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

by Amy Gamerman

Overview

“Yellowstone meets Matlock” (Tom Clavin) in this dazzling tale of land lust and the American West, chronicling the rise and fall 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 most 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 five-hundred-foot wind turbines.

So began an epic showdown that would pull in an ever-widening cast of 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, even as the most coveted rangeland in the West was threatened by forces more powerful than anything one man could muster: record drought, raging wildfires, dwindling snowpack.

“An epic tale of greed and resilience,” The Crazies “has the power to leave you feeling walloped, whip-sawed, and wildly invigorated, all within the same breath” (Kevin Fedarko, New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Park). It’s an exquisitely reported, ruggedly beautiful western for a warming planet—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
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(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.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: Ranching It 1 RANCHING IT
February 20, 2019

Park County Courthouse

Livingston, Montana

• RICHARD JARRETT, having first been duly sworn, testified as follows:
• Q: Mr. Jarrett, did you decide to lease your ground to Crazy Mountain Wind?
• MR. JARRETT: I did.
• Q: Okay. And can you tell the Court why?
• MR. JARRETT: It’s tough to make a ranch, by itself, make ends meet.

Big Timber, Montana, population 1,650, is a railroad town. Like many small Western towns, it exists because someone put his thumb on a map and decided it would make a good spot for a train station. The Northern Pacific Railway Company laid track through the area in 1882, tracing the route of the Lewis and Clark Expedition along the Yellowstone. A year later, a railway surveyor platted a site at a bend in the Yellowstone for a town to go with those train tracks, and named it for the tall cottonwood trees that Captain William Clark had noted in his journal.

Big Timber’s rail yard forms the top line of the town grid: twelve principal streets crisscrossed by nine numbered avenues. Turn-of-the-century buildings of rough-edged sandstone and weathered brick line its tiny business district; modest mid-century bungalows and carports dot its cross streets. The town’s central axis is McLeod Street, a broad thoroughfare that dead-ends in the train tracks and a spectacular view of the Crazies.

When Big Timber was the wool capital of the world, a river of sheep flowed down McLeod Street every September, trotting back from summer grazing leaseholds in the mountains past the saloon of the redbrick Grand Hotel. The Grand still anchors McLeod Street, one of the few old buildings to survive the great fire that incinerated a third of the town in 1908. It sits opposite Cole Drug, Little Timber Quilts & Candy, and the Timber Bar, whose neon lumberjack lights up, red-faced, when the sun goes down. Many of the old storefronts are empty now. It’s been more than a decade since anyone played pool at the Madhatter Saloon. Big Timber doesn’t get as many visitors as the larger city of Livingston to its west, or the rodeo town of Red Lodge to its south. Mostly, it’s a place you pass through on your way to Bozeman or Billings.

But it’s a picturesque old town, with a weekly summer rodeo, huckleberry milkshakes, and some of the best fly-fishing in the state. Every summer, the Grand’s fourteen rooms fill up and the Sorry sign switches on, in loopy neon cursive, at the Lazy J Motel. All through the night, guests hear the whistle of Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) freight trains hurtling past town. Each train stretches a mile or more, a conga line of hoppers, boxcars, tankers, and gondolas loaded with coal, crude oil, plastics, and fertilizers. The sound of the heavy cars juddering over the train tracks fills the quiet streets for a minute or more, when the wind doesn’t drown it out.

The wind touches every aspect of life in Big Timber. It rattles plate-glass windows in their frames on McLeod Street, where tourists shop for T-shirts and tractor caps at Gusts department store and the old-timers gossip over coffee at Cole Drug. Golden eagles and red-tailed hawks use it to hunt, catching a gust as it bounces off a ridge and surfing it like a wave as they scope the prairie dog towns below. Townies joke about the wind, the way it will pluck the dollars from your hand and steal the lawn chairs from your yard. The uninitiated have been locked out of their vehicles when the wind slammed shut car doors left carelessly open.

But for cattle and sheep ranchers, the wind is an affliction. It sucks every drop of moisture from the soil, tosses thousand-pound bales of hay across pastures like tumbleweed, whips up brushfires into blazes that can consume thousands of acres in a night. Most people in Big Timber learn to live with the wind. Rick Jarrett sought his fortune in it.

Rick was a rancher. He never had the imagination to be anything else, he said. His people had ranched in Big Timber since 1882—cattle first, then sheep, then cattle and some sheep. Any Montanan who makes his living off livestock will tell you that what he really does is raise grass. Rick raised fields of alfalfa and orchard grass and timothy hay and forage winter wheat, to be cut and baled for the long winters. When spring came in April or May, he’d turn the calves and the mother cows out on fresh green grass. Everything came in cycles on a ranch, just as it had for Rick’s grandparents and his great-grandparents.

Being a rancher meant knowing how to do things. How to brand a calf, dock a lamb, break a colt. Mending a barbed-wire fence, cleaning out a clogged irrigation ditch so the water could flow clear and cold to your hay fields, knowing when to cut the hay and how many days to let it cure in the sun before you baled it—those were essential skills, along with a basic grasp of cattle futures, soil science, and veterinary medicine. You preg-checked your cows by sticking your arm up the rectum and giving a squeeze. If a calf got stuck in a heifer’s birth canal, you’d loop a chain over its fetlock and slowly tug it free. Then you’d get some suture thread from the floor of your truck and stitch up the torn mother cow.

Not every calf lived, not every heifer survived. You saw a lot of death on the ranch. So you adapted. You’d skin the dead calf, then tie its pelt to the orphan, fooling the bereaved bovine into suckling it like it was her own.

It took a lifetime to acquire such knowledge. Rick could kill a rattlesnake with a rock or a rein, drive a fence post, cook beef goulash. If it busted, he fixed it. Rick always had a bit of wire or baling twine on hand if a gate didn’t hook right or his suspenders snapped under the strain. When his tractor sputtered or the muffler fell off his 1987 Cadillac Brougham, he’d scavenge a spare part from one of the many junked vehicles that dotted his land. To be a rancher was to be a master of the work-around—to make do with what you had and get on with it. This was called ranching it. The corollary to ranching it was that your ranch looked like shit, because you never threw anything away. Rick’s ranch was an open-air museum of historic farm machinery in various stages of decay, with the serrated white and blue peaks of the Crazy Mountains for a backdrop. He called it the Crazy Mountain Cattle Company.

Rick’s connection to the place was earthy, sweat-stained, prideful. He took pride in the grass crops he grew on the land, pride in the cattle and sheep it sustained. The land gave him independence. He had the freedom to do what he wanted with it, to manage it how he saw fit, and that was more valuable to him than whatever he earned from it. Not everyone could find happiness in this life, one of punishing physical labor without much money or time off. But ranching suited Rick Jarrett. It wasn’t a hard life if you’d never done anything else.

One July afternoon, Rick took me on a tour of his hayfields in his side-by-side—an open-sided, two-seat Yamaha Rhino built for rough terrain, like a Hummer crossed with a golf cart. Ten minutes earlier, over coffee at his kitchen table, Rick had seemed listless, his hazel-green eyes dull. I was asking him questions about the past and there were gaps in his memory. “I’m not exactly able to recall stuff,” he said.

Now, at the wheel of his side-by-side, jolting across his domain at twenty miles per hour, Rick straightened and brightened like a cut plant dropped in a glass of water. We passed low fields of alfalfa sprouting tendrils of clustered purple flowers, and timothy hay whose nubby plumes nodded back and forth with the wind. The cows and their calves had moved to a summer grazing lease up on the Boulder River. Rick seemed infused with vitality by the sight of all the green things shooting up from his earth, their juicy vegetal fragrances mingling with the smell of warm dirt and sage crushed under the wheels of the Rhino.

“Holy shit, this is good!” he said as we drove through a pasture of orchard grass and smooth brome, so tall and lush that it completely concealed a startled deer, which leaped sideways and bounded away, vanishing again in the ocean of grass. “This’ll be cut for hay, this is way too good to graze. Goddamn, holy shit. It’s beautiful,” he exulted. “Isn’t it something? Isn’t it goddamn something?”

Rick was born in 1950 on land that his great-grandfather Ralph Jarrett, the son of homesteaders, bought in 1908. The ranch sits in the foothills of the Crazy Mountains on Duck Creek, which winds through its sandstone bluffs under a canopy of silvery-leaved cottonwoods and golden willows, fringed with chokecherry bushes heavy with purple-red berries that generations of Jarrett women boiled into syrups and jams. Duck Creek is both the spine of the ranch and its main artery, gushing with fresh snowmelt from the Crazies every spring. The Jarretts rely on the mountain snowpack for water to irrigate their hayfields and water their livestock. Their rights to that water date back to Big Timber’s earliest days.

In Montana, owning land doesn’t confer ownership of the water that flows through it, the rivers, creeks, and streams. Ranchers must own a deeded right to draw that water, and the amount they can draw is measured to the inch. Those with the oldest recorded water rights have priority—“first in time is first in right,” or so the doctrine goes. The Jarretts’ deeded water rights are older than many of the higher-elevation mountain ranches above theirs—the trophy ranches with the best views—because their land was homesteaded first, in the 1880s. The growing season is longer in the valleys, the land more productive, which once made it more valuable. They were practical in the old days, Rick said. Today, people valued the scenery more.

Rick grew up in a farmhouse with a Northern Pacific boxcar pushed up against one side of it that had been repurposed as living space for his grandparents. He was the youngest of four boys. A fifth brother, Donald, died in his crib in 1941 at the age of six months. An old photograph shows the four surviving Jarrett brothers in a row, tallest to smallest: Billy, Ron, Ray, and Rick, a grinning, tow-headed toddler. The boys are dressed in Western shirts with pearly snaps sewn by their mother, Betty, who has wetted down their hair and brushed it neatly to the side. Rick’s father, Bob, whippet-thin, his face shadowed by a white hat with a high, narrow crown—a gentleman’s hat, for special occasions—smiles down at his sons from the top of the line.

Bob Jarrett was a sheep man; he didn’t give a shit about cattle. He ran two thousand mother ewes on a ranch that sprawled across both sides of the Yellowstone River, some eight thousand acres in all. Rick’s mother, Betty, was a Halverson, the granddaughter of the Norwegian sheep rancher who built the Grand Hotel. She was small enough to sit on a child’s chair, with a short temper to match. They fought a lot, Rick’s dad and mom. Ranch life could be hard on a woman.

From the time he was five years old, Rick went everywhere with Bob, one small hand tucked in his father’s hip pocket. He tagged along when Bob irrigated the fields and tossed square bales to the sheep and drove the 1950 Studebaker truck high up Mendenhall Creek with provisions for the sheepherder, an old Norwegian who spent winters there in a humpbacked aluminum wagon with a sleeping bunk and a potbellied stove. The sheepherder would make them coffee on the stove, boiling the water with the grounds, maybe cut up some salt mutton. Rick sipped his coffee from a tin cup and felt like one of the men.

In the late winter, they sheared the sheep and Rick helped tromp the wool, stomping the gritty balls of fleece down into sacks with his feet. The Jarretts brought the year’s clip to the wool house, a brick warehouse at the railroad depot near the stockyards, where the sacks were weighed and numbered and piled up to the rafters. The younger, spryer ranch hands clambered up the towering bales of wool to scrawl their names—and the occasional bit of smutty graffiti—on the warehouse’s brick walls with the fat, ink-filled tubes they used to label the sacks. The names reached all the way to the wooden rafters, which had been salvaged from an older wool house that burned down in one of the fires that swept through Big Timber on a regular basis in the old days. All it took was a few sparks from a passing locomotive and a gust of wind to fan them into a blaze. The Northern Pacific Railway rebuilt the wool house in the 1880s, then built it again. Then built it twice more.

The town was busier, livelier, when Rick was a boy. Big Timber had a movie theater and a bowling alley, five churches, and five bars. Bob Jarrett would head for one of those bars, his little boy’s hand tucked in his hip pocket, when he wanted to hire a sheepherder for the summer. Bars were a good place to find sheepherders, many of whom were drunks in the off-season. Bob rarely drank at home, but once he’d walked inside a bar and gotten himself settled, he could drink for a day and a night. He drank to get drunk; that’s just the way it was. “I was too little, sometimes,” Rick said, remembering. But somebody had to get the tough son of a bitch home.

From first grade through eighth grade, Rick and his brothers attended a one-room schoolhouse on Duck Creek with robin’s-egg blue wainscoting and a Braumuller upright piano shipped by rail from New York City. The schoolhouse sat on the lower end of the Jarretts’ ranch near the county road, which had once been a stagecoach road, and a Pony Express route before that. Rick rode his horse to school, stabling him in an ancient barn, a relic of the saloon that once stood at the stagecoach stop. The Jarrett boys nailed a basketball hoop under its eaves. Over the years, the barn slowly crumpled to the ground, its weathered gray boards folding and splaying like a pack of splintery playing cards, till only the rusted basketball hoop remained upright.

On summer days, Rick rode over to the Plunge at Hunter’s Hot Springs—a giant concrete-bottomed pool fed by natural hot and cold springs a few miles west of the ranch. The springs were once owned by Rick’s Great-Great-Grandfather Mendenhall, part of a spa resort. The hotel burned to the ground in 1932 but the Plunge survived. A local couple put a steel Quonset hut over it and charged thirty-five cents a swim, with bathing suits for rent.

At Sweet Grass High School, Rick joined the Future Farmers of America and played linebacker on the football team, the Sweet Grass Sheepherders. By senior year, he was going steady with Susan Davis, who had smooth, dark hair that flipped up at the ends and an assured, wide-set gaze framed by a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. Susan was smart—she and Rick were in the National Honor Society together—and she was bound for the University of Montana after graduation. At the senior prom, Rick and Susan danced to music by a local band called the Tijuana Trash. The theme was “A Taste of Honey.”

The Jarrett–Davis wedding was announced in the Big Timber Pioneer that July. The ceremony was held without delay, as soon as the eighteen-year-old groom had returned from driving the sheep to the Jarretts’ summer leasehold in the alpine meadows of the Absaroka National Forest, Hellroaring division. The bride, who kept her glasses on beneath her silk illusion veil, wore an empire-waisted gown; she was pregnant with the couple’s first child, conceived the night of the Taste of Honey prom. Susan always believed that Rick got her pregnant on purpose, to keep her from leaving him. She’d never go to college.

Rick and Susan’s son, Jay, was born the winter of Rick’s freshman year at Montana State University in Bozeman. Susan cared for the baby while her young husband took classes on the care of sheep and swine, wool science, and soil fertility. He was in the second semester of his junior year when Betty called. It was late winter, just before the ewes started dropping their lambs, a grueling season. The pregnant ewes had to be fed, watered, and watched around the clock in the battering winds gusting off the Crazies. Betty told Rick that his father couldn’t manage another lambing season on his own and needed his help.

Susan had different memories of that time. Rick’s older brother Ron had moved back to the ranch with his wife by then, she recalled, and Rick was afraid that he’d be cut out. Rick wanted that ranch—he always had. He was just a few semesters away from completing his college degree, but after his mother’s call, Rick dropped his classes and went home. He paid $5,000 for a trailer house, twelve feet wide, and towed it next to the farmhouse with a tractor. He never left the ranch again, never looked back or considered what might have been. Rick and Susan’s second child, a daughter they named Jami, was born that September. Rick was twenty-one. “I was a happy boy,” he said.

Rick worked on the ranch alongside his father for the next four years. On September 15, 1975, Bob went into Big Timber. Mid-September was when the Jarretts sold their lambs, so Bob had money in his pockets. Most likely, he’d been drinking for hours by the time he got in his 1967 Ford and pulled onto the highway. A little past 9:00 p.m., his truck veered into the opposite lane and collided with a double-trailer truck hauling diesel fuel. The semi plowed Bob’s truck 150 feet down the highway before tipping over, fuel spilling from its ruptured tank. Bob was killed instantly. He was buried in Mountain View Cemetery a few days later, beneath a headstone carved with the jagged outline of the Crazies and a pair of soft-eyed ewes.

It’s a common misconception that ranches like Rick Jarrett’s are inherited, passed down from one generation to the next like family silver. They’re not. Before an agricultural property changes hands, the market value of the land, livestock, ranch buildings, and equipment are assessed so the family can arrive on a fair price. If the parents are alive, the adult children usually have to buy them out. Ranchers don’t have 401(k)s. Most spend their lives plowing every bit of money they have back into their agricultural operation. Their assets are the land and the livestock. If the kids want to take over, they have to pay their parents enough to retire on. Then it’s up to them to figure out how to divide the land among siblings, or come up with the cash to buy each other out.

Rick was twenty-five years old when he buried his father. Youngest sons rarely got the chance to take over the family ranch, but Rick’s older brothers had all left for more lucrative professions by then, like teaching high school and working for John Deere. Rick was the one who stayed. The brothers agreed that Rick would manage the ranch. But to claim title to the place, he’d have to buy out everyone in his family, starting with Bob’s mother, Edna Jarrett, who hadn’t been compensated for her ownership interest in the ranch at the time of his death. Paying off Grandma, that was Rick’s first headache. Then he had to take care of his mother, Betty.

The four Jarrett brothers formed a partnership and drafted a promissory note, agreeing to pay Betty a principal sum of $209,500 over the course of twenty years, with interest—an amount far below the fair market value of the ranch, which was assessed at $568,000 at the time. Betty, who gifted the difference in the ranch’s value to her sons, moved to town and went to work behind the lunch counter at Cole Drug.

For a time, Rick’s brothers shared in the ranch’s profits. Then they started breaking off pieces of land. Bill took an alpine parcel of land high on the Boulder River that generations of Jarretts had used as a stopping place for the sheep on their way to their summer grazing lease in the Absaroka Forest. At the time of Bob’s death, the Jarretts still owned nine hundred acres of land on the southern side of the Yellowstone, on Mendenhall Creek. That land was sold, which went a ways toward paying off Ray and Ron, though not completely.

By 1985, the ranch was down to about two thousand acres, a fraction of its original size. That’s the way it went with family ranches: they shrank with each generation. Rick ran several hundred head of Black Angus cows and kept a small herd of sheep. People weren’t eating as much lamb or wearing as much wool as they once did, and beef had a better profit margin. But Rick wasn’t earning enough on his cattle to make his payments to his mother, settle accounts with his brothers, and clear a profit, not even when beef prices were high.

The beef industry is dominated by a handful of multinational meat-packing giants, companies like Cargill, Tyson, and JBS, which set prices and control distribution. Beef prices are affected by everything from the weather and disease to geopolitics and export policies. Small ranches like the Crazy Mountain Cattle Company have no control over any of that stuff. Rick got one payday a year—the day he sold his calves. Then they became part of Big Ag. The meat-packers shipped them off to sprawling feedlots across the Midwest to bulk up on corn and other grains, to give the beef the marbling consumers expected. Then they were slaughtered, processed, packaged, and sold.

The buyers and packers were the pricemakers; cattlemen like Rick were the price takers. Options for increasing his profit margin were limited. You couldn’t starve money out of a cow by cutting its feed. You couldn’t increase the number of livestock you grazed without overtaxing the land. You could only grow so much grass, and in a dry year, you might not be able to grow enough to feed your herd. Then you’d have to buy feed or sell off your cows at a loss. Ranching was a starve-to-death industry, Rick reflected. The only people who were successful at it were those who came into it with a big enough cushion of cash not to care how much they lost.

Rick and Susan were good at being poor; they didn’t know any different. Susan drove a school bus and worked part time as a school clerk to bring in more money. She raised a small herd of goats and sold the offspring to kids for 4-H projects. Then she found a job in town, working for a financial planner. Once a month, the young ranch wives would get together to drink coffee and share their troubles. “We used to talk about what a myth the family ranch was—that it was this wonderful family thing,” Susan recalled. Family ranches were riven by jealousy and conflict; that was the truth. The Jarrett ranch was no different from any other. “Everybody fought everybody,” she said.

Susan described Rick as a controlling husband who could be abusive, slapping her or shoving her against a wall when he got mad. He was unfaithful—Susan was sure of it. “He’d take a cow to Billings at eight o’clock in the morning and not come home till six or seven at night,” she said. Selling a cow didn’t take that long. There was a strip joint off the highway to Billings called Shotgun Willies. Word got back to Susan that everyone at Shotgun Willies knew Rick by name.

Susan divorced Rick in 1992. Jami and Jay were both married by then—ranch kids marry young. Once the kids were gone, it was time for Susan to fly, was how Rick saw it. So, she flew. “She got tired of me,” he said. “She never really did feel a part of the ranch like she should.”

Susan got half the money they had in savings and investments. She didn’t ask for more than that, out of fear that the ranch would have to be sold to pay her divorce settlement. Despite everything she’d come to believe about the hollow myth of the family ranch, Susan wanted it to be there for Jay and Jami.

But Rick was struggling to hang on to the place even before the divorce. He confided his money troubles to a friend—Tim Owen, the financial advisor Susan had worked for. Owen would come out to the ranch and they’d shoot gophers together. Owen told Rick that if he wanted to keep ranching, he’d better find a partner. As it happened, he had someone in mind: his client Penelope Bell Hatten. Hatten, who originally hailed from Wayzata, Minnesota, was independently wealthy. Her great-grandfather James Ford Bell founded General Mills. Penny spent half the year in Bozeman, where she owned a stable and sat on the boards of various museums and schools. Apparently, she was interested in investing in a family cattle ranch.

For a wealthy person, owning an agricultural property can have certain financial advantages. A struggling cattle ranch makes a great tax write-off. But that was not what motivated Penny Hatten to buy a 50 percent stake in the Crazy Mountain Cattle Company, which she did shortly after she met Rick and decided she liked him. “It was never about making money; it was just about preserving some of the history of Montana,” Hatten told me. “It was about maintaining the integrity of a true ranch.”

Penny’s husband and son went hunting on the ranch sometimes, but that was pretty much it. She left the decisions about the Crazy Mountain Cattle Company up to Rick, which suited him just fine. She didn’t take any profits from the cattle operation, but she didn’t pour money into it, either. Her investment was a one-time influx of cash that enabled Rick to pay debts to his various family members and go on doing what he’d always done. But even though everything still looked the same, the ranch was transformed. On paper, Rick now owned just half of the place.

In between irrigating hayfields and tagging calves and worming sheep, he began exploring other ways to make money—to diversify. In 1995, he got married again, to a woman named Linda who worked at Big Timber’s assisted living facility. After Linda quit her job and moved into the farmhouse, Rick thought she could manage a new business venture he’d come up with: a game bird preserve for sportsmen. Rick raised the pheasants—“peasants,” he called them—in a pen. When a sportsman booked a day of bird hunting with his dogs, Rick would go into the pen with a butterfly net, catch a pheasant, and tuck its head under its wing, rocking it back and forth until it went to sleep. He’d repeat this process several times, planting the drowsy pheasants under tufts of sagebrush around the coulees and hills of his ranch. This proved time-consuming and not very profitable, and fizzled out after a few years, along with his second marriage. Linda never took to the peasants.

In the late fall of 2001, Rick was working in his machine shop by the barn when a shiny truck wended its way down the dirt road along Duck Creek. It was too clean to belong to a rancher. A man got out, shook Rick’s hand, and told him that he was a ranch broker. He worked with out-of-state clients who wanted to buy ranches. Had Rick ever thought of selling? He had a wealthy buyer who’d be interested in the place, willing to pay a lot of money.

Rick wasn’t surprised. Rich people—famous rich people, even—were nothing new in Big Timber. The place was like a Hollywood fantasy of the West. Gene Autry, Hollywood’s singing cowboy, bought a ranch just north of Big Timber in the 1940s and raised quarter horses there. In 1991, the Sundance Kid himself, Robert Redford, showed up in Big Timber to shoot A River Runs through It. Norman Maclean’s fly-fishing novella was set in Missoula, but Big Timber was a lot more photogenic.

Sleepy as the town was, you might spot Michael Keaton eating a hamburger at the Grand, or bump into Tom Brokaw signing his latest book at Cinnabar Creek, a giftshop on McLeod Street. Both men owned big ranches nearby, along with a lot of people you hadn’t heard of—big players from the worlds of finance, like David Leuschen, a private equity billionaire who bought an old dude ranch in the Crazies and turned it into a private playground for his family and friends.

Most of the year, these ranches were unoccupied, unless you counted the ranch managers, caretakers, cow bosses, and hired hands that maintained them. Then the summer would come, and with it, a stream of Learjets and Gulfstreams screeching low over the Crazy Mountain Cattle Company on their flight path into Big Timber’s tiny airport or Livingston’s slightly larger one.

Now it seemed that a millionaire had a hankering for Rick Jarrett’s land. Rick listened, stony-faced, as the ranch broker made his pitch. It wasn’t a long conversation. Rick was dedicated to keeping the ranch in one piece for his kids, so fuck no, he wasn’t interested in selling. He watched the man drive away in his shiny truck, and thought no more of it.

He had a new girlfriend by then, a dynamite lady named Karen. Unlike Linda and Susan, Karen was passionate about the ranching lifestyle. After she was laid off from her job as a hospital administrator, she traveled to Spain for an international conference on women and rural economic development. That’s where she learned about European farm holidays, and how people would pay good money to stay on farms and help pick olives or crush grapes. Once Karen got back to Big Timber, she and Rick sat down at the kitchen table and began planning a new business, hosting working-ranch vacations for paying guests. Tourists who wanted to get up close and personal with a genuine cow-calf outfit could do it right there, at the Crazy Mountain Cattle Company.

Rick and Karen converted an old engine room into a bunkhouse, cleaning out the hives that bees had built in its walls and hanging curtains on the windows. Their first official guests were Penny and her son Max, who visited during lambing. Max helped brand the newborn lambs with sheep paint and funneled ewe’s milk down the throats of the ones that were too weak to suck. “Lambing Camp,” Rick called it. Max got sheep paint on his new coat, but Penny didn’t seem to mind. After that, Rick and Karen put the word out to the state’s tourism board and invited travel writers to stay. Sunset magazine ran a glowing feature on the joys of reconnecting with one’s inner cowboy at the Crazy Mountain Cattle Company. Paying guests soon followed.

Rick took to the role of ranch host with gusto. He read in a travel magazine that you had to give your guests a truly memorable experience, something unique that they’d tell all their friends about, which is how he came up with the Tour. He’d drive new arrivals around the ranch in an old Suburban, pointing out the sights. At the climax of the Tour, he’d pause at the lip of a flat-topped hill overlooking the Yellowstone River, giving his passengers a moment to appreciate the view. Then he’d put the truck in gear and careen straight down the side. Sometimes, he’d pretend that his brakes had failed. A delighted teenage visitor compared the Tour to Disney World’s Tower of Terror.

Otherwise, the roster of recreational activities at the Crazy Mountain Cattle Company was pretty much whatever work needed doing. Bunkhouse guests trotted along on horseback while Rick moved cows from one pasture to another, pulled on hip-high waders to help flood-irrigate his fields, and squirted worming medicine into the mouths of his sheep. Sometimes, they got to watch him castrate a horse. Rick enjoyed his visitors, by and large. But it was a lot of work, saddling up horses and packing lunches and making sure there was half-and-half in his refrigerator for their morning coffee. Guests from Japan complained about dead flies in the bunkhouse.

One day in 2004, Rick was in his truck when a feature on wind farms came on the radio. There was a market for wind, the radio host said, and Montana had some of the best wind in the country. Montana’s winds blew hard and steady all winter long, providing a reliable form of renewable energy that could heat homes without the harmful carbon emissions that were heating up the planet. Rick snorted. He didn’t believe in climate change. Heat and drought came in cycles same as they always had; that was nothing new. Montana had always been a dry goddamn place. Scientists predicted all kinds of things. You had to let the ball bounce a couple of times before you saw where it was going to go.

But when Rick heard how much money these wind farms were earning for landowners who leased their ground for the turbines, he turned up the volume. Millions of dollars, for wind. Rick didn’t know what to believe about greenhouse gases, but he knew all about wind. The wind was a steady force that was always working against you. It dried up the soil something terrible. It took a cold day and made it even colder, turned a summer lightning strike into a brushfire that could destroy a season’s grass crop in a few hours. The sandstone hills of his ranch were honeycombed with holes carved by its relentlessness. 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.

Editorial Reviews

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

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

“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

“It’s impossible to say what’s more compelling about this marvelous book: the story itself—an epic tale of greed, resilience, and hypocrisy playing out against the backdrop of one of the most stunningly gorgeous pieces of real estate in the entire world—or the skill with which Amy Gamerman has masterfully woven a set of complex themes into 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 Western drama with enough twists, clashes, and colorful characters to rival Yellowstone.”
—Cowboys & Indians

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

“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 frontier and the nature of American freedom aren’t over.”
—Christopher Leonard, New York Times bestselling author of The Lords of Easy Money

“[A] tale of greed and grit.... If you didn’t have an opinion about billionaires in this country right now, you surely will after reading this book.”
—The Colorado Sun

“Ms. Gamerman... conveys the craziness of this saga with empathy and vivid detail.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“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

“Amy Gamerman’s riveting narrative reads like Yellowstone meets Matlock. This gripping story of a dispute over land rights is also a tale of the ongoing struggle to both preserve and exploit the American West.”
—Tom Clavin, #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of The Heart of Everything That Is

From the Publisher