The Art of Manliness - Episode #18： Gritty Stories From the Wild West With Matthew Mayo

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00:00:34.880 Brett McKay here and welcome to another episode of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now, one of the

00:00:58.080 most iconic images of manliness, at least in America, is that of the cowboy. Filled with rugged

00:01:03.700 individualism, grit, and determination, these men, along with mountain men and explorers,

00:01:08.720 tamed the Wild West. Even after a century, the influence of these men are still with us. Boys

00:01:15.140 grew up playing cowboys and Indians, and many men today still dream about saddling up and riding

00:01:19.600 off into the sunset guns a-blazing. But most of our ideas about the Wild West are really just

00:01:24.680 romanticized versions found in John Wayne movies. Don't get me wrong, John Wayne movies are awesome.

00:01:28.860 But the reality was that living in the frontier was dangerous and hard, and it required a certain

00:01:34.160 kind of person to survive. Well, our guest today has written a book filled with stories about these

00:01:39.620 hardy men and women who helped settle the Wild West. His name is Matthew Mayo, and he's the author of the

00:01:44.960 book Cowboys, Mountain Men, and Grizzly Bears, 50 of the Grittiest Moments in the History of the

00:01:50.100 Wild West. Matt has written several Western novels and is also the managing editor of Big Sky

00:01:55.280 Journal. And he and his wife divide their time between Maine and Montana. Matt, welcome to the

00:02:01.780 show. Hi there. Thanks for having me on. Well, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. So

00:02:07.040 Matthew, your book is Cowboys, Mountain Men, and Grizzly Bears. And I read here in your bio, you are

00:02:13.280 actually a son of New England. So how did a New Englander like you end up writing a book about the

00:02:20.460 Wild West and writing novels about the Wild West? Well, I think like a lot of folk all over America,

00:02:26.040 I was raised on a dairy farm in northern Vermont. But like so many folks, I grew up watching TV shows

00:02:35.380 like Gunsmoke and Bonanza and Rawhide, you know, the movies of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and so many

00:02:40.480 others. And my parents are big fans of those as well. So we'd watch reruns on our little black and

00:02:46.140 white set. And I'd run around outside in my cowboy outfit with my six guns. And my mother was very

00:02:53.580 indulgent. She was a great seamstress. So I sported a lot of homemade cowboy beds. Oh, later on, about

00:02:59.460 age eight or so, I recall getting into reading pretty much everything I could find. But I was

00:03:03.680 really drawn to kids' books, especially the adventurous ones. And from there, led to all sorts

00:03:10.620 of genre fiction, mysteries, adventure tales, and an awful lot of Westerns. So by the time I was in

00:03:17.380 high school, that led me to exploring more about American history. Fast forward a few years, I was

00:03:25.220 married by then, been writing and publishing a lot of poetry, short stories, essays, articles, that sort

00:03:30.920 of thing. Worked as a magazine editor, and then a freelance editor and writer for all sorts of

00:03:38.580 publishers. And I'd begun to write a lot of novels, but never really finished any. And I got my MFA,

00:03:45.560 wrote a comic adventure caper as my thesis. But to date, that book's unpublished. Maybe it'll see the

00:03:53.340 light of day someday. I don't know. And I really wanted to try something different. I'd been reading a

00:03:58.400 lot of Westerns all along. One day at the library, I found one by a fellow named Lauren D. Esselman,

00:04:04.680 who's just as well known for his detective fiction. And this Western was called White Desert. And it's

00:04:11.060 the only book that I've ever read that when I finished it, I just turned right around and started

00:04:16.480 reading it again. And I still haven't done that with any other book. But it just made all sorts of

00:04:23.800 sense. Something clicked. And I decided after I finished it a second time that I'd try to write one.

00:04:28.540 So I did. Ended up publishing three for a publisher in England named Robert Hale. They have a Black 1.00

00:04:36.960 Horse Westerns line. And they come out as hardbacks. Then they go to softcover, large print versions.

00:04:43.160 So they're out there. But at the same time, I was freelancing for different magazines,

00:04:47.100 one of which was Western Art and Architecture in Bowdoin, Montana. And their sister publication,

00:04:52.220 Big Sky Journal, which is sort of a lifestyle culture magazine of the Northern Rockies,

00:04:57.460 needed a managing editor. So in June of 2008, after the Western Writers Conference

00:05:05.080 in Scottsdale, Arizona, where incidentally, I got to meet Lauren Esselman, among many other famous

00:05:11.960 Western authors, we drove north through Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, checked out Montana, and just fell in love

00:05:19.500 with the Rocky Mountain West. Took the job. Sold the house in Maine. Moved out there with our two

00:05:25.920 dogs. And after I was there about a month, Alan Jones, editor for Globe Pequot, had a nonfiction

00:05:31.560 project in mind. He was looking for an author with a strong background in fiction. He liked my sort of

00:05:37.900 fast-paced Western novels, and liked my writing style. It meshed from there. And he had the basic

00:05:43.500 idea for the book. And I ran it through my own meat grinder. And I said, well, what do you think of

00:05:48.100 this? And added a little of this and that to the recipe. He liked it. And we were off and running.

00:05:53.260 The result was the book that came out in January.

00:05:55.680 Huh. And you mentioned there that you are a fiction writer, mainly that's your focus, and that

00:06:01.860 the publisher who did this nonfiction book, I guess, wanted a fiction writer. Can you tell us

00:06:07.260 then how you approach telling these historical stories, you know, weaving in your fiction writing

00:06:13.260 ability into these historical stories?

00:06:17.560 Sure. It's a pretty common tradition. It's called narrative history, which is basically writing history

00:06:23.860 in a story format. And it's sort of a useful way of conveying history. Oftentimes, history books can

00:06:31.460 be pretty dry, as we all know. And so this is a fun way of sort of spiking it up. For this book,

00:06:38.660 the 50 chapters in this book, as an example, there aren't all that many eyewitness accounts available.

00:06:43.740 Certainly no eyewitnesses left alive, I don't believe. If they are, they're pretty impressive.

00:06:48.560 As far as the accounts, if there are written accounts of them, even when they are, they're often

00:06:53.200 one-sided and poorly written. Or they're heavy on fact, which is great, but they're laid on detailed

00:07:00.560 dialogue. Or the eyewitness accounts of events just don't exist at all. So you take the basic facts

00:07:07.900 and figures, dates, times, people, locations. They form the skeleton, and then you doll it up with

00:07:13.180 organs, blood, flesh, the whole work, and put likely words in their mouths, all the while naturally being

00:07:19.840 cautious to stay within the parameters of what really happened, where it happened, and how it

00:07:25.680 happened. An example to help illustrate that would be in the book, The O.K. Corral Gunfight.

00:07:33.320 I call that chapter Tombstone Gun Down. And since Hollywood played so fast and loose with it for

00:07:39.900 decades, there's been so many books, rather movies made of it, that really sort of stretch the truth

00:07:46.400 here and there. The public has come to form certain conceptions and misconceptions about it.

00:07:52.820 I wanted to make sure if I was going to include that in the book, that I researched the heck out of

00:07:57.860 it in an effort to convey the full flavor of the shootout with all the facts I could muster,

00:08:04.540 while being careful to avoid the same errors and misconceptions that we've seen so often in the

00:08:11.960 movies, for instance, I tried to give it an interesting narrative angle. So I had, I said

00:08:16.660 it in, through Virgil Ertz, what am I trying to say, his deathbed. In other words, he was, he was on his

00:08:22.820 deathbed thinking back over the years and thinking about the, that incident in particular, how it

00:08:28.740 played out. That gave me sort of an interesting in to that chapter.

00:08:32.520 So you have 50 stories in this book, but I'm sure there's hundreds and maybe even thousands of

00:08:39.100 stories that you could have put in here. I mean, how did you decide which stories to include in the

00:08:44.980 book?

00:08:45.920 It wasn't easy. For the very reason you just stated, I was given pretty much free reign to come up with

00:08:51.780 the list. Once, once they liked my writing style, it just, I just went at it. And my initial list

00:08:57.340 included way more than 50. I came up with hundreds of possible chapters, which bodes well for sequels,

00:09:04.560 which oddly enough, people are already asking for. So I'm happy to delve that out. To help give the

00:09:11.820 book shape, I decided to break, break it down into three rough categories, mountain men and Indians,

00:09:16.660 man versus nature and cowboys and gunfighters. And those rough designations gave me plenty of

00:09:23.780 direction. So from there, I made sure each category covered all roughly one third of the book. And

00:09:29.660 then I arranged them all chronologically at the end. It took a bit of work to make sure they each

00:09:34.880 covered that one third, mostly so it didn't seem that the book was too stacked in any one direction

00:09:39.480 in favor of too many gunfighters, that sort of thing, because pretty much what's expected.

00:09:44.180 That's what most people know. When they think of the Wild West or the Old West, they think

00:09:47.060 gunfighters, and there's so much more to it. So it made my job a lot of fun, too, as I got to root

00:09:52.600 around in history and come up with what I hope for the reader are unexpected incidents, in addition

00:09:59.220 to the ones that are expected, like that Little Bighorn, the OK Corral, Hugh Glasses, 350 mile death

00:10:05.800 crawl. But I also included lesser events, lesser known events, like there was a horrible stampede in

00:10:13.520 Texas in 1882. And Uncle Dick Wooten's fistfight with a Ute chief. He was driving, in 1852, he was

00:10:23.520 driving 9,000 head of sheep from New Mexico to California. And this Ute chief and his warriors 0.56

00:10:32.640 demanded tribute payment more than Uncle Dick was willing to pony up. So he took matters into his own

00:10:40.060 hands and trounced, trounced the old chief right in front of his warriors. Rather than humiliate the

00:10:46.240 man further, he went on to treat him respectfully, but getting that upper edge that he needed to get

00:10:53.000 through the day.

00:10:54.060 Yeah. So what's your favorite story, Matt, that you included in the book?

00:10:59.800 There are so many. That's the typical answer, I suppose. But for various reasons, I have a handful

00:11:08.240 of favorites. One would be the first chapter I wrote on the mountain man, Hugh Glass. It has all the

00:11:16.000 elements that I admired as a kid reading all those adventure stories. It's a survival story. He was

00:11:22.780 attacked by a grizzly. Two men of his party were charged with staying behind with him until he died

00:11:29.520 because he was just so messed up and so mauled that they figured nobody could survive such a thing.

00:11:35.280 But they were kind of freaked out at having to be left behind in Indian territory. So they bolted and

00:11:43.520 they took all his stuff with him, his possibles bag, his rifle, his knife. They left him for dead,

00:11:48.960 but he lived. And he dragged himself 350 miles for six weeks, survived, open wounds on his back,

00:11:55.200 the whole work. He was so driven by revenge, he wanted just nothing more than to kill those two 0.99

00:12:00.880 guys. One of them ended up was Jim Bridger, famous mountain man. He was just a punk kid at the time, 0.85

00:12:08.320 and I guess he learned his lesson. They humbled him a bit, but Glass forgave him. Another favorite

00:12:14.720 story would be the Teddy Roosevelt story, for different reasons wholly. The whole story, it's a short

00:12:20.960 chapter, but I think it did a really decent job of conveying the vigor and sort of that engaging

00:12:25.920 essence of the guy. And it was written, the way I wrote it was super pulpy and very manly, and it

00:12:32.240 reads a bit like an old Peter Capstick safari story. And I think that chapter came up particularly well.

00:12:39.440 I also like the way the book is built in general. It's got a lot of interesting information for people,

00:12:47.680 a big bibliography, a nice introduction. Each chapter is followed with extra information that

00:12:54.240 helps facts and figures. It helps to bolster each chapter and maybe engage people to,

00:13:01.040 or interest them rather to go and explore those incidents on their own.

00:13:06.480 And one thing I noticed too, a lot of times when we think of the Wild West, we usually think of the

00:13:11.440 men being the ones who really tamed it and settled it. But women were a big part of this as part of 1.00

00:13:18.560 this as well, and in settling the West. Can you give us an example of about a woman who lived and

00:13:24.640 faced the dangers of the Wild West and survived? Sure, absolutely. I tried to include, certainly it

00:13:31.760 isn't 50-50 in the book, mostly because more men were involved in gritty encounters than women,

00:13:39.200 but there were lots and lots of amazing women in the Old West. Let's see, Marie Dorian is one that

00:13:46.800 comes to mind. She's a Sioux Indian. She traveled West with her husband. He's a trapper and I think

00:13:56.320 sort of a guide and interpreter. They traveled to Oregon Territory in 1811 on this horrible ill-fated

00:14:03.280 trapping party trip. Along the way, they were starving. The whole party was just horrible.

00:14:09.920 She gave birth to a baby that died, plus she had two little boys with her. And I think they were just

00:14:15.520 like two and four years old, something like that. They traveled for more than 2,000 miles.

00:14:20.960 And then when they got there, things started to even out. They thought, well, okay, well,

00:14:23.920 it's going to get better. And then her husband and his trapping partners were killed by the Bannock

00:14:28.320 Indians. And this is in fall and winter. She fled with her two little boys. They traveled for months

00:14:36.080 starving and on foot in the winter over the Blue Mountains. And ended up towards spring,

00:14:42.320 she was saved by the Walla Walla tribe. During that time in the mountains, she was snow blind part

00:14:47.600 of the time. It was just rough. But despite that, she got her kids to safety and she lived to a

00:14:54.240 a fairly ripe old age. Pretty tough lady. 0.98

00:14:58.160 Now, Matt, what one trait do you think all these people had that allowed them to face

00:15:05.360 the challenges of settling a new frontier?

00:15:08.000 I think there are lots of big traits that come to mind, but I think it would be a mixture of the

00:15:13.440 two. If I had to narrow it down to one, I would choose two. I think it would be probably determination

00:15:20.480 and curiosity, but sort of a mixture of those two. They can be broken down further into sub traits.

00:15:26.880 I suppose that those are the biggies. You take Hugh Glass, we just spoke of as an example.

00:15:32.560 He was determined to live if only to get his revenge on those two guys.

00:15:37.200 There are so many other people who are determined to head west to get away from dead-end lives or

00:15:43.920 oppressive situations, whether they be family-oriented or what have you. Or just figure,

00:15:52.560 gosh, you know, back in the east, I'm a nobody. But out in the west, I can be somebody. I can be my

00:15:57.200 own person, have some freedom. So yeah, determination, curiosity, those would be the biggies for me.

00:16:03.200 And are there any real-life lessons you took away after researching and writing about

00:16:08.320 the men you include in your book that has helped you become a better man?

00:16:12.880 Yes. Two pop to mind, naturally. I can't just choose one. And one of them, believe it or not,

00:16:21.520 is the chapter on a young woman. She offered as many or more lessons in manliness than I think

00:16:30.560 any six trigger-happy gunfighters. She's a teenage girl named Jeanette Riker. And in the fall of 1849,

00:16:38.320 in what would become Montana, she and her father and two brothers stopped before making the final

00:16:46.640 push to cross the Rockies. And this was in the fall. And in the morning, the three men went off

00:16:52.480 to hunt for buffalo to stock up on meat for the rest of the journey. And they never came back. And so

00:16:57.840 she was afraid to move on for fear that they might come back any day. They never did. And then before

00:17:04.560 the snow came, and as we know in the Rockies, the snow really stacked up. So she manned up,

00:17:10.240 as they say. And she killed, insulted an ox, built a shelter, used the stove from the wagon and the 1.00

00:17:18.400 wagon's canvas covering. She used logs and branches and mud, sort of borrowed in. And she survived all

00:17:25.280 winter, despite the fact that she was harassed every night by cougars and wolves, walking around the

00:17:31.920 outside of her little hut, trying to get in, clawing at the thing. And in the spring, she was

00:17:37.840 nearly starving. She had only a handful of rotten cornmeal and some rancid meat.

00:17:42.640 The floods washed away her little house. And she just had maybe another day or two of

00:17:47.600 left of food, and she didn't know what she was going to do. She was half-soaked. And some Indians 1.00

00:17:53.120 found her. And they were so impressed with her, they brought her to the fort at Walla Walla.

00:17:57.120 And no much else has known about her, except that she went on to marry and raise a family

00:18:03.920 and become a successful pioneer woman. No sign of her father or brothers is ever found. So I was

00:18:10.880 so taken with that story that I'm writing a book about her right now. It's shaping up to be

00:18:17.520 corker of a book. It's just such a fascinating story. So whenever I hear some, you know, whiny

00:18:23.120 teenager whining about his life, I think of that girl and all she went through. And I think,

00:18:28.480 boy, she'd be amazed at the sort of the toothless, cushy lives so many of us lead nowadays.

00:18:33.440 Just I think she's a fine example of manliness. And then the other one I'll just take a sec to 1.00

00:18:41.120 mention would be Bass Reeves. Fascinating man, probably the most fascinating man in the book,

00:18:46.320 as far as I'm concerned. He epitomized what it means to be a sort of a straight shooting,

00:18:51.840 honest man. Some folks know of him, but I think everybody should know about him. And it's a shame

00:18:58.320 that he's not more well known. And it blows my mind that Hollywood hasn't made a big budget movie

00:19:03.440 of his life. And they don't even need to embellish anything. He was a black man born into slavery,

00:19:09.040 spoke a handful of Indian languages. And in 1875, he became the first US deputy marshal,

00:19:18.000 the first black American to hold that title west of the Mississippi. He was illiterate, 0.96

00:19:25.440 but he had people read warrants to him. And then he would memorize them. He would track those outlaws

00:19:29.920 into Indian nation and catch them. He made 3000 arrests. He was never shot, though he was shot at 0.88

00:19:37.440 many times. They shot his hat off. They shot buttons off his coat. They shot his belt. They shot his

00:19:42.560 reins in half. He ended up killing 14 men, but he, uh, people say he's never, he never shot until he

00:19:49.920 was drawn on. And, uh, he said the toughest case of his 35 year career was when he had to bring his,

00:19:57.280 track his own son and bring him back for murder. And he did it. So I think he, uh, much more so than,

00:20:04.240 uh, again, uh, any, uh, anybody who's famous for drawing the gun fast, I think this all would be,

00:20:11.920 uh, one to epitomize. Well, Matthew, uh, it, thank you for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:20:18.560 Okay, great. Thanks. Thanks very much. I appreciate it. Our guest today was Matthew Mayo. Matt's the

00:20:23.840 author of the book, Cowboys, Mountain Men and Grizzly Bears, 50 of the grittiest moments in the history

00:20:29.600 of the wild west. For more information about Matt's book, make sure to check out his site at

00:20:34.920 matthewmayo.com. Well, that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast. For

00:20:46.940 more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the art of manliness website at

00:20:51.400 art of manliness.com. And until next week, stay manly.

00:21:21.400 Bye.

00:21:51.400 Bye.

00:22:21.400 Bye.

00:22:51.400 Bye.

00:23:21.400 Bye.

00:23:22.400 Bye.

The Art of Manliness - April 03, 2014

Episode #18： Gritty Stories From the Wild West With Matthew Mayo

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