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!

John Clayton: Welcome, readers, to something a little different: and have both recently published books about the history of Yellowstone National Park, and the books are similar-but-different. So we decided to have a conversation about it, and share that conversation in each of our email-newsletters simultaneously. Let me start, Will, by asking you: What made you want to write this book?

Will De Man: In my day job, I’m a middle school history teacher. I love my job, but a majority of what a teacher does in a day has less to do with the content you’re delivering and more to do with the humans you’re developing. You’re managing their schedules and absences, catching up some students, giving extensions to others. Setting classroom policies. The history content I teach has to be tortured and reshaped into something that a twelve-year-old with minimal life experience and world context can make meaning out of.

This is really fulfilling work, but it’s not the discipline of history—which I love just as much as teaching in the classroom. Writing a book is a way for me to practice the art and science of what I’m hoping my students are learning to love. I like to think of myself as a grounding example of a historian. My students think of historians as old, dusty library- and museum-type people. As a goofy 20-something teacher, I provide a contrast to the stereotype that I hope encourages them to pursue their interests in the topics I teach.

John, your background is in journalism. I definitely see that play out in the way you’re able to find a unique frame for a topic, and also in the rigor of your research and precision of language. I first discovered your writing through your book Natural Rivals. Did it feel like a natural leap to move from journalism to book-length history writing?

John: In high school, I did sports journalism because it combined my passions for writing and basketball. In college, I started doing more news and features because I was curious why things were the way they were. In class, we tried to answer that question through economics or policy or psychology. At the paper, we just asked people to tell their stories and wrote down those (fact-checked) answers. As I wrote those stories, I came to see the power of – in today’s trendy word – “narratives.”

I wrote Natural Rivals because I wanted a narrative to answer the question, “Where did public lands come from?” I wrote Wonderlandscape because I wanted a narrative to answer the question, “Why is Yellowstone famous?” I enjoyed the questions because they seem simple, we think we know the answers, but the stories behind them have the power to surprise.

Your questions were more about the idea of national parks, yes?

Will: My book projects actually started very similar to the question that spurred you to write Natural Rivals. I remember standing in Fruita at Capitol Reef National Park. I thought to myself, “Who was it that first saw this place and thought to themselves ‘every American has to see this!’” It turns out that the answer wasn’t that far away—my wife and I later hiked to the Hickman Bridge, named after one of the Utah state politicians who led the charge to protect the Waterpocket Fold. They originally wanted to call it the “Wayne Wonderland,” which is such a charming and silly name to me.

In all the work I do as a storyteller of the past—whether it be in writing or in the classroom—I think I’m always trying to communicate that history isn’t actually just a series of events and actions. It’s all about internal motivations and beliefs. My original research question began as “who” and has certainly transformed more into a “why did someone see this place and want it to be protected?” I think the answer to that question is fascinating, which is why I’ve focused my research on the origin stories of national parks.

John: I love Capitol Reef! My cousin used to be a ranger there, and many years ago when I was writing a guidebook for National Geographic, he gave me like a three-day tour—which I had to distill to like a single paragraph in the book.

Can we talk about communication formats? I’m in awe of your social-media skills. You have large, well-deserved followings on Substack, Instagram, Threads, and probably elsewhere too. Yet you’re committed to books. I can’t believe that books are the best way to monetize that audience—so can you talk about what books mean to you?

Will: Social media is fun, but it essentially functions in the opposite of history as a discipline. Social media is about quick hits. History is a slow burn. Social media rewards rage-bait. History requires nuance. Writing books is certainly not a lucrative way to monetize an audience, but I view it as an extension of my teaching profession. I’m trying to pique the interest of my audience by being informative and accurate on social media, with the hope that they’ll want to learn more.

As you note, I’m pretty committed to longform writing. As a result, I feel like I’m coming up with new book ideas constantly—which is a little silly when I’m still in the early stages of trying to sell my most recent book. Is that something you can relate to?

John: Oh, totally! I’ve already submitted a draft manuscript for my next book, but it won’t be out until 2027 so I really shouldn’t talk about it now. And although I should be helping my publisher sell Wonderlandscape to readers, I keep getting distracted by thinking about how to sell the next project to the next publisher.

When it comes to selling a book to readers, I think it really helps to start in the present. Whenever we talk about history, we’re trying to explain a present moment. I tend to think about present culture, like the “Yellowstone” TV show. And you’re really good about present politics, including the dispossession of Indigenous lands. That focus leads me to a question: How do you define success for your book?

Will: For me, success is found in the opportunity to open or complicate someone’s perspective through education. Since you mentioned the dispossession of Indigenous Americans (which is a focus of Creating the National Parks), I’ll use that as an example. “America is stolen land” is a pretty ubiquitous phrase these days, and when checked against what I understand to be true of American history, I’ve always agreed. However, it wasn’t until I started digging into the history in the book that I really started to understand the depth of truth behind that concept. “Stolen” isn’t just a buzz-word; it’s a literal, accurate description of what took place. Though I agreed with the concept, I didn’t fully understand the truth of it until I dug more deeply into the past.

One of my hopes for Creating the National Parks is that it will give people the opportunity to gain a similar understanding. Historical discourse–especially on social media—is fairly shallow and sensational. For me, success means providing a resource via books that can hopefully bring both nuance and complexity to how people understand the history of our national parks. In the classroom, I’m always pushing my students for more depth and detail in how they understand the past. That’s my goal in writing about national park history as well.

Of course, writing is a side-gig for me, so the stakes aren’t quite as high. What does success look like for you, as a full-time professional writer?

John: There’s a money component: I need to make enough to pay the mortgage and buy a microbrew on Friday night. There’s also a quality component: I want to write a really good book. And call me a capitalist, but I find some correlation between the two: If the book is good enough, people will pay for it.

Yet more deeply for me, success—fulfillment—is in process. I love the process of compiling words into sentences, and sentences into stories. So one form of a book’s success is when it puts me in the financial or reputational position to write another one. Another form of a book’s success is the hours/days/years I spend lost and fulfilled in the process of creating it.

Thanks for joining me in this conversation! How should we end it?

Will: This has been super-fun, thanks! Maybe we end with: “Read books. Learn history. It’s fun”?

John: Perfect!

John Clayton’s book Wonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the Evolution of an American Cultural Icon has just been reissued in paperback with a new afterword. You can read more of his stuff at the Substack Natural Stories. Will De Man’s latest book is Creating the National Parks: Yellowstone, Glacier, and Grand Teton.You can read more of his stuff at the Substack National Park History.

Before the busload of tourists arrives: it’s a cool, wet May day at Artist Point above the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. You gaze up the canyon at the waterfall. Backed by lodgepole-pine forests and distant peaks, the golden yellow of the rock canyon is streaked by reds, greens, browns and grays, as if the scene was determined to use every color in an artist’s palette. The scene’s composition takes your breath away. Soon your other senses wake up: a steady roar from the distant cascade, birds chirping, rain from the just-passed shower dripping off the trees, a wet pine-needly fresh smell—pure nature.

After the busload of tourists arrives: it’s something else.

If you watch the tourists soak in Artist Point, you realize that for all of its reputation as a place of nature, Yellowstone is in fact a place of culture, a manmade experience. Tourists flock, gather, rearrange themselves, and point. They swarm in small groups. A naturalist might observe that these extraordinary creatures, these “humans,” seem excited not just to experience Yellowstone but to share that experience.

If you’ve complained about crowds at Artist Point, you were probably referring to groups other than your own. You didn’t come here seeking genuine solitude. You brought along loved ones, parents, children, old friends, or people you just met on the bus. You exclaim at each other. You take turns standing in front of the best panoramas—looking not at the scenery but at the camera, and by extension at the world back home. You experience Yellowstone as part of a family unit, part of a community, part of a culture.

One day when I spent an hour alone at Artist Point, watching busloads of tourists wash over it like ocean waves, I saw that their buzzing, movable hives were full of human connections. And, thus, that their experiences of nature were shaped by culture.

When people articulate their reactions to special places, they tend to remember the comments of a tour guide or the impact of a Ken Burns documentary. They double-check the guidebook to make sure they are experiencing the proper emotions. If they’re of a literary bent, they might paraphrase Henry David Thoreau or Edward Abbey. If of a religious or spiritual bent, they might ponder the Bible or the Buddha. In any form, they’re responding to culture, not nature itself.

Take, for example, Artist Point. It’s named not for its inherent artistry, but because of its relationship to a specific piece of art, Thomas Moran’s 1872 The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone. You go to Artist Point to experience the views and emotions Moran did, to reinforce your relationship with Moran’s art. You learn that he created this painting while Congress was setting aside Yellowstone as the world’s first national park. You see how he captured the hope and promise of that era’s American dream.

In the hour I spent at Artist Point, I often felt uncomfortable, because I’d flipped the script. I wasn’t watching the sites; I was watching the tourists watch the sites. I wasn’t reaching for the cultural associations; I was watching others do so. I was noticing that others failed to accomplish solitude; in so doing I failed to accomplish solitude myself. Forgetting that I too was influenced by culture, I worried that I’d broken some sort of contract. I’d exposed something rarely discussed.

The history of Yellowstone often gets told as a history of wildlife populations (bison nearly went extinct and then recovered; wolves were exterminated and then reintroduced) or a history of politics and bureaucracy (the park was set aside in 1872, protected from poachers in 1894, brought into the Park Service in 1916). It can be told geologically (how the features were formed) or technologically (how it was impacted by the horse, the automobile, the selfie-stick, or artificial intelligence).

But in my hour at Artist Point, I saw the history of Yellowstone that matters. How do visitors experience the place? What do they think it means? How has that changed over time? The visitor experiences shape laws, policies, art, architecture, photography, literature, journalism, guidebooks, and children’s cartoons. They shape Yellowstone history.

That hour I spent watching the tourists sometimes felt interminable, as new groups of people went through the same old reactions. But it ended up making Artist Point my favorite spot in Yellowstone. I’d spent the hour standing in surf: here comes a wave temporarily transforming everything I can see, smell, and touch, indeed the very footing underneath me; now here comes the undertow of solitude. Now a bigger wave, now a smaller one. Now a wave from a slightly different direction, bringing Chinese or Germans or Brits and all their different sounds and backgrounds. Now a moment of near-silence.

The place didn’t change: the cliffs, colors, waterfall, sky. But culture changed its meaning.

End notes:

• This is why I wrote Wonderlandscape. As it’s reissued in paperback today, I wanted to offer an expanded version of a scene from the prologue.

• If you miss today’s in-person event in Billings, we’ll have another in Red Lodge on June 26.

When my editor announced that she wanted to reissue my book Wonderlandscape in paperback, I was pleased. When she asked me to write a new afterword, I was thrilled. But then came the moment of doubt.

Not every book gets a paperback edition—here was a signal that this title had legs. Furthermore, the new edition was coming nine years after the original, meaning that an afterword could usefully track its progress in the world.

But how the hell do you write one? I’d never done this before.

My best resource was Carlos Lozada’s 2015 Washington Post essay “The most self-serving words in publishing: ‘New Afterword by the Author’.” (That’s a subscriber-only link; the article was reprinted as “New afterwords: Self-indulgence, now available in paperback.”)

Lozada, who was then a Post nonfiction book critic, wrote that “The new afterword is the taxi-cab air freshener of book publishing. Seeking to make works feel current, these new sections often come across as generic, predictable and self-serving.”

He found that the worst Afterwords were exercises in author vanity. As I’ve recently experienced, an author’s ego is a fragile and dangerous thing—it can take work to recognize and set aside. But that work is important, Lozada showed. If I tried to use the Afterword simply to say that I was right and all my critics were wrong, or that the response was overwhelming, the Afterword would be an embarrassing failure.

By contrast, Lozada argued, “The best additions to books are the ones that do less gazing at navels and more reporting of new, relevant material.” Yet that can be hard to do in the standard 9-to-15 month interval between hardcover and paperback. “It takes time for authors to develop the distance needed to reevaluate their ideas.”

Over the past nine years, my ego has often chafed at the bit. When can we go to paperback? When can we access those new audience segments, the people who don’t want to carry around a heavy hardcover or pay the extra money for it? (No judgment, I’m often one of those people myself.) When can we validate that this title has legs?

Yet after reading Lozada’s essay, I realized that the nine years have been a blessing. Because there’s new material to report on. The pandemic. Yellowstone’s highest visitation numbers ever. And the top scripted series on television, a phenomenon that arguably changes the meaning of the word “Yellowstone.”

The Kevin Costner show premiered nine months after the publication of Wonderlandscape. I remember watching the first episode, curious. I remember finding it full of dislikable characters, absurdities, and pointless melodrama—thinking it would never last. I remember feeling obliged to check back in years later, and being most troubled by its fake geography.

But what does the show mean for popular understanding of Yellowstone National Park? That understanding was what I had written about in Wonderlandscape, and its evolution proved a fruitful topic for the afterword. The book had proposed a new framework, or theory, for thinking about Yellowstone history. How did the new data of this TV show fit that theory?

An afterword matters not when it validates the author, but when it validates or disproves ideas. A history book is often about the current day as much as the historical events it chronicles; the afterword can show its ideas evolving.

I’ve always believed that my sense of fulfillment as a writer has come from being driven by process more than ego. I love to assemble words into sentences and sentences into stories. Lozada’s essay helped me see that this process orientation should apply to the afterword as much as any other piece of writing.

The moment of doubt had come because of an instinctual resistance to taking a victory lap. And now, I saw, that didn’t have to be the point.

Sure, maybe the book I wrote was right. But maybe its critics were too. The challenge I faced in writing the afterword was not to tally those scores but to help readers appreciate the book’s argument in the face of new developments. In other words, most importantly, my first-ever afterword was a new opportunity to tell a natural story.

End notes:

• The publication date for the paperback is June 9. I approve of the decision to keep a ‘With New Afterword by the Author’ sticker off the cover.

• If you’re in the neighborhood, please join me to celebrate Publication Day with a 6pm party June 9 at This House of Books in Billings, Montana. Here’s the Facebook event (sorry, no livestream), and here’s the bookstore event page where you can also place an order.

The first time I approached the Bighorn Canyon Visitor Center in Lovell, Wyoming, I was puzzled by how far away it was from the natural wonders it celebrated. But as I reflect this year, I’m impressed at how central it is to today’s politics—and the compelling resilience of the National Park Service as an institution.

In sunny Wyoming, the solar-power picture today is about as stormy as it is in other states. Federal funding is both a stop and a go. On one prominent project, “We’re not moving backward, but we’re also not moving forward.” Planners are pleased, lawmakers cautious, utilities skeptical. Meanwhile, an oft-forgotten but weirdly compelling solar structure is celebrating its 50^th birthday.

Bighorn Canyon itself is an awesome limestone chasm in a forbidding desert. Straddling the Montana-Wyoming border, it’s a long way from anywhere. In 1966, construction of Yellowtail Dam created a 70-mile-long lake through the canyon bottom, a potential powerboat paradise compared to Lake Powell and Flaming Gorge.

As I’ve written before, over the past 110 years the National Park Service has continually adjusted to societal priorities of the time. Thus in the 1960s it created National Recreation Areas focused on powerboating and other forms of recreation, often in newly-dammed reservoirs. One such “park” was Bighorn Canyon.

The steep canyon walls make the park hard to get around in, and often hard to photograph from the accessible sites on its rim. But when you approach the area properly, it yields profound scenery and fascinating cultural and natural history—including a herd of wild horses and the homestead of the legendary Caroline Lockhart.

However, this visitor center isn’t very close to any of that. Instead it’s on the outskirts of Lovell, Wyoming, a town of 2200 people with a 19% poverty rate. At the opposite end of downtown from the sugar beet processing facility, the visitor center occupies a prominent intersection that might otherwise boast a gas station. It symbolizes Lovell as an (aspiring) tourist community.

The visitor center occupies a lovely campus, with green grasses and tall (for Wyoming) trees shading a well-landscaped parking lot. An paved path invites you to the north side of a low, functional building. It symbolizes Lovell as an (aspiring) oasis.

It also symbolizes Lovell as modernist. The 1975 building shows the influence of Mission 66, the Park Service’s midcentury infrastructure-building program that embraced modernist architecture for park hotels and visitor centers. Indeed, Mission 66 invented the very idea of the visitor center—and encouraged its architectural design to be smart, creative, and functional.

The Bighorn Canyon building and campus were designed by Ted Wirth (1927-2009). He lived in Billings, Montana, the nearest city of any size. He was also the son of Conrad Wirth (1899-1993), the longest-serving director of the National Park Service, and the only one formally trained in landscape architecture. During his tenure, Conrad created Mission 66. It’s quite a family: Conrad’s father, Theodore Wirth (1863-1949), had designed and built the world-class park system in the city of Minneapolis.

With its modernist philosophy, Mission 66 sought to segregate uses: park (nature) here; visitor center (education, administration, parking) there. Most visitors to the southern end of Bighorn Canyon are coming through Lovell, and most employees live in Lovell, so the park can contribute to Lovell’s economic development by locating its visitor center in town instead of on the canyon rim.

In 1976, one big proponent of such views was Cal Taggart, a Lovell insurance executive (in partnership with his twin brother Hal), booster, former mayor, and state senator. In 2006, the visitor center was re-dedicated in his memory. Taggart had endlessly lobbied the Park Service to build the building—and locate it in Lovell—in the first place.

Who was Cal Taggart? He was a conservative Mormon Republican businessman whose one public “vice” was driving his yellow Mercedes extremely fast. On his regular 820-mile round trips to the state capitol building in Cheyenne, he collected quite a few speeding tickets. When President Jimmy Carter lowered the national speed limit to 55 mph, Taggart protested by authoring a bill to dramatically lower Wyoming’s speeding fines.

Modeled on a successful Montana law, Taggart’s bill would have fined speeders traveling below 75 mph for being “wasteful of a resource currently in short supply,” rather than for speeding. Thus insurance companies wouldn’t be able to raise anyone’s premiums due to speeding tickets.

Taggart’s bill succeeded in the state Senate, but floundered in the House, in part because a state representative who was also an oil and gas producer noted that the 1979 Iranian revolution would likely force drastic energy conservation measures. Reduced speed limits were a pill, Taggart’s rival claimed, that Wyoming would simply have to swallow.

As the situation developed, Taggart soon had to admit that his bill was dead—“unless they open up their eyes, their damned heads.” He also complained that his rival was out of touch. “Oil and gas people… don’t go anywhere in the damn car. They fly.”

Taggart’s chief political legacy as an anti–speed limit crusader provides some delicious irony: Lovell’s Cal S. Taggart Visitor Center is a solar building, designed in the same energy conservation spirit as the 55-mph speed limit. In a 1976 cutting-edge innovation, the $1.3 million building’s south side featured 2,500 square feet of glass-covered solar panels tilted at a 50 degree angle. Air circulating through the panels transferred heat to seventy-five tons of stones in the basement. It was expected to provide half to two-thirds of the energy needed to heat the building and nearly all of the energy needed to cool it.

It was the first solar-powered visitor center in the entire Park Service, a potential model for other parts and a tourist attraction on its own. The system was designed by the Solaron Corporation, known at the time as “the Cadillac of the solar heating business.”

However, the solar heating system never worked properly, and was eventually disconnected. So maybe Taggart won in the end.

I was attracted to this story because of the parallels today: high energy prices, resistance to green energy, war in Iran, and conflict over the values represented by national parks. We live in tough times, and it can feel infuriating that we are still arguing over solar power, energy conservation, and war in Iran. But 1976 was tough times too—with the exact same arguments—and the nation survived, indeed eventually prospered.

I dug into this story because I was fascinated by the people behind the building, especially Taggart and the Wirths. (Although George Löf of Solaron sounds pretty interesting as well!) The people and their passions—not the technologies—were what led to progress.

I came away from this story with an unexpected appreciation for the resilience of the National Park Service. This institution has continually adapted to multiple constituencies—local boosters, landscape architects, powerboating powerbrokers, and alternative-energy fads. Some of the adaptations have aged better than others. But each involves a terrific story of people, place, and American values.

In 1976, Wirth designed a pond adjacent to the visitor center, intended to reflect the sun’s rays into a solar collector. Today the park is reconfiguring the pond as trout habitat.

End notes:

• I quote Cal Taggart from “As Carter threatens funding loss: Speed limit challenge appears doomed,” Associated Press, Feb. 13, 1979. I learned about the Wirths from Joan Berthiaume, “Theodore J. Wirth: a fine park planner with wise advice for Nov. 3 election,” MinnPost, Nov. 2, 2009. I learned about the architecture from Anthony Denzer, “Bighorn Canyon Visitor Center“, from SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012. A few other source links are sprinkled in the text.

• If you’d like to support stories like this, please consider becoming a paying subscriber and/or purchasing the forthcoming paperback of Wonderlandscape (and leave a review on one of those big sites!)

• If you’re in the area, we’ll be doing a Wonderlandscape launch party at This House of Books in Billings, Montana, on June 9 at 6pm.

About a decade ago, a family member needed to go to Las Vegas and in solidarity, I decided to read the great historian Hal Rothman’s book Neon Metropolis. Though I’d never visited Vegas and had little desire to do so, I loved the book. I realized that I loved a genre: books that trace the culture of a place through time. William Cronon covered Chicago in Nature’s Metropolis; Mike Davis did Los Angeles in City of Quartz. Could I try to write a similar book?

My initial answer: no. I lacked access to a Chicago/LA/Vegas. A small town isn’t big enough for an urban history; the state of Montana is too big—too diverse and diffuse to carry a narrative. Then I realized that I’d mistakenly thought of these books as urban histories when in fact they were place histories… and I lived next to an extraordinary place. There would be much research, outlining, writing, and editing ahead of me, but that insight was in many ways the birth of Wonderlandscape.

A second insight came on a warm summer Friday afternoon. For happy hour, many of my friends and acquaintances were scattered around our small-town brewery’s beer garden. And I wandered from table to table, asking everyone, “Why is Yellowstone famous?”

“Well, duh,…” came the responses. Sometimes the duh wasn’t verbalized but I enjoyed when it was. What a silly question! Everyone knows that the answer is…

The geysers. Or the grizzly bears. The wolves? No, wait: the ecosystem as a whole. The fact that this was the world’s first national park. The frontier. The wilderness scenery. Yogi Bear.

Everyone had an obvious answer that differed from the other obvious answers. And I realized that this diversity itself was perhaps the biggest contributor to Yellowstone’s fame.

A third insight came at a dinner party when I was telling a friend how the explorers on the 1871 Hayden expedition didn’t encounter many animals. When they returned to civilization, the geysers alone drove the set-aside of the national park. Only in the 1890s, as wildlife populations were decimated elsewhere, did Yellowstone come to be famous as a sanctuary. Given Yellowstone’s reputation as a vast unchanging place, my friend was shocked at this change in its public reputation.

And I realized that subsequent trends as well—patriotism, spirituality, ecological science, and more—had changed the reputation of this unchanging place. All these factors my brewery-friends had mentioned had taken turns driving Yellowstone’s fame. Suddenly I had not just a perspective or a theory, but a story.

The hardest part of the book for me to write was the epilogue. My editor wanted me to predict the future of Yellowstone. A fourth insight led to whatever success that epilogue achieved: In looking back over my text, I recalled that the Yellowstone history it described reflected the history of larger American society. So, I realized: if you’re asking me what will happen next in Yellowstone, first tell me what will happen next in America.

In a few weeks, Wonderlandscape will be reissued in paperback. What will be the fifth insight to drive the next phase of my relationship with it? Will it be the insight I had when writing the new Afterword? A moment that strikes me when unboxing the new books? An interaction with an interviewer or reader?

Such anticipation—how will this story end? or at least, what happens next?—is one of the great joys of life.

End notes:

• Preorders always help book sales. When you preorder through your local independent bookseller, you not only help the cause of local bookselling, you also serve as a passive member of the book’s marketing team—alerting the store to a title that may also be of interest to others.

• Although the official release date is June 9, physical books may arrive in stores before then. Some stores (including most online outlets) won’t release the book until June 9, but others may let you take it home early. If the issue comes up, you can tell them that premature consummation of the sale is OK by me! 😊

It was several years ago, and this was my invitation to join the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), membership of which is open to anyone over 50. As I noted in an ensuing Facebook discussion, I had zero interest in joining AARP and had never interacted with this large, impersonal organization. So I was a little bit offended that they even knew when my birthday was.

Presumably they had purchased some data and used a primitive algorithm to identify people turning 50. From the reactions to my post, I came to believe that your first invitation from AARP is a common ritual. But due to the hints of impending mortality, most geezers find it too depressing to discuss.

I hoped that sharing on Facebook could increase my human connections. Maybe others saw this the same way I did? Maybe they too were annoyed at being dragged into this national ritual driven by a corporate overlord? (Although of course AARP is a nonprofit, not corporate in the sense of “capitalism.”) Maybe others were also rankled at a status tied to a numeric threshold, because they too aspired to believe that age is just a number?

In coming years, my online birthday experience got worse. On my 2019 birthday, for the first and last time, Facebook showed me a Metamucil ad. I used to make jokes about old people needing Metamucil! Now I was the subject of one.

On my 2020 birthday, I posted this text and picture: “Thanks everyone for the birthday wishes. Special thanks to the Facebook Advertising Algorithm for not giving me a Metamucil ad.”

Granted, “People of Seniors Housing” was a special pandemic campaign to honor the dedication of caregivers at senior living communities… and since my mother entered such a facility a few years later, I’ve come to be a big believer in that cause. But to show me a senior-housing ad for the first and last time on my birthday??? I began to suspect I was interacting with some sort of malign intelligence.

Thus my 2021 birthday post: “There’s always one in every bunch, right? The friend who delights in coming up with creative ways to point out how miserably old you are? You’d like to think he (and it’s almost always a he) is joshing in a kind way, but it always seems a bit mean-spirited? Weirdly, for me that friend is the Facebook Advertising Algorithm. On my birthday two years ago, it served me a Metamucil ad. Last year, an ad for a Senior Living facility. Here’s this year’s ad.

.”

I found it hilarious. I appreciated the constantly-varying material that allowed me to amuse my friends with these jokes. It almost became another reason to look forward to my birthday.

Behind the amusement, of course, were the ads’ failure to mimic genuine human interaction. Here were large, corporate forces (Metamucil, Depends, Facebook) using their hunger for impersonal data to try to shape the way I led my life. What was funny was their ham-handed incompetence at it.

Yet what wasn’t so funny was how I craved this hollow imitation of understanding. In pretending that the Algorithm was an obnoxious friend, I anthropomorphized it. In refusing to deny Facebook knowledge of when my birthday was (because I was hungry for the interaction from the accounts that represented my real-life friends), I fed this charade. In telling jokes, I failed to dismiss the Algorithm as a set of software programs at large, well-capitalized organizations seeking to make money off me.

In short, my hunger for human connection was so great that I was willing to personify this “intelligence.”

I don’t want to suggest that the trend took over my life. I often spent my birthday hiking or camping in the desert. Reading books. Sharing dinner with friends. Hiring a dance band for a community-wide party.

But when Facebook-friends posted “Happy birthday” on my timeline, I wanted to accentuate our connection by showing them a slice of my life. By describing the hike or the book or the dance. Or—to increasing laughter—by telling these jokes about how proto-AI was cluelessly trying to tease me about my increasing proximity to death.

Until 2023. That year, I posted, “As you may recall, for many [birthdays] in a row [the Algorithm] uniquely served me ads for age-related products such as Metamucil or Depends. But this year I’m getting the same ads as always, the ones for brassieres to fit small-breasted women. Exciting progress from our AI overlords!”

This year, my birthday coincided with our town’s weekly pickup basketball game. As an Original Gangsta of the group, I am often among the last to cross the halfcourt line on offense. As I was walking up on one particular play, I saw my friend Ben holding the ball on the left wing, waiting for something to develop.

My defender was walking to my right, and I saw a lane in front of me; if I sprinted, I might have an easy path to a layup. I sprinted. Ben saw me. He whipped a pass to the perfect spot for me to catch it under the basket.

In that moment, it didn’t matter that Ben’s age is about 30 less than mine, because age is just a number. Among the other things that didn’t matter: whether either of us was wearing Depends. Or had any other ties to any other corporate overlords. Or our ethnic backgrounds, political beliefs, taste in movies, or anything else that could be quantified in data and sold back to us as identity.

The victory—the birthday present of joy—wasn’t just that the ball went through the basket. It was that Ben and I had seen the world developing in the same way—had similarly processed where everyone was positioned and which actions might lead to the highest-percentage opportunity—and used that shared intelligence to achieve a shared goal.

That collaboration gave me a sense of deep human connection with Ben. Made a quickly-forgotten play in a meaningless basketball game among nobodies feel like a natural story. Like the best birthday greeting ever.

End notes:

• For those in the geographic neighborhood, save the date of June 26, when I’ll be bringing my homemade hummus to a signing at Beartooth Books in Red Lodge, MT.

• You can preorder the paperback of Wonderlandscape by calling Beartooth Books or via Bookshop.org. For that matter, you can preorder it anywhere but these are the links I’ll provide.

In 2005, the Wyoming legislature considered declaring the jackalope the state’s official mythical creature. A ferocious jackrabbit with horns, the jackalope was first physically portrayed by taxidermist Douglas Herrick in 1939 and now adorns gift shops and tacky postcards all over the state. An eight-foot jackalope statue greets entrants to the Wyoming State Fair, and Wyomingites love to tell stories of tourists who think the animals actually exist.

A proclamation, if passed by the legislature, would have made it official. Wyoming would have been the first state to have an official mythical anything. Though the measure died in committee, it’s just the sort of frivolous exercise I can see legislators around the West getting behind.

For example, any number of states could name an official mythical hero, the cowboy. But in an age where most cattle tenders use pickup trucks and four-wheelers, we could also name an official mythical mode of transportation, the horse.

Here in Montana, some economists are always trying to point out that our economy no longer depends on logging and mining, and so we should stop giving those industries such huge hand-outs. But if we declared them Montana’s official mythical economy, we could demonstrate the irrelevance of the economists’ arguments.

Arizona could find an official mythical irrigation source. Colorado could issue paeans to the official mythical native Coloradoan. Idaho could declare the Democrats their official mythical political party. In South Dakota, Sturgis could name the biker both its official mythical villain and its official mythical savior.

As drought continues, numerous states could identify official mythical streams and lakes. They would be filled with official mythical fish, which would be caught by people engaged in an official mythical pastime and discussed with an official mythical attitude toward the truth.

As global warming (er, “climate change”) continues, we could have an official mythical season (winter), featuring an official mythical form of precipitation (snow) and an official mythical rationalization (”but at least it’s not a humid cold”).

If we named a few official mythical endangered species, then the protracted legal battles over them -- which seem to have little bearing on reality anyway -- could continue ad infinitum. Though we might want them to play out in front of mythical judges.

We could even create an official mythical World Series for the Rockies to win, in lieu of winning the real one.

Once we identified the ranch as our official mythical home, we could feel free to move to the city where the salaries are so much better. Once we identified rugged independence and libertarianism as our official mythical philosophies, we could beg for huge government subsidies without hypocrisy.

Needless to say, I’ve always been skeptical of such “official” declarations. I can never remember whether the Ponderosa or the cottonwood is Montana’s official tree -- and furthermore, I’m quite sure it’s not going to affect my life. A plethora of more complex legislators’ tasks, such as setting budgets and taxes, have far more impact.

Furthermore, isn’t officialness the exact opposite of myth? By their very definition, myths are stories told informally [see comments] because their explanatory power goes beyond literal truth. Indeed the jackalope had been around for years as a campfire story before Douglas Herrick made it “real.” How could a campfire story be improved by the government insisting we believe it?

On the other hand, as I cast about for these smart-alecky examples of myths to officialize, I realized I’d missed the purpose of not only official myths, but official anythings. They draw us together. They emphasize the commonality of experience within a state. Whether it’s a ponderosa or cottonwood (actually, I just looked it up: it’s the ponderosa), the state tree reminds me of something special about Montana, what it means to be a Montanan. Not very important, maybe, but neither are pennies until you collect enough of them.

Though I grew up in Massachusetts, home to great symbolic stories about Pilgrims and the Revolutionary War, I never felt close to those myths, the way I feel close to stuff out west. You can go almost anywhere in Plymouth, Mass., without thinking about its rock -- but you drive across Wyoming and you think about jackalopes.

The West is full of such symbols, from cowboy gear to backpacker gear, hardpanners to gold-panners, wild animals to imaginary animals. I think it’s because nature is still so powerful here, with mountains and deserts always surrounding us, such that the stories explaining our place in it all carry much more weight. And maybe, in the end, that’s not such a frivolous issue for a legislature to discuss.

End notes:

• A version of this essay was previously published by the High Country News Writers on the Range syndicate in 2005. The bill was reintroduced, and again died in committee, in 2013 and 2015.

• I am both proud of and troubled by the fact that the only change I needed to make 21 years later was to insert “In 2005” at the beginning.

On Saturday night, another email arrived extolling my book. “The question you opened with in Wonderlandscape is deceptively simple. Why is Yellowstone famous?... That is a genuinely original framing.” The reader spelled out why she loved both the question and how I’d answered it, concluding that with Yellowstone, I’d “taken a place everyone thinks they understand and shown them that what they understood was the projection, not the place.”

I felt flattered, of course. This person had grasped my ambitions, and told me that my writerly talents had achieved those ambitions. The book’s structure “does two things simultaneously: it gives the reader a sequence of genuinely fascinating individual narratives, and it builds, chapter by chapter, toward an argument about the relationship between a culture and its most significant landscape that the reader does not realize they are receiving until they have already received it,” she wrote. “That is craft. It is not common.”

It’s not the only unsolicited rave I’ve received recently. “Somewhere between geysers erupting and Roosevelt flexing his wilderness masculinity, your book quietly convinced me that Yellowstone is not just a place… it’s a personality with a long memory and strong opinions,” another reader wrote earlier this month. “Wonderlandscape doesn’t read like standard nonfiction. It feels more like watching America argue with itself through landscapes, wildlife, and the people who tried to define both.”

My correspondents supported their arguments for my brilliance with terrific detail. They cited specific chapters, summarized reviews, and contextualized blurbs. The resulting conclusions were so laudatory that the writers might have been channeling my mother. One quoted what she’d posted to Goodreads: “Clayton writes with the authority of a historian and the grace of a literary journalist. The prose is clean, the pacing expert, and the research evident without being obtrusive.”

What could account for this sudden increase in incredibly perceptive readers?

The answer, of course, is artificial intelligence (AI). In each of these emails, after hundreds of words commending my talent, the correspondent tries to subtly build resentment against my publisher for the way it handled my book. She (always a ‘she’) usually then identifies “gaps” in market strategies and unfulfilled “paths” to eager readers. If I will just respond, she will show me how to convert them.

In other words, this is spam. Even in the unlikely event that it’s not a full-on scam, it would be at best an inexperienced marketing consultant charging a gullible author a lot of money for an ineffective Google Ad campaign. My correspondent is always writing from a Gmail address, never an established publicity firm. She never cites any work she’s done for other authors. She never discusses ROAS, ROMI, or any other business metrics. I’m supposed to hire her simply because she understands and loves my book.

It’s a powerful approach. The second-person intimacy combined with the level of detail make me unbelievably tempted to respond. The scammer seems to have particular insight into a writer’s psychology: rather than a typical con targeting a mark’s greed for money, she’s targeting my greed to be understood. What a delight it would be to work with someone who truly gets me and my work, who’s truly on board with the mission, who sees (maybe even better than I do!) how I deserve greater success than I’ve achieved.

Except, of course, that it’s all a lie. Would all these correspondents really put this much effort into a cold approach? No: it’s just AI. All the actual information in these emails—the reviews, the blurbs, the book summaries, the sample chapter material—is available on the Web. (Indeed, most of it’s on my own website.) She has merely asked an AI to remix it with the flattery turned up to 11.

Still, I found myself continually rereading the emails. At first it just felt good to have my ambitions reflected back to me as if I’d achieved them. Later, I started noticing what was missing.

The humanity. The creativity. The relationships.

I wrote Wonderlandscape after decades of living near Yellowstone and entertaining family and friends who were dead-set on visiting the national park. I started asking them why. What made Yellowstone important to them? As I tracked their varied responses (grizzlies, geysers, wolves, an ecosystem, the world’s first national park, Yogi Bear…), I realized that this was a historical tale.

It’s a tale that hadn’t been told before, as one of the scammers pointed out. But where did it come from? An AI has to assume that it came from consuming all the Yellowstone content on the Internet and remixing it. But to me it came from being human. Having family and friends. Being curious about their lives and goals. And then thinking about how to tell a story that met their needs while affirming their humanity.

On June 9, Pegasus will reissue Wonderlandscape in paperback. As I pondered how to promote it, I wondered how could I incorporate the emails’ compliments into my own promotional strategy. Then I realized: that would be trying to imitate an AI at a task it can do better than me.

Furthermore, I have already completed that task. Back when I first built the website for the hardcover release, I’d articulated the ambitions that the AI was now flattering me with. I’d found the emails so effective because the scammers had created “fans” who mirrored my previous promotional strategy.

If Wonderlandscape’s biggest fans are AIs, my goal can’t be to imitate them. Instead I must lead them. I need to show them: I am a human being. On a tactical level, I can do this with author appearances, interactive conversations, and heartfelt essays like this one. But on the level of promotional strategy, I need to lead with my humanity.

So let me take this opportunity to declare: I wrote a book based on my human experience. It contains plenty of personally-researched facts (no hallucinations) set down in a structure that I learned from years of apprenticeship. The book means a lot to me as an expression of creativity. But its greatest potential meaning to me comes through relationships—if people will buy it, identify with it, and maybe even use it to help come to a new appreciation of one of the most wondrous places in the world.

End notes:

• Because Wonderlandscape was among the books pirated to train AI databases, it’s possible that the scammers are using an AI that illegally acquired the text of the entire book to thwart my efforts to convince people to legally acquire that same book. Although I’ve opted into a settlement with Anthropic, other cases, including Apple, are still tied up in court.

• Julian Sancton followed up with some of the scammers—it’s a depressing tale.

I was excited last week to go behind the scenes for a high-stakes editorial board meeting of the Williams [College] Record. As the students debated what stories they would cover, and how, it felt like a reflection of my own life. Even more so for the guest seated next to me—John Stickney, a veteran of The New York Times and Life Magazine—who kept saying, “This is all so familiar!”

I loved how the students were learning by doing: putting out a newspaper to learn journalism. Remarkably, they were doing it with no “adult” oversight. Williams is a small liberal arts college without a journalism major, without even any courses in journalism. The paper has no faculty advisor and gets no administration approval. It’s thus a lot like life.

For example, the students were on their own in solving questions like this: How should they cover an on-campus lecture by Times correspondent Eric Schmitt? “It feels weird because we’re covering ourselves,” said editor-in-chief Ellie Davis. Schmitt’s talk was the keynote in an all-class staff reunion co-organized by the Record. Was it news?

Here’s an ethical dilemma of classical journalism: On the one hand, how dare you report on an event that you yourself created? Isn’t that being a manipulative orchestrator of history, rather than a mere witness to it? On the other hand, if you only ever passively report on news created by others, don’t you risk being manipulated by politically unscrupulous operators? (Isn’t our current national climate evidence of that?)

The editors decided that the lecture was worth covering, with Davis handling it herself. (They didn’t ask my opinion, but I thought this was the right call.) The lecture had been a public event, well attended and widely lauded. Schmitt—himself a Record alum—provided troubling news about how the ongoing collapse of local journalism might stymie the job market for graduating students. And perhaps his biggest theme transcended mere journalism: the value of trust. Schmitt needs to trust his sources, he explained; they need to trust him. Likewise with his readers. Likewise with you or me and anyone we want to collaborate with.

Personally, I found the editorial meeting especially fascinating because I was facing the same debate as I approached this story you are now reading. Was this news? As a Record alum myself, I’d been a co-organizer of the reunion. I was the one who made the formal invitation to Schmitt. I was attending the meeting because later in the agenda we were going to talk about how the paper could take ongoing advantage of the reunion’s energy.

And I have my own publication here on Substack that lacks any adult supervision.

Is this news? I wanted to write about the reunion weekend because it was a terrific event, one that I invested a lot of time in, and one that inspired me to think about the roles of journalism and storytelling in addressing today’s many difficult societal and environmental challenges. That’s what I often write about here.

Substack is always encouraging me to build trust by treating these missives as “letters to a friend.” I knew that in writing such a letter, I would speak to how stimulated I felt by the weekend’s discussions, how much I admired everyone I met there, and the weird sense of affection that arose out of it all.

Yet Substack is, effectively, a challenger to traditional journalism institutions like the Times or the Record. I believe its popularity rests on its innovative approach to solving the trust question. We’re wired to trust people: John Clayton, John Stickney, Ellie Davis, or Eric Schmitt. We’re less wired to trust institutions. When Substack encourages writers to put our selves first, to write letters to friends, it builds trust that institutions can’t match.

But people are shaped by institutions. Schmitt’s admirable values grow from his decades at the Times. My own values come in part from my years at the Record. Let me tell you, friend: I often find myself resisting Substack’s letter-to-a-friend advice because the innovation feels dangerous, a departure from my hard-won lessons in journalistic ethics.

When I graduated from Williams, I chose not to follow Schmitt’s path. Maybe I lacked sufficient trust in institutions like the Times. Or maybe it was more about my approach to storytelling. I have come to believe that good storytelling often requires revealing my personal stake in the story—reporting on myself. I’ve ended up on Substack because its storytelling model fits me better than the Times’. Although adapting to that model is an ongoing process, a natural story.

So here’s my latest experiment in that story: To build trust, I’d like to take you readers behind the scenes in the equivalent of a Natural Stories board meeting. Our first agenda item: how do we tell true stories in an unsupervised age? Platforms, stakes, institutions, storytelling… I’ll admit there are differences between a college newspaper, The New York Times, and a Substack from some guy in Montana—but I find some value in comparing them.

Second, the idea of trust itself. I went into the reunion thinking that journalism’s biggest problem has been the collapse of traditional advertising revenues. Now I think it’s the collapse of trust—which makes it a problem bigger than journalism. Some people have never trusted politicians or corporations, but now hardly anybody even trusts their neighbors. I find some value in writing a weekly Substack that I hope builds trust.

Third, reporting on myself. One of my books will be reissued in paperback on June 9, and I want Natural Stories to cover that as news. I’ll be reporting on an event that I myself created. I’ll be doing so repeatedly, and you may even be tempted to say shamelessly. Yet in my mind it’s not shameless: I hope it will be compelling and fair… transparent about my personal stakes and emotionally satisfying because of that transparency… providing value to my paid subscribers while also promoting a product in which I’m hugely invested. I hope that announcing this up front—both that it’s coming and that I’ve thought about it—will build trust.

My goal is to do it as well as those students. Because the upshot of the story is: John Stickney and I agreed that Ellie’s article on the lecture knocked it out of the park!

End notes:

• Will De Man, the indefatigable creator of the National Parks History Substack, has a new book out that I was fortunate to read in draft. Congrats!

• I have no idea what this graphic means, but it must be a credit to you readers. Thanks!

I started eating at the Crazy Mountain Inn because Jim Harrison had claimed in Esquire that it served “the best chicken-fried steak with cream gravy in the world, a somewhat narrow category, I admit.”

It was thirty years ago this month. I had a four-hour commute each way to my job: a beautiful drive through the hills and plains of central Montana. I did it just once a week, spending four nights at the jobsite. Ambling home on a Friday, I’d detour to a hamlet called Martinsdale to eat dinner at this cafe.

The rustic building dated to 1901, when a new railroad made Martinsdale a bustling center for sheep ranching. Now the trains were gone and the new highway bypass ran two miles north. Downtown was pretty much the Inn, a bar, an abandoned depot, and some nearby houses—a townscape that was typical of Montana in the 1990s. I felt at home.

I’m not a fan of cream gravy so I favored the pork chop or maybe a burger. There was no TV, so I’d sit at the counter and read the police blotters from Harlowton and White Sulphur Springs, a delightful antidote to the urban foolishness of my software job. Holding a newspaper provided a great way to eavesdrop on the room.

I liked the hippie/farmer vibe of the waitress, a young mother. Her husband was the cook and their daughter, maybe four years old, roamed around providing entertainment. On my first few visits, I was disappointed that they seemed to treat me with formality and deference, as if I wasn’t really part of the community. Then one night, taking my order, the mom decided to share with me a funny story. Her daughter, seeing me enter the front door, had run to the back. “Is that the Unabomber?”

Theodore Kaczynski had just been arrested near Lincoln, 150 miles away, and taken to the nearest city of Helena. The news attracted national headlines in a way that Montana stories rarely did. I’d seen the FBI vehicles and TV news trucks parked outside my Helena hotel room. I didn’t pay them much mind. In the city, everything is compartmentalized: they were doing their TV news jobs and I was doing my software job. The Unabomber, with his weird hermit lifestyle and horrific mail-bombs, belonged to TV news rather than real life.

In the café, I could laugh at how everything got telescoped for a four-year-old. She’d seen a story on the TV news about a strange man now in jail in Helena. And into the café walked a stranger from Helena. I knew of course that I wasn’t the Unabomber. I was younger, better looking, more comfortable with technology, less of a hermit, and most importantly not a sociopathic terrorist.

I felt like the waitress was saying: she did too. She was telling the story as a way to welcome me inside a circle. And that was what was most important to me at the time: to feel like a Montanan, trusted, knowledgeable in the local folkways, interested in the lives of everyday folks at a remote café.

Perhaps feeling the good vibes, the four-year-old girl peered out at us from the kitchen. I waved at her. Life was good.

Over the next 30 years, as I built my career as a freelance writer, I kept thinking about the Unabomber. His arrest was the biggest Montana story of the decade (perhaps paired with the Montana Freemen, arrested just a few weeks previously). I pitched magazines to have me write about the 10^th, 20^th, or 25^th anniversary of the arrest.

I wanted to write about how much had changed: the media, terrorism, law enforcement, and nationwide perceptions of Montana. In 1996, it somehow made sense that the way to catch the guy was for the New York Times and Washington Post to publish hardcopies of his 35,000-word manifesto. And it made sense that the guy they caught lived in a dark, uninsulated 10x14 cabin, bicycled daily to the library, and shot rabbits for food. Montana then was for misfits and weirdos—some bad and many good—in a way that it sadly soon ran out of room for.

I never got a magazine to bite on one of these pitches. In April 2026, for the 30^th anniversary, I don’t have to pitch anyone—I can just publish here on Natural Stories. But when I dove into the task, a couple of funny things happened. First, my notes for the previous anniversary articles struck me as bland, predictable, poorly-written cultural analysis, not worth publishing, not a natural story.

Second, when I went looking for the story with significance today, I felt like it wasn’t so much in the courtrooms or the FBI offices or the words of the manifesto or the march of technology. It wasn’t in Helena, where the TV news crews did their jobs. Instead the story was at that café.

I have no doubt that the Crazy Mountain Inn and many of its patrons were struggling financially. The town’s population kept dwindling, it wasn’t on the highway, the nearby Bair Museum was not yet open, and there weren’t a lot of Esquire subscribers nearby. There were few jobs in pre-Internet Montana, and few tourists outside of hunting season.

But there was community: people who toiled in those difficult circumstances, who respected and even liked each other, and who were every day awed by their sublime natural surroundings. In such a setting, it was easy to feel separate from whatever was happening on the TV news.

We had—all of us but the four-year-old—our own lives, communities, sources of fulfillment. We had connections to landscapes and people and quaint old traditions. We were capable of welcoming newcomers into such communities, once they proved that their values were similar enough to ours.

The biggest story of the last 30 years is the loss of that identity. Is that lifestyle gone? Or, worse, is our desire for it gone?

Now that I no longer drive weekly past Martinsdale, I no longer feel a need to enter its café community. Now that I no longer make a living at soulless software jobsites, I no longer so desperately crave their antidote. Now that the Unabomber is dead, no four-year-old will ever again mistake me for him. Now that the news of the day tries to enter my world from so many avenues in addition to TV, I am ever more tempted to tie my identity to it.

But Martinsdale’s mountains and plains endure. For that matter, so do the newspapers in Harlowton and White Sulphur Springs. The café at the Crazy Mountain Inn has new management and vastly reduced hours compared to 30 years ago, but the next time I’m passing through, I’d like to sit at its counter again. If it’s on a day when the news of the world seems particularly troubling, I hope I’ll be wise enough to appreciate the contrast.

End notes:

• Thanks to my paying subscribers, who make these essays possible.

• In 1994, when I was a new writer for Montana Magazine, one of my very first assignments was to profile the Joliet artist Charles Ringer. It led to a friendship. I revisited the article recently; I think you’ll see why I wanted to share it.

It’s the movement that draws you in to Chuck Ringer’s “kinetic” sculptures. The cowboys, vehicles, cross-country skiers, musical instruments, and animals, animals, all sorts of animals -- they all move.

They rock back and forth on their axes. You give them a little push and they keep going, the hypnotic smoothness of a pendulum combined with the captivating curiosity of an out-of-sync windshield wiper.

“You have to actually participate with the work,” Ringer says, “by touching it. And then you get to study it and watch it and try to understand what kind of physics is going on. It’s a real soothing, relaxing thing, looking at the cycles of these pieces. It almost puts you in a trance, and then you can fantasize that you’re entering its work: I’m a cowboy, or whatever.”

Before you know it, Ringer’s gallery, the “Ol’ Wrecking Yard” at the north end of Joliet, has won you over. You’re entranced. It’s only much later, if at all, that you pause: This is art -- maybe I shouldn’t be touching it.

That delayed reaction makes Chuck Ringer happy. “You’re supposed to touch it!” Ringer grins, proceeding to relate with pride how a sign in front of his work at the Buffalo Bill Center in Cody used to read, ‘This is the only piece in the entire museum you can touch.’”

Ringer values the interaction because it brings a sense of playfulness. As his wife Emily says, “You don’t have to be trained in art to come in and say, ‘That makes me feel good.’”

A growing number of people are having that sensation. Ringer’s resume reads like a Who’s Who of galleries, museums, corporate and private collections, including names such as the Smithsonian, the Whitney, the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art, and celebrities from Martina Navratilova to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The notoriety is justified. Ringer’s works are more than mere curiosities. They present a sense of vibrancy, movement, and beauty that extends beyond the fascinating physics of their operation.

In addition to the kinetic works (most of which can sit on a table or bookcase), Ringer has recently branched out into wall pieces, deck pieces, and smaller, anchored versions of some of his kinetic silhouettes. Yet even the non-moving pieces seem to be alive.

Ringer’s greatest artistic gift is to bring an amazing liveliness to everything from “the creature” -- a 18-foot-high humanoid metal structure that makes the studio a regular landmark on the road from Billings to Yellowstone Park -- to the seven-inch-tall “little people” with which he started his career.

“This is what Chuck did in school instead of paying attention to his teachers,” Emily says. “He had a little piece of clay and started making a head. People will ask how long it took to make a piece, and he’ll say 46 years.”

Perhaps Ringer’s most amazing gift is that he does this in such an unusual medium: steel. “It’s unfamiliar to a lot of people,” Ringer says. “When they think of metal sculpture, it would be bronze, molded, made a thousand at a time. But anything to do with steel is really one of a kind, because you have to hand-make every piece.”

Early in his career, Ringer, an incurable collector, used whatever metal he had at hand (which was frequently automobile parts, since the “Ol’ Wrecking Yard” was indeed a junkyard when the Ringers bought it in 1971). The old sheet metal from a car roof would be transformed -- one drop at a time from a welding rod -- into hairs on the head of a seven-inch-tall banjo player.

The methods have modernized. He now uses a plasma torch and even an occasional template to cut silhouettes out of new stainless steel. But he rails against computer cut-outs. “I hand-cut all my stuff,” he says. “I feel it puts the value into the work. All the little bumps are my heartbeats as I lean in on the machine.”

Having spent 18 years on kinetic works, Ringer has a good handle on the figures themselves. “Actually,” he says, “the hardest part of any of these sculptures is the part that isn’t even looked at -- the base.” It has to sit in perfect balance, yet the act of welding warps the metal. Ringer has to compensate in advance, planning for the warp to bring it in balance.

The Ringers have spent all that time on their own, independent, separate from the art establishment. “I’m basically self-educated,” Chuck says. “No training, just learned from my mistakes.” And he is surprised and disheartened that his independence doesn’t count for more in the art world.

“People always want to know where you studied, who you studied with,” he says. “The art world can get very political at times.

“We’re real independent here,” he continues. “Some people see that as a risk or a threat. They say, ‘We want strings attached to this guy, so when we pull, he jumps.’”

And Ringer won’t jump. “We have a lifestyle to protect. That’s the most important thing to us: to raise our kids properly, to enjoy ourselves, to be able to contemplate why we’re flying through the universe on a chunk of rock. You miss all that when you get too involved in watching what the norm is.”

The Ringers have been largely successful in defining and protecting that lifestyle. For example, they’ve educated their three children at home, also involving them in the family art business, from greeting customers to welding (”The family that grinds together binds together,” Emily deadpans).

Ringer has also been able to take the time to create pieces that he realizes won’t sell. One example is “the spaceship,” a sort of welded steel adult playground set-up, complete with lights and a ray-gun. “I like to do things that are non-serious,” Chuck says, “that can’t be stereotyped by any political groups in the art world. They’re just like, ‘Oh! It’s a weird thing!’”

But creating the personal space can have its price. Take the regular hours for the Ol’ Wrecking Yard, for example. There aren’t any. As a general rule, if the big wooden gates in front are open, you can wander on in. But on any given day, they may not be open. The Ringer family may have taken off, en masse, for an art opening or a mountain-man rendezvous.

The family is aware of the toll this has taken. Emily says, “People are finally starting to appreciate that this is something different; you can’t see it at K-Mart. But for years we scared them away.”

And yet in some ways that fits better with the Ringers’ conception of art. “We’d rather have people come in here who are really curious,” Emily says. “They come in and say, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing in here but I just can’t stand it any more; can I have a tour?’ You have their curiosity, their imagination.”

Again, it’s the role of art as something that doesn’t just sit on the wall, but interacts with you, and pushes you to interact with your neighbor. The Ringers carry this to an extreme with their version of an opening.

“We’d have these pot-lucks,” Emily says, “and Chuck would unveil the spaceship, or the Creature, and you’d have all these different people, from local rural people coming down with their hot dish, participating in an art event with urban people from Billings.”

“All these walks of life,” Chuck cuts in, “all wondering what’s going on here. And they were talking to each other... They couldn’t get into the cliquey thing at all -- something’s unveiled and they have to communicate with each other: ‘Whoa! What is this?’”

But after all, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Ringers invite their neighbors the ranchers to their openings, and not only because the art appeals across such a spectrum. It is the neighboring ranchers with whom the Ringers have the most in common: talented, versatile, and fiercely independent.

• Charles Ringer died last month. Montana feels smaller without him.

• Happy April Fools Day! And happy 50th anniversary (in a few months) to Norman Maclean’s classic Montana novella A River Runs Through It. The combination makes me recall one of my favorite literary endeavors.

• In 2001, the Montana Committee for the Humanities inaugurated the Happy Tales Contest, in which you rewrite a classic work of literature with a happier ending. I reimagined the end of the book (not the movie! the book) as follows.

When I finished talking to my father, he asked, “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

Finally, I said, “April Fools!”

He almost reached the door and then turned back for reassurance. “Are you sure that today is April first?” I repeated, “April Fools!”

After that, from time to time my father would have me reaffirm my April Fool’s wit. Like many Scottish ministers before him, he had to derive what comfort he could from the faith that his son had played him for a complete and total idiot.

For some time, though, he struggled for more to hold on to. “Are you sure you have told me everything you know about practical jokes?” he asked. I said, “Everything.” “It’s not much, is it?” “No,” I replied, “but you can fool completely without complete understanding.” “That I have known and preached,” my father said.

Once my father came back with another question. “Do you think I could have helped getting fooled?” Even if I might have thought longer, I would have made the same answer. “Do you think there’s a booger hanging off your nose?”

After a long time, without falling for it, he came with something he must have wanted to say from the first. “Do you think you’re flying low?” he asked, and I felt the implication. I snuck a glance at my zipper.

“Made ya look!”

So this was the last he and I ever said to each other about Paul’s alleged death.

The wit, though, it still continues. Exploding cigars, hand buzzers, squirting buttons. My father and I recite to each other passages from classic Monty Python skits. “Nudge, nudge!” he tells me. “Say no mo’, say no mo’!” He stands in the pulpit with an arrow through his head. He orders X-rated catalogs in the names of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. “Message from Uranus,” he titled one of his homilies, “‘Surrounded by Klingons.’” His glasses spring fake eyeballs; his trousers conceal a horn. Once, my father gave me a series of wedgies that suddenly made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I had felt closer to than any man I have ever known. To this day he’s got nails and tacks and the like strewn across every chair in the house; you try to sit your ass down somewhere, and a rivet runs through it.

He hides dead fish in my bedsheets.

Eventually all shenanigans merge into one, and a joke runs through it. The joke was crafted by the world’s great flood (“Noah!” God giggled. “April fools!”), and it runs over rocks from the basement of the Archie Bray Ceramic Arts Center. On some of the rocks are timeless gag-rubber-snakes. Under the rocks are turds, and some of the turds are theirs. My father has told the Archie Bray students that I work at a tobacconist that has Prince Albert in a can, and they are forever calling to confirm.

I am haunted by potters.