The Crazies: The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West

by Amy Gamerman

Overview

A dazzling piece of narrative nonfiction about land lust and the American West, The Crazies tells the story of a wind farm that triggers a 21st century range war between a struggling fifth-generation rancher and the billionaires next door.

Most locals in Big Timber, Montana learn to live with the wind. Rick Jarrett sought his fortune in it. Like his pioneer ancestors who staked their claims in the Treasure State, he believed in his right to make a living off the land—and its newest precious resource, million-dollar wind.

Trouble was, Jarrett’s neighbors were some of the wealthiest and most influential men in America, trophy ranchers who’d come West to enjoy magnificent mountain views, not stare at 500-foot wind turbines.

And so began an epic showdown that would pull in an ever-widening cast of larger-than-life characters, including a Texas oil and gas tycoon, a roguish wind prospector, a Crow activist fighting for his tribe’s rights to the mountains they hold sacred, and an Olympic athlete-turned-attorney whose path to redemption would lead to Jarrett’s wind farm. A wildly entertaining yarn, the brawl over Crazy Mountain Wind would become a fight over the values that define us as Americans—and a window into how this country actually works. All the while, the most coveted rangeland in the West was being threatened by forces more powerful than anything one man could muster: dwindling snowpack, record drought, raging wildfires.

The Crazies is a Western for a warming planet, full of cowboys and billionaires and billionaire cowboys. But it’s also so much more. It’s an exquisitely reported, ruggedly beautiful elegy for a vanishing way of life and a bighearted inquiry into how you can love a place so much you risk destroying it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982158163
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	01/07/2025
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	29,177
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Amy Gamerman has written about real estate and culture for The Wall Street Journal for more than two decades. The Crazies is her first book.

Editorial Reviews

12/02/2024

A new kind of range war roils a small town in this intricate debut account. Wall Street Journal reporter Gamerman recaps a zoning and development controversy in the picturesque Crazy Mountains region near Big Timber, Mont. On one side were Rick Jarrett, a debt-saddled cattle rancher worried about losing his land, and Marty Wilde, a wildcat wind prospector trying to develop a wind farm on Jarrett’s property. Opposing them were billionaire oilman Russell Gordy and other wealthy ranch owners whose mountain vistas and property values would be compromised, they insisted, by having 500-foot-tall turbines nearby. The conflict led to lawsuits and a court showdown that spotlighted the muddled ideologies and class politics of renewable energy, with desperate but traditionalist ranch families haphazardly aligned with progressive environmentalists while squaring off against plutocratic NIMBYs—who championed pristine wilderness aesthetics over economic development, bemoaned the threat posed to eagles and bats by the turbine blades, and cited the potential human health risks of the whooshing noise and flickering shadows they produce. Gamerman’s lush prose evokes the imprint of the harsh, beautiful landscape on its more hard-bitten inhabitants. (“The wind was a steady force that was always working against you.... The wind was as much a part of Rick’s legacy as the land itself. People were buying wind? Well, goddammit, he had wind to sell.”) It’s a captivating saga. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

The Crazies has the sweep of The Grapes of Wrath and the storytelling power of Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain.”
—Rinker Buck, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Oregon Trail

“Like the ferocious winds that that roar down from the mountains and across the pains of central Montana, The Crazies has the power to leave you feeling walloped, whip-sawed, and wildly invigorated, all within the same breath. An epic tale of greed and resilience, this narrative that boasts all the page-turning compulsiveness of a true-to-life thriller.”
—Kevin Fedarko, New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Park

“A fascinating story about the new energy economy. If you want to understand why change does—or doesn't—happen in America, read The Crazies.”
—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction

“Empire of Pain, but for the Wild West.”
—Amazon Book Review, Editors' Pick

“A gripping tale of the struggle to preserve and exploit the American West, this riveting narrative reads like Yellowstone meets Matlock.”
—Tom Clavin, #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of The Heart of Everything That Is

“A fascinating page turner that would make a tremendous TV series. In a majestic Montana setting, a hard-headed cattleman, a high-rolling Vegas lawyer, a slew of fantastically entitled billionaires, a Native American activist, and other larger-than-life characters become embroiled in a battle royale over wind power.”
—Richard Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Dispatches from Pluto

“Excellent. A timely telling of change and inequality in the American West with reporting I trust, characters I’m drawn to, and writing that sparkles.”
—Anna Sale, host of the podcast Death, Sex & Money and author of Let's Talk About Hard Things

“Will drive readers to the book's conclusion in a page-turning frenzy.”
—New York Journal of Books

“An astonishing feat of reporting and storytelling, in the tradition of courtroom classics like A Civil Action. Highly recommended!”
—Nate Blakeslee, New York Times bestselling author of American Wolf

“An absolutely wild ride through the untamed frontier of American culture. Gamerman brings alive the modern West in a breakneck story that’s outlandish but also almost mythically familiar. It turns out that the old fights over the nature of American freedom aren’t over.”
—Christopher Leonard, New York Times bestselling author of The Lords of Easy Money

From the Publisher

2024-10-12
How a proposed wind farm set off epic struggles on one of America’s new frontiers.

This account of a modern land battle in the American West, told dramatically in the form of narrative nonfiction, explores “a story centuries in the making, with millionaires and billionaires, cattle barons and Crow warriors, prospectors and politicians, meat-packers and medicine men.” A coveted region of Montana stands at the center of the complex disputes described here, with competing factions pursuing sometimes incompatible aims: developing wind power, securing ancestral tribal rights, or reserving the picturesque landscape for private and commercial interests. The various scenes that play out suggest a reiteration of the nation’s frontier history, with lax regulation of aggressive instincts and enormous disparities in power. The author’s brisk, consistently engaging storytelling vividly sets forth the financial stakes involved for those who control the land and its energy potential and the cultural and personal stakes for those who seek to prolong traditional ways of life. We gain a memorable sense, at last, of what this territory has meant to its Indigenous inhabitants as well as waves of settlers in the Montana region. A major difference from the 19th century, as the book makes clear, is that this 21st-century Wild West faces an existential crisis as the climate warms and ecosystems threaten collapse. Old ideals about the inexhaustibility of the nation’s resources must yield to new understandings of sustainability. An enormous expansion of wind farms in places such as this, Gamerman notes, will be essential for a successful transition to a clean energy future and the mitigation of harms produced by exploitative practices. This Western narrative is, she convincingly concludes, crucially relevant to the entire nation’s fate.

A dynamic, informed, absorbing exploration of literal and figurative power struggles.

Kirkus Reviews