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[music] Some people must live in great spaces where the sky goes on forever. Where [music] everyone must bend to the land. Where to hunt, to fish, [music] to sleep under that big sky aren't activities, but a way of life.
Anthony Bourdain explores Montana's wide landscapes, Crow horse culture, stream access disputes between ranchers and anglers, and Butte's mining and labor history.
Key Takeaways
- Montana's land use is contested between private property rights and public access to rivers and open spaces.
- The Crow horse culture and relay racing show how animals and sport sustain identity and community.
- Butte's history reflects the rise and decline of mining and the enduring importance of labor unions.
- Conservation and hunting interests often overlap with, yet can conflict with, ranching and industry.
What the video covers
- Bourdain opens with Montana's vast skies and the land-bound way of life, tying it to Jim Harrison's writing and home.
- The Crow tribe's history with horses, from Spanish-introduced mustangs to their settlement in the Yellowstone River Valley, is explored.
- Kennard Realbird raises horses and represents the intense, dangerous sport of Indian relay racing, which builds courage and cultural pride.
- A traditional lunch of buffalo steak and juneberry pudding highlights food tied to ancestral health and identity.
- Bill Galt, a fifth-generation rancher, opposes the 1985 Montana stream access law that lets anglers wade public water across private land.
- Fishing guide Lee Kinsey and author David McCumber represent differing views on land use, showing the divide among Montanans.
- Butte, a former copper mining town, is shown through its history of hard rock mining, open-pit transition, and immigrant labor.
- Former state congresswoman Amanda Curtis discusses the union movement and workers' collective power in Butte.
- Dan Bailey of Pheasants Forever discusses conservation, hunting, and public access to open lands used for timber, grazing, and mining.
- The episode closes on Montana's identity and landscape, questioning what it means to live in the 'most awesome place on earth.'
Chapters
- 00:00Montana's Open Landscape and Jim Harrison
- 03:45Crow Horse Culture and Relay Racing
- 08:00Ranching, Fishing, and the Stream Access Debate
- 12:20Butte's Mining History
- 18:00Labor Unions and Workers in Butte
- 24:30Conservation, Hunting, and Public Lands
- 30:00Wildlife, Coyotes, and Montana Writers
- 34:00Reflections on Living in Montana
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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It was between here and those mountains that Cheyenne and Crow [music] battle took place.
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But I like it. It's very peaceful. Huh. What was it like 100 years ago? 200 years ago.
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Oh, not much [music] different. This was never forested. This is the dry side of the river cuz [music] the primary winds come from the west. Rain tends to blow over here. that brings the snow to the mountains.
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Legendary writer and poet Jim Harrison is [music] one of those people and this is his home.
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I took a walk through this [music] beautiful world. Felt the cool rain on my shoulder.
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Found something [music] beautiful in this beautiful world. [music] I felt the rain getting colder.
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[music] [music] I don't like the [music] [music] Am I as old as I am?
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Maybe not. Time is a mystery that could tip us upside down. Yesterday I was seven in the woods. A [music] bandage covering my blind eye.
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68 years later, I could still inhabit that boy's body without thinking of the time in between.
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It is the burden of life to be many ages without seeing the end of time.
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[music] Next time you turn off a news cycle filled with shouting bobbleheads, convinced that America is devolving into a moronic inferno, questioning the greatness of your nation. Maybe you should [music] come here.
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Here are your purple mountains majesty. This is the landscape that generations of dreamers, desperates, adventurers, [music] explorers, crackpots, and heroes fought and died for. It's one of the most beautiful places [music] on Earth.
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There is no place like it. Montana. Many have come to claim their peace over the years. But before the prospectors and explorers, there were the Plains Indians.
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The Absarakica have been master horsemen since they adopted Spanish introduced mustangs in the 18th century.
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General Blackjack Persian, he called the Native Americans the centaurs of the plains. Better known as the Crow, they were once part of the larger Hadasa tribe.
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Centuries ago, they split off on their own and wandered or were pushed by conflict with the Black Feet, Cheyenne, and Dakota until settling here in the Yellowstone River Valley. [music] That horse became everything to our people. Kennard Realbird grew up
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ranching and raising horses here at Medicine Tail Koulie which happens to be the exact spot where General George Kuster had the worst day of his life.
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Kennard raises horses for rodeo, for riding and for this Indian relay racing. The athletic ability on them kids are just amazing. The competition is intense. They travel all over to compete at this collarbone smashing, skull cracking, bones snappingly dangerous
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sport. Former allies and former blood enemies alike. Requires a lot of courage. I'll bet.
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And a high threshold for pain. It's representative of warrior mentality. [music] One rider, three horses.
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When they're lined up, gun goes off. It's like a spontaneous combustion. [cheering] Top speed is around 40 mph. And after each lap, the rider dismounts at full freaking gallop and leaps hopefully onto the next horse. Yes, it's as dangerous
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and difficult as it looks. The prizes at big events run into the thousands of dollars, but really it's about bragging rights and pride.
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being in motion, in rhythm, in time, and in one with that horse, they develop strength, of character. [music] And once they conquer that fear, that feeling of accomplishment is so great. When they walk back from that race, they have this
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sense of pride and selfworth is skyhigh. Now they've identified with their ancestors. [music] [music] Ken's wife Diane has prepared a lunch of buffalo steaks, potato salad, fried bread, and Indian [music] pudding made of juneberry stewed with flour and
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sugar. When I looked at my ancestors, they didn't have diabetes. They didn't have much cancer. They were very strong, durable people. [music] And I said, "Well, I'm going to start eating nothing but buffalo." Over the course of your life, [music]
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how much has this area changed? Quite a bit. We went and picked up a four-wheeler last Sunday. [music] Be the first four-wheeler on the place given those changes. What are the crow people going to be doing in 20 years, 30
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years? The horse going to play an important part in the culture still? I think so. Yeah. [music] Because what's a place going to be like without horses?
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I wouldn't want to be there. Who owns this land? Can anyone really own it? Who gets to use it? These are big questions that cut across [music] traditional ideological lines out here where they have real meaning, not theoretical meaning.
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All this belongs to one man. This guy, Bill G. Hey, we're about a half mile from the confluence of Rock Creek and the Smith River.
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Galt Ranch is 100,000 acres of grazing land, mountains, cliffs, and valleys. [music] There's also some of the best trout fishing on the planet.
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Bill, the water level on the creek looks good. This is Bill's friend, the author and journalist David McCumber. They disagree on land use, a major issue. Remember when you could do that and still be friends?
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Lee Kinsey is a professional outfitter who Bill leases some areas of his property to for fishing.
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Goal is to outwit a fish. I know. Amazing. All right, go ahead. Stop that tip high.
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That thing's straight up in the air. Good. Perfect. Bill's a fifth generation Montana whose principal business is raising cattle.
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He's no weekend cowboy. This is work and he pays a lot of attention to his land.
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And a big issue for him for just about everybody around here is the 1985 stream access law.
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Anybody that could access a stream via a public means could in fact use a stream, even if it was on private ground, as long as they stayed within the ordinary high water mark of the stream.
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Widely heralded by sportsmen and outdoor enthusiasts, the law did not go down well with land owners like Bill. Oh, got a something took a bite. Yep.
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He's still got a fish right in there, too. Oh, I see him. Perfect. Set. Whoa. The fish of the day. Nice brownie.
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All right. Woo. Beautiful thing. That's pretty. But I will not eat you today, my friend. Not today. [laughter] For lunch, a modest proteententric repast of steak. A Wagyu Angus hybrid bred and raised right [music] here on Bill's Ranch.
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There's the marbling and Wagu steak. That's what makes them good. Oh, that's nice. And it's pretty damn tasty. [music] I can tell you.
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So you hold an opposing view, is that correct? On access, the idea behind the stream access law that if you stay in the water, it's public. I agree with that concept.
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But where do you draw the line for private property rights? State were to pass a law that your restroom was public because the public needed it in your house.
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But just because this isn't my backyard doesn't mean it's any less mine than your toilet is yours. We still pay taxes on every foot of it. I'm an old school lefty, but I got to say I kind of
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completely understand the property owner's point of view here, there would be no ambiguity in my feeling. If if I inherited this land, it had been in my family for generations and I looked around at it and wanted to keep it like
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it is. If I were to go to a bar in town and I would ask, how [music] do you feel about this issue? Where would it break?
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What would most a fisherman or a landowner? Clearly divided right down the middle. But you know, a lot of people are going to say, "When I was a kid, I used to be able to go hunt and fish and and I can't
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now. stuff's getting closed off. I have some sympathy for that. Anybody that's not complying with stream access merely has to step into the stream when he hears you coming, right?
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The spirit of it is it makes sense. The spirit of it thievery. We own it and they took it and that's not stealing it without compensation.
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I think it's still here. This is about being a good neighbor, right? I mean, so if people ask nicely more often than not, you're going to say [music] yes.
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We do. used to be before stream access, we seldom required somebody to have permission if they just behaved themselves.
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After stream access is when the outfitters came into the world, not because we wanted to make money, but we wanted somebody there patrolling and policing it. The outfitters take care of it.
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A small stream like this can [music] only take so much pressure. It really can.
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And so we try to manage it, fish it responsibly. And if somebody wants to walk all the way from the Smith 5 miles up to here and do it legally, I say all the more power to them. What am I
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saying? [music] [music] At first look, you'd think this is the worst place on Earth. A [music] ravaged, toxic, god-forsaken hill threatened from above, riddled with darkness below. But you'd be wrong.
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but Montana. It is in fact heartbreakingly poignantly beautiful. The gall [music] frames seem eyes for only a second before it becomes clear why they're points of fierce pride for locals [music] for whom they signify and commemorate everything for Montanans. Many people consider it
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sort of a black eye. I happen to think it's sort of the essence of of Montana.
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Aaron Peret was born in but he's a professor of literature and a chronicler of the city's colorful literary history.
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There is something beautiful about this city right? Yeah. The enduring decay. Like in Detroit or a Buffalo or Cleveland, you can see the aspirations of the builders or the people who they were building for.
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As I've gotten older, I kind of think about it the way Europeans [music] romanticize those ruins in Greece and Rome. but is America's acropolis.
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In its heyday, but produced tens of billions of dollars worth of copper that built, [music] well, America that helped power the country, defend it against Germany and Japan. Without this hill, no copper wire, no electricity. At the turn
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of the century, Marcus Dy's Amalgamated Company consumed its competitors and became [music] Anaconda Copper. By the 20s, the company, as it was referred to, was one of the largest corporations in America, [music] generating staggering wealth by today's or any day's
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standards. People came from all over the world to make their fortunes here or simply for steady [music] work, a better life.
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Cornish, Welsh, a lot of Eastern Europeans, Croatians, Serbs, very ethnically diverse by Montana standards or by any standards.
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I would [music] say by any standards that kind of a micro version of New York City. Meterville was an Italian neighborhood and developed a tradition of supper clubs. Lydia's was opened in 1946 by Lydia Mitchetti in the four mile
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the valley below but so what is a supper club? I've heard about this tradition but I don't really understand what distinguishes a supper club from a restaurant.
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At least in Montana the supper clubs are a variation on meterville style. Involves this aipasto beginning. [music] sliced beets, sweet potato salad, salami and cheese, side salad, pickled peppers, [music] and bread sticks.
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Then when you actually get your entree, you get, oddly enough, ravioli or spaghetti or here both, but also French [music] fries.
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Ah, that may be unique to Montana. For entre, seared scallops, and white wine sauce for Aaron. Me noticing we're pretty much [music] landlocked around here, I go for the extra thick tenderloin of beef. Thank you very much.
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This is wacky. It makes no sense. It is somewhat bizarre to have scallops and French fries.
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Yeah. Meterville no longer around. No, it's not. It was swallowed up by the pit in the early 60s.
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For the first 70 years, it was hard rock mining, blasting and digging tunnels deep into the ground. By the 1950s, mining was moving increasingly to above ground, open pit, which meant fewer jobs and a bigger, more visible footprint. By
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1955, the Berkeley Pit had become the largest open pit copper mine in the world. As it expanded, it devoured Meterville and surrounding neighborhoods. There [music] was money down there to be dug out of the ground, and that's what had always been about
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from [music] the beginning. In 1983, the pumps that held back the groundwater from thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the city were turned off.
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The pit filled with 30 billion gallons of water. And as mine tailings and mineral refues contaminated the water, it became a giant, insanely toxic [music] lake of sulfuric acid. A monument to greed and heedless exploitation of the earth and something
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eerily [music] tragically beautiful. If you're still living here, you've got to have some kind of weird perverse pride in the pit.
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Absolutely. Correct me if I'm wrong. No, you nailed it. Obviously, the pit is an enduring emblem of that rapacious capitalist greed, but you also have people here who are proud proud of where they live. The history of but in many
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ways is, you know, this town that should have died but [music] never did. Part of that is luck geographically, but also the character of the people here. You know, they endured.
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As you might have gathered by now, this is a workingass town and unusual in that it's a union town. A proudly union town in an otherwise very red [music] state.
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But is the most interesting important town in America that nobody knows about. Bryant McGregor is the owner of the Silver Dollar Saloon in what was once but Chinatown.
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So we call ourselves but America. Amanda Curtis, a former state congresswoman, was born of the labor movement. She's a unionist, an advocate [music] for workers, and this solidly union city she calls home.
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When you got off the boat in Ellis Island, it said but pinned to your shirt. And it wasn't but Montana, right?
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It was but America. We were founded by European immigrants who came from socialist countries with all of these crazy socialist ideas.
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Would you say Montana in a stereotypical way is relatively socially conservative? Oh, absolutely. But is a labor town.
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Nobody knows anything about union history. You know, they don't teach it. When the country was at its peak, unions were at their peak. When wages were at their peak, unions were at their peak.
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That was then. This is now. This is the era of I got mine, Jack.
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That's what makes me different. It's not a I've got mine. It [music] isn't. It's it's truly not. Union is together.
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We've grown this community out of taking care of each other. You have to remember what it was like here for workers before unions. If [music] you can imagine, men worked underground for as little as $3 a day, 10 to 12-hour shifts, 6 days a week.
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Thousands died over the years in industrial accidents or from silicosis, [music] lungs ravaged by the airborne silica dust.
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You don't have any rights in your workplace unless you bond [music] together and have a collective voice. In a one company town, despite hiring assassins and strike breakers, but thousands of workers successfully managed to unionize, labor costs increased while copper prices slumped.
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Anaconda responded by moving their production increasingly south, way south, to Chile, where such impediments as labor laws at fair wages were more malleable.
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We serve as the example about what happens if you allow unfettered capitalism. But isn't there something beautiful about unpettered capitalism though? Because look, this this structure here, we powered we powered the entire world.
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As long as they're making that money in the goddamn United States of America first right?
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I feel I'm a patriot. And you're taking jobs away from America to export them overseas.
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You're not. You're not. And we've been talking about this for decades in this country, right? Or keep our jobs here.
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Yeah. [music] Time sinks slowly to the deepest [music] part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench.
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She's tired of light and there it's pure black. They say that but is a mile high and a mile [music] deep. And to get an idea of what they mean, you've got to go down.
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Down deep [music] into the hill. An intricate warrant of tunnels riddled through the rock and soil that lay beneath the city was flooded forever by water and darkness. The Orphan Boy Mine is one of the few remaining hard rock
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mines in the city. Today, it serves as a training facility for the Montana Tech School of Mines and Engineering.
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There's five generations of mining here. In order to survive and provide the resources for America, these people were super skillful.
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Jim Keane is a state senator and labor advocate who grew up working the mines of but how many miles of tunnel undert 10,000 miles of tunnels?
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10,000 miles. And I feel like this like this only smaller usually. Larry Hoffman [music] is a longtime mining engineer and instructor. Matt Prattinger is the new guy. A hard rock miner by day. He likes [music] to relax by spending his free time down here
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playing. I come mining for fun on my days off. [music] Okay. It's one of those things that just gets in your blood. You got a lot of pride in it.
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These guys like it underground. And even more, they seem to like drilling holes deep [music] into the rock face.
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You want a drill? Pull that out. Now you get to feel some where the weight's at on it.
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Oh yeah. Cool. to do that several hundred times a day. No, [laughter] it's good.
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[music] The community recognized the miner was at the top of the food chain. When I grew up, he was considered [music] just like a doctor or a lawyer because everybody knew he was the one making everything work. The other thing about
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mining is it's so intensive. I mean, you need engineers, you need guys running ventilation, mechanic or a carpenter or a pipe fitter. It's just such a diverse asset to have all these different types of people. That's what was so good about
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it. Mining was always dangerous. [music] But these men are proud of what they do and of the generations who came before them, [music] who built neighborhoods and schools and helped power the nation.
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They love their work. They raised their families. [music] They worked all the time. He was a destination with hopes and dreams of hard work leading to a better life.
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You know, the company's a son of a let's face it. But they were our son of a So, so you know that's just the way it was.
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The community worked to support the [music] people. [music] Here's the fun part. Cool. How many holes do you usually drill to make a round?
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Between 20 and 30. What is a round? This pattern has to be drilled out. And every time you advance the face, that is a round. You drill it, you load it, you blast it, you muck it, you bolt it, you
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drill it again. And that's a cycle. We're in the loading process right here. They call collar priming or top priming this hole, but still away.
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Back in the day, it was dynamite. But in the 60s, they started [music] switching over to this stuff, Anfo, ammonium nitrate, and fuel oil.
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Okay, so got everything charged up, loaded. Now we get to tim it. [music] This is kind of where I got hooked on mining. Soon as I set that first round off, it was how do we do another one?
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Good. Fascinating. This is where it all starts. All right. Right here. Everybody got everything out?
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4 seconds of silence. All right, everybody's good. Everybody's ready. Yep. All right. Fire in the hole.
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One, two three. That's Welcome to mining. That's deeply satisfying. Oh yeah. Very cool. Can we see the smoke?
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What is that vented out? Yeah. The smoke will start moving towards us. You got to get in the smoke.
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Oh yeah. Smells like victory. This is the smell of mining. We'll see if it all works as planned.
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That shock wave is awesome, isn't it? Yeah. This is like being an astronaut right now. We go in there and you're going to be the first person in the world to see what you're [music] seeing.
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All right. Did you break it? Yeah. Nice, huh? Happy with your work? I'm very happy with it. Everything came out just the way it should. Oh, that's another 6ft advance.
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And that is around. Beautiful thing. Yes, it is. I fell in love with the dark and the blowing things up and the people.
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The people's a big thing. You meet some of the most interesting people. [music] About onethird of Montana is public land. It was set aside for the people of the United States of America. Generally speaking, it is intended for [music]
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multi-purpose use. Timber harvest, grazing land, hiking, fishing, hunting, and mining. These open lands are important to [music] hunters and anglers like Dan Bailey. He's the Montana representative for Feeasants [music] Forever, an organization working to conserve feeasants and other wildlife
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through careful management. So, this is a piece of property that's owned by Feeasants Forever. It's open to public access. This is through Montana's block management system. We sign in, they collect all the tags, they know who's on the property.
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Today, me and my friend Joe Rogan are going after some delicious feeasant for dinner.
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Yeeha! Ladies and gentlemen, Joe is of course the voice of the UFC [music] and the host of the wildly popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. In recent years, Joe has become an advocate for the notion that you should whenever possible know where
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your food comes from. The connection that you have with your food when you kill it yourself, you it's just it's a totally different experience.
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I believe that if you choose to eat meat that you there should be a little bit of guilt and shame involved. Something did die. So, there should be a sense of loss and understanding right here. This is it. I mean, you know
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where your food comes from. That's as small circles you can get. [music] Hey, Tony. The three things we can hunt here are Hungarian partridge, which is a small bird in the big cubby, sharptile grouse, and then rooster feeasants. So, no, no hinn feeasants.
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I'll call out what it is. Yeah, I'm going to wait for you because I sure as hell wouldn't be able to identify.
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So, we'll get one person on one side of the jaw, one person on the other, and I'll run the dogs through the middle.
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Which way they're going to break, do you think? Anywhere. Could [music] be any. Any which way. We're hoping over us.
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[music] Hen hen. What happens if you accidentally shoot a hand? [music] You get in trouble for yourself.
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You've heard about the walk of shame. So really, you have a split second [music] to determine whether it's a shootable thing. Okay. Well, we're counting on you.
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[music] That's a hurster. I had a shot at that, too. That was an easy shot.
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Some days. Yeah, one of those days, huh? Public lands in Montana, we're fortunate we have a lot of them, but you know, they get a lot of pressure and so when you get one of these birds, it's pretty
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special. Public land hunting is always always a lot of work. In general, anybody and everybody can come out here and chase your [music] birds. though.
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There's a bunch of birds right there. Yeah. See them going through the trees there?
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I saw a bunch of feeasants just got up. Let's get serious about this. All right, I'm going take these dogs to the river.
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Rooster. Oh, nice shot, D. Got to get up on that bank. Who got it?
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Anthony got it. Nice. I missed that one over here. Good boy. Come. Bring it here. Come on.
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Good boy. Come on, Junger. Nice shot. Look at you. Bring it here. Come on.
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Drop. There you go. Montana rooster. Good eating bird. All right, man. Start plucking. With one in the bag, we meet up with the rest of our party to cook [music] and drink and eat. Lan Tonyie is a fifth
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generation Montana and an active conservationist. Hal Herring is a journalist for Field and Stream. The pheasant [music] is cooked two ways.
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Marinated in soy and fish sauce, Sriracha and lime, browned in butter, and buffaloed like chicken wings, or dredged in flour and Cajun spice, sauteed with garlic and brandy, then brazed a bit with stock and wild mushrooms. Collarded greens and bacon as
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a side serve as a nice cleanse. Man, these greens are good. And a bird's delicious. [music] Oh yeah, man. Amazing day.
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Eating it today. It was beautiful today. Why should people in New York or San Francisco who've never hunted? In what way does your access to hunting ground impact on this nation in a positive way?
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Why should they care? Well, it's not hunting ground. It's public ground. It's owned by the people of the United States of America.
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And I I just see our country. It's very nuanced and private property is bedrock, but public lands have worked.
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But you're talking big government stepping in and saying you we're taking all this land and we're going to protect it from exploitation by capitalists.
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Public land management is not perfect for anybody, but it's a path forward. It's not happening anywhere else in the world. And the reason that it came here is because we are such a great country.
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But as we move into the future, it's going to take everybody understanding how unique it is to America. To say that hunting and conservation are intertwined is an absolute fact.
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It is an absolute fact, but it is a really painful admission that we are the masters of this environment whether we like it or not.
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As thinking beings, we're the only ones in the food chain that understand the consequences of the imbalance. And therefore, we do have a right to take care of this thing and manage it. When it comes to animals that can alter their
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environment, we're unique. You know, I'm not a hunter. Obviously, we hunted all day today. If you take a you're a I don't. [laughter] My daddy didn't take me for the long run.
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That's what it is. You shot that feeasant. We're eating that pheasant. There's no closer connection to food almost than that.
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I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding by people that don't hunt or people that call themselves animal activists that we don't love the animals as much as they do. And that's just not true. We do what we do because
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we love mother nature. We love wildlife. We want people to enjoy it. You know, three of us, [music] we have decided to spend what we do for a living to protect wildlife and to protect access and to protect hunting heritage.
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They're fellow living beings that live in a very hard scrabble life. They're howling right now because they killed something. Whatever it is, they're letting all the other coyotes know and they're going to eat it right now. And that is what they do.
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You know, if you ever been out on an open body of water where you're just surrounded by the ocean or or the desert or here actually for that [laughter] matter right?
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You do begin to understand your place in the universe. Meaning, at the end of the day, I'm not that different from that pheasant I shot today.
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We're all in it together. The elk and me and the wolves. What we do to the world, we do to ourselves. We're all in it together.
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As the evening progresses, the bourbon flows and the fire burns down to coals. A late night vape with Joe and the earth seems to shift on its axis.
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Later, stumbling out of my tent, I find myself somehow no longer vertical, looking up up at a magnificent bewilderment of [music] stars.
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[music] [music] Livingston, Montana may be one of the prettiest and oddest towns in America.
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[music] It's also one of my favorites. Originally a railroad town, a place where cattlemen could drink and philander.
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Then later, a gateway to Yellowstone National Park. [music] In the 1960s, the surrounding Paradise Valley was a popular setting for Hollywood films, and local ranchers began to see a strange mix of creative types showing up. first to work on films
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but later to stay and play cowboy for real. Writers [music] like Richard Broadigan, Tom Mcuain, and Jim Harrison.
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Actors like Peter Fonda, Warren Oats, the notorious director [music] Sam Peckenpaw made Livingston their home.
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[music] [music] [music] [music] The Mint Bar opened in the 1920s and holds the oldest liquor license in Montana.
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Railroad workers used to drink here. Everybody drank here. I blew that picture of the bar right there.
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Yeah, that picture is this building during prohibition. It was a grocery store. My friend Dan Luren is a jack of all trades native son, a hunter, fisherman, and a key figure in the life of the town.
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I mean, this is a rough and tumble railroad cattleman town, right? Yeah. Why did they put a railroad stop here?
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It was Xar from Minneapolis and Xar to Seattle. It was kind of middle ground. 700 miles that way, 700 miles that way, right?
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Um, be who would exemplify the qualities that a prepundonderance of Montanas would aspire to to?
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The American Indian, the Plains Indian that lived here before a white man, cuz it was a tough a tough place to live, [laughter] you know.
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When's the last time you walked outside and you looked at those mountains and you said, "I possibly live in the most awesome place on earth." When When was the last time that happened?
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I I do. I never take this place for granted. Okay. It's one of the most beautiful places that I've been. And I like to enjoy the outdoors. Take my son hunting, right?
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You know, you know that moment when an animal dies and they look at you and there's a look in their face. I always interpret it as I'm very disappointed in you.
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Yeah. Well, as an older hunter, I'm feeling more and more remorse for the animals that I kill. And that's that's why I use every part of the animal that I can. I have respect for that creature.
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I always felt like, look, whatever this thing I shot, I will treat it the way I would like to be treated. I mean, you're going to shoot me. Please don't just leave me there.
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Yeah. Don't just rip my breasts out and throw my ass away. [music] Yeah, that's a country music song right there. [laughter] Don't rip my breast long [laughter] [music] time. She prepared us drifting through our lives like clouds riding her like the templates of horses.
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You know, if you're seeing northern lights and the thunderstorm in the east and wolves all at once, it's sort of nice.
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Do you know there are 90 billion galaxies? I get a little tentative when I hear that.
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Jim Harrison is a colossus, a legend, and the last of his kind. People forget children grow up making up stories and that's all I'm doing as an adult. You know, he is one of America's greatest poets.
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The author of 39 novels and books, many set in Montana, including The Legends of the Fall. He's a screenwriter and gourmet. [music] In his food memoir, The Raw and the Cooked, he chronicles many, many epic meals. He has lived a life
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that can only [music] be imagined. Dan is his friend and confidant, and the two have for years hunted and fished together.
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Here's to Here's to the game. His health prevents him from hunting, but not from enjoying a meal of spatchcock Hungarian partridge. I made a liver loaf with elk meat, elk liver, and pork fat, some spices. Going to have some beets.
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Quail in aspect. Quail on an elk carpacio and a morel and shantel risoto using a stock made from 10 lbs of roasted game bird bones and smoked trout.
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Smoked trout. Yeah, we caught these on the big horn. [music] You know, this is my problem in Montana.
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All this primitive country ass cooking that you local yals do. Oh, and Rosato with wild mushrooms. It's awesome.
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Every time I come here, is it are there others like you? Yeah, a few.
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That soda is gorgeous. Excellent. Jimmy, you want to grab a hun right here? Okay. And a couple of morelss.
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Is writing any way to make a living? No, not large. I try to explain this to people. You have to be either a monster of self-regard, uh, delusional, or just so lucky that I mean, the forces of the
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universe are aligned against you. Yeah. The only thing you can do is if you're just completely tenacious and right in disregard for every outside circumstance that there is.
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[music] Most people look in the mirror and say, you know, I'm getting old or something like that. But Shakespeare, the poet, said, "Devouring [music] time, blood thou thy lion's paws." That's a little better, huh?
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Nice view. I cannot complain about this. Yeah. So, what are you doing around half a year here and half a year in Arizona?
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Arizona. Real interesting culture. I ever present border patrol which I tease a lot. I'll be hunting in their border patrol plane flies over and I run under a tree like I'm hiding and then their vehicles start swarming on. They say, "Harrison, you
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asshole." I says, "I'm trying to keep you on your toes. [laughter] What was it about this place that that hooked you?
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Well, I'm claustrophobic, acutely so. So, Montana's about the best place you could live. You never feel hemmed [music] in any direction. You could go miles and miles.
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It had been very hot for 3 weeks. So I worked well into a cool night when at 3:00 a.m. a big thunderstorm hit.
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The lightning was relentless 200 years ago when the Cheyenne from the east attacked [music] the Absuroka in this valley.
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A group of the Styan Mormons, the wolves of heaven, warriors who [music] painted themselves solid yellow.
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[music] I want to be a yellow wolf of heaven. They disappeared [music] into the lightning.
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[music]
Topics:Anthony BourdainMontanaCrow tribeIndian relay racingstream access lawButte mininglabor unionspublic landranchingParts Unknown
