If Dos Equis ever updates its ad campaign, I may have a nominee for ‘the most interesting woman in the world’. On a recent (fully-vaccinated) family vacation to Montana and Wyoming, we squeezed in a day trip to Yellowstone National Park and hired a local guide. Rather than a grizzled old timer, she turned out to have movie star looks and an alto voice like melted chocolate that we happily listened to all day.
As we navigated our way through the highlights of Old Faithful, bison herds, and Yellowstone Falls, she unspooled her life story in tantalising snippets and asides. Never volunteering too much, she dropped little morsels into the conversation like a fly-fisherman teasing the tourist trout to take her hook.
She told us that migrating Californians had driven up real estate prices to the point where she now lives year-round in a tent in the Bridger Mountains. Her remote lodgings let her hunt game, chop her own wood, and lay in supplies for the winter. When not guiding tourists, her solo backpacking exploits have taken her all over the West and have involved many close calls with grizzlies and mountain lions.
As we braved the crowds at the ‘Grand Canyon of Yellowstone’, she pointed to a promontory where she comes to write on her laptop, her noise-cancelling headphones playing her own nature sound recordings. She told us it’s her favourite place to write her columns for a host of magazines like Field and Stream and various tech review sites who send her cool new outdoor gadgets to evaluate.
Recently she’s parlayed her writing into various TV gigs and in the next couple of months is off to Mongolia to make a movie about the Altai Kazakh Eagle Festival. She’d also just turned down the opportunity to appear on the hit series Alone (think Survivor with bears), because the producers wouldn’t let her wear contact lenses and her hunting skills aren’t nearly as sharp wearing unfamiliar glasses.
As the day wound down, our conversation turned to fly-fishing and she ornamented her already fascinating story by telling us that she’s the grandniece of Norman McLean, celebrated author of A River Runs Through It and fly-fishing royalty. While she shared some interesting titbits about her generation of McLeans, she also slipped in some self-deprecation, admitting that she didn’t inherit the fly-casting gene, so she’s always been happier hunting supper on dry land than waist-deep in freezing water.
It was a wonderful day, elevated to a truly memorable one by our guide’s natural storytelling abilities. Like all good raconteurs it was never a monologue. She drew us in and engaged us, giving us that elusive sense of being insiders with privileged access. But for the rest of the vacation, we came back many times to the question of how much of what she told us was true and how much was exaggerated and embellished. We also debated whether the answer to that question mattered when it came to our enjoyment of our day in Yellowstone.
Cursory social media sleuthing confirmed her base narrative of being an outdoors ninja complete with Instagram posts of her skinning an elk carcass and toting some scary looking rifles and bows, but we couldn’t confirm every fascinating detail. As our vacation progressed, our scepticism was amplified by our recognition of how fundamental self-mythologising is to both the history and the current day reality of the American West.
As America expanded westward over the Appalachian Mountains, the frontiersmen who broke the trails also perfected the art of becoming legends in their own lifetimes. From the 1784 publication of The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone to plays lauding the larger-than-life congressman, Alamo martyr, and proto-Western superhero Davy Crockett, the new country craved distinctly American heroes. By the mid-1800s, the Rocky Mountains were the American frontier and our most complete lesson in the art of creating and controlling your own narrative was to be found during the couple of days we spent in the small town of Cody, Wyoming.
‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody was a hunter, pony express rider, Army scout, medal of honour winner and businessman, and by 1900 he was arguably the most famous American in the world. At 23, Cody was already the subject of serialised newspaper stories that played fast and loose with the facts and by 30 he was a full-blown theatrical impresario. His scripted Wild West shows were a first draft of American history and helped define how both the American and European public understood the American West.
In 1887, it took three ships to transport the show across the Atlantic where a five-month tour of England drew Queen Victoria out of mourning to see Annie Oakley and the rest of the cast re-enact how the West was won. Over the 30 years that the show toured, it was often the principals rather than actors who told their own stories, from gunslinger Will Bill Hickock in the early days to Sitting Bull and a war party of 20 Lakota Sioux in later productions.
After Cody, it was fitting that our last stop was the Little Big Horn battlefield, the terminus for the personal mythology train of George Armstrong Custer. When the boy general was dead and unable to burnish his own legend, Buffalo Bill often finished his show by re-enacting the Last Stand as a heroic tragedy, with Cody (who had scouted for Custer) delivering a dose of mythologising squared by playing the role of the golden-locked ego maniac.
Having lapped up these self-authored narratives, did it matter if our guide was doing her own bit of legend manufacturing for the benefit of the Connecticut Yankees? We concluded that it did matter if a baseless commitment to your own exceptionalism becomes a defining life philosophy rather than just chum in the water for gullible tourists.
That dangerous exceptionalism was on full view the night we went to a dusty local rodeo in Columbia Falls where cowboys called Rusty roped steers and were thrown from bucking broncos, and where there wasn’t a face mask to be seen. The announcer welcomed visitors from the coastal states to ‘Real America’ and encouraged them to spend their money but then head back home. Seemingly in the ‘Real America’ there’s no Covid pandemic and, regardless of where we went and what we did, the only mentions of public health precautions were countless yard signs equating even minimal restrictions to fascism.
For those unlucky enough to live outside Montana, the voyeuristic cowboy porn of the hit TV show Yellowstone lets them watch Kevin Costner sit stoically on his horse gazing across his cattle ranch. The show asks us to admire a cowboy culture that supersedes the rule of law as Costner’s character fights to protect the idea of the West from a rotating cast of mercenary lawyers and one-dimensional property developers. By fetishising vigilante justice, the show reinforces the old western saying that ‘there’s no law west of Dodge’ and glamourises the type of arrogance I saw blazoned across a t-shirt in Cody which read: ‘I have a beautiful daughter, but also a gun, a spade, and an alibi’.
From rodeo announcers to fly-fishing guides to barmen, during our 10 days in the West we heard nothing but disdain for the Federal government and its effort to combat Covid. The Wyoming Governor called his own constituents ‘knuckleheads’ for their contempt of health precautions and more recently their unwillingness to get vaccinated, which has put them in the bottom five states.
Personally, I have nothing but admiration for a 5ft 5in woman who can bring down a bull elk with a bow and arrow and then make sausages and jerky from it to feed herself through the winter. If you want to live in a tent in the woods, go ahead. The hardiness and self-reliance required to survive in that type of liminal space between the wild and the inhabited world should confer a degree of freedom to live your life the way you want to. If you want to spend much of your time outside of society, then maybe the social contract under which you operate should be abridged.
But the problem is that the moral superiority engendered by that type of radical individualism has bled across into those to who horses are in fact pickup trucks and who – like it or not – are enmeshed and entangled in the communities in which they live and work. They can tell themselves that their atomic unit of concern is narrowly proscribed by just themselves or their close family, but Covid doesn’t respect those self-drawn boundaries. In the past week, there’s been a widely-shared video of a Missouri man in an ICU bed gasping for breath while delivering the non sequitur that he didn’t need to get vaccinated because he’s from a ‘strong conservative family’. Across the US, but particularly in the West and the South, it’s that type of misguided and unfounded self-mythologising that’s killing people at a rapidly increasing rate again.
From wannabe cowboys in Montana to lockdown protestors rallying in Trafalgar Square, the rejection of any notion of a collective good in favour of untrammelled individualism is corrupting the idea of freedom and liberty to a dangerous degree. If the anti-mask, anti-vaxxers in the UK truly want a taste of freedom, I now know someone who can find them a place to pitch their tent in the vast expanse of the West and give them a few lessons in how to skin their own elk.
Alan McIntyre is a trustee and patron of the Institute of Contemporary Scotland
By Alan McIntyre | 18 August 2021