43. Good Talk #9: Betsy Gaines Quammen

"Cowboys are not heroes that solve issues in little towns with guns."

Yay for public lands.

Happy February, friends! We are one month closer to spring, a season I appreciate more and more the older I get. I’m always amazed at the ways my neighborhood explodes after a months of Oregon gloom with cherry blossoms and silly little daffodils, like nature is throwing some kind of party for itself. Everything feels fresh and reborn and possible.

Maybe I sound a little more optimistic than usual. Weird, I know. I think it’s because I had a great conversation last weekend at Powell’s Bookstore with Montana writer Betsy Gaines Quammen about her new book, True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America. Betsy, a historian, bases her work in the book off face-to-face conversations she has with people all over the western United States and the understandings she comes to along the way. We have interviewed many of the same people, and seem to be always working on projects that compliment each other.

There are many things to be feared, and millions of reasons for vigilance, during this dreaded how-is-it-here-already election year. My conversation with Betsy, which you can read below, gave me some hope.

Before we get into that, let me say two things:

1. I am interested in telling stories from the Western United States about injustice, conflict and people who feel overlooked, thrown away or pushed to the fringes. In case I haven’t made it clear before, if you have an idea for a story you think I should take a look at, I’d love to hear from you. You can hit reply to this email, or fill out the contact form on my website. I read every idea people send me. I can’t always respond, but rest assured I will look at what you send.

2. I have a pitch for you to upgrade to a paid subscription to this newsletter. In this dreadful media climate, think of this one newsletter like a tiny little magazine that would not operate without you. It arrives once a month (sometimes more, when I have time). For your subscription dollars, you get a surprising dispatch from an independent journalist and writer firmly living far outside the big city media bubble. And every time I come out with a new story, podcast, book or otherwise creative-thing, you can know with absolute certainty that you helped make that project happen.

Thanks for letting me put on that uncomfortable salesperson hat. Here’s Betsy.

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Photo by Seth Cotlar, of Rightlandia

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

LEAH SOTTILE:

Welcome to Portland, Betsy. I'm so excited to ask you questions. I have many, so let's get started. You start the book talking about the power of myth, and I just wanted to ask you, when was the first time that you recognized that mythology was a part of the Western experience?

BETSY GAINES QUAMMEN: 

Oh my gosh, that's a really good question. You know, the West is layered with myths. And I really looked at it as how are western myths foundational to America? I really think whether most Americans realize it or not, they are inspired by Western mythology. That goes to the myth of the cowboy, the rugged individualism. But I also think it really informs the way people see America as a place of endless resources, a place of continued manifest destiny. 

During COVID I think there was the myth of the West as hail and hardy, as salubrious, as a place where they could come and heal, and they brought COVID to tiny western communities that were overwhelmed in terms of their clinics. So there were these ideas that people carried about the west that they've grown up seeing. I mean, Hollywood is a big myth maker in terms of portraying the West. And I thought that it was a really interesting way to start thinking about what has happened to us over the course of the last few years — to look at the West as a museum of myths.

LS:

That kind of builds into another question I have: do you think that the West in itself is its own kind of myth or its own kind of conspiracy theory?

BGQ: 

One of the things that I do think gets overlaid on the west is this idea of homeland. And that really brings in the mix of misinformation, of extremism. And we see that in various pockets of the west. I wrote about quite a bit the Idaho panhandle, but it's in Eastern Oregon. We see it in Eastern Washington. For example, there are people who see the West as the Christian nationalist homeland, but then they also see the West as their getaway, their second home, their wilderness retreat. And that also is a myth. They’re ever pressuring our wilderness, our ecosystems, our resources, our rivers. And so these ideas become dangerous. They put pressure on Western communities, but they really are informed by these foundational myths.

LS:

I asked the conspiracy theory question not to be flip, but also just to say I feel like so much of the reporting that I do about conspiracy theories, you put the facts in front of people and they still decide to believe in a thing. And I was thinking about conspiracy theories a lot while I was reading your book: here’s you putting a lot of facts in front of people throughout the book — in personal conversations and by talking about the work you've done — and yet the myths remain. So to me, I was like, is the west a conspiracy theory? Maybe I'm just down my own rabbit hole there. But this was never wide-open country. This is stolen land. To believe the opposite is like believing John Wayne was an actual cowboy.

BGQ; 

I think that's really interesting because it is like the idea of a blank slate. The idea of free land. The idea of unpeopled land. That absolutely was false. And it was used to promote the settlement of the West. And I still think, to a certain extent, people actually believe in the erasure of Indigenous people, who are still very much a part of this landscape and this geography. I go back and forth between conspiracy theories and mythology and misinformation and what they all mean, and how they all tangle together.

LS:

I want to shift to ask you how much of your work do you feel like is driven by an inclination to find compromise with people that you don't understand or agree with? Or is it just fact gathering

BGQ:

I'm not sure it's as much about finding compromise. I mean, we’ve just gone through one of the most… I should say, it’s not past tense, we are going through an incredible period of polarization. I think that my motivation was mainly to get nuance. We were getting such versions of each other over social media and we didn't have opportunities for conversation because we weren't going to our kids' sports games. We weren't playing card games, we weren't doing book clubs. We weren't in proximity with each other. We really isolated into bubbles. And we got really angry at each other. I mean, there was so much to be angry about, and there were people who were profiting from our anger. 

And so my motivation for this book was really to go out and talk to people and, and kind of hear where they were coming from without having preconceived notions. And — I should step that back — I did have preconceived notions. I absolutely did. In one case in particular, um, I had a guy in Terry, Montana, which is a very, very, very, rural community in eastern Montana with a population under 600 people. When I first started talking to him — because that's what I did, this book is about interviews and trying to navigate what was happening in our country and our region — he said, ‘I've been radicalized.’ That was the first thing he told me. I have to say, I was taken aback.

I had spent time with the Bundys and been with people who have been truly radicalized. He joined the NRA, he was buying guns. I talked to him for a little while and, and it was hard because I was trying to pay attention, but I could feel myself sort of pulling back when he said that. And he said ‘are you going to take down my information?’ He said, ‘I've asked you three times. Are you gonna take down my contact information? I want you to come to my ranch.’ He invited me to his ranch, and I've now gone three times. I've taken my dad. We’ve become friends. And he told me, ‘if I'd never met you, I would've been scared of you.’

I don't know how to scale the work I've done. And I'm not saying that you should do that with everybody. I'm not going to spend the time of day with Christian nationalists that are trying to build homelands. But this guy was a conservative guy who had gotten wrapped up in this whole polarization narrative. He watched conservative media. He was living in this tiny town. He didn't know a lot of people who had different political beliefs. And when we started talking, even though we didn't agree on things, we really found that we liked each other. And there was something really nice about that. Because I'd been so angry.

“We're always gonna live among myths. It's just how we operate. But what I really wanted people to do is be able to be critical and unpack myths. Myths become toxic when they're not challenged.” — Betsy Gaines Quammen

LS: 

I noticed that you point out a few times in the book that you often find that you enjoy the time that you spend with people that you disagree with. Talk about that. What do you think is happening there? How do you find bridges? Is it just through conversation? Is it just showing up and saying that you're willing to listen?

BGQ:

Yeah, I'm not really sure. I did have really uncomfortable conversations. I remember when I went and spoke to the Bundy family, and I was at their house, and I was there for three hours, and I talked to them, and they were so friendly to me. I remember getting back into my car and feeling like, ‘oh my God, I have just been with very dangerous people who are influencing other dangerous people.’ There were those moments. There's one guy that I spoke to in Escalante, Utah, and he had started — well, he wouldn't let me call it a militia. But he had started a watchdog group — 

LS:

Oh, definitely doesn’t sound like a militia. [laughs]

BGQ: 

Yeah. Even though they had their exercises, they’d walk around with guns, and they showed up at the Black Lives Matter protest because they were certain Antifa was gonna be there. This was something that he had heard through social media. It was a very surface layer, and he hadn't had anybody challenge him on it and say, ‘no, Antifa did not show up in your town.’ you know? 

I had him read the chapter I wrote, where I proved him wrong — not in a mean way, but just in ‘well, no, you were inaccurate about this’ way. And he said, thank you, that chapter was fair. Each chapter that I write about each person, I've had them read. So there's nothing that they have not already seen. I really wanted it to be accurate. I wanted it to be fair. And I wanted them to have a mirror shown by somebody who was kindly saying, ‘not so fast.’

LS:

I think that this work of dismantling mythology, conspiracy theory and disinformation is the work of all of us at this point. These things are in people's faces on social media, on cable news. What tips have you learned along the way about dispelling falsehoods or even just having a conversation with people where you know you might be able to agree, or you might even be a little bit afraid of what they think.

BGQ: 

I've thought about this a lot because I think that as humans, we're a myth making species. So we're always gonna live among myths. It's just how we operate. But what I really wanted people to do is be able to be critical and unpack myths. Myths become toxic when they're not challenged. In looking at this book, I have such an array of things that I'm trying to cover. I mean, I'm, I'm talking about wolves and the myth around the big bad wolf. I'm talking about endless abundance — there is always gonna be enough water, there's always gonna be enough. Those are untenable myths that go back to frontier ideals.

I mean, the idea of free land and empty space is dangerous. It was 500 years ago, and it is today. I really just wanted to present these myths. Not to say we can't have a cowboy myth, but to say cowboys are not heroes that solve issues in little towns with guns. They actually were kind of hard on their luck guys who worked for cattle barons and barely had any money. And guns — when you went into many Western towns, you had to check your gun either with a sheriff or at a hotel. The myth of the cowboy's just not true. I wanted people to be able to say, we've seen a lot of cowboy movies, we've watched Yellowstone, But there's an inaccuracy there that it's incumbent upon us to understand.

LS:

Was there a catalyzing moment for you that you could talk about that inspired this book? I'm wondering if it was when you were doing the work for American Zion that that kind of gave birth to this new book.

BGQ: 

This is a companion piece to American Zion. The way that the Bundys were spinning their antigovernment sort of fight — it was just layered in mythology, much of which could be attributed to Latter-Day Saint early church theology. And yet there were still a lot of Western myths that they were embracing. I mean, the idea of Ammon and Ryan wanting to wear cowboy outfits in court to somehow engage the jury that way. I was seeing these sort of theatrical examples of cowboy mythology, and I was talking to a friend of mine and who is an editor at Mountain Journal, who said ‘I've seen the Bundification of a West,’ and I said, ‘I think we've seen the BundIfication of America.’ 

So how did these ideas go from Bunkerville Nevada to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, to the January 6th Insurrection? It was really important for me to take those pieces and put them together and stretch them out. But also, this was really a matter of me. After being cooped up and seeing how everyone was being absolutely saturated by misinformation online. I wanted to get out and just talk to people and really get a sense of how they had been impacted by this proliferation of misinformation. Were we beyond reconciliation? Was it broken completely or were there opportunities to still have conversations with people when we completely had different ideas of the truth? It was a post-truth era. I wanted to know what that meant.

LS: 

I feel like the first time I ever realized that people could have two versions of the truth was when I was covering the Bundy trial here and realizing when Ammon Bundy was testifying on the stand that either he was lying or is it, or there are different versions of truth for different people. It seems like you encounter that again and again in this book. But I read this and I wasn't freaked out. Was that intentional? Did you come away thinking this is solvable?

BGQ:

I felt more hopeful when I finished the book than I did when I started. I have hope for communities. I'm really concerned about national politics. It just continues to get more worrying. But I do feel like communities have the ability to come together. A mutual friend of ours, Kathleen McLaughlin, has talked about the disappearance of local newspapers and how that really impacts communities. All of a sudden you don't have local news, so you’re looking at national news, and everybody's focused on national news, and there aren’t common ground issues to talk about. There isn’t information about what's going on in one's community. And then during COVID, you didn't have those sports games or those PTA meetings, and that’s when you started to have the school board meetings. All of a sudden people were wanting to ban books. They were just fueled by misinformation.

I do see communities coming back together a little bit more. I’m really heartened by what's happening in Bozeman right now. We have a wonderful mayor that was just elected, even though we've had the same things all communities probably across the United States have had — these shrill, angry school board meetings about Critical Race Theory and people screaming about it. I do feel like there's opportunity for conversation on the community level. There’s the Take Back Idaho movement. In one of the most conservative states in the country, they’re making headway into pushing out extremists. Even though they are very conservative folks, they do not want extremists in their midst. 

LS:

I want to talk about fear. When I do events like this people will often ask, ‘what's the most scared you've ever been in a situation?’ Or ‘aren't you afraid to do this work?’ I often find those to be really gendered questions, but I also think it maybe doesn't get at how I personally think about fear. You and I have traded some stories of scary situations we’ve been in. But I want to take that further and ask what you think can be learned from facing one's fear and using it to gather information.

BGQ: 

I have had so many people ask me, are you scared? Have you been targeted? I mean, I’ve had some mean things said to me on social media. 

LS: 

Of course, who hasn’t.

BGQ: 

But I haven't really been scared considering, in retrospect, what I just talked about. But in the middle of it, I'm really trying to get an understanding to the best of my ability of what somebody is saying to me and what their motivations are. I think that fear is one of the biggest tools that is used against us. Did you see the Rachel Maddow interview with E. Jean Carroll? She and my husband David are very, very good friends. They lived together in Ennis, Montana when they were young writers. They became great, great friends. And so we've been really keeping in touch with her through this whole ordeal. We watched her on Rachel Maddow the other day and she is so gutsy. She's one of the only people that stood up to Trump. And she said, ‘I walked in that courtroom and I was terrified. And I looked at him and I thought, you are nothing. You are nothing.’ 

Stewart Rhodes — the head of the Oath keepers — preyed on insecurities. He preyed on people who wanted to be tough guys when they had dead-end jobs. He wanted to engage people who were sort of afraid themselves. I think it's really incumbent upon journalists and storytellers and writers and activists to be brave.

LS: 

It’s interesting that you bring that up about Stewart Rhodes and that idea of preying on individual insecurities. I think through some of the work I’ve done, I’ve found that entire communities can also be insecure and exploitable. That if a lot of outside media comes to your town, for example, and says it's on fire — as we have experienced a lot here in Portland — that may make the community more vulnerable if people start believing that misinformation to be true. Have you found that in your work — that communities can be as vulnerable as individuals?

BGQ: 

I do talk a little bit about Portland and the things that happened here during the Black Lives Matter protests. I also was looking at communities that had practiced traditional economic opportunities —mining, logging, and grazing. And, as we’ve seen, environmental regulations impact those economies. I saw communities that were angry and disenfranchised and have been preyed upon. I interviewed a guy, who's a real estate agent in Coeur d’Alene when it was a sawmill town and nobody could really make a living, and they had to leave. Then it became a place where people wanted to retire.

There was an influx of police coming up from LA to retire in and around Coeur d'Alene and Sandpoint. Then you started to have real estate agents specializing in Christian nationalist culture. Again, this had been a town that had the timber industry, and it dried up. People couldn't live there. People were angry. And then it got preyed upon because it was pretty and people felt like they could retreat there. And then this became part of the white flight from California, then the American Redoubt, which is a movement where Christian nationalists try to create like-minded communities in communities that have been emptied out so they can build their homelands. 

LS: 

Your chapter about wolves was one of my favorite parts of this book. I was struck by how this mythologizing of the West always loses to nature. Things like wildfire or this idea that you can come and wipe out a bunch of species and then a predator like wolf begins preying on livestock, and people get mad at nature. Talk about how nature is this unspoken element of a lot of the stories you're telling here. 

BGQ: 

That chapter really has to do with the myth of dominion. I talk a lot about biblical literalism in this book, and how we're living in this kind of European, Judeo-Christian, colonialist culture. There is this idea that if we're gonna build these agrarian operations and ranches, somehow we can subdue nature. And we have the authority to do it. The chapter deals with a conflict between a wolf-friendly rancher and his staff that had grown up in a Mormon community and really did not like predators. It turned out not only were there layers of understandings that were biblically-motivated, but they hadn't had a generation before them to tell them how to live with predators.

These kids grew up thinking that predators were awful. You had a guy from California come in and say ‘I wanna live with wolves.’ He didn't understand that wolves are predators. They do need to eat. And it's much easier to take down a cow than it is an elk. The ranch hands were really informed with this idea that we have dominion. Humans are the most important. And some of the ways that they went about controlling wolves were awfully inhumane. They ran them down on ATVs and crushed them. 

So I really tried to look at how wolves are complicated. They're gonna be difficult. But they're certainly not evil. I think that this chapter actually gave me appreciation for the fact that they are hard to deal 

LS: 

Well, I think all the, every single chapter in this book deals with something hard. How much do you feel like blame is a factor that we're all dealing with right now? Do you think we could realistically, as people, can get beyond blame and look toward reconciliation

BGQ:

I do think that there are real things to blame. In Montana, we have a very, very, very wealthy and exclusive community called the Yellowstone Club. People want to build wilderness retreats, and they are putting evermore pressure on elk habitat on the rivers. And they're getting away with it. And it's creating a housing nightmares. They want to go out to dinner and have wait staff and have people come clean their houses, and those people don't have places to live. You look at issues like that in terms of inequity, and there are problems that you can pin blame on.

The fact is that there are people who will spend a lot of money to do this because they want to have a piece of this place. And there are a lot of politicians that are permissive. There are a lot of developers that have ethics that are questionable. 

I think Donald Trump was really good at blaming anybody but himself. There's very little interest in self-reflection or owning a portion of contribution to some of our problems. And again, that's created polarization. There's a less likelihood now to work across the aisles to create solutions together because blame wins votes. 

I wanted to show that we just cannot ‘other’ each other. I know it sounds so simple, but it really is about being in a relationship with one another. Not with the bad guys, but with community members who may vote differently, but you still go over and say, can I borrow a cup of sugar?’ Or, ‘I'll take your kid to daycare.’ We can't let these influences make us hate each other.