Bloodlines and Belonging: What Yellowstone Taught Me on the Way Home From Yellowstone
I came to this the wrong way around, and it turned out to be the right way. I had tried the flagship Yellowstone series once, years ago, and set it down. It felt too mean, too much a parade of people hurting each other for reasons I didn't yet understand. Then this summer we flew to Wyoming for the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the nation's independence, and somewhere over the Rockies I opened 1883 simply because it was available on the plane ride. I'd already started a few podcasts and books on Yellowstone's history in the weeks before the trip, so the timing was perfect, and 1883 turned out to be exactly the right show for the setting. We were even flying out of my husband's hometown of Walla Walla, Washington, a place along the Oregon Trail with its own history worth exploring on its own someday. We'd driven up from California with our two young sons, three and five, and were surprised to learn the mountain leg would take another fourteen hours by car, so we flew that stretch instead, timed to meet up with my dad, who was driving in from Chicago, eighteen hours for him.
By the time we landed I was hooked on the historical series, and glad I'd started there instead of with the flagship. I love a generational epic, historical fiction that sets the tone before the plot arrives, and the writing throughout is intense and beautiful enough that I keep wanting to pull actual lines out and hold onto them. The prequel gave me the origin of the wound before I ever had to watch the family live with it. I have been thinking about little else since, filling in gaps with research and tracing the threads on and off screen around the series, because the show got its hooks in me and I wanted to understand why.
The land is a stand-in for the bloodline
The thing the Duttons are actually protecting was never really the dirt. The ranch is proof that the people who came before survived something enormous, and the descendants inherit an obligation not to let that survival have been for nothing. Watched that way, a lot of otherwise incomprehensible behavior starts to make sense, even when it doesn't become forgivable. Protecting a child becomes protecting the family, which becomes protecting the land, which becomes protecting the secrets, which becomes harming anyone who threatens any part of the chain. Love curdles into control one reasonable-sounding step at a time.
Nobody starts out cruel
What struck me most watching the prequels back to back is how rarely the show hands you a villain who was simply born rotten. Almost everyone cruel in this universe was first wounded, abandoned, humiliated, or taught early that softness gets you killed. Loyalty turns into possessiveness. Strength turns into an inability to feel anything. Protection turns into violence. The traits that make these people dangerous are the same traits that once kept them alive. That doesn't excuse what they do to each other, but it does explain the machine.
Which is where the tragedy sits for me. The family is extraordinarily good at staying alive and much worse at making each other feel safe or free. Survival is both the triumph and the curse, and I don't think that's an accident of writing. I think it's the whole point.
Independence that can't receive love
This is the idea I keep circling. There is a version of independence that says I can stand on my own, and because I can, I'm free to love without clinging. And there's a defensive version that says needing people is dangerous, so I will need nothing and no one. The second one looks like strength from the outside. It's productive, stoic, admirable even. But it's a fortress built around an old injury, not actual freedom, and the Duttons keep mistaking one for the other. They can express love through labor, sacrifice, land, money, even violence. What almost none of them can do is simply receive care without flinching.
I think about this next to modern convenience a lot, because I don't think it's neutral. Food arrives without a farmer. Heat arrives without anyone gathering wood. Childcare, elder care, birth, death, entertainment, even friendship can now be outsourced or moved behind a screen, and every one of those conveniences quietly removes a place where people used to need each other. We pay for the isolation, and then we pay again, in fitness classes and therapy and wellness retreats and meal kits, to treat the fallout of having engineered belonging out of daily life. Tribal and agrarian life had real dangers and real cruelties. It also gave people a role, repeated contact with the same faces, physical usefulness, and the sense that their presence mattered to someone. We traded some of that for personal choice, and choice is wonderful, but it made belonging optional, and optional things are fragile.
Separation from land and from each other is enormously profitable for a small number of people and quietly costly for everyone else, and it taps straight into addiction patterns: isolation leads to discomfort, discomfort leads to consumption, consumption gives temporary relief, and the relief deepens the isolation it was supposed to fix. A product that actually cured the loneliness would put itself out of business. Belonging is hard to package. Endless soothing is not.
1883 as the correction
Here's where the prequel does something I didn't expect. So many stories, so many fairy tales, start by killing the mother and sending the hero out alone, as if maturity requires severing yourself from love. 1883 doesn't do that to Elsa the way I expected. Margaret and James are frightened and protective, certainly, but they don't seem to be grading her partners by social standing. They worry about danger and heartbreak and the raw vulnerability of loving someone in a hard, dangerous world, and they let her have an interior life anyway. That is generous for parents written into such an unforgiving period, and it stands in real contrast to how the later generations behave.
Beth is the clearest rebellion against the family pattern. Her mother would never have approved of Rip. He has no lineage, no polish, nothing the Dutton hierarchy would count as worth. Beth chooses him anyway, and in doing so she rejects the idea that family standing outranks emotional truth. He turns out to be the best kind of husband possible for whoever ends up carrying the ranch forward in whatever form it takes, proof that the family's old sorting criteria were wrong even by the family's own practical standards. It's tempting to read the timeline as the writer working backward: the earliest Duttons had almost nothing but each other, so love was the whole legacy. Later generations accumulated land and status and power, and slowly confused those things with the legacy itself. "We suffered so you could have a future" quietly becomes "we suffered, so you must live the future we selected for you," and that shift from gift to claim is where I think the corruption actually enters the bloodline.
A healthier version was always available. Keep the land because you love it, not because the dead demand it. Let people leave without treating it as betrayal. Choose partners for love, not obligation. Tell the truth about what the ranch costs instead of turning sacrifice into a debt nobody can ever repay. Pass down belonging, never bondage.
Strong women, and the men worth learning from
What genuinely caught me off guard is how well the earlier story ties into the later one, given that it wasn't actually written first. 1883 came out in 2021, three years after Yellowstone had already been airing, which means Sheridan built the origin story already knowing exactly where the family would end up. That explains why it feels less like a prequel bolted on for cash and more like someone going back to lay the actual foundation under a house they'd already built. The daughter who starts it all, Elsa, is strong in a way that has nothing to do with being hardened. She stays open, curious, and in love with the world right up until the end, and the show treats that openness as her real strength rather than a weakness she has to grow out of. That thread runs through the whole franchise. Margaret and Cara hold their families together through wars, droughts, and grief without ever losing their own voice in the process. Beth is ferocious in a different register entirely, and even Monica and Alexandra, for as much as the story costs them, are never written as passive. This is nominally a story about men and land, and somehow the women are doing at least half the load-bearing work throughout.
And the men worth admiring in this universe are worth admiring for reasons that feel genuinely useful outside of it. Rip is loyal without needing to dominate anyone to prove it. James Dutton is protective without confusing protection for control. Spencer Dutton is a soldier and a fighter who gets completely undone by love rather than hardened against it, and the show never treats that as unmanly. That's the model so many people are hungry for right now, a kind of strength that doesn't require coldness as its proof. The Duttons who go wrong, John most of all, aren't punished by the show for being strong. They're shown paying for the specific choice to keep strength and warmth separate, as if a man could only really have one.
Michelle Pfeiffer's Stacy in Madison fits into this same thread, even in a completely different family. She's wealthy enough to hand her adult daughters anything they want, and she refuses to. She's furious with them, honestly, for coasting on money instead of building something of their own, even as she stays fiercely protective of them underneath that anger. It's a small, sharp rebuke of exactly the trap the Duttons fell into with land: that inheritance, handled carelessly, teaches people to expect rather than to earn, and that the kindest thing a parent can sometimes do is refuse to make life too easy.
The story the bloodline obsession leaves out
I love some of the choices the writers, particularly Sheridan himself, make here, because the show does seem to know what it's doing with this tension, at least sometimes. It treats the Dutton line as sacred, worth generations of blood to preserve. Meanwhile the deeper history sitting underneath the ranch, the Native bloodlines that were there first and that were wiped out or displaced with barely a second thought by comparison, gets treated as background scenery unless you go looking for it. A one-hundred-plus-year-old white family's continuity is the emotional center of a five-show universe. Entire nations' continuity was treated as expendable in the actual history the show is built on top of.
Beth's own backstory is the moment that lands hardest for me on this front. As a teenager, she's taken in for what she's told is a routine procedure and comes out of it permanently unable to have children, sterilized without her real understanding or consent. It's a devastating twist for her character. But it's also, whether the show says so directly or not, a version of something that really happened to a great many Native American women in this country, not so long ago, women who went in for minor procedures, a tonsillectomy, an appendectomy, and came out sterilized without being properly told what was being done to them. Giving that history to Beth, the show's most beloved white character, doesn't erase whose story it originally belongs to, but it does put the pain in front of an audience that might otherwise scroll past a headline about it. Sometimes the widest door into a hard truth is a character people already love.
Monica's arc carries a version of this same pattern, and what's happened to her since makes it sharper still. The newest spinoff, Marshals, has its own behind-the-scenes turbulence, a new writing staff, and a showrunner who was let go around the same time Dutton Ranch lost its own, and within that show Monica has died off-screen of cancer tied to toxic contamination on the Broken Rock Reservation before the story even begins. It's a gutting choice, and it turns out the decision was largely forced by circumstances behind the camera rather than chosen for its own sake. The showrunner has said it came down to the actress's availability, and reports point to streaming-rights tension between Paramount and Peacock as part of why the new show needed distance from the flagship series. That same rights dispute reportedly kept Sheridan out of the writers' room entirely, out of concern that staying too closely involved in a series under new ownership could open the door to litigation, so he had to step back rather than choose to. There's a real chance he ends up folded back into that corner of the universe once the legal picture clears in a few years.
Even so, I love that the show found a way to use something nobody planned as an entry point into a genuinely important topic. Water and land rights get treated in most of this franchise as almost a spiritual grievance, sacred but abstract. Monica's death reframes it as a present-day health reality that most Americans never have reason to think about at all. Several of the actors involved have said they were shaken by the decision, as surprised as anyone watching at home, which tells you the loss wasn't just a plot mechanism to them either.
The man behind it, and how his own life keeps interrupting his stories
Taylor Sheridan didn't start writing seriously until after forty. Before that he was a working actor picking up small parts, and for a stretch of time genuinely broke, sleeping in his truck and pitching a tent near Los Angeles rather than give up and go home. He wrote Sicario and Hell or High Water off the strength of that hard-won patience, and Yellowstone came after, first developed for HBO before Paramount picked it up and turned it into the biggest thing on television. There's something genuinely encouraging in that timeline. He didn't need to have it all figured out by forty to end up one of the most significant storytellers working today.
But the scale he's operating at now seems to be catching up with the work itself. He's reportedly the sole credited writer across an enormous slate of shows, without a traditional writers' room, while also running actual ranches and licensing his own horses and land to the productions. The Beth and Rip spinoff, now called Dutton Ranch, sat delayed for a year before finally arriving in 2026. The Kayce spinoff, streamlined from a longer working title down to simply Marshals, ended up airing on CBS as more of a straightforward procedural than the connected saga fans expected, and even the actor playing Kayce has said the direction surprised him. Reports point to streaming-rights complications between Paramount and Peacock as part of why that show had to distance itself from the original series. Meanwhile, other announced prequels and spinoffs, including one set in the 1940s and one centered on the Four Sixes Ranch, have sat with no real update for years. Sheridan is moving to a new deal with NBCUniversal once his current Paramount commitments run out at the end of 2028, and it's easy to imagine that once he's untangled from the current web of contracts and legal constraints, some of these stalled threads finally get resolved. It says something about him that even at this scale, with money and lawsuits and rights issues visibly complicating the thing he clearly cares about most, he keeps building.
The money explanation is the one that got reported, and I believe it's real. But I keep turning over the irony sitting underneath it. McConaughey has spent a career, and a whole memoir in Greenlights, describing how much he loves working without a finished script, chasing the raw and unrehearsed take, not knowing exactly what's coming so the emotion on camera stays honest. Sheridan is famous for writing exactly that way, sole author, no writers' room, script pages sometimes arriving late, the story finding its shape as production moves. On paper that should have been McConaughey's ideal collaborator. Instead he walked from the one project that seemed built for precisely the instinct he says he prizes most. It's entirely possible the money was the whole story. It's also possible that wanting the terms and the timeline settled before signing was its own quiet admission that the unscripted, organic version of the process felt different in practice than it does in theory, and that money is simply the explanation everyone already knows how to nod along to. That's a very human move, reaching for the reason that needs no further conversation instead of the one that actually costs something to admit. Meanwhile Pfeiffer walked into an unfinished, unfinalized script with what by every account was total ease. That contrast, one star needing the ground fixed under him before he'd commit and another comfortable building the plane in the air, says something about trust that I don't think is only about money at all.
The Madison was written entirely by Sheridan himself, but it was meant to be a continuation of Yellowstone, then a lawsuit issue between owners of the rights forced it to be its own thing entirely.
It's Dutton Ranch that broke his own pattern (which did NOT have Sheridan as the main writer). Chad Feehan wrote all nine episodes of that first season with an entirely new writers' room, and Sheridan stayed on only as an executive producer, the first time anywhere in this universe he wasn't the credited writer. Cole Hauser has said publicly how hard that was, that not having Sheridan in the room changed everything about how the cast had to work. Feehan was then fired once the season wrapped, reportedly after clashes with Sheridan, the cast, and the studio, with a new showrunner taking over for season two.
Meanwhile Madison, though wonderful for different reasons, was not able to do what it had originally been marketed, or intended, to do.
To me, it seems anything written by Sheridan himself is worth more than any of the ones not able to be given his full attention.
Costner's exit was never part of the plan. Nor was Monica’s. He's said the show was originally pitched to him as something closer to a single long season, a limited story, which is what drew him to it in the first place. A one-season idea became a five-season phenomenon. The actual break came at the seam of season five, when the studio split the season into two halves and the second half's scripts weren't finished by the time Costner's own long-planned commitment to directing Horizon was set to begin. He says he offered a week; the studio and its sources say he offered too little; a "pay or play" clause and a lump-sum figure around twelve million dollars became the sticking point neither side would move on. Whatever the precise truth in the middle, no one involved describes it as something either side wanted going in. It came apart in real time, the way the family in the show itself so often does, through a slow accumulation of unmet expectations rather than one clean break, and then the writers had to build John Dutton's death into a season that was never written with his absence in mind.
The unplanned nature of that exit ended up rewriting the bloodline question at the center of everything. Jamie was always the character who wanted love more than he wanted the ranch, and never got it. He was adopted as an infant after his birth father killed his birth mother, and John himself admits on screen that he knew Jamie's biological mother before she married that man, that he and Evelyn knew something and begged her not to go through with it. The show never explains what that means. Fan theories run toward Jamie being secretly blood-related to the Duttons after all, through Evelyn's side or further back, which would be its own devastating irony: a boy spending his whole life being told he wasn't really one of them, quietly related to them by blood the entire time, and still never given the warmth that was supposedly reserved for people who belonged. He dies in the finale still fighting for a version of approval that was never coming, killed by the sister who never forgave him.
That leaves the bloodline thinner than the mythology around it would suggest. Tate, Kayce and Monica's son, is the one clean line still standing. Kayce and Monica's second son died shortly after birth. Jamie's own son with Christina, born back in season two, quietly disappears from the story after season four; one of the show's own executive producers said outright that a later season was not about Jamie as a father, it was about Jamie as a son, which reads like a deliberate choice to let that thread go rather than resolve it. Whether Christina took the boy away to shield him from what the Dutton name does to people is speculation, not shown on screen, but it's a reasonable read given everything else that name has cost the people born into it and the people who married in.
Spencer, Alexandra, and the sons the show hasn't finished with
Going back a generation further, 1923 gives the clearest version yet of love as the actual origin point of everything. Spencer Dutton spends the back half of that show fighting his way home, and Alexandra spends it crossing an ocean and a continent to reach him, and by the time they finally reunite she's already dying of frostbite from the journey. She lives just long enough to give birth to their son and name him John, after Spencer's murdered brother, before she dies in Spencer's arms. That baby, John Dutton II, grows up to become the father of Kevin Costner's John Dutton, which means the entire modern saga runs, at its root, through one woman's death by exposure and one man's devotion to her memory for the rest of his life.
What the show hasn't resolved, and seems to be holding back on purpose, is what happens next. Elsa's closing narration tells us Spencer never remarried, but that he "took the comfort of a widow and made another boy," refused to marry her, and one day the widow was simply gone. That's the whole of what we know. Who she was, why he wouldn't marry her, and what became of that second son afterward is a real, deliberate gap, presumably left for the still-unmade 1944 prequel to fill in whenever it actually happens. It's a striking contrast to sit with either way: one son born entirely out of love and grief and carried into the family's future, another born of something unnamed and left to disappear from the record. The bloodline the family is so obsessed with preserving turns out to have a whole branch it apparently didn't think was worth keeping track of.
And it's not only Spencer who broke from the family's usual pattern for love. Two Duttons across the whole span of this saga choose Native partners specifically, which is its own quiet rebellion against everything the family otherwise stands for. Elsa marries Sam, a Comanche man, in 1883, in a full ceremony the show treats with real tenderness. Generations later, Kayce marries Monica. Both choices happen outside whatever the family's unspoken hierarchy would have picked for them, the same way Beth later chooses Rip. But it's worth holding the harder truth right alongside the romantic one. Loving outside the bloodline's usual boundaries didn't spare either woman from what the family ultimately costs the people who marry into it. Monica's own arc, as already covered, ends with her death being handled almost as an afterthought by the production itself. Love breaking the pattern doesn't seem to be enough, on its own, to break the pattern's price.
Which might be the sharpest way to say what I keep circling back to. Love was the whole thing at the very start, when the earliest Duttons had nothing else to hold onto. It stopped being the thing once land and status had something to compete with it for the family's loyalty. And every time the show lets someone choose love over the hierarchy anyway, Elsa, Kayce, Beth, Spencer, it treats that choice as almost heroic, which quietly admits how rare and costly it had become by then. If it had simply stayed the thing all along, so much of this saga's damage might never have had room to happen.
Seven generations, and the debt that got absorbed into a single child
The finale is where all of this actually resolves, and it resolves through a promise the show waits a hundred and forty years to cash in. Back in 1883, Spotted Eagle gives James Dutton the land outright, but warns him plainly that in seven generations, his people will rise up and take it back. James answers without hesitation: in seven generations, you can have it. That exchange sits completely dormant for the rest of the franchise, never repeated, never referenced, until Elsa's narration returns from beyond her own death in the very last scene to spell out that the family stayed on that land for exactly seven generations, and that the promise, though it was never written down anywhere, lived on in the spirit of the place regardless.
Tate is confirmed as that seventh generation. And this is the detail that makes the whole prophecy land so much harder than a simple land transfer would: Tate is Kayce and Monica's son, which means he is already both Dutton and Broken Rock by blood before any of this gets resolved on paper. So when Kayce finally sells the ranch back to Rainwater for the same nominal price it was first taken for, with the one condition that it can never be sold or developed again, the return isn't really a transaction between two separate peoples at all. It's a debt that had already been absorbed into a single child the moment Kayce chose to marry Monica, long before either of them knew they were fulfilling anything. The land doesn't just pass from one family to another at the end. It comes home through someone who was always, quite literally, both families at once. That reframes the whole hundred-and-forty-year wait for me. It was never really a debt one people owed another. It was a debt that love had already started repaying generations before the paperwork caught up.
The Madison, his newest series, was pitched as connected to this universe and then quietly stood up on its own instead, following a wealthy Manhattan family who relocate to Montana after tragedy. Even set apart from the Duttons, it's the same question again: what does it cost a person of total means and total choice to want the kind of rooted, hard, land-bound life the Duttons were born into. Money can buy the scenery. It can't buy the belonging that comes from generations of need. And there's more territory Sheridan has built in the last ten years beyond this one family: Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Special Ops: Lioness, Lawmen: Bass Reeves, Landman, with more spinoffs of those already in motion. It's an enormous amount of story to be holding at once, by one person, and I have a feeling once the current contracts and legal tangles clear, some of it is going to come back together in ways nobody's expecting yet. The Madison's own director has already teased a possible crossover with Dutton Ranch, saying only that you'd have to ask the man who holds the pen. I'd bet on it happening eventually.
What it cost to keep him, and what it cost to lose him
The money underneath this franchise turns out to trace the same status lines the story itself keeps drawing. Costner started at five hundred thousand dollars an episode in season one, back in 2018, and by season five in 2022 he was reportedly clearing somewhere between $1.2 and $1.3 million an episode, a jump that tracks almost exactly with the show going from a cable curiosity to the biggest thing on television. Cole Hauser started at $200,000 an episode and reached $700,000 by season five. Kelly Reilly's numbers are reported less consistently, somewhere between $200,000 and $700,000 an episode by season five depending on the source, which is itself a small tell about whose pay gets tracked precisely and whose doesn't. When the Beth and Rip spinoff was being negotiated, Reilly reportedly asked for $1.5 million an episode and was talked down toward $1.2 million, with Paramount's actual offer landing closer to $850,000 to $950,000 an episode across the first two seasons. Hauser asked for $1.25 million and settled somewhere below that too.
So even at the peak of her own negotiating leverage, on a show built around her, Beth's asking price was still roughly what John Dutton had already been quietly paid two years earlier, and what Paramount actually offered her fell short of that. Beth Dutton is arguably the most beloved character to come out of the entire franchise, source of the show's most quoted lines and its most-watched moments, and the numbers still landed under her father's. It's a strange, quiet footnote to everything else this universe has to say about status, inheritance, and who gets to hold the value in a family built on legacy.
Here's the run of it, for reference:
Released, in order of story:
1883 — 2021
1923 Season 1 — December 2022
1923 Season 2 — February 2024
Yellowstone Season 1 — 2018
Yellowstone Season 2 — 2019
Yellowstone Season 3 — 2020
Yellowstone Season 4 — 2021
Yellowstone Season 5, Part 1 — November 2022
Yellowstone Season 5, Part 2 — November 2024
Marshals — March 2026 (CBS)
Dutton Ranch — 2026 (Paramount+, season 2 already in production)
The Madison — March 2026 (Paramount+, already renewed for season 2)
Announced but still in the works, with no confirmed release yet:
1944 — a further prequel picking up after 1923
6666 — a spinoff centered on the real-life Four Sixes Ranch in Texas
It's worth a note that Madison itself was originally announced under the working title 2024, planned at the time as a direct sequel to Yellowstone rather than the standalone show it eventually became, so that title isn't a separate project waiting in the wings, just an earlier name for the same one. Given how much of this universe has already found ways to fold back into itself, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these still-separate threads end up connecting in future seasons too.
The trip itself
We went for the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the country's independence. My father drove up from Chicago, eighteen hours, the same way he made a trip to Yellowstone and Cody with his family for the two hundredth, fishing lakes we later walked past ourselves. My kids can go for the three hundredth someday, and there's something worth keeping in that rhythm, a reason to make a genuinely hard trip on a schedule bigger than any one visit.
And it is a hard trip to make. There's no easy flight in, no simple lodging plan. Do you drive the whole way or fly in with camping gear? Rent an enormous RV, or buy one you'll barely get your money's worth from against a handful of nice hotel stays? We drove up to Washington to stage a car for my father's side of the family, then flew into Jackson Hole, rented a car for a single day at an eye-watering rate for the drive into Cody, and spent our last days in the town Buffalo Bill built as a place people could actually live in year-round when the park itself becomes inaccessible for months at a time.
The two towns could not have been more different, and I think that contrast is half the point of visiting both. Jackson Hole is polished, wealthy, a ski town dressed up for people with money, full of galleries and outfitters and a gondola that runs up one of the hardest ski mountains in the world. Cody is rougher and warmer at the same time, a town built by one restlessly inventive man out of pure will, still carrying the rodeo and the ruggedness in its bones rather than its marketing. Most people who fly into Jackson Hole never make the drive over to see the other half of the story, and I think that's a real loss, because the road between the two is supposed to be one of the most beautiful hour of driving anywhere in the world. I'll admit I went looking for the quote everyone repeats about that drive, that Teddy Roosevelt himself called it the most scenic fifty miles in America, and it turns out that's not true. It started as a 1930s tourism slogan and got pinned on Roosevelt decades later by, of all things, a real estate developer's marketing team. He apparently never even took that route. Which feels almost perfectly on theme for this whole trip: even the compliments out here get mythologized past what actually happened.
We only had two nights in each town and a single day to drive through the park itself, so everything moved fast. In Jackson we grabbed bikes right from town, kids loaded into a trailer behind us, meaning to do what I thought would be a modest five-mile ride out to see the sculpture walk near the museum and Teton Village. We ended up on e-bikes covering something closer to thirty miles before we were done, which was not remotely the plan but turned out to be one of the best surprises of the whole trip, and worth every extra mile once we got up to the village and could see the full sweep of the Tetons behind it. I'd have happily stayed another full day in each town, one more day in Jackson to actually catch my breath, one more day in Cody to sit with its history properly instead of rushing it.
Our single day inside the park itself went to the two things I most wanted to see: West Thumb, where the hot springs run in these unreal, layered colors right along the edge of Yellowstone Lake, and Old Faithful, named for exactly what it does, going off predictably and reliably for longer than anyone alive has been watching it. There's something quietly moving about a geological feature earning a name that's really a character trait. Faithful isn't a word we throw around lightly, and the ground itself has apparently earned it.
The whole thing was epic in the true sense: a rodeo, a windstorm that felt biblical, a snowball fight in July on that same Jackson gondola ride. There was a musical about Buffalo Bill's life I would have loved to see, and didn't get to, because traveling with young kids doesn't leave room for every luxury yet.
The valley itself turned out to be almost unbelievable once I started reading. Something like ten overlapping volcanic systems built the geology under our feet. And it is, genuinely, the ancestral home of every horse, donkey, zebra, and hybrid alive today. Horses evolved in North America, spread out to the rest of the world, and then died out entirely on this continent before being reintroduced by European settlers centuries later, so the popular version, that horses came from Europe, is only true if you zoom in on the last chapter of a much longer story. For roughly a third of their evolutionary history, the animals on this continent were dwarf horses, roughly the size of a house cat. Almost nobody seems to know that, and I can't stop thinking about it.
I also read about how people die here, because that history matters as much as the beauty does. Boiling from the inside out in a hot spring days after the fact. Running after a dog that bolted toward a thermal feature. This is the first national park in the world, and it is still a genuinely harsh place, harsh weather, harsh animals, harsh terrain, and people keep coming back anyway, which tells you something about what it offers in exchange.
It struck me, standing there, how often the crowd around you in an American national park is more foreign than domestic. We delay the things that are close to us. I did the same thing at twenty-two, spending two weeks after college seeing more of California, Yosemite's chain-hiked cliffs, San Diego's beaches, Big Sur, Napa, the long bored stretch of Nebraska on old Route 66, than I'd seen in the ten years I actually lived there.
Bison, buffalo, and the land's other memory
We swam in the Great Salt Lake, where the water genuinely lifts you, and watched bison graze nearby. Bison and buffalo are technically different species, true buffalo being native to Africa and Asia, and the American animal is a bison that ended up carrying the wrong name anyway, likely from early French fur trappers, possibly reinforced later by towns and showmen like the one nicknamed Buffalo Bill. The name stuck regardless of the biology.
What the bison actually built underneath us matters more than the naming confusion. Their grazing pattern built some of the richest topsoil on the continent, soil that industrial farming has been depleting and abandoning ever since instead of working with it. And the slaughter of the herds wasn't incidental to westward expansion, it was a deliberate strategy, piles of bones stacked to break Native communities that depended on the animal for nearly everything. Growing up in North Carolina, we watched live plays on the Trail of Tears in Cherokee villages and made beaded bracelets, I was named Tiger Lily, and eventually named by orange striped kitty that, then white dog lily. The names had their roots in those trips to the Indian communities.
I still think there’s a genuinely missed opportunity across a place like Wyoming: real workshops in beadwork and leatherwork and basket weaving, run by and for Native communities, for the tourists who come through wanting exactly this kind of hands-on connection to the land and its actual first people. The demand is already standing there in line for the gondola.
Even Buffalo Bill himself resists a simple story. Genuinely inventive man, first rodeo, a touring stage show that traveled with hundreds of performers across the world, studied by the army to understand how to move such a large operation across such vast distances, a bar gifted to him by Queen Victoria, a dam, a town built to make the park livable year-round, a presence at Chicago's World's Fair. And also a man whose whole enterprise depended on the same westward land grab that people like Benjamin Franklin had already warned against generations earlier, worried specifically about how quickly settlers were being invited to take land by force. Genius and harm sitting in the same biography, which is more or less the whole theme of this trip and this show, now that I think about it.
Then there's the ghost town by Yosemite, where the river ran with arsenic and mercury from gold panning operations that sifted the largest particles out first and poisoned the water chasing the smallest ones after. Almost nobody who worked that gold rush actually got rich. Most of the people who did make money were the ones selling shovels or starting the banks that lent everyone else money to keep digging. One family did strike it rich outright, and built a mansion behind a fence high enough that everyone in town hated them for it. It's the same shape as the Duttons, really: enormous sacrifice, concentrated reward, and a fence between the people who paid the cost and the people who kept what it bought.
Where that leaves me
I don't think the show is arguing that the old ways were simply better, and I don't think the past this trip kept surfacing was simply better either. It was harder, more dangerous, more limited for the people the systems weren't built to protect. But it did offer things the market has a hard time selling back to us: a role, repeated contact with the same people, usefulness, a season to move through, and the sense that your presence actually mattered to somebody. Yellowstone the show and Yellowstone the place are both asking some version of the same question. Can you stay rooted without becoming a prisoner of your roots. Can a family, or a nation, hold onto what its ancestors built without turning that inheritance into a debt the next generation can never finish paying.
And how beautiful, and profitable, that undeveloped land can be.
I cannot wait to see what the next decade of Sheridan brings us. But my first rodeo, a windstorm, a snowball fight in July, and a family of dwarf horses that used to roam this exact valley has got me hooked, on both this fictional story and the land itself.
More of Sheridan's work worth exploring, and what's actually won something
If you want to go beyond the Dutton universe, his film work is where the real trophies are. Hell or High Water, from 2016, is by far his most decorated single project, four Oscar nominations including Best Picture and his own nod for Best Original Screenplay, plus a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Jeff Bridges and a string of Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations alongside it. It's also just a tight, devastating film, two brothers robbing small Texas banks to save the family ranch from foreclosure, which makes it feel like the spiritual seed of everything he's built since. Sicario, from 2015, came first and is colder and more brutal, earning three Oscar nominations of its own for cinematography, score, and sound editing, plus a Writers Guild nomination for Sheridan's script. Wind River, his 2017 directorial debut, is smaller and quieter than either, set on a Wyoming reservation, and it's the most direct ancestor of everything he'd later do with Native land and grief in the Yellowstone universe.
On the television side, the most awards attention by far has gone to 1923, not the flagship show. Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren both drew real recognition for it, Mirren picked up a Golden Globe nomination and a Satellite Award win for her performance, the series itself landed a Golden Globe nomination for Best Drama, and it's pulled in Emmy attention for its production design and writing. It's a strange but telling detail that Yellowstone itself, despite being one of the most-watched shows on television for years, was largely shut out by the major awards bodies the whole time it aired. Popularity and critical recognition just never lined up for that one, which makes 1923 the better answer if you want the version of this world that the industry itself actually rewarded.
Lawmen: Bass Reeves is the other one I'd point you to before anything else, both for its own sake and because it's a real change of tone from the rest of Sheridan's westerns. David Oyelowo plays the real historical figure of Bass Reeves, one of the first Black deputy U.S. Marshals west of the Mississippi, and earned Golden Globe, Critics' Choice, and SAG nominations for it. It sits with the moral weight of a formerly enslaved man enforcing the law under the same system that once enslaved him, and it's some of the most serious, least mythologized writing Sheridan has done. Beyond those, Tulsa King, Mayor of Kingstown, Landman, and Special Ops: Lioness are all worth a look if you want more of his voice, even though none of them have picked up the kind of hardware Hell or High Water, 1923, or Bass Reeves have. They're proof of how much ground he's covering all at once, even if not everything he touches lands with the same weight.
