that is gone.”

My first insight involved Yellowstone’s boundaries, or lack thereof, as illustrated by the phrase at Cody and in Yellowstone. Albright knew that tourists would lump the park in with a greater region. They were making a grand trip through the West, looking for the “picturesque.” In 1924, Albright didn’t need people to see Yellowstone as sublime, as wilderness, as an ecosystem. Just picturesque.

Furthermore, Albright embraced the romance of the frontier’s “customs and costumes.” In fact he added that the frontier, the “spirit of the pioneers,” would make America “the moral leader of the World.” And that spirit would be found—in both Cody and America’s preeminent national park—through events like this one. “Let us hold every year celebrations that will be so colorful and picturesque as to keep up our own interest in this conservation of the spirit of the Old West,” he concluded.

Thus my second insight was that the meaning of Yellowstone has changed in the past 102 years. Today, it’s less overlaid with frontier—cowboy lariats, homesteading heroes, panning for gold. After all, none of those activities took place inside the literal boundaries of the national park. But the 1920s were full of nostalgia for these recently-departed traditions—and Albright took advantage. He knew Yellowstone’s meaning was malleable.

The insight struck me hard because I had already written about this Fourth of July celebration, in my biography of Caroline Lockhart, The Cowboy Girl. Lockhart and Albright shared a mindset: “picturesque” was one of her favorite words, too. It was one of her favorite aspects of living in Cody—greater Yellowstone, the West—with its frontier values.

I was amazed that Albright claimed to share those values. The superintendent of Yellowstone, in front of thousands of people and newsreel filmmakers, cited not geysers nor wildlife nor scenery as his park’s chief attraction, but the rugged frontier. Granted, having always been held back from development, Yellowstone had always been, in some sense, a remnant of an enduring frontier. But Albright was morphing the meaning of Yellowstone’s frontier to match a Lockhart-style nostalgia.

It feels wrong, today. Most Americans seek conservation for wildlife or wilderness, not frontier. The “spirit of the Old West” may be a romantic ideal, maybe even a commercially alluring one—but not in need of government subsidy. The spirit of the Old West was a spirit of consumptive development. Yellowstone’s mission, we believe today, was to be set aside from it.

Seeing this tension—seeing Albright solve it in ways different from today—was my third insight. I got so excited, I immediately started writing this episode as the first chapter of my long-contemplated history of Yellowstone (which eventually became Wonderlandscape). When a park leader like Albright embraced frontier spirit, he was changing the meaning of the national park to match the commercially lucrative vision of one of its gateway communities.

I later found better places to start the book. But I retain an incredible fondness for Albright’s Fourth of July speech because it crystallized the bigger insight I’d been groping toward. The meaning of Yellowstone was malleable. As a place, the park consists of barely-changing geysers and wildlife and mountains and river-headwaters. But the social meaning of that place changes rapidly. That’s what makes its history so interesting.

On the Fourth of July—today as in 1924—we’re obsessed with social meanings. We pack real-life rituals (parades, hot dogs, fireworks) with abstract national values (democracy, equality, freedom). But we too rarely talk about how that process works identically with landscapes. In Cody in 1924, Albright promoted his park by packing its social meaning with the abstract values most lauded in his neighborhood.

End notes:

• I first read Albright’s speech as quoted by Liza Nicholas in Becoming Western, p. 61.

• My chronicle of the speech ended up in Chapter 4 of Wonderlandscape (now out in paperback, with a new afterword!). But the bigger insight of this episode became the bigger insight of the book: Yellowstone is not only an everlasting natural wonder, but also an ever-changing cultural icon.

• Happy Fourth of July to all who celebrate!

The first thing I noticed about the Custer Battlefield Hiway was the spelling. Did they really have to be so overly cute about how to spell highway? Then I reflected: when the Hiway was born in 1919, highway didn’t necessarily mean what it does now. The idea of a fast road for automobiles was new; words to describe it could be too.

The second thing I noticed was that large stretches of the Hiway were nowhere near the Custer Battlefield. The road extended from Des Moines, Iowa, to the Canadian border near Glacier National Park. At the time I was immersed in a history of named roads, and I found lots of roads named for some famous feature distantly on the way. For example, the Yellowstone Trail ran from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound. So I reflected that maybe this Hiway was using best available practices.

The third thing I noticed was the cultural context, this forgotten period from about 1912 to 1926 when people wanted to drive on long-distance vacations but had no route-system to guide them. Entrepreneurs thus created named roads. They printed maps. They paid for the maps with subsidies or advertising from towns along the way, and pocketed whatever profit was left over. The era ended when the federal government agreed to fund roads but also insisted on owning the comprehensive numbering system.

Only later did I notice that 1926, when the Hiway was probably at the peak of its power, was a significant date for the place then called Custer Battlefield.

This week marks the 150^th anniversary of the battle of the Greasy Grass, also known as the Little Bighorn, at which General George Custer was killed. It is one of the most over-interpreted conflicts in our nation’s history, and I can think of little new to say about the events themselves.

So in the current issue of Big Sky Journal, I look at how those events were remembered 50 years later. The anniversary was perceived as an opportunity to bury some hatchets. Was the opportunity fulfilled? Well, the article explains…

In writing the article, however, I came across one of the reasons that white people were so eager to reconceive the story of what was then called the Custer Battlefield: economic development. Montana had not yet turned into the land of milk and honey that people like Custer had expected; indeed it was mired in drought and depression. But what if tourism could help?

In many ways, the “Old West” was invented by tourism promoters in the 1920s. Romantic images of explorers, cowboys, and Indian fighters were flooding the nation from newly-invented movies. Demand surged to be able to live out those fantasies.

But not literally. Tourists didn’t want to be killed—thus the value of showing that both sides in the Little Bighorn battle had reconciled. Furthermore, tourists didn’t want the inconveniences of traditional rail and horseback travel. They wanted to drive their cars.

It had originally struck me as odd that the Custer Battlefield Hiway organizers would name their road after a place where lots of people died. Granted that this was a well-known tourist attraction, wasn’t it too depressing to anchor a cross-country trip?

Research for my article suggested that the organizers of the 50^th anniversary—regardless of their success—had been well-meaning folks with a high-minded objective. They perceived their function as healing. The same could be said of the Hiway organizers: tourists wanted to make a pilgrimage to the battlefield, so let’s help them get there.

Why did tourists want to go to the battlefield or commemorate the anniversary? I think they knew it was a tragic place (for warriors on all sides). I think the tourists wanted to educate themselves, better understand their history, use that knowledge to live more complete lives.

They may not have all succeeded. They may not have grasped essential questions, such as: Whose history? Told by whom? These are, I believe, the very questions we’re struggling with in today’s America250 debates. It can feel tedious and even tawdry, but engaging with the questions is always better than not.

In that way we resemble those Montana tourists of 100 years ago. They—and the commercialized infrastructure projects that carried them—were trying to drive toward historical understanding and reconciliation. That drive has value, even when unfulfilled. And it gives a certain nobility to any road that carries pilgrims, regardless of how its name is spelled.

End notes:

• Ten years ago an old friend brought his teenaged boys for a visit to Montana. We discussed what to do—hiking, fishing, etc.—and they decided they wanted to visit the Little Bighorn battlefield. “Very powerful experience,” he later wrote. A good portion of our drive there was on the route that used to be called the Custer Battlefield Hiway.

• If you are in Red Lodge, Montana, on Friday (6/26), please stop by Beartooth Books between 4pm and 6pm for a book release party for the paperback of Wonderlandscape!