Episode #18： Gritty Stories From the Wild West With Matthew Mayo
Episode Stats
Summary
Matthew Mayo is the author of the book Cowboys, Mountain Men, and Grizzly Bears, 50 of the Grittiest Moments in the History of the Wild West. He s also the managing editor of Big Sky Journal, and splits his time between Maine and Montana.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another episode of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now, one of the
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most iconic images of manliness, at least in America, is that of the cowboy. Filled with rugged
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individualism, grit, and determination, these men, along with mountain men and explorers,
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tamed the Wild West. Even after a century, the influence of these men are still with us. Boys
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grew up playing cowboys and Indians, and many men today still dream about saddling up and riding
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off into the sunset guns a-blazing. But most of our ideas about the Wild West are really just
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romanticized versions found in John Wayne movies. Don't get me wrong, John Wayne movies are awesome.
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But the reality was that living in the frontier was dangerous and hard, and it required a certain
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kind of person to survive. Well, our guest today has written a book filled with stories about these
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hardy men and women who helped settle the Wild West. His name is Matthew Mayo, and he's the author of the
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book Cowboys, Mountain Men, and Grizzly Bears, 50 of the Grittiest Moments in the History of the
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Wild West. Matt has written several Western novels and is also the managing editor of Big Sky
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Journal. And he and his wife divide their time between Maine and Montana. Matt, welcome to the
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show. Hi there. Thanks for having me on. Well, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. So
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Matthew, your book is Cowboys, Mountain Men, and Grizzly Bears. And I read here in your bio, you are
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actually a son of New England. So how did a New Englander like you end up writing a book about the
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Wild West and writing novels about the Wild West? Well, I think like a lot of folk all over America,
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I was raised on a dairy farm in northern Vermont. But like so many folks, I grew up watching TV shows
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like Gunsmoke and Bonanza and Rawhide, you know, the movies of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and so many
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others. And my parents are big fans of those as well. So we'd watch reruns on our little black and
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white set. And I'd run around outside in my cowboy outfit with my six guns. And my mother was very
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indulgent. She was a great seamstress. So I sported a lot of homemade cowboy beds. Oh, later on, about
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age eight or so, I recall getting into reading pretty much everything I could find. But I was
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really drawn to kids' books, especially the adventurous ones. And from there, led to all sorts
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of genre fiction, mysteries, adventure tales, and an awful lot of Westerns. So by the time I was in
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high school, that led me to exploring more about American history. Fast forward a few years, I was
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married by then, been writing and publishing a lot of poetry, short stories, essays, articles, that sort
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of thing. Worked as a magazine editor, and then a freelance editor and writer for all sorts of
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publishers. And I'd begun to write a lot of novels, but never really finished any. And I got my MFA,
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wrote a comic adventure caper as my thesis. But to date, that book's unpublished. Maybe it'll see the
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light of day someday. I don't know. And I really wanted to try something different. I'd been reading a
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lot of Westerns all along. One day at the library, I found one by a fellow named Lauren D. Esselman,
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who's just as well known for his detective fiction. And this Western was called White Desert. And it's
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the only book that I've ever read that when I finished it, I just turned right around and started
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reading it again. And I still haven't done that with any other book. But it just made all sorts of
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sense. Something clicked. And I decided after I finished it a second time that I'd try to write one.
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So I did. Ended up publishing three for a publisher in England named Robert Hale. They have a Black
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Horse Westerns line. And they come out as hardbacks. Then they go to softcover, large print versions.
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So they're out there. But at the same time, I was freelancing for different magazines,
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one of which was Western Art and Architecture in Bowdoin, Montana. And their sister publication,
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Big Sky Journal, which is sort of a lifestyle culture magazine of the Northern Rockies,
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needed a managing editor. So in June of 2008, after the Western Writers Conference
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in Scottsdale, Arizona, where incidentally, I got to meet Lauren Esselman, among many other famous
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Western authors, we drove north through Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, checked out Montana, and just fell in love
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with the Rocky Mountain West. Took the job. Sold the house in Maine. Moved out there with our two
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dogs. And after I was there about a month, Alan Jones, editor for Globe Pequot, had a nonfiction
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project in mind. He was looking for an author with a strong background in fiction. He liked my sort of
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fast-paced Western novels, and liked my writing style. It meshed from there. And he had the basic
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idea for the book. And I ran it through my own meat grinder. And I said, well, what do you think of
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this? And added a little of this and that to the recipe. He liked it. And we were off and running.
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The result was the book that came out in January.
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Huh. And you mentioned there that you are a fiction writer, mainly that's your focus, and that
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the publisher who did this nonfiction book, I guess, wanted a fiction writer. Can you tell us
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then how you approach telling these historical stories, you know, weaving in your fiction writing
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Sure. It's a pretty common tradition. It's called narrative history, which is basically writing history
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in a story format. And it's sort of a useful way of conveying history. Oftentimes, history books can
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be pretty dry, as we all know. And so this is a fun way of sort of spiking it up. For this book,
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the 50 chapters in this book, as an example, there aren't all that many eyewitness accounts available.
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Certainly no eyewitnesses left alive, I don't believe. If they are, they're pretty impressive.
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As far as the accounts, if there are written accounts of them, even when they are, they're often
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one-sided and poorly written. Or they're heavy on fact, which is great, but they're laid on detailed
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dialogue. Or the eyewitness accounts of events just don't exist at all. So you take the basic facts
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and figures, dates, times, people, locations. They form the skeleton, and then you doll it up with
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organs, blood, flesh, the whole work, and put likely words in their mouths, all the while naturally being
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cautious to stay within the parameters of what really happened, where it happened, and how it
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happened. An example to help illustrate that would be in the book, The O.K. Corral Gunfight.
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I call that chapter Tombstone Gun Down. And since Hollywood played so fast and loose with it for
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decades, there's been so many books, rather movies made of it, that really sort of stretch the truth
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here and there. The public has come to form certain conceptions and misconceptions about it.
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I wanted to make sure if I was going to include that in the book, that I researched the heck out of
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it in an effort to convey the full flavor of the shootout with all the facts I could muster,
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while being careful to avoid the same errors and misconceptions that we've seen so often in the
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movies, for instance, I tried to give it an interesting narrative angle. So I had, I said
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it in, through Virgil Ertz, what am I trying to say, his deathbed. In other words, he was, he was on his
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deathbed thinking back over the years and thinking about the, that incident in particular, how it
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played out. That gave me sort of an interesting in to that chapter.
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So you have 50 stories in this book, but I'm sure there's hundreds and maybe even thousands of
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stories that you could have put in here. I mean, how did you decide which stories to include in the
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It wasn't easy. For the very reason you just stated, I was given pretty much free reign to come up with
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the list. Once, once they liked my writing style, it just, I just went at it. And my initial list
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included way more than 50. I came up with hundreds of possible chapters, which bodes well for sequels,
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which oddly enough, people are already asking for. So I'm happy to delve that out. To help give the
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book shape, I decided to break, break it down into three rough categories, mountain men and Indians,
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man versus nature and cowboys and gunfighters. And those rough designations gave me plenty of
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direction. So from there, I made sure each category covered all roughly one third of the book. And
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then I arranged them all chronologically at the end. It took a bit of work to make sure they each
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covered that one third, mostly so it didn't seem that the book was too stacked in any one direction
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in favor of too many gunfighters, that sort of thing, because pretty much what's expected.
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That's what most people know. When they think of the Wild West or the Old West, they think
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gunfighters, and there's so much more to it. So it made my job a lot of fun, too, as I got to root
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around in history and come up with what I hope for the reader are unexpected incidents, in addition
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to the ones that are expected, like that Little Bighorn, the OK Corral, Hugh Glasses, 350 mile death
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crawl. But I also included lesser events, lesser known events, like there was a horrible stampede in
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Texas in 1882. And Uncle Dick Wooten's fistfight with a Ute chief. He was driving, in 1852, he was
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driving 9,000 head of sheep from New Mexico to California. And this Ute chief and his warriors
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demanded tribute payment more than Uncle Dick was willing to pony up. So he took matters into his own
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hands and trounced, trounced the old chief right in front of his warriors. Rather than humiliate the
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man further, he went on to treat him respectfully, but getting that upper edge that he needed to get
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Yeah. So what's your favorite story, Matt, that you included in the book?
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There are so many. That's the typical answer, I suppose. But for various reasons, I have a handful
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of favorites. One would be the first chapter I wrote on the mountain man, Hugh Glass. It has all the
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elements that I admired as a kid reading all those adventure stories. It's a survival story. He was
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attacked by a grizzly. Two men of his party were charged with staying behind with him until he died
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because he was just so messed up and so mauled that they figured nobody could survive such a thing.
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But they were kind of freaked out at having to be left behind in Indian territory. So they bolted and
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they took all his stuff with him, his possibles bag, his rifle, his knife. They left him for dead,
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but he lived. And he dragged himself 350 miles for six weeks, survived, open wounds on his back,
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the whole work. He was so driven by revenge, he wanted just nothing more than to kill those two
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guys. One of them ended up was Jim Bridger, famous mountain man. He was just a punk kid at the time,
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and I guess he learned his lesson. They humbled him a bit, but Glass forgave him. Another favorite
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story would be the Teddy Roosevelt story, for different reasons wholly. The whole story, it's a short
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chapter, but I think it did a really decent job of conveying the vigor and sort of that engaging
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essence of the guy. And it was written, the way I wrote it was super pulpy and very manly, and it
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reads a bit like an old Peter Capstick safari story. And I think that chapter came up particularly well.
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I also like the way the book is built in general. It's got a lot of interesting information for people,
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a big bibliography, a nice introduction. Each chapter is followed with extra information that
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helps facts and figures. It helps to bolster each chapter and maybe engage people to,
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or interest them rather to go and explore those incidents on their own.
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And one thing I noticed too, a lot of times when we think of the Wild West, we usually think of the
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men being the ones who really tamed it and settled it. But women were a big part of this as part of
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this as well, and in settling the West. Can you give us an example of about a woman who lived and
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faced the dangers of the Wild West and survived? Sure, absolutely. I tried to include, certainly it
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isn't 50-50 in the book, mostly because more men were involved in gritty encounters than women,
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but there were lots and lots of amazing women in the Old West. Let's see, Marie Dorian is one that
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comes to mind. She's a Sioux Indian. She traveled West with her husband. He's a trapper and I think
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sort of a guide and interpreter. They traveled to Oregon Territory in 1811 on this horrible ill-fated
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trapping party trip. Along the way, they were starving. The whole party was just horrible.
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She gave birth to a baby that died, plus she had two little boys with her. And I think they were just
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like two and four years old, something like that. They traveled for more than 2,000 miles.
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And then when they got there, things started to even out. They thought, well, okay, well,
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it's going to get better. And then her husband and his trapping partners were killed by the Bannock
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Indians. And this is in fall and winter. She fled with her two little boys. They traveled for months
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starving and on foot in the winter over the Blue Mountains. And ended up towards spring,
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she was saved by the Walla Walla tribe. During that time in the mountains, she was snow blind part
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of the time. It was just rough. But despite that, she got her kids to safety and she lived to a
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Now, Matt, what one trait do you think all these people had that allowed them to face
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I think there are lots of big traits that come to mind, but I think it would be a mixture of the
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two. If I had to narrow it down to one, I would choose two. I think it would be probably determination
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and curiosity, but sort of a mixture of those two. They can be broken down further into sub traits.
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I suppose that those are the biggies. You take Hugh Glass, we just spoke of as an example.
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He was determined to live if only to get his revenge on those two guys.
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There are so many other people who are determined to head west to get away from dead-end lives or
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oppressive situations, whether they be family-oriented or what have you. Or just figure,
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gosh, you know, back in the east, I'm a nobody. But out in the west, I can be somebody. I can be my
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own person, have some freedom. So yeah, determination, curiosity, those would be the biggies for me.
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And are there any real-life lessons you took away after researching and writing about
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the men you include in your book that has helped you become a better man?
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Yes. Two pop to mind, naturally. I can't just choose one. And one of them, believe it or not,
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is the chapter on a young woman. She offered as many or more lessons in manliness than I think
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any six trigger-happy gunfighters. She's a teenage girl named Jeanette Riker. And in the fall of 1849,
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in what would become Montana, she and her father and two brothers stopped before making the final
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push to cross the Rockies. And this was in the fall. And in the morning, the three men went off
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to hunt for buffalo to stock up on meat for the rest of the journey. And they never came back. And so
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she was afraid to move on for fear that they might come back any day. They never did. And then before
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the snow came, and as we know in the Rockies, the snow really stacked up. So she manned up,
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as they say. And she killed, insulted an ox, built a shelter, used the stove from the wagon and the
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wagon's canvas covering. She used logs and branches and mud, sort of borrowed in. And she survived all
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winter, despite the fact that she was harassed every night by cougars and wolves, walking around the
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outside of her little hut, trying to get in, clawing at the thing. And in the spring, she was
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nearly starving. She had only a handful of rotten cornmeal and some rancid meat.
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The floods washed away her little house. And she just had maybe another day or two of
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left of food, and she didn't know what she was going to do. She was half-soaked. And some Indians
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found her. And they were so impressed with her, they brought her to the fort at Walla Walla.
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And no much else has known about her, except that she went on to marry and raise a family
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and become a successful pioneer woman. No sign of her father or brothers is ever found. So I was
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so taken with that story that I'm writing a book about her right now. It's shaping up to be
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corker of a book. It's just such a fascinating story. So whenever I hear some, you know, whiny
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teenager whining about his life, I think of that girl and all she went through. And I think,
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boy, she'd be amazed at the sort of the toothless, cushy lives so many of us lead nowadays.
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Just I think she's a fine example of manliness. And then the other one I'll just take a sec to
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mention would be Bass Reeves. Fascinating man, probably the most fascinating man in the book,
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as far as I'm concerned. He epitomized what it means to be a sort of a straight shooting,
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honest man. Some folks know of him, but I think everybody should know about him. And it's a shame
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that he's not more well known. And it blows my mind that Hollywood hasn't made a big budget movie
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of his life. And they don't even need to embellish anything. He was a black man born into slavery,
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spoke a handful of Indian languages. And in 1875, he became the first US deputy marshal,
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the first black American to hold that title west of the Mississippi. He was illiterate,
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but he had people read warrants to him. And then he would memorize them. He would track those outlaws
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into Indian nation and catch them. He made 3000 arrests. He was never shot, though he was shot at
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many times. They shot his hat off. They shot buttons off his coat. They shot his belt. They shot his
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reins in half. He ended up killing 14 men, but he, uh, people say he's never, he never shot until he
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was drawn on. And, uh, he said the toughest case of his 35 year career was when he had to bring his,
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track his own son and bring him back for murder. And he did it. So I think he, uh, much more so than,
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uh, again, uh, any, uh, anybody who's famous for drawing the gun fast, I think this all would be,
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uh, one to epitomize. Well, Matthew, uh, it, thank you for your time. It's been a pleasure.
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Okay, great. Thanks. Thanks very much. I appreciate it. Our guest today was Matthew Mayo. Matt's the
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author of the book, Cowboys, Mountain Men and Grizzly Bears, 50 of the grittiest moments in the history
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of the wild west. For more information about Matt's book, make sure to check out his site at
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matthewmayo.com. Well, that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast. For
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more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the art of manliness website at
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art of manliness.com. And until next week, stay manly.