Into the Sunrise, with Terry Grant
On the flares of optimism and the gritty exploration of potential
“Shit could go sideways in a hurry” - Terry Grant
End of the Trail
November 6, 1908 – San Vicente, Bolivia
It was in the small Bolivian mining town of San Vicente that two American strangers — claiming to be prospectors — closed out whatever prospect they had in retirement.
Locals had been quick to grow suspicious of the pair that sauntered their way down from the North; while they presented themselves as businessmen, their gritty horsemanship and roughneck knowledge of ranch practices had raised enough eyebrows to blow their cover.
Word traveled quickly and, before too long, Bolivian authorities had surrounded a home that the drifters managed to occupy.
Inside the casa of Bonifacio Casasola, Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh prepared for what they wouldn’t likely assume to be their last gunfight.
Also known as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the duo had reached the climax of an odyssey that had, through the erosion of retrospect, etched them into history as the most notorious outlaws of the Wild West.
When called out to surrender, the two answered with bullets and bravado.
And far from any cinematic showdown that featured a galloping getaway through the adobe valleys around, they were riddled with gunshots in an insignificant mud-brick room far from land of train-hopping and bank-robbing impressions left behind as their claimed bit of legacy.
No last words, no blaze of glory - just the quiet and collapsed possibilities of two ‘outlaws’ that ran out of time and out of options.
The "Fort Worth Five" taken in 1900 — Longabaugh (Sundance Kid) seated on the far left; Ben Kilpatrick (The Tall Texan) – seated next to Sundance; Robert LeRoy Parker (Butch Cassidy) – center, seated; Harvey Logan (Kid Curry) – standing behind Butch; Will Carver – standing on the far right.
In the cosmic dance of particles and consciousness, traits like ambition and resilience—forged in the crucible of evolutionary biology—resonate as echoes of the universe’s own emergent complexity.
Such traits are immortalized in epics and sagas of certain individuals only because they’re projected from within each of us; moreover, they reflect the inherent evolution of the natural world.
Everything seeks to grow, to become more complex and to evolve. To get there, it needs a sense of exploratory conviction in its own development.
Drive, ambition, grit.
This systemic bias towards positive outcomes and the exploration of potential is something that we’ve come to contextualize in the human experience by way of a personified concepts like hope, mindset or optimism.
"If you don’t know where you’re going, any trail will take you there.” - Cowboy proverb
Do we call them cowboys or outlaws?
The definition of any given life is so dynamic that it can remain malleable even generations later. All that seems to matter is how a life was lived to the subjective adventurer.
And the best journeys seem to be those unsaddled from cynicism and ever-open to the rising sun of possibility.
Because it’s optimism that inspires exploration, adaptation and the emergence of meaning; it’s part of an evolutionary drive that becomes fortified by way of positive feedback and resilience, all to move us towards higher-ordered states of existence.
From yarns of the old west to the cellular divisions that spilled out of the primordial soups of our origin, it’s this sense of buoyant confidence that stokes the embers of our potential.
Before Longabaugh became the sun-dancing, gun-slinging stoic counterpart to the charismatic Parker, he had little reason to be any kind of footnote in history. He was born to a regular family in a regular town in Pennsylvania in 1867; a decade and a half later, he traveled westward in a covered wagon with his cousin to help settle relatives in Colorado, working on a ranch wrangling horses before he became caught up in Cassidy’s Wild Bunch.
Gritted optimism fueled every step of he took towards his ambitions; the same way that it had fueled the ‘Wild Bunch’ and the same way that it pushes every generation and every iteration of any given organism along.
“They were men who could not be stampeded” - Colonel Homer T. Garrison Jr., Texas Ranger
We’re meant to transcend the mechanistic grind of survival, and we’ve done a hell of a job doing it.
The conscious bias toward possibility, and towards ordering the disordered nature of reality, propels us forward like migratory birds riding unseen currents, aligning us to the rhythms of our environment.
The more I interview various minds about their specialized interests, the more I’m made aware of a powerful common denominator: ‘success’ entails not only the ability to remain unshaken by the external chaos of the world, but also a knack for managing to order a little part of it.
To claim a bit of ordered territory in an otherwise nonsensical world.
In discussions with folks like Alan Tenta, who conquered chaos on season 10 of Alone, or Pablo Budassi, who somehow puts the infinite galactic nonsense overhead into digestible frames of perspective, it becomes clear that an unrelenting drive and optimism is what fuels their ability to achieve the ultra-ordinary.
Below is a recent interview with another example of such an endeavor. Terry grant (whom I first interviewed in 2020), is better known as Mantracker - the antagonist and protagonist of a 2000s Canadian series on OLN.
What follows is a conversation with Grant, on everything from authenticity to technology to knowing how to simply get by in a strange world that we can barely understand, and of the kind of steadfast optimism that drives each pair of eyes reading this.
When we first spoke, you mentioned that you went out to the Bar U ranch in ‘76 right?
Yes, yeah.
I looked into it a bit - I didn’t realize that the Sundance Kid may have worked there at some point. Any truth to that?
Yep, there's there're rumors that he worked there. Normally, when Cowboys work at a ranch somewhere, they'll carve their name in a board, or onto the door or something, and I don't think they have any recorded history of that, but I think there are pictures.
It was either one or the other, Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid that worked there at one point… You can't really get that anywhere else nowadays.
One thing we talked about last time had been authenticity, and how you experienced the need for it with the whole Mantracker bit.
It seems that the more you go through life, the more you encounter these divergence points where you can chisel away at the kind of things you value or things that define you.
To have a situation where you had this opportunity to let go of authenticity for the sake of profit or viewership or whatever else, and to pass on that to the point where you know you're no longer willing to continue on with the show.
I know what you’ll say, but do you still look back and know that it was the right decision you made?
I have no regrets on what I did on the show because early on, the producer asked me to do some stuff, and I said no.
He said, “why not - won't the horse do it?”
And I said, “yeah, the horse will do it, but I won't… That's not what a cowboy does.”
And he said, “well, what would a cowboy do?”
And I showed him, and away we went.
I don't care if you're a welder, a carpenter, a cowboy - do it right. Show people what it's like.
People tend to get the wrong idea about Cowboys - they think it's pretty glamorous and it's great; you get to ride a horse all day, but they don't show you the 12-hour days in a blizzard trying to save some calves, or the two o'clock in the morning night checks, where we’re out there pulling calves. They don't show you the real hard stuff.
I did everything true to what a cowboy would do. And you know, I didn't fake it. I didn't add shit. I didn't make stuff up. I just did what I knew how to do, and it worked.
To some degree, I’m assuming you couldn’t afford to fake anything - wilderness brings out circumstances that require a certain level of authenticity.
In other words, you can't really fake your way through the bush..
You’re right, you can't.
I think growing up and being a cowboy most of my life, every day was like that.
You learn about yourself when you're out there riding a horse in 30 below weather, wind's blowing and it's snowing… You're riding around looking for newborn calves and trying to save their life. You realize that you've got to watch what you're doing because you could die out there. You're a long ways from home. You get bucked off a horse and get stomped on or something like that and there ain't nobody coming looking for you for several hours because you're not due back til lunch.
So being alone and doing all that stuff, you learn to have a very quiet confidence… You go into it with your eyes wide open, ready for anything.
Roping a cow -- roping anything -- you've got to be ready for that ‘what if?’ … Shit could go sideways in a hurry.
Have you ever had a moment where you just threw your hands up in there or been pushed beyond that kind of quiet confidence?
Lots of times where you're dealing with a cranky cow - you've got to get her in the barn so you can pull the calf because she's having problems and she's on the fight and she's hurting. There’s a point where whatever you're doing isn’t working.
You don't get mad, because that doesn't help anybody, right? You never give up - ‘give up’ - that's not in a cowboy vocabulary.
You stop and you step back and you sit on the fence for a couple of minutes and you settle down and you come up with a new plan. You just figure out a better way to do it.
Ever catch yourself thinking that the cattle have their own kind of awareness that we can't really comprehend?
Oh, heck, yeah. I learned a long time ago. There's no stupid cows, but there's a lot of stupid Cowboys.
Their fields of perception are a little bit different – they’re in a herd, they’re subordinated, their eyes are more to the side of their head to watch for predators. They see the world differently, both figuratively and physically..
Oh yeah, a creature that has herd it around - it's different, but they maintain that kind of role that’s carved out for them.
I had known a cowboy one time that was having problems with this cow doing something in the corral.
He says, “if you want be a good cowboy, you got to think like a cow.”
So, I sat there for a minute. I thought, ‘okay, if I was a cow, and I didn't want to go in there…’
I just changed my whole demeanor. I didn't go in there hard and fast -- I walked in real slow. I sat there. I looked at the cow and moved four feet one way. Ten feet the other way. Cow looked back, in she went into the corral they wanted her in.
That makes so much sense if you can use that in everyday life. If you're looking at that other driver in their car and they're doing stupid stuff - I'm gonna put myself in that car and try to imagine what the hell's going on in there to make that person do that.
Cows are smart. They're smart. They're as smart as the cowboy is probably smarter; whatever you do, the cow is going to react, and you need to be smart enough to figure it out that when I do this, the cow does that.
How does the physical side creep into the mental side of it all - have you ever been limited by a physical issue or injury?
If you're breaking horses, the old way was to get on them and buck them out – that has changed a lot.
There are times where even my old horse used to buck me off regularly, just because you'd run into wire or get into a bad situation and she'd jump one way, and you were thinking the other way.
Your elbows, your knees. They all take a kick in… your hips hitting the ground. Very seldom that, as a cowboy, you don't have something hurting, but you don't let it affect your job.
You just figure out how to make your make things work with that little bit of pain and try not to make the same mistake twice. That's it. The commitment to the lifestyle is the driving force towards kind of trying to override the physical discomforts of it.
I've talked to lots of guys that broke their pelvis or hurt their back something and they've said the most comfortable place they can find is sitting on a horse in their saddle.
Cowboys that break their legs or a foot or something like that - they modify the stirrup to fit a cast into it and away they go It comes with the territory.
For those that hang their hat up after a certain while -- because I'm sure you've encountered a few already — what’s the main driving force behind that decision?
We never hang it up, we grow up.
We realized that when we get older, it's just harder to do stuff. And you know, we still want to go riding, and we still go riding, but it's on a real nice well broke horse, and we don't ride all day.
If you're capable and you're able, don't have too many aches and pains and got some good horses, you can ride till you fall off, you know?
There have been a lot of changes to the way things are done, especially in the last decade or two. Work on a ranch is one of the only professions I can think of that is regarded for being existentially threatened by the whole concept of convenience.. In other words, to lean into the technological innovation and comfort is to kind of undermine the whole concept of what it means to be a cowboy.
Have you seen a departure from that with the younger guys coming in, or have you seen this around you where it's all kind of threatening the old way?
Oh, definitely. The last 15 years, 20 years. The younger kids don't want to get on a horse to spend 3 hours putting out salt; they want to want to jump in the quad, run out there and be back in half an hour.. But I think it's taken away from the term cowboy.
When I was working on ranches, we didn't have cell phones. So if you got hurt or something out there, you figured out how you were going to get home, or you waited for somebody to come get you.
I think the Cowboys, as long as they have pastures, there will always be cowboys on horses.. It's slowing down. There's getting to be less and less of them. Another 10 years, we’ll see where it goes.
If you look at somebody who has been cowboying for 20 years, the way you did it versus somebody who's going to be cowboying for 20 years from today, they’re two very different situations in terms of how time is used and how time is saved and how meaningful that whole enterprise is. I don't think you can compare that.
Yep, and you know, there's so much more to be in a cowboy. Like, you know, understanding your grass; what kind of grasses you are up in and when do you move your cows and stuff like that.
When you're out there, you understand the weather a lot better - you can feel the weather change. You can feel the wind change… It might be a West wind, and then it changes South, and then it switches around to the East… Now it's getting cold and we've got a storm coming.You’re learning everyday you go out on your horse. Whether it's the grass, the weather, the way the cows are moving. If the animals are out feeding at 2:00 in the afternoon, well, there's probably a storm coming that night because they want a full belly when the storm hits. The animals are telling you what's going to happen - you just need to be smart enough to figure it out.
Do you find that after so many years of doing it, you're still learning from the seasons and the cycles, the herds and grasses, and everything else as you move through it all?
When you stop learning, it's when you’re throwing dirt on your face.
You’ve trained soldiers in tracking IEDs, you have a big love of carpentry, and I’d wager that you wouldn’t trade your shop full of tools or an open horizon in for another season of Mantracker..
Now that you’ve been across the fence and back from that tv-production environment, would you change anything?
I might change a few things that I had said to the producer.. Might add a few adjectives in there. No, I wouldn’t change a dang thing. I told people ever since I’ve been done: I had a perfectly good life before Mantracker, just going to step back into that life and away I go…
If somebody grew a brain and Mantracker was to go another 5 seasons, that would be pretty cool, but it’s not going with me.
Follow Terry on social media (@themantracker) or through his website: www.trackingwithterry.com
Also check out the Rafter Six Ranch
