Fiction in the Ramapos: The New Yorker "Out of the Furnace," a new movie starring Christian Bale, Casey Affleck, Willem Dafoe, Forest Whitaker, and Woody Harrelson, opens in theatres this weekend. It's got the feel of an Appalachian "Mystic River," set primarily in Pennsylvania steel country, but with an unlikely subplot in the Ramapo Mountains of New Jersey. The subplot involves a bare-knuckle fight club led by Harrelson's irredeemable character, whose surname - De Groat - happens to be one of the most common among the real-life Ramapough Mountain Indians. The movie does not mention the tribe, nor does it really dwell on the historically isolated mountain community in anything other than stark terms that are meant to amplify our fear of Harrelson as a local kingpin of the backwoods variety. There are tracking shots of parked A.T.V.s. Harrelson injects meth between his toes. A policeman expresses doubts about his own authority up in the hills. A recent story in the New York Post ("New movie lifts curtain on NJ's Ramapough Mountain people") attempted to make the connection more explicit. In doing so, it made some mistakes that bear addressing. A few of these are minor: the Ramapoughs are not concentrated on the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as the article originally stated (it has since been corrected online), but around the border of New Jersey and New York. Pennsylvania is more than an hour's drive from the tribal headquarters, on Stag Hill, in Bergen County. And Braddock, the mill town where the movie begins and ends, is some three hundred and seventy miles to the west, outside of Pittsburgh. As I said, it's an unlikely subplot. Also, the roads on and around Stag Hill are not "mostly unpaved," as the Post reports; residents and visitors use A.T.V.s recreationally on a network of wooded trails and pipelines that pass through municipal, county, and state parks. That last point is worth noting because it was a park patrol aimed in part at curbing the illegal use of A.T.V.s that led to the death of a Ramapough tribe member, Emil Mann, in 2006 - an incident that I wrote about for the magazine. The Post refers to this as "a shootout that killed a tribe member," but there was no exchange of fire. The only shots came from the gun of a park ranger. Emil Mann was unarmed - and not riding an A.T.V., for that matter. But he was hanging out on county land, in a place where tribe members often gathered, on a day when three rangers had earlier arrested a man who was riding nearby with an unlicensed gun. This being the woods, the gun was intended for recreation: target shooting, hunting. The atmosphere was fraught, with years and even generations of pent-up fear and distrust on both sides, which is what I sought to explore. Local legends, such as were passed around by teen-agers about Stag Hill when I was a high-school student in the area, make for the stickiest kind of prejudice - couched as much in geographic as in ethnic terms, and therefore seemingly free of the stigma of overt racism. The Post goes on to say, "According to a 2010 New Yorker article, the insular community - not wanting to attract outside attention - refused afterward to cooperate with police." This is neither fair nor true. There was reluctance, certainly, on the part of many witnesses to coöperate with an investigation into the shooting and the events that preceded it (three Manns were also arrested). But this was largely because, as in other minority communities, they were wary of police generally, and had little faith that the justice system might work on their behalf. Yet coöperate they did, and after many months, Chad Walder, the ranger who shot and killed Emil Mann, was tried for manslaughter - and acquitted, on the ground of self-defense. Belated vindication, of a sort, arrived for the Ramapoughs two years later, when the jury in a wrongful-death suit awarded Emil Mann's children more than two million dollars in compensatory damages, and found Walder responsible for an additional hundred and fifty thousand dollars in punitive damages. What was even more striking, I thought, was the fact that Walder's civil attorneys now dismissed as a "red herring" the principal theory that had been floated (by a different attorney) to win their client's criminal acquittal. This was a theory worthy only of fiction - of a character as deranged as Woody Harrelson's, perhaps, but nobody I've ever met. It held that the people on Stag Hill, angered by the initial arrest earlier that day, and the confiscation of an A.T.V., hatched an elaborate plan to lure the rangers back into the woods, specifically in order to ambush them and kill them, in revenge. Three bodies for a four-wheeler: I'm not sure I'd want to attract outside attention, either, if people attributed that kind of moral calculus to me and my neighbors.