How Triumph And Tragedy Shaped The Story Of America

In this episode of Writing the West podcast, Paul Andrew Hutton sits down to discuss his new book, The Undiscovered Country. Drawing on a lifetime of research, Hutton threads seven iconic lives through 150 years of frontier transformation—balancing myth and memory, tragedy and triumph—from Braddock’s Defeat to Wounded Knee. We talk popular vs. academic history, the surprising friendship of Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill, and why the story of the West is inseparable from the story of America.

Transcript

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.) 

Cowboys & Indians: What first drew you to the American West as both a storyteller and a historian?

Paul Andrew Hutton: Well, it’s all Walt Disney’s fault. In 1955, there was a television show called Davy Crockett, a three-part little miniseries way ahead of its time, and it’s not a very exclusive club to have been hooked by that. It was the first baby boomer craze, and every kid had a coonskin cap and was singing “Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.” And that really hooked me on history as a kid. I mean, I was six years old, and it just absolutely hooked me on the West—so Davy Crockett, The Alamo, and then, well, who is Andrew Jackson? What’s the whole western movement about? And I kind of knew I was always going to be doing something with Western history. I played with the idea: oh, I should be a lawyer, and then I can get rich, retire at 50, and write Western history. And then I decided, you know, why don’t I just be a college professor? And I liked college so much, I decided to do it for 48 years, so it worked out well.

 C&I: Did your career as a professor lend itself well to your work as a historian and author?

Hutton: Well, obviously, in the university world you are promoted based on publications and awards and that sort of thing. And my very first book, Phil Sheridan and His Army in 1985, which was based on my dissertation that I did at Indiana University, won all kinds of big academic prizes and also won the Western Writers of America Spur Award. So, I kind of was bridging that gap from a very early point in my career. Now, in the academic world, doing books on Davy Crockett and Buffalo Bill and General Custer is not usually looked upon with favor. Fortunately for me, though, Sheridan’s success gave me the opportunity to go off in different directions. In my whole career, I’ve really striven to write for a popular audience as well as take care of the academic business. And part of that was I ran the Western History Association for almost 20 years as executive director and ran Western Writers of America—was also president of that organization. So, I’ve always been deeply involved in the academic world and with Western history, and certainly that allowed me to go off in different directions into what we call popular history, which I see as a very positive term. All I want to do is communicate with people, and I taught at public universities—that was our job. I’m communicating with thousands of students. Well, I want to do broader outreach, so that’s my goal.

C&I: Your latest book, The Undiscovered Country, comes right after The Apache Wars. How does the new book build on that previous work, and how does it differ for your readers?

Hutton: Well, it’s a very different book in that it’s much broader. The Apache Wars, of course—which was very successful, and which your magazine did a wonderful critique of, which I think really helped sales—really focused on the Southwest, really focused on the Apaches. And I’ll confess that the reason I got that opportunity and got the opportunity to really move out of academic publishing into the New York world of publishing was because of the success of S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon, which was just such a blockbuster and still sells well today. And suddenly, that was really kind of initiating this Western boom we’re experiencing right now, thanks to Taylor Sheridan. 

In fact, Taylor Sheridan, I just was reading, is going to be making Empire of the Summer Moon into a movie. So, it all kind of ties together. And so, Gwynne’s success kind of got the folks in New York to think that maybe there is something to what’s going on out in the West—they thought the West was New Jersey, of course. And I think that really helped me sell this book to my publisher. And it’s doing phenomenally well. It was 12 on the New York Times bestseller list, sold out the first printing. In fact, the good news was it sold out the first printing; the bad news was there were no books.

So, there’s nothing on Amazon—the biggest bookseller in the world. Barnes & Noble still has copies, but by the end of the week there’ll be copies again. Pretty exciting.

C&I: You spent a lifetime in the world of history and especially of the West, but this one, like you mentioned, covers nearly 150 years of history. Was there a lot of pointed research that had to go into this one, or were you pulling on a lifetime of research here?

Hutton: I really was pulling on a lifetime of research. I don’t want to say it’s a wrap-up book—I am getting a little long in the tooth—but I think I might have a few more words in me that I could spill out to the public. But certainly, it is pulling together the threads of research that I had done my whole life. And of course, I’ve taught Western history all these years. I’ve written hundreds of articles, done hundreds of television shows, and published widely, and this is a culmination of all of that. There was an old book—by “old,” I mean 1900, I think, is when it was published—called The Way of the West by Emerson Hough, the fellow who wrote The Covered Wagon and The Story of the Outlaw. And Hough talked about Boone, Crockett, and Carson, and used their lives to kind of tell the story of the West. And I thought, what a great concept. 

And so that was the genesis—along with Walt Disney—of this book. But I felt, well, I want to tell the whole story, and I want to tell the story all the way from colonial times to 1900, and I want to tell both sides of the story. So, I added Red Eagle—William Weatherford of the Creeks—Mangas Coloradas of the Apaches, and of course some of that’s pulled from The Apache Wars, and then Sitting Bull, along with Boone, Crockett, Carson, Cody. 

C&I: Speaking of the seven protagonists who are the threads for this narrative that you’ve weaved together: Why these figures? Obviously, you kept the original three from the 1900 work, but why these seven, and how did their stories help you connect to the West in a narrative way?

Hutton: I wanted to pick individuals that worked for me both geographically and in a chronological sense. And so, they were kind of tough choices. I did want to pick notable figures—thus Boone, Crockett, Carson, Cody. I mean, at one time everyone knew their names, sort of like the old Cheers song, but do people really know anything about them? 

My daughter was just visiting over the weekend from Alaska, brought her boyfriend with her. And so, we’re going over to the museum so I can show them my museum, and I say, “What do you know about Buffalo Bill?” to this young man. “Well, wasn’t he involved with the circus?” So, you see, there’s a lot of missionary work to do out there with the public. And I think—and of course this is a major theme of the book—the story of the West is the story of America.

Certainly, the first era of American history up to 1900. Then things change, obviously, very dramatically—and there are other major threads: slavery, the Civil War, for heaven’s sake. But even in the West, it is critical to the whole slavery question. It was the expansion of slavery into the West that was the spark that actually fired that cannon at Fort Sumter. So, I felt here was an opportunity—and some reviewers may think it’s old-fashioned—because I, of course, evoked the name of Frederick Jackson Turner, who I think is America’s greatest historian, kind of my hero as a historian. And his idea that the story of America was the story of the West, and that what’s unique about our character as a people—because we’re such a hodgepodge from all over the world—was shaped by the Western experience and the rebuilding of society in relation to the environment over and over again on successive frontiers. And certainly, I think that shaped much of our national character.

C&I: You mentioned a couple of your bookends here. I think we start your timeline with Braddock’s Defeat in the mid-1700s, and the other bookend obviously is Wounded Knee in the latter half of the 1800s. How did you decide on those two bookends for your story, and why not pull it a little bit further back or set it a little bit further into the 20th century?

Hutton: I did want to use those two events as bookends, and I thought the contrast between the two—where at one time Native peoples and their allies, the French, had the upper hand, and then by the end, of course, we had the very sad events at Wounded Knee where everything has changed—and it’s a last desperate… it’s not even an uprising, it’s almost a protest against what is happening on the reservation. And so, I thought those were good bookends. And of course they’re also exciting. And one of the main points that I tried to really work on and craft in this book is so it would be a page-turner. It would be an exciting read. I want people to enjoy history—and I love history—and I want to share that with others and make them see how, also, history is relevant. I’m not beating that drum too much, but it’s all through the book.
It’s the subtext of the entire book. 

I was anxious to start early because I believe in the frontier movement. And so, it is a movement—from the Appalachians westward—and it also showed how integral the West—Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee—was to the creation of the nation. And that’s why George Washington kind of took on a life of his own, and I had no intention of making him a major character in the book until I started writing. And novelists always say this—it takes you over—but I think that works for history, too. When you’re trying to write popular history, reach out, and make the story flow, a character can come along and really seize the moment. 

It seemed to me that to show the connection of the Founding Fathers—and I use Franklin as well—and how interested they were in the West puts that story front and center in the American story. And then Daniel Boone becomes, of course, the great western hero of the Revolutionary War, and he’s at Braddock’s Defeat. And so that was important to me. That’s my thread to tie these lives together and in the chronology of the Western story.

C&I: As you’ve mentioned Boone and Crockett a few times—they’re so romanticized in our popular culture, they’re almost mythic at this point. But others—Mangas Coloradas, Red Eagle—are less well known. How did you approach telling their stories with equal weight in your book with these seven protagonists?

Hutton: I really got deep into the weeds in Creek history, and its actually kind of a hot topic now in academic history, and there’s real interest in the Southeastern Indians, who are unique people and who are so fascinating, especially in terms of their leadership because so much of it is mixed blood. And Weatherford—certainly Weatherford’s three-quarters white—yet he identifies as a Creek, as a Native, and leads them against the white advance into their territory. 

And so, I wanted to show the complexity of that society. And also, you’ve got slavery in the mix. And of course, the real story of the Creeks and what’s going on in the southeastern frontier is the slaveocracy moving in, wanting that incredibly rich land in Mississippi and Alabama to expand their cotton and slave culture into. And it’s always about land—from the time of Weatherford (Red Eagle) to the time of Sitting Bull. And in fact, the whole Ghost Dance comes about because the government is just seizing more and more Native land after the Dawes Act, and it brings on this crisis. I must say the government doesn’t come across very well in this book.

I really worked hard—I hope I’ve achieved this—to reach balance. All of my protagonists are heroic. Mangas is; Red Eagle is; Sitting Bull is; Kit Carson is; Buffalo Bill is. But all of them, I think, are complex, and the way their lives interact, I think, is fabulous. And that’s why I picked these characters. There’s a connection with all of them. And I had to leave out people that I really liked and I would’ve liked to have had. I mean, like Custer, who’s one of my favorites, although that’s a pretty small club these days. But nevertheless, he just gets a cameo, and he dies offstage.

C&I: And not all of your protagonists interact, obviously, because of the time periods in which they live, but Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill crossed paths in pretty remarkable ways, and they’re probably two of the best-known figures in your book. What does their relationship reveal about the contradictions of this western frontier that has almost become romanticized and mythical in our modern society?

Hutton: That they became such good friends—it’s just remarkable. And a point I repeatedly make here is that all of these frontiersmen who were all famous as Indian fighters were all sympathetic to Native peoples.

And in many ways—certainly with Boone and Crockett—you see that living on the edge of the frontier like they did, they had more of an identity with the culture of the Indians than they did with the kind of white planter class that’s moving into that territory. And Carson, too—Carson understood Native peoples. He spoke several Native languages. He was the Indian agent to the Utes. Of course, he’s famous as an Indian fighter—that was the nature of the time. And then Cody wins the Medal of Honor, for heaven’s sake, as a scout for the Army, and yet he has nothing but sympathy for what’s happening. Well, any human being would if you’ve got any compassion at all. Now, there were people that didn’t, obviously, but certainly my protagonists—my white protagonists—all had a lot of sympathy. We see this in the friendship of Sitting Bull and Cody. Of course, Cody wanted Sitting Bull in the show because Sitting Bull was the man who wiped out Custer, and this was show business, and he felt that he’d have his biggest season ever.

And he did. He’s headlining, of course, then he’s got Annie Oakley, and he’s got Sitting Bull. It was just perfection. And Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull became pals, and Sitting Bull was enamored of her. He just thought she was really something—gave her the name “Little Sure Shot.” And the way Cody managed to talk Sitting Bull into coming to the show is that Sitting Bull was such a fanboy of Annie Oakley. He said, well, you can be right with her; you’ll be a headliner right with Annie Oakley. And he said, all right—although he struck a tough bargain on his contract.

And then the Indian Bureau people got upset because they felt Sitting Bull was getting a swelled head being in show business. So, they wouldn’t let him go back out with Cody’s show, which was really too bad. And of course, then the Ghost Dance comes along. Sitting Bull’s not a leader of the Ghost Dance, but he kind of plays along with it. He’s a savvy political leader. And Cody goes—he’s sent by General Miles out to the reservation to bring Sitting Bull in. He’s going to take Sitting Bull to Chicago to meet with Miles and get him off the scene. And again, the Indian Bureau goes to the President of the United States and gets him to recall Cody. And what follows, of course, is then the Indian agent sends in the Indian police to arrest Sitting Bull, and Sitting Bull is essentially murdered. I mean, he’s killed while “resisting arrest,” is the way they put it.

It’s my favorite chapter, actually, in the book. It’s called “The Dancing Horse.” Cody had given Sitting Bull this horse that was trained to prance in the arena and do tricks when gunfire went off. And so, when they came in, they just kicked his door in and dragged him out of his bed and hauled him out. Well, the people heard this, and they started gathering around. It’s a real tense situation. And they had gotten the horse—the gray horse that Cody had given Sitting Bull—and brought it to put Sitting Bull on. And all hell just broke loose, and gunfire erupted. Sitting Bull was immediately shot in the back of the head by Red Tomahawk, and then the horse began to dance. It began to prance, and everyone just stopped for a second and recoiled like, “Oh my God.” And it was almost—if we’re talking about the Ghost Dance—this really was a dance for the end of a whole era. And then they started shooting each other again; the cavalry rode to the rescue of the Indian police. But it was a bloody scene. And what was so interesting, too, is on both sides were warriors—both the Indian police and those who were defending Sitting Bull—who had fought with Sitting Bull at Little Bighorn.

And so here they’re killing each other. And that’s part of the complication of the story, too. And I think that just makes it all the more tragic.

C&I: And just like these characters, the narratives are very complex, like you just mentioned, and you’re almost balancing a story of frontier progress with violence and exploitation. How did you go about balancing these competing narratives in your story?

Hutton: As you well know, Western history is contested ground. And certainly, in the academy we fight over this all the time, although one side has pretty well won the academy—kind of shut down the debate. I wanted to reach a balanced approach. I think—I’m a big believer in America. I think we’re a great force for good in the world. We saved the world in the 20th century. Well, we couldn’t have done it if we hadn’t won the West. So when you take the long view of history: if we don’t win the West, fulfill our continental destiny—I mean, I’m only sorry we didn’t take Baja and maybe even Canada while we were at it—when we fulfill that, that puts us in a position then to defeat fascism and communism in the 20th century. And sure, there are lots of problems in the world today, but nevertheless, Thomas Jefferson, when he was president, prophesied—I can’t believe he did this, but he did. He called the West “an empire for liberty,” and he said we would overspread the entire continent, and one day there would be 300 million people. He thought they would only come from Europe, to enjoy the benefits of freedom. Well, he was right.

And this great experiment we have in human liberty—which has been a struggle, and it’s still a struggle—nevertheless, it’s all come true. And it couldn’t have happened without the West. Wow. It is an incredibly positive story that people can take pride in, but yet it’s a dark and tragic story at the same time because of environmental despoliation at a mind-boggling level—and I emphasize, for instance, the buffalo, just as an example—and then what happens to Native peoples. It’s a great human tragedy. 

And so, it is kind of like birth: there’s pain, but then something wonderful comes from it. So that’s kind of, I guess, in a nutshell, the thesis of the book. And I am not whitewashing anything in terms of the history, but I’m not dwelling on the negative either. Yeah, that’s quite a little juggling action. I’ve got a lot of balls in the air there.

C&I: The book promises to strip away some layers of that national myth and the frontier myth, and along your research and the writing of this book, what were some of those myths that you encountered that you really wanted to bring truth out of?

Hutton: Certainly, Hollywood has had a lot of fun with the West, and much of what we perceive, both good and bad, in the Western story comes from popular entertainment. It did in the 19th century, beginning with James Fenimore Cooper in the 1820s, going up to the TV show Yellowstone and the incredible success that has had. And all of a sudden everybody’s wearing cowboy hats. What is that? I mean, Beyoncé’s doing country albums. It’s like, wow, I guess the West has really won the country. And so, it’s always been a force that has shaped the American consciousness, and I’m trying to explain exactly how that happened and tell it in a compelling and fascinating way.

C&I: You mentioned also the land, obviously, and the environmental impacts of the western expansion, but also how the wildlife—buffalo—responded to that. How central in your research was the land itself as a character in our history of the West?

Hutton: The land is the key to everything, of course. What’s the American dream? A house in the suburbs, a couple of cars, send the kids to college. I mean, it wasn’t any different in the 18th and 19th centuries—except it was even more so, because in Europe only the aristocracy owned land, and land decided social and political position. In America, everyone can be a landowner—except, obviously, enslaved people. And so, these indentured servants are coming over—hundreds of thousands of them—from Europe. They’re serving out their servitude, and then all of a sudden, they’re free people and they own land, and this is going to be their gift to their children and their grandchildren. And that’s part of the struggle. 

We certainly see that with Boone and with Crockett, with Carson, and even with Cody. I mean, Cody comes from very modest circumstances and becomes one of the wealthiest men in the world. So, all of them reach a level of fame, if not wealth. Although one of the points in the story is that for each of them, there’s a certain melancholy by the end. Now, there’s always melancholy as you get older, I can tell you.

But they actually destroy what they loved. They brought—like Boone—he sees Kentucky as a paradise, and then he brings people in, more and more come. And soon, of course, as he said, “I had to leave; I had to get elbow room.” But he was beset by competing land claims, and of course a locust flood of lawyers came in. And so, he fled all that. And Crockett, of course, makes his political stand in defense of the Indians, which leads to the end of his political career. The Jacksonians freeze him out, and he tells them all they can go to hell; he is going to Texas. Well, we can debate which is worse, but nevertheless, he goes to the Alamo—immortality. Great career move for legend, but probably a bad personal move. Carson, at the end, has seen everything he loved kind of destroyed, including the Native societies that he himself had to fight against, that he had once been friends with.

And he dies impoverished at the end, quite young. And only Cody—and my Native protagonists—have… Weatherford (Red Eagle) kind of has a semi-happy ending. He dies fairly young, but nevertheless, he becomes a planter in the South. Of course, Mangas Coloradas is murdered, and Sitting Bull is murdered. And I picked them for that reason. I wanted to be able to use them as a showcase for the perfidy of the government in their dealings with Indians. Only Cody comes out—everything comes out roses, sort of, for him. Although in his last years, the arena show falls out of style; motion pictures are coming in. He dies in 1917—boy, has the world changed. I mean, he really saw—from 1846 to 1917—he lives the Wild West, then he takes it on the road in a show which had an impact all around the world that we cannot overestimate.

It just defined for Europe what Americans were, and the Wild West conquered not just America in terms of its mindset, but the whole world. And that’s why I do the Chicago World’s Fair, where both Cody has the Wild West Show in his most successful season ever, and Frederick Jackson Turner is at the American Historical Association meeting and gives “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” thesis paper. And Cody wins the popular culture war to make the West central, and Turner wins the intellectual war to make the West central. And so, it all comes together there in Chicago in 1893. That’s kind of the climax of the book.

C&I: We mentioned earlier that you’re pulling on a lifetime of research, but I’m sure there were several sources that you reviewed and used in this work. Were there any discoveries that surprised you in your history of these seven protagonists? And were there any sources that you continually drew from for your research?

Hutton: I really went off into undiscovered country with the colonial period with George Washington. And that was fresh for me—just how involved Washington was in western land speculation and the kind of role that played in the American Revolution I emphasized in a way I had not planned to. And that led me to actually write about the Battle of Kings Mountain and Cowpens as well as the Boone story, so I could show how the West was so essential to the victory in the American Revolution. 

And then, as I mentioned before, I really got fascinated with Creek Indian history and with McGillivray—Red Eagle’s uncle—and then with Red Eagle himself. And that was very… it wasn’t a new story to me, but it was kind of an unknown story to me. I didn’t know the kind of detail that I had to use to tell that story correctly. And the whole relationship between the so-called Five Civilized Tribes and slavery, which was so important in their societies as well—that was kind of like, wow. I mean, I don’t think any of us think Indians owned slaves. Yeah, they sure did. And they took them with them when they were removed to Indian Territory. It’s just like crazy when you think about it.

C&I: Were there any specific challenges in your research? I know especially with early Indigenous cultures, it can be difficult for primary research and sources of that nature. Can you talk for a second about the challenges that you might’ve encountered?

Hutton: Yeah, there is such a wide and broad literature. It’s almost, how do you pick and choose? And when I’m jumping into Creek history—and I know something about it; I knew the bare bones of it—but I don’t know the literature. So, I had to just completely immerse myself in all the literature, both old and new, and become an expert in this area, which I had not been before. And I think I mastered it pretty well. 

And then you’ve got to take it after you absorb all this—this could explain why the book took so long to write—after you absorb all this, then you’ve got to make it into a story, a compelling story that works, and get rid of all that detail. And so that was certainly a challenge as a writer. One reviewer called the book an experiment in writing because of the way I use the lives. So, it is kind of biography, but it’s not—but it’s a biographical approach to the story of the American West. 

C&I: You mentioned your role as writer is so important in not only bridging academic history and intellectual studies with public understanding and trying to bridge that gap, I think. How difficult was that for you? I know you said you set out with that goal in mind—why was that such an important goal for you with The Undiscovered Country?

Hutton: Well, it was important on two levels. I mean, one, I am writing for a broad public, and obviously I want to sell books. I mean, that’s part of it—there’s a commercial part here. And to be on the New York Times bestseller list—my goodness, that is pretty amazing, and I haven’t been there before. And to have a work of Western history there, that’s even more amazing. Not that there haven’t been others—Stephen Ambrose, certainly, with Undaunted Courage; Hampton Sides; Blood and Thunder; and S.C. Gwynne’s book. But not a lot. Not a lot. And so, to break into that market—this fills my missionary zeal to tell a story of the West and show the American people and people around the world how important the West was to our national development, to our idea of who we are as a people. And so that seemed very important to me. So, there’s the commercial aspect, there’s the missionary zeal. 

And then, just as a writer, I really wanted to write a wonderful book that people would respond to. And that’s always your goal as a writer—you want to reach the audience. And this was a difficult book to write. It took a long time. And of course, COVID came in the middle, and I got ulcers and had to stop drinking. I had to give up coffee. It was terrible. And so, it was a real struggle, and I’m pleased with its reception.

It’s kind of a great consolation to have it reach people and have them responding in a positive way. And I’m sure I’ll get some negatives—there’s no question about that—because it’s contested ground. I’ll know that I’ve really done something right—and I saw this with The Apache Wars—like the Amazon reviews, which I swear I’ll never read. But then, of course, you always do. And it’s like, “Oh, this guy is just bleeding heart; all he cares about is the Indians; every white man is a villain.” And then, “Wow, he’s really doing a hatchet job on the Indians, and the white guys are all heroes.” Well, all right, I guess I’ve hit that perfect middle ground, and that’s what I was trying to do here.

C&I: Earlier you brought up Taylor Sheridan, and I don’t think we’ve had a podcast yet that hasn’t mentioned his name. And after reading some of your book, it strikes me there are a lot of similarities between him and a Buffalo Bill character in mythologizing the West—or at least the West that we know in our own time period. And you’ve also been president, I think, of Western Writers of America, which really pushes Western literature to the forefront and tries to amplify those stories and voices. Do you feel, as a writer of Western literature and academic literature, that we’re seeing a resurgence of interest in the West and the frontier? Has it always been there and maybe it’s just not gotten the publicity? How do you reckon all of that in 2025?

Hutton: It’s always been there, but it’s been kind of under the surface. And we’ve certainly gone through a period of reconsideration of the past. When you think about books like the 1619 Project or the Howard Zinn book on American history, which is a very negative take on American history—which they use in high schools, some places—and so there’s been a lot of self-loathing going on, and that’s one of the things I was reacting against with this book. I felt that the pendulum had swung too far. But the interest in the West has always been there. And we have these little boomlets. It’s never going to be like it was—at one time 30% of Hollywood’s product in the ’40s, ’50s, and early ’60s were westerns, and television was totally dominated by westerns in the ’50s and ’60s. Well, I don’t think that’s ever going to come back. But we’re seeing people have a more sophisticated take on the West. And you look at successful films—older ones like Young Guns and Tombstone and Lonesome Dove, of course, which helped the initial Western resurgence—and then The Revenant today and its success. I mean, who would’ve thought a mountain man film would win Academy Awards? And then this incredible commercial success that Sheridan is having. Sheridan’s view of the West is not unlike mine. I mean, it’s kind of glorious, positive, in tension with constant tragedy. And that’s just like, wow—everybody dies on these shows—you go, whoa. But that’s the reality. 

I mean, the West really was a violent place, and our nation is born in violence. I mean, we’re a nation that at least used to think we were kind of nice—oh no, we never picked a fight. Well, that’s not true. We picked plenty of them. And we’re in some ways a nation made by war. And certainly, we see that the Western frontier movement is a movement that has constant conflict in it.

C&I: You quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet in your book’s title when Hamlet speaks of “the undiscovered country,” most assume it to mean death and the afterlife, but you’ve kind of recast that over the American West. What meaning were you hoping to ascribe to that title, and what does it mean to you personally?

Hutton: The daring to go forward into the unknown and reinvent yourself. And that’s kind of what Hamlet is saying: with death, maybe there’s something else—but we’re afraid. And when you went West, you cut yourself off from the past, and you could reinvent yourself in a new place and make something of yourself. And it was that concept. I must say I personally identified with that recently when I retired from the university world and took on a job as a museum curator, of all things, which in a way is teaching—just in a different way—but moved from my very comfortable life in New Mexico up here to the Wyoming frontier. This really is the Wild West up here. We have wolves out when I’m in my backyard. We’re only 50 miles from Yellowstone. We have bears everywhere. And Cody’s like going back in time to the 1950s as a community—and I say that in a nice way. I mean, it really is. It’s just different. It’s so different. 

And so, this idea to reinvent yourself, I think, is so central. And that’s central to my use. I did have a couple of people who wrote in on the internet—the bane of our existence, which is also, of course, wonderful beyond belief—saying, “Well, it had been discovered before.” And I said, it’s not about discovery; it’s about Hamlet. It’s about Hamlet. And I’d like to say that I’m a student of Shakespeare—but I’ll confess that at 12 years old I saw My Darling Clementine, and there’s a scene in it where Victor Mature, as Doc Holliday, does Hamlet’s soliloquy.

And that’s when I heard it, and I thought—I was 12—and I thought, wow, that’s like a metaphor for the West. And that’s what Ford thought—that’s what John Ford thought, too, why he uses it. I thought that, yeah, going forward, seeking something new, but still with this kind of dark sense of melancholy that overspreads it. So that’s where the title comes from—although in our modern world people write and say, “Did you get that from Star Trek?”

C&I: Even on into the 20th century, we saw that idea of reinventing yourself—of these amazing opportunities—shape our national identity. Have you seen that, now that you’re such a scholar of this era? Do you see that echoing in our present-day culture now that we have no frontier left to explore?

Hutton: John F. Kennedy called his whole program the New Frontier, and he felt that going into space was the frontier of the future. And I agree with that. I grew up when I was a kid, when he was president, and he’s actually my favorite president while I’ve been alive on the planet. And I found him such an inspiring figure as a child, and that idea of the New Frontier and this going… I’m so bummed that we’re not already on Mars. We should have been there. How is it possible we haven’t gone back to the moon and colonized it? I mean, this is the essence of the American spirit.

And we hear talk about it. Almost every president comes in and is talking about this, and certainly now with figures like Elon Musk on the scene—who seems to have a mania to get to Mars. And he, in fact, believes that we’re going to destroy ourselves here; for humanity to survive, we’ve got to go to other planets. That was also part of the whole westward movement—especially if you think about the Mormons and their migration West. They thought the whole world was corrupt back in the East, and they were going to build this perfect society in Zion out in Utah. The Puritans thought that when they came to America—that European society was completely corrupt and it was going to hell—and they had to build this “city upon a hill,” and it’s that city-upon-a-hill idea that permeates our movement into the West. And I hope our movement to the stars. I think that really is our new frontier. And we’re always going to have problems on Earth, and it’s not going to end. If you’re a student of history, that’s the one thing you learn. We’ve got light bulbs—and they’re fabulous. We’ve got toilets that flush and running water—but human nature never changes.

So, we’ve got to keep reaching for the stars. We’ve got to keep reaching out. And so, I’m kind of a Pollyanna on all this. I haven’t gotten too cynical. And that’s what I see in my own story—in my own personal story—but also in the book I just wrote. It’s a story about striving, about reaching out—with tragedy, but also ultimately with the creation of something wonderful.

C&I: That triumph and tragedy side by side obviously permeates your book. What do you hope readers take away? We had these beautiful triumphs and these horrible melancholic tragedies—what do you hope they feel after they put down the book?

Hutton: I hope they come to an understanding that they can be proud of their country and proud of everything we’ve achieved and proud of the story of the West—while at the same time understanding that it wasn’t smooth, it wasn’t easy, and that terrible things were done. That doesn’t negate the story; that doesn’t negate the value of it. In fact, that makes it more complex and more interesting—as Americans strove to build something and others, Native people, strove to preserve something. They were trying—in a way, they’re the ultimate conservatives. They’re attempting to preserve a society that the world is leaving behind very rapidly. Custer is wiped out 30 years before the airplane is invented, so the game is up on buffalo hunting and roaming across the plains as nomadic warriors. 

And so, Sitting Bull, while he’s such a heroic character, is in some ways the most conservative character in the whole book. Red Eagle, early on, is trying to find a different path—even though he fights the Americans, he’s at the same time trying to find a way to work with them. Of course, what all the Native leaders discovered is you can’t work with them.

Their goal is to destroy you and take what you have. That’s the sad reality, and that’s the ultimate tragedy. And we didn’t have the political will to make it work. I don’t know if that’s possible—it hasn’t worked anywhere else in the world—but we certainly… I think we’re trying now. We’re trying to make it right, but it’s not… there are still a lot of problems in Indian Country out here. You had mentioned earlier, and I forgot about literature and writing this book: I really was inspired by Francis Parkman and this whole idea of history as literature, and by Dale Van Every, Bernard DeVoto, David Lavender, Ambrose, McCullough, Hampton Sides, Gwynne—these are my heroes in terms of writings. Peter Cozzens—he does great work—and I wanted to have strong narrative. We see a lot of lip service about that in the academy. They’re always saying, why can’t we write this great history like Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison wrote—where narrative history really was important, and you told a story, and you taught lessons through storytelling. Homer was doing that when he was telling the story of Troy, and I wanted to do that.

That’s the point of the book in terms of storytelling. I was inspired by those great writers and others, and I wanted to be in that group. I’ve got a long way to go to be like David McCullough, but I think that’s an aspiration. And I must tell you that in my world—in the academic world—my colleagues would talk about “Oh, David McCullough history” with a sneer. Oh, I’m sorry—he brings John Adams back to the forefront of American history and makes an HBO series about it. Or Stephen Ambrose with Band of Brothers. I mean, think about the impact those books have had. Or Dee Brown—my God, he changed the whole framework of the way we taught American Indian history with Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in 1969. There’s a power to that that is astonishing. And the pen really is mightier than the sword, I guess.

C&I: The Undiscovered Country is available now everywhere books are sold, and it is on its second printing, I believe? 

Hutton: We’re on our second printing, and it’s out—it’s coming out this week. So, if people want those first editions, Barnes & Noble still has some—I think they have some copies. There you go. But Amazon sold all of theirs, but they have the new ones.

C&I: Are there any other upcoming projects that we should look out for? I know you’re busy, obviously, in your career pivot—but any new projects to work on right now?

Hutton: I am really focused on the museum and my whole new career here, and we’re really going to be changing up the Buffalo Bill Museum here at the Center of the West, and I’ll be actively involved with that. Got a new TV show I wrote for PBS coming out in mid-September in New Mexico, on the territorial courts. Talk about something entirely different. And I’ll probably be doing more TV, I assume—we get asked to do that a lot. And I’m still kind of just enjoying the success of The Undiscovered Country, but I am thinking about what’s next. I’ve got more books in me. I’ve always been talking about writing a biography—a big biography—of Davy Crockett. That’s a bucket-list project. And then I’ve got this character, William Wells—who’s an Indian captive who becomes a famous scout and Indian agent back in the old Northwestern frontier—that I’m captivated by. I want to do that story if I can.

C&I: We’re eager to see what’s next, but we’ve got The Undiscovered Country to tide us over until then. Paul, thank you so much for your time.

Hutton: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. It was a great conversation. I enjoyed it.

The Undiscovered Country by Paul Andrew Hutton is available now wherever books are sold. Visit his website for more information.