How a rustic retreat below the Bighorn Mountains became the ‘West’s last resort’

The Wagon Box is a rustic retreat nestled amid ponderosa pines and aspen groves below the Bighorn Mountains in Story, Wyoming. Besides the fishing pond and the odd bison, the 20-acre property boasts a bunkhouse, log cabins, and a main building that has
long hosted locals and travelers from afar, feasting them at its steakhouse-style restaurant and keeping them cool at its frontier-style bar.

The Wagon Box
went up for sale a few years ago and was acquired in late 2022 by Tom Bombadil LLC. The entity is named after the forest-dwelling J.R.R. Tolkien character immune to the ring of power.

The resort has since undergone a transformation that left it magnetized, attracting positive attention from “homesteaders, literati, rebel coders, ascetics, founders, political skeptics, freedom lovers, doomer optimists, wilderness foragers and such,” according to the
resort’s website. This, in turn, has led to negative attention from elements of the liberal media, including a former contributor to an “open-source intelligence” outfit that has received funding from Open Society Foundations and the National Endowment for Democracy.

The structures on-site remain intact, as do the retreat’s charming rough edges, its names-carved bar rail, and its many blurred borders with nature, which appears — at least in photographs — to be everywhere encroaching.

What’s changed under the new leadership of Paul McNiel, the combat veteran and outdoorsman behind Tom Bombadil, besides the addition of a few camperized school buses, teepees, instruments on the wall, and an ever-growing library?

For starters, it’s no longer
just a place or a venue.

The Wagon Box

It’s now a “project,” a “parallel network node,” and the “West’s last resort”; according the Wagon Box website, a
convergence of “the best of Web3 with the concrete” that serves “as a catalyst and clearinghouse for ideas, and a launching point and headquarters for experiments in new models of human organization.”

Although now effectively a picturesque incubator for big American ideas, largely of the kind rooted in hope and an essentially Christian worldview, the Wagon Box accomplishes something far more basic yet increasingly rare: It successfully facilitates the nourishment of those panged by the pandemic-exacerbated hunger of our times — the hunger for deep and meaningful personal connection.

McNiel recently spoke to Blaze News about how this transformation came about and detailed the project’s greater significance — a significance recognized by others, including American novelist Walter Kirn, who
characterized the Wagon Box as a “refuge for thoughtful spirits,” and environmental sociologist Ashley Fitzgerald, the co-founder of the “Doomer Optimism” podcast, who noted it is “a realistic place in the greatest sense of the word.”

Inception

McNiel, a real estate investor who grew up off-grid in remote Quebec and served in Afghanistan after college, told Blaze News that he hosted numerous events in Montana, “from little gatherings in my living room, to open mics, to movie nights, to all sorts of get-togethers,” during the pandemic.

These gatherings quickly became the go-to for “various factions” that shared in common, at the very least, a healthy skepticism of the mainstream narratives surrounding COVID-19.

“I find myself often as sort of the middleman between various — you could say — extremes or just different sides of certain things,” said McNiel.

Paul McNiel. The Wagon Box

While McNiel appreciates the appeal and popularity of group chats, online forums, and other meetings in virtual realms — despite never really dialing in himself — the pandemic drove home the realization that they were no replacement for in-person meetings, which he suggested better foster the good faith and trust “necessary to restore America’s culture and to restore some kind of fabric of understanding.”

As the pandemic began to wind down, the Wagon Box resort went up for sale.

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Gabriel Gigliotti

Although McNiel was still living in Montana at the time, Wyoming, with its favorable crypto legislation and “live and let live” ethos, looked like an ideal place to “build on and expand the kind of gatherings that [he had] been doing and, more than that, try to start building it as a node, a cultural node, for people to meet, to exchange ideas, and to connect in this post-COVID landscape where people are realizing how important that is.”

‘Real people come there with their full families and their full selves.’

He acquired the property in 2022 and “started small” with writers’ retreats and other events. But as people began to connect on site and the Wagon Box started hosting other people’s larger events as well as its own, it started to gain a reputation as something of a cultural hub.

The Wagon Box has hosted multiple events in recent years featuring relatively big names, and more are scheduled.

The Wagon Box

For instance, a recent event on futurism featured Notre Dame political science professor
Patrick Deneen and Matthew Azrieli, founder of the Post Millennial.

Fitzgerald and James Pogue, a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine, have a
doomer optimism event scheduled next month, where they’ll speak along with English author and Dark Mountain Project co-founder Paul Kingsnorth, Symbolic AI co-founder Jon Stokes, and others on the topic of “how the Machine shapes families, the environment, personal autonomy, and class politics while highlighting inspiring acts of creative resistance.”

A previous doomer optimist event is what first landed Fitzgerald at the Wagon Box.

Hardware

Fitzgerald told Blaze News that she and an associate sought to bring together a number of people from across their shared networks — “disaffected environmentalist” and MAHA types — and McNiel invited them to have it at the Wagon Box.

“It’s not really that easy to get to, so it’s kind of like a retreat,” said Fitzgerald. “People have to go out of their way to get there. It’s sort of isolated in a small town. There’s not really much outside the complex.”

Fitzgerald indicated that the resort’s remoteness, its layout — a TV-free bar, library, and restaurant all attached — and the absence of external distractions helped bring her and her online friends together in what some suggested felt like a “family reunion.”

The Wagon Box

She indicated it was also culturally conducive to “fun and convivial” conversations.

“It’s not this stuffy, air-conditioned conference room or hotel lobby,” continued Fitzgerald. “It feels like a real place where real things are happening.”

“Real people come there with their full families and their full selves, and their messiness,” added Fitzgerald.

McNiel observed that there are “all these projects out there that I think of as software because they’re mostly ideas and networks, but they don’t have a campus.”

He wants the Wagon Box to become hardware that different “software programs” can run on simultaneously.

‘This is a Christian project, but you don’t have to be a Christian to be part of it.’

When asked about the Wagon Box’s operating system and what all the guests share in common, McNiel said the “operating system is very much personal. It’s not a particular defined doctrinal statement or even a mission statement. It’s a personal sort of central nervous system of core people.”

While there are other proponents and members, McNiel told Blaze News that he is “the center of the hub,” operating as a moderator, as a “filtering mechanism,” and a connector.

Coding in common

Past guests and speakers at the Wagon Box appear to be all over the traditional political spectrum; however, McNiel, numerous key guests, and champions online appear to share Christianity in common.

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Eric Granado

McNiel told Blaze News that “this is a Christian project, but you don’t have to be a Christian to be part of it. And, I think, that probably could have been said about America 200 years ago.”

Nihilists and materialists may, however, struggle to fit in, as the Wagon Box, on the other hand, “is for people who believe in God and have hope for the future; that God cares about this world; and that it is our responsibility to do our best to honor him with our little corner of it and to bring forth some kind of a brighter, more heavenly future.”

Besides Christian faith, the coding that much of the “software” share in common appears to be an estranged or a hostile relationship with the postwar liberal consensus and its guardians.

The resort’s website indicates that those drawn to the Wagon Box largely are those who:

want to get away from the Cathedral hall monitors, obsolete arguments mired in [global American empire] party politics, vacuous hack corporate journalism, identity political games and want to get in on the discussions that matter: possible future relationship between human nature and machines, ancient avenues to truth and beauty, postliberal governance models, fourth-world solutions, corporate surrealism, parallel economic systems, new models of property ownership and investment collaboration, re-wilding and re-civilizing.

Fitzgerald’s doomer optimism, for instance, is a reaction “against the machine — the machine being the sort of techno, global neoliberal, taking the souls away from everything good and beautiful” state of play.

“We realized there was a lot of overlap between the sphere of people we wanted to bring together and then the Wagon Box people, so we kind of just became friends,” said Fitzgerald.

“I would say a lot of the people drawn to doomer optimism, at least at first, are sort of like fringe lefty environmentalists —
Battle of Seattle-type environmentalists who now feel like the environmental movement has morphed into something weird and corporate,” said Fitzgerald.

“We aren’t exactly the same,” continued Fitzgerald. “We have a lot of the same critiques with the same things and a lot of the same solutions, so they’re almost like mirror images.”

James Pogue
noted in a 2023 Vanity Fair piece that “McNiel is extraordinarily well read and friendly with a number of literary types. He is a bit of a prepper, and while he is deeply Christian, he doesn’t consider himself right-wing.”

The Wagon Box

McNiel told Pogue at the time that the right-left political binary was kaput; that it’s now “us against the machine.”

Suzy Weiss, a reporter with the Free Press who attended the second annual “The Machine and (Human) Nature” retreat at the Wagon Box last year,
noted, “There are many tensions in the nascent ideology brewing at The Wagon Box.”

“The retreat was billed as an opportunity to disagree about the specifics,” continued Weiss. “A labor organizer told me that his politics differ from most of the people here, but that ‘this happened to be the place where people are open-minded.'”

Pigeonholing

A pair of reporters who have written about real and imagined extremism for the New York Times and other liberal publications recently hinted at a desire to paint the Wagon Box as a hive of right-wing radicalism.

Ali Winston
noted in a letter, subsequently posted by McNiel to X, that he and Jason Wilson, a Portland-based smear merchant who writes for the Guardian and previously contributed to Bellingcat, were writing an article about events hosted at the Wagon Box.

‘They seem to be just really bitter folks who are really trying to exorcise some … boogeyman from American culture.’

“Does your organization have an open political affiliation with a movement that seeks to replace democratic governance with corporate governance?” asked Winston. “Are you hosting any events other than far right political and cultural conferences?”

Winston alluded in the letter to the “Malheur occupation,” hinting that the duo are interested in making hay out of an
old link between McNiel and Ryan Payne, an individual sentenced to 37 months in federal prison for his involvement in the Ammon Bundy-led 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon.

The Sheridan Daily
previously reported that McNiel and Payne recorded a video together in 2021, and McNiel suggested communications were few and far between after the fact.

Winston’s writing partner has sought to do more damage with even less of a link in the past, smearing prominent right-leaning personalities and lumping them in with actual identitarians and bigots.

For instance, when working for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s so-called Hatewatch in 2022, Wilson
identified Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok fame, BlazeTV host Alex Stein, Catholic YouTuber Taylor Marshall, parental rights advocate Alvin Lui, Trump State Department official Darren Beattie, and others as “extremists.”

Quillette
noted in 2019 that “Wilson is not simply a pro-Antifa activist who also happens to write for the Guardian: He actively leverages his role as a regular Guardian writer to promote Antifa, whitewash its violence, and signal-boost its leaders (whom he presents as ‘experts’) — often under the guise of neutral news reporting.”

McNiel, who dismissed the insinuations from the duo in a full-throated response highlighting the diversity of views represented at the doomer optimism events, told Blaze News, “They seem to be just really bitter folks who are really trying to exorcise some … boogeyman from American culture. I’m not sure what their problem is. They’ve doxxed a lot of people, and they’re digging around and trying to mix connections.”

The Wagon Box

McNiel suggested further that the reflexive liberal hostility toward the Wagon Box appears to be born of a Calvinist-style outlook in which “you’re either elect or damned.”

“They’re trying to decide whether or not I’m a horrible person and need to be cut out like a tumor and the Wagon Box needs to be cut like a tumor out of the American landscape,” added the founder.

On the rails

McNiel has made clear from the outset that the Wagon Box is not lawless.

“I love localism, but there is definitely a point where it can turn into blood and soil,” McNiel told Pogue around the time he was getting the resort ready to open to the public. “I feel like my role is to argue for a localism that doesn’t go off the rails into exclusion.”

Like localism, he is protective generally of the culture at the retreat.

McNiel stressed to Blaze News that the Wagon Box “is a cozy, wholesome, and based place where there’s plenty of room to disagree, plenty of room to be honest and share where you’re coming from — but it’s not a free-for-all.”

He reckons the Wagon Box has so far struck a good balance, telling Blaze News that at every gathering, the conversations feel like they are the most important taking place in America right now, and this sense is enhanced by the intimacy of “sitting around a campfire or smoking a pipe on the deck, having a glass of wine inside, you know, or just wandering, going on a walk. … There’s just something that, really, I haven’t found anywhere else, and we’re trying to build on that.”

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