The Crazies

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

Amy Gamerman

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781982158194
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

“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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Map
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• A Note on Sources
• Preface
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Ranching It
• Chapter 2: The Treasure State
• Chapter 3: If You Give Anybody Luck, Shit Will Do for Brains
• Chapter 4: Awaxaawippíia
• Chapter 5: Coyote Wind
• Chapter 6: Alfred and Whitney and a $10,000 Bull
• Chapter 7: High on the Horse in Big Timber
• Chapter 8: Diana’s Great Idea
• Chapter 9: Boxing in Prison
• Chapter 10: The Engine Room
• Chapter 11: What Would You Do?
• Chapter 12: Crow Country
• Chapter 13: Earthquake
• Chapter 14: Good Neighbors
• Chapter 15: Fire Season
• Chapter 16: Anaconda
• Chapter 17: Show Ponies
• Chapter 18: Findings of Fact
• Chapter 19: Eighteen Inches of Rain
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Copyright