- If you lived in Massachusetts or Virginia, coming up with source material for an America 250 celebration probably wouldn't be that difficult.

Not so in Wyoming, which was more than a century away from even becoming a state in 1776.

But documentary filmmaker Geoff O'Gara's new project titled "Before Wyoming" solves that problem.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle."

(bright upbeat music) The list of official state-certified projects for Wyoming's part in the nationwide America 250 observances this year is long, diverse, colorful, and quirky.

And when Wyoming PBS wanted to add a distinctive television production to that list, we called on one of our go-to people, Geoff O'Gara.

The new documentary by the veteran Wyoming writer, journalist, filmmaker, and former Wyoming PBS producer and host is titled "Before Wyoming: The West in 1776."

The film takes viewers far from the familiar Founding Fathers Spirit of '76 story of the American Revolution, about 2,000 miles west, in fact, where human life hummed and thrived 250 years ago.

All but invisible and unimagined to the British colonists back east, marching toward the Declaration of Independence.

You are about to launch and complete a documentary that will be screened, premiered here on Wyoming PBS.

- Yep.

- And it's a large part of what Wyoming's contribution to the National America 250 commemoration is gonna be.

So no pressure.

How's that- how you feeling about it?

- Well, I kind of love pressure, and I got used to that working here at Wyoming PBS.

You know what it's all about.

So in that sense, I kind of enjoy it.

It keeps me going.

I have a feeling that in Massachusetts or Virginia, or Philadelphia and other places back east, as we say, the idea of what to do to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence became pretty obvious, obviously, to some of them, less so in our part of the country.

And around Wyoming, I've done some other shows with "Wyoming Chronicle" about some smaller individual projects from community to community.

You had an idea for something bigger and you found something worth telling.

- It was- it turned out to be really interesting.

I mean, you, I talked to Shawn Reese at the Humanities Council at that time, really, two years ago and got some help doing the research to find out what was going on.

Because if you look at European maps from 1775-1776, there's all this detail on the North American East Coast.

- I know where you're going.

- Yep.

And then you kind of scan to the west and there's this big empty spot.

And it says, "Parts unknown."

And I thought, "Ah, if Anthony Bourdain hadn't already taken that title, I'd be using it right now."

But it really was what prompted this film, is like, "We want to know what was going on here."

Well located where we are right near the Wind River reservation, we had people we could ask about, "What did you learn?

What was passed down from your ancestors about what was going on here, what they were doing and other tribes as well before the Europeans even arrived?"

If you think about that sort of wave of immigration of Europeans and Americans coming west- - Right.

- At 1776, it hadn't even quite gotten here.

And they didn't.

So right at that point when the revolution was happening on the East coast, the life here was multicultural, 'cause there were a lot of different tribes, but it was completely unknown to the folks in the east.

- There were people here.

- [Geoff] There were people here.

- Human beings living lives.

- Yeah.

- Organization, activity, work trade.

- Yep.

- And largely unattended to in a lot of conventional American history.

And nothing's more conventional about American history, I think, than the good old Founding Father stories, which are important.

- Yeah.

Without spilling too many of your beans here.

In fact, you mentioned off camera you're still editing the film.

It's not in its- - Yeah.

- Final form yet.

It's gonna be premiered here in our station in, around the 4th of July.

Good timing for that.

I wanted to just talk to you a minute about the methodology of doing something like this.

- Sure.

- I remember you years ago as a print journalist.

And in a lot of what you did, I was in that line of work as well.

You identify a topic, you call a person or two, maybe you read something, and you write the story, and then you move on to the next one.

Your film about Dick Cheney, for example, which received national attention, started here at Wyoming PBS as well.

A lot of that could be documented through history and records, and you could interview the subject.

Not the case with this.

You had to start much more from scratch, as we say.

- [Geoff] Yeah.

- How do you get started when an idea like this?

- Well, I mean, like you, I'm an old journalist, so I start the same way.

I look up some names, I find the historians that have books about this era.

I call them up, say, "Can you talk to me," you know.

"Colin Calloway, can you help me develop a story for what was going on out here?"

Then you find there's a whole other layer.

There's archeologists.

There's still, Wyoming's a very young state, and there's still a lot of work being done out there to dig things up, like the Vore Buffalo Jump, and find what in that fact that you can go layers and layers down into the ground finding history.

So that's what they've been doing, and they kind of welcome the opportunity, the archeologists- - Do they?

- The historians who, you know, don't at all feel that this is a story that conflicts with the story of the revolution.

It's just a bigger story.

It broadens the story to include these other cultures and this other area in the country that, you know, when we're talking about the revolution, we're really talking about the 13 colonies on the East Coast.

So you think nothing's going on out here?

Not true at all.

- Not true.

- But we have these tools.

And again, we do it like journalists.

We just kind of go call people up.

"I'm not an expert, but you tell me everything you know."

They were all willing to go into the field with us, to really remote areas here in Wyoming.

The Red Desert, we did a lot of work out there at a place called Natural Corrals or Buffalo Jump.

And yeah, again, I keep coming back to the fact that we both did newspaper work.

You do it like you would a newspaper story.

The only difference is you have to bring the cameras in at some point.

- Yeah.

- Put those people on camera.

But you do it after you already kind of know what their story is.

- Yeah.

What's the significance, for example, of the Red Desert in your film?

And say the name of it, by the way, which I know has, even that has changed a little bit.

- Yeah, which I won't get it right, you know.

Beyond Wyoming, or "Before Wyoming: The West in 1776."

- Okay.

- And it's focused very much on what became Wyoming.

There's a broader story, of course, that would include- - Right.

- The Spaniards in the southwest, the Canadian movement of trappers, European trappers, into the West.

But we wanted to focus on this area 'cause it's a particularly interesting area.

And you can kind of map.

And there's Demitri Shimkin, an anthropologist, once created maps showing the movement of tribes during different eras in this area.

And it's so busy.

- Yeah.

- People weren't holding still.

And then even before the Americans or Europeans got to this particular area, some of their effects did.

- Well you've got a great story about that concerning the Red Desert, which you mentioned to me off camera.

And it's about- - Yeah.

- A tiny little artifact, which tells us a lot.

- Yeah, so we went out to a place called Natural Corrals with Dudley Gardner, a prominent archeologist here in the state.

And we were just doing an interview, but we thought, "We'll do it in the setting where some of these native peoples were back in the time."

And we know that partly because there's rock art.

You know, there's rock art of- - Right.

- A warrior right near Point of Rocks.

But Natural Corrals is a place where when they got horses, which happened in the 18th century, they could actually kind of corral them with rock surrounding.

But the interesting thing is, the horses got here before the Spaniards, the Europeans, or the Americans did, as did other things.

And what Dudley did was we're in the middle of doing the interview surrounded by this beautiful area.

He holds out his hand, and there's a little blue bead in it.

- A bead.

- Yeah.

And he says, "This came from Europe.

And this was here before any Europeans got here."

Which was a way of saying, "Before any of us got here or our ancestors, there was a huge trade network that ran to the Northwest and ran to the Hidatsa in the East, and, really, ran all the way to the East Coast."

But the Europeans themselves didn't get here, their artifacts did.

- How does he think, or what does history tell us about how that bead might have got here?

Who gave it to who to gave it to who?

Do we- how much of that can be reconstructed, do we think?

Not that particular bead- - Sure.

- But that process.

- It's all guesswork at that point.

- Yeah.

- You can date a lot of these things.

If they find the remains of a horse, you know, they can carbon date.

And they can actually do DNA testing now and figure out was that a Spanish horse or not.

This has also happened in Wyoming.

They do a dig, they find a horse carcass, appears to have been here way before we thought horses were even here.

They figure, "Oh, it's from the Spaniards."

Then they do the DNA testing.

It's a northern European horse.

So there was- - Wow.

- All this movement going on, and the bead is a good indication of that.

Horses, guns, all these things happened.

It was happening really fast.

So when you talk about the revolution on the East Coast, that's a dramatic and important event.

Lots of interesting stuff.

- Which was documented.

- Which was documented.

- Yes.

- Here we've got things that are, in a different way, documented.

Because the thing we haven't even mentioned is- - Yeah.

- Oral history passed down- - Right.

- In native groups from ancestors to the people today that talk about what was it like then?

What were we doing?

So we're trying to find all that for this story.

- The role of the historian, I think, is changing, I guess, through the generations of the practice of the craft, so to speak.

And I think when I, when you and I were in school, when I was learning in fourth grade, "Here's what Wyoming history was.

This is the way it was.

Learn this and you'll know everything, or you'll know what you need to know."

Modern practice of history is, takes sort of a different approach to that, doesn't it?

We're not here to say, "This is what it was."

It's, "Here's what we're trying to find out."

- Yeah.

And I think we can add to that, that if you are of Native American descent, you have an extra special reason to want to know more about what was going on in this undocumented period and how we can learn about it.

The great thing is educators are really working on that.

- Yeah.

- There's much more of an attempt to integrate those stories into the other ones that we tell and have been telling for a long time.

I think it's true in the Wyoming schools.

I know it's true at the university down in Laramie.

There are, you know, you can learn about this stuff.

But a lot of the kids, a lot of the native kids we've talked to, they didn't get much of it in school, at least in their early grades.

So they're getting it now.

And they're, you know, I'm eager to learn it, and I don't have Native American background, but those kids are really eager to learn it.

And I think it's another kind of, I don't wanna call it a service 'cause this is much too much fun to be that.

But we're doing that.

We're providing information that I think will spark more interest and maybe more research into what those stories are from that period.

- These children, for example, they're not thinking, "I'm an historian now."

They're making a con, they're learning it and then can make a contribution going forward.

- Yeah.

- I guess that's sort of what history is.

It's being added onto all the time.

- Yeah.

- And if it isn't, probably not doing it right.

- Well that's a really good point.

I think, you know, history is malleable.

We think it's just done, it's static.

It's not at all.

And the reason that we get new biographies of the Founding Fathers coming out regularly is because- - Right.

- There's a new angle to look at, or there's new information that we didn't have then.

It's kind of lucky for us to be looking at a period when that's just beginning, you know, the sort of unearthing of more information about this period.

- Yeah.

In the shot that we're in, you've been kind enough to allow us to play some silent footage from your film.

It begins, or very early on, we see that you aren't in Wyoming at all.

In fact, you've ventured back to the East Coast.

Why did you do that, and what were some of the experiences you had there?

- Well this is kind of documentary sleight of hand.

You know, we know this is a period when there's gonna be so much stuff on the air.

Ken Burns has already done it about the revolution- - Yeah.

- And about the colonies revolting.

And I thought, "Well I'm gonna call these guys up in Lexington, Massachusetts and say, 'You know, do you have any footage of you guys reenacting these events?'"

And they were like, "Why don't you just come up, bring a-" And I did.

I just went up.

And they got out, brought everybody out on a special day and did their drills, and then even did interviews in which they talked about what they knew about that additional history.

I think it's a good example of what I think is really true of this story, which is it isn't a battle between this history and that history.

It's just an expansion of it.

There is more history we're trying to add to that.

And again, I think of us as just kind of prompting it.

There's gonna be a lot more work done.

- And in the brief clips that I've seen, I was pleased to see that these guys that you're mentioning, these reenactors, you'd think would be just about as set in their ways as anybody could be.

- Yeah.

- "We're gonna come out here and do a drill just like this."

It's a partly a performance, a script.

Yet they were among the very first to say, "There's so much more to it than that."

And that had to please you as you imagine the next, the coming months.

- Yeah, I mean, you know how this is in doing documentary film.

You can't script it for them.

They gotta say it.

And there's that moment when they do and you think, "Oh, you just gave me my transition."

- Yes.

- Thank you.

- I didn't know I was after this, but.

- Yeah.

- Thank you for giving, for giving it to me.

Where else, where were some other places that you went?

You've talked about Red Desert, went back east.

What were some of your other location shoots?

- Well one place we did a lot of shooting was the Buffalo Initiative on Wind River.

- Yeah.

- Jason Baldes is running that.

We went out there.

One of the young people that we've interviewed about, "What do you know about your history, and what do you wanna know?"

Albert Mason works out there.

So we did a lot of filming.

We wanted to, of course, show in an environment that somewhat duplicates the world back then.

Bison roaming and a rider on horseback going among them.

So we did that, and we did a lot of filming there, a fair amount of interviewing.

You know, everybody, I mean, Lynette St.

Clair has worked with us on this.

She's brought us into a lot of different places where we could get some of the settings on the reservation, get people outdoors for interviews, some of the elders that talked to us.

So we did a good deal of that.

In addition to going out in the Red Desert to a number of different places, whether rock art or just a location where we know things happen 'cause the archeologists have found them.

- How much of this did you, are you doing yourself?

What's the size of your production team as you proceed through months and months of work?

- We're a very small team.

I mean, my little production company is really just me and a couple of part-timers who've been with me forever.

Forever being, you know, a decade or two.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- But we've had the help of the crew here from Wyoming PBS.

Matt Wright has been on a bunch of shoots, excuse me, with us.

We had a, you know, we hire a crew when we go up to Lexington, an East Coast crew.

I've got an editor actually who's back in Baltimore who's working with me.

But that's kind of the way, you know, documentary production works these days.

- Yeah.

- Nobody actually has to be very much in the same room.

I'm old fashioned.

I want to be in the same room.

So when we get to the close of the edit, I'll be hanging over somebody's shoulder to look at things.

- How close to the vision, when you think back to what that was, how much changed?

I'm not asking you to cite a percentage, but- - Yeah.

- Is it hewing pretty carefully to what you had in mind or do you worry so much about that?

- I worry about it, of course.

You know, I start, and this is part of being a print person first.

I always write a script for a documentary before I've even interviewed anyone, sort of predicting what they're gonna say if I've got people lined up.

And of course then they never do.

They, you know, they're gonna say what they want and maybe take the story in a new direction.

And that did happen fairly often.

But the general idea and outline of we wanna know what the world was like here then, we kind of held to that all the way.

So I would say yeah, we had to learn a lot of things, and those ended up being probably larger than I anticipated.

If you go back into my files, you'll find, like, 20 iterations of the script.

- No kidding.

- 'Cause I keep doing that all the way through.

- Yeah.

- There'll be another one tomorrow.

- An older man that you've interviewed, he says very simply, "We have history too."

- Yeah.

- "And we want it to be known."

In your own personal history of documenting as much as you can, how confident are we that these oral histories are reliable, have not been altered, changed through the years through the sort of elementary school game called telephone?

You start, I tell you- - Oh yeah.

- And by the time it gets around the room, something is quite different.

We're pretty confident that these oral histories have survived intact through the generations?

- That's a really good question.

You know, oral history, us telling stories, they change over time.

- Yeah.

- And there's always that risk.

The fellow you're talking about in the film is John Washakie.

He's an elder in the tribe.

But like all of us, he's aging out.

And I think when you look at oral history, one of the valuable things that has happened here at Wyoming PBS and in the Humanities Council programs as well is the recording of elders.

- Yeah.

- Folks who are, you know, I mean, I remember, gosh, when I first was working here interviewing Pius Moss of the Arapaho tribe.

- I knew him as well.

- Pius is long gone as you know, but that document is there, that oral history.

Now the question of what is the accurate version, 'cause there are bound to be distortions, I think is the closer you are to that past in terms of who you interview and are they respected within their community, the more likely you are to get a fairly full truth.

We've been pretty careful about that.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- I could tell some stories about places we went to shoot and then didn't for various reasons.

But often they had to do with, "Do we have an authentic voice and a knowledgeable voice to tell that story here."

We work pretty hard at that.

I mean, people like John, he's respected.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- He knows his stuff, and he's very careful about what he says.

- That's not all that different from the process of collecting and reporting and revising history that you mentioned earlier.

I'm not sure benefit of the doubt is the right term, but that's what you understand as you go through your work- - Right.

- Is inevitable.

- And I would anticipate revisions to some of the things that we assert in the documentary.

- Sure.

- Somebody will come along with more knowledge or just a new archeological find that can change everything.

You're finding that horse, a European horse, a North European horse, in southern Wyoming from way back when.

Well that makes you think all new about what was happening back then.

- Yeah.

The assumptions of history- - Yeah.

- Are worth challenging all the time, I guess.

- Yeah.

- And it's something like you've done.

That's pretty much what you're all about.

The entity called Wyoming Humanities has been under stress, we'll put it this way.

- Yeah.

- And you mentioned to me earlier, as we were just planning the interview, that that cast a little bit of doubt on whether you were going to be able to proceed, or to what scale and scope you were going to be able to proceed.

But you found a way through that entity.

We did a show with the executive director about that back before Christmas in late 2025 when things were still in doubt.

- They came through for you, and pretty vital for you, wasn't it?

- It was very much.

The Wyoming Humanities Council and Wyoming PBS are the reason this film could happen.

You know, it's- doing a film is not a quick and easy thing to do.

It takes a lot of work, a lot of people, and a lot of money.

And the support to get it done quickly, 'cause we wanted to hit that 250th anniversary year, was really came from Humanities and from the station.

The, you know, we were delayed 'cause money was, especially money that had a federal source- - Right.

- Was being delayed all over the country.

And in fact, staff was being laid off because they weren't funded - Well the man you mentioned- - Yeah.

- That was so helpful to you at the beginning, he's not there anymore.

- He's not there anymore.

And Chloe Flagg has been tremendous too.

Again, it's- Wyoming's a small state, and we all know each other.

And so one of the things that gets us through problems like that is a certain amount of trust.

We had to take a little bit of a leap of faith that that money would, at some point, be released, but it delayed things.

We would probably be doing a longer documentary if we'd had a little more time.

- [Steve] I see.

- And yet it's a good discipline to kind of force it into that 30 minute length, 'cause it just makes it more concise and interesting.

But again, I have to say we have partners.

That's the only way this stuff gets done.

Television isn't inexpensive.

Documentaries are not inexpensive.

And given, yeah, the political world in which this kind of funding through Humanities has been largely cut off at the top.

Our old friend Ruby Calvert, who used to run this station, was the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting- - Yeah.

- When it got axed.

- And that entity no longer exists, in case people don't realize that.

- And I should know because I had a project that was in development with them.

So it's, you know, it's a tough time.

I guess what I like still about working in Wyoming is that we all kind of know each other and we can work together to kind of figure out workarounds.

- Yeah.

The thing you're doing is a particular sort of public broadcasting approach to it.

Am I right about that, do you think?

- I don't even know quite what that means anymore.

- Guess you just wouldn't see this maybe in the way that you've done it, the depth that you've done it on a commercial enterprise.

Do you think about that as you're doing it?

"I'm working in the public broadcasting realm, so this is what I, this is what we're gonna try to do."

- That's an interesting question.

Because I didn't really work in television ever, in commercial television- - Yeah.

- Or other fields.

I just got dragged by Ruby Calvert into working here.

- Yeah.

- And like you, I'd been a print guy forever.

So I guess this is the only way I would make a film.

I don't really know how to do anything else.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- You aren't a trained historian, fair to say.

- Fair to say.

- You learn, I think, in the sort of reporter's context, as you and I both know so well, we know about a lot of things about this.

- Yeah, that's right.

- But you dealt with a lot of historians and tried to bring their- - Yeah.

- Work to light.

The historian's role, the contribution, the sensibilities, what did you learn about more about their practice and their contributions to American culture through doing this?

- Well, I'm a little jealous of historians because they get to take the deep dive.

- Yeah.

- And when I worked on books and documentaries, I feel like I take a deep dive, but it's not nearly what someone like Colin Calloway or Claudio Saunt, who are two experts on this period of time, do when they write books.

So, you know, I go in to talk to them feeling a little small and envious of them.

What I find is it works in reverse as well.

They don't have the kind of outlet that you do where there's a public out there that's gonna watch things that probably isn't gonna read a 300 page book.

So they're actually rather eager to get their story out.

So it's kind of, you know, we work together that way.

And I think my bit of insecurity about not being a historian might be accompanied by their insecurity about getting on camera and trying to boil it down into something that people can understand.

- Yeah.

Well that's a good way of looking at it.

It's a reciprocating sort of arrangement there.

Is there a twist or a turn or an anecdote?

You told us about the bead.

Something else that comes to mind that maybe you weren't expecting or were very pleased to have learned, or just to have experienced when you're out making "Before Wyoming?"

- The best experience for me has been we followed a few young people around in their lives who we knew, Native American young people, who we knew wanted to know more.

And they're- it's a great experience to me to find that they're so expressive that I don't write a script for them.

I don't put words in their mouth.

They're really talking to you about what's in their heart and what their needs are, and what their lives are like.

That's always the kind of surprise of doing this kind of work is that you can't write that in the script.

They're gonna bring it to you.

So we found that at kind of all levels of this.

And not just on the reservation, but elsewhere.

Talking to folks at Vore Buffalo Jump, you know, this family that's just decided they needed to rescue this place and love telling the stories about it.

As you know, you can do that forever in Wyoming.

There's so many untold stories.

So that's the great fun of doing this.

- Well we're looking forward to seeing the finished product.

It's gonna be finished one of these days, right?

- Don't put- don't trap me on this.

- If it ever really is, that's the question I often ask.

When is your work done?

- Well we, again, having a really tough deadline, which from the newspaper world, we know what that's about.

- That's when it's done.

- Yeah.

But we actually have anticipated that we might expand this into an hour long show where we throw a bigger net.

We go to the Hidatsa, we go to the Lakota.

We have Lakota in it, but we would expand it to their stories as well.

Some of the stories in the southwest, you know, where the Spaniards were there and colonies.

And there's just a lot more to tell.

So you could do a bigger story about what was it like in the West.

I thought we wouldn't be able to because everybody would say, "Gotta have that out on 1776."

That's not what they say.

The revolution went on for years.

- Yeah.

- So put it out any time during the next, what would it be, seven or eight years.

And you're still kind of hitting the mark.

So we'll see.

We will look into it.

We'd have to get funding to do that larger project.

- Right.

- And there are other projects, of course, that wanna be done as well.

- Yeah, I hope you get a chance to do that.

- Yeah.

- The name of the film is "Before Wyoming: The West in 1776."

I think it premieres on July 3rd- - Okay.

- On Wyoming PBS.

This happens to be our final "Wyoming Chronicle" installment of our current season.

I'm glad it was, has been with you.

Congratulations on this work that you've already done and the finished product, which is about to be completed.

Geoff O'Gara, thanks for being with us on "Wyoming Chronicle."

- Steve, thank you very much.

And I appreciate that you're keeping all these good programs going on Wyoming PBS.

(bright upbeat music)